William Stanley Jevons - True Science 汉译

From science, modestly pursued, with a due consciousness of the extreme finitude of our intellectual powers, there can arise only nobler and wider notions of the purpose of Creation. Our philosophy will be an affirmative one, not the false and negative dogmas of Auguste Comte, which have usurped the name, and misrepresented the tendencies of a true positive philosophy. True science will not deny the existence of things because they cannot be weighed and measured. It will rather lead us to believe that the wonders and subtleties of possible existence surpass all that our mental powers allow us clearly to perceive. The study of logical and mathematical forms has convinced me that even space itself is no requisite condition of conceivable existence. Everything, we are told by materials, must be here or there, nearer or further, before or after. I deny this—and point to logical relations as my proof.<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />

… So far am I from accepting kant’s doctrine that space is a necessary form of thought, that I regard it as an accident, and an impediment to pure logical reasoning. Material existences must exist in space, no doubt, but intellectual existences may be neither in space nor out of space; they may have no relation to space at all, just as space itself has no relation to time. For all that I can see, then, there may be intellectual existences to which both time and space are nullities.

Now among the most unquestionable rules of scientific method is that first law that whatever phenomenon is, is. We must ignore no existence whatever; we may variously interpret or explain its meaning and origin, but, if a phenomenon does exist, it demands some kind of explanation. If then there is to be competition for scientific recognition, the world without us must yield to the undoubted existence of the spirit within. Our own hopes and wishes and determinations are the most undoubted phenomenon within the sphere of consciousness. If me do act, feel, and live as if they were not merely the brief products of a casual conjunction of atoms, but the instruments of a far-reaching purpose, are we to record all other phenomena and pass over these? We investigate the instincts of the ant and the bee and the beaver, and discover that they are led by an inscrutable agency to work towards a distant purpose. Let us be faithful to our scientific method, and investigate also those instincts of the human mind by which man is led to work as if the approval of a Higher Being were the aim of life.