Читать книгу Natural Philosophy - Wilhelm Ostwald - Страница 15

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By reason of its frequency and importance the mental process above described has been subjected to the most diverse investigations, and that most general form of the scientific conclusion (which we apply in ordinary life even much more frequently than in science) has been raised, under the name of the law of causation, to a principle anteceding all experience and to the very condition making experience possible. Of this so much is true, that through the peculiar physiological organization of man, memory in the most general sense—the easier execution of such processes as have already repeatedly taken place in the organism, as against entirely new kinds of processes—the formation of concepts (of the recurring parts in the constantly changing variety of processes), is especially stimulated and facilitated. By it the recurring parts of experience step into the foreground, and on account of their paramount practical importance for the security of life, it may well be said in the sense of the theory of evolution and adaptation, that the entire structure and mode of life of the organism, especially of the human organism, nay, perhaps life itself, is indissolubly bound up with that foresight and, therefore, with the law of causation also. Of course, there is nothing in the way of calling such a relation an a priori relation, if it is so desired. As far as the individual is concerned it no doubt antedates all his experience, since the entire organization which he inherits from his parents had already been formed under such an influence. But that there can be forms or existence without such an attribute is shown by the whole world of the inorganic, in which, as far as our knowledge goes, there is no evidence of either memory or foresight, but only of an immediate passive participation in the processes of the world around them.[C]

Further, the circumstance that the causal relation is brought about by the peculiar manner in which we react upon our experiences, has sometimes been expressed in this way—the relation of cause and effect does not exist in nature at all, but has been introduced by men. The element of truth in this is, that a quite differently organized being, it is to be supposed, would be able to, or would have to, arrange its experiences according to quite different mutual relations. But since we have no experience of such a being, we have no possibility of forming a valid opinion of its behavior. On the other hand, we must recognize that it is possible, at least formally, to conceive also of kinds of experiences with no coinciding parts, or a world in which there are no experiences at all with coinciding parts. In such, therefore, prediction is impossible. Such a world will not call forth, even in a being endowed with memory, a conception and generalization of the various experiences in the shape of natural laws. Consequently we must recognize that in addition to the subjective factor in the formation of our knowledge of the world, or that factor which is dependent upon our physico-psychical structure, there is also the objective character of the world with which we must decidedly reckon, or that character which is independent of us; and that in so far the natural laws contain also objective parts. To represent the relation clearly to our minds by a figure, we may compare the world to a heap of gravel and man to a pair of sieves, one coarser than the other. As gravel passes through the double sieve pebbles of apparently equal size accumulate between the sieves, the larger ones being excluded by the first sieve and the smaller ones allowed to pass by the second. It would be an error to assert that all the gravel consisted of such pebbles of equal size. But it would be equally false to assert that it was the sieves that made the pebbles equal.