Metaphysics and Materialism

Abstract

“IF the illusion of the scholastic method is that from mere forms we can deduce essences, then the world-view which we call materialism is only a scholastic pastime.” This is the concluding sentence of Hermann Weyl's “Raum, Zeit, Materie.“ Whatever may be the case with the physicists, the mathematicians are under no illusion with regard to the completeness of the scientific revolution. The principle of relativity has not merely complicated the concept of physical reality; it has re-formed it.. Mathematics is, and has always been recognised as being, a constructive process of the human mind exercised on physical existence. The old mathematics took its matter from physics; the new mathematics gives, matter to physics. The effect is that the world-view which had become for physical science in the nineteenth century practically unchallengeable, and the acceptance of which had come to be regarded as the indispensable condition and only passport for those who would enter the ranks of scientific investigators, has become suddenly incredible. It is true, indeed, that it still has its defenders, and that it is held as firmly as ever by many who continue to be in their special departments authoritative teachers; but this does not alter the fact that for us to-day the world-view is changed, and it is not even strange that many leaders in scientific research still cling fast to the old view when we remember that the great originator of the modern inductive method in the seventeenth century, Francis Bacon, to the end rejected the Copernican theory.