Abstract

Any inquiry into the origins and character of science and its place in human activity based on a thorough-going materialism must confront a fascinating dilemma. For a in a framework which avoids the intractable problems involved in maintaining a spirit-matter dualism by assuming a single natural reality with only internal relations, scientific consciousness is at once a constituent part and historical product of the very natural processes it addresses. Since humanity is a part of nature, and further, that which nature has become and is becoming, a satisfactory understanding of nature must rest upon self-understanding. But self-understanding itself develops as part of the historical process, and has always, however implicitly, been an important mediating factor in human knowledge of extra-human reality; it is both a progressive result of and moving force in that historical process.