Realism, Idealism and Analogy in the Interpretation of Scientific Thought

Abstract

We are now in a position to examine the question of the relation between the empirical and the transcendent and ask in what senses the main forms of human thought — science, religion, history, philosophy — claim to be true of reality beyond our experience. Our examination of the nature of perceptual experience has shown that such experience, when used for theoretic ends, demands both a conceptual activity which orders and interprets in symbolic forms, and also a non-conceptual activity of response to interrelated energetic activities. We have also seen that we can hardly venture to go so far as to assert identity of pattern or structure between the two.