Identity & Reality

Emile Meyerson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781317828464
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

This is Volume IV of six in a series on Epistemology. Originally published in 1930, this is the third edition and translated from French in the domain of the philosophy of science.

Identity and Reality

Chapter I

Law and Cause

WHEN a certain phenomenon strikes our attention, it appears enigmatic at first, but after having studied it, we can explain it and we say that we know its cause.

What do these terms exactly mean? What is a scientific explanation? What is the cause for which we were looking?

A precise answer to this question was given by Berkeley nearly two centuries ago.(1) “For the laws of nature being once ascertained, it remains for the philosopher to show that each thing necessarily follows in conformity with these laws; that is, that every phenomenon necessarily results from these principles. This is to explain and solve the phenomena; that is, to assign the reason why they take place.” From the context we see that Berkeley regarded the laws and the principles mentioned in this passage as experimental (experimentis comprobatae).

Thus the cause of a phenomenon is the law, the empirical rule, which governs the entire class of analogous phenomena. This rule teaches us that one group of phenomena involves another group. Since we are able to observe only in time, i.e. successively, the empirical law amounts really to a law of succession of phenomena. And consequently Berkeley’s formula is equivalent to that enunciated a little later by Hume; namely, that the concept of cause or causality is reducible to succession.(2)

Berkeley’s formula has often been revived since. “A stone tends to fall,” says Taine, “because all objects tend to fall.”(3) Helmholtz writes: “The principle of causality is nothing else than the supposition that all the phenomena of nature are subject to law.”(4) Hannequin in the same way declares that “to search for the cause of a fact, is, for a physicist, to search for its law,”(5) and Ostwald formulates the principle of causality as follows: “If we establish the same conditions, phenomena will take place in the same manner,”(6) a statement which, we see, approaches Hume’s conceptions.

Here we find a complete assimilation of the two concepts of “cause” and “law,” the second entirely absorbing the first. But the opposite tendency has also continued—that is, efforts have been made to include the law in the cause. Thus Lucretius, after having stated what is, as we shall see later on, one of the forms of the principle of causality, declares that if we do not admit it, we are forced to give up establishing any regularity whatsoever in nature. “Nor would the same fruits stay constant to the trees, but all would change: all trees might avail to bear all fruits;”(7) and eighteen centuries later, Jean Bernoulli expresses himself in an identical manner by declaring that if we reject the principle of causality “all nature would fall into disorder”.(8)

It seems that this assimilation could be explained only if there were a real logical identity between the two concepts of law and cause, if the two terms were synonymous. Everyone knows that this is not so. Yet it is important to throw some more light on this question.

Let us take up again the formula of Helmholtz, considering it for what it really is—that is, as an expression of the principle, not of causality, but of lawfulness (légalité). Although the use of this term is not customary in the sense we are giving to it, yet we believe it is clear: it signifies the supremacy of law. This will permit us to translate with more exactitude the last part of Helmholtz’s phrase, which we have cited earlier, where he stipulates literally “the supposition of the lawfulness (Gesetzlichkeit) of all the phenomena of nature.”(9).

How do we arrive at formulating laws? By the observation and the generalization of phenomena. The human mind’s power of generalization has at all times occupied the attention of philosophers; but this is a chapter of logic which we mean to leave here completely aside. We shall consider as an accepted fact that the human mind possesses the faculty of forming, with the aid of the perception of different individuals, the concept man, just as it will form the concept sulphur with the aid of the perception of different pieces of a matter which is yellow, inflammable, etc. The principle of lawfulness of nature demands evidently the formation of such concepts, otherwise, phenomena being infinitely diverse we should not be able to formulate rules, and having once formulated them, we should not be in the least helped by them without the faculty of generalization.

Helmholtz, we have just seen, characterizes conformity to law as a “presupposition”; but, in certain respects, it is much more than that, it is a real conviction, perhaps the strongest amongst those we are capable of harbouring. In fact, all of our conscious acts are intentional acts—that is, acts performed in view of an end which we foresee; but this foresight would be entirely impossible if we did not have the absolute conviction that nature is well-ordered, that certain antecedents determine and will always determine certain consequences. It is this which Auguste Comte has summed up in the following terms: “Knowledge generates foresight, foresight generates action.”(10)

It has sometimes been asserted that this conviction is based solely on experience. But this seems difficult to believe. Without doubt, from the abstract point of view one can completely separate observation from action, construct a type of observation from which every element of action would be absent. But when one thinks of the functioning of our sense organs, of their elementary acts, intentional or semi-intentional, which it presupposes, such as turning the eyes or moving the hands, one begins to doubt the possibility of a real separation of that kind; and one doubts especially whether the period of action is or ever has been preceded in nature by a period of observation necessary to establish the conviction that order is the rule of the world. It is indeed certain that primitive man, however near to the animal one may imagine him, must have been imbued with this conviction, since without this conviction he could not have acted at all; and the animal itself, acting as it does, implies, by its action, that its intelligence on this point does not radically differ from our own, unless we suppose, as did Descartes, that it is a simple machine, or that it does everything impelled only by instinct. The dog to whom I throw a piece of meat knows how to catch it in the air: this is because he knows in advance the trajectory that this body will describe in falling. It appears, without doubt, to him no less than to us, as a way of behaving, peculiar to the object thrown under certain circumstances—that is, as a law. Goethe has said; _“In the beginning there was action.”(11)

But the dog’s processes of generalization and investigation are extremely limited. He knows how to foresee only a very limited number of phenomena. Primitive man was already immensely superior to him. His previsions, it is true, based on the belief in regularity, were applied only to a part of nature; a great number of phenomena appeared to him as evading the rule, being subject to the free-will of invisible powers. But however general one may suppose this latter conviction, it has doubtless never embraced more than the smallest part of the ordinary phenomena of life, the far greater number of phenomena having always been conceived as purely conformable to law. As Adam Smith has remarked, no people on earth has ever known a god of gravity.(12)

The progress of science has naturally resulted in limiting more and more the domain of the miraculous. “Science,” as H. Poincaré has so well said, “is a rule of action which succeeds,”(13) and there where our ancestors saw only miracles, eluding all prevision, we observe more and more the effect of exact laws. And yet, however marked may be this progress, does it suffice to explain even the modern conviction of the reign of law? The number of phenomena whose rules we know is necessarily minute compared with the phenomena comprising all nature, the first being finite and the second infinite; every general conclusion on the basis of known phenomena, extending to nature in its entirety, would thus seem logically questionable. This probably explains why certain philosophers, who emphasize this point of view, have appeared to doubt the absolute sway of laws in nature. The most striking example of this is Auguste Comte. He believed that “the natural laws, the true object of our research, could not remain rigorously compatible in any case with a too detailed investigation.”(14) Comte does not question the validity of a certain particular law which we are required to maintain provisionally for lack of a better one, even though knowing it to be only approximate, he questions the validity of the very occurrence of law—that is, of the conformity of nature to law in general. Comte does not believe that beneath this law a better one may exist, perhaps more complicated, but adapting itself more closely to the phenomena; he is convinced that a too detailed investigation would lead us to the knowledge of phenomena evading all law, all rule. And so he rejects very severely all research of this kind; piling up terms of reprobation, he declares that the investigations in which too precise measuring instruments are used “are incoherent or sterile,” proceeding from a curiosity that is always “vain and seriously disturbing,” from a “childish curiosity stimulated by vain ambition”; he protests strongly against the “abuse of microscopic research and the exaggerated merit still too often accorded to a means of investigation so dubious,” and he does not hesitate to invoke against “the active disorganization” by which the system of positive knowledge seems to him menaced because of these endeavours, the secular arm of “the veritable speculative rule” of the future.(15)

We shall discover later on the source of these opinions of Comte’s. To understand fully how far they are foreign to the principles which really guide the advance of science, it is perhaps not sufficient to prove, as has already been done very justly, that science has since followed a direction diametrically opposed to that indicated by the founder of positivism. It has tirelessly sought for phenomena more and more minute, measures more and more precise, and its constant care has been to perfect its instruments of investigation, amongst others, the thermometer and the microscope so obnoxious to Comte, far beyond the limits of accuracy at that time.(16) We must still add that in spite of the celebrity of Comte’s work and the prestige which his writings enjoy, no scientist, in the course of his studies, has ever tried to follow the principles laid down by positivism. Without doubt, confronted by a multiplicity of phenomena, a scientist may ask himself whether the data which he possesses and which his means of investigation will permit him to acquire, will be sufficient to bring to light the particular laws which govern them; but never has any physicist, chemist, or astronomer asked himself whether the phenomena which he was about to investigate, no matter what their nature might be, were conformable to law. Never has any scientist worthy of the name doubted that nature, even in its most intimate recesses, was entirely subject to law. A single doubt in this respect would have been sufficient, as G. Léchalas has justly said,(17) to put a stop to all research.

Might this be, as has sometimes been intimated, a manner of thinking peculiar to the scientist or to the modern man trained in his school? We have seen that, on the contrary, it could not be acquired by experience, that, even to-day, experience does not justify it; and it appears that wherever they find themselves confronted with dead nature alone, in which they suppose that no intervention of the will of a living being occurs, primitive men, and even the animals, have opinions on this subject entirely analogous to our own. What, then, is the source of this conviction? How does it happen that we have an absolute faith in the validity of laws, that we infer their existence, even when we have not yet learned how to formulate them?

To understand it we have only to recall that foresight is indispensable for action. Now action for any organism of the animal kingdom is an absolute necessity. Surrounded by hostile nature it must act, it must foresee, if it wishes to live. “All life, all action,” says Fouillée, “is a conscious or an unconscious divining. Divine or you will be devoured.”(18) Therefore, I have not the choice of believing in prevision (that is, in science), or of not believing in it. If I want to live, I must believe in it. Consequently, it is not astonishing that this conviction based directly on the most powerful of the organism’s instincts, that of conservation, should manifest itself with such unusual force.

In defining science in terms of utility from the point of view of action, have we not diminished its domain? At all times the scientist who is not busy with researches immediately applicable has been a subject of ridicule to the man in the street, and surely at the present moment many physicists, chemists, geologists, etc., are occupied with problems the solution of which does not seem to admit of practical consequences. Are these investigations illegitimate?

Auguste Comte believed that there was, indeed, also a limit on that side; certain speculations were radically useless, and, more-over, doomed to sterility, such as, for instance, studies of the physical constitution of the stars. In the following terms Comte states the existence of this limit: “There exists in all kinds of research, in all important relations, a harmony that is constant and necessary between the study of our real intellectual needs and the actual range, present or future, of our real knowledge. This harmony … springs simply from this evident necessity: we need only know what can act upon us in a more or less direct manner, and, on the other hand, just because such an influence exists, it becomes sooner or later a sure means of knowledge for us.”(19)

It is quite permissible to doubt whether Comte’s deduction is of any value, even from the point of view of his definition of science. There is, indeed, at the base of his reasoning a postulate: that by some means or other we are able to distinguish in advance that which can act u...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Author’s Preface to the English Edition
• Author’s Preface to the French Edition
• Editor’s Preface
• Chapter I. Law and Cause
• Chapter II. Mechanism
• Chapter III. The Principle of Inertia
• Chapter IV. The Conservation of Matter
• Chapter V. The Conservation of Energy
• Chapter VI. The Elimination of Time
• Chapter VII. The Unity of Matter
• Chapter VIII. Carnot’s Principle
• Chapter IX. The Irrational
• Chapter X. Non-Mechanical Theories
• Chapter XI. Common Sense
• Chapter XII. Conclusions
• Appendices
• Index