Abstract

From his authority as the co-author of established text-books, notably The Foundations of Physics, Dr. Margenau compares current scientific methodology with some relevant principles of St. Thomas’s epistemology, particularly in the perennial problem of the valid functions of reason and of sense in scientific experience. Since Quantum Theory has removed the possibility of absolute prediction and verification, reason can no longer be considered to offer a mere image of the sense world. Hence “the sensory domain is forever richer than theory since individual sensory events have no direct counterpart in theory, and on the other hand, it is clear that the concepts of reason cannot be directly sensed … in the realm of the atom”. This change, he submits, confirms the reality of an ‘active’ or ‘factive’ intellect in the Aristotelian-Thomist sense. In illustration he cites Eddington’s distinction between the macroscopic desk of ordinary sense experience and the microscopic desk of mathematico-physical science, which produces the dilemma: “The second desk … has ultimate elements which cannot be perceived. He who identifies the two desks is guilty of saying that an object wholly given in sensation can be decomposed by the magic of science into constituents not given in sensation”. Further, he claims that this difference “appears in every careful analysis of all scientific quantities or objects” and ambiguously explains it thus: “the second desk is the product, very largely, of Aquinas’s factive intellect; the first involves mere abstraction, collation of sensory material, performed by what Thomas called the passive [?] intellect “.