British mathematician and philosopher E. W. Hobson (1856-1933) was the Gifford Lecturer for 1921-22; and his lectures have been reprinted as The Domain of Natural Science (Dover 1968). Prof. Hobson traced the history of natural science and concluded that, despite its successes, there is no scientific basis for a claim that the formulas of natural science constitute universal truth. On the contrary, Prof. Hobson argued that the domain of natural science was limited and that extension of its approach outside of that domain was only speculative.
The book is rarely found nowadays and some excerpts are offered here.
At the outset, Prof. Hobson stated "the really fundamental question ... is whether, or how far, it is possible to represent the physical world as a closed and independent system of deterministic types, uninfluenced by the psychical world." (p. 22) He was concerned with the "fear that the Scientific view of the world leaves no room for the domain of freedom, spontaneity, and values, for teleological conceptions, or generally for the spiritual order of things." (p. 17)
"No scientific theory is designed to describe at once the whole of the perceptions which an observor would have under given circumstances, but only particular classes of perceptions arbitrarily separated from the rest, in accordance with the particular kinds of percepts and their sequences which the theory is designed to describe..." (p. 38) All actual measurement is approximate only. (p. 40) Scientific theories only serve "to give a conceptual description of a range of phenomena which is of a limited and circumscribed character, spatially and temporarily." (p. 41)
"What we call a material object is prima facie a construct, built up by the synthesis of a group of actual sense-impressions, and of images of earlier sense-impressions stored up in memory." (pp. 53-54) "[I]t is sufficient ... for the purposes of Natural Sciences to regard a perceptual object as a construct of sense-impressions..." (p. 54)
[Compare to Whitehead and Russell's Principia Mathematica: " 'Apollo' means really 'the object having such-and-such properties,' say 'the object having the properties enumerated in the Classical Dictionary.' "]
Notwithstanding its constructional character, "A material object has most frequently been regarded as having some kind of sub-stratum, not identical with the synthesis of sense-impressions, but as a thing in itself, a kind of bearer of the various properties or qualities..." (p. 54-55) In other words, there is "an independent Real." (p. 55)
Most of Prof. Hobson's lectures focussed on the history of natural science and its development into specialized theories.
In the concluding lectures, Prof. Hobson emphasized "the fact that any acceptable view of the world, whether theistic or other, must be such as not to be incompatible with the existence of Natural Science." (p. 470) "The whole history of Natural Science tends to extend the scope of the ascertained fact that the perceptual domain is such that whole tracts of it, and processes in it, are capable of description by rational schemes." (p. 487)
Prof. Hobson states that "the actual achievements of Natural Science have been sufficient to cause in many minds a belief in the unlimited rationality of the ground of the real world." (p. 489) He finds this belief unwarranted.
"This line of thought has led to the postulation that reality is fundamentally rational and unitary. It is rational, as exhibited in its correlation with human reason, and unitary, as consisting of a completely interconnected system. ... But the limitation must be fully recognized, that this postulation of complete rationality of the real goes far beyond anything that has been, or can be, unimpeachably established by Natural Science. ...the evidence that phenomena can be described by, and correlated with, rational mental process is incomplete... It is the methodological axiom of Science that the correlation of phenomena with rational schemes can be carried out to an unlimited extent, but the actual amount of verification which the axiom has received is at all times strictly limited." (pp. 488-489)
Finally, Prof. Hobson declares: "My main aim has been, by means of a delineation of the domain of Natural Science, to vindicate the perfect freedom of Religious and Philosophical thought from any fear of destructive interference from the side of Natural Science, subject to the sole condition that no encroachment is made upon the autonomy of Natural Science in its own proper domain." (p. 499)
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