The Metaphysical Foundation of Buddhism and Modern Science

activities of the spirit of mankind. He is the origin of the striving
towards an accurate analysis of each given situation which in the end has
created modern European Science. We can see in the labours of his life,
the first clear example of a philosophic intuition passing into a scientific
method.
Section III. This transition from philosophic intuition to scientific
methods is in fact the whole topic of this chapter. A philosophic system,
viewed as an attempt to coordinate all such intuitions, is rarely of any
direct importance for particular sciences. Each such science in tracing its
ideas backward to their basic notions stops at a half-way house. It finds
a resting place amid notions which for its immediate purposes and for its
immediate methods it need not analyse further. These basic notions are a
specialization from the philosophic intuitions which form the background
of the civilized thought of the epoch in question. They are intuitions
which, apart from their use in science, ordinary language rarely
expresses in any defined accuracy, but habitually presupposes in its
current words and expressions. For example, the words 'tables', 'chairs',
'rocks', presuppose the scientific notion of material bodies, which has
governed natural science from the seventeenth century to the end of the
nineteenth.
But, even from the point of view of the special sciences, philosophic
systems with their ambitious aims at full comprehensiveness, are not
useless. They are the way in which the human spirit cultivates its deeper