cCHAPTER 2
THE NATURE OF COSMOLOGY
TWO
COSMOLOGICAL METHODS
2.1.1.
The ultimate goal of cosmology1 is to establish the nature of the universe. This goal may be approached by two very different methods, each having its strengths and limitations. That there should exist two, and only two, such methods is due, at bottom, to the fact that there exist only two basic kinds of evidence by which the truth of any cosmological theory may be substantiated. The evidence we can adduce in favour of the universe possessing any designated feature is either that this has been experienced - direct, or empirical, evidence; or that its existence is implied by a feature which has been experienced - indirect, or rational, evidence. Now, both methods incorporate both kinds of evidence, but, owing to the difference in emphasis placed upon these, utilise them very differently. The two methods - in effect, empirical cosmology and rational cosmology - are usually known as science and metaphysics. I shall use the term science, or empirical science, in the normal way, though with almost total emphasis on its philosophical, as against its technological, connotation. But, for a number of reasons, I shall not, in general, be using 'metaphysics': firstly, because of its ad hoc origins in a perfunctory classification of the topics dealt with by a particular philosopher (Aristotle); secondly, because, however 'meta' (beyond) be interpreted, it is an offence against reason to define the more ontologically fundamental discipline in terms of the less; thirdly, because 'metaphysics' has, by this time, become so devalued in the course of its manifold misappropriations, that there is nothing else to be done but discard it. Instead, I shall use the word ontology for 'rational cosmology'. 'Ontology' means literally 'the study of being', and since the universe is 'all existence' and 'being' is a synonym of 'existence', 'ontology' is as eminently suitable a word as any to denote a cosmological method. Whenever I do use the word metaphysics it will always be as a synonym for 'ontology'.
2.1.2.
In Chapters 3 - 5 we shall be offering an historical overview of cosmology, in order to show, however sketchily, where, after two and a half thousand years' endeavour, it stands today in relation to its ultimate goal of giving a rationally coherent account of the universe: an overview all the more necessary in view of those monumental errors built into postmodernism which we discussed in our Introduction. But although ontology and science can only really be understood in the context of their actual historical manifestation, it would still seem advisable, in view of prevailing misconceptions, to preface our historical account (i) with matter relating to the essentials of the two methods and (ii) by pointing out their complementarity. It is this which forms the subject matter of the present chapter.
ONTOLOGY (RATIONAL COSMOLOGY)
Rational Connection
2.2.1.
The criteria of this method arise from the interconnectedness of entities - an entity being any part of the universe - and which, on account of our lack of knowledge, we are usually obliged to refer to in abstract and general, rather than concrete and particular, terms. The only part of the universe of which we have direct cognisance is our own experience; and the most fundamental attribute of this experience is that it is composite. It is composed of many different discernible parts which are connected to one another in one or more of three fundamental ways: temporally, spatially, or sympathically2 – the last being particularly outstanding in the connection between our past and present experience. The only evidence we possess for the existence of any entity beyond those of our experience, is that this experience is such as to imply its existence. The more necessarily it is implied by our experience, the stronger the evidence for its existence. Necessary connections are also known as rational connections: connections which are implied by the very natures of the entities so connected.
2.2.2.
It follows that rational cosmology is dependent for its validity upon rational connections. We mean by 'a rational connection' a connection which is a necessary implication of the natures of the entities connected. These last may be of any number, and their interconnections may be direct, or mediated by other entities. At the commonsense level of rationality many types of connection - gravitation for instance - seem right or natural merely from familiarity; no reason can be found at this level as to why an unsupported body should fall towards the Earth. On the other hand there are innumerable cases where common sense can perceive a reason why certain entities should occur together. One such is provided by an animal's anatomy and physiology on the one hand, and its way of life on the other. For example, given that, in the wild, a cat survives principally by eating any small vertebrates it can catch, it makes sense that it should have the physical make-up it has. A rabbit with the same lifestyle would not survive - hence its rarity. But we see such instances suggestive of rational connection everywhere : faster running taps filling the bath more quickly than slower running taps; square pegs fitting into square holes; disappointment ensuing on the non-occurrence of a confidently anticipated pleasure, and so on. I am in no way concerned here with claiming that these are necessary connections, but only with pointing out that since the connections obviously depend upon the natures of the entities involved, something more than the mere constant conjunctions postulated by Hume must be operating. To see the inadequacy of ‘constant conjunctions’, we have only to imagine living in a world where cats behave like rabbits, and rabbits like cats, where square pegs fit into round holes, not square ones, where the slower you run your taps the quicker your bath fills, and where, greatly looking forward to an evening’s tennis, you feel pleased when it is rained off. Such a world would be manifestly absurd. We have seen that a rational connection is one proceeding from the natures of the entities connected. But the appropriateness of so many causes to their effects is essentially rational – i.e. it makes sense – even if it doesn’t amount to necessity. And even in cases, such as that of gravitation, when, on the commonsense level, nothing in the way of a rational connection between the Earth and a falling body can be detected, it is still clear that some causal constraint must exist between them, since, if it did not, why this constant conjunction?
2.2.3.
But, irrespective of the rationality of connections at the commonsense level, the vital question for rational cosmology is: Are all connections between entities necessarily rational? Or: can there possibly exist non-rational connections? This last question is all-important because, if it can be demonstrated that there may be such connections, the attempt to infer the general nature of the universe from that fragment of it given in experience loses much, if not all, of its evidential cogency. Now, by the very fact of thinking about entities for cognitive purposes, we extract them conceptually from a context of interconnections. And in so doing we are very apt to commit the atomistic error : the unconscious assumption that we are not changing the entity when we extract it from its natural relational context. But two connected entities are not two mutually isolated entities: they are two parts of a diversified unity, two components of a synthesis, which is something over and above two entities in mutual isolation. Thus, ding-dong is not just a ding and an unconnected dong, but the two unified in the form of a temporal sequence. And, whatever else a connection may be, as a unifying factor it must necessarily partake of, or share in, the natures of those unified. Otherwise we would be postulating a contradiction: a unity whose parts are not united – or a connection which does not connect. We would, in such a hypothetical case, have, not a unity in duality, but three unconnected entities. As for an indirect connection - this will consist of a connected number of direct connections. And two entities may be unified by any number of connections, direct and indirect, But, however many, and however indirect, always these unifying connections must necessarily be grounded in the entities which they connect.
2.2.4.
Such connections are what is meant by rational connections, but the fact of all connections being rational makes the universe rational only if all its parts are connected. Is this, in fact, the case? By definition, the universe is 'all that exists' or 'all existence', but my sole criterion for the meaning of 'existence' is, and can only be, my own experience. To talk of a hypothetical "entity" possessing no connection, howsoever remote or tenuous with my experience, would certainly be to talk nonsense. Such an "entity" would be no more than a flatus vocis. Hence 'the universe' or 'all existence' becomes 'my experience and all that is in any way connected with it'. And since all connections are rational, it follows necessarily that I am part of a rational universe; with the corollary that ontology - rational cosmology - possesses at least prima facie validity as a method of acquiring knowledge of its nature.Analysis and Synthesis.
2.2.5.
We have used the phrase 'the nature of'. What do we mean by it? The nature of an entity is: that which makes it what it is. Now, if this definition is to mean anything, 'that' must be different from 'what it is'. 'That' can, therefore, refer only to other entities, in the context of their connection with the entity in question. And, so far as this connection is concerned, these other entities can be of only three kinds. Firstly, those which, as an interconnected complex, establish the entity as an entity - in other words, its constituents. Secondly, those entities with which the entity is itself connected, to form with them some more comprehensive entity - in other words, its fellow constituents. Thirdly, those more comprehensive entities of which it is a constituent. So that the process of revealing, not just the existence, but the rationality, of connections is essentially a matter of analysis and synthesis: we must be able to analyse an entity into its constituents, and then show how these constituents, possessing the natures they do, are necessarily interconnected to constitute a synthesis - the entity in question.
2.2.6.
Entities, then, are what they are, both by virtue of connections between their constituent entities, and by their own further connections with other entities to form more comprehensive entities. All these connections are what are termed formal, or structural, connections. It can be seen that this necessarily follows from the twin facts already alluded to: that connections always unify, and that a unity is necessarily a synthesis - something over and above the individual entities unified. So that the ultimate aim of ontology, the conceptual bodying forth of the universe as a fully rational system, is to be achieved by rendering fully explicit the structures (= forms) of entities. And this process of rendering structurally explicit, or explaining, is, as I have implied, essentially analytico-synthetic. To avoid misunderstanding, I should like to make clear that in using the word 'structure' I am in no way implying anything static; as we shall discover later, since duration always enters into structure, all structures are, in fact, processes, and their individual components, events. This systematic elucidation of event structures is itself a process of rendering explicit on the level of conceptual thought, the connections which are implicit in actual, or lived, experience: in effect, raising them from the unconscious level to the conscious.
2.2.7.
But however intricate the precise forms of their association, complex entities are always composed of rational associations of the less complex. Does this mean then that all complex entities are ultimately composed of simple entities? The only prima facie alternative is an infinite regress of complexity. But to postulate such an infinite regress is to assert that there are constituents of a synthesis which can never be reached, even in principle, by a continuous sequence of analytic steps; but this is effectually to assert that the initial synthesis can never be reached, even in principle, from these same constituents which, ex hypothesi, exist, by a continuous sequence of synthetic steps. But the synthesis exists; therefore such hypothetical constituents do not. Hence, simple entities must exist.
2.2.8.
From the above it is clear that the fact of the universe’s being a rationally interconnected system of entities implies its most general structure. It must contain certain absolutely simple entities (simples), of which all other entities are natural associations; the more complex associations being associations of simpler, that are themselves associations of yet simpler, and so on right back to the ultimate simples - though, as we shall see (3.3.1.), without this necessarily implying that the overall structure is one of nesting hierarchies.
2.2.9.
That the universe necessarily posesses this general structure suggests that the ideal ontological method would be along the lines of analysing experience into its ultimate simple elements, and then, by displaying the ways in which these simples are naturally associated at increasingly more complex levels, synthetically regaining experience. And this, broadly, is the method followed in this book. But to the achievement of success by the sole employment of this ideal method, there exist certain insurmountable natural barriers.Impossibility of a Purely Rational Cosmology
2.2.10.
We have said above that ontology can be viewed as the systematic elucidation of event structures; that is, through analysis and resynthesis, rendering explicit what exists implicitly. In short, laying bare the structures of things. But the very act of so doing inevitably changes our experience of these things Their natural state is the implicit one. They are gestalten, or naturally summated wholes, in which the great majority of parts are not individually distinguishable. This arises because whole and part compete for our attention. This competition is resolved when, although we still perceive all the parts, we do not perceive them individually, but only by the fact of perceiving the whole which, of course, contains them. But the whole purpose of our rational analysis is precisely to reveal these parts in order to show how, by their very natures, they are associated with other parts to form the whole. This intellectual artefact, is inevitably different from the actuality whose structure it is an attempt to represent. In short, we cannot, in the very nature of things, conceive these products of analysis as they really are: such conceptions are experiences different from the experiences we are conceiving. Like all representations, they are the originals transposed to another order of experience: from the perceptive to the cognitive.
2.2.11.
Moreover, the simples, as well as many kinds of simpler association, exist in such overwhelming numbers, manifest with such rapidity, exhibit so many subtle gradations of similarity and difference, and associate in ways that are so complex, as to make it impossible, given the above discrepancy between being and knowing, for us to envisage them in the mind’s eye. For all that, because these simple levels share something with our experience, such restrictions do not mean that we cannot understand anything at all. What it does mean is that we are restricted to conceiving event structures only at the highest levels of generality and abstraction; levels defined clearly enough by the concepts in which ontological discourse has traditionally been conducted: substance and attribute, order, time, space, motion, matter, mind, permanence and change, unity and plurality, relation, appearance and reality, positive and negative affect and so on. In short, rational cosmology working alone is inevitably restricted to the most general structural features, both abstract and concrete, of the universe.
2.2.12.
But, as a matter of historical fact, this ideal method has been little attempted. And that, basically, because it has been so little grasped just what a rational universe necessarily entails as to its general structure. We have always to remember that rational thought about the world is a relatively late outgrowth, emerging from other, pre-rational modes of conceptualisation, from which it has always found it difficult to emancipate itself. These modes are basically two: the everyday commonsense world of things and people lived in by us all, ontologist and non-ontologist alike, for all practical purposes; and the world of gods and nature spirits as conceived by religion. From these stem two errors inimical to cosmological success. From the first arises the subjectivist error: the very natural error of believing that the external physical world as it exists objectively is closer to the world as it appears to us, the perceiving subject, than it actually is. In its extreme form of naive realism, this approaches actual identification. The theistic error is to believe that disembodied, cosmically scaled-up versions of quasi-human beings are responsible for the creation and the ongoing orderly course of the natural world. After all, every ontologist spends his early life as a naive realist in the care of teachers and parents within a community holding certain officially sanctioned religious or quasi-religious beliefs. If these, as has customarily been the case, are erroneous, the budding ontologist starts from a position of inbuilt false assumptions. To emancipate himself fully from these is not easy. And, in addition to these two major sources of error there exist four more – the atomistic, the teleological, the abstractionist, and the analogical - scarcely less destructive in their effects. I discuss all six errors in the next chapter (3.4.)Essentials of the Ontological Method
2.2.13.
In view of all this, then, rational cosmology has inevitably been very tentative. Its practitioners have always proceeded on the correct assumption – even if only as a working hypothesis - that they have to deal with a rational system of entities. Hence, the sole justification for the truth of any of the ontologist’s postulates as to what exists, is that it exists because the world is more rational if it does than if it does not. In a word, because it helps to explain things. The ontologist, then, rightly assumes that the world is rational; he also rightly deduces that if it consists solely of his own experience, it is not. It is on precisely these same explanatory grounds that all sane human beings who reflect upon them, accept the truth of the two great prolepses: (i) that physical things persist irrespective of whether we are perceiving them or no, and (ii) that our fellow humans possess an inner world of perceptions thoughts and feelings. The ontologist is one who goes beyond this commonsense world to postulate, on rational grounds, the existence of yet further entities - and in these I include constituents of existing experiences which are too minute or rapid or otherwise inaccessible to be individually discriminable – existing in association with the world as experienced, on this sole ground: that, so associated, they make for a more rational world. But it is a common experience that such a postulated entity, while making the world more rational in the region which the ontologist had particularly in mind when postulating it, turns out to make the world less rational when some other region is taken into account. In which case some radical readjustments are called for, at least one postulated extension to the world of experience having to be abandoned, or, at least, significantly modified.
2.2.14.
But however systematic or unsystematic the method employed, all ontology which possesses genuine intellectual substance has three things in common. It (i) assumes, even if only as a working hypothesis, that it has to deal with a rationally interconnected universe; (ii) takes as its inferential basis and point of departure the world as experienced; (iii) extends this world by postulating the further existence of entities and connections on the sole ground that their inclusion makes the universe more rational than their exclusion.
2.2.15.
Rational cosmology, then, is the attempt to establish the general nature of the universe by reflecting upon that fragment of it we call human experience in order to discover what this rationally implies. But human experience, considered as, in itself, knowledge of the universe, can itself be greatly improved upon. The more wide ranging, analytically probing, systematically organised, precisely expressed, and thoroughly checked our empirical knowledge, the more it will in itself, constitute greater knowledge of the universe. Equally, if not more, important, it is clear that the more our empirical knowledge of the world possesses these attributes, the more probable, other things being equal, that the attempt to infer therefrom the nature of what is not thus accessible, will be successful. And such a systematic improvement of our empirical knowledge is precisely our second cosmological method.
SCIENCE (EMPIRICAL COSMOLOGY)The Same Point of Departure as Ontology ...
2.3.1.
The point of departure for science, as for ontology, is the naively realistic world-conception of commonsense man. This conception is essentially one of solid, enduring physical things (bodies), of widely differing qualities and properties, located, and interacting, within an all-enveloping, indefinitely extensive, space. These bodies are of two basic kinds: animate and inanimate, the former inhabited by consciousness - sensations, feelings, memories, volitions etc.; the latter, apparently not. This naively realistic, or commonsense, world makes sufficient rough and ready sense for commonsense man, by grasping its orderly changes, to attain his practical ends. But, as we pointed out in our discussion of ontology, intelligent reflection upon it reveals all manner of irrationalities, which can be accounted for only by the assumption that the empirical world is no more than a fragment of the universe. And the method of ontology is to build upon this experienced fragment by adding further entities on the sole ground of increased rationality, until a conception is attained whose possession of intrinsic completeness implies that it embodies the whole universe.... but Differently Developed
2.3.2.
Science, likewise, systematically develops this naively realistic datum, but quite differently, applying other methods, and orienting itself by other criteria of conceptual organisation; as we have said, placing the emphasis, not upon reason, but upon experience. Basically, what science does is systematically to improve our knowledge of the universe as far as this may be done whilst keeping essentially to the commonsense conceptual framework centred upon bodies in space. Its primary aim is to study systematically the history, structure, composition, intrinsic changes, and spatial changes of bodies, individually and collectively.A Fundamental Dilemma Impossible of Satisfactory Resolution
2.3.3.
Now, at the very outset of this enterprise, science is confronted by a fundamental dilemma, which it is impossible satisfactorily to resolve. It is this. As I have said, science (empirical cosmology) places the emphasis on experience: but not just experience qua experience. Rather on experience of the world - the world as experienced. Now, my basic experience of the world, more especially the world of bodies in space. is acquired perceptually, via my sense organs. This experience is, of course, subjective: part of myself, the perceiver, a consequence of the stimulation of my sense organs by some source, or sources, in the external world. But these sources, ex hypothesi, are objective: that is, external to myself. How, then, can I know what they are? I cannot, in some magical fashion, transcend myself and make a direct comparison of them with the effect which, via my organs of sense, they have had upon me. Clearly, in a rational universe, there must be a rational connection between the external source (or noumenon) and the internal effect (or phenomenon). But what is the nature of this connection? Ontology would claim that it is possible to find out, if at all, only by a process of ontological reasoning. But science, by its very nature, eschews such a course. What course, then, does it take?
2.3.4.
Commonsense reasoning would suggest that some perceptual attributes (secondary qualities) are entirely the effect of the bodies upon us, whereas others (primary qualities) inhere in the bodies themselves. Thus common sense would reject as absurd the notion that the pain of a pin prick or the pleasure from a slice of cake in any sense reside in the pin or the cake. And a little reflection shows it to be only less absurd to believe that colours, sounds, olfactory, gustatory, and tactile sensations, sensations of heat and cold, and so forth, reside in the external bodies which stimulate them in ourselves. On the other hand it seems equally absurd to common sense to deny that bodies must endure through time, occupy space, possess solidity, resist attempts to change them, move from place to place, etc. - in effect, since these seem the essential attributes of bodies, to deny that bodies, as such, exist. A further point making for this primary/secondary distinction is that, in the case of secondary qualities, one can discover physical processes conceived in primary terms whose regular variation results in precisely corresponding regular variation of secondary qualities (e.g. the vibration of bodies, and the sensation of sound) strongly suggesting that secondary qualities are grounded on primary; that in some way - inevitably an insoluble mystery for science - the regularities (primary) of the external, physical world are translated into corresponding regularities (secondary) in the internal, mental world. And that this, seemingly, cannot be done for primary qualities offers a further argument to common sense that they truly belong to the external world.
2.3.5.
This distinction, then, is what science, as systematised common sense, settles for. More especially since this way of regarding the world carries with it a great methodological bonus. Which is that the qualities thus selected as primary are also those which prove the most amenable to counting and measurement - which serve ideally for that quintessential feature of scientific method, putting numbers into nature. Nor, of course, is it a coincidence that this should be the case. Undoubtedly the primary qualities are more germane to the fundamental nature of the physical world than are the secondary, and, equally, because of the overwhelming repetitiveness of the ordered processes of this world, both counting and measurement cannot but serve as indispensable theoretical tools for its structural elucidation.
2.3.6.
However, sound as these arguments undoubtedly seem to the comonsense scientific mind, it is not difficult to see where error - conceivably great error - could enter in. While it is perfectly reasonable to assume that such properties as 'enduring through time' or 'occupying space' can legitimately be predicated of the entities of the external world, it would be a very strange thing (to put it mildly) if these entities themselves experienced such properties in the ways we do. Just, in fact, as the secondary qualities, though differently experienced, are somehow grounded on corresponding primary processes, so here, at a more fundamental level, the apparently primary qualities themselves might well correspond to, and be grounded on, a further set of, truly primary, processes. Both the notorious fact that science finds it impossible to explain how secondary qualities have arisen out of primary, and that these primary qualities, when subjected to ontological analysis, reveal themselves as radically irrational, indicate that this is indeed the case. But, of course, conceptually to discover the truly primary processes of the physical world is a task for ontology. Science, as little more than systematised naive realism, is helpless in the face of such problems. “ ... [we do] not in the least deny that there are problems of metaphysics and epistemology; it is merely contended that physics can throw no light on them.” [Alfred O’Rahilly, Electromagnetics. A Discussion of Fundamentals (Dover, 1965, p.843)].Essentials of the Scientific Method
2.3.7.
How, then, does science actually implement its programme of systematically investigating in detail the nature of a world viewed primarily as one of interacting bodies in space? We need do little more here than note its principal methodological features. These are: (i) gathering, collating, and classifying on the basis of structural similarity, as many thoroughly checked and corroborated observational facts as possible; (ii) wherever possible, defining measurements as ratios of precisely defined units; (iii) defining classes of observation as precisely - and also as inter-referentially – as possible, with the general aim of defining the less fundamental in terms of the more; (iv) the invention of instruments, thereby enormously extending the scope of observation in the directions of the remote, the minute, the fleeting, and the obscured; (v) conducting experiments, which is to say, varying selected parameters in peculiarly relevant, carefully controlled, conditions, and noting the precise effect of such variation on other parameters: in this way, coordinations among changes - the basic form of experiential order - can be grasped in their essentials, free from the many masking irrelevances with which they are normally associated.
2.3.8.
Science, as I have said, centres upon the investigation of bodies in space: their origins, history, composition, structure, internal changes, and motions relative to other bodies. Now, fundamental to this investigation, has been the practical acceptance of two basic, closely interconnected, hypotheses, part ontological, part methodological, which, taken together, have proved capable of bringing to it very considerable systematisation. The first hypothesis is that all bodies are composed of numbers of ultimately small bodies of a very few basic types - the fewer the better; the second, that the motions of these ultimate bodies are determined by a very few - once again, the fewer the better - laws of motion. One can immediately see why, in a general way, these hypotheses should prove so unifying. The origins of bodies are to be explained in terms of the ultimate bodies' coming together under the operation of the basic laws of motion, and their subsequent history, in terms of their sustainment by these same laws. Their composition will, of course, be conceived in terms of arrangements of these ultimate bodies - their structures as ordered arrangements of sub-structures, and so on, hierarchically, right down to the ultimate bodies. Internal changes will be explained in terms of shifts in dynamic equilibrium, due to the operation of the basic laws working within specific sets of conditions, either between the various sub-structures, or between the body as a whole and other, surrounding bodies. And, of course, similarly, the motions of the bodies themselves are to be explained in terms of the operation of the general basic laws under the specific situations they collectively constitute. Through its discovery of widely holding constancies and regularities operating in respect of the origins, histories, constitutions, structures, and motions of bodies, science enormously improves the ability of commonsense man to acquire inferentially knowledge of the unobserved, even - as in the outstanding instance of the past - the unobservable.
2.3.9.
Two short comments are in order here. Firstly, the discovery of these basic laws, and, even more, the evidence for their universality, is greatly facilitated by the methodological strategy of assigning unit measures to physical concepts (quantification), thereby allowing any observed instance of such a concept to be described as so many unit measures; and also by defining these unit measures in terms of constant mathematical relationships obtaining between the unit measures of physically more fundamental concepts. In this way ramifying fabrics of measure-number equations can be constructed, by means of which, laws (kinematic or kinetic) holding good within certain specific conditions can be demonstrated by algebraic analysis to be, ultimately, no other than the universal laws operating within the particular constraints imposed upon them by these conditions. The fact that these constantly obtaining quantitative relationships are expressed in the form of measure-number equations means, necessarily, that when the measure of one quantity is increased or decreased, that of some other quantity must correspondingly change to maintain the equality. So that these equations are precise, quantitative descriptions of the constancies underlying, and therefore governing - hence the word, laws - the spatial changes (internal and external) of bodies.
2.3.10.
Secondly, science's comprehensive unifying conception of all bodies as consisting of different arrangements of the same few ultimate types of body whose motions are determined by a single set of universal laws, bears an obvious, if naive and grotesque, resemblance to the general ontological truth, touched on earlier, that all entities are syntheses of ultimately simple entities - syntheses arising necessarily out of these simple entities by their mode of origin. It is to the incorporation of this basic ontological truth into its conceptual foundations that science owes its momentous theoretical successes; but no more than it owes its equally momentous theoretical failures to its grotesquely crude and distorted way of so doing.Extensions of the Field of Scientific Enquiry
2.3.11.
So much, at this stage, for science as the sytematic study of bodies in space. But though this is the paradigmatic field for the application of scientific method, it is not the only one. Many bodies are animate, and commonsense man ascribes to these an inner, or conscious life: in the special case of human bodies, consisting of perceptions, memories, feelings, ideas, thoughts, volitions, etc. - and let us not for a moment forget that science's knowledge of bodies is entirely a phenomenon of consciousness. And on the basis of the resemblance of their appearance and behaviour to the human, common sense accords a corresponding degree of consciousness to other organisms. For obvious reasons - the complexity, unobservability, subjectivity, and recalcitrance to clear-cut definition of this internal data chief among them - scientific method is less happily applicable here. However, it can always be applied as far as the nature of the subject matter permits, and this, in every case, can be made to yield knowledge greatly superior to the deliverances of unsystematic acquaintance. Every branch of human knowledge and endeavour may be studied scientifically, but, so far as cosmology is concerned, four great fields are of noteworthy significance. The first is the general nature of conscious experience: the structure, and origin and development (both phylogenetic and ontogenetic) of, and relations between, its principal components - sensations, feelings, volitions etc. The second is that of the causal correlations obtaining between conscious experience and the anatomy, physiology, and behaviour of organisms - humans, above all. The third is the relationship holding between conscious experience and unconscious. The fourth is paranormal experience: experience which, either in itself, or by clear implication, provides substantial evidence for the existence of types and realms of conscious experience transcending that normal, everyday, commonsense world in whose physical manifestation science finds its paradigmatic field of investigation.
THE COMPLEMENTARITY OF ONTOLOGY AND SCIENCE2.4.1.
However greatly they may differ methodologically, ontology and science have the same aim: to discover as much as possible about the nature of the universe. Together, each with its strengths and weaknesses, they comprise cosmology. Ontology's strength is that it can establish the universe as a rational system, and outline its basic structural features; its weakness, that it cannot work out this general conceptual framework at an acceptable level of detail. Science's strength is that it can acquire a large and systematic body of detailed knowledge; its weakness, that it cannot exhibit this as part of a rational universe. Clearly, then, the two are complementary, each strong where the other is weak.
2.4.2.
Through its ability to deduce the true nature of those entities underlying the world of appearance, ontology can correct the fundamental confusions of science arising from its slaphappy identification of these truly objective attributes with what it is pleased to call primary qualities. And since these so-called primary, in addition to the secondary, qualities can be seen to arise naturally out of the ‘real primary qualities’ (i.e. truly objective attributes), it follows that what science finds intrinsically impossible - a rational synthesis between its two sets of qualities - is now fully achievable. But this synthesis is, effectively, a synthesis between the physical properties of bodies and the conscious life of organisms. And. moreover, a synthesis from which three further syntheses - between conscious and unconscious, normal and paranormal, and incarnate and discarnate experience - naturally follow.
2.4.3.
Yet, in its turn, this achievement of ontology owes much to science. Though all the discoveries of science exist only on the commonsense level, yet they are sufficiently wide-ranging and systematically organised as to imply unequivocally that the fundamental structure of the universe must possess certain features. Science's virtual demonstration that all bodies, even those with as complex properties as the human, have arisen, ultimately, as syntheses of the members of one or two basic, immeasurably simpler, classes of body, strongly implies two interdependent structural truths of immense ontological significance. Firstly, that all complex entities have arisen as syntheses of simpler - and hence, ultimately, of absolutely simple - entities; secondly, that the endless variety of the world does not imply a variety of substances but rather the variety of syntheses which the elements of a single universal substance are able to compose. The challenge which science offers to ontology is that of conceiving these elements in a rational way - which will certainly not be that of unchanging material particles in space (still less of singularities in a wave field!) - thereby laying the necessary foundations for a rational synthesis of our empirical knowledge.
2.4.4.
So that the true cosmological method comprises both ontology and science in mutually furthering relationship, Some will see this as ontologically grounded science, others, as scientifically developed ontology, but the difference is more apparent than real. From whichever direction we choose to approach it there exists only the one great synthesis of ontology and science. It is this we call cosmology.
NOTES AND REFERENCES
1. Strictly, this should be “universology”. But, as (i) this is a clumsy word, (ii) “cosmology” is often (if loosely) used in the sense I am using it, and (iii) almost all our knowledge of the universe is confined to that part of it I call “the cosmos”, I use “cosmology” in preference to “universology”.
2. Past experience is associated with present through similarity and contiguity. Such associations I term ‘sympathic2’.
