Scientific Truth and the Scientific Spirit

James Gibson Hume (1916)

Classics in the History of Psychology

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Christopher D. Green

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Scientific Truth and the Scientific Spirit

After tactfully referring to the part played by Canadians in 1861 in assisting in the

struggle against slavery, and the present effort of Canadians on behalf of liberty, he turns to the

forces that should bring men together in peaceful co-operation, among these preeminently

"scientific truth and the scientific spirit".

He then shows his versatility by discussing truth and the method of its discovery from

the angle of the history of science and the discussions, of the two contending schools of

philosophy at the present time, the Pragmatists and their opponents, whom he describes as

believing in an Absolute "absolved from all limitations of time and capable of all that we can

conceive and more".

It soon appears that Dr. Macallum enrols himself as an enthusiastic admirer of the

A brief sketch of the rise and growth of the science of Biochemistry with a fine statement

of the aims and [p. 444] ideals and aspirations of science in general, completes a very

interesting and suggestive article.

Livros Grátis

Comment:

It is not at all surprising that the statement philosophical principles and methods by

William James should appeal to a Biochemist. James was first of all trained in biology,

physiology and medicine and was a teacher in that field before turning to psychology and later

to philosophical construction. He therefore had an intimate acquaintance with and sympathy for

the work in biology and understood its problems and difficulties and methods.

But it is not so evident why Dr. Macallum should follow with such an implicit trust the

Pragmatists in their misunderstanding amounting to misrepresentation of their philosophical

opponents, charging them with a preposterous view of the Absolute that comes with it the

supposition that any knowledge of any kind and to any degree of an Absolute is the belief in an

supposed to be the arch offender in Absolutism. Now the truth is that just a half-century before

wrote his epoch-making "Origin of Species", Hegel had written his'' Philosophy of History'', etc.,

and had enunciated the theory of development and applied it to the interpretation of human

civilisation. The naturalistic philosophical view of evolution in and the previously announced

idealistic [p. 445] philosophical view of development in Hegel are identical in so far as the belief

in progressiveness is concerned. Indeed both had the same tendency to make almost a fetich

[sic] of this feature of progressiveness, so that to some of their disciples in each case

progressiveness appeared as something inevitable. The view of William James corrects this

inevitableness in the Darwinian evolution, representing it on the-contrary as conditional and in

the case of human progressiveness dependent on human volition and human effort. But

It is indeed a revelation to find the earlier rationalists guilty for the persecutions in the

middle ages. We had supposed these were due to the school of the anti-rationalists who

desired to accelerate the "will to believe".

Dr. Macallum has had a preliminary training for philosophical construction similar to that

possessed by John Locke and by William James but with a more extended study of

physiological science, and we should welcome further philosophical ventures on his part. As he

has nailed to the mast the flag of "Progressiveness" it is not unlikely that he may yet, while

extending his pragmatic views allow a more charitable interpretation to be put on the views and

methods of the Constructive Idealists.

Footnote

Johns Hopkins in 1888, and became a UT professor in 1891 (much like Hume himself).

Macallum was instrumental in the modernization of the UT Medical Faculty. He discovered one

of the first neurotransmitters, and was made a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1906. In 1917,

the year after this paper was published, he left UT to become Chair of the Research Council

of , and then he went on to teach medicine in in 1920. He returned to to take up a

professorship at McGill from 1920 to 1929, where he became an outspoken advocate of public

educational reform.