The sun of science shone brightly in the late nineteenth and early this centuries, promising a great future for mankind. Scientists and laymen alike took heart and had set their mind and hope on science. They acclaimed every scientific discovery and technological advancement as an assuring testimony that science held the key not only to the secret of nature but also to the happiness of mankind. They lauded the triumphant progress of scientific knowledge as an unmistakable sign that every significant human problem could be solved sooner or later, and that the man's age-old dream of building a paradise on earth was about to come true.
To be sure, a good number of landmarks in science has been majestically erected since the dawn of the 19th century. In 1801, by publishing his
Disquistiones Arithmeticae, Gauss advanced number theory, the Queen of mathematics which is in turn considered the Queen of science. In 1803, Dalton proposed his atomic theory of matter. Less than twenty years later, Oersted discovered electromagnetism, and in 1825, non-Euclidean geometries were constructed independently by Lobachevski and Bolyi. In the year 1827, Ohm stated the law of electric conduction, and the following year, the first human synthesis of an organic compound from inorganic material appeared. In 1831, Faraday discovered the electromagnetic induction, and during this decade, man saw the formulation of the law of the conservation of energy and the theory of entropy, known respectively as the first and the second laws of thermodynamics. In 1884, Cantor formulated the concepts of transfinite mathematics, and developed the set theory, providing the basis for modern mathematics. And then in the 1850s, due mainly to the efforts of Kirchhoff and Dunsen, the science of spectroscopy was established, leading to a number of far-reaching discoveries in physics. In 1854, Boolean algebra was invented. And in the year 1859, Darwin's epoch-making treatise,
Origin of Species, saw the light of the day. In 1860s, Kekule led the way in the establishment of organic chemistry, and Maxwell pioneered in the formulation of the mathematical theory of electromagnetic radiation. Mendel set up a number of fundamental laws of genetics, and Mendeleev proposed the periodic law and periodic table of elements. In 1884, the concept of ionization was established by the work of Arrhenius, and in 1887, through the efforts of Hertz, much was learned about the propagation of electromagnetic waves, the so-called radio waves, including the demonstration that these waves travel at the velocity of light. And during the last decade of the 19th century, Roentgen discovered X-rays, Becquerel, radioactivity in uranium, and Thomson, the electron.
Our own century started with the same excitement, inspiration, and dream. At the very first year of this century, Planck proposed a theory known later as quantum theory, and the following year, Rutherford established the nature of radioactive integration and refined our concept of the structure of atoms. In the same year, De Vries enunciated the notion of evolution by mutation. And in 1905, the greatest genus of science since Newton, Albert Einstein, published the special theory of relativity and proposed the photon theory of light. Ten years later, the general theory of relativity saw the light.
In this first decade of our century, the scientists led by Wilson began to observe nuclear particles. And during the following decade, Kammerlingh-Hnnes discovered superconductivity, Bohr proposed the concept of the planetary atom, Moseley established the concept of atomic number and identified it to the charge on the nucleus of an atom. In 1913, Russell and Whitehead completed their momentous
Principia Mathematica, a milestone in symbolic logic and the foundation of mathematics. And then during the next decade, man saw the formulation of wave mechanics by de Broglie in 1924, and that of matrix mechanics by Heisenbeg in 1925. In 1926, Pavlov published his
Conditioned Reflexes, giving psychologico-behavioral studies a new stimulus, if not a complete redirection. At the beginning of the following decade, Parli postulated the existence of the neutrino, Chadwick and Anderson discovered, respectively, the neutron and the positron. Fermi led the way in the production of transuranium elements by neutron bombardment of uranium, and Meitner, Hahn and Strassmann succeeded in the first nuclear fission of uranium. Then in 1942, controlled nuclear fission of uranium was achieved by Fermi and others that put man on the very verge of a totally new era of atomic energy. We can continue without any efforts this long list of scientific discoveries and add to the examples of human achievements in science
ad nauseam. As a matter of fact, never had there been a time since the dawn of our civilization did man become so exhilarating in his spirit, so sure in his future, and so proud of his place in the universe that he could not help losing his heart to science. Science was everything and anything worthy of man's pursuit and his respect must be scientific. It was a time for scientists. It was an era of progress. It was an age of science.
At first, the revolutionary nature and the philosophical implications of non-Euclidean geometries, quantum theory and the theories of relativity did not receive as much attention, and as prompt and deep reflection, as they deserve. The "new" geometry and the "modern" physics caught the eyes of people only little by little, leading some of them eventually to embark upon the study of the nature of scientific endeavorings in general and the formation of scientific theory and knowledge in particular. Thus the philosophy of science began to flourish in our age. This is, however, an endeavor confined mostly to the academic circle. For the man in the street, it was the war-time employment of scientific technology with its productive feat never before achieved and its grievous destruction yet done that made him start looking in awe of science. The first atomic bomb exploded in 1945, and on the 6th and the 9th of August that year, atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, respectively, that ruined these two cities and destroyed hundreds of thousands of human lives. This horrorstricken event cut a deep wound in man's heart. It left a cloud of suspicion over his mind. The devastating power of modern scientific technologies seemed thus to introduce the serpent into the science enthusiasts' paradise.
Subsequent developments and achievements in science struck us with a mixture of hope and fear. Atomic reactors were constructed giving man a new form of energy resources, but nuclear-fusion bombs (hydrogen bombs) were also invented with the capacity of destroying the whole human race. The structure of both DNA and RNA was deciphered, gene synthesis completed and the "test-tube babies" born. Man seems to come a delightful distance to improve our genetic quality, but at the same time he also took a fearful step nearer to the control of the behavior of others. Man-made satellites flying all over our heads bring us closer together through new ways of communication, but they may someday carry nuclear weapons to threaten our very own existence. Modern industry made possible by scientific technologies provides us with daily necessities and fancy conveniences most welcome, but its pollutions also blacken our lungs and poison our blood. It seems to many that this once science enthusiasts' dreamland has become more and more dreadful and less and less livable. Man began to gaze inward and have second thought on science, wondering if Spencer was not truly prophetic and Orwell's dystopian world of 1984 has not come painfully near at hand. Do we have a dream turned into a nightmare? Is science really everything? Man began to turn back from gazing deeply and bewitchingly into the dazzling horizon of science to think, ask, and talk philosophically-once again, that is.
Philosophical has man always been from the time immemorial. Man is no animal. He is rational, being both reflective and speculative. He is no angel. But he is capable of something divine with a view to making it part of his humanity. He asks fundamental questions concerning his own existence and tries to find a way of arriving at the answers-and this is what philosophy is all about. Questions like what is the meaning of human existence? What can we know about the world and about ourselves? What is Good, what is Truth, what is Beauty and what is Love? How can we know what the future would be like when is Beauty and what is Love? How can we know what the future would be like when we have only the experience of the past? How can mathematics which is the product of arm-chair mathematicians be the backbone of science? What is scientific method and how can its application be justified? Are we really free in determining our own destiny and creating our own future? And a good many other questions. These questions are fundamental, because the answers to, and sometimes the formulations of , other more apparent and practical questions presuppose the answers to these questions. They are the results of our reflective and speculating mind, because in doing philosophy we have to look not merely outwardly searching for objective existence and reality, but also inwardly gazing into ourselves. We look for the ultimacy and eternity that is inherent in the world, and at the same time we reach at our own consciousness and spirituality. We examine how this subjectivity illuminates-nay, as some will hasten to say, constitutes the ultimacy and eternity of the reality. Philosophy is not a profession. Being philosophical is having a certain quality to our life.
Science and philosophy were born together in the beginning. They were closely integrated, if barely distinguishable at first. Philosophy, which means the love of wisdom in Greek, embraced scientific endeavorings among its activities. Thales, the first renowned philosopher in the West, was also the man who tried to explain the ultimate nature of universe by speculating on its constituents. He worked in the same spirit as Archimedes, Eratosthenes, Aristartus, Hipparchus and Ptolemy in a later time. Democritus, another early Greek philosopher, was the first to propose that the ultimate constituents of our universe were not common-sensical elements like water, fire, earth or air, but rather something which was not divisible. He called them atoms, meaning that which is indivisible in Greek. By his speculation, Democritus became the first philosopher to give mankind an atomic theory of matter that purported to explain the being and becoming of the world in terms of its underlying properties of the fundamental elements. We can easily multiply the examples of the meeting between science and philosophy from ancientry to the present. In fact, many great minds in our history are both scientists and philosophers at the same time, and there have been even more men of learning who are scientist-turned philosophers or philosophically-minded scientists. The reason is simple. Philosophy, as we have just said, deals with ultimate problems of our life, people with this ultimate concern will turn eventually to philosophy.
Friendly rather than as a foe, science parted company with philosophy only relatively late to turn up intellectual products of admirable quality when scientists began to use extensively, if not exclusively, special methodology, to narrow their subjects of concern, consciously or unconsciously, down to a much more limited scope, making their territories better defined, and to emphasize, with or without justification, the factuality and objectivity of human experience.
Scientists are of course not to blame for doing all this. What has gone wrong ever since consists in the narrow-minded interpretation, and over-enthusiastic expectation, of science thus construed. For a layman, it is understandably only a small, although careless, step to jump to the conclusion that science is almighty after having witnessed its glorious achievements over the post four hundred years. He is under a strong temptation to glorify science, extolling it to the skies. Thus a whole cloud of narrow-minded "scienticism" formed hanging steadily over our intellectual horizon and permeating persistently our daily atmosphere-until quite recently. In this intellectual mist and common-sensical fog, people extolled science not only as the thing most valuable and worthy , but often as the only thing desirable and respectable. Quite a few people, among them a sizable number of the intellectuals, even went so far as to attempt to justify the dubious moral and political relativisms by appealing, fallaciously of course, to Einstein's well-founded theories of relativity!
Fortunately at long last, we are now beginning to awake, at a high price in some cases, to the realities of human existence. We see more clearly now the nature, scope and limitations of science. We are no longer all sound asleep in a scienticist's dream, fancifully awaiting the paradise begotten by the alleged almighty science alone. We are more and more awake to the fact that all our human experiences are not purely scientific, even if it is granted that science can solve exclusively and exhaustively every question concerning matters of fact, which must remain rather doubtful. We once again realize that human life is not just an aggregate of facts. It is a totality of facts and values, of reason and emotion, of objective truths and subjective minds, of objects corporeal and things spiritual, of actuality and possibility, of reality and dreams, of scientific thinking and metaphysical speculation, of logical reasoning and artistic imagination, of practical necessity and moral ideality. Thus we must face our own existence systematically, organically and holistically instead of confronting it piecemeal-to say nothing of picking up the scienticist piece and taking it for the only reality of human existence. In short, ours is a life that could be full and rich only if we would go beyond scientific sagacity and attempt at philosophical wisdom.