Philosophical Values and the Future of Civilization

Extract

In An article published in the July 1942 number of the Review of Politics, I suggested that contemporary learned men who deny the existence of truth, virtue, or beauty, are led into a dilemma. Either they must confine truth to positive science, where the results are always tentative and incomplete with respect to the universe in which human beings have to move, or else they must believe that people generally will be inclined towards good and wise actions even though learning refuses to admit the existence of standards, apart from the rules of conduct that can be derived from positive science. The second view, we suggested, involves the admission that impersonal standards do exist, independent of positive science. We might conclude that the nourishment of these standards by means of the intellect, and with the help of results obtained by science, ought to be the supreme task of learning.