If Intelligence Becomes Limited To Reason
We will mention, by way of reminder, that Descartes limited intelligence to reason, that he granted to what he thought might be called "metaphysics" the mere function of serving as a basis for physics, and that this [kind of] physics itself was by its very nature destined, in his eyes, to pave the way for the applied sciences, mechanical, medical and moral sciences, representing the final limit of human knowledge as he conceived it.
Are not these by him affirmed tendencies, those which - at the first glance may be seen to - characterize the whole development of the modern world? To deny or to ignore all pure and super-rational knowledge was to open up the path which logically could only lead on the one hand to positivism and agnosticism, which resign themselves to the narrowest limitations of intelligence and its object, and on the other hand to all those sentimental and "voluntarist" theories which feverishly seek in the infra-rational for what reason cannot provide them with. Indeed, [many of] those of our contemporaries who wish to react against rationalism accept none the less the complete identification of intelligence with mere reason, and they believe that intelligence is nothing more than a purely practical faculty, incapable of going beyond the realm of matter. EW?!p.24
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2006-04-17