The Logic of Hegel

The followers of Bacon and Newton Sir Francis Bacon (1561–1626) and Isaac Newton (1642–1727), the foundational figures of the scientific method and classical physics. endeavored to study the laws of mental movement by a method that was a strange mixture of empiricism The theory that all knowledge is derived from sense-experience. and metaphysics. They attempted to apply the general laws of thought to the examination of the specific phenomena of the mind. In the works of these thinkers—as with the pre-Socratics—one element may be called philosophical, and another element may be called scientific, if we use both words loosely.

But with Socrates in the ancient era, and with Kant in the modern era of philosophy, the boundary between the two regions was definitively drawn. This distinction was achieved primarily by turning away from science and popular ideas. Socrates withdrew thought from long discussions concerning the nature of the universe and focused it instead upon man and the human condition. Kant left the broad fields of established knowledge and inquired into the central principle upon which the acquisitions of science were founded.

The change thus begun was not unlike the revolution that Copernicus achieved in the theory of astronomy. Human thought—whether in the realized form of the State or in the abstract shape of Reason (that thought which is a person's true world)—was made the pivot around which the system of the sciences might turn. In the contest that Thomas Reid A Scottish philosopher (1710–1796) who founded the "Common Sense" school of philosophy. claimed exists between Common Sense and Philosophy, the assumptions of the former have been distinctly reversed. Kant, like Socrates, has shown that the real resting point and true center of movement is not any single body of doctrine, but rather the humanity, the moral law, and the thought that underlies these doctrines.

However, this skeptical or "negative" attitude of philosophy toward the sciences is only the beginning, necessary to secure a firm standing ground. In the ancient world Aristotle, and in the modern world Hegel, demonstrate the outward movement to reconquer the universe, proceeding from that principle which Socrates and Kant had emphasized in its simpler and less developed form.

Mr. Mill John Stuart Mill (1806–1873), an influential English philosopher and economist., in the closing chapter of his Logic, has briefly sketched the ideal of a science to which he gives the name of Teleology The study of purpose or design in nature or human actions., which corresponds to the ethical and practical sphere...