Philosophy and Specific Problems [pp. 208-232]

PHIILOSOPHY AND ITS SPECIFIC PROBLEMS.
tribution of matter and motion"), the result is not positive explanation, real comprehension of the experimentally given, the
illumination of experience with the light of genuine objective
intelligence, but something very different. The things to be
explained, the facts to be comprehended, are either explained
away-i.e., in substance denied, or resolved into subjective and
illusory "prejudices"-or are summarily declared absolutely incomprehensible, or "unknowable," and so removed out of all
practical relation to human experience. The picture of existence which physical science draws is monochromatic. Its painting is all "gray on gray."
"Gray, my dear friend, is all our theory,
And green the golden tree of life."
That is, being interpreted, all our physico-scientific the ory is "gray," and comes far short of reproducing the fulness
of living, experimental reality. Its last results are abstract
and not concrete; they are spectral, "phenomenal," anatomi cal, dead, and not bright, fresh, and inspired with the glow
of man's unmutilated experience. It is true science, most important and most indispensable within its sphere. But it is not
all science. It is the interpretation of one aspect of experience,
but not of all aspects. It is therefore not philosophy, in which
man justly requires that he shall find himself and his universe,
on all their sides, not explained away or resolved into illusion,
but comprehended.
From what has gone before it must now be sufficiently plain
that the first thing which philosophy must do-the first thing
which philosophy had to do-in order to vindicate the foregoing assertions and prove its right to resist absorption into physical science is, and was, to labor for the establishment of a complete science of knowledge or-which amounts to the same
thing-of conscious experience. For the creation of this science
much more was accomplished than is generally supposed in the
philosophy of Plato and Aristotle. But the most extensive
labors in this direction have been accomplished in modern times
More especially the whole strength of the brilliant philosophical movement represented in modern history by the names of
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