The Metaphysical Aspects of Relativity

Abstract

THERE is a possible misconception in the application of the term “metaphysical” to the new principle of relativity which it is advisable to clear up. In the great era of the triumphant advance of the positive sciences, which began about the end of the first third of the nineteenth century, metaphysics was decried as the main obstacle to scientific progress. Following the lead of Auguste Comte, the workers in the sciences held it up to scorn as obscurantism. The derision and reproach which were then poured on it have clung to it ever since. There are many to-day who acknowledge, indeed, that metaphysics must be assigned a place in the hierarchy of the sciences, but interpret the Aristotelian definition, “that which follows or comes after physics,” as indicating a dark realm of the yet unknown, or even of the unknowable, which surrounds the clear zone of positive knowledge, into which we may peer, but will discern nothing. The objects of metaphysics—the soul, the cosmos, the deity—are in this view vain imaginings, not objects of which there can be knowledge in the scientific meaning—that is, objects amenable to the experimental method. Such a view simply ignores the scientific tradition. Modern science is the result of the formulation and adoption of the experimental method, but the experimental method is not self-evident or inherently rational; it depends on a metaphysical concept, and its rationality can be established only by metaphysical principles. To contrast, then, the experimental method with the principles on which it depends, to describe one as the realm of science and the other as the realm of ignorance or unknow-ability, is from any philosophic point of view stultifying, and, in the literal sense, absurd.