A critique of economics by Boucke Oswald Fred 1881-

Author:Boucke, Oswald Fred, 1881- [from old catalog]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Economics
Publisher: New York, The Macmillan company
Published: 1922-03-25T05:00:00+00:00

What seems necessary first is a resort to transcendence, if knowledge (including scientific data) is to become explicable without straining our demand for logic; and what again seems evident is the difference, not between a Real and a Knowable as Kant had insisted upon it, but between an object and its content for us, or between magnitudes of data and their relations. Granting that knower and the known are two facts, and granting also that an element of relativity enters into all our understanding of events, we are still able to harmonize the largest possible variety of data and problems in the one belief that the

^Eddington, A. S., in "Mind," 19^, p. 155. See also Bain, A., "Logic," 1874, p. 853.

objective minimum and our subjective maximum of experience are fused by a process which presupposes transcendence. More than sensation and science is at stake; but in them the raw-materials are given out of which we build our castles and creeds. If we may accept the words of a recent work on this subject, we believe "that ^physicaF things exist independently of being known; that they may be our objects, but that they are never our mental content; that they differ in some respects from the quality-groups of our perception (e. g., in not possessing the secondary qualities which we find in our percepts); but that they stand in such causal relation to our percepts that it is possible for science to investigate some of these relations and some of the relations between the physical things, and thus to gain trustworthy knowledge concerning the laws of their actions.'' *

It is with our knowing process and our valuations, in other words, as with the act of perception that psychologists have dwelt on so often, and most illuminatingly. We see more and less than is presented to our eyes, and we see different things according to our angle of vision, antecedents of thought, etc. In the blend of points, lines and shades, for instance, which a book on psychology calls our attention to, we may see either a duck's bill or a rabbit's head, according to focus and predisposition. Both pictures may be read into, or out of, the data presented, but it is hardly possible to predict which one we shall first think of. There are principles that decide our interpretation, and it is not difficult to explain why and how both

•"Essays in Critical Realism" by Drake, D., Lovcjoy, A. O., Pratt, P., Rosers, A. "K., Santayana, G., Sellars, R. W., and Strong, C. A^ 19^. See also essay by Pratt, p. 109, and Sellars, R. W^ in "Minc^" 1919, pp. 410, and 407-26.

readings are brought about; but there is no sure way of excluding entirely either one of them.

Thus life itself is a maze of potential values, of possibilities that alternate or succeed each other or are combined for some reason. A vast array of puzzle pictures, in one sense, is this Manifold! A meshwork so finely wrought and intricate, so

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