Science and Philosophy

Science is slow in its affirmations, but it is sure; at times it repels the truth, but it never shares absolute error. It proceeds with mathematical rigor; it admits only that which is, whereas Philosophy admits all that may be; hence the difference one notices between the aim of the one and that of the other. Philosophy arrives at a first impulse; Science crosses laboriously and slowly the arid road of positive knowledge. But Philosophy and Science are sisters; they set out from the same origin to run the same course and to arrive at the same end. Alone, Philosophy may commit deviations that reason and scientific experimentation must repress; isolated, Science may lead to the annihilation of the sentiments, if it is not regenerated by the excellence of the sentiments of the heart and of the aspirations toward moral progress. In the original periods of the elaboration of worlds, sophism dominates man together with scientific error. Then the thinkers and the learned, taking diverse paths, separate during the phases consecrated to the struggle, only to reunite later in a common triumph.

Certainly you are still far from having said the last word on all things; but you will arrive with great strides at that epoch in which Humanity will advance toward the infinite along a single route, broad, sure, tolerant, and united in solidarity. Man will no longer be a unit fighting for his own glory and seeking to aggrandize himself upon the intellectual corpses of his contemporaries. He will be an element of the great family, a modality forming part of a harmonious whole, a rational instrument in a concert without flaw! It will be the era of happiness par excellence, the blessed era, the era of peace through fraternity and of progress through the union of intelligent efforts. Honor to Philosophy, which knows how to ally itself with Science to obtain such a result.

Honor to the men of Science who dare to affirm their philosophical beliefs and to draw from its wrapping, to unfurl before the astonished eyes of the world of thought, the banner upon which they have inscribed these three words: Work, experimentation, certainty.

Deprived of Science, Philosophy hurls itself into the infinite, but, flying with one wing only, it falls exhausted from the heights to which it aspires. Science without Philosophy is one-eyed, seeing well only on one side; it does not perceive the abyss that opens beneath its absent eye. Science and Philosophy, united in a common impulse toward the unknown, represent certainty, the truth in the direction of God.

Clélie Duplantier. n [1]

[see Clélie Duplantier.]