The church philosophers of the time, - for example the French philosopher, René Descartes (1596-1650) - employed what we have come to call the deductive method of thinking. But for a new breed of thinkers, a different approach was being adopted.10 Fearless men were stating that for knowledge to be valid it must be the result of experience; the natural world we live in must be approached by building, on, thoroughly tested theories, theories that fit in with our real life experiences; these theories were built up by employing an induction method of thinking.
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The Fundamental Question (the study, or the investigation, of it, is known as epistemology), is, how does one come to know what he knows. While man might well come delivered with certain primitive urges, plainly needed for a start: the question is, does the process of learning operate in the same way; or, is it, simply the full development of innate urges? Or, does man have free will, and while having an innate capacity to receive data, is guided by his past experiences; proceeding in life on a trial and error basis, a basis, in fact, on which all science proceeds.
In answer to the question of how man comes to know what he knows (the study of epistemology) we see that two theories have come about. There is the rationalist view, led by Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, and others; who sought to integrate a belief in the existence of certain innate ideas with an acceptance of the value of data received by experience. Empiricism (expounded by Hobbes, Hume, Locke) denied the existence of innate ideas altogether, maintaining that all knowledge comes from human experience. Kant and numerous people since have attempted to combine the two views.
Dualism is the belief that reality, subsists, both in thought and in matter. It is important in your intellectual dealings with others to recognize a dualist. He or she is a type of person who believes there does exist, a universe, beyond that in which one exists. A "dualist" believes in this world and in the next; he lives in this one and aspires to another. His line of thought comes from the misty dark ages, when everything be a mystery. As I have said, only gradually did man come to grips with the nature of the universe, of which he is part; culminating in Darwin's evolutionary and comprehensive vision. Seemingly taking his cue from Spinoza, Darwin, in his monistic vision, showed that reality is a unitary and continuous process with no dualistic split between soul and body, between matter and mind, between life and not-life. There is no cleavage between natural and supernatural. All phenomena, observed and unobserved, are of one universe; they are all natural to it.11
It was during this time, too, that religious dissenters were picking the church's lock which it had -- on what, and what was not, the correct mode of thinking. Wycliffe (1320-84) of England was one of the first dissenters (the church, as an official act, in 1415, ordered that his bones be dug up and burned.) Martin Luther (1483-1546), an ex-monk, of Germany, was another who attacked the church. Instead of disputing in Latin, as was the fashion in those days, Luther took up the new weapon of the printed word and scattered his views in a contemporary language, in his case the language used by the ordinary people of Germany. It is with these religious dissenters that we see in history the opening of an age which continues to this day: an age of multiplying ideas and weakening faith.
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Yet today, there exists among us, mystics:
"You that will have all solid, and a world of pig-lead, deceive yourselves grossly. You believe yourselves rooted and grounded on adamant, and yet if we uncover the last facts of our knowledge, you are spinning like bubbles on a river, you know not whither or whence, and you are bottomed and capped and wrapped in delusions."12
And so what are we to make of all this; does there exist a Grand Force? How are we to describe it? What attributes do we lend to it? One conclusion we might immediately come to: This Grand Force "is indifferent to progressive development, it has no aims, no goal to reach. Its main motive is to continue striving, to continue living, so to speak. Somehow or other, however, it does bring progress in its wake."13
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