Читать книгу Natural Philosophy - Wilhelm Ostwald - Страница 11

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First and unconditionally those concepts possess reality which always and without exception are based on experienced facts. But we can easily make manifold arbitrary combinations of concepts from different experiences, since our memory freely places them at our disposal, and from such a combination we can form a new concept. Of course it is not necessary that our arbitrary combination should also be found in our past or future experiences. On the contrary, we may rather expect that there could be many more arbitrary combinations not to be found in experience than combinations later "confirmed" by experience. The former are purposeless because unreal, the latter, on the contrary, are of the utmost consequence because upon them is based the real aim of knowledge, prediction. The former are those which have brought the very "reality" of the concepts into ill repute, while the latter show that the formation and the mutual reaction of the concepts practically constitute the entire content of all science. It is of the greatest importance, therefore, to distinguish between the two kinds of concept combinations, and the study of this differentiation forms the content of that most general of all the sciences which we have characterized as logic, or, better, the science of concepts.