The Higher Learning in a Democracy

IT IS now some centuries since Aristotle announced the philosophic principle of induction as the process by which the universal is extracted from a number of varying cases, to be followed by definition, fixing the principle thus extracted for use in all subsequent thinking. In so doing he not only developed a logical theory which furnished the intellectual method of Europe for almost two thousand years but laid the seeds of an intellectual controversy still rife today. As the lines came eventually to be drawn, the battle is between rationalism, on the one hand, and empiricism, on the other; the former devoted to principles, the latter to facts. The protagonist of the former is typically Descartes; of the latter, Francis Bacon. We have long been assured by our leading philosophers that the battle is largely sham, that all thinking worth while must make use of the rationalistic process of deduction, and of the empirical process of induction, of speculation and experimentation, of theorizing and of observing facts, each as complements of the other. If, therefore, an individual emphasizes one process more than the other, it is because of his tastes and inclination and not for reasons of eternal verity. In the natural sciences there seems a fair agreement on this, and it is accepted that the essence of scientific method is the verification of intelligent theory or even of shrewd guess. But in the social sciences such reconciliation is far from being obtained. John Dewey refers to the split as tragic, pointing to our oscillation "between a normative and rationalistic logic in morals and an empirical, purely descriptive method in concrete matters of fact," so that "our supposed ultimate ideals and aims