The Metaphysical Foundation of Buddhism and Modern Science

This collapse of nineteenth century dogmatism is a warning that the
special sciences require that the imaginations of men be stored with
imaginative possibilities as yet unutilized in the service of scientific
explanation. The nearest analogy is to be seen in the history of some
species of animal, or plant, or microbe, which lurks for ages as an obscure
by-product of nature in some lonely jungle, or morass, or island. Then by
some trick of circumstance it escapes into the outer world and
transforms a civilization, or destroys an empire or the forests of a
continent. Such is the potential power of the ideas which live in the
various systems of philosophy.
Of course in this action, and reaction, between science and philosophy
either helps the other. It is the task of philosophy to work at the
concordance of ideas conceived as illustrated in the concrete facts of
the real world. It seeks those generalities which characterize the
complete reality of fact, and apart from which any fact must sink into an
abstraction. But science makes the abstraction, and is content to
understand the complete fact in respect to only some of its essential
aspects. Science and Philosophy mutually criticize each other, and
provide imaginative material for each other. A philosophic system should
present an elucidation of concrete fact from which the sciences
abstract. Also the sciences should find their principles in the concrete
facts which a philosophy system presents. The history of thought is the
story of the measure of failure and success in this joint enterprise.