ABSTRACT
The philosophy which has seemed appropriate to science has varied from time to time. To Newton and most of his English contemporaries science seemed to afford proof of the existence of God as the Almighty Lawgiver: He had decreed the law of gravitation and whatever other natural laws had been discovered by Englishmen. In spite of Copernicus, Man was still the moral centre of the universe, and God’s purposes were mainly concerned with the human race. The more radical among the French philosophes, being politically in conflict with the Church, took a different view. They did not admit that laws imply a lawgiver; on the other hand, they thought that physical laws could explain human behaviour. This led them to materialism and denial of free will. In their view, the universe has no purpose and man is an insignificant episode. The vastness of the universe impressed them and inspired in them a new form of humility to replace that which atheism had made obsolete. This point of view is well expressed in a little poem by Leopardi and expresses, more nearly than any other known to me, my own feeling about the universe and human passions:
But this has become an old-fashioned way of feeling. Science used to be valued as a means of getting to know the world; now, owing to the triumph of technique, it is conceived as showing how to change the world. The new point of view, which is adopted in practice throughout America and Russia, and in theory by many modern philosophers, was first proclaimed by Marx in 1845, in his Theses on Feuerbach. He says:
From the point of view of technical philosophy, this theory has been best developed by John Dewey, who is universally acknowledged as America’s most eminent philosopher.
