What is the most salient characteristic of our thinking in modern times? Some admirers of present-day efficiency may perhaps say the modern spirit is more practical than that of antiquity and of the Middle Ages. We would rather say, it is more materialistic. The practical is not, of course, necessarily materialistic. The practical may be highly spiritual. But the practical spirit characterizing our modern era is not particularly spiritual. Plato was a thousand times more spiritual than that.
The element lacking in our peculiar practicality is, once more, the vision of a purpose, a meaningful goal. What is the picture we obtain here if we go to the really eminent and influential philosophers of modern times?
Of course we must first mention Descartes. His Discours de la Méthode becomes a sort of constitutional charter to all subsequent philosophy. That illustrious manifesto of the principles of modern thinking, however, bluntly declares that the speculative philosophy of antiquity and of the Middle Ages must finally be replaced by a new philosophy,--a "practical" philosophy!
But let us notice one thing: this is not practical in the mild, humanistic, and spiritual sense of the word. It is much rather practical in what we should like to call a "political" sense. For what is the great goal here? It is, expressly, to make man a possessor and master of nature.
What now finds its genesis, is the era of Western science in fact, the hardest and coldest form intellectualism has ever adopted.
Science, that brilliant new star of technical progress and material prosperity, is finally to take over the intellectual leadership of this world after the bankrupt reign of impractical super-idealists, as some moderns might undoubtedly like to call their predecessors.
Thus the old form of intellectualism--comparatively naive and harmless, after all--is henceforth inexorably replaced by a form more relentless and glaringly one-sided (that is, deficient in human totality) than almost any other. For if idealism without science (factual knowledge) is a bad thing, then science without idealism is ten times worse. Here, too, the exclusiveness appears to be the great misfortune and the fatality. For true totality, also, may have its perfectly affirmative attitude towards intellectual life. And that attitude is just a happy synthesis of those two fateful extremes of isolation.
But back to Descartes, that shrewd and capable initiator: the acuteness of his sagacious genius told him that nothing but the mathematical method would enable man to render himself master of nature within a reasonably brief period of time. In fact, Descartes (together with Galileo) must be regarded as the great founder of mathematical physics. This actually meant an entirely different direction chosen for the future orientation of philosophy, as compared to that adopted by the philosophers of old.
Well, you may say, but certainly not only the moderns have been spellbound by the peculiar fascination of mathematics. Was that not, for instance, just one of the hobbyhorses of old Pythagoras as well? And heaven knows how far back the passion for mathematical computations may be traced in our history!
That is all very true. But the attitude of a Pythagoras towards mathematics is not entirely the same, we think, as that adopted by our modern world. We would rather insist that his attitude was essentially different. Permit us to call him a rather "idealistic" mathematician. In fact, we have the vision here of a comparatively innocent old theorist, losing himself in some rather impractical ideas far up in the high heavens of pure contemplation; in other words, something akin to our traditional cartoons of the distracted scholar, whose queernesses mean no serious harm to anybody, except perhaps to himself sometimes.
However, that new scientific spirit publicly inaugurated by Descartes is not quite as harmless as that; we mean harmless considered from our special point of view. It has been claimed--and it would be difficult to invalidate the claim--that Descartes definitively eliminated quality in favour of quantity. We shall presently show more precisely what we understand by the special "harmfulness" and the special "hardness" inherent in the spirit of modern science. But let us first have a glance at some aspects the dualism of body and soul tends to adopt in the new age that is dawning.