A Scandal Scanned, or How to Keep Philosophy Respectable

Abstract

ASTORY has recently gone forth' purporting to reveal Mother relations with True Being. Indeed, it is hinted that the odor of sanctity has not hovered over certain of the more private and internal of her internal relations, which are slyly referred to as Nature's Secrets. It is further disclosed that Mother Nature is fickle, changeable, of surprises and novelties, and that she is regularly in a state of becoming. I propose, therefore, to examine these charges, indictments, innuendoes, intimations, and insinuations into Mother life and character in order that the pristine and spotless condition of metaphysics be rendered still more spotless and that our great love, Philosophy, be kept respectable. But first, as to the indictment. It is charged: (i) That when True Being first met Mother Nature, he found her full of movements, contingencies, hazards, chances, changes, surprises, and genuine novelties. (2) That Mother Nature became a sort of diversion from True Being's eternal contemplation of himself. (3) That because of this diversion and because True Being refused to take Time seriously, Evil came into the world. (4) That Mother Nature was soon in a state of becoming and that passage was essential for her to be what she was. (5) That Mother Nature gave birth to Fact. (6) That this Fact cannot be explained away and that Mother Nature, in shame and humiliation, has retired into a solipsism. How can we hope to meet such a formidable array of accusations? Truly, the patient probing of Socrates, the endlessness of Kant, the dialectical ingenuity of Hegel, the acumen of Dewey, the bifurcative instinct of Lovejoy, the gentle irony of Santayana-in short, the totum simul of the Absolute, would be needed to parry such thrusts and to turn the trusty steel upon the perpetrator of these charges. His masterly skill, his fearlessness, his depth of learning, have our unbounded admiration. Indeed, we are reminded of W. S. Gilbert's couplet: