perate
fruitfully in a vacuum. It must be incarnate. It must, as Hegel said,
have "hands and feet." When we turn to the history of modern science the
one thing that stands out is that it was not until the point was reached
where intelligence was ready (continuing the Hegelian figure) to thrust
its hands into the vitals of nature and society that it began to acquire
a real control over its operations.

In default of such controlling technique there was nothing to be done
with this newly found instrument of intelligence--the universal--but to
retain it as an object of contemplation and of worshipful adoration.
This involved, of course, its hypostasis as the metaphysical reality of
supreme importance. With this, the only difference between "opinion" and
"science" became one of the kind of objects known. That universals were
known by reason and particulars by sense was of little more logical
significance than that sounds are known by the ear and smells by the
nose. Particulars and universals were equally given. If the latter
required some abstraction this was regarded as merely auxiliary to the
immediate vision, as sniffing is to the perception of odor. That
universals should or could be conceived as experimental, as hypotheses,
was, when translated into later theology, the sin against the Holy
Ghost.

However, the fact that the particulars in the world of opinion were the
stimuli to the "recollection" of universals and that the latter in turn
were the patterns, the forms, for the particulars, opened the way in
actual practice for the exercise of a great deal of the controlling
function of the universals. But the failure to recognize this control
value of the universal as fundamental, made it necessary for the
universal to exercise its function surreptitiously, in the disguise of a
pattern and in the clumsy garb of imitation and participation.

With perceptions, desires, and impulses relegated to the world of
opinion and shadows, and with the newly discovered instrument of
knowledge turned into an object, the knower was stripped of all his
knowing apparatus and was left an empty, scuttled entity definable and
describable only as "a knower." The knower must know, even if he had
nothing to know with. Hence the mystical almost indefinable character of
the knowing act or relation. I say "almost indefinable"; for as an act
it had, of course, to have some sort of conceptualized form. And this
form vision naturally furnished. "