Foundation for Integrated Education

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IV.Since in natural science the original assumptions aboutspecific aspects of infinity and perfection become an integralpart of demonstrable structures and processes, they becomepublicly demonstrated as working truths, not mere speculation,nor unimplementable belief.This is doubtless one reason why we all feel coerced to liveby science, and yet find it difficult to act according to theconcrete yet universal principles of religion- The latter wesay we believe; the others we say we know. Truly religiouspersons maintain that they know directly, and when they liveaccordingly i.e., make over their lives, as demonstrations we may respect and prize them. But the structuring, whetherreasonable to them or inarticulate, necessarily remains a privatepossession, and cannot lead to a consensus except to those capable of leading similar experimental lives. Society dealsharshly with such individuals and communities, even such of themas history later pronounces to have been admirable.The pragmatic failure of religion is caused by the lack ofoperating connections between basic faith in infinitude andperfection, and the finite, material, imperfect approximationswith which we have to deal every day in the ethical and moralchallenges of ordinary life. The same state of affairs turns upin science. Imperfections are also seen in crystals, for example.But since in crystallography we possess a fairly fully worked-outbody of theory (operable truth), we know which parts are imperfections, and the extent to which nature has succeeded in expressing in matter the ideal properties of crystalline space.
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8.In our complex society what is right and what is wrong become operationally uncertain, even though all agree that love,justice, freedom, and the like are universal rights of mankind.In this state of affairs it is possible for a man in publiclife to adhere verbally over and over tc ideals without in theleast being called to account for his conduct. There are nocriteria, and that is why men can take high office proclaimingthe highest ideals. In fact, these ideals in certain instancesare so high that they seem to be quite out of reach and uselesseven to the claimant himself.In physics and chemistry the success of this deductive-exact method, the highest form of science, can be readilydemonstrated. Few examples of its success can be cited inbiology, fewer still in the sciences of man. The overweightof success in physics and chemistry is, therefore, both anadvantage and a danger. We are able to display the method andderive some knowledge of natural orders In energy and matter.But this tends to the belief that these are the only majorkinds of orders, and hence that life is but a yeasty scum ofprotoplasm on the face of the planet, man but a vapor arisingfrom the slime.We propose a program of studies aimed to get a betterbalance in the sciences themselves- In practice this means,first, to examine the present status and content of this kind
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of knowledge in physics, chemistry, and astronomy, in order todisclose the root postulates and the structures in each significant example. Then the nature and value of the inquiry will beclear, beyond doubt, and the use of the method in other areascan be expected to increase.We may be confident that the very considerable evidence forlike, but more subtle lawful orders in life and functional formwill be seen. The writings of D'Arcy Thompson, Herman Weyl andothers will be starting points in this area-Although little or nothing is available along these methodological lines as to man and society, what may be found so farshould be mentioned. These will prompt new suggestions.The ultimate goal is to disclose the background of Realityin which not only all science whether physics, biology, oranthropology but religion, art and ethics and the very game oflife itself, inhere.VI.Our basic proposal is that this work shall be done so systematically and with such authoritative documentation that itwill constitute a small beginning of a publicly demonstrableconsensus upon which the educational systems of free men theworld over can rest an important part of their necessarilyotherwise varied programs. 'Ve start with physical science forobvious reasons, but we propose that at every stage the trueshall be demonstrated as one with the beautiful and the good,until at last juncture with inherited culture can be made atmany important points.
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10.At present only the merest start can be made. A properlystaffed, equipped, and financed research institute for integrative studies could, of course, greatly accelerate andbroaden the program. The times call for such acceleration andbroadening. American scholars and scientists are now comingto the defense, and may later come to the aid, of the lifeof the mind. Thus encouraged, let us begin.F. L. KunzHillandale RoadPort Chester, N.Y.November 17, 1957Copyright, 1957
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ON THE THEORY OF KNOWLEDGE *Albert EinsteinWhen the editor asked me to write something about BertrandRussell, my admiration and respect for the author at once inducedme to say yes. I owe innumerable happy hour3 to the reading ofRussell's works, something which I cannot say of any other contemporary scientific writer, with the exception of Thorstein Veblen.Soon, however, I discovered that it is easier to give such a promisethan to fulfill it. I had promised to say something about Russellas philosopher and epistemologist. After having in full confidencebegun with it, I quickly recognized what a slippery field I hadventured upon, having, due to lack of experience, until nowcautiously limited myself to the field of physics. The presentdifficulties of this science force the physicist to come to gripswith philosophical problems to a greater degree than was the casewith earlier generations. Although I shall not speak here of thosedifficulties, it was my concern with them, more than anything else,which led me to the position outlined in this essay.In the evolution of philosophic thought through the centuries the following question has played a major role: what knowledge is pure thought able to supply independently of sense perception? Is there any such knowledge? If not, what precisely is the* Remarks on Bertrand Russell's theory of knowledge from The Philosophy of Bertrard Russell. Vol. V of "The Library of Living Philosophers," edited by Paul Arthur Schilpp, 1944- Translated from theoriginal German by Paul Arthur Schilpp. Tudor Publishers. Takenfrom Ideas and Opinions. Albert Einstein, Crown, New York, 1954,pp.18-24.
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2.relation between our knowledge and the raw material furnished bysense impressions? An almost boundless chaos of philosophicalopinions corresponds to these questions and to a few others intimately connected with them. Nevertheless there is visible inthis process of relatively fruitless but heroic endeavors a systematic trend of development, namely, in increasing skepticism concerning every attempt by means of pure thought to learn somethingabout the "objective world," about the world of "things" in contrast to the world of mere "concepts and ideas." Be it saidparenthetically that, just as on the part of a real philosopher,quotation marka are used here to introduce an illegitimate concept, which the reader ia asked to permit for the moment, althoughthe concept is suspect in the eyes of the philosophical police.During philosophy's childhood it was rather generallybelieved that it is possible to find everything which can be knownby means of mere reflections. It was an illusion which anyonecan easily understand if, for a moment, he dismisses what he haslearned from later philosophy and from natural science; he willnot be surprised to find that Plato ascribed a higher reality to"ideas" than to empirically experienceable things. Even in Spinozaand as late as in Hegel this prejudice was the vitalizing forcewhich seems still to have played the major role. Someone, indeed,might even raise the question whether, without something of thisillusion, anything really great can be achieved in the realm ofphilosophic thought—but we do not wish to ask this question.This more aristocratic illusion concerning the unlimitedpenetrative power of thought has as its counterpart the more
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3.plebeian illusion of naive realism, according to which things"are" as they are perceived by us through our senses. This illusion dominates the daily life of men and of animals; it is alsothe point of departure in all of the sciences, especially of thenatural sciences.These two illusions cannot be overcome independently.The overcoming of naive realism has been relatively simple. Inthis introduction to his volume. An Incuiry into Meaning find Truth.Russell ha3 characterized this process in a marvelously concisefashion:"We all start from 'naive realism,* i.e., the doctrine thatthings are what they seem. We think that grass is green, thatstones are hard, and that snow is cold. But physics assuresus that the greenness of grass, the hardness of stones, and thecoldness of snow are not the greenness, hardness, and coldnessthat we know in our own experience, but something very different. The observer, when he seems to himself to be observing a stone, is really, if physics is to be believed, observingthe effects of the stone upon himself. Thus science seems tobe at war with itself: when it most means to be objective, itfinds itself plunged into subjectivity against its will. Naiverealism leads to physics, and physics, if true, shows thatnaive realism is false. Therefore naive realism, if true,is false;* therefore it Is false." (pp.14-15)Apart from their masterful formulation these lines saysomething which had never previously occurred to me. For, superficially considered, the mode of thought in Berkeley and Humeseems to stand in contrast to the mode of thought in the naturalsciences. However, Russell's just cited remark uncovers a connection if Berkeley relies upon the fact that we do not directlygrasp the "things" of the external world through our senses, but*Because if one says it ia.in itself, dependable as truth, onemust also say that it leads to something very different (i.e.physics). If physics is false, naive realism has misled us,so it is therein false. F.L.K.
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that only events causally connected with the presence of "things"reach our sense organs, then this is a consideration which gets itspersuasive character from our confidence in the physical mode ofthought. For, if one doubts the physical mode of thought in evenit? most general features, there is no necessity to interpolatebetween the object and the act of vision anything which separatesthe object from the subject and makes the "existence of the object"problematical.It was, however, the very same physical mode of thoughtand its practical successes which have shaken the confidence in thepossibility of understanding things and their relations by means ofpurely speculative thought. Gradually the conviction gained recognition that all knowledge about things is exclusively a working-over of the raw material furnished by the senses, in this general(and intentionally somewhat vaguely stated) form this sentenceis probably today commonly accepted. But this conviction does notrest on the supposition that anyone has actually proved the impossibility of gaining knowledge of reality by means of pure speculation, but rather upon the fact that the empirical (in the above-mentioned sense) procedure alone has shown its capacity to be thesource of knowledge. Galileo and Hume first upheld this principlewith full clarity and decisiveness.Hume saw that concepts which we must regard as essential,such as, for example, causal connection, cannot be gained frommaterial given to us by the senses. This insight led him to askeptical attitude as concerns knowledge of any kind. If one readsHume's books, one is amazed that many and sometimes even highly
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esteemed philosophers after him have been able to write so muchobscure stuff and even find grateful readers for it. Hume has permanently influenced the development of the best philosophers whocame after him. One senses him in the reading of Russell's philosophical analyses, whose acumen and simplicity of expression haveoften reminded me of Hume.Man has an intense desire for assured knowledge. That iswhy Hume's clear message seemed crushing; the sensory raw material,the only source of our knowledge, through habit may lead us tobelief and speculation but not to the knowledge and still lea3 tothe understanding of lawful relations. Then Kant took the stagewith an idea which, though certainly untenable in the form in whichhe put it, signified a step towards the solution of Hume's dilemma:whatever in knowledge is of empirical origin is never certain (Hume).If, therefore, we have definitely assured knowledge, it must begrounded in reason itself. This is held to be the case, for example, in the propositions of geometry and in the principle ofcausality. These and certain other types of knowledge are, so tospeak, a part of the implements of thinking and therefore do notpreviously have to be gained from sense data (i.e., they are apriori knowledge). Today everyone knows, of course, that the mentioned concepts contain nothing of the certainty, of the inherentnecessity, which Kant had attributed to them. The following, however, appears to me to be correct in Kant's statement of the problem:in thinking we use, with a certain "right," concepts to which thereis no access from the materials of sensory experience, if the situation is viewed from the logical point of view.
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6.As a matter of fact, I am convinced that even much moreis to be asserted: the concepts which arise in our thought and inour linguistic expressions are all-—when viewed logically—thefree creations of thought which cannot inductively be gained fromsense experiences. This is not so easily noticed only because wehave the habit of combining certain concepts and conceptual relations (propositions) 30 definitely with certain sense experiencesthat we do not become conscious of the gulf logically unbridgeable—which separates the world of sensory experiences from theworld of concepts and propositions.Thus, for example, the series of integers is obviously aninvention of the human mind, a self-created tool which simplifiesthe ordering of certain sensory experiences. But there is no wayin which this concept could be made to grow, as it were, directlyout of sense experiences. It is deliberately that I choose herethe concept of number, because it belongs to pre-scientific thinking and because, in spite of that fact, its constructive characteris still easily recognizable. The more, however, we turn to themost primitive concepts of everyday life, the more difficult itbecomes amidst the mass of inveterate habits to recognize theconcepts as an independent creation of thinking. It was thus thatthe fateful ccnception-—fateful, that is to say, for an understanding of the here-existing conditions could arise, accordingto which the concepts originate from experience by way of "abstraction," i.e., through omission of a part of its content. 1want to indicate now why this conception appears to me to be sofateful.
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As soon as one is at home in Hume's critique one is easilyled to believe that all those concepts and propositions which cannotbe deduced from the sensory raw material are, on account of their"metaphysical" character, to be removed from thinking. For allthought acquires material content only through its relati onship withthat sensory material. This latter proposition I take to be entirely true; but I hold the prescription for thinking which is groundedon this proposition to be false. For this claim—if only carriedthrough consistently—absolutely excludes thinking of any kind as"metaphysical."In order that thinking might not degenerate into "metaphysics," or into empty talk, it ia only necessary that enough propositions of the conceptual system be firmly enough connected withsensory experiences and that the conceptional system, in view ofits task of ordering and surveying sense experience, should showas much unity and parsimony as possible. Beyond that, however, the"system" is (as regards logic) a free play with symbols accordingto (logically) arbitrarily given rules of the game. All this appliesas much [and in the same manner) to the thinking in daily life as tothe more consciously and systematically constructed thinking in thesciences.It will now be clear what is meant if I make the followingstatement: by his clear critique Hume did not only advance philosophy in a decisive way but also though through no fault of his created a danger for philosophy in that, following his critique, afateful "fear of metaphysics" arose which has come to be a maladyof contemporary empiricistic philosophizing; this malady is the
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counterpart to that earlier philosophizing in the clouds, whichthought it could neglect and dispense with what was given by thesenses.No matter how much one may admire the acute analysiswhich Russell has given us in this latest book on Meaning and Truth,it still seems to me that even there the specter of the metaphysicalfear has caused some damage. For this fear seems to me, for example, to be the cause for conceiving of the "thing" as a "bundleof qualities," such that the "qualities" are to be taken from thesensory raw material. Now the fact that two things are said to beone and the same thing, if they coincide in all qualities, forcesone to consider the geometrical relations between things as belonging to their qualities. (Otherwise one is forced to look uponthe Eiffel Tower in Paris and a New York skyscraper as "the samething.")* However, I see no "metaphysical" danger in taking thething (the object in the sense of physics) as an independent concept into the system together with the proper spatio-temporalstructure.In view of these endeavors I am particularly pleased tonote that, in the last chapter of the book, it finally turns outthat one can, after all, not get along without "metaphysics." Theonly thing to which I take exception there is the bad intellectualconscience which shines through between the lines.* Compare Russell's An Inouirv into Meaning and Truth. 119-120,chapter on "ProperTIamea."

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