Volume 11, Number 2 · August 1, 1968
Ideal Idealist
By A. Rupert Hall
Newtonian Studies
by Alexandre Koyré
Harvard, 288 pp., $7.95
Metaphysics and Measurement, Essays in Scientific Revolution
by Alexander Koyré
Harvard, 176 pp., $7.00
In the history of science there is a consistent antithesis between idealism and sensationalism. According to one school of historians (which, having the authority of Locke behind it, has flourished throughout the last two centuries), man's conception of his natural environment is essentially formed through sensation: of course, the senses unaided brought man little knowledge, and during the period in which he relied on them alone science was necessarily speculative, even magical, certainly restricted. Richness and precision of knowledge can come only from a great number of carefully specified sensations (colored patches, meter-readings, geometric tracings) such as experimental investigation provides. So knowledge, it is held, has developed—that is, approximated to what we now believe to be knowledge—in proportion to the quantity and quality of organized sensation, in other words empirical data.
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