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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 March 2022
We live in a circular universe, of which each item must be defined in terms of other items, ultimately of its complement-opposite, by their mutual limitation. The employment of abstract, formally consistent, thought in this work is quite inadequate. Abstract thought is not metaphysically valid, because its formal consistency forces it to ignore—which in the realm of pure reason is tantamount to denying—some pertinent elements of reality—experience, and then implicitly at once and perhaps explicitly later to recognize the ignored elements, and thus be unconsciously inconsistent with itself. Therefore mankind is forced to undertake the monumental task of constructing a philosophical method of thought which does not strive after formal consistency and so which is able as constantly as may be consciously to express both (1) the recognized and the (complementary-opposite) ignored elements of reality—experience, that is, in ontological terms, being and non-being, and (2) the consistent and the inconsistent elements in thought. This the needed method can do only by relating items by their mutual restraint or measurement of various kinds and degrees, as will be explained below. To put the essential matter bluntly: philosophers must seek to learn discursively what scientists have always known intuitively—that the ultimate method of discovering truth is measurement, not abstract consistency. The proposed method must not, however, interfere with the rhetorical ordering of material, which must contain a conscious element of pure consistency, as will also be explained below.
1 For confirmation cf. Handbook of the Society for Religious Culture pp. 28d, 29a 27–8, 30f and “On Meeting the Crisis in Culture,” Periodical Review, May 1948, pp. 4c, 4b, 4d, 10.
2 Cf. My “Salvaging Physiological Psychology,” Philosophy of Science, vol. 13, no. 2, April, 1946, pp. 123–130, and A. Szent-Gyorgyi, “Towards a New Biochemistry,” Science, vol. 93, 1941, pp. 609–611. Note that the facts reported in the latter article support the belief that irrational breaks exist in nature; that the postulation of energy levels designed to avoid that belief has no independent, casual proof; and that if all science progresses by means of such rational-irrational postulation, then all science supports the present gestalt interpretation of reality.
3 Cf. My “The Spiritual Nature of Man: A study in Catholic Psychology,” The Journal of Social Psychology, 1948, 27, 151–178.
4 Cf. His “Dover Beach Revisited: A New Fable for Critics,” Harper's Magazine, 1940, CLXXX, 235–244.
5 In my “The Nature and Source of Value,” Archives of the Society for Religious Culture, I point out more than one hundred explicit or implicit self-contradictions in Naturalism and the Human Spirit, written by some fifteen especially competent contemporary philosophers.
6 Accepted for publication in an early issue of the Philosophy of Science.