Science and metaphysics

Abstract

The idea that there is a difference in principle between science and metaphysics, and not only a difference but an opposition, is about as old as science itself (and by 'science' we mean modem science as it has e:xisted for the last three or four hundred years). It became generally accepted by the men of science themselves in the seventeenth century, at least after the influence of the Cartesians had baen broken. For Descartes could not, of course, accommodate such a delimitation as his whole philosophy was one great attempt to merge science and metaphysics into one. But he already had to reckol1 with contemporaries who thought differently. Gassendi, for example, was of opinion that science (and with it all other secular knowledge) can attain only to the appearances which things present to us~ not to their 'inner truth'1. Later, when Newton's physics swept everything before it, this became the prevailing idea (while the further idea that metaphysics is an impossible enterprise anyhow was to develop more slowly). After all, had Newton himself not repeated.ly insisted with great fervour that he did not make hypotheses, i.e., metaphysical assumptions, but deduced everything from experiments? And had he not also answered those who critici:zed gravitation as an unexplained force by saying that he was not c()ncerned with metaphysical causes (although what the critics belieVEd they had demanded of him was not so much, a metaphysical as a me chanical explanation of gravitation)? By the beginning of the nineteenth century the belief that 'no created spirit penetrates to nature's core' and that 'he is already blessed to whom she only shows her outer shell' had become so common that a man like Goethe (for whom nature had neither shell nor core but was a whole) could speak of it ~ a philistines' litany he had been obliged to listen to all his life 2 •