Page 35 - CONSCIENCISM By Kwame Nkrumah_Neat

28 CONSCIENCISM
are accounted to be so far from explaining perception that they
deepen the mystery.
And yet, to a certain extel1t, all this must be deemed to be correct.
When it is made a basis for idealism, however, then an indulgence CHAPTER 2
in fallacies occurs. We know that in normal physiological and
physical conditions, we cannot choose whether to see or not. If PHILOSOPHY AND SOCIETY
spirit or consciousness were completely independent ofmatter for
its arising, there should be the possibility of such breakdowns in T IS OBVIOUS from the foregoing skeleton history of philo­
perception as are not completely explicable in terms ofphysiology sophy that philosophy could very easily come to be divorced
and physics. The doctor, one supposes, would then need to be from human life. It becomes so abstract in certain Western
aided occasionally by the priest, as indeed was supposed to be the . as to bring its practitioners under the suspicion ofbeing
case in the Dark Ages of Knowledge. of concepts. And yet the early history ofphilosophy
Our universe is a natural universe. And its basis is matter with its it to have had living roots in human life and human society.
objective laws. Philosophy had its origins in theological speculation. The
earliest theological speculations were a conglomeration ofthoughts
milling around the great ideas ofGod, Soul, Destiny and Law. At
point, these thoughts enjoyed a practical inspiration. For, in
those far-off days, the religious life was one of the cardinal con­
~erns of human existence. That was a time when it was sincerely
l-,,,l'p..:red that man's cultivation ofthe gods at the same time as his
was one ofhis major purposes on earth. Religion and worship
preoccupations of day-to-day life, they were the ways in
man conducted himself in his privacy, before others and in
presence ofhis gods.
Even much later than ancient times, even as recently as the
middle ages of Europe, other concerns of life were tyrannically
subjected to the religious concern at the insistence of the clergy.
Economic concerns, without which the clergy themselves could
have survived, were required by them to be confined within
the limits of human sustenance. To transgress these limits was in
their eyes to indulge greed, and so to hazard their disfavour in this
life and the divine disfavour in the after life.
Suitably, therefore, the chief concern of philosophy continued
to be an elucidation of the nature of God, of the human soul, of
human freedom and of kindred concepts.
According to this notion of philosophy, when the primary