RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY
RECONSTRUCTION IN
PHILOSOPHY
BY
JOHN DEWEY
Professor of Philosophy in Columbia University
NEW YORK
HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY
1920
FEB 1 8 1952
COPTRIflHT, 1920,
BY
HBNRY HOLT AND COMPANY
gfte ifiuinn & goben Company
BOOK MANUFACTURERS
RAHWAY NEW JERSEY
PREFATORY NOTE
BEING invited to lecture at the Imperial University
of Japan in Tokyo during February and March of the
present year, I attempted an interpretation of the recon
struction of ideas and ways of thought now going on in
philosophy. While the lectures cannot avoid revealing
the marks of the particular standpoint of their author,
the aim is to exhibit the general contrasts between older
and newer types of philosophic problems rather than to
make a partisan plea in behalf of any one specific solu
tion of these problems. I have tried for the most part
to set forth the forces which make intellectual recon
struction inevitable and to prefigure some of the lines
upon which it must proceed.
Any one who has enjoyed the unique hospitality of
Japan will be overwhelmed with confusion if he en
deavors to make an acknowledgment in any way com
mensurate to the kindnesses he received. Yet I must
set down in the barest of black and white my grateful
appreciation of them, and in particular record my inef
faceable impressions of the courtesy and help of the
members of the department of philosophy of Tokyo
University, and of my dear friends Dr. Ono and Dr.
Nitobe. J. D.
September, 1919.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I CHANGING CONCEPTIONS OF PHILOSOPHY .... 1
Origin of philosophy in desire and imagination.
Influence of community traditions and authority.
Simultaneous development of matter-of-fact knowl
edge. Incongruity and conflict of the two types.
Respective values of each type. . . . Classic philos
ophies (i) compensatory, (ii) dialectically formal,
and (iii) concerned with "superior" Reality. Con
temporary thinking accepts primacy of matter-of-
fact knowledge and assigns to philosophy a social
function rather than that of absolute knowledge.
II SOME HISTORICAL FACTORS IN PHILOSOPHICAL RECON
STRUCTION 28
Francis Bacon exemplifies the newer spirit. . . .
He conceived knowledge as power. As dependent
upon organized cooperative research. ... As tested
by promotion of social progress. The new thought
reflected actual social changes, industrial, political,
religious. . . . The new idealism.
III THE SCIENTIFIC FACTOR IN RECONSTRUCTION OF PHI
LOSOPHY 53
Science has revolutionized our conception of Na
ture. Philosophy has to be transformed because
no longer depending upon a science which accepts
a closed, finite world. Or, fixed species. Or, su
periority or rest to change and motion. Contrast
of feudal with democratic conceptions. Elimination
of final causes. Mechanical science and the possi
bility of control of nature. Respect for matter.
New temper of imagination. Influence thus far
technical rather than human and moral.
IV CHANGED CONCEPTIONS OF EXPERIENCE AND REASON . 77
Traditional conception of nature of experience.
Limits of ancient civilization. Effect of classsic
idea on modern empiricism. Why a different con
ception is now possible. Psychological change em-
vi CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
phasizes vital factor using environment. Effect
upon traditional ideas of sensation and knowledge.
Factor of organization. Socially, experience is now
more inventive and regulative. . . . Corresponding
change in idea of Reason. Intelligence is hypo
thetical and inventive. Weakness of historic Ra
tionalism. Kantianism. Contrast of German and
British philosophies. Reconstruction of empirical
liberalism.
V CHANGED CONCEPTIONS OF THE IDEAL AND THE REAL . 103
Idealization rooted in aversion to the disagree
able. . . . This fact has affected philosophy. . . .
True reality is ideal, and hence changeless, com
plete. Hence contemplative knowledge is higher
than experimental. Contrast with the modern prac
tise of knowledge. . . . Significance of change. . . .
The actual or realistic signifies conditions effect
ing change. . . . Ideals become methods rather than
goals. Illustration from elimination of distance.
Change in conception of philosophy. . . . The
significant problems for philosophy. . . . Social
understanding and conciliation. The practical prob
lem of real and ideal.
VI THE SIGNIFICANCE OF LOGICAL RECONSTRUCTION . . 132
Present confusion as to logic. Logic is regulative
and normative because empirical. Illustration from
mathematics. Origin of thinking in conflicts. Con
frontation with fact. Response by anticipation or
prediction. Importance of hypotheses. Impartial
inquiry. Importance of deductive function. Or-
fanization and classification. Nature of truth,
ruth is adverbial, not a thing.
VII RECONSTRUCTION IN MORAL CONCEPTIONS . . . 161
Common factor in traditional theories. Every
moral situation unique. Supremacy of the specific
or individualized case. Fallacy of general ends.
Worth of generalization of ends and rules is in
tellectual. Harmfulness of division of goods into
intrinsic and instrumental. Into natural and moral.
Moral worth of natural science. Importance of
discovery in morals. Abolishing Phariseeism. . . .
Growth as the end. Optimism and pessimism. Con
ception of happiness. Criticism of utilitarianism.
All life moral in so far as educative.
CONTENTS vii
CHAPTER PAGE
VIII RECONSTRUCTION AS AFFECTING SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY . 187
Defects of current logic of social thought. Neg
lect of specific situations. Defects of organic con
cept of society. Evils of notion of fixed self or
individual. Doctrine of interests. Moral and in
stitutional reform. Moral test of social institu
tions. Social pluralism. Political monism, dogma
of National State. Primacy of associations. In
ternational humanism. Organization a subordinate
conception. Freedom and democracy. Intellectual
reconstruction when habitual will affect imagination
and hence poetry and religion.
INDEX . 217
RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY
CHAPTER I
CHANGING CONCEPTIONS OF PHILOSOPHY
MAN differs from the lower animals because he pre
serves his past experiences. What happened in the past
is lived again in memory. About what goes on today
hangs a cloud of thoughts concerning similar things
undergone in bygone days. With the animals, an ex
perience perishes as it happens, and each new doing or
suffering stands alone. But man lives in a world where
each occurrence is charged with echoes and reminiscences
of what has gone before, where each event is a reminder
of other things. Hence he lives not, like the beasts of
the field, in a world of merely physical things but in a
world of signs and symbols. A stone is not merely
hard, a thing into which one bumps ; but it is a monu
ment of a deceased ancestor. A flame is not merely
something which warms or burns, but is a symbol of the
enduring life of the household, of the abiding source of
cheer, nourishment and shelter to which man returns
from his casual wanderings. Instead of being a quick
fork of fire which may sting and hurt, it is the hearth
at which one worships and for which one fights. And all
this which marks the difference between bestiality and
1
2 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY
humanity, between culture and merely physical nature,
is because man remembers, preserving and recording his
experiences.
The revivals of memory are, however, rarely literal.
We naturally remember what interests us and because it
interests us. The past is recalled not because of itself
but because of what it adds to the present. Thus the
primary life of memory is emotional rather than intel
lectual and practical. Savage man recalled yesterday s
struggle with an animal not in order to study in a scien
tific way the qualities of the animal or for the sake of
calculating how better to fight tomorrow, but to escape
from the tedium of today by regaining the thrill of
yesterday. The memory has all the excitement of the
combat without its danger and anxiety. To revive it
and revel in it is to enhance the present moment with a
new meaning, a meaning different from that which actu
ally belongs either to it or to the past. Memory is
vicarious experience in which there is all the emotional
values of actual experience without its strains, vicissi
tudes and troubles. The triumph of battle is even more
poignant in the memorial war dance than at the moment
of victory ; the conscious and truly human experience of
the chase comes when it is talked over and re-enacted
by the camp fire. At the time, attention is taken up
with practical details and with the strain of uncertainty.
Only later do the details compose into a story and fusei
CHANGING CONCEPTIONS OF PHILOSOPHY 3
into a whole of meaning. At the time of practical
experience man exists from moment to moment, pre
occupied with the task of the moment. As he re-
surveys all the moments in thought, a drama emerges
with a beginning, a middle and a movement toward
the climax of achievement or defeat.
Since man revives his past experience because of the
interest added to what would otherwise be the emptiness
of present leisure, the primitive life of memory is one
of fancy and imagination, rather than of accurate recol
lection. After all, it is the story, the drama, which
counts. Only those incidents are selected which have
a present emotional value, to intensify the present tale
as it is rehearsed in imagination or told to an admiring
listener. What does not add to the thrill of combat or
contribute to the goal of success or failure is dropped.
Incidents are rearranged till they fit into the temper of
the tale. Thus early man when left to himself, when
not actually engaged in the struggle for existence, lived
in a world of memories which was a world of suggestions.
A suggestion differs from a recollection in that no 1
attempt is made to test its correctness. Its correctness
is a matter of relative indifference. The cloud suggests
a camel or a man s face. It could not suggest these
things unless some time there had been an actual, literal
experience of camel and face. But the real likeness is
of no account. The main thing is the emotional interest
4 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY
in tracing the camel or following the fortunes of the
face as it forms and dissolves.
Students of the primitive history of mankind tell of
the enormous part played by animal tales, myths and
cults. Sometimes a mystery is made out of this histori
cal fact, as if it indicated that primitive man was moved
by a different psychology from that which now animates
humanity. But the explanation is, I think, simple.
Until agriculture and the higher industrial arts were
developed, long periods of empty leisure alternated with
comparatively short periods of energy put forth to
secure food or safety from attack. Because of our own
habits, we tend to think of people as busy or occupied,
if not with doing at least with thinking and planning.
But then men were busy only when engaged in the hunt
or fishing or fighting expedition. Yet the mind when
awake must have some filling; it cannot remain literally
vacant because the body is idle. And what thoughts
should crowd into the human mind except experiences
with animals, experiences transformed under the
influence of dramatic interest to make more vivid and
coherent the events typical of the chase? As men in
fancy dramatically re-lived the interesting parts of their
actual lives, animals inevitably became themselves dram
atized.
They were true dramatis personoe and as such as
sumed the traits of persons. They too had desires,
CHANGING CONCEPTIONS OF PHILOSOPHY 5
hopes and fears, a life of affections, loves and hates,
triumphs and defeats. Moreover, since they were essen
tial to the support of the community, their activities
and sufferings made them, in the imagination which
dramatically revived the past, true sharers in the life
of the community. Although they were hunted, yet they
permitted themselves after all to be caught, and hence
they were friends and allies. They devoted themselves,
quite literally, to the sustenance and well-being of the
community group to which they belonged. Thus were
produced not merely the multitude of tales and legends
dwelling affectionately upon the activities and features
of animals, but also those elaborate rites and cults which
made animals ancestors, heroes, tribal figure-heads and
divinities.
I hope that I do not seem to you to have gone too
far afield from my topic, the origin of philosophies.
For it seems to me that the historic source of phi
losophies cannot be understood except as we dwell, at
even greater length and in more detail, upon such con
siderations as these. We need to recognize that the
ordinary consciousness of the ordinary man left to
himself is a creature of desires rather than of intel
lectual study, inquiry or speculation. Man ceases to
be primarily actuated by hopes and fears, loves and
hates, only when he is subjected to a discipline which
is foreign to human nature, which is, from the stand-
6 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY
point of natural man, artificial. Naturally our books,
our scientific and philosophical books, are written
by men who have subjected themselves in a superior
degree to intellectual discipline and culture. Their
thoughts are habitually reasonable. They have learned
to check their fancies by facts, and to organize their
ideas logically rather than emotionally and dramati
cally. When they do indulge in reverie and day-dream
ing which is probably more of the time than is con
ventionally acknowledged they are aware of what they
are doing. They label these excursions, and do not con
fuse their results with objective experiences. We tend
to judge others by ourselves, and because scientific and
philosophic books are composed by men in whom the
reasonable, logical and objective habit of mind predomi
nates, a similar rationality has been attributed by them
to the average and ordinary man. It is then overlooked
that both rationality and irrationality are largely
irrelevant and episodical in undisciplined human nature ;
that men are governed by memory rather than by
thought, and that memory is not a remembering of
actual facts, but is association, suggestion, dramatic
fancy. The standard used to measure the value of the
suggestions that spring up in the mind is not congruity
with fact but emotional congeniality. Do they stimu
late and reinforce feeling, and fit into the dramatic tale?
Are they consonant with the prevailing mood, and can
CHANGING CONCEPTIONS OF PHILOSOPHY 7
they be rendered into the traditional hopes and fears
of the community? If we are willing to take the word
dreams with a certain liberality, it is hardly too much
to say that man, save in his occasional times of actual
work and struggle, lives in a world of dreams, rather
than of facts, and a world of dreams that is organized
about desires whose success and frustration form its
stuff.
To treat the early beliefs and traditions of mankind
as if they were attempts at scientific explanation of the
world, only erroneous and absurd attempts, is thus to
be guilty of a great mistake. The material out of
which philosophy finally emerges is irrelevant to science
and to explanation. It is figurative, symbolic of fears
and hopes, made of imaginations and suggestions, not
significant of a world of objective fact intellectually
confronted. It is poetry and drama, rather than
science, and is apart from scientific truth and falsity,
rationality or absurdity of fact in the same way in
which poetry is independent of these things.
This original material has, however, to pass through
at least two stages before it becomes philosophy proper.
One is the stage in which stories and legends and their
accompanying dramatizations are consolidated. At
first the emotionalized records of experiences are largely
casual and transitory. Events that excite the emotions
of an individual are seized upon and lived over in tale
8 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY
and pantomime. But some experiences are so frequent
and recurrent that they concern the group as a whole.
They are socially generalized. The piecemeal adventure
of the single individual is built out till it becomes repre
sentative and typical of the emotional life of the tribe.
Certain incidents affect the weal and woe of the group in
its entirety and thereby get an exceptional emphasis and
elevation. A certain texture of tradition is built up;
the story becomes a social heritage and possession;
the pantomime develops into the stated rite. Tradition
thus formed becomes a kind of norm to which individual
fancy and suggestion conform. An abiding framework
of imagination is constructed. A communal way of
conceiving life grows up into which individuals are
inducted by education. Both unconsciously and by
definite social requirement individual memories are
assimilated to group memory or tradition, and indi
vidual fancies are accommodated to the body of beliefs
characteristic of a community. Poetry becomes fixated
and systematized. The story becomes a social norm.
The original drama which re-enacts an emotionally im
portant experience is institutionalized into a cult. Sug
gestions previously free are hardened into doctrines.
The systematic and obligatory nature of such doc
trines is hastened and confirmed through conquests and
political consolidation. As the area of a government is
extended, there is a definite motive for systematizing
CHANGING CONCEPTIONS OF PHILOSOPHY 9
and unifying beliefs once free and floating. Aside from
natural accommodation and assimilation springing from
the fact of intercourse and the needs of common under
standing, there is often political necessity which leads
the ruler to centralize traditions and beliefs in order
to extend and strengthen his prestige and authority.
Judea, Greece, Rome, and I presume all other countries
having a long history, present records of a continual
working over of earlier local rites and doctrines in the
interests of a wider social unity and a more extensive
political power. I shall ask you to assume with me
that in this way the larger cosmogonies and cosmologies
of the race as well as the larger ethical traditions have
arisen. Whether this is literally so or not, it is not
necessary to inquire, much less to demonstrate. It is
enough for our purposes that under social influences
there took place a fixing and organizing of doctrines
and cults which gave general traits to the imagination
and general rules to conduct, and that such a consolida
tion was a necessary antecedent to the formation of
any philosophy as we understand that term.
Although a necessary antecedent, this organization
and generalization of ideas and principles of belief is
not the sole and sufficient generator of philosophy.
There is still lacking the motive for logical system and
intellectual proof. This we may suppose to be furnished
by trie need of reconciling the moral rules and ideals em-
10 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY
bodied in the traditional code with the matter of fact
positivistic knowledge which gradually grows up. For
man can never be wholly the creature of suggestion
and fancy. The requirements of continued existence
make indispensable some attention to the actual facts
of the world. Although it is surprising how little check
the environment actually puts upon the formation of
ideas, since no notions are too absurd not to have been
accepted by some people, yet the environment does
enforce a certain minimum of correctness under penalty
of extinction. That certain things are foods, that they
are to be found in certain places, that water drowns,
fire burns, that sharp points penetrate and cut, that
heavy things fall unless supported, that there is a
certain regularity in the changes of day and night and
the alternation of hot and cold, wet and dry: such
prosaic facts force themselves upon even primitive atten
tion. Some of them are so obvious and so important
that they have next to no fanciful context. Auguste
Comte says somewhere that he knows of no savage
people who had a God of weight although every other
natural quality or force may have been deified. Gradu
ally there grows up a body of homely generalizations
preserving and transmitting the wisdom of the race
about the observed facts and sequences of nature. This
knowledge is especially connected with industries, arts
and crafts where observation of materials and processes
CHANGING CONCEPTIONS OF PHILOSOPHY 11
is required for successful action, and where action is
so continuous and regular that spasmodic magic will
not suffice. Extravagantly fantastic notions are
eliminated because they are brought into juxtaposition
with what actually happens.
The sailor is more likely to be given to what we now
term superstitions than say the weaver, because his
activity is more at the mercy of sudden change and
unforeseen occurrence. But even the sailor while he
may regard the wind as the uncontrollable expression
of the caprice of a great spirit, will still have to become
acquainted with some purely mechanical principles of
adjustment of boat, sails and oar to the wind. Fire
may be conceived as a supernatural dragon because some
time or other a swift, bright and devouring flame called
before the mind s eye the quick-moving and dangerous
serpent. But the housewife who tends the fire and the
pots wherein food cooks will still be compelled to observe
certain mechanical facts of draft and replenishment,
and passage from wood to ash. Still more will the
worker in metals accumulate verifiable details about the
conditions and consequences of the operation of heat.
He may retain for special and ceremonial occasions
traditional beliefs, but everyday familiar use will expel
these conceptions for the greater part of the time, when
fire will be to him of uniform and prosaic behavior,
controllable by practical relations of cause and effect.
12 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY
As the arts and crafts develop and become more elabo
rate, the body of positive and tested knowledge enlarges,
and the sequences observed become more complex and of
greater scope. Technologies of this kind give that
common-sense knowledge of nature out of which science
takes its origin. They provide not merely a collection
of positive facts, but they give expertness in dealing
with materials and tools, and promote the development
of the experimental habit of mind, as soon as an art
can be taken away from the rule of sheer custom.
For a long time the imaginative body of beliefs closely
connected with the moral habits of a community group
and with its emotional indulgences and consolations per
sists side by side with the growing body of matter of
fact knowledge. Wherever possible they are interlaced.
At other points, their inconsistencies forbid their inter
weaving, but the two things are kept apart as if in
different compartments. Since one is merely super
imposed upon the other their incompatibility is not felt,
and there is no need of reconciliation. In most cases,
the two kinds of mental products are kept apart because
they become the possession of separate social classes.
The religious and poetic beliefs having acquired a defi
nite social and political value and function are in the
keeping of a higher class directly associated with the
ruling elements in the society. The workers and crafts
men who possess the prosaic matter of fact knowledge
CHANGING CONCEPTIONS OF PHILOSOPHY 13
are likely to occupy a low social status, and their kind
of knowledge is affected by the social disesteem enter
tained for the manual worker who engages in activities
useful to the body. It doubtless was this fact in Greece
which in spite of the keenness of observation, the ex
traordinary power of logical reasoning and the great
freedom of speculation attained by the Athenian, post
poned the general and systematic employment of the
experimental method. Since the industrial craftsman
was only just above the slave in social rank, his type of
knowledge and the method upon which it depended
lacked prestige and authority.
Nevertheless, the time came when matter of fact
knowledge increased to such bulk and scope that it
came into conflict with not merely the detail but with the
spirit and temper of traditional and imaginative beliefs.
Without going into the vexed question of how and why,
there is no doubt that this is just what happened in
what we term the sophistic movement in Greece, within
which originated philosophy proper in the sense in
which the western world understands that term. The
fact that the sophists had a bad name given them by
Plato and Aristotle, a name they have never been able
to shake off, is evidence that with the sophists the
strife between the two types of belief was the emphatic
thing, and that the conflict had a disconcerting effect
upon the traditional system of religious beliefs and the
14 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY
moral code of conduct bound up with it. Although
Socrates was doubtless sincerely interested in the recon
ciliation of the two sides, yet the fact that he ap
proached the matter from the side of matter of
fact method, giving its canons and criteria primacy,
was enough to bring him to the condemnation of
death as a contemner of the gods and a corrupter of
youth.
The fate of Socrates and the ill-fame of the sophists
may be used to suggest some of the striking contrasts
between traditional emotionalized belief on one hand
and prosaic matter of fact knowledge on the other:
the purpose of the comparison being to bring out the
point that while all the advantages of what we call
science were on the side of the latter, the advantages of
social esteem and authority, and of intimate contact
with what gives life its deeper lying values were on the
side of traditional belief. To all appearances, the
specific and verified knowledge of the environment had
only a limited and technical scope. It had to do with
the arts, and the purpose and good of the artisan after
all did not extend very far. They were subordinate and
almost servile. Who would put the art of the shoe
maker on the same plane as the art of ruling the state?
Who would put even the higher art of the physician
in healing the body, upon the level of the art of the
priest in healing the soul? Thus Plato constantly
CHANGING CONCEPTIONS OF PHILOSOPHY 15
draws the contrast in his dialogues. The shoemaker is
a judge of a good pair of shoes, but he is no judge at
all of the more important question whether and when
it is good to wear shoes ; the physician is a good judge
of health, but whether it is a good thing or not to be
well or better to die, he knows not. While the artisan
is expert as long as purely limited technical questions
arise, he is helpless when it comes to the only really
important questions, the moral questions as to values.
Consequently, his type of knowledge is inherently in
ferior and needs to be controlled by a higher kind of
knowledge which will reveal ultimate ends and purposes,
and thus put and keep technical and mechanical knowl
edge in its proper place. Moreover, in Plato s pages we
find, because of Plato s adequate dramatic sense, a lively
depicting of the impact in particular men of the conflict
between tradition and the new claims of purely intellec
tual knowledge. The conservative is shocked beyond
measure at the idea of teaching the military art by
abstract rules, by science. One does not just fight,
one fights for one s country. Abstract science cannot
convey love and loyalty, nor can it be a substitute, even
upon the more technical side, for those ways and means
of fighting in which devotion to the country has been
traditionally embodied.
The way to learn the fighting art is through associa
tion with those who have themselves learned to defend
16 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY
the country, by becoming saturated with its ideals and
customs ; by becoming in short a practical adept in the
Greek tradition as to fighting. To attempt to derive
abstract rules from a comparison of native ways of
fighting with the enemies ways is to begin to go over
to the enemies traditions and gods : it is to begin to be
false to one s own country.
Such a point of view vividly realized enables us to
appreciate the antagonism aroused by the positivistic
point of view when it came into conflict with the tradi
tional. The latter was deeply rooted in social habits
and loyalties; it was surcharged with the moral aims
for which men lived and the moral rules by which they
lived. Hence it was as basic and as comprehensive as
life itself, and palpitated with the warm glowing colors
of the community life in which men realized their own
being. In contrast, the positivistic knowledge was con
cerned with merely physical utilities, and lacked the
ardent associations of belief hallowed by sacrifices of
ancestors and worship of contemporaries. Because of
its limited and concrete character it was dry, hard,
cold.
Yet the more acute and active minds, like that of
Plato himself, could no longer be content to accept,
along with the conservative citizen of the time, the
old beliefs in the old way. The growth of positive
knowledge and of the critical, inquiring spirit under-
CHANGING CONCEPTIONS OF PHILOSOPHY 17
mined these in their old form. The advantages in
definiteness, in accuracy, in verifiability were all on the
side of the new knowledge. Tradition was noble in
aim and scope, but uncertain in foundation. The un
questioned life, said Socrates, was not one fit to be lived
by man, who is a questioning being because he is a
rational being. Hence he must search out the reason
of things, and not accept them from custom and political
authority. What was to be done ? Develop a method of
rational investigation and proof which should place the
essential elements of traditional belief upon an unshak
able basis ; develop a method of thought and knowledge
which while purifying tradition should preserve its
moral and social values unimpaired; nay, by purify
ing them, add to their power and authority. To put
it in a word, that which had rested upon custom was
to be restored, resting no longer upon the habits of
the past, but upon the very metaphysics of Being and
the Universe. Metaphysics is a substitute for custom
as the source and guarantor of higher moral and
social values that is the leading theme of the classic
philosophy of Europe, as evolved by Plato and
Aristotle a philosophy, let us always recall, renewed
and restated by the Christian philosophy of Medieval
Europe.
Out of this situation emerged, if I mistake not, the
entire tradition regarding the function and office of
18 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY
philosophy which till very recently has controlled the
systematic and constructive philosophies of the western
world. If I am right in my main thesis that the origin
of philosophy lay in an attempt to reconcile the two
different types of mental product, then the key is in
our hands as to the main traits of subsequent philosophy
so far as that was not of a negative and heterodox
kind. In the first place, philosophy did not develop in
an unbiased way from an open and unprejudiced origin.
It had its task cut out for it from the start. It had a
mission to perform, and it was sworn in advance to that
mission. It had to extract the essential moral kernel
out of the threatened traditional beliefs of the past. So
far so good; the work was critical and in the interests
of the only true conservatism that which will conserve
and not waste the values wrought out by humanity.
But it was also precommitted to extracting this moral
essence in a spirit congenial to the spirit of past be
liefs. The association with imagination and with social
authority was too intimate to be deeply disturbed. It
was not possible to conceive of the content of social
institutions in any form radically different from that in
which they had existed in the past. It became the
work of philosophy to justify on rational grounds the
spirit, though not the form, of accepted beliefs and
traditional customs.
The resulting philosophy seemed radical enough and
CHANGING CONCEPTIONS OF PHILOSOPHY 19
even dangerous to the average Athenian because of the
difference of form and method. In the sense of pruning
away excrescences and eliminating factors which to the
average citizen were all one with the basic beliefs, it
was radical. But looked at in the perspective of history
and in contrast with different types of thought which
developed later in different social environments, it is
now easy to see how profoundly, after all, Plato and
Aristotle reflected the meaning of Greek tradition and
habit, so that their writings remain, with the writings
of the great dramatists, the best introduction of a stu
dent into the innermost ideals and aspirations of dis
tinctively Greek life. Without Greek religion, Greek
art, Greek civic life, their philosophy would have been
impossible; while the effect of that science upon which
the philosophers most prided themselves turns out to
have been superficial and negligible. This apologetic
spirit of philosophy is even more apparent when Medie
val Christianity about the twelfth century sought for a
systematic rational presentation of itself and made
use of classic philosophy, especially that of Aristotle, to
justify itself to reason. A not unsimilar occurrence
characterizes the chief philosophic systems of Germany
in the early nineteenth century, when Hegel assumed the
task of justifying in the name of rational idealism the
doctrines and institutions which were menaced by the
new spirit of science and popular government. The
20 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY
result has been that the great systems have not been
free from party spirit exercised in behalf of pre
conceived beliefs. Since they have at the same time
professed complete intellectual independence and ration
ality, the result has been too often to impart to philoso
phy an element of insincerity, all the more insidious be
cause wholly unconscious on the part of those who
sustained philosophy.
And this brings us to a second trait of philosophy
springing from its origin. Since it aimed at a rational
justification of things that had been previously accepted
because of their emotional congeniality and social pres
tige, it had to make much of the apparatus of reason
and proof. Because of the lack of intrinsic rationality
in the matters with which it dealt, it leaned over back
ward, so to speak, in parade of logical form. In dealing
with matters of fact, simpler and rougher ways of
demonstration may be resorted to. It is enough, so to
say, to produce the fact in question and point to it
the fundamental form of all demonstration. But when
it comes to convincing men of the truth of doctrines
which are no longer to be accepted upon the say-so of
custom and social authority, but which also are not
capable of empirical verification, there is no recourse
save to magnify the signs of rigorous thought and rigid
demonstration. Thus arises that appearance of ab
stract definition and ultra-scientific argumentation
CHANGING CONCEPTIONS OF PHILOSOPHY 21
which repels so many from philosophy but which has
been one of its chief attractions to its devotees.
At the worst, this has reduced philosophy to a show
of elaborate terminology, a hair-splitting logic, and a
fictitious devotion to the mere external forms of com-
prehensive and minute demonstration. Even at the
best, it has tended to produce an overdeveloped attach
ment to system for its own sake, and an over-pretentious
claim to certainty. Bishop Butler declared that proba
bility is the guide of life ; but few philosophers have been
courageous enough to avow that philosophy can be
satisfied with anything that is merely probable. The
customs dictated by tradition and desire had claimed
finality and immutability. They had claimed to give
certain and unvarying laws of conduct. Very early in
its history philosophy made pretension to a similar
collusiveness, and something of this temper has clung
to classic philosophies ever since. They have insisted
that they were more scientific than the sciences that,
indeed, philosophy was necessary because after all the
special sciences fail in attaining final and complete
truth. There have been a few dissenters who have ven
tured to assert, as did William James, that " philosophy
is vision " and that its chief function is to free men s
minds from bias and prejudice and to enlarge their
perceptions of the world about them. But in the main
philosophy has set up much more ambitious pretensions.
22 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY
To say frankly that philosophy can proffer nothing but
hypotheses, and that these hypotheses are of value
only as they render men s minds more sensitive to life
about them, would seem like a negation of philosophy
itself.
In the third place, the body of beliefs dictated by
desire and imagination and developed under the in
fluence of communal authority into an authoritative
tradition, was pervasive and comprehensive. It was, so
to speak, omnipresent in all the details of the group
life. Its pressure was unremitting and its influence
universal. It was then probably inevitable that the
rival principle, reflective thought, should aim at a simi
lar universality and comprehensiveness. It would be
as inclusive and far-reaching metaphysically as tradi
tion had been socially. Now there was just one way
in which this pretension could be accomplished in con
junction with a claim of complete logical system and
certainty.
All philosophies of the classic type have made a
fixed and fundamental distinction between two realms
of existence. One of these corresponds to the re
ligious and supernatural world of popular tradition,
which in its metaphysical rendering became the world
of highest and ultimate reality. Since the final source
and sanction of all important truths and rules of con
duct in community life had been found in superior and
CHANGING CONCEPTIONS OF PHILOSOPHY 23
unquestioned religious beliefs, so the absolute and
supreme reality of philosophy afforded the only sure
guaranty of truth about empirical matters, and the sole
rational guide to proper social institutions and indi
vidual behavior. Over against this absolute and noume-
nal reality which could be apprehended only by the
systematic discipline of philosophy itself stood the ordi
nary empirical, relatively real, phenomenal world of
everyday experience. It was with this world that the
practical affairs and utilities of men were connected.
It was to this imperfect and perishing world that mat
ter of fact, positivistic science referred.
This is the trait which, in my opinion, has affected
most deeply the classic notion about the nature of
philosophy. Philosophy has arrogated to itself the
office of demonstrating the existence of a transcendent,
absolute or inner reality and of revealing to man the
nature and features of this ultimate and higher reality.
It has therefore claimed that it was in possession of a
higher organ of knowledge than is employed by posi
tive science and ordinary practical experience, and
that it is marked by a superior dignity and
importance a claim which is undeniable if philoso
phy leads man to proof and intuition of a Reality be
yond that open to day-by-day life and the special
sciences.
This claim has, of course, been denied by various
24 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY
philosophers from time to time. But for the most part
these denials have been agnostic and sceptical. They
have contented themselves with asserting that absolute
and ultimate reality is beyond human ken. But they
have not ventured to deny that such Reality would be
the appropriate sphere for the exercise of philosophic
knowledge provided only it were within the reach of
human intelligence. Only comparatively recently has
another conception of the proper office of philosophy
arisen. This course of lectures will be devoted to
setting forth this different conception of philosophy in
some of its main contrasts to what this lecture has
termed the classic conception. At this point, it can be
referred to only by anticipation and in cursory fashion.
It is implied in the account which has been given of the
origin of philosophy out of the background of an
authoritative tradition; a tradition originally dictated
by man s imagination working under the influence of
love and hate and in the interest of emotional excite
ment and satisfaction. Common frankness requires that
it be stated that this account of the origin of philoso
phies claiming to deal with absolute Being in a sys
tematic way has been given with malice prepense. It
seems to me that this genetic method of approach is a
more effective way of undermining this type of philo
sophic theorizing than any attempt at logical refutation
could be.
CHANGING CONCEPTIONS OF PHILOSOPHY 25
If this lecture succeeds in leaving in your minds as a
reasonable hypothesis the idea that philosophy origi
nated not out of intellectual material, but out of social
and emotional material, it will also succeed in leaving
with you a changed attitude toward traditional philoso
phies. They will be viewed from a new angle and placed
in a new light. New questions about them will be
aroused and new standards for judging them will be
suggested.
If any one will commence without mental reservations
to study the history of philosophy not as an isolated
thing but as a chapter in the development of civiliza
tion and culture ; if one will connect the story of philoso
phy with a study of anthropology, primitive life, the
history of religion, literature and social institutions, it
is confidently asserted that he will reach his own inde
pendent judgment as to the worth of the account which
has been presented today. Considered in this way, the
history of philosophy will take on a new significance.
What is lost from the standpoint of would-be science is
regained from the standpoint of humanity. Instead
of the disputes of rivals about the nature of reality, we
have the scene of human clash of social purpose and
aspirations. Instead of impossible attempts to tran
scend experience, we have the significant record of the
efforts of men to formulate the things of experience to
which they are most deeply and passionately attached.
26 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY
Instead of impersonal and purely speculative endeavors
to contemplate as remote beholders the nature of abso
lute things-in-themselves, we have a living picture of the
choice of thoughtful men about what they would have
life to be, and to what ends they would have men shape
their intelligent activities.
Any one of you who arrives at such a view of past
philosophy will of necessity be led to entertain a quite
definite conception of the scope and aim of future
philosophizing. He will inevitably be committed to the
notion that what philosophy has been unconsciously,
without knowing or intending it, and, so to speak, under
cover, it must henceforth be openly and deliberately.
When it is acknowledged that under disguise of dealing
with ultimate reality, philosophy has been occupied with
the precious values embedded in social traditions, that
it has sprung from a clash of social ends and from a
conflict of inherited institutions with incompatible con
temporary tendencies, it will be seen that the task of
future philosophy is to clarify men s ideas as to the
social and moral strifes of their own day. Its aim is to
become so far as is humanly possible an organ for deal
ing with these conflicts. That which may be preten
tiously unreal when it is formulated in metaphysical
distinctions becomes intensely significant when connected
with the drama of the struggle of social beliefs and
ideals. Philosophy which surrenders its somewhat
CHANGING CONCEPTIONS OF PHILOSOPHY 27
barren monopoly of dealings with Ultimate and Abso
lute Reality will find a compensation in enlightening
the moral forces which move mankind and in contribut
ing to the aspirations of men to attain to a more ordered
and intelligent happiness.
CHAPTER II
SOME HISTORICAL FACTORS IN PHILOSOPHI
CAL RECONSTRUCTION
FRANCIS BACON of the Elizabethan age is the great
forerunner of the spirit of modern life. Though slight
in accomplishment, as a prophet of new tendencies he
is an outstanding figure of the world s intellectual life.
Like many another prophet he suffers from confused
intermingling of old and new. What is most signifi
cant in him has been rendered more or less familiar by
the later course of events. But page after page is filled
with matter which belongs to the past from which
Bacon thought he had escaped. Caught between these
two sources of easy disparagement, Bacon hardly re
ceives his due as the real founder of modern thought,
while he is praised for merits which scarcely belong
to him, such as an alleged authorship of the specific
methods of induction pursued by science. What makes
Bacon memorable is that breezes blowing from a new
world caught and filled his sails and stirred him to ad
venture in new seas. He never himself discovered the
land of promise, but he proclaimed the new goal and
by faith he descried its features from afar.
28
SOME HISTORICAL FACTORS 29
The main traits of his thought put before our mind
the larger features of a new spirit which was at work in
causing intellectual reconstruction. They may suggest
the social and historical forces out of which the new
spirit was born. The best known aphorism of Bacon
is that Knowledge is Power. Judged by this pragmatic
criterion, he condemned the great body of learning then
extant as not -knowledge, as pseudo- and pretentious-
knowledge. For it did not give power. It was otiose,
not operative. In his most extensive discussion he
classified the learning of his day under three heads,
delicate, fantastic and contentious. Under delicate
learning, he included the literary learning which through
the influence of the revival of ancient languages and
literatures occupied so important a place in the intellec
tual life of the Renaissance. Bacon s condemnation is
the more effective because he himself was a master of
the classics and of all the graces and refinements which
this literary study was intended to convey. In sub
stance he anticipated most of the attacks which educa
tional reformers since his time have made upon one
sided literary culture. It contributed not to power but
to ornament and decoration. It was ostentatious and
luxurious. By fantastic learning he meant the quasi-
magical science that was so rife all over Europe in the
sixteenth century wild developments of alchemy,
astrology, etc. Upon this he poured his greatest vials
30 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY
of wrath because the corruption of the good is the
worst of evils. Delicate learning was idle and vain, but
fantastic learning aped the form of true knowledge.
It laid hold of the true principle and aim of knowledge
control of natural forces. But it neglected the condi
tions and methods by which alone such knowledge could
be obtained, and thus deliberately led men astray.
For our purposes, however, what he says about con
tentious learning is the most important. For by this, he
means the traditional science which had come down, in
scanty and distorted measure to be sure, from antiquity
through scholasticism. It is called contentious both
because of the logical method used and the end to which
it was put. In a certain sense it aimed at power, but
power over other men in the interest of some class or
sect or person, not power over natural forces in the
common interest of all. Bacon s conviction of the quar
relsome, self-displaying character of the scholarship
which had come down from antiquity was of course not
so much due to Greek science itself as to the degenerate
heritage of scholasticism in the fourteenth century,
when philosophy had fallen into the hands of disputa
tious theologians, full of hair-splitting argumentative-
ness and quirks and tricks by which to win victory over
somebody else.
But Bacon also brought his charge against the
Aristotelian method itself. In its rigorous forms it
SOME HISTORICAL FACTORS 31
aimed at demonstration, and in its milder forms at
persuasion. But both demonstration and persuasion
aim at conquest of mind rather than of nature. More
over they both assume that some one is already in pos
session of a truth or a belief, and that the only problem
is to convince some one else, or to teach. In contrast,
his new method had an exceedingly slight opinion of the
amount of truth already existent, and a lively sense of
the extent and importance of truths still to be attained.
It would be a logic of discovery, not a logic of argu
mentation, proof and persuasion. To Bacon, the old
logic even at its best was a logic for teaching the already
known, and teaching meant indoctrination, discipling.
It was an axiom of Aristotle that only that which was
already known could be learned, that growth in knowl
edge consisted simply in bringing together a universal
truth of reason and a particular truth of sense which
had previously been noted separately. In any case,
learning meant growth of knowledge, and growth be
longs in the region of becoming, change, and hence is
inferior to possession of knowledge in the syllogistic
self-revolving manipulation of what was already known
demonstration.
In contrast with this point of view, Bacon eloquently
proclaimed the superiority of discovery of new facts
and truths to demonstration of the old. Now there is
only one road to discovery, and that is penetrating in-
32 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY
quiry into the secrets of nature. Scientific principles
and laws do not lie on the surface of nature. They are
hidden, and must be wrested from nature by an active
and elaborate technique of inquiry. Neither logical
reasoning nor the passive accumulation of any number
of observations which the ancients called experience
suffices to lay hold of them. Active experimentation
must force the apparent facts of nature into forms
different to those in which they familiarly present them
selves; and thus make them tell the truth about them
selves, as torture may compel an unwilling witness to re
veal what he has been concealing. Pure reasoning as a
means of arriving at truth is like the spider who spins
a web out of himself. The web is orderly and elaborate,
but it is only a trap. The passive accumulation of
experiences the traditional empirical method is like
the ant who busily runs about and collects and piles up
heaps of raw materials. True method, that which Bacon
would usher in, is comparable to the operations of the
bee who, like the ant, collects material from the external
world, but unlike that industrious creature attacks and
modifies the collected stuff in order to make it yield its
hidden treasure.
Along with this contrast between subjugation of na
ture and subjection of other minds and the elevation
of a method of discovery above a method of demonstra
tion, went Bacon s sense of progress as the aim and
SOME HISTORICAL FACTORS 33
test of genuine knowledge. According to his criticisms,
the classic logic, even in its Aristotelian form, inevitably
played into the hands of inert conservatism. For in
accustoming the mind to think of truth as already
known, it habituated men to fall back on the intellectual
attainments of the past, and to accept them without
critical scrutiny. Not merely the medieval but the
renaissance mind tended to look back to antiquity as a
Golden Age of Knowledge, the former relying upon
sacred scriptures, the latter upon secular literatures.
And while this attitude could not fairly be charged up
against the classic logic, yet Bacon felt, and with
justice, that any logic which identified the technique
of knowing with demonstration of truths already pos
sessed by the mind, blunts the spirit of investigation and
confines the mind within the circle of traditional learn
ing.
Such a logic could not avoid having for its salient
features definition of what is already known (or thought
to be known), and its systematization according to
recognized canons of orthodoxy. A logic of discovery
on the other hand looks to the future. Received truth
it regards critically as something to be tested by new
experiences rather than as something to be dogmatically
taught and obediently received. Its chief interest in
even the most carefully tested ready-made knowledge
is the use which may be made of it in further inquiries
34 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY
and discoveries. Old truth has its chief value in assist
ing the detection of new truth. Bacon s own apprecia
tion of the nature of induction was highly defective.
But his acute sense that science means invasion of the
unknown, rather than repetition in logical form of the
already known, makes him nevertheless the father of
induction. Endless and persistent uncovering of facts
and principles not known such is the true spirit of
induction. Continued progress in knowledge is the only
sure way of protecting old knowledge from degeneration
into dogmatic doctrines received on authority, or from
imperceptible decay into superstition and old wives
tales.
Ever-renewed progress is to Bacon the test as well
as the aim of genuine logic. Where, Bacon constantly
demands, where are the works, the fruits, of the older
logic? What has it done to ameliorate the evils of life,
to rectify defects, to improve conditions? Where are
the inventions that justify its claim to be in possession
of truth? Beyond the victory of man over man in
law courts, diplomacy and political administration,
they are nil. One had to turn from admired " sciences "
to despised arts to find works, fruits, consequences of
value to human kind through power over natural forces.
And progress in the arts was as yet intermittent, fitful,
accidental. A true logic or technique of inquiry would
make advance in the industrial, agricultural and medi-
SOME HISTORICAL FACTORS 35
cal arts continuous, cumulative and deliberately sys
tematic.
If we take into account the supposed body of ready-
made knowledge upon which learned men rested in
supine acquiescence and which they recited in parrot-
like chorus, we find it consists of two parts. One
of these parts is made up of the errors of our ances
tors, musty with antiquity and organized into pseudo-
science through the use of the classic logic. Such
" truths " are in fact only the systematized mistakes
and prejudices of our ancestors. Many of them origi
nated in accident ; many in class interest and bias, per
petuated by authority for this very reason a consid
eration which later actuated Locke s attack upon the
doctrine of innate ideas. The other portion of accepted
beliefs comes from instinctive tendencies of the human
mind that give it a dangerous bias until counteracted
by a conscious and critical logic.
The mind of man spontaneously assumes greater sim
plicity, uniformity and unity among phenomena than
actually exists. It follows superficial analogies and
jumps to conclusions; it overlooks the variety of de
tails and the existence of exceptions. Thus it weaves a
web of purely internal origin which it imposes upon
nature. What had been termed science in the past con
sisted of this humanly constructed and imposed web.
Men looked at the work of their own minds and thought
36 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY
they were seeing realities in nature. They were wor
shipping, under the name of science, the idols of their
own making. So-called science and philosophy con
sisted of these " anticipations " of nature. And the
worst thing that could be said about traditional logic
was that instead of saving man from this natural source
of error, it had, though attributing to nature a false
rationality of unity, simplicity and generality, sanc
tioned these sources of delusion. The office of the new
logic would be to protect the mind against itself: to
teach it to undergo a patient and prolonged appren
ticeship to fact in its infinite variety and particularity :
to obey nature intellectually in order to command it
practically. Such was the significance of the new logic
the new tool or organon of learning, so named in
express opposition to the organon of Aristotle.
Certain other important oppositions are implied.
Aristotle thought of reason as capable of solitary com
munion with rational truth. The counterpart of his
celebrated saying that man is a political animal, is that
Intelligence, Nous, is neither animal, human nor politi
cal. It is divinely unique and self-enclosed. To Bacon,
error had been produced and perpetuated by social in
fluences, and truth must be discovered by social agencies
organized for that purpose. Left to himself, the indi
vidual can do little or nothing; he is likely to become
involved in his own self-spun web of misconceptions.
SOME HISTORICAL FACTORS 37
The great need is the organization of co-operative re
search, whereby men attack nature collectively and the
work of inquiry is carried on continuously from genera
tion to generation. Bacon even aspired to the rather
absurd notion of a method so perfected that differences
in natural human ability might be discounted, and all
be put on the same level in production of new facts
and new truths. Yet this absurdity was only the nega
tive side of his great positive prophecy of a combined
and co-operative pursuit of science such as characterizes
our own day. In view of the picture he draws in his
New Atlantis of a State organized for collective inquiry,
we readily forgive him his exaggerations.
Power over nature was not to be individual but col
lective; the Empire, as he says, of Man over Nature,
substituted for the Empire of Man over Man. Let us
employ Bacon s own words with their variety of pic
turesque metaphor : " Men have entered into the desire
of learning and knowledge, . . . seldom sincerely to
give a true account of their gift of reason, to the benefit
and use of men, but as if they sought in knowledge a
couch whereon to rest a searching and wandering spirit ;
or a terrace for a wandering and variable mind to walk
up and down with a fair prospect; or a tower for a
proud mind to raise itself upon ; or a fort or command
ing ground for strife and contention ; or a shop for
profit and sale ; and not a rich storehouse for the glory
38 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY
of the creator and the relief of man s estate." When
William James called Pragmatism a New Name for an
Old Way of Thinking, I do not know that he was think
ing expressly of Francis Bacon, but so far as concerns
the spirit and atmosphere of the pursuit of knowledge,
Bacon may be taken as the prophet of a pragmatic
conception of knowledge. Many misconceptions of its
spirit would be avoided if his emphasis upon the social
factor in both the pursuit and the end of knowledge were
carefully obsejrved.
This somewhat over-long resume of Bacon s ideas has
not been gone into as a matter of historic retrospect.
The summary is rather meant to put before our minds
an authentic document of the new philosophy which may
bring into relief the social causes of intellectual revolu
tion. Only a sketchy account can be here attempted,
but it may be of some assistance even barely to remind
you of the direction of that industrial, political and
religious change upon which Europe was entering.
Upon the industrial side, it is impossible, I think,
to exaggerate the influence of travel, exploration and
new commerce which fostered a romantic sense of ad
venture into novelty; loosened the hold of traditional
beliefs ; created a lively sense of new worlds to be investi
gated and subdued ; produced new methods of manufac
ture, commerce, banking and finance; and then reacted
everywhere to stimulate invention, and to intro-
SOME HISTORICAL FACTORS 39
duce positive observation and active experimentation
into science. The Crusades, the revival of the profane
learning of antiquity and even more perhaps, the con
tact with the advanced learning of the Mohammedans,
the increase of commerce with Asia and Africa, the
introduction of the lens, compass and gunpowder, the
finding and opening up of North and South America
most significantly called The New World these are
some of the obvious external facts. Contrast between
peoples and races previously isolated is always, I think,
most fruitful and influential for change when psycho
logical and industrial changes coincide with and rein
force each other. Sometimes people undergo emotional
change, what might almost be called a metaphysical
change, through intercourse. The inner set of the mind,
especially in religious matters, is altered. At other
times, there is a lively exchange of goods, an adoption
of foreign tools and devices, an imitation of alien habits
of clothing, habitation and production of commodities.
One of these changes is, so to speak, too internal and the
other too external to bring about a profound intellectual
development. But when the creation of a new mental
attitude falls together with extensive material and
economic changes, something significant happens.
This coincidence of two kinds of change was, I take it,
characteristic of the new contacts of the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries. Clash of customs and traditional
40 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY
beliefs dispelled mental inertia and sluggishness ; it
aroused a lively curiosity as to different and new ideas.
The actual adventure of travel and exploration purged
the mind of fear of the strange and unknown: as new
territories geographically and commercially speaking
were opened up, the mind was opened up. New contacts
promoted the desire for still more contacts ; the appetite
for novelty and discovery grew by what it fed upon.
Conservative adherence to old beliefs and methods
underwent a steady attrition with every new voyage
into new parts and every new report of foreign ways.
The mind became used to exploration and discovery. It
found a delight and interest in the revelations of the
novel and the unusual which it no longer took in what
was old and customary. Moreover, the very act of
exploration, of expedition, the process of enterprising
adventure into the remote, yielded a peculiar joy and
thrill.
This psychological change was essential to the birth
of the new point of view in science and philosophy.
Yet alone it could hardly have produced the new method
of knowing. But positive changes in the habits and
purposes of life gave objective conformation and sup
port to the mental change. They also determined the
channels in which the new spirit found exercise. New
found wealth, the gold from the Americas and new arti
cles of consumption and enjoyment, tended to wean men
SOME HISTORICAL FACTORS 41
from preoccupation with the metaphysical and theologi
cal, and to turn their minds with newly awakened in
terest to the joys of nature and this life. New material
resources and new markets in America and India under
mined the old dependence upon household and manual
production for a local and limited market, and generated
quantitative, large scale production by means of steam
for foreign and expanding markets. Capitalism, rapid
transit, and production for exchange against money and
for profit, instead of against goods and for consump
tion, followed.
This cursory and superficial reminder of vast and
complicated events may suggest the mutual interde
pendence of the scientific revolution and the industrial
revolution. Upon the one hand, modern industry is so
much applied science. No amount of desire to make
money, or to enjoy new commodities, no amount of mere
practical energy and enterprise, would have effected the
economic transformation of the last few centuries and
generations. Improvements in mathematical, physical,
chemical and biological science were prerequisites.
Business men through engineers of different sorts, have
laid hold of the new insights gained by scientific men
into the hidden energies of nature, and have turned
them to account. The modern mine, factory, railway,
steamship, telegraph, all of the appliances and equip
ment of production, and transportation, express scienti-
42 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY
fie knowledge. They would continue unimpaired even
if the ordinary pecuniary accompaniments of economic
activity were radically altered. In short, through the
intermediary of invention, Bacon s watchword that
knowledge is power and his dream of continuous empire
over natural forces by means of natural science have
been actualized. The industrial revolution by steam
and electricity is the reply to Bacon s prophecy.
On the other hand, it is equally true that the needs
of modern industry have been tremendous stimuli to
scientific investigation. The demands of progressive
production and transportation have set new problems
to inquiry; the processes used in industry have sug
gested new experimental appliances and operations in
science; the wealth rolled up in business has to some ex
tent been diverted to endowment of research. The un
interrupted and pervasive interaction of scientific dis
covery and industrial application has fructified both
science and industry, and has brought home to the con
temporary mind the fact that the gist of scientific
knowledge is control of natural energies. These four
facts, natural science, experimentation, control and
progress have been inextricably bound up together.
That up to the present the application of the newer
methods and results has influenced the means of life
rather than its ends ; or, better put, that human aims
have so far been affected in an accidental rather than
SOME HISTORICAL FACTORS 43
in an intelligently directed way, signifies that so far the
change has been technical rather than human and moral,
that it has been economic rather than adequately social.
Put in the language of Bacon, this means that while
we have been reasonably successful in obtaining com
mand of nature by means of science, our science is not
yet such that this command is systematically and pre
eminently applied to the relief of human estate. Such
applications occur and in great numbers, but they are
incidental, sporadic and external. And this limita
tion defines the specific problem of philosophical re
construction at the present time. For it emphasizes
the larger social deficiencies that require intelligent
diagnosis, and projection of aims and methods.
It is hardly necessary to remind you however that
marked political changes have already followed upon the
new science and its industrial applications, and that in
so far some directions of social development have at
least been marked out. The growth of the new technique
of industry has everywhere been followed by the fall of
feudal institutions, in which the social pattern was
formed in agricultural occupations and military pur
suits. Wherever business in the modern sense has gone,
the tendency has been to transfer power from land to
financial capital, from the country to the city, from the
farm to factory, from social titles based on personal
allegiance, service and protection, to those based on
44 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY
control of labor and exchange of goods. The change
in the political centre of gravity has resulted in emanci
pating the individual from bonds of class and custom
and in producing a political organization which depends
less upon superior authority and more upon voluntary
choice. Modern states, in other words, are regarded
less as divine, and more as human works than they
used to be; less as necessary manifestations of some
supreme and over-ruling principles, and more as con
trivances of men and women to realize their own desires.
The contract theory of the origin of the state is a
theory whose falsity may easily be demonstrated both
philosophically and historically. Nevertheless this
theory has had great currency and influence. In form,
it stated that some time in the past men voluntarily got
together and made a compact with one another to
observe certain laws and to submit to certain authority
and in that way brought the state and the relation of
ruler and subject into existence. Like many things in
philosophy, the theory, though worthless as a record
of fact, is of great worth as a symptom of the direction
of human desire. It testified to a growing belief that
the state existed to satisfy human needs and could be
shaped by human intention and volition. Aristotle s
theory that the state exists by nature failed to satisfy
the thought of the seventeenth century because it
seemed by making the state a product of nature to re-
SOME HISTORICAL FACTORS 45
move its constitution beyond human choice. Equally
significant was the assumption of the contract theory
that individuals by their personal decisions expressing
their personal wishes bring the state into existence. The
rapidity with which the theory gained a hold all over
western Europe showed the extent to which the bonds
of customary institutions had relaxed their grip. It
proved that men had been so liberated from absorption
in larger groups that they were conscious of themselves
as individuals having rights and claims on their own
account, not simply as members of a class, guild or
social grade.
Side by side with this political individualism went a
religious and moral individualism. The metaphysical
doctrine of the superiority of the species to the indi
vidual, of the permanent universal to the changing par
ticular, was the philosophic support of political and
ecclesiastical institutionalism. The universal church
was the ground, end and limit of the individual s beliefs
and acts in spiritual matters, just as the feudal hier
archical organization was the basis, law and fixed limit
of his behavior in secular affairs. The northern bar
barians had never completely come under the sway of
classic ideas and customs. That which was indigenous
where life was primarily derived from Latin sources
was borrowed and more or less externally imposed in
Germanic Europe. Protestantism marked the formal
46 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY
breaking away from the domination of Roman ideas.
It effected liberation of individual conscience and wor
ship from control by an organized institution claiming
to be permanent and universal. It cannot truly be said
that at the outset the new religious movement went far
in promoting freedom of thought and criticism, or in
denying the notion of some supreme authority to which
individual intelligence was absolutely in bonds. Nor at
first did it go far in furthering tolerance or respect for
divergency of moral and religious convictions. But
practically it did tend to disintegration of established
institutions. By multiplying sects and churches it en
couraged at least a negative toleration of the right of
individuals to judge ultimate matters for themselves. In
time, there developed a formulated belief in the sacred-
ness of individual conscience and in the right to freedom
of opinion, belief and worship.
It is unnecessary to point out how the spread of this
conviction increased political individualism, or how it
accelerated the willingness of men to question received
ideas in science and philosophy to think and observe
and experiment for themselves. Religious individualism
served to supply a much needed sanction to initiative and
independence of thought in all spheres, even when re
ligious movements officially were opposed to such free
dom when carried beyond a limited point. The greatest
influence of Protestantism was, however, in developing
SOME HISTORICAL FACTORS 47
the idea of the personality of every human being as an
end in himself. When human beings were regarded as
capable of direct relationship with God, without the
intermediary of any organization like the Church, and
the drama of sin, redemption and salvation was some
thing enacted within the innermost soul of individuals
rather than in the species of which the individual was a
subordinate part, a fatal blow was struck at all doc
trines which taught the subordination of personality
a blow which had many political reverberations in
promoting democracy. For when in religion the idea of
the intrinsic worth of every soul as such was proclaimed,
it was difficult to keep the idea from spilling over, so to
say, into secular relationships.
The absurdity is obvious of trying in a few para
graphs to summarize movements in industry, politics and
religion whose influence is still far from exhausted and
about which hundreds and thousands of volumes have
been written. But I shall count upon your forbearance
to recall that these matters are alluded to only in order
to suggest some of the forces that operated to mark out
the channels in which new ideas ran. First, there is the
transfer of interest from the eternal and universal to
what is changing and specific, concrete a movement
that showed itself practically in carrying over of atten
tion and thought from another world to this, from the
supematuralism characteristic of the Middle Ages
48 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY
to delight in natural science, natural activity and
natural intercourse. Secondly, there is the gradual
decay of the authority of fixed institutions and class
distinctions and relations, and a growing belief in the
power of individual minds, guided by methods of obser
vation, experiment and reflection, to attain the truths
needed for the guidance of life. The operations and
results of natural inquiry gained in prestige and power
at the expense of principles dictated from high
authority.
Consequently principles and alleged truths are
judged more and more by criteria of their origin
in experience and their consequences of weal and woe
in experience, and less by criteria of sublime origin
from beyond everyday experience and independent of
fruits in experience. It is no longer enough for a princi
ple to be elevated, noble, universal and hallowed by time.
It must present its birth certificate, it must show under
just what conditions of human experience it was gen
erated, and it must justify itself by its works, present
and potential. Such is the inner meaning of the modern
appeal to experience as an ultimate criterion of value
and validity. In the third place, great store is set
upon the idea of progress. The future rather than the
past dominates the imagination. The Golden Age lies
ahead of us not behind us. Everywhere new possibilities
beckon and arouse courage and effort. The great
SOME HISTORICAL FACTORS 49
French thinkers of the later eighteenth century bor
rowed this idea from Bacon and developed it into the
doctrine of the indefinite perfectibility of mankind on
earth. Man is capable, if he will but exercise the re
quired courage, intelligence and effort, of shaping his
own fate. Physical conditions offer no insurmountable
barriers. In the fourth place, the patient and experi
mental study of nature, bearing fruit in inventions
which control nature and subdue her forces to social
uses, is the method by which progress is made. Knowl
edge is power and knowledge is achieved by sending the
mind to school to nature to learn her processes of
change.
In this lecture as in the previous one, I can hardly
close better than by reference to the new responsibilities
imposed upon philosophy and the new opportunities
opened to it. Upon the whole, the greatest effect of
these changes up to date has been to substitute an
Idealism based on epistemology, or the theory of knowl
edge, for the Idealism based on the metaphysics of
classic antiquity.
Earlier modern philosophy (even though uncon
sciously to itself) had the problem of reconciling the
traditional theory of the rational and ideal basis, stuff
and end of the universe with the new interest in indi
vidual mind and the new confidence in its capacities. It
was in a dilemma, On the one hand, it had no intention
50 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY
of losing itself in a materialism which subordinated man
to physical existence and mind to matter especially
just at the moment when in actual affairs man and mind
were beginning to achieve genuine rule over nature.
On the other hand, the conception that the world as
it stood was an embodiment of a fixed and comprehensive
Mind or Reason was uncongenial to those whose main
concern was with the deficiencies of the world and with
an attempt to remedy them. The effect of the objective
theological idealism that had developed out of classic
metaphysical idealism was to make the mind submissive
and acquiescent. The new individualism chafed under
the restrictions imposed upon it by the notion of a uni
versal reason which had once and for all shaped nature
and destiny.
In breaking away from antique and medieval thought,
accordingly, early modern thought continued the older
tradition of a Reason that creates and constitutes the
world, but combined it with the notion that this Reason
operates through the human mind, individual or collec
tive. This is the common note of idealism sounded by
all the philosophies of the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries, whether belonging to the British school of
Locke, Berkeley and Hume or the Continental school of
Descartes. In Kant as everybody knows the two
strains came together; and the theme of the formation
of the knowable world by means of a thought that
SOME HISTORICAL FACTORS 51
operated exclusively through the human knower became
explicit. Idealism ceased to be metaphysical and cosmic
in order to become epistemological and personal.
It is evident that this development represents merely
a transitional stage. It tried, after all, to put the new
wine in the old bottles. It did not achieve a free and
unbiased formulation of the meaning of the power to
direct nature s forces through knowledge that is,
purposeful, experimental action acting to reshape be
liefs and institutions. The ancient tradition was still
strong enough to project itself unconsciously into men s
ways of thinking, and to hamper and compromise the
expression of the really modern forces and aims. Es
sential philosophic reconstruction represents an attempt
to state these causes and results in a way freed from
incompatible inherited factors. It will regard intelli
gence not as the original shaper and final cause of
things, but as the purposeful energetic re-shaper of
those phases of nature and life that obstruct social
well-being. It esteems the individual not as an exag
geratedly self-sufficient Ego which by some magic
creates the world, but as the agent who is responsible
through initiative, inventiveness and intelligently
directed labor for re-creating the world, transforming
it into an instrument and possession of intelligence.
The train of ideas represented by the Baconian
Knowledge is Power thus failed in getting an emanci-
52 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY
pated and independent expression. These become hope
lessly entangled in standpoints and prepossessions that
embodied a social, political and scientific tradition with
which they were completely incompatible. The ob
scurity, the confusion of modern philosophy is the
product of this attempt to combine two things which
cannot possibly be combined either logically or morally.
Philosophic reconstruction for the present is thus the
endeavor to undo the entanglement and to permit the
Baconian aspirations to come to a free and un
hindered expression. In succeeding lectures we shall
consider the needed reconstruction as it affects certain
classic philosophic antitheses, like those of experience
and reason, the real and the ideal. But first we shall
have to consider the modifying effect exercised upon
philosophy by that changed conception of nature, ani
mate and inanimate, which we owe to the progress of
science.
CHAPTER III
THE SCIENTIFIC FACTOR IN RECONSTRUC
TION OF PHILOSOPHY
PHILOSOPHY starts from some deep and wide way of
responding to the difficulties life presents, but it grows
only when material is at hand for making this practical
response conscious, articulate and communicable. Ac
companying the economic, political and ecclesiastical
changes which were alluded to in an earlier lecture, was
a scientific revolution enormous in scope and leaving un
changed almost no detail of belief about nature, physical
and human. In part this scientific transformation was
produced by just the change in practical attitude and
temper. But as it progressed, it furnished that change
an appropriate vocabulary, congenial to its needs, and
made it articulate. The advance of science in its larger
generalizations and in its specific detail of fact supplied
precisely that intellectual equipment of ideas and con
crete fact that was needed in order to formulate,
precipitate, communicate and propagate the new dispo
sition. Today, accordingly, we shall deal with those
contrasting conceptions of the structure and constitu
tion of Nature, which when they are accepted on the
53
54 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY
authority of science (alleged or real), form the intel
lectual framework of philosophy.
Contrasting conceptions of ancient and modern
science have been selected. For I see no way in which
the truly philosophic import of the picture of the
world painted by modern science can be appreciated
except to exhibit it in contrast with that earlier picture
which gave classic metaphysics its intellectual founda
tion and confirmation. The world in which philoso
phers once put their trust was a closed world, a world
consisting internally of a limited number of fixed forms,
and having definite boundaries externally. The world
of modern science is an open world, a world varying in
definitely without the possibility of assignable limit in
its internal make-up, a world stretching beyond any
assignable bounds externally. Again, the w r orld in
which even the most intelligent men of olden times
thought they lived was a fixed world, a realm where
changes went on only within immutable limits of rest
and permanence, and a world where the fixed and un-
moving was, as we have already noted, higher in quality
and authority than the moving and altering. And in
the third place, the world which men once saw with
their eyes, portrayed in their imaginations and re
peated in their plans of conduct, was a world of a
limited number of classes, kinds, forms, distinct in
quality (as kinds and species must be distinct) and
THE SCIENTIFIC FACTOR 55
arranged in a graded order of superiority and
inferiority.
It is not easy to recall the image of the universe which
was taken for granted in the world tradition. In spite
of its dramatic rendering (as in Dante), of the dialecti
cal elaborations of Aristotle and St. Thomas, in spite of
the fact that it held men s minds captive until the last
three hundred years, and that its overthrow involved a
religious upheaval, it is already dim, faded and remote.
Even as a separate and abstract thing of theory it is
not easy to recover.
As something pervasive, interwoven with all the de
tails of reflection and observation, with the plans and
rules of behavior, it is impossible to call it back again.
Yet, as best we can, we need to put before our minds a
definitely enclosed universe, something which can be
called a universe in a literal and visible sense, having the
earth at its fixed and unchanging centre and at a
fixed circumference the heavenly arch of fixed stars
moving in an eternal round of divine ether, hemming in
all things and keeping them forever at one and in order.
The earth, though at the centre, is the coarsest, gross
est, most material, least significant and good (or per
fect) of the parts of this closed world. It is the scene
of maximum fluctuation and vicissitude. It is the least
rational, and therefore the least notable, or knowable ;
it offers the least to reward contemplation, provoke
56 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY
admiration and govern conduct. Between this grossly
material centre and the immaterial, spiritual and eternal
heavens lie a definite series of regions of moon, planets,
sun, etc., each of which gains in rank, value, rationality
and true being as it is farther from earth and nearer
the heavens. Each of these regions is composed of its
own appropriate stuff of earth, water, air, fire in its
own dominant degree, until we reach the heavenly firma
ment which transcends all these principles, being con
stituted, as was just said, of that immaterial, inalterable
energy called ether.
Within this tight and pent in universe, changes take
place of course. But they are only of a small number
of fixed kinds ; and they operate only within fixed limits.
Each kind of stuff has its own appropriate motion. It
is the nature of earthly things to be heavy, since they
are gross, and hence to move downward. Fire and
superior things are light and hence move upward to
their proper place ; air rises only to the plane of the
planets, where it then takes its back and forth motion
which naturally belongs to it, as is evident in the winds
and in respiration. Ether being the highest of all
physical things has a purely circular movement. The
daily return of the fixed stars is the closest possible
approximation to eternity, and to the self-involved revo
lution of mind upon its own ideal axis of reason. Upon
the earth in virtue of its earthly nature or rather its
THE SCIENTIFIC FACTOR 57
lack of virtue is a scene of mere change. Mere flux,
aimless and meaningless, starts at no definite point and
arrives at nothing, amounts to nothing. Mere changes
of quantity, all purely mechanical changes, are of this
kind. They are like the shiftings of the sands by the
sea. They may be sensed, but they cannot be " noted "
or understood ; they lack fixed limits which govern them.
They are contemptible. They are casual, the sport of
accident.
Only changes which lead to some defined or fixed out
come of form are of any account and can have any
account any logos or reason made of them. The
growth of plants and animals illustrates the highest
kind of change which is possible in the sublunary or
mundane sphere. They go from one definite fixed form
to another. Oaks generate only oaks, oysters only
oysters, man only man. The material factor of
mechanical production enters in, but enters in as acci
dent to prevent the full consummation of the type of the
species, and to bring about the meaningless variations
which diversify various oaks or oysters from one an
other; or in extreme cases to produce freaks, sports,
monsters, three-handed or four-toed men. Aside from
accidental and undesirable variations, each individual
has a fixed career to pursue, a fixed path in which to
travel. Terms which sound modern, words like poten
tiality and development abound in Aristotelian thought,
58 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY
and have misled some into reading into his thought
modern meanings. But the significance of these words
in classic and medieval thought is rigidly determined by
their context. Development holds merely of the course
of changes which takes place within a particular mem
ber of the species. It is only a name for the prede
termined movement from the acorn to the oak tree. It
takes place not in things generally but only in some
one of the numerically insignificant members of the oak
species. Development, evolution, never means, as in
modern science, origin of new forms, a mutation from
an old species, but only the monotonous traversing of a
previously plotted cycle of change. So potentiality
never means, as in modern life, the possibility of novelty,
of invention, of radical deviation, but only that
principle in virtue of which the acorn becomes the oak.
Technically, it is the capacity for movement between
opposites. Only the cold can become hot ; only the dry
can become wet ; only the babe can become a man ; the
seed the full-grown wheat and so on. Potentiality in
stead of implying the emergence of anything novel means
merely the facility with which a particular thing re
peats the recurrent processes of its kind, and thus
becomes a specific case of the eternal forms in and
through which all things are constituted.
In spite of the almost infinite numerical diversity of
individuals, there are only a limited number of species,
THE SCIENTIFIC FACTOR 59
kinds or sorts. And the world is essentially a world
which falls into sorts ; it is pre-arranged into distinct
classes. Moreover, just as we naturally arrange plants
and animals into series, ranks and grades, from the
lower to the highest, so with all things in the universe.
The distinct classes to which things belong by their
very nature form a hierarchical order. There are
castes in nature. The universe is constituted on an
aristocratic, one can truly say a feudal, plan. Species,
classes do not mix or overlap except in cases of acci
dent, and to the result of chaos. Otherwise, everything
belongs in advance to a certain class, and the class has
its own fixed place in the hierarchy of Being. The
universe is indeed a tidy spot whose purity is interfered
with only by those irregular changes in individuals
which are due to the presence of an obdurate matter
that refuses to yield itself wholly to rule and form.
Otherwise it is a universe with a fixed place for every
thing and where everything knows its place, its station
and class, and keeps it. Hence what are known techni
cally as final and formal causes are supreme, and
efficient causes are relegated to an inferior place. The
so-called final cause is just a name for the fact that
there is some fixed form characteristic of a class or sort
of things which governs the changes going on, so that
they tend toward it as their end and goal, the fulfilment
of their true nature. The supralunar region is the end
60 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY
or final cause of the proper movements of air and fire;
the earth of the motions of crass, heavy things ; the oak
of the acorn ; the mature form in general of the germi
nal.
The " efficient cause," that which produces and in
stigates a movement is only some external change as
it accidentally gives a kind of push to an immature,
imperfect being and starts it moving toward its per
fected or fulfilled form. The final cause is the per
fected form regarded as the explanation or reason of
prior changes. When it is not taken in reference to the
changes completed and brought to rest in it, but in
itself it is the "formal cause": The inherent nature
or character which " makes " or constitutes a thing
what it is so far as it truly is, namely, what it is so far
as it does not change. Logically and practically all of
the traits which have been enumerated cohere. Attack
one and you attack all. When any one is undermined,
all go. This is the reason why the intellectual modifica
tion of the last few centuries may truly be called a
revolution. It has substituted a conception of the world
differing at every point. It makes little matter at what
point you commence to trace the difference, you find
yourself carried into all other points.
Instead of a closed universe, science now presents us
with one infinite in space and time, having no limits here
or there, at this end, so to speak, or at that, and as
THE SCIENTIFIC FACTOR 61
infinitely complex in internal structure as it is infinite
in extent. Hence it is also an open world, an infinitely
variegated one, a world which in the old sense can
hardly be called a universe at all; so multiplex and
far-reaching that it cannot be summed up and grasped
in any one formula. And change rather than fixity is
now a measure of " reality " or energy of being ; change
is omnipresent. The laws in which the modern man
of science is interested are laws of motion, of generation
and consequence. He speaks of law where the ancients
spoke of kind and essence, because what he wants is a
correlation of changes, an ability to detect one change
occurring in correspondence with another. He does not
try to define and delimit something remaining constant
in change. He tries to describe a constant order of
change. And while the word "constant" appears in
both statements, the meaning of the word is not the
same. In one case, we are dealing with something con
stant in existence, physical or metaphysical; in the
other case, with something constant in fimction and
operation. One is a form of independent being; the
other is a formula of description and calculation of
interdependent changes.
In short, classic thought accepted a feudally
arranged order of classes or kinds, each " holding "
from a superior and in turn giving the rule of conduct
and service to an inferior. This trait reflects and
62 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY
parallels most closely the social situation we were con
sidering at the last hour. We have a fairly definite
notion of society as organized upon the feudal basis.
The family principle, the principle of kinship is strong,
and especially is this true as we ascend in the social
scale. At the lower end, individuals may be lost more or
less in the mass. Since all are parts of the common
herd, there is nothing especial to distinguish their birth.
But among the privileged and ruling class the case is
quite different. The tie of kinship at once marks a group
off externally and gives it distinction, and internally
holds all its members together. Kinship, kind, class,
genus are synonymous terms, starting from social and
concrete facts and going to the technical and abstract.
For kinship is a sign of a common nature, of something
universal and permanent running through all particular
individuals, and giving them a real and objective unity.
Because such and such persons are kin they are really,
and not merely conventionally, marked off into a class
having something unique about it. All contemporary
members are bound into an objective unity which in
cludes ancestors and descendants and excludes all who
belong to another kin or kind. Assuredly this parcel
ling out of the world into separate kinds, each having
its qualitatively distinct nature in contrast with other
species, binding numerically distinct individuals to
gether, and preventing their diversities from exceeding
THE SCIENTIFIC FACTOR 63
fixed bounds, may without exaggeration be called a pro
jection of the family principle into the world at large.
In a feudally organized society, moreover, each kin
ship group or species occupies a definite place. It is
marked by the possession of a specific rank higher or
lower with respect to other grades. This position con
fers upon it certain privileges, enabling it to enforce
certain claims upon those lower in the scale and en
tailing upon it certain services and homage to be ren
dered to superiors. The relationship of causation, so
to speak, is up and down. Influence, power, proceeds
from above to below; the activities of the inferior are
performed with respect, quite literally, to what is above.
Action and reaction are far from being equal and in
opposite directions. All action is of one sort, of the
nature of lordship, and proceeds from the higher to
the lower. Reaction is of the nature of subjection and
deference and proceeds from lower to higher. The
classic theory of the constitution of the world corre
sponds point by point to this ordering of classes in a
scale of dignity and power.
A third trait assigned by historians to feudalism is that
the ordering of ranks centres about armed service and
the relationship of armed defense and protection. I am
afraid that what has already been said about the paral
lelism of ancient cosmology with social organization may
seem a fanciful analogy; and if a comparison is also
64, RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY
drawn in this last regard, there will be no doubt in
your minds that a metaphor is being forced. Such is
truly the case if we take the comparison too literally.
But not so, if we confine our attention to the notion
of rule and command implied in both. Attention has
already been called to the meaning that is now given
the term law a constant relationship among changes.
Nevertheless, we often hear about laws which " govern "
events, and it often seems to be thought that phenomena
would be utterly disorderly were there not laws to
keep them in order. This way of thinking is a survival
of reading social relationships into nature not neces
sarily a feudal relationship, but the relation of ruler
and ruled, sovereign and subject. Law is assimilated
to a command or order. If the factor of personal will
is eliminated (as it was in the best Greek thought)
still the idea of law or universal is impregnated with the
sense of a guiding and ruling influence exerted from
above on what is naturally inferior to it. The universal
governs as the end and model which the artisan has in
mind " governs " his movements. The Middle Ages
added to this Greek idea of control the idea of a
command proceeding from a superior will; and hence
thought of the operations of nature as if they were a
fulfilment of a task set by one who had authority to
direct action.
The traits of the picture of nature drawn by modern
THE SCIENTIFIC FACTOR 65
science fairly spring by contrast into high relief.
Modern science took its first step when daring astrono
mers abolished the distinction of high, sublime and ideal
forces operating in the heavens from lower and material
forces actuating terrestrial events. The supposed
heterogeneity of substances and forces between heaven
and earth was denied. It was asserted that the same
laws hold everywhere, that there is homogeneity of
material and process everywhere throughout nature.
The remote and esthetically sublime is to be scientifically
described and explained in terms of homely familiar
events and forces. The material of direct handling and
observation is that of which we are surest ; it is the
better known. Until we can convert the grosser and
more superficial observations of far-away things in
the heavens into elements identical with those of things
directly at hand, they remain blind and not understood.
Instead of presenting superior worth, they present only
problems. They are not means of enlightenment but
challenges. The earth is not superior in rank to sun,
moon and stars, but it is equal in dignity, and its occur
rences give the key to the understanding of celestial
existences. Being at hand, they are also capable of
being brought under our hand; they can be manipu
lated, broken up, resolved into elements which can be
managed, combined at will in old and new forms. The
net result may be termed, I think, without any great
66 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY
forcing, the substitution of a democracy of individual
facts equal in rank for the feudal system of an ordered
gradation of general classes of unequal rank.
One important incident of the new science was the
destruction of the idea that the earth is the centre of
the universe. When the idea of a fixed centre went,
there went with it the idea of a closed universe and a
circumscribing heavenly boundary. To the Greek sense,
just because its theory of knowing was dominated by
esthetic considerations, the finite was the perfect.
Literally, the finite was the finished, the ended, the
completed, that with no ragged edges and unaccountable
operations. The infinite or limitless was lacking in
character just because it was in-finite. Being every
thing, it was nothing. It was unformed and chaotic,
uncontrolled and unruly, the source of incalculable
deviations and accidents. Our present feeling that as
sociates infinity with boundless power, with capacity
for expansion that knows no end, with the delight in a
progress that has no external limit, would be incom
prehensible were it not that interest has shifted from
the esthetic to the practical ; from interest in beholding
a harmonious and complete scene to interest in trans
forming an inharmonious one. One has only to read
the authors of the transition period, say Giordano
Bruno, to realize what a pent-in, suffocating sensation
they associated with a closed, finite world, and what a
THE SCIENTIFIC FACTOR 67
feeling of exhilaration, expansion and boundless pos
sibility was aroused in them by the thought of a world
infinite in stretch of space and time, and composed
internally of infinitesimal infinitely numerous elements.
That which the Greeks withdrew from with repulsion
they welcomed with an intoxicated sense of adventure.
The infinite meant, it was true, something forever un-
traversed even by thought, and hence something forever
unknown no matter how great attainment in learn
ing. But this " forever unknown " instead of being
chilling and repelling was now an inspiring challenge
to ever-renewed inquiry, and an assurance of inexhaust
ible possibilities of progress.
The student of history knows well that the Greeks
made great progress in the science of mechanics as well
as of geometry. At first sight, it appears strange that
with this advance in mechanics so little advance was
made in the direction of modern science. The seeming
paradox impels us to ask why it was that mechanics
remained a separate science, why it was not used in
description and explanation of natural phenomena after
the manner of Galileo and Newton. The answer is
found in the social parallelism already mentioned.
Socially speaking, machines, tools, were devices em
ployed by artisans. The science of mechanics had to
do with the kind of things employed by human mechan
ics, and mechanics were base fellows. They were at the
68 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY
lower end of the social scale, and how could light on the
heavens, the highest, be derived from them? The appli
cation of considerations of mechanics to natural
phenomena would moreover have implied an interest in
the practical control and utilization of phenomena
which was totally incompatible with the importance
attached to final causes as fixed determiners of nature.
All the scientific reformers of the sixteenth and seven
teenth centuries strikingly agree in regarding the doc
trine of final causes as the cause of the failure of science.
Why? Because this doctrine taught that the processes
of nature are held in bondage to certain fixed ends which
they must tend to realize. Nature was kept in lead
ing strings ; it was cramped down to production of a
limited number of stereotyped results. Only a com
paratively small number of things could be brought
into being, and these few must be similar to the ends
which similar cycles of change had effected in the past.
The scope of inquiry and understanding was limited to
the narrow round of processes eventuating in the fixed
ends which the observed world offered to view. At
best, invention and production of new results by use of
machines and tools must be restricted to articles of
transient dignity and bodily, not intellectual, use.
When the rigid clamp of fixed ends was taken off
from nature, observation and imagination were emanci
pated, and experimental control for scientific and prac-
THE SCIENTIFIC FACTOR 69
tical purposes enormously stimulated. Because natural
processes were no longer restricted to a fixed number
of immovable ends or results, anything might conceiv
ably happen. It was only a question of what elements
could be brought into juxtaposition so that they would
work upon one another* Immediately, mechanics ceased
to be a separate science and became an organ for at
tacking nature. The mechanics of the lever, wheel, pul
ley and inclined plane told accurately what happens
when things in space are used to move one another
during definite periods of time. The whole of nature
became a scene of pushes and pulls, of cogs and levers,
of motions of parts or elements to which the formulae
of movements produced by well-known machines were
directly applicable.
The banishing of ends and forms from the universe
has seemed to many an ideal and spiritual impoverish
ment. When nature was regarded as a set of mechanical
interactions, it apparently lost all meaning and pur
pose. Its glory departed. Elimination of differences
of quality deprived it of beauty. Denial to nature of
all inherent longings and aspiring tendencies toward
ideal ends removed nature and natural science from
contact with poetry, religion and divine things. There
seemed to be left only a harsh, brutal despiritualized
exhibition of mechanical forces. As a consequence, it
has seemed to many philosophers that one of their
70 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY
chief problems was to reconcile the existence of this
purely mechanical world with belief in objective ration
ality and purpose to save life from a degrading ma
terialism. Hence many sought to re-attain by way of
an analysis of the process of knowing, or epistemology,
that belief in the superiority of Ideal Being which had
anciently been maintained on the basis of cosmology.
But when it is recognized that the mechanical view is
determined by the requirements of an experimental con
trol of natural energies, this problem of reconciliation
no longer vexes us. Fixed forms and ends, let us recall,
mark fixed limits to change. Hence they make futile all
human efforts to produce and regulate change except
within narrow and unimportant limits. They paralyze
constructive human inventions by a theory which con
demns them in advance to failure. Human activity
can conform only to ends already set by nature. It
was not till ends were banished from nature that pur
poses became important as factors in human minds
capable of reshaping existence. A natural world that
does not subsist for the sake of realizing a fixed set of
ends is relatively malleable and plastic ; it may be used
for this end or that. That nature can be known through
the application of mechanical formulae is the prime
condition of turning it to human account. Tools,
machines are means to be utilized. Only when nature is
regarded as mechanical, is systematic invention and
THE SCIENTIFIC FACTOR 71
construction of machines relevant to nature s activities.
Nature is subdued to human purpose because it is no
longer the slave of metaphysical and theological pur
pose.
Bergson has pointed out that man might well be called
Hom^ Faber. He is distinguished as the tool-making
animal. This has held good since man was man; but
till nature was construed in mechanical terms, the mak
ing of tools with which to attack and transform nature
was sporadic and accidental. Under such circum
stances it would not have occurred even to a Bergson
that man s tool-making capacity was so important and
fundamental that it could be used to define him. The
very things that make the nature of the mechanical-
physical scientist esthetically blank and dull are the
things which render nature amenable to human control.
When qualities were subordinated to quantitative and
mathematical relationships, color, music and form dis
appeared from the object of the scientist s inquiry as
such. But the remaining properties of weight, exten
sion, numerable velocity of movement and so on were
just the qualities which lent themselves to the substi
tution of one thing for another, to the conversion of one
form of energy into another; to the effecting of trans
formations. When chemical fertilizers can be used in
place of animal manures, when improved grain and
cattle can be purposefuUy bred from inferior animals
72 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY
and grasses, when mechanical energy can be converted
into heat and electricity into mechanical energy, man
gains power to manipulate nature. Most of all he gains
power to frame new ends and aims and to proceed in
regular system to their actualization. Only indefinite
substitution and convertibility regardless of quality
render nature manageable. The mechanization of
nature is the condition of a practical and progressive
idealism in action.
It thus turns out that the old, old dread and dislike
of matter as something opposed to mind and threaten
ing it, to be kept within the narrowest bounds of
recognition ; something to be denied so far as possible
lest it encroach upon ideal purposes and finally exclude
them from the real world, is as absurd practically as
it was impotent intellectually. Judged from the only
scientific standpoint, what it does and how it functions,
matter means conditions. To respect matter means
to respect the conditions of achievement; conditions
which hinder and obstruct and which have to be changed,
conditions which help and further and which can be
used to modify obstructions and attain ends. Only as
men have learned to pay sincere and persistent regard
to matter, to the conditions upon which depends nega
tively and positively the success of all endeavor, have
they shown sincere and fruitful respect for ends and
purposes. To profess to have an aim and then neglect
THE SCIENTIFIC FACTOR 73
the means of its execution is self-delusion of the most
dangerous sort. Education and morals will begin to
find themselves on the same road of advance that say
chemical industry and medicine have found for them
selves when they too learn fully the lesson of whole
hearted and unremitting attention to means and condi
tions that is, to what mankind so long despised as
material and mechanical. When we take means for ends
we indeed fall into moral materialism. But when we
take ends without regard to means we degenerate into
sentimentalism. In the name of the ideal we fall back
upon mere luck and chance and magic or exhortation
and preaching; or else upon a fanaticism that will
force the realization of preconceived ends at any
cost.
I have touched in this lecture upon many things in
a cursory way. Yet there has been but one point in
mind. The revolution in our conceptions of nature and
in our methods of knowing it has bred a new temper of
imagination and aspiration. It has confirmed the new
attitude generated by economic and political changes.
It has supplied this attitude with definite intellectual
material with which to formulate and justify itself.
In the first lecture it was noted that in Greek life
prosaic matter of fact or empirical knowledge was at
a great disadvantage as compared with the imaginative
beliefs that were bound up with special institutions
74, RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY
and moral habitudes. Now this empirical knowledge
has grown till it has broken its low and limited sphere
of application and esteem. It has itself become an
organ of inspiring imagination through introducing
ideas of boundless possibility, indefinite progress, free
movement, equal opportunity irrespective of fixed limits.
It has reshaped social institutions, and in so far de
veloped a new morale. It has achieved ideal values.
It is convertible into creative and constructive philoso
phy-
Convertible, however, rather than already converted.
When we consider how deeply embedded in customs of
thought and action the classic philosophy came to be
and how congenial it is to man s more spontaneous be
liefs, the throes that attended its birth are not to be
wondered at. We should rather wonder that a view so
upsetting, so undermining, made its way without more
persecutions, martyrdoms and disturbances. It cer
tainly is not surprising that its complete and consistent
formulation in philosophy has been long delayed. The
main efforts of thinkers were inevitably directed to
minimizing the shock of change, easing the strains of
transition, mediating and reconciling. When we look
back upon almost all of the thinkers of the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries, upon all excepting those who
were avowedly sceptical and revolutionary, what strikes
us is the amount of traditional subject-matter and
THE SCIENTIFIC FACTOR 75
method that is to be found even among those who were
regarded as most advanced. Men cannot easily throw
off their old habits of thinking, and never can throw off
all of them at once. In developing, teaching and re
ceiving new ideas we are compelled to use some of the
old ones as tools of understanding and communication.
Only piecemeal, step-by-step, could the full import of
the new science be grasped. Roughly speaking, the
seventeenth century witnessed its application in
astronomy and general cosmology; the eighteenth cen
tury in physics and chemistry; the nineteenth century
undertook an application in geology and the biological
sciences.
It was said that it has now become extremely dif
ficult to recover the view of the world which univer
sally obtained in Europe till the seventeenth century.
Yet after all we need only recur to the science of plants
and animals as it was before Darwin and to the ideas
which even now are dominant in moral and political
matters to find the older order of conceptions in full
possession of the popular mind. Until the dogma of
fixed unchangeable types and species, of arrangement
in classes of higher and lower, of subordination of the
transitory individual to the universal or kind had been
shaken in its hold upon the science of life, it was im
possible that the new ideas and method should be made
at home in social and moral life. Does it not seem to be
76 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY
the intellectual task of the twentieth century to take
this last step? When this step is taken the circle of
scientific development will be rounded out and the re
construction of philosophy be made an accomplished
fact.
CHAPTER IV
CHANGED CONCEPTIONS OF EXPERIENCE
AND REASON
WHAT is experience and what is Reason, Mind?
What is the scope of experience and what are its limits?
How far is it a sure ground of belief and a safe guide
of conduct? Can we trust it in science and in be
havior? Or is it a quagmire as soon as we pass
beyond a few low material interests? Is it so shaky,
shifting, and shallow that instead of affording sure
footing, safe paths to fertile fields, it misleads, betrays,
and engulfs? Is a Reason outside experience and above
it needed to supply assured principles to science and
conduct? In one sense, these questions suggest tech
nical problems of abstruse philosophy ; in another sense,
they contain the deepest possible questionings regard
ing the career of man. They concern the criteria he is
to employ in forming his beliefs ; the principles by which
he is to direct his life and the ends to which he is to
direct it. Must man transcend experience by some
organ of unique character that carries him into the
super-empirical? Failing this, must he wander sceptical
and disillusioned? Or is human experience itself worth
77
78 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY
while in its purposes and its methods of guidance? Can
it organize itself into stable courses or must it be sus
tained from without?
We know the answers of traditional philosophy.
They do not thoroughly agree among themselves, but
they agree that experience never rises above the level of
the particular, the contingent, and the probable. Only
a power transcending in origin and content any and all
conceivable experience can attain to universal, neces
sary and certain authority and direction. The em
piricists themselves admitted the correctness of these
assertions. They only said that since there is no faculty
of Pure Reason in the possession of mankind, we must
put up with what we have, experience, and make the
most possible out of it. They contented themselves with
sceptical attacks upon the transcendentalist, with indi
cations of the ways in which we might best seize the
meaning and good of the passing moment ; or like Locke,
asserted that in spite of the limitation of experience, it
affords the light needed to guide men s footsteps
modestly in conduct. They affirmed that the alleged au
thoritative guidance by a higher faculty had practically
hampered men.
It is the function of this lecture to show how and
why it is now possible to make claims for experience as
a guide in science and moral life which the older empiri
cists did not and could not make for it.
EXPERIENCE AND REASON 79
Curiously enough, the key to the matter may be found
in the fact that the old notion of experience was itself
a product of experience the only kind of experience
which was then open to men. If another conception of
experience is now possible, it is precisely because the
quality of experience as it may now be lived has under
gone a profound social and intellectual change from
that of earlier times. The account of experience which
we find in Plato and Aristotle is an account of what
Greek experience actually was. It agrees very closely
with what the modern psychologist knows as the method
of learning by trial and error as distinct from the
method of learning by ideas. Men tried certain acts,
they underwent certain sufferings and affections. Each
of these in the time of its occurrence is isolated, particu
lar its counterpart is transient appetite and transient
sensation. But memory preserves and accumulates
these separate incidents. As they pile up, irregular
variations get cancelled, common features are selected,
reinforced and combined. Gradually a habit of action is
built up, and corresponding to this habit there forms a
certain generalized picture of an object or situation.
We come to know or note not merely this particular
which as a particular cannot strictly be known at all
(for not being classed it cannot be characterized and
identified) but to recognize it as man, tree, stone, leather
an individual of a certain kind, marked by a certain
80 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY
universal form characteristic of a whole species of thing.
Along with the development of this common-sense
knowledge, there grows up a certain regularity of con
duct. The particular incidents fuse, and a way of act
ing which is general, as far as it goes, builds up. The
skill develops which is shown by the artisan, the shoe
maker, the carpenter, the gymnast, the physician, who
have regular ways of handling cases. This regularity
signifies, of course, that the particular case is not
treated as an isolated particular, but as one of a kind,
which therefore demands a kind of action. From the
multitude of particular illnesses encountered, the physi
cian in learning to class some of them as indigestion
learns also to treat the cases of the class in a common
or general way. He forms the rule of recommending a
certain diet, and prescribing a certain remedy. All this
forms what we call experience. It results, as the illus
tration shows, in a certain general insight and a certain
organized ability in action.
But needless to insist, the generality and the organi
zation are restricted and fallible. They hold, as Aris
totle was fond of pointing out, usually, in most cases,
as a rule, but not universally, of necessity, or as a
principle. The physician is bound to make mistakes,
because individual cases are bound to vary unaccount
ably : such is their very nature. The difficulty does not
arise in a defective experience which is capable of
EXPERIENCE AND REASON 81
remedy in some better experience. Experience itself, as
such, is defective, and hence default is inevitable and
irremediable. The only universality and certainty is in
a region above experience, that of the rational and con
ceptual. As the particular was a stepping-stone to
image and habit, so the latter may become a stepping-
stone to conceptions and principles. But the latter
leave experience behind, untouched; they do not react
to rectify it. Such is the notion which still lingers in
the contrast of " empirical " and " rational " as when
we say that a certain architect or physician is empirical,
not scientific in his procedures. But the difference be
tween the classic and the modern notion of experience
is revealed in the fact that such a statement is now a
charge, a disparaging accusation, brought against a
particular architect or physician. With Plato, Aris
totle and the Scholastic, it was a charge against the
callings, since they were modes of experience. It was
an indictment of all practical action in contrast with
conceptual contemplation.
The modern philosopher who has professed himself
an empiricist has usually had a critical purpose in mind.
Like Bacon, Locke, Condillac and Helvetius, he stood
face to face with a body of beliefs and a set of institu
tions in which he profoundly disbelieved. His problem
was the problem of attack upon so much dead weight
carried uselessly by humanity, crushing and distorting
82 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY
it. His readiest way of undermining and disintegrating
was by appealing to experience as a final test and cri
terion. In every case, active reformers were " empiri
cists " in the philosophical sense. They made it their
business to show that some current belief or institution
that claimed the sanction of innate ideas or necessary
conceptions, or an origin in an authoritative revela
tion of reason, had in fact proceeded from a lowly origin
in experience, and had been confirmed by accident, by
class interest or by biased authority.
The philosophic empiricism initiated by Locke was
thus disintegrate in intent. It optimistically took it
for granted that when the burden of blind custom, im
posed authority, and accidental associations was re
moved, progress in science and social organization would
spontaneously take place. Its part was to help in re
moving the burden. The best way to liberate men
from the burden was through a natural history of the
origin and growth in the mind of the ideas connected
with objectionable beliefs and customs. Santayana
justly calls the psychology of this school a malicious
psychology. It tended to identify the history of the
formation of certain ideas with an account of the things
to which the ideas refer an identification which natu
rally had an unfavorable effect on the things. But
Mr. Santayana neglects to notice the social zeal and aim
latent in the malice. He fails to point out that this
EXPERIENCE AND REASON 83
" malice " was aimed at institutions and traditions
which had lost their usefulness ; he fails to point out
that to a large extent it was true of them that an
account of their psychological origin was equivalent to
a destructive account of the things themselves. But
after Hume with debonair clarity pointed out that
the analysis of beliefs into sensations and associations
left " natural " ideas and institutions in the same posi
tion in which the reformers had placed " artificial "
ones, the situation changed. The rationalists employed
the logic of sensationalistic-empiricism to show that ex
perience, giving only a heap of chaotic and isolated par
ticulars, is as fatal to science and to moral laws and
obligations as to obnoxious institutions ; and concluded
that " Reason " must be resorted to if experience was
to be furnished with any binding and connecting princi
ples. The new rationalistic idealism of Kant and
his successors seemed to be necessitated by the
totally destructive results of the new empirical
philosophy.
Two things have rendered possible a new conception
of experience and a new conception of the relation of
reason to experience, or, more accurately, of the place
of reason in experience. The primary factor is the
change that has taken place in the actual nature of
experience, its contents and methods, as it is actually
lived. The other is the development of a psychology
84 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY
based upon biology which makes possible a new scien
tific formulation of the nature of experience.
Let us begin with the technical side the change in
psychology. We are only just now commencing to ap
preciate how completely exploded is the psychology that
dominated philosophy throughout the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries. According to this theory, mental
life originated in sensations which are separately and
passively received, and which are formed, through laws
of retention and association, into a mosaic of images,
perceptions, and conceptions. The senses were regarded
as gateways or avenues of knowledge. Except in com
bining atomic sensations, the mind was wholly passive
and acquiescent in knowing. Volition, action, emotion,
and desire follow in the wake of sensations and images.
The intellectual or cognitive factor comes first and emo
tional and volitional life is only a consequent conjunc
tion of ideas with sensations of pleasure and pain.
The effect of the development of biology has been to
reverse the picture. Wherever there is life, there is be
havior, activity. In order that life may persist, this,
activity has to be both continuous and adapted to the
environment. This adaptive adjustment, moreover, is
not wholly passive ; is not a mere matter of the mould
ing of the organism by the environment. Even a clam
acts upon the environment and modifies it to some ex
tent. It selects materials for food and for the shell that
EXPERIENCE AND REASON 85
protects it. It does something to the environment as
well as has something* done to itself. There is no such
thing in a living creature as mere conformity to con
ditions, though parasitic forms may approach this limit.
In the interests of the maintenance of life there is trans
formation of some elements in the surrounding medium.
The higher the form of life, the more important is the
active reconstruction of the medium. This increased
control may be illustrated by the contrast of savage
with civilized man. Suppose the two are living in a
wilderness. With the savage there is the maximum of
accommodation to given conditions; the minimum of
what we may call hitting back. The savage takes things
" as they are," and by using caves and roots and oc
casional pools leads a meagre and precarious existence.
The civilized man goes to distant mountains and dams
streams. He builds reservoirs, digs channels, and con
ducts the waters to what had been a desert. He
searches the world to find plants and animals that will
thrive. He takes native plants and by selection and
cross-fertilization improves them. He introduces ma
chinery to till the soil and care for the harvest. By
such means he may succeed in making the wilderness
blossom like the rose.
Such transformation scenes are so familiar that we
overlook their meaning. We forget that the inherent
power of life is illustrated in them. Note what a change
86 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY
this point of view entails in the traditional notions of
experience. Experience becomes an affair primarily of
doing. The organism does not stand about, Micawber-
like, waiting for something to turn up. It does not wait
passive and inert for something to impress itself upon
it from without. The organism acts in accordance with
its own structure, simple or complex, upon its surround
ings. As a consequence the changes produced in the
environment react upon the organism and its activities.
The living creature undergoes, suffers, the consequences
of its own behavior. This close connection between
doing and suffering or undergoing forms what we call
experience. Disconnected doing and disconnected suf
fering are neither of them experiences. Suppose fire
encroaches upon a man when he is asleep. Part of his
body is burned away. The burn does not perceptibly
result from what he has done. There is nothing which
in any instructive way can be named experience. Or
again there is a series of mere activities, like twitchings
of muscles in a spasm. The movements amount to noth
ing; they have no consequences for life. Or, if they
have, these consequences are not connected with prior
doing. There is no experience, no learning, no cumu
lative process. But suppose a busy infant puts his
finger in the fire ; the doing is random, aimless, without
intention or reflection. But something happens in con
sequence. The child undergoes heat, he suffers pain.
EXPERIENCE AND REASON 87
The doing and undergoing, the reaching and the burn,
are connected. One comes to suggest and mean the
other. Then there is experience in a vital and signifi
cant sense.
Certain important implications for philosophy follow.
In the first place, the interaction of organism and en
vironment, resulting in some adaptation which secures
utilization of the latter, is the primary fact, the basic
category. Knowledge is relegated to a derived posi
tion, secondary in origin, even if its importance, when
once it is established, is overshadowing. Knowledge is
not something separate and self-sufficing, but is in
volved in the process by which life is sustained and
evolved. The senses lose their place as gateways of
knowing to take their rightful place as stimuli to action.
To an animal an affection of the eye or ear is not an
idle piece of information about something indifferently
going on in the world. It is an invitation and induce
ment to act in a needed way. It is a clue in behavior,
a directive factor in adaptation of life in its surround
ings. It is urgent not cognitive in quality. The whole
controversy between empiricism and rationalism as to
the intellectual worth of sensations is rendered strangely
obsolete. The discussion of sensations belongs under the
head of immediate stimulus and response, not under the
head of knowledge.
As a conscious element, a sensation marks an inter-
88 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY
ruption in a course of action previously entered upon.
Many psychologists since the time of Hobbes have
dwelt upon what they call the relativity of sensations.
We feel or sense cold in transition from warmth rather
than absolutely ; hardness is sensed upon a background
of less resistance; a color in contrast with pure light
or pure dark or in contrast with some other hue. A
continuously unchanged tone or color cannot be at
tended to or sensed. What we take to be such monoto
nously prolonged sensations are in truth constantly in
terrupted by incursions of other elements, and represent
a series of excursions back and forth. This fact was,
however, misconstrued into a doctrine about the nature
of knowledge. Rationalists used it to discredit sense as
a valid or high mode of knowing things, since accord
ing to it we never get hold of anything in itself or
intrinsically. Sensationalists used it to disparage all
pretence at absolute knowledge.
Properly speaking, however, this fact of the rela
tivity of sensation does not in the least belong in the
sphere of knowing. Sensations of this sort are emo
tional and practical rather than cognitive and intel
lectual. They are shocks of change, due to interruption
of a prior adjustment. They are signals to redirections
of action. Let me take a trivial illustration. The
person who is taking notes has no sensation of the pres
sure of his pencil on the paper or on his hand as long
EXPERIENCE AND REASON 89
as it functions properly. It operates merely as stimulus
to ready and effective adjustment. The sensory activity
incites automatically and unconsciously its proper
motor response. There is a preformed physiological
connection, acquired from habit but ultimately going
back to an original connection in the nervous system.
If the pencil-point gets broken or too blunt and the
habit of writing does not operate smoothly, there is a
conscious shock: the feeling of something the matter,
something gone wrong. This emotional change operates
as a stimulus to a needed change in operation. One
looks at his pencil, sharpens it or takes another pencil
from one s pocket. The sensation operates as a pivot
of readjusting behavior. It marks a break in the
prior routine of writing and the beginning of some other
mode of action. Sensations are " relative " in the sense
of marking transitions in habits of behavior from one
course to another way of behaving.
The rationalist was thus right in denying that sensa
tions as such are true elements of knowledge. But the
reasons he gave for this conclusion and the consequences
he drew from it were all wrong. Sensations are not
parts of any knowledge, good or bad, superior or in
ferior, imperfect or complete. They are rather provo
cations, incitements, challenges to an act of inquiry
which is to terminate in knowledge. They are not ways
of knowing things inferior in value to reflective ways, to
90 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY
the ways that require thought and inference, because
they are not ways of knowing at all. They are stimuli
to reflection and inference. As interruptions, they raise
the questions: What does this shock mean? What is
happening? What is the matter? How is my relation
to the environment disturbed? What should be done
about it? How shall I alter my course of action to
meet the change that has taken place in the surround
ings? How shall I readjust my behavior in response?
Sensation is thus, as the sensationalist claimed, the be
ginning of knowledge, but only in the sense that the
experienced shock of change is the necessary stimulus
to the investigating and comparing which eventually
produce knowledge.
When experience is aligned with the life-process and
sensations are seen to be points of readjustment, the
alleged atomism of sensations totally disappears. With
this disappearance is abolished the need for a synthetic
faculty of super-empirical reason to connect them.
Philosophy is not any longer confronted with the hope
less problem of finding a way in which separate grains
of sand may be woven into a strong and coherent rope
or into the illusion and pretence of one. When the
isolated and simple existences of Locke and Hume are
seen not to be truly empirical at all but to answer to
certain demands of their theory of mind, the necessity
ceases for the elaborate Kantian and Post-Kantian ma-
EXPERIENCE AND REASON 91
chinery of a priori concepts and categories to synthe
size the alleged stuff of experience. The true " stuff "
of experience is recognized to be adaptive courses of
action, habits, active functions, connections of doing
and undergoing; sensori-motor co-ordinations. Experi
ence carries principles of connection and organization
within itself. These principles are none the worse be
cause they are vital and practical rather than epistemo-
logical. Some degree of organization is indispensable to
even the lowest grade of life. Even an amoeba must
have some continuity in time in its activity and some
adaptation to its environment in space. Its life and
experience cannot possibly consist in momentary,
atomic, and self-enclosed sensations. Its activity has
reference to its surroundings and to what goes before
and what comes after. This organization intrinsic to
life renders unnecessary a super-natural and super-em
pirical synthesis. It affords the basis and material for
a positive evolution of intelligence as an organizing
factor within experience.
Nor is it entirely aside from the subject to point
out the extent in which social as well as biological
organization enters into the formation of human ex
perience. Probably one thing that strengthened the idea
that the mind is passive and receptive in knowing was
the observation of the helplessness of the human infant.
But the observation points in quite another direction.
92 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY
Because of his physical dependence and impotency, the
contacts of the little child with nature are mediated by
other persons. Mother and nurse, father and older
children, determine what experiences the child shall
have ; they constantly instruct him as to the meaning of
what he does and undergoes. The conceptions that are
socially current and important become the child s prin
ciples of interpretation and estimation long before he
attains to personal and deliberate control of conduct.
Things come to him clothed in language, not in physical
nakedness, and this garb of communication makes him
a sharer in the beliefs of those about him. These be
liefs coming to him as so many facts form his mind ; they
furnish the centres about which his own personal expe
ditions and perceptions are ordered. Here we have
" categories " of connection and unification as impor
tant as those of Kant, but empirical not mythological.
From these elementary, if somewhat technical con
siderations, we turn to the change which experience it
self has undergone in the passage from ancient and
medieval to modern life. To Plato, experience meant
enslavement to the past, to custom. Experience was
almost equivalent to established customs formed not by
reason or under intelligent control but by repetition
and blind rule of thumb. Only reason can lift us above
subjection to the accidents of the past. When we come
to Bacon and his successors, we discover a curious re-
EXPERIENCE AND REASON 93
versal. Reason and its bodyguard of general notions
is now the conservative, mind-enslaving factor. Ex
perience is the liberating power. Experience means the
new, that which calls us away from adherence to the
past, that which reveals novel facts and truths. Faith
in experience produces not devotion to custom but en
deavor for progress. This difference in temper is the
more significant because it was so unconsciously taken
for granted. Some concrete and vital change must have
occurred in actual experience as that is lived. For,
after all, the thought of experience follows after and
is modelled upon the experience actually undergone.
When mathematics and other rational sciences de
veloped among the Greeks, scientific truths did not
react back into daily experience. They remained
isolated, apart and super-imposed. Medicine was the
art in which perhaps the greatest amount of posi
tive knowledge was obtained, but it did not reach
the dignity of science. It remained an art. In
practical arts, moreover, there was no conscious in
vention or purposeful improvement. Workers fol
lowed patterns that were handed down to them, while
departure from established standards and models
usually resulted in degenerate productions. Im
provements came either from a slow, gradual, and un
acknowledged accumulation of changes or else from
some sudden inspiration, which at once set a new stand-
94 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY
ard. Being the result of no conscious method, it was
fittingly attributed to the gods. In the social arts,
such a radical reformer as Plato felt that existing evils
were due to the absence of such fixed patterns as con
trolled the productions of artisans. The ethical pur
port of philosophy was to furnish them, and when once
they were instituted, they were to be consecrated by
religion, adorned by art, inculcated by education and
enforced by magistrates so that alteration of them would
be impossible.
It is unnecessary to repeat what has been so often
dwelt upon as to the effect of experimental science in
enabling man to effect a deliberate control of his en
vironment. But since the impact of this control upon
the traditional notion of experience is often overlooked,
we must point out that when experience ceased to be
empirical and became experimental, something of radi
cal importance occurred. Aforetime man employed the
results of his prior experience only to form customs
that henceforth had to be blindly followed or blindly
broken. Now, old experience is used to suggest aims
and methods for developing a new and improved ex
perience. Consequently experience becomes in so far
constructively self-regulative. What Shakespeare so
pregnantly said of nature, it is " made better by no
mean, but nature makes that mean," becomes true of
experience. We do not merely have to repeat the past,
EXPERIENCE AND REASON 95
or wait for accidents to force change upon us. We use
our past experiences to construct new and better ones
in the future. The very fact of experience thus includes
the process by which it directs itself in its own better
ment.
Science, " reason " is not therefore something 1 laid
from above upon experience. Suggested and tested in
experience, it is also employed through inventions in a
thousand ways to expand and enrich experience. Al
though, as has been so often repeated, this self-creation
and self-regulation of experience is still largely techno
logical rather than truly artistic or human, yet what
has been achieved contains the guaranty of the possi
bility of an intelligent administering of experience. The
limits are moral and intellectual, due to defects in our
good will and knowledge. They are not inherent meta
physically in the very nature of experience. " Reason "
as a faculty separate from experience, introducing us to
a superior region of universal truths begins now to
strike us as remote, uninteresting and unimportant.
Reason, as a Kantian faculty that introduces generality
and regularity into experience, strikes us more and
more as superfluous the unnecessary creation of men
addicted to traditional formalism and to elaborate
terminology. Concrete suggestions arising from past
experiences, developed and matured in the light of the
needs and deficiencies of the present, employed as aims
96 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY
and methods of specific reconstruction, and tested by
success or failure in accomplishing this task of re
adjustment, suffice. To such empirical suggestions used
in constructive fashion for new ends the name intelli
gence is given.
This recognition of the place of active and planning
thought within the very processes of experience radi
cally alters the traditional status of the technical prob
lems of particular and universal, sense and reason, per
ceptual and conceptual. But the alteration is of much
more than technical significance. For reason is experi
mental intelligence, conceived after the pattern of
science, and used in the creation of social arts; it has
something to do. It liberates man from the bondage of
the past, due to ignorance and accident hardened into
custom. It projects a better future and assists man in
its realization. And its operation is always subject to
test in experience. The plans which are formed, the
principles which man projects as guides of reconstruc
tive action, are not dogmas. They are hypotheses to
be worked out in practice, and to be rejected, corrected
and expanded as they fail or succeed in giving our
present experience the guidance it requires. We may
call them programmes of action, but since they are to be
used in making our future acts less blind, more directed,
they are flexible. Intelligence is not something pos
sessed once for all. It is in constant process of form-
EXPERIENCE AND REASON 97
ing, and its retention requires constant alertness in
observing consequences, an open-minded will to learn
and courage in re-adjustment.
In contrast with this experimental and re-adjusting
intelligence, it must be said that Reason as employed by
historic rationalism has tended to carelessness, conceit,
irresponsibility, and rigidity in short absolutism. A
certain school of contemporary psychology uses the
term " rationalization " to denote those mental mechan
isms by which we unconsciously put a better face on our
conduct or experience than facts justify. We excuse
ourselves to ourselves by introducing a purpose and
order into that of which we are secretly ashamed. In
like fashion, historic rationalism has often tended to
use Reason as an agency of justification and apologet
ics. It has taught that the defects and evils of actual
experience disappear in the " rational whole " of things ;
that things appear evil merely because of the partial,
incomplete nature of experience. Or, as was noted by
Bacon, " reason " assumes a false simplicity, uniform
ity and universality, and opens for science a path of
fictitious ease. This course results in intellectual irre
sponsibility and neglect : irresponsibility because ra
tionalism assumes that the concepts of reason are so
self-sufficient and so far above experience that they
need and can secure no confirmation in experience. Neg
lect, because this same assumption makes men care-
98 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY
less about concrete observations and experiments. Con
tempt for experience has had a tragic revenge in ex
perience; it has cultivated disregard for fact and this
disregard has been paid for in failure, sorrow and war.
The dogmatic rigidity of Rationalism is best seen in
the consequences of Kant s attempt to buttress an other
wise chaotic experience with pure concepts. He set
out with a laudable attempt at restricting the extrava
gant pretensions of Reason apart from experience. He
called his philosophy critical. But because he taught
that the understanding employs fixed, a priori, concepts,
in order to introduce connection into experience and
thereby make known objects possible (stable, regular
relationships of qualities), he developed in German
thought a curious contempt for the living variety of
experience and a curious overestimate of the value of
system, order, regularity for their own sakes. More
practical causes were at work in producing the
peculiarly German regard for drill, discipline, " order "
and docility.
But Kant s philosophy served to provide an intel
lectual justification or " rationalization " of subordi
nation of individuals to fixed and ready-made uni-
versals, " principles," laws. Reason and law were held
to be synonyms. And as reason came into experi
ence from without and above, so law had to come into
life from some external and superior authority. The
EXPERIENCE AND REASON 99
practical correlate to absolutism is rigidity, stiffness,
inflexibility of disposition. When Kant taught that
some conceptions, and these the important ones, are a
priori, that they do not arise in experience and cannot
be verified or tested in experience, that without such
ready-made injections into experience the latter is
anarchic and chaotic, he fostered the spirit of
absolutism, even though technically he denied the possi
bility of absolutes. His successors were true to his spirit
rather than his letter, and so they taught absolutism
systematically. That the Germans with all their scien
tific competency and technological proficiency should
have fallen into their tragically rigid and " superior "
style of thought and action (tragic because involving
them in inability to understand the world in which they
lived) is a sufficient lesson of what may be involved in a
systematical denial of the experimental character of
intelligence and its conceptions.
By common consent, the effect of English empiricism
was sceptical where that of German rationalism was
apologetic ; it undermined where the latter justified. It
detected accidental associations formed into customs
under the influence of self- or class-interest where
German rational-idealism discovered profound meanings
due to the necessary evolution of absolute reason. The
modern world has suffered because in so many matters
philosophy has offered it only an arbitrary choice be-
100 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY
tween hard and fast opposities : Disintegrating analysis
or rigid synthesis; complete radicalism neglecting and
attacking the historic past as trivial and harmful, or
complete conservatism idealizing institutions as embodi
ments of eternal reason ; a resolution of experience into
atomic elements that afford no support to stable or
ganization or a clamping down of all experience by
fixed categories and necessary concepts these are
the alternatives that conflicting schools have pre
sented.
They are the logical consequences of the traditional
opposition of Sense and Thought, Experience and
Reason. Common sense has refused to follow both
theories to their ultimate logic, and has fallen back on
faith, intuition or the exigencies of practical com
promise. But common sense too often has been con
fused and hampered instead of enlightened and directed
by the philosophies proffered it by professional in
tellectuals. Men who are thrown back upon " common
sense " when they appeal to philosophy for some general
guidance are likely to fall back on routine, the force of
some personality, strong leadership or on the pressure
of momentary circumstances. It would be difficult to
estimate the harm that has resulted because the liberal
and progressive movement of the eighteenth and earlier
nineteenth centuries had no method of intellectual articu
lation commensurate with its practical aspirations. Its
EXPERIENCE AND REASON 101
heart was in the right place. It was humane and social
in intention. But it had no theoretical instrumentali
ties of constructive power. Its head was sadly deficient.
Too often the logical import of its professed doctrines
was almost anti-social in their atomistic individualism,
anti-human in devotion to brute sensation. This de
ficiency played into the hands of the reactionary and
obscurantist. The strong point of the appeal to fixed
principles transcending experience, to dogmas incapable
of experimental verification, the strong point of reliance
upon a priori canons of truth and standards of morals
in opposition to dependence upon fruits and conse
quences in experience, has been the unimaginative con
ception of experience which professed philosophic
empiricists have entertained and taught.
A philosophic reconstruction which should relieve men
of having to choose between an impoverished and trun
cated experience on one hand and an artificial and im
potent reason on the other would relieve human effort
from the heaviest intellectual burden it has to carry.
It would destroy the division of men of good will into
two hostile camps. It would permit the co-operation
of those who respect the past and the institutionally
established with those who are interested in establishing
a freer and happier future. For it would determine
the conditions under which the funded experience of the
past and the contriving intelligence which looks to the
102 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY
future can effectually interact with each other. It
would enable men to glorify the claims of reason without
at the same time falling into a paralyzing worship of
super-empirical authority or into an offensive " ration
alization " of things as they are.
CHAPTER V
CHANGED CONCEPTIONS OF THE IDEAL AND
THE REAL
IT has been noted that human experience is made
human through the existence of associations and recol
lections, which are strained through the mesh of imagi
nation so as to suit the demands of the emotions. A
life that is humanly interesting is, short of the results
of discipline, a life in which the tedium of vacant leisure
is filled with images that excite and satisfy. It is in
this sense that poetry preceded prose in human experi
ence, religion antedated science, and ornamental and
decorative art while it could not take the place of utility
early reached a development out of proportion to the
practical arts. In order to give contentment and de
light, in order to feed present emotion and give the
stream of conscious life intensity and color, the sug
gestions which spring from past experiences are worked
over so as to smooth out their unpleasantnesses and en
hance their enjoyableness. Some psychologists claim
that there is what they call a natural tendency to
obliviscence of the disagreeable that men turn from
the unpleasant in thought and recollection as they do
103
104 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY
from the obnoxious in action. Every serious-minded
person knows that a large part of the effort required in
moral discipline consists in the courage needed to
acknowledge the unpleasant consequences of one s past
and present acts. We squirm, dodge, evade, disguise,
cover up, find excuses and palliations anything to
render the mental scene less uncongenial. In short, the
tendency of spontaneous suggestion is to idealize ex
perience, to give it in consciousness qualities which it
does not have in actuality. Time and memory are true
artists; they remould reality nearer to the heart s
desire.
As imagination becomes freer and less controlled by
concrete actualities, the idealizing tendency takes fur
ther flights unrestrained by the rein of the prosaic
world. The things most emphasized in imagination as
it reshapes experience are things which are absent in
reality. In the degree in which life is placid and easy,
imagination is sluggish and bovine. In the degree in
which life is uneasy and troubled, fancy is stirred to
frame pictures of a contrary state of things. By
reading the characteristic features of any man s castles
in the air you can make a shrewd guess as to his under
lying desires which are frustrated. What is difficulty
and disappointment in real life becomes conspicuous
achievement and triumph in revery ; what is negative in
fact will be positive in the image drawn by fancy ; what
THE IDEAL AND THE REAL 105
is vexation in conduct will be compensated for in high
relief in idealizing imagination.
These considerations apply beyond mere personal
psychology. They are decisive for one of the most
marked traits of classic philosophy: its conception of
an ultimate supreme Reality which is essentially ideal
in nature. Historians have more than once drawn an
instructive parallel between the developed Olympian
Pantheon of Greek religion and the Ideal Realm of
Platonic philosophy. The gods, whatever their origin
and original traits, became idealized projections of the
selected and matured achievements which the Greeks
admired among their mortal selves. The gods were
like mortals, but mortals living only the lives which
men would wish to live, with power intensified, beauty
perfected, and wisdom ripened. When Aristotle criti
cized the theory of Ideas of his master, Plato, by saying
that the Ideas were after all only things of sense eternal
ized, he pointed out in effect the parallelism of philoso
phy with religion and art to which allusion has just
been made. And save for matters of merely technical
import, is it not possible to say of Aristotle s Forms
just what he said of Plato s Ideas? What are they,
these Forms and Essences which so profoundly influ
enced for centuries the course of science and theology,
save the objects of ordinary experience with their blem
ishes removed, their imperfections eliminated, their lacks
106 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY
rounded out, their suggestions and hints fulfilled?
What are they in short but the objects of familiar life
divinized because reshaped by the idealizing imagina
tion to meet the demands of desire in just those respects
in which actual experience is disappointing?
That Plato, and Aristotle in somewhat different
fashion, and Plotinus and Marcus Aurelius and Saint
Thomas Aquinas, and Spinoza and Hegel all taught
that Ultimate Reality is either perfectly Ideal and
Rational in nature, or else has absolute ideality and
rationality as its necessary attribute, are facts well
known to the student of philosophy. They need no ex
position here. But it is worth pointing out that these
great systematic philosophies defined perfect Ideality
in conceptions that express the opposite of those things
which make life unsatisfactory and troublesome. What
is the chief source of the complaint of poet and moralist
with the goods, the values and satisfactions of experi
ence? Rarely is the complaint that such things do not
exist ; it is that although existing they are momentary,
transient, fleeting. They do not stay; at worst they
come only to annoy and tease with their hurried and dis
appearing taste of what might be; at best they come
only to inspire and instruct with a passing hint of truer
reality. This commonplace of the poet and moralist
as to the impermanence not only of sensuous enjoy
ment, but of fame and civic achievements was profoundly
THE IDEAL AND THE REAL 107
reflected upon by philosophers, especially by Plato and
Aristotle. The results of their thinking have been
wrought into the very fabric of western ideas. Time,
change, movement are signs that what the Greeks called
Non-Being somehow infect true Being. The phrase
ology is now strange, but many a modern who ridicules
the conception of Non-Being repeats the same thought
under the name of the Finite or Imperfect.
Wherever there is change, there is instability, and in
stability is proof of something the matter, of absence,
deficiency, incompleteness. These are the ideas com
mon to the connection between change, becoming and
perishing, and Non-Being, finitude and imperfection.
Hence complete and true Reality must be changeless,
unalterable, so full of Being that it always and for
ever maintains itself in fixed rest and repose. As
Bradley, the most dialectially ingenious Absolutist of
our own day, expresses the doctrine " Nothing that is
perfectly real moves." And while Plato took, compara
tively speaking, a pessimistic view of change as mere
lapse and Aristotle a complacent view of it as tendency
to realization, yet Aristotle doubted no more than Plato
that the fully realized reality, the divine and ultimate, is
changeless. Though it is called Activity or Energy, the
Activity knew no change, the energy did nothing. It
was the activity of an army forever marking time and
never going anywhere.
108 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY
From this contrast of the permanent with the tran
sient arise other features which mark off the Ultimate
Reality from the imperfect realities of practical life.
Where there is change, there is of necessity numerical
plurality, multiplicity, and from variety comes opposi
tion, strife. Change is alteration, or " othering " and
this means diversity. Diversity means division, and
division means two sides and their conflict. The world
which is transient must be a world of discord, for in
lacking stability it lacks the government of unity. Did
unity completely rule, these would remain an unchang
ing totality. What alters has parts and partialities
which, not recognizing the rule of unity, assert them
selves independently and make life a scene of contention
and discord. Ultimate and true Being on the other
hand, since it is changeless is Total, All-Comprehensive
and One. Since it is One, it knows only harmony, and
therefore enjoys complete and eternal Good. It is
Perfection.
Degrees of knowledge and truth correspond with de
grees of reality point by point. The higher and more
complete the Reality the truer and more important the
knowledge that refers to it. Since the world of be
coming, of origins and perishings, is deficient in true
Being, it cannot be known in the best sense. To know it
means to neglect its flux and alteration and discover
some permanent form which limits the processes that
THE IDEAL AND THE REAL 109
alter in time. The acorn undergoes a series of changes ;
these are knowable only in reference to the fixed form
of the oak which is the same in the entire oak species in
spite of the numerical diversity of trees. Moreover, this
form limits the flux of growth at both ends, the acorn
coming from the oak as well as passing into it. Where
such unifying and limiting eternal forms cannot be de
tected, there is mere aimless variation and fluctuation,
and knowledge is out of the question. On the other
hand, as objects are approached in which there is no
movement at all, knowledge becomes really demonstra
tive, certain, perfect truth pure and unalloyed. The
heavens can be more truly known than the earth, God
the unmoved mover than the heavens.
From this fact follows the superiority of contempla
tive to practical knowledge, of pure theoretical specula
tion to experimentation, and to any kind of knowing
that depends upon changes in things or that induces
change in them. Pure knowing is pure beholding, view
ing, noting. It is complete in itself. It looks for
nothing beyond itself ; it lacks nothing and hence has no
aim or purpose. It is most emphatically its own excuse
for being. Indeed, pure contemplative knowing is so
much the most truly self-enclosed and self-sufficient
thing in the universe that it is the highest and indeed
the only attribute that can be ascribed to God, the
Highest Being in the scale of Being. Man himself is
110 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY
divine in the rare moments when he attains to purely
self-sufficient theoretical insight.
In contrast with such knowing, the so-called knowing
of the artisan is base. He has to bring about changes
in things, in wood and stone, and this fact is of itself
evidence that his material is deficient in Being. What
condemns his knowledge even more is the fact that it is
not disinterestedly for its own sake. It has reference to
results to be attained, food, clothing, shelter, etc. It
is concerned with things that perish, the body and its
needs. It thus has an ulterior aim, and one which itself
testifies to imperfection. For want, desire, affection of
every sort, indicate lack. Where there is need and
desire as in the case of all practical knowledge and
activity there is incompleteness and insufficiency.
While civic or political and moral knowledge rank
higher than do the conceptions of the artisan, yet in
trinsically considered they are a low and untrue type.
Moral and political action is practical; that is, it im
plies needs and effort to satisfy them. It has an end
beyond itself. Moreover, the very fact of association
shows lack of self-sufficiency ; it shows dependence upon
others. Pure knowing is alone solitary, and capable of
being carried on in complete, self-sufficing independence.
In short, the measure of the worth of knowledge ac
cording to Aristotle, whose views are here summarized,
is the degree in which it is purely contemplative. The
THE IDEAL AND THE REAL 111
highest degree is attained in knowing ultimate Ideal
Being, pure Mind. This is Ideal, the Form of Forms,
because it has no lacks, no needs, and experiences no
change or variety. It has no desires because in it all
desires are consummated. Since it is perfect Being, it
is perfect Mind and perfect Bliss ; the acme of ration
ality and ideality. One point more and the argument
is completed. The kind of knowing that concerns itself
with this ultimate reality (which is also ultimate
ideality) is philosophy. Philosophy is therefore the last
and highest term in pure contemplation. Whatever
may be said for any other kind of knowledge, philos
ophy is self-enclosed. It has nothing to do beyond
itself; it has no aim or purpose or function except to
be philosophy that is, pure, self-sufficing beholding of
ultimate reality. There is of course such a thing as
philosophic study which falls short of this perfection.
Where there is learning, there is change and becoming.
But the function of study and learning of philosophy is,
as Plato put it, to convert the eye of the soul from
dwelling contentedly upon the images of things, upon
the inferior realities that are born and that decay,
and to lead it to the intuition of supernal and eternal
Being. Thus the mind of the knower is transformed.
It becomes assimilated to what it knows.
Through a variety of channels, especially Neo-
Platonism and St. Augustine, these ideas found their
112 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY
way into Christian theology; and great scholastic
thinkers taught that the end of man is to know True
Being, that knowledge is contemplative, that True Being
is pure Immaterial Mind, and to know it is Bliss and
Salvation. While this knowledge cannot be achieved
in this stage of life nor without supernatural aid, yet so
far as it is accomplished it assimilates the human mind
to the divine essence and so constitutes salvation.
Through this taking over of the conception of knowl
edge as Contemplative into the dominant religion of
Europe, multitudes were affected who were totally inno
cent of theoretical philosophy. There was bequeathed
to generations of thinkers as an unquestioned axiom the
idea that knowledge is intrinsically a mere beholding
or viewing of reality the spectator conception of
knowledge. So deeply engrained was this idea that it
prevailed for centuries after the actual progress of
science had demonstrated that knowledge is power to
transform the world, and centuries after the practice
of effective knowledge had adopted the method of
experimentation.
Let us turn abruptly from this conception of the
measure of true knowledge and the nature of true philos
ophy to the existing practice of knowledge. Nowa
days if a man, say a physicist or chemist, wants to
know something, the last thing he does is merely to con
template. He does not look in however earnest and
THE IDEAL AND THE REAL 113
prolonged way upon the object expecting that thereby
he will detect its fixed and characteristic form. He does
not expect any amount of such aloof scrutiny to reveal
to him any secrets. He proceeds to do something, to
bring some energy to bear upon the substance to see
how it reacts; he places it under unusual conditions in
order to induce some change. While the astronomer
cannot change the remote stars, even he no longer merely
gazes. If he cannot change the stars themselves, he can
at least by lens and prism change their light as it
reaches the earth; he can lay traps for discovering
changes which would otherwise escape notice. Instead
of taking an antagonistic attitude toward change and
denying it to the stars because of their divinity and
perfection, he is on constant and alert watch to find
some change through which he can form an inference
as to the formation of stars and systems of stars.
Change in short is no longer looked upon as a fall
from grace, as a lapse from reality or a sign of im
perfection of Being. Modern science no longer tries
to find some fixed form or essence behind each process
of change. Rather, the experimental method tries to
break down apparent fixities and to induce changes.
The form that remains unchanged to sense, the form of
seed or tree, is regarded not as the key to knowledge
of the thing, but as a wall, an obstruction to be broken
down. Consequently the scientific man experiments with
114, RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY
this and that agency applied to this and that condition
until something begins to happen ; until there is, as we
say, something doing. He assumes that there is change
going on all the time, that there is movement within
each thing in seeming repose ; and that since the process
is veiled from perception the way to know it is to bring
the thing into novel circumstances until change becomes
evident. In short, the thing which is to be accepted and
paid heed to is not what is originally given but that
which emerges after the thing has been set under a
great variety of circumstances in order to see how it
behaves.
Now this marks a much more general change in the
human attitude than perhaps appears at first sight.
It signifies nothing less than that the world or any
part of it as it presents itself at a given time is accepted
or acquiesced in only as material for change. It is
accepted precisely as the carpenter, say, accepts things
as he finds them. If he took them as things to be
observed and noted for their own sake, he never would
be a carpenter. He would observe, describe, record tho
structures, forms and changes which things exhibit to
him, and leave the matter there. If perchance some of
the changes going on should present him with a shelter,
so much the better. But what makes the carpenter a
builder is the fact that he notes things not just as
objects in themselves, but with reference to what he
THE IDEAL AND THE REAL 115
wants to do to them and with them; to the end he
has in mind. Fitness to effect certain special changes
that he wishes to see accomplished is what concerns
him in the wood and stones and iron which he observes.
His attention is directed to the changes they undergo
and the changes they make other things undergo so that
he may select that combination of changes which will
yield him his desired result. It is only by these processes
of active manipulation of things in order to realize his
purpose that he discovers what the properties of things
are. If he foregoes his own purpose and in the name
of a meek and humble subscription to things as they
" really are " refuses to bend things as they " are "
to his own purpose, he not only never achieves his pur
pose but he never learns what the things themselves are.
They are what they can do and what can be done with
them, things that can be found by deliberate trying.
The outcome of this idea of the right way to know
is a profound modification in man s attitude toward the
natural world. Under differing social conditions, the
older or classic conception sometimes bred resignation
and submission ; sometimes contempt and desire to
escape; sometimes, notably in the case of the Greeks,
a keen esthetic curiosity which showed itself in acute
noting of all the traits of given objects. In fact, the
whole conception of knowledge as beholding and noting
is fundamentally an idea connected with esthetic enjoy-
116 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY
ment and appreciation where the environment is beauti
ful and life is serene, and with esthetic repulsion and
depreciation where life is troubled, nature morose and
hard. But in the degree in which the active conception
of knowledge prevails, and the environment is regarded
as something that has to be changed in order to be truly
known, men are imbued with courage, with what may
almost be termed an aggressive attitude toward na
ture. The latter becomes plastic, something to be sub
jected to human uses. The moral disposition toward
change is deeply modified. This loses its pathos, it
ceases to be haunted with melancholy through suggest
ing only decay and loss. Change becomes significant
of new possibilities and ends to be attained ; it becomes
prophetic of a better future. Change is associated with
progress rather than with lapse and fall. Since changes
are going on anyway, the great thing is to learn enough
about them so that we be able to lay hold of them and
turn them in the direction of our desires. Conditions
and events are neither to be fled from nor passively
acquiesced in ; they are to be utilized and directed. They
are either obstacles to our ends or else means for their
accomplishment. In a profound sense knowing ceases
to be contemplative and becomes practical.
Unfortunately men, educated men, cultivated men in
particular, are still so dominated by the older concep
tion of an aloof and self-sufficing reason and knowledge
THE IDEAL AND THE REAL 117
that they refuse to perceive the import of this doctrine.
They think they are sustaining the cause of impartial,
thorough-going and disinterested reflection when they
maintain the traditional philosophy of intellectualism
that is, of knowing as something self-sufficing and self-
enclosed. But in truth, historic intellectualism, the
spectator view of knowledge, is a purely compensatory
doctrine which men of an intellectual turn have built
up to console themselves for the actual and social im-
potency of the calling of thought to which they are
devoted. Forbidden by conditions and held back by
lack of courage from making their knowledge a factor
in the determination of the course of events, they have
sought a refuge of complacency in the notion that know
ing is something too sublime to be contaminated by con
tact with things of change and practice. They have
transformed knowing into a morally irresponsible
estheticism. The true import of the doctrine of the
operative or practical character of knowing, of intelli
gence, is objective. It means that the structures and
objects which science and philosophy set up in contrast
to the things and events of concrete daily experience
do not constitute a realm apart in which rational con
templation may rest satisfied ; it means that they repre
sent the selected obstacles, material means and ideal
methods of giving direction to that change which is
bound to occur anyway.
118 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY
This change of human disposition toward the world
does not mean that man ceases to have ideals, or ceases
to be primarily a creature of the imagination. But it
does signify a radical change in the character and
function of the ideal realm which man shapes for him
self. In the classic philosophy, the ideal world is essen
tially a haven in wliich man finds rest from the storms
of life ; it is an asylum in which he takes refuge from
the troubles of existence with the calm assurance that
it alone is supremely real. When the belief that knowl
edge is active and operative takes hold of men, the ideal
realm is no longer something aloof and separate; it is
rather that collection of imagined possibilities that
stimulates men to new efforts and realizations. It still
remains true that the troubles which men undergo are
the forces that lead them to project pictures of a better
state of things. But the picture of the better is shaped
so that it may become an instrumentality of action,
while in the classic view the Idea belongs ready-made in
a noumenal world. Hence, it is only an object of
personal aspiration or consolation, while to the modern,
an idea is a suggestion of something to be done or of
a way of doing.
An illustration will, perhaps, make the difference
clear. Distance is an obstacle, a source of trouble. It
separates friends and prevents intercourse. It isolates,
and makes contact and mutual understanding difficult.
THE IDEAL AND THE REAL 119
This state of affairs provokes discontent and restless
ness ; it excites the imagination to construct pictures of
a state of things where human intercourse is not in
juriously affected by space. Now there are two ways
out. One way is to pass from a mere dream of some
heavenly realm in which distance is abolished and by
some magic all friends are in perpetual transparent
communication, to pass, I say, from some idle castle-
building to philosophic reflection. Space, distance, it
will then be argued, is merely phenomenal ; or, in a more
modern version, subjective. It is not, metaphysically
speaking, real. Hence the obstruction and trouble it
gives is not after all " real " in the metaphysical sense
of reality. Pure minds, pure spirits, do not live in a
space world ; for them distance is not. Their relation
ships in the true world are not in any way affected by
special considerations. Their intercommunication is
direct, fluent, unobstructed.
Does the illustration involve a caricature of ways of
philosophizing with which we are all familiar? But if
it is not an absurd caricature, does it not suggest that
much of what philosophies have taught about the ideal
and noumenal or superiorly real world, is after all, only
casting a dream into an elaborate dialectic form
through the use of a speciously scientific terminology?
Practically, the difficulty, the trouble, remains. Practi
cally, however it may be "metaphysically," space is
120 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY
still real: it acts in a definite objectionable way.
Again, man dreams of some better state of things.
From troublesome fact he takes refuge in fantasy.
But this time, the refuge does not remain a permanent
and remote asylum.
The idea becomes a standpoint from which to examine
existing occurrences and to see if there is not among
them something which gives a hint of how communica
tion at a distance can be effected, something to be
utilized as a medium of speech at long range. The sug
gestion or fancy though still ideal is treated as a
possibility capable of realization in the concrete natural
world, not as a superior reality apart from that world.
As such, it becomes a platform from which to scrutinize
natural events. Observed from the point of view of this
possibility, things disclose properties hitherto unde
tected. In the light of these ascertainments, the idea
of some agency for speech at a distance becomes less
vague and floating: it takes on positive form. This
action and reaction goes on. The possibility or idea is
employed as a method for observing actual existence;
and in the light of what is discovered the possibility
takes on concrete existence. It becomes less of a mere
idea, a fancy, a wished-for possibility, and more of an
actual fact. Invention proceeds, and at last we have
the telegraph, the telephone, first through wires, and
then with no artificial medium. The concrete environ-
THE IDEAL AND THE REAL 121
ment is transformed in the desired direction; it is
idealized in fact and not merely in fancy. The ideal is
realized through its own use as a tool or method of
inspection, experimentation, selection and combination
of concrete natural operations.
Let us pause to take stock of results. The division
of the world into two kinds of Being, one superior,
accessible only to reason and ideal in nature, the other
inferior, material, changeable, empirical, accessible to
sense-observation, turns inevitably into the idea that
knowledge is contemplative in nature. It assumes a
contrast between theory and practice which was all to
the disadvantage of the latter. But in the actual course
of the development of science, a tremendous change has
come about. When the practice of knowledge ceased to
be dialectical and became experimental, knowing became
preoccupied with changes and the test of knowledge be
came the ability to bring about certain changes. Know
ing, for the oxperimental sciences, means a certain kind
of intelligently conducted doing; it ceases to be con
templative and becomes in a true sense practical. Now
this implies that philosophy, unless it is to undergo a
complete break with the authorized spirit of science,
must also alter its nature. It must assume a practical
nature ; it must become operative and experimental.
And we have pointed out what an enormous change this
transformation of philosophy entails in the two con-
122 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY
ceptions which have played the greatest role in historic
philosophizing the conceptions of the " real " and
" ideal " respectively. The former ceases to be some
thing ready-made and final; it becomes that which has
to be accepted as the material of change, as the obstruc
tions and the means of certain specific desired changes.
The ideal and rational also ceased to be a separate
ready-made world incapable of being used as a lever to
transform the actual empirical world, a mere asylum
from empirical deficiencies. They represent intelligently
thought-out possibilities of the existent world which may
be used as methods for making over and improving it.
Philosophically speaking, this is the great difference
involved in the change from knowledge and philosophy
as contemplative to operative. The change does not
mean the lowering in dignity of philosophy from a lofty
plane to one of gross utilitarianism. It signifies that
the prime function of philosophy is that of rationaliz
ing the possibilities of experience, especially collective
human experience. The scope of this change may be
realized by considering how far we are from accomplish
ing it. In spite of inventions which enable men to use
the energies of nature for their purposes, we are still
far from habitually treating knowledge as the method
of active control of nature and of experience. We tend
to think of it after the model of a spectator viewing a
finished picture rather than after that of the artist
THE IDEAL AND THE REAL 123
producing the painting. Thus there arise all the ques
tions of epistemology with which the technical student
of philosophy is so familiar, and which have made
modern philosophy in especial so remote from the under
standing of the everyday person and from the results
and processes of science. For these questions all spring
from the assumption of a merely beholding mind on
one side and a foreign and remote object to be viewed
and noted on the other. They ask how a mind and
world, subject and object, so separate and independent
can by any possibility come into such relationship to
each other as to make true knowledge possible. If
knowing were habitually conceived of as active and
operative, after the analogy of experiment guided by
hypothesis, or of invention guided by the imagination
of some possibility, it is not too much to say that the
first effect would be to emancipate philosophy from all
the epistemological puzzles which now perplex it. For
these all arise from a conception of the relation of mind
and world, subject and object, in knowing, which as
sumes that to know is to seize upon what is already
in existence.
Modern philosophic thought has been so preoccupied
with these puzzles of epistemology and the disputes
between realist and idealist, between phenomenalist and
absolutist, that many students are at a loss to know
what would be left for philosophy if there were removed
124 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY
both the metaphysical task of distinguishing between the
noumenal and phenomenal worlds and the epistemologi-
cal task of telling how a separate subject can know an
independent object. But would not the elimination of
these traditional problems permit philosophy to devote
itself to a more fruitful and more needed task? Would
it not encourage philosophy to face the great social and
moral defects and troubles from which humanity suffers,
to concentrate its attention upon clearing up the causes
and exact nature of these evils and upon developing a
clear idea of better social possibilities ; in short upon
projecting an idea or ideal which, instead of expressing
the notion of another world or some far-away unrealiz
able goal, would be used as a method of understanding
and rectifying specific social ills?
This is a vague statement. But note in the first
place that such a conception of the proper province of
philosophy where it is released from vain metaphysics
and idle epistemology is in line with the origin of phi
losophy sketched in the first hour. And in the second
place, note how contemporary society, the world over,
is in need of more general and fundamental enlighten
ment and guidance than it now possesses. I have tried
to show that a radical change of the conception of
knowledge from contemplative to active is the inevitable
result of the way in which inquiry and invention are
now conducted. But in claiming this, it must also be
THE IDEAL AND THE REAL 125
conceded, or rather asserted, that so far the change has
influenced for the most part only the more technical
side of human life. The sciences have created new in
dustrial arts. Man s physical command of natural
energies has been indefinitely multiplied. There is con
trol of the sources of material wealth and prosperity.
What would once have been miracles are now daily
performed with steam and coal and electricity and air,
and with the human body. But there are few persons
optimistic enough to declare that any similar command
of the forces which control man s social and moral wel
fare has been achieved.
Where is the moral progress that corresponds to
our economic accomplishments? The latter is the
direct fruit of the revolution that has been wrought
in physical science. But where is there a correspond
ing human science and art? Not only has the im
provement in the method of knowing remained so far
mainly limited to technical and economic matters,
but this progress has brought with it serious new moral
disturbances. I need only cite the late war, the problem
of capital and labor, the relation of economic classes,
the fact that while the new science has achieved wonders
in medicine and surgery, it has also produced and spread
occasions for diseases and weaknesses. These consider
ations indicate to us how undeveloped are our politics,
how crude and primitive our education, how passive and
126 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY
inert our morals. The causes remain which brought
philosophy into existence as an attempt to find an in
telligent substitute for blind custom and blind impulse
as guides to life and conduct. The attempt has not
been successfully accomplished. Is there not reason for
believing that the release of philosophy from its burden
of sterile metaphysics and sterile epistemology instead
of depriving philosophy of problems and subject-matter
would open a way to questions of the most perplexing
and the most significant sort?
Let me specify one problem quite directly suggested
by certain points in this lecture. It has been pointed
out that the really fruitful application of the contem
plative idea was not in science but in the esthetic field.
It is difficult to imagine any high development of the
fine arts except where there is curious and loving in
terest in forms and motions of the world quite irrespec
tive of any use to which they may be put. And it is
not too much to say that every people that has attained
a high esthetic development has been a people in which
the contemplative attitude has flourished as the Greek,
the Hindoo, the medieval Christian. On the other hand,
the scientific attitude that has actually proved itself in
scientific progress is, as has been pointed out, a prac
tical attitude. It takes forms as disguises for hidden
processes. Its interest in change is in what it leads to,
what can be done with it, to what use it can be put.
THE IDEAL AND THE REAL 127
While it has brought nature under control, there is
something hard and aggressive in its attitude toward
nature unfavorable to the esthetic enjoyment of the
world. Surely there is no more significant question be
fore the world than this question of the possibility and
method of reconciliation of the attitudes of practical
science and contemplative esthetic appreciation. With
out the former, man will be the sport and victim of
natural forces which he cannot use or control. With
out the latter, mankind might become a race of economic
monsters, restlessly driving hard bargains with nature
and with one another, bored with leisure or capable of
putting it to use only in ostentatious display and ex
travagant dissipation.
Like other moral questions, this matter is social and
even political. The western peoples advanced earlier
on the path of experimental science and its applica
tions in control of nature than the oriental. It is not,
I suppose wholly fanciful, to believe that the latter have
embodied in their habits of life more of the contempla
tive, esthetic and speculatively religious temper, and
the former more of the scientific, industrial and practi
cal. This difference and others which have grown up
around it is one barrier to easy mutual understanding,
and one source of misunderstanding. The philosophy
which, then, makes a serious effort to comprehend these
respective attitudes in their relation and due balance,
128 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY
could hardly fail to promote the capacity of peoples to
profit by one another s experience and to co-operate
more effectually with one another in the tasks of fruit
ful culture.
Indeed, it is incredible that the question of the rela
tion of the " real " and the " ideal " should ever have
been thought to be a problem belonging distinctively to
philosophy. The very fact that this most serious of
all human issues has been taken possession of by philos
ophy is only another proof of the disasters that follow
in the wake of regarding knowledge and intellect as
something self-sufficient. Never have the " real " and
the " ideal " been so clamorous, so self-assertive, as at
the present time. And never in the history of the world
have they been so far apart. The world war was car
ried on for purely ideal ends: for humanity, justice
and equal liberty for strong and weak alike. And it
was carried on by realistic means of applied science, by
high explosives, and bombing airplanes and blockading
marvels of mechanism that reduced the world well nigh
to ruin, so that the serious-minded are concerned for
the perpetuity of those choice values we call civiliza
tion. The peace settlement is loudly proclaimed in
the name of the ideals that stir man s deepest emo
tions, but with the most realistic attention to details of
economic advantage distributed in proportion to physi
cal power to create future disturbances.
THE IDEAL AND THE REAL 129
It is not surprising that some men are brought to
regard all idealism as a mere smoke-screen behind which
the search for material profit may be more effectually
carried on, and are converted to the materialistic inter
pretation of history. " Reality " is then conceived as
physical force and as sensations of power, profit and
enjoyment; any politics that takes account of other
factors, save as elements of clever propaganda and for
control of those human beings who have not become
realistically enlightened, is based on illusions. But
others are equally sure that the real lesson of the war
is that humanity took its first great wrong step when
it entered upon a cultivation of physical science and
an application of the fruits of science to the improve
ment of the instruments of life industry and com
merce. They will sigh for the return of the day when,
while the great mass died as they were born in animal
fashion, the few elect devoted themselves not to science
and the material decencies and comforts of existence
but to " ideal " things, the things of the spirit.
Yet the most obvious conclusion would seem to be
the impotency and the harmfulness of any and every
ideal that is proclaimed wholesale and in the abstract,
that is, as something in itself apart from the detailed
concrete existences whose moving possibilities it em
bodies. The true moral would seem to lie in en
forcing the tragedy of that idealism which believes
130 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY
in a spiritual world which exists in and by itself,
and the tragic need for the most realistic study
of forces and consequences, a study conducted in a
more scientifically accurate and complete manner than
that of the professed Real-politik. For it is not truly
realistic or scientific to take short views, to sacrifice the
future to immediate pressure, to ignore facts and forces
that are disagreeable and to magnify the enduring
quality of whatever falls in with immediate desire. It
is false that the evils of the situation arise from absence
of ideals ; they spring from wrong ideals. And these
wrong ideals have in turn their foundation in the absence
in social matters of that methodic, systematic, impar
tial, critical, searching inquiry into " real " and opera
tive conditions which we call science and which has
brought man in the technical realm to the command
of physical energies.
Philosophy, let it be repeated, cannot " solve " the
problem of the relation of the ideal and the real. That
is the standing problem of life. But it can at least
lighten the burden of humanity in dealing with the
problem by emancipating mankind from the errors
which philosophy has itself fostered the existence of
conditions which are real apart from their movement
into something new and different, and the existence of
ideals, spirit and reason independent of the possi
bilities of the material and physical. For as long
THE IDEAL AND THE REAL 131
as humanity is committed to this radically false bias,
it will walk forward with blinded eyes and bound limbs.
And philosophy can effect, if it will, something more than
this negative task. It can make it easier for mankind
to take the right steps in action by making it clear that
a sympathetic and integral intelligence brought to bear
upon the observation and understanding of concrete
social events and forces, can form ideals, that is aims,
which shall not be either illusions or mere emotional
compensations.
CHAPTER VI
THE SIGNIFICANCE OF LOGICAL RECON
STRUCTION
LOGIC like philosophy itself suffers from a curious
oscillation. It is elevated into the supreme and legisla
tive science only to fall into the trivial estate of keeper
of such statements as A is A and the scholastic verses
for the syllogistic rules. It claims power to state the
laws of the ultimate structure of the universe, on the
ground that it deals with the laws of thought which are
the laws according to which Reason has formed the
world. Then it limits its pretensions to laws of correct
reasoning which is correct even though it leads to no
matter of fact, or even to material falsity. It is
regarded by the modern objective idealist as the ade
quate substitute for ancient ontological metaphysics ;
but others treat it as that branch of rhetoric which
teaches proficiency in argumentation. For a time a
superficial compromise equilibrium was maintained
wherein the logic of formal demonstration which the
Middle Ages extracted from Aristotle was supple
mented by an inductive logic of discovery of truth that
Mill extracted from the practice of scientific men. But
132
LOGICAL RECONSTRUCTION 133
students of German philosophy, of mathematics, and of
psychology, no matter how much they attacked one
another, have made common cause in attack upon the
orthodox logics both of deductive proof and inductive
discovery.
Logical theory presents a scene of chaos. There is
little agreement as to its subject-matter, scope or pur
pose. This disagreement is not formal or nominal but
affects the treatment of every topic. Take such a
rudimentary matter as the nature of judgment. Repu
table authority can be quoted in behalf of every possible
permutation of doctrine. Judgment is the central thing
in logic ; and judgment is not logical at all, but personal
and psychological. If logical, it is the primary func
tion to which both conception and inference arc subordi
nate ; and it is an after-product from them. The dis
tinction of subject and predicate is necessary, and it is
totally irrelevant ; or again, though it is found in some
cases, it is not of great importance. Among those who
hold that the subject-predicate relationship is essen
tial, some hold that judgment is an analysis of some
thing prior into them, and others assert that it is a
synthesis of them into something else. Some hold that
reality is always the subject of judgment, and others
that " reality " is logically irrelevant. Among those
who deny that judgment is the attribution of predi
cate to subject, who regard it as a relation of elements,
134, RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY
some hold that the relation is " internal," some that
it is " external," and others that it is sometimes one
and sometimes the other.
Unless logic is a matter of some practical account,
these contrarieties are so numerous, so extensive, and
so irreconcilable that they are ludicrous. If logic is
an affair of practical moment, then these inconsistencies
are serious. They testify to some deep-lying cause of
intellectual disagreement and incoherency. In fact,
contemporary logical theory is the ground upon which
all philosophical differences and disputes are gath
ered together and focussed. How does the modification
in the traditional conception of the relation of experi
ence and reason, the real and ideal affect logic?
It affects, in the first place, the nature of logic itself.
If thought or intelligence is the means of intentional
reconstruction of experience, then logic, as an account
of the procedure of thought, is not purely formal. It
is not confined to laws of formally correct reasoning
apart from truth of subject-matter. Neither, on the
contrary, is it concerned with the inherent thought
structures of the universe, as Hegel s logic would have
it ; nor with the successive approaches of human thought
to this objective thought structure as the logic of Lotze,
Bosanquet, and other epistemological logicians would
have it. If thinking is the way in which deliberate re
organization of experience is secured, then logic is such
LOGICAL RECONSTRUCTION 135
a clarified and systematized formulation of the pro
cedures of thinking as will enable the desired reconstruc
tion to go on more economically and efficiently. In
language familiar to students, logic is both a science
and an art ; a science so far as it gives an organized
and tested descriptive account of the way in which
thought actually goes on ; an art, so far as on the basis
of this description it projects methods by which future
thinking shall take advantage of the operations that
lead to success and avoid those which result in failure.
Thus is answered the dispute whether logic is em
pirical or normative, psychological or regulative. It is
both. Logic is based on a definite and executive supply
of empirical material. Men have been thinking for ages.
They have observed, inferred, and reasoned in all sorts
of ways and to all kinds of results. Anthropology, the
study of the origin of myth, legend and cult ; linguistics
and grammar ; rhetoric and former logical compositions
all tell us how men have thought and what have been the
purposes and consequences of different kinds of think
ing. Psychology, experimental and pathological, makes
important contributions to our knowledge of how think
ing goes on and to what effect. Especially does the
record of the growth of the various sciences afford in
struction in those concrete ways of inquiry and testing
which have led men astray and which have proved ef
ficacious. Each science from mathematics to history
136 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY
exhibits typical fallacious methods and typical effica
cious methods in special subject-matters. Logical
theory has thus a large, almost inexhaustible field of
empirical study.
The conventional statement that experience only tells
us how men have thought or do think, while logic is
concerned with norms, with how men should think, is
ludicrously inept. Some sorts of thinking are shown by
experience to have got nowhere, or worse than nowhere
into systematized delusion and mistake. Others have
proved in manifest experience that they lead to fruitful
and enduring discoveries. It is precisely in experience
that the different consequences of different methods
of investigation and ratiocination are convincingly
shown. The parrot-like repetition of the distinction be
tween an empirical description of what is and a norma
tive account of what should be merely neglects the most
striking fact about thinking as it empirically is
namely, its flagrant exhibition of cases of failure and
success that is, of good thinking and bad thinking.
Any one who considers this empirical manifestation will
not complain of lack of material from which to con
struct a regulative art. The more study that is given
to empirical records of actual thought, the more ap
parent becomes the connection between the specific
features of thinking which have produced failure and
success. Out of this relationship of cause and effect
LOGICAL RECONSTRUCTION 137
as it is empirically ascertained grow the norms and
regulations of an art of thinking.
Mathematics is often cited as an example of purely
normative thinking dependent upon a priori canons and
supra-empirical material. But it is hard to see how the
student who approaches the matter historically can
avoid the conclusion that the status of mathematics is
as empirical as that of metallurgy. Men began with
counting and measuring things just as they began with
pounding and burning them. One thing, as common
speech profoundly has it, led to another. Certain ways
were successful not merely in the immediately practical
sense, but in the sense of being interesting, of arousing
attention, of exciting attempts at improvement. The
present-day mathematical logician may present the
structure of mathematics as if it had sprung all at once
from the brain of a Zeus whose anatomy is that of pure
logic. But, nevertheless, this very structure is a product
of long historic growth, in which all kinds of experi
ments have been tried, in which some men have struck
out in this direction and some in that, and in which some
exercises and operations have resulted in confusion and
others in triumphant clarifications and fruitful growths ;
a history in which matter and methods have been con
stantly selected and worked over on the basis of em
pirical success and failure.
The structure of alleged normative a priori mathe-
138 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY
matics is in truth the crowned result of ages of toilsome
experience. The metallurgist who should write on the
most highly developed method of dealing with ores would
not, in truth, proceed any differently. He too selects, re
fines, and organizes the methods which in the past have
been found to yield the maximum of achievement. Logic
is a matter of profound human importance precisely
because it is empirically founded and experimentally
applied. So considered, the problem of logical theory
is none other than the problem of the possibility of the
development and employment of intelligent method in
inquiries concerned with deliberate reconstruction of
experience. And it is only saying again in more spe
cific form what has been said in general form to add
that while such a logic has been developed in re
spect to mathematics and physical science, intelli
gent method, logic, is still far to seek in moral and
political affairs.
Assuming, accordingly, this idea of logic without
argument, let us proceed to discuss some of its chief
features. First, light is thrown by the origin of think
ing upon a logic which shall be a method of intelligent
guidance of experience. In line with what has already
been said about experience being a matter primarily of
behavior, a sensori-motor matter, is the fact that think
ing takes its departure from specific conflicts in experi
ence that occasion perplexity and trouble. Men do not,
LOGICAL RECONSTRUCTION 139
in their natural estate, think when they have no troubles
to cope with, no difficulties to overcome. A life of ease,
of success without effort, would be a thoughtless life,
and so also would a life of ready omnipotence. Be
ings who think are beings whose life is so hemmed in
and constricted that they cannot directly carry through
a course of action to victorious consummation. Men
also do not tend to think when their action, when they
are amid difficulties, is dictated to them by authority.
Soldiers have difficulties and restrictions in plenty, but
qua soldiers (as Aristotle would say) they are not no
torious for being thinkers. Thinking is done for them,
higher up. The same is too true of most workingmen
under present economic conditions. Difficulties occasion
thinking only when thinking is the imperative or urgent
way out, only when it is the indicated road to a solu
tion. Wherever external authority reigns, thinking is
suspected and obnoxious.
Thinking, however, is not the only way in which a
personal solution of difficulties is sought. As we have
seen, dreams, reveries, emotional idealizations are roads
which are taken to escape the strain of perplexity and
conflict. According to modern psychology, many sys
tematized delusions and mental disorders, probably hys
teria itself, originate as devices for getting freedom
from troublesome conflicting factors. Such considera
tions throw into relief some of the traits essential to
140 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY,
thinking as a way of responding to difficulty. The
short-cut " solutions " alluded to do not get rid of the
conflict and problems; they only get rid of the feeling
of it. They cover up consciousness of it. Because the
conflict remains in fact and is evaded in thought, dis
orders arise.
The first distinguishing characteristic of thinking
then is facing the facts inquiry, minute and extensive
scrutinizing, observation. Nothing has done greater
harm to the successful conduct of the enterprise of
thinking (and to the logics which reflect and formulate
the undertaking) than the habit of treating observation
as something outside of and prior to thinking, and
thinking as something which can go on in the head with
out including observation of new facts as part of itself.
Every approximation to such " thinking " is really an
approach to the method of escape and self-delusion just
referred to. It substitutes an emotionally agreeable and
rationally self-consistent train of meanings for inquiry
into the features of the situation which cause the trouble.
It leads to that type of Idealism which has well been
termed intellectual somnambulism. It creates a class of
" thinkers " who are remote from practice and hence
from testing their thought by application a socially
superior and irresponsible class. This is the condition
causing the tragic division of theory and practice, and
leading to an unreasonable exaltation of theory on one
LOGICAL RECONSTRUCTION 141
side and an unreasonable contempt for it on the other.
It confirms current practice in its hard brutalities and
dead routines just because it has transferred thinking
and theory to a separate and nobler region. Thus has
the idealist conspired with the materialist to keep actual
life impoverished and inequitable.
The isolation of thinking from confrontation with
facts encourages that kind of observation which merely
accumulates brute facts, which occupies itself labori
ously with mere details, but never inquires into their
meaning and consequences a safe occupation, for
it never contemplates any use to be made of the ob
served facts in determining a plan for changing the
situation. Thinking which is a method of reconstruct
ing experience treats observation of facts, on the other
hand, as the indispensable step of defining the problem,
of locating the trouble, of forcing home a definite, in
stead of a merely vague emotional, sense of what the
difficulty is and where it lies. It is not aimless, random,
miscellaneous, but purposeful, specific and limited by
the character of the trouble undergone. The purpose is
so to clarify the disturbed and confused situation that
reasonable ways of dealing with it may be suggested.
When the scientific man appears to observe aimlessly,
it is merely that he is so in love with problems as
sources and guides of inquiry, that he is striving to turn
up a problem where none appears on the surface: he
142 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY
is, as we say, hunting for trouble because of the satis
faction to be had in coping with it.
Specific and wide observation of concrete fact always,
then, corresponds not only with a sense of a problem or
difficulty, but with some vague sense of the meaning of
the difficulty, that is, of what it imports or signifies
in subsequent experience. It is a kind of anticipation
or prediction of what is coming. We speak, very truly,
of impending trouble, and in observing the signs of what
the trouble is, we are at the same time expecting, fore
casting in short, framing an idea, becoming aware
of meaning. When the trouble is not only impending
but completely actual and present, we are overwhelmed.
We do not think, but give way to depression. The kind
of trouble that occasions thinking is that which is in
complete and developing, and where what is found,
already in existence can be employed as a sign from
which to infer what is likely to come. When we intelli
gently observe, we are, as we say apprehensive, as well
as apprehending. We are on the alert for something
still to come. Curiosity, inquiry, investigation, are di
rected quite as truly into what is going to happen next
as into what has happened. An intelligent interest in
the latter is an interest in getting evidence, indications,
symptoms for inferring the former. Observation is
diagnosis and diagnosis implies an interest in anticipa
tion and preparation. It makes ready in advance an
LOGICAL RECONSTRUCTION 143
attitude of response so that we shall not be caught
unawares.
That which is not already in existence, that which is
only anticipated and inferred, cannot be observed. It
does not have the status of fact, of something given, a
datum, but of a meaning, an idea. So far as ideas are
not fancies, framed by emotionalized memory for escape
and refuge, they are precisely anticipations of some
thing still to come aroused by looking into the facts of
a developing situation. The blacksmith watches his
iron, its color and texture, to get evidence of what it
is getting ready to pass into ; the physician observes
his patient to detect symptoms of change in some definite
direction ; the scientific man keeps his attention upon
his laboratory material to get a clue as to what will
happen under certain conditions. The very fact that
observation is not an end in itself but a search for evi
dence and signs shows that along with observation goes
inference, anticipatory forecast in short an idea,
thought or conception.
In a more technical context, it would be worth while
to see what light this logical correspondence of observed
fact and projected idea or meaning throws upon certain
traditional philosophical problems and puzzles, includ
ing that of subject and predicate in judgment, object
and subject in knowledge, " real " and " ideal " gen
erally. But at this time, we must confine ourselves to
144 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY
pointing out that this view of the correlative origin
and function of observed fact and projected idea in
experience, commits us to some very important conse
quences concerning the nature of ideas, meanings, con
ceptions, or whatever word may be employed to denote
the specifically mental function. Because they are sug
gestions of something that may happen or eventuate,
they are (as we saw in the case of ideals generally) plat
forms of response to what is going on. The man who
detects that the cause of his difficulty is an automobile
bearing down upon him is not guaranteed safety; he
may have made his observation-forecast too late. But
if his anticipation-perception comes in season, he has
the basis for doing something which will avert threaten
ing disaster. Because he foresees an impending result,
he may do something that will lead to the situation
eventuating in some other way. All intelligent thinking
means an increment of freedom in action an emancipa
tion from chance and fatality. " Thought " represents
the suggestion of a way of response that is different
from that which would have been followed if intelligent
observation had not effected an inference as to the
future.
Now a method of action, a mode of response, intended
to produce a certain result that is, to enable the black
smith to give a certain form to his hot iron, the physi
cian to treat the patient so as to facilitate recovery, the
LOGICAL RECONSTRUCTION 145
scientific experimenter to draw a conclusion which will
apply to other cases, is by the nature of the case ten
tative, uncertain till tested by its results. The signifi
cance of this fact for the theory of truth will be dis
cussed below. Here it is enough to note that notions,
theories, systems, no matter how elaborate and self-con
sistent they are, must be regarded as hypotheses. They
are to be accepted as bases of actions which test them,
not as finalities. To perceive this fact is to abolish
rigid dogmas from the world. It is to recognize that
conceptions, theories and systems of thought are always
open to development through use. It is to enforce the
lesson that we must be on the lookout quite as much
for indications to alter them as for opportunities to
assert them. They are tools. As in the case of all
tools, their value resides not in themselves but in their
capacity to work shown in the consequences of their
use.
Nevertheless, inquiry is free only when the interest in
knowing is so developed that thinking carries with it
something worth while for itself, something having its
own esthetic and moral interest. Just because knowing
is not self-enclosed and final but is instrumental to
reconstruction of situations, there is always danger that
it will be subordinated to maintaining some precon
ceived purpose or prejudice. Then reflection ceases to
be complete; it falls short. Being precommitted to
146 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY
arriving at some special result, it is not sincere. It is
one thing to say that all knowing has an end beyond
itself, and another thing, a thing of a contrary kind, to
say that an act of knowing has a particular end which
it is bound, in advance, to reach. Much less is it true
that the instrumental nature of thinking means that it
exists for the sake of attaining some private, one-sided
advantage upon which one has set one s heart. Any
limitation whatever of the end means limitation in the
thinking process itself. It signifies that it does not
attain its full growth and movement, but is cramped,
impeded, interfered with. The only situation in which
knowing is fully stimulated is one in which the end is
developed in the process of inquiry and testing.
Disinterested and impartial inquiry is then far from
meaning that knowing is self-enclosed and irresponsible.
It means that there is no particular end set up in
advance so as to shut in the activities of observation,
forming of ideas, and application. Inquiry is emanci
pated. It is encouraged to attend to every fact that
is relevant to defining the problem or need, and to follow
up every suggestion that promises a clue. The barriers
to free inquiry are so many and so solid that mankind
is to be congratulated that the very act of investigation
is capable of itself becoming a delightful and absorbing
pursuit, capable of enlisting on its side man s sporting
instincts.
LOGICAL RECONSTRUCTION 147
Just in the degree in which thought ceases to be held
down to ends fixed by social custom, a social division
of labor grows up. Investigation has become a domi
nant life occupation for some persons. Only super
ficially, however, does this confirm the idea that theory
and knowledge are ends in themselves. They are, rela
tively speaking, ends in themselves for some persons.
But these persons represent a social division of labor;
and their specialization can be trusted only when such
persons are in unobstructed co-operation with other
social occupations, sensitive to others problems and
transmitting results to them for wider application in
action. When this social relationship of persons par
ticularly engaged in carrying on the enterprise of know
ing is forgotten and the class becomes isolated, inquiry
loses stimulus and purpose. It degenerates into sterile
specialization, a kind of intellectual busy work carried
on by socially absent-minded men. Details are heaped
up in the name of science, and abstruse dialectical de
velopments of systems occur. Then the occupation is
" rationalized " under the lofty name of devotion to
truth for its own sake. But when the path of true
science is retaken these things are brushed aside and
forgotten. They turn out to have been the toy-
ings of vain and irresponsible men. The only guar
antee of impartial, disinterested inquiry is the
social sensitiveness of the inquirer to the needs
148 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY
and problems of those with whom he is asso
ciated.
As the instrumental theory is favorable to high
esteem for impartial and disinterested inquiry, so, con
trary to the impressions of some critics, it sets much
store upon the apparatus of deduction. It is a strange
notion that because one says that the cognitive value of
conceptions, definitions, generalizations, classifications
and the development of consecutive implications is not
self-resident, that therefore one makes light of the de
ductive function, or denies its fruitfulness and neces
sity. The instrumental theory only attempts to state
with some scrupulousness where the value is found
and to prevent its being sought in the wrong place.
It says that knowing begins with specific observations
that define the problem and ends with specific observa
tions that test a hypothesis for its solution. But that
the idea, the meaning, which the original observations
suggest and the final ones test, itself requires careful
scrutiny and prolonged development, the theory would
be the last to deny. To say that a locomotive is an
agency, that it is intermediate between a need in experi
ence and its satisfaction, is not to depreciate the worth
of careful and elaborate construction of the locomotive,
or the need of subsidiary tools and processes that are
devoted to introducing improvements into its structure.
One would rather say that because the locomotive is
LOGICAL RECONSTRUCTION 149
intermediary in experience, not primary and not final,
it is impossible to devote too much care to its con
structive development.
Such a deductive science as mathematics represents
the perfecting of method. That a method to those con
cerned with it should present itself as an end on its
own account is no more surprising than that there
should be a distinct business for making any tool.
Rarely are those who invent and perfect a tool those
who employ it. There is, indeed, one marked difference
between the physical and the intellectual instrumental
ity. The development of the latter runs far beyond
any immediately visible use. The artistic interest in
perfecting the method by itself is strong as the uten
sils of civilization may themselves become works of finest
art. But from the practical standpoint this difference
shows that the advantage as an instrumentality is on
the side of the intellectual tool. Just because it is not
formed with a special application in mind, because it is
a highly generalized tool, it is the more flexible in
adaptation to unforeseen uses. It can be employed in
dealing with problems that were not anticipated. The
mind is prepared in advance for all sorts of intellectual
emergencies, and when the new problem occurs it does
not have to wait till it can get a special instrument
ready.
More definitely, abstraction is indispensable if one
150 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY
experience is to be applicable in other experiences.
Every concrete experience in its totality is unique ; it is
itself, non-reduplicable. Taken in its full concreteness,
it yields no instruction, it throws no light. What is
called abstraction means that some phase of it is
selected for the sake of the aid it gives in grasping
something else. Taken by itself, it is a mangled frag
ment, a poor substitute for the living whole from which
it is extracted. But viewed teleologically or practically,
it represents the only way in which one experience can
be made of any value for another the only way in
which something enlightening can be secured. What is
called false or vicious abstractionism signifies that the
function of the detached fragment is forgotten and neg
lected, so that it is esteemed barely in itself as some
thing of a higher order than the muddy and irregular
concrete from which it was wrenched. Looked at func
tionally, not structurally and statically, abstraction
means that something has been released from one experi
ence for transfer to another. Abstraction is liberation.
The more theoretical, the more abstract, an abstraction,
or the farther away it is from anything experienced in
its concreteness, the better fitted it is to deal with
any one of the indefinite variety of things that may
later present themselves. Ancient mathematics and
physics were much nearer the gross concrete experi
ence than are modern. For that very reason they were
LOGICAL RECONSTRUCTION 151
more impotent in affording any insight into and con
trol over such concretes as present themselves in new
and unexpected forms.
Abstraction and generalization have always been
recognized as close kin. It may be said that they are
the negative and positive sides of the same function.
Abstraction sets free some factor so that it may be
used. Generalization is the use. It carries over and
extends. It is always in some sense a leap in the dark.
It is an adventure. There can be no assurance in
advance that what is extracted from one concrete can
be fruitfully extended to another individual case. Since
these other cases are individual and concrete they must
be dissimilar. The trait of flying is detached from
the concrete bird. This abstraction is then carried over
to the bat, and it is expected in view of the application
of the quality to have some of the other traits of the
bird. This trivial instance indicates the essence of
generalization, and also illustrates the riskiness of the
proceeding. It transfers, extends, applies, a result of
some former experience to the reception and interpreta
tion of a new one. Deductive processes define, delimit,
purify and set in order the conceptions through which
this enriching and directive operation is carried on,
but they cannot, however perfect, guarantee the out
come.
The pragmatic value of organization is so conspicu-
152 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY
ously enforced in contemporary life that it hardly seems
necessarjr to dwell upon the instrumental significance of
classification and systematization. When the existence
of qualitative and fixed species was denied to be the
supreme object of knowledge, classification was often
regarded, especially by the empirical school, as merely a
linguistic device. It was convenient for memory and
communication to have words that sum up a number of
particulars. Classes were supposed to exist only in
speech. Later, ideas were recognized as a kind of ter-
tium quid between things and words. Classes were al
lowed to exist in the mind as purely mental things.
The critical disposition of empiricism is well exemplified
here. To assign any objectivity to classes was to en
courage a belief in eternal species and occult essences
and to strengthen the arms of a decadent and obnox
ious science a point of view well illustrated in Locke.
General ideas are useful in economizing effort, enabling
us to condense particular experiences into simpler and
more easily carried bunches and making it easier to
identify new observations.
So far nominalism and conceptualism the theory
that kinds exist only in words or in ideas was
on the right track. It emphasized the teleological
character of systems and classifications, that they exist
for the sake of economy and efficiency in reaching ends.
But this truth was perverted into a false notion, because
LOGICAL RECONSTRUCTION 153
the active and doing side of experience was denied or
ignored. Concrete things have ways of acting, as many
ways of acting as they have points of interaction with
other things. One thing is callous, unresponsive, inert
in the presence of some other things ; it is alert, eager,
and on the aggressive with respect to other things ; in
a third case, it is receptive, docile. Now different ways
of behaving, in spite of their endless diversity, may be
classed together in view of common relationship to an
end. No sensible person tries to do everything. He
has certain main interests and leading aims by which
he makes his behavior coherent and effective. To have
an aim is to limit, select, concentrate, group. Thus a
basis is furnished for selecting and organizing things
according as their ways of acting are related to car
rying forward pursuit. Cherry trees will be differ
ently grouped by woodworkers, orchardists, artists,
scientists and merry-makers. To the execution of
different purposes different ways of acting and re
acting on the part of trees are important. Each
classification may be equally sound when the difference
of ends is borne in mind.
Nevertheless there is a genuine objective standard for
the goodness of special classifications. One will further
the cabinetmaker in reaching his end while another will
hamper him. One classification will assist the botanist
in carrying on fruitfully his work of inquiry, and an-
154 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY
other will retard and confuse him. The teleological
theory of classification does not therefore commit us
to the notion that classes are purely verbal or purely
mental. Organization is no more merely nominal or
mental in any art, including the art of inquiry, than
it is in a department store or railway system. The
necessity of execution supplies objective criteria.
Things have to be sorted out and arranged so that
their grouping will promote successful action for
ends. Convenience, economy and efficiency are the
bases of classification, but these things are not re
stricted to verbal communication with others nor to
inner consciousness; they concern objective action.
They must take effect in the world.
At the same time, a classification is not a bare
transcript or duplicate of some finished and done-for
arrangement pre-existing in nature. It is rather a
repertory of weapons for attack upon the future and
the unknown. For success, the details of past knowl
edge must be reduced from bare facts to meanings, the
fewer, simpler and more extensive the better. They
must be broad enough in scope to prepare inquiry to
cope with any phenomenon however unexpected. They
must be arranged so as not to overlap, for otherwise
when they are applied to new events they interfere
and produce confusion. In order that there may be
ease and economy of movement in dealing with the
LOGICAL RECONSTRUCTION 155
enormous diversity of occurrences that present them
selves, we must be able to move promptly and definitely
from one tool of attack to another. In other words,
our various classes and kinds must be themselves classi
fied in graded series from the larger to the more spe
cific. There must not only be streets, but the streets
must be laid out with reference to facilitating passage
from any one to any other. Classification transforms
a wilderness of by-ways in experience into a well-
ordered system of roads, promoting transportation
and communication in inquiry. As soon as men begin
to take foresight for the future and to prepare them
selves in advance to meet it effectively and prosper
ously, the deductive operations and their results gain
in importance. In every practical enterprise there are
goods to be produced, and whatever eliminates wasted
material and promotes economy and efficiency of pro
duction is precious.
Little time is left to speak of the account of the
nature of truth given by the experimental and func
tional type of logic. This is less to be regretted be
cause this account is completely a corollary from the
nature of thinking and ideas. If the view held as to
the latter is understood, the conception of truth fol
lows as a matter of course. If it be not understood,
any attempt to present the theory of truth is bound
to be confusing, and the theory itself to seem arbi-
156 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY
trary and absurd. // ideas, meanings, conceptions,
notions, theories, systems are instrumental to an active
reorganization of the given environment, to a removal
of some specific trouble and perplexity, then the test of
their validity and value lies in accomplishing this work.
If they succeed in their office, they are reliable, sound,
valid, good, true. If they fail to clear up confusion,
to eliminate defects, if they increase confusion, uncer
tainty and evil when they are acted upon, then are they
false. Confirmation, corroboration, verification lie in
works, consequences. Handsome is that handsome does.
By their fruits shall ye know them. That which guides
us truly is true demonstrated capacity for such guid
ance is precisely what is meant by truth. The adverb
" truly " is more fundamental than either the adjec
tive, true, or the noun, truth. An adverb expresses a
way, a mode of acting. Now an idea or conception is
a claim or injunction or plan to act in a certain way
as the way to arrive at the clearing up of a specific
situation. When the claim or pretension or plan is
acted upon it guides us truly or falsely; it leads us to
our end or away from it. Its active, dynamic function
is the all-important thing about it, and in the quality
of activity induced by it lies all its truth and falsity.
The hypothesis that works is the true one; and
truth is an abstract noun applied to the collection
of cases, actual, foreseen and desired, that
LOGICAL RECONSTRUCTION 157
receive confirmation in their works and conse
quences.
So wholly does the worth of this conception of truth
depend upon the correctness of the prior account of
thinking that it is more profitable to consider why
the conception gives offence than to expound it on its
own account. Part of the reason why it has been
found so obnoxious is doubtless its novelty and defects
in its statement. Too often, for example, when truth
has been thought of as satisfaction, it has been thought
of as merely emotional satisfaction, a private comfort,
a meeting of purely personal need. But the satisfac
tion in question means a satisfaction of the needs and
conditions of the problem out of which the idea, the
purpose and method of action, arises. It includes
public and objective conditions. It is not to be manip
ulated by whim or personal idiosyncrasy. Again
when truth is defined as utility, it is often thought
to mean utility for some purely personal end, some
profit upon which a particular individual has set his
heart. So repulsive is a conception of truth which
makes it a mere tool of private ambition and ag
grandizement, that the wonder is that critics have
attributed such a notion to sane men. As matter of
fact, truth as utility means service in making just that
contribution to reorganization in experience that the
idea or theory claims to be able to make. The usefulness
158 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY
of a road is not measured by the degree in which it
lends itself to the purposes of a highwayman. It is
measured by whether it actually functions as a road, as
a means of easy and effective public transportation and
communication. And so with the serviceableness of an
idea or hypothesis as a measure of its truth.
Turning from such rather superficial misunderstand
ings, we find, I think, the chief obstacle to the recep
tion of this notion of truth in an inheritance from the
classic tradition that has become so deeply engrained in
men s minds. In just the degree in which existence is
divided into two realms, a higher one of perfect being
and a lower one of seeming, phenomenal, deficient
reality, truth and falsity are thought of as fixed, ready-
made static properties of things themselves. Supreme
Reality is true Being, inferior and imperfect Reality is
false Being. It makes claims to Reality which it can
not substantiate. It is deceitful, fraudulent, inherently
unworthy of trust and belief. Beliefs are false not be
cause they mislead us; they are not mistaken ways of
thinking. They are false because they admit and ad
here to false existences or subsistences. Other notions
are true because they do have to do with true Being -
with full and ultimate Reality. Such a notion lies at
the back of the head of every one who has, in however
an indirect way, been a recipient of the ancient and
medieval tradition. This view is radically challenged by
LOGICAL RECONSTRUCTION 159
the pragmatic conception of truth, and the impossibility
of reconciliation or compromise is, I think, the cause of
the shock occasioned by the newer theory.
This contrast, however, constitutes the importance of
the new theory as well as the unconscious obstruction
to its acceptance. The older conception worked out
practically to identify truth with authoritative dogma.
A society that chiefly esteems order, that finds growth
painful and change disturbing, inevitably seeks for a
fixed body of superior truths upon which it may depend.
It looks backward, to something already in existence,
for the source and sanction of truth. It falls back
upon what is antecedent, prior, original, a priori, for
assurance. The thought of looking ahead, toward the
eventual, toward consequences, creates uneasiness and
fear. It disturbs the sense of rest that is attached to
the ideas of fixed Truth already in existence. It puts
a heavy burden of responsibility upon us for search,
unremitting observation, scrupulous development of
hypotheses and thoroughgoing testing. In physical
matters men have slowly grown accustomed in all spe
cific beliefs to identifying the true with the verified.
But they still hesitate to recognize the implication of
this identification and to derive the definition of truth
from it. For while it is nominally agreed upon as a
commonplace that definitions ought to spring from con
crete and specific cases rather than be invented in the
160 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY
empty air and imposed upon particulars, there is a
strange unwillingness to act upon the maxim in defining
truth. To generalize the recognition that the true
means the verified and means nothing else places upon
men the responsibility for surrendering political and
moral dogmas, and subjecting to the test of conse
quences their most cherished prejudices. Such a change
involves a great change in the seat of authority and the
methods of decision in society. Some of them, as first
fruits of the newer logic, will be considered in the fol
lowing lectures.
CHAPTER VII
RECONSTRUCTION IN MORAL CONCEPTIONS
THE impact of the alteration in methods of scientific
thinking upon moral ideas is, in general, obvious.
Goods, ends are multiplied. Rules are softened into
principles, and principles are modified into methods of
understanding. Ethical theory began among the
Greeks as an attempt to find a regulation for the con
duct of life which should have a rational basis and
purpose instead of being derived from custom. But
reason as a substitute for custom was under the obliga
tion of supplying objects and laws as fixed as those of
custom had been. Ethical theory ever since has been
singularly hypnotized by the notion that its business
is to discover some final end or good or some ultimate
and supreme law. This is the common element among
the diversity of theories. Some have held that the end
is loyalty or obedience to a higher power or authority ;
and they have variously found this higher principle in
Divine Will, the will of the secular ruler, the main
tenance of institutions in which the purpose of superiors
is embodied, and the rational consciousness of duty. But
they have differed from one another because there was
161
162 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY
one point in which they were agreed: a single and final
source of law. Others have asserted that it is impossible
to locate morality in conformity to law-giving power,
and that it must be sought in ends that are goods. And
some have sought the good in self-realization, some in
holiness, some in happiness, some in the greatest pos
sible aggregate of pleasures. And yet these schools
have agreed in the assumption that there is a single,
fixed and final good. They have been able to dis
pute with one another only because of their common
premise.
The question arises whether the way out of the con
fusion and conflict is not to go to the root of the
matter by questioning this common element. Is not the
belief in the single, final and ultimate (whether con
ceived as good or as authoritative law) an intellectual
product of that feudal organization which is disappear
ing historically and of that belief in a bounded, ordered
cosmos, wherein rest is higher than motion, which has
disappeared from natural science? It has been re
peatedly suggested that the present limit of intellectual
reconstruction lies in the fact that it has not as yet
been seriously applied in the moral and social disci
plines. Would not this further application demand
precisely that we advance to a belief in a plurality of
changing, moving, individualized goods and ends, and
to a belief that principles, criteria, laws are intellectual
MORAL RECONSTRUCTION 163
instruments for analyzing individual or unique situa
tions?
The blunt assertion that every moral situation is a
unique situation having its own irreplaceable good may
seem not merely blunt but preposterous. For the
established tradition teaches that it is precisely the
irregularity of special cases which makes necessary the
guidance of conduct by universals, and that the es
sence of the virtuous disposition is willingness to sub
ordinate every particular case to adjudication by a
fixed principle. It would then follow that submission
of a generic end and law to determination by the
concrete situation entails complete confusion and un
restrained licentiousness. Let us, however, follow the
pragmatic rule, and in order to discover the meaning
of the idea ask for its consequences. Then it surpris
ingly turns out that the primary significance of the
unique and morally ultimate character of the concrete
situation is to transfer the weight and burden of
morality to intelligence. It does not destroy responsi
bility; it only locates it. A moral situation is one in
which judgment and choice are required antecedently
to overt action. The practical meaning of the situation
that is to say the action needed to satisfy it is not
self-evident. It has to be searched for. There are con
flicting desires and alternative apparent goods. What
is needed is to find the right course of action, the right
164 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY
good. Hence, inquiry is exacted: observation of the
detailed makeup of the situation ; analysis into its
diverse factors; clarification of what is obscure; dis
counting of the more insistent and vivid traits ; tracing
the consequences of the various modes of action that
suggest themselves; regarding the decision reached as
hypothetical and tentative until the anticipated or sup
posed consequences which led to its adoption have been
squared with actual consequences. This inquiry is in
telligence. Our moral failures go back to some weak
ness of disposition, some absence of sympathy, some one
sided bias that makes us perform the judgment of the
concrete case carelessly or perversely. Wide sympathy,
keen sensitiveness, persistence in the face of the dis
agreeable, balance of interests enabling us to undertake
the work of analysis and decision intelligently are the
distinctively moral traits the virtues or moral excel
lencies.
It is worth noting once more that the underlying
issue is, after all, only the same as that which has been
already threshed out in physical inquiry. There too it
long seemed as if rational assurance and demonstration
could be attained only if we began with universal con
ceptions and subsumed particular cases under them.
The men who initiated the methods of inquiry that are
now everywhere adopted were denounced in their day
(and sincerely) as subverters of truth and foes of
MORAL RECONSTRUCTION 165
science. If they have won in the end, it is because, as
has already been pointed out, the method of universals
confirmed prejudices and sanctioned ideas that had
gained currency irrespective of evidence for them ; while
placing the initial and final weight upon the individual
case, stimulated painstaking inquiry into facts and ex
amination of principles. In the end, loss of eternal
truths was more than compensated for in the accession
of quotidian facts. The loss of the system of superior
and fixed definitions and kinds was more than made
up for by the growing system of hypotheses and laws
used in classifying facts. After all, then, we are only
pleading for the adoption in moral reflection of the
logic that has been proved to make for security, strin
gency and fertility in passing judgments upon physical
phenomena. And the reason is the same. The old
method in spite of its nominal and esthetic worship
of reason discouraged reason, because it hindered
the operation of scrupulous and unremitting in
quiry.
More definitely, the transfer of the burden of the
moral life from following rules or pursuing fixed ends
over to the detection of the ills that need remedy in a
special case and the formation of plans and methods for
dealing with them, eliminates the causes which have
kept moral theory controversial, and which have also
kept it remote from helpful contact with the exigencies
166 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY
of practice. The theory of fixed ends inevitably leads
thought into the bog of disputes that cannot be settled.
If there is one summum bonum, one supreme end, what
is it? To consider this problem is to place ourselves in
the midst of controversies that are as acute now as they
were two thousand years ago. Suppose we take a seem
ingly more empirical view, and say that while there is
not a single end, there also are not as many as there are
specific situations that require amelioration; but there
are a number of such natural goods as health, wealth,
honor or good name, friendship, esthetic appreciation,
learning and such moral goods as justice, temperance,
benevolence, etc. What or who is to decide the right
of way when these ends conflict with one another, as they
are sure to do? Shall we resort to the method that
once brought such disrepute upon the whole business
of ethics: Casuistry? Or shall we have recourse to
what Bentham well called the ipse dixlt method: the
arbitrary preference of this or that person for this or
that end? Or shall we be forced to arrange them all in
an order of degrees from the highest good down to the
least precious? Again we find ourselves in the middle
of unreconciled disputes with no indication of the way
out.
Meantime, the special moral perplexities where the
aid of intelligence is required go unenlightened. We
cannot seek or attain health, wealth, learning, justice
MORAL RECONSTRUCTION 167
or kindness in general. Action is always specific, con
crete, individualized, unique. And consequently judg
ments as to acts to be performed must be similarly
specific. To say that a man seeks health or justice
is only to say that he seeks to live healthily or justly.
These things, like truth, are adverbial. They are modi
fiers of action in special cases. How to live healthily
or justly is a matter which differs with every person.
It varies with his past experience, his opportunities, his
temperamental and acquired weaknesses and abilities.
Not man in general but a particular man suffering from
some particular disability aims to live healthily, and
consequently health cannot mean for him exactly what it
means for any other mortal. Healthy living is not some
thing to be attained by itself apart from other ways of
living. A man needs to be healthy in his life, not apart
from it, and what does life mean except the aggregate
of his pursuits and activities? A man who aims at
health as a distinct end becomes a valetudinarian, or a
fanatic, or a mechanical performer of exercises, or an
athlete so one-sided that his pursuit of bodily develop
ment injures his heart. When the endeavor to
realize a so-called end does not temper and color all
other activities, life is portioned out into strips and
fractions. Certain acts and times are devoted to getting
health, others to cultivating religion, others to seeking
learning, to being a good citizen, a devotee of fine art
168 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY
and so on. This is the only logical alternative to sub
ordinating all aims to the accomplishment of one alone
fanaticism. This is out of fashion at present, but who
can say how much of distraction and dissipation in life,
and how much of its hard and narrow rigidity is the
outcome of men s failure to realize that each situation
has its own unique end and that the whole personality
should be concerned with it? Surely, once more, what a
man needs is to live healthily, and this result so affects
all the activities of his life that it cannot be set up as
a separate and independent good.
Nevertheless the general notions of health, disease,
justice, artistic culture are of great importance : Not,
however, because this or that case may be brought ex
haustively under a single head and its specific traits
shut out, but because generalized science provides a
man as physician and artist and citizen, with questions
to ask, investigations to make, and enables him to
understand the meaning of what he sees. Just in the
degree in which a physician is an artist in his work he
uses his science, no matter how extensive and accurate,
to furnish him with tools of inquiry into the individual
case, and with methods of forecasting a method of
dealing with it. Just in the degree in which, no matter
how great his learning, he subordinates the individual
case to some classification of diseases and some generic
rule of treatment, he sinks to the level of the routine
MORAL RECONSTRUCTION 169
mechanic. His intelligence and his action become rigid,
dogmatic, instead of free and flexible.
Moral goods and ends exist only when something has
to be done. The fact that something has to be done
proves that there are deficiencies, evils in the existent
situation. This ill is just the specific ill that it is. It
never is an exact duplicate of anything else. Conse
quently the good of the situation has to be discovered,
projected and attained on the basis of the exact defect
and trouble to be rectified. It cannot intelligently be
injected into the situation from without. Yet it is the
part of wisdom to compare different cases, to gather
together the ills from which humanity suffers, and to
generalize the corresponding goods into classes. Health,
wealth, industry, temperance, amiability, courtesy,
learning, esthetic capacity, initiative, courage, patience,
enterprise, thoroughness and a multitude of other gen
eralized ends are acknowledged as goods. But the value
of this systematization is intellectual or analytic.
Classifications suggest possible traits to be on the look
out for in studying a particular case; they suggest
methods of action to be tried in removing the inferred
causes of ill. They are tools of insight ; their value is
in promoting an individualized response in the indi
vidual situation.
Morals is not a catalogue of acts nor a set of rules
to be applied like drugstore prescriptions or cook-book
170 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY
recipes. The need in morals is for specific methods
of inquiry and of contrivance: Methods of inquiry to
locate difficulties and evils ; methods of contrivance to
form plans to be used as working hypotheses in dealing
with them. And the pragmatic import of the logic
of individualized situations, each having its own irre
placeable good and principle, is to transfer the atten
tion of theory from preoccupation with general con
ceptions to the problem of developing effective methods
of inquiry.
Two ethical consequences of great moment should be
remarked. The belief in fixed values has bred a division
of ends into intrinsic and jn^tnuniiJLal, of those that
are really worth while in themselves and those that are
of importance only as means to intrinsic goods. Indeed,
it is often thought to be the very beginning of wisdom,
of moral discrimination, to make this distinction. Dia-
lectically, the distinction is interesting and seems harm
less. But carried into practice it has an import that
is tragic. Historically, it has been the source and
justification of a hard and fast difference between ideal
goods on one side and material goods on the other.
At present those who would be liberal conceive intrinsic
goods as esthetic in nature rather than as exclusively
religious or as intellectually contemplative. But the
effect is the same. So-called intrinsic goods, whether
religious or esthetic, are divorced from those interests
MORAL RECONSTRUCTION 171
of daily life which because of their constancy and
urgency form the preoccupation of the great mass.
Aristotle used this distinction to declare that slaves and
the working class though they are necessary for the
state the commonweal are not constituents of it.
That which is regarded as merely instrumental must
approach drudgery ; it cannot command either intellec
tual, artistic or moral attention and respect. Anything
becomes unworthy whenever it is thought of as intrin
sically lacking worth. So men of " ideal " interests have
chosen for the most part the way of neglect and escape.
The urgency and pressure of " lower " ends have been
covered up by polite conventions. Or, they have been
relegated to a baser class of mortals in order that the
few might be free to attend to the goods that are really
or intrinsically worth while. This withdrawal, in the
name of higher ends, has left, for mankind at large and
especially for energetic " practical " people the lower
activities in complete command.
No one can possibly estimate how much of the ob
noxious materialism and brutality of our economic life
is due to the fact that economic ends have been re
garded as merely instrumental. When they are recog
nized to be as intrinsic and final in their place as any
others, then it will be seen that they are capable of
idealization, and that if life is to be worth while, they
must acquire ideal and intrinsic value. Esthetic, re-
172 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY
ligious and other " ideal " ends are now thin and meagre
or else idle and luxurious because of the separation from
" instrumental " or economic ends. Only in connection
with the latter can they be woven into the texture of
daily life arid made substantial and pervasive. The van
ity and irresponsibility of values that are merely final
and not also in turn means to the enrichment of other
occupations of life ought to be obvious. But now the
doctrine of " higher " ends gives aid, comfort and sup
port to every socially isolated and socially irrespon
sible scholar, specialist, esthete and religionist. It pro
tects the vanity and irresponsibility of his calling from
observation by others and by himself. The moral de
ficiency of the calling is transformed into a cause of
admiration and gratulation.
The other generic change lies in doing away once for
all with the traditional distinction between moral goods,
like the virtues, and natural goods like health, economic
security, art, science and the like. The point of view
under discussion is not the only one which has deplored
this rigid distinction and endeavored to abolish it. Some
schools have even gone so far as to regard moral excel
lencies, qualities of character as of value only because
they promote natural goods. But the experimental
logic when carried into morals makes every quality
that is judged to be good according as it contributes
to amelioration of existing ills. And in so doing, it
MORAL RECONSTRUCTION 173
enforces the moral meaning of natural science. When
all is said and done in criticism of present social de
ficiencies, one may well wonder whether the root diffi
culty does not lie in the separation of natural and
moral science. When physics, chemistry, biology, medi
cine, contribute to the detection of concrete human
woes and to the development of plans for remedying
them and relieving the human estate, they become moral ;
they become part of the apparatus of moral inquiry or
science. The latter then loses its peculiar flavor of the
didactic and pedantic; its ultra-moralistic and horta
tory tone. It loses its thinness and shrillness as well as
its vagueness. It gains agencies that are efficacious.
But the gain is not confined to the side of moral science.
Natural science loses its divorce from humanity; it
becomes itself humanistic in quality. It is something to
be pursued not in a technical and specialized way for
what is called truth for its own sake, but with the
sense of its social bearing, its intellectual indispensable-
ness. It is technical only in the sense that it provides
the technique of social and moral engineering.
When the consciousness of science is fully impreg
nated with the consciousness of human value, the
greatest dualism which now weighs humanity down,
the split between the material, the mechanical, the scien
tific and the moral and ideal will be destroyed. Human
forces that now waver because of this division will be
174 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY
unified and reinforced. As long as ends are not thought
of as individualized according to specific needs and
opportunities, the mind will be content with abstrac
tions, and the adequate stimulus to the moral or social
use of natural science and historical data will be
lacking. But when attention is concentrated upon the
diversified concretes, recourse to all intellectual materials
needed to clear up the special cases will be imperative.
At the same time that morals are made to focus in
intelligence, things intellectual are moralized. The
vexatious and wasteful conflict between naturalism and
humanism is terminated.
These general considerations may be amplified.
First : Inquiry, discovery take the same place in morals
that they have come to occupy in sciences of nature.
Validation, demonstration become experimental, a mat
ter of consequences. Reason, always an honorific term
in ethics, becomes actualized in the methods by which
the needs and conditions, the obstacles and resources,
of situations are scrutinized in detail, and intelligent
plans of improvement are worked out. Remote and
abstract generalities promote jumping at conclusions,
" anticipations of nature." Bad consequences are then
deplored as due to natural perversity and untoward
fate. But shifting the issue to analysis of a specific
situation makes inquiry obligatory and alert observa
tion of consequences imperative. No past decision nor
MORAL RECONSTRUCTION 175
old principle can ever be wholly relied upon to justify a
course of action. No amount of pains taken in form
ing a purpose in a definite case is final; the conse
quences of its adoption must be carefully noted, and f
purpose held only as a working hypothesis until results
confirm its Tightness. Mistakes are no longer either
mere unavoidable accidents to be mourned or moral
sins to be expiated and forgiven. They are lessons in
wrong methods of using intelligence and instructions
as to a better course in the future. They are indica
tions of the need of revision, development, readjust
ment. Ends grow, standards of judgment are
improved. Man is under just as much obligation to
develop his most advanced standards and ideals as to
use conscientiously those which he already possesses.
Moral life is protected from falling into formalism and
rigid repetition. It is rendered flexible, vital, growing.
In the second place, every case where moral action is
required becomes of equal moral importance and urgency
with every other. If the need and deficiencies of a
specific situation indicate improvement of health as the
end and good, then for that situation health is the ulti
mate and supreme good. It is no means to some
thing else. It is a final and intrinsic value. The same
thing is true of improvement of economic status, of
making a living, of attending to business and family
demands all of the things which under the sanction of
176 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY
fixed ends have been rendered of secondary and merely
instrumental value, and so relatively base and unim
portant. Anything that in a given situation is an end
and good at all is of equal worth, rank and dignity with
every other good of any other situation, and deserves the
same intelligent attention.
We note thirdly the effect in destroying the roots of
Phariseeism. We are so accustomed to thinking of this
as deliberate hypocrisy that we overlook its intellectual
premises. The conception which looks for the end of
action within the circumstances of the actual situa
tion will not have the same measure of judgment for all
cases. When one factor of the situation is a person of
trained mind and large resources, more will be expected
than with a person of backward mind and uncultured
experience. The absurdity of applying the same stand
ard of moral judgment to savage peoples that is used
with civilized will be apparent. No individual or group
will be judged by whether they come up to or fall short
of some fixed result, but by the direction in which they
are moving. The bad man is the man who no matter
how good he has been is beginning to deteriorate, to
grow less good. The good man is the man who no
matter how morally unworthy he has been is moving to
become better. Such a conception makes one severe in
judging himself and humane in judging others. It
excludes that arrogance which always accompanies
MORAL RECONSTRUCTION 177 X
judgment based on degree of approximation to fixed
ends.
In the fourth place, the process of growth, of im
provement and progress, rather than the static outcome
and result, becomes the significant thing. Not health
as an end fixed once and for all, but the needed im
provement in health a continual process is the end
and good. The end is no longer a terminus or limit to
be reached. It is the active process of transforming
the existent situation. Not perfection as a final goal,
but the ever-enduring process of perfecting, maturing,
refining is the aim in living. Honesty, industry, tem
perance, justice, like health, wealth and learning, are
not goods to be possessed as they would be if they ex
pressed fixed ends to be attained. They are directions
of change in the quality of experience. Growth itself
is the only moral " end."
Although the bearing of this idea upon the problem
of evil and the controversy between optimism and pessi
mism is too vast to be here discussed, it may be worth
while to touch upon it superficially. The problem of
evil ceases to be a theological and metaphysical one,
and is perceived to be the practical problem of reducing,
alleviating, as far as may be removing, the evils of life.
Philosophy is no longer under obligation to find in
genious methods for proving that evils are only ap
parent, not real, or to elaborate schemes for explaining
178 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY
them away or, worse yet, for justifying them. It as
sumes another obligation : That of contributing in
however humble a way to methods that will assist us in
discovering the causes of humanity s ills. Pessimism is
a paralyzing doctrine. In declaring that the world is
evil wholesale, it makes futile all efforts to discover the
remediable causes of specific evils and thereby destroys
at the root every attempt to make the world better and
happier. Wholesale optimism, which has been the con
sequence of the attempt to explain evil away, is, however,
equally an incubus.
After ah 1 , the optimism that says that the world is
already the best possible of all worlds might be regarded
as the most cynical of pessimisms. If this is the best
possible, what would a world which was fundamentally
bad be like? Meliorism is the belief that the specific
conditions which exist at one moment, be they com
paratively bad or comparatively good, in any event may
be bettered. It encourages intelligence to study the
positive means of good and the obstructions to their
realization, and to put forth endeavor for the improve
ment of conditions. It arouses confidence and a reason
able hopefulness as optimism does not. For the latter
in declaring that good is already realized in ultimate
reality tends to make us gloss over the evils that con
cretely exist. It becomes too readily the creed of those
who live at ease, in comfort, of those who have been sue-
MORAL RECONSTRUCTION 179
cessful in obtaining this world s rewards. Too readily
optimism makes the men who hold it callous and blind
to the sufferings of the less fortunate, or ready to find
the cause of troubles of others in their personal vicious-
ness. It thus co-operates with pessimism, in spite of
the extreme nominal differences between the two, in
benumbing sympathetic insight and intelligent effort
in reform. It beckons men away from the world of
relativity and change into the calm of the absolute and
eternal.
The import of many of these changes in moral attitude
focusses in the idea of happiness. Happiness has often
been made the object of the moralists contempt. Yet
the most ascetic moralist has usually restored the idea
of happiness under some other name, such as bliss.
Goodness without happiness, valor and virtue without
satisfaction, ends without conscious enjoyment these
things are as intolerable practically as they are self-
contradictory in conception. Happiness is not, however,
a bare possession ; it is not a fixed attainment. Such
a happiness is either the unworthy selfishness which
moralists have so bitterly condemned, or it is, even if
labelled bliss, an insipid tedium, a millennium of ease in
relief from all struggle and labor. It could satisfy
only the most delicate of molly-coddles. Happiness is
found only in success ; but success means succeeding,
getting forward, moving in advance. It is an active
180 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY
process, not a passive outcome. Accordingly it in
cludes the overcoming of obstacles, the elimination of
sources of defect and ill. Esthetic sensitiveness and
enjoyment are a large constituent in any worthy happi
ness. But the esthetic appreciation which is totally
separated from renewal of spirit, from re-creation of
mind and purification of emotion is a weak and sickly
thing, destined to speedy death from starvation. That
the renewal and re-creation come unconsciously not by
set intention but makes them the more genuine.
Upon the whole, utilitarianism has marked the best
in the transition from the classic theory of ends and
goods to that which is now possible. It had definite
merits. It insisted upon getting away from vague
generalities, and down to the specific and concrete. It
I subordinated law to human achievement instead of sub-
l ordinating humanity to external law. It taught that
institutions are made for man and not man for institu
tions; it actively promoted all issues of reform. It
made moral good natural, humane, in touch with the
natural goods of life. It opposed unearthly and other
worldly morality. Above all, it acclimatized in human
imagination the idea of social welfare as a supreme test.
But it was still profoundly affected in fundamental
points by old ways of thinking. It never questioned the
idea of a fixed, final and supreme end. It only ques
tioned the current notions as to the nature of this
MORAL RECONSTRUCTION 181
end; and then inserted pleasure and the greatest pos
sible aggregate of pleasures in the position of the fixed
end.
Such a point of view treats concrete activities and
specific interests not as worth while in themselves, or as
constituents of happiness, but as mere external means to
getting pleasures. The upholders of the old tradition
could therefore easily accuse utilitarianism of making
not only virtue but art, poetry, religion and the state
into mere servile means of attaining sensuous enjoy
ments. Since pleasure was an outcome, a result valuable
on its own account independently of the active processes
that achieve it, happiness was a thing to be possessed
and held onto. The acquisitive instincts of man were
exaggerated at the expense of the creative. Production
was of importance not because of the intrinsic worth of
invention and reshaping the world, but because its
external results feed pleasure. Like every theory that
sets up fixed and final aims, in making the end passive
and possessive, it made all active operations mere tools.
Labor was an unavoidable evil to be minimized.
Security in possession was the chief thing practically.
Material comfort and ease were magnified in contrast
with the pains and risk of experimental creation.
These deficiencies, under certain conceivable condi
tions, might have remained merely theoretical. But the
disposition of the times and the interests of those who
182 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY
propagated the utilitarian ideas, endowed them with
power for social harm. In spite of the power of the
new ideas in attacking old social abuses, there were
elements in the teaching which operated or protected to
sanction new social abuses. The reforming zeal was
shown in criticism of the evils inherited from the class
system of feudalism, evils economic, legal and political.
But the new economic order of capitalism that was
superseding feudalism brought its own social evils with
it, and some of these ills utilitarianism tended to cover
up or defend. The emphasis upon acquisition and pos
session of enjoyments took on an untoward color in
connection with the contemporary enormous desire for
wealth and the enjoyments it makes possible.
If utilitarianism did not actively promote the new
economic materialism, it had no means of combating it.
Its general spirit of subordinating productive activity
to the bare product was indirectly favorable to the
cause of an unadorned commercialism. In spite of its
interest in a thoroughly social aim, utilitarianism fos
tered a new class interest, that of the capitalistic
property-owning interests, provided only property was
obtained through free competition and not by govern
mental favor. The stress that Bentham put on se
curity tended to consecrate the legal institution of
private property provided only certain legal abuses in
connection with its acquisition and transfer were
MORAL RECONSTRUCTION 183
abolished. Beati possidentes provided possessions had
been obtained in accord with the rules of the competi
tive game without, that is, extraneous favors from
government. Thus utilitarianism gave intellectual con
firmation to all those tendencies which make " business "
not a means of social service and an opportunity for
personal growth in creative power but a way of accumu
lating the means of private enjoyments. Utilitarian
ethics thus afford a remarkable example of the need
of philosophic reconstruction which these lectures have
been presenting. Up to a certain point, it reflected the
meaning of modern thought and aspirations. But it
was still tied down by fundamental ideas of that very
order which it thought it had completely left behind:
The idea of a fixed and single end lying beyond the
diversity of human needs and acts rendered utilitarian
ism incapable of being an adequate representative of the
modern spirit. It has to be reconstructed through
emancipation from its inherited elements.
If a few words are added upon the topic of education,
it is only for the sake of suggesting that the educative
process is all one with the moral process, since the latter
is a continuous passage of experience from worse to
better. Education has been traditionally thought of as
preparation : as learning, acquiring certain things be
cause they will later be useful. The end is remote, and
education is getting ready, is a preliminary to some-
184, RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY
thing more important to happen later on. Childhood is
only a preparation for adult life, and adult life for
another life. Always the future, not the present, has
been the significant thing in education: Acquisition of
knowledge and skill for future use and enjoyment;
formation of habits required later in life in business,
good citizenship and pursuit of science. Education is
thought of also as something needed by some human
beings merely because of their dependence upon others.
We are born ignorant, unversed, unskilled, immature,
and consequently in a state of social dependence. In
struction, training, moral discipline are processes by
which the mature, the adult, gradually raise the help
less to the point where they can look out for themselves.
The business of childhood is to grow into the independ
ence of adulthood by means of the guidance of those
who have already attained it. Thus the process of
education as the main business of life ends when the
young have arrived at emancipation from social de
pendence.
These two ideas, generally assumed but rarely ex
plicitly reasoned out, contravene the conception that
growing, or the continuous reconstruction of experience,
is the only end. If at whatever period we choose to take
a person, he is still in process of growth, then education
is not, save as a by-product, a preparation for some
thing coming later. Getting from the present the degree
MORAL RECONSTRUCTION 185
and kind of growth there is in it is education. This
is a constant function, independent of age. The best
thing that can be said about any special process of
education, like that of the formal school period, is that
it renders its subject capable of further education:
more sensitive to conditions of growth and more able to
take advantage of them. Acquisition of skill, possession
of knowledge, attainment of culture are not ends: they
are marks of growth and means to its continuing.
The contrast usually assumed between the period
of education as one of social dependence and of maturity
as one of social independence does harm. We repeat
over and over that man is a social animal, and then con
fine the significance of this statement to the sphere in
which sociality usually seems least evident, politics.
The heart of the sociality of man is in education. The
idea of education as preparation and of adulthood as a
fixed limit of growth are two sides of the same obnoxious
untruth. If the moral business of the adult as well as
the young is a growing and developing experience, then
the instruction that comes from social dependencies and
interdependencies are as important for the adult as for
the child. Moral independence for the adult means ar
rest of growth, isolation means induration. We exag
gerate the intellectual dependence of childhood so that
children are too much kept in leading strings, and then
we exaggerate the independence of adult life from inti-
186 RECONSTRUCTION JN PHILOSOPHY
macy of contacts and communication with others. When
the identity of the moral process with the processes of
specific growth is realized, the more conscious and
formal education of childhood will be seen to be the
most economical and efficient means of social advance
and reorganization, and it will also be evident that the
test of all the institutions of adult life is their effect in
furthering continued education. Government, business,
art, religion, all social institutions have a meaning, a
purpose. That purpose is to set free and to develop the
capacities of human individuals without respect to race,
sex, class or economic status. And this is all one with
saying that the test of their value is the extent to which
they educate every individual into the full stature of his
possibility. Democracy has many meanings, but if it
has a moral meaning, it is found in resolving that the
supreme test of all political institutions and industrial
arrangements shall be the contribution they make to
the all-around growth of every member of society.
CHAPTER VIII
RECONSTRUCTION AS AFFECTING
SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY
How can philosophic change seriously affect social
philosophy? As far as fundamentals are concerned,
every view and combination appears to have been for
mulated already. Society is composed of individuals:
this obvious and basic fact no philosophy, whatever its
pretensions to novelty, can question or alter. Hence
these three alternatives : Society must exist for the sake
of individuals ; or individuals must have their ends and
ways of living set for them by society ; or else society
and individuals are correlative, organic, to one another,
society requiring the service and subordination of indi
viduals and at the same time existing to serve them.
Beyond these three views, none seems to be logically
conceivable. Moreover, while each of the three types in
cludes many subspecies and variations within itself, yet
the changes seem to have been so thoroughly rung that
at most only minor variations are now possible.
Especially would it seem true that the " organic "
conception meets all the objections to the extreme indi
vidualistic and extreme socialistic theories, avoiding the
187
188 EECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY
errors alike of Plato and Bentham. Just because so
ciety is composed of individuals, it would seem that indi
viduals and the associative relations that hold them to
gether must be of coequal importance. Without strong
and competent individuals, the bonds and ties that form
society have nothing to lay hold on. Apart from asso
ciations with one another, individuals are isolated from
one another and fade and wither ; or are opposed to one
another and their conflicts injure individual develop
ment. Law, state, church, family, friendship, industrial
association, these and other institutions and arrange
ments are necessary in order that individuals may grow
and find their specific capacities and functions. With
out their aid and support human life is, as Hobbes said,
brutish, solitary, nasty.
We plunge into the heart of the matter, by asserting
that these various theories suffer from a common defect.
They are all committed to the logic of general notions
under which specific situations are to be brought. What
we want light upon is this or that group of individuals,
this or that concrete human being, this or that special
institution or social arrangement. For such a logic of
inquiry, the traditionally accepted logic substitutes dis
cussion of the meaning of concepts and their dialectical
relationship to one another. The discussion goes on in
terms of the state, the individual ; the nature of institu
tions as such, society in general.
SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY 189
We need guidance in dealing with particular perplexi
ties in domestic life, and are met by dissertations on the
Family or by assertions of the sacredness of individual
Personality. We want to know about the worth of the
institution of private property as it operates under
given conditions of definite time and place. We meet
with the reply of Proudhon that property generally is
theft, or with that of Hegel that the realization of will
is the end of all institutions, and that private ownership
as the expression of mastery of personality over physi
cal nature is a necessary element in such realization.
Both answers may have a certain suggestiveness in con
nection with specific situations. But the conceptions are
not proffered for what they may be worth in connection
with special historic phenomena. They are general
answers supposed to have a universal meaning that
covers and dominates all particulars. Hence they do
not assist inquiry. They close it. They are not instru
mentalities to be employed and tested in clarifying con
crete social difficulties. They are ready-made principles
to be imposed upon particulars in order to determine
their nature. They tell us about the state when we
want to know about some state. But the implication is
that what is said about the state applies to any state
that we happen to wish to know about.
In transferring the issue from concrete situations to
definitions and conceptual deductions, the effect, espe-
190 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY
cially of the organic theory, is to supply the apparatus
for intellectual justification of the established order.
Those most interested in practical social progress and
the emancipation of groups from oppression have turned
a cold shoulder to the organic theory. The effect, if not
the intention, of German idealism as applied in social
philosophy was to provide a bulwark for the mainte
nance of the political status quo against the tide of
radical ideas coming from revolutionary France. Al
though Hegel asserted in explicit form that the end of
states and institutions is to further the realization of
the freedom of all, his effect was to consecrate the Prus
sian State and to enshrine bureaucratic absolutism.
Was this apologetic tendency accidental, or did it
spring from something in the logic of the notions that
were employed?
Surely the latter. If we talk about the state and the
individual, rather than about this or that political or
ganization and this or that group of needy and suffering
human beings, the tendency is to throw the glamor and
prestige, the meaning and value attached to the general
notion, over the concrete situation and thereby to cover
up the defects of the latter and disguise the need of seri
ous reforms. The meanings which are found in the gen
eral notions are injected into the particulars that come
under them. Quite properly so if we once grant the
logic of rigid universals under which the concrete cases
SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY 191
have to be subsumed in order to be understood and ex
plained.
Again, the tendency of the organic point of view is
to minimize the significance of specific conflicts. Since
the individual and the state or social institution are but
two sides of the same reality, since they are already rec
onciled in principle and conception, the conflict in any
particular case can be but apparent. Since in theory
the individual and the state are reciprocally necessary
and helpful to one another, why pay much attention to
the fact that in this state a whole group of individuals
are suffering from oppressive conditions? In " reality "
their interests cannot be in conflict with those of the
state to which they belong; the opposition is only super
ficial and casual. Capital and labor cannot " really "
conflict because each is an organic necessity to the
other, and both to the organized community as a whole.
There cannot " really " be any sex-problem because men
and women are indispensable both to one another and
to the state. In his day, Aristotle could easily employ
the logic of general concepts superior to individuals to
show that the institution of slavery was in the interests
both of the state and of the slave class. Even if the in
tention is not to justify the existing order the effect
is to divert attention from special situations. Rational
istic logic formerly made men careless in observation of
the concrete in physical philosophy. It now operates to
192 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY
depress and retard observation in specific social phe
nomena. The social philosopher, dwelling in the region
of his concepts, " solves " problems by showing the
relationship of ideas, instead of helping men solve prob
lems in the concrete by supplying them hypotheses to be
used and tested in projects of reform.
Meanwhile, of course, the concrete troubles and evils
remain. They are not magically waived out of existence
because in theory society is organic. The region of
concrete difficulties, where the assistance of intelligent
method for tentative plans for experimentation is ur
gently needed, is precisely where intelligence fails to
operate. In this region of the specific and concrete, men
are thrown back upon the crudest empiricism, upon
short-sighted opportunism and the matching of brute
forces. In theory, the particulars are all neatly dis
posed of; they come under their appropriate heading
and category ; they are labelled and go into an orderly
pigeon-hole in a systematic filing cabinet, labelled politi
cal science or sociology. But in empirical fact they
remain as perplexing, confused and unorganized as they
were before. So they are dealt with not by even an
endeavor at scientific method but by blind rule of
thumb, citation of precedents, considerations of imme
diate advantage, smoothing things over, use of coercive
force and the clash of personal ambitions. The world
still survives; it has therefore got on somehow: so
SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY 193
much cannot be denied. The method of trial and error
and competition of selfishnesses has somehow wrought
out many improvements. But social theory neverthe
less exists as an idle luxury rather than as a guiding
method of inquiry and planning. In the question of
methods concerned with reconstruction of special situa
tions rather than in any refinements in the general con
cepts of institution, individuality, state, freedom, law,
order, progress, etc., lies the true impact of philosophi
cal reconstruction.
Consider the conception of the individual self. The
individualistic school of England and France in the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was empirical in in
tent. It based its individualism, philosophically speak
ing, upon the belief that individuals are alone real, that
classes and organizations are secondary and derived.
They are artificial, while individuals are natural. In
what way then can individualism be said to come under
the animadversions that have been passed? To say the
defect was that this school overlooked those connections
with other persons which are a part of the constitution
of every individual is true as far as it goes ; but unfortu
nately it rarely goes beyond the point of just that
wholesale justification of institutions which has been
criticized.
The real difficulty is that the individual is regarded
as something given, something already there. Conse-
194- RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY
quently, he can only be something to be catered to, some
thing whose pleasures are to be magnified and posses
sions multiplied. When the individual is taken as some
thing given already, anything that can be done to him
or for him it can only be by way of external impres
sions and belongings: sensations of pleasure and pain,
comforts, securities. Now it is true that social arrange
ments, laws, institutions are made for man, rather than
that man is made for them; that they are means and
agencies of human welfare and progress. But they are
not means for obtaining something for individuals, not
even happiness. They are means of creating indi
viduals. Only in the physical sense of physical bodies
that to the senses are separate is individuality an
original datum. Individuality in a social and moral
sense is something to be wrought out. It means initia
tive, inventiveness, varied resourcefulness, assumption
of responsibility in choice of belief and conduct. These
are not gifts, but achievements. As achievements, they
are not absolute but relative to the use that is to be
made of them. And this use varies with the environ
ment.
The import of this conception comes out in consider
ing the fortunes of the idea of self-interest. All mem
bers of the empirical school emphasized this idea. It
was the sole motive of mankind. Virtue was to be at
tained by making benevolent action profitable to the
SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY 195
individual ; social arrangements were to be reformed so
that egoism and altruistic consideration of others would
be identified. Moralists of the opposite school were not
backward in pointing out the evils of any theory that
reduced both morals and political science to means of
calculating self-interest. Consequently they threw the
whole idea of interest overboard as obnoxious to morals.
The effect of this reaction was to strengthen the cause
of authority and political obscurantism. When the
play of interest is eliminated, what remains? What
concrete moving forces can be found? Those who iden
tified the self with something ready-made and its in
terest with acquisition of pleasure and profit took the
most effective means possible to reinstate the logic of
abstract conceptions of law, justice, sovereignty, free
dom, etc. all of those vague general ideas that for all
their seeming rigidity can be manipulated by any clever
politician to cover up his designs and to make the worse
seem the better cause. Interests are specific and dy
namic ; they are the natural terms of any concrete social
thinking. But they are damned beyond recovery when
they are identified with the things of a petty selfishness.
They can be employed as vital terms only when the
self is seen to be in process, and interest to be a
name for whatever is concerned in furthering its move
ment.
The same logic applies to the old dispute of whether
196 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY
reform should start with the individual or with institu
tions. When the self is regarded as something complete
within itself, then it is readily argued that only internal
moralistic changes are of importance in general reform.
Institutional changes are said to be merely external.
They may add conveniences and comforts to life, but
they cannot effect moral improvements. The result is
to throw the burden for social improvement upon free
will in its most impossible form. Moreover, social and
economic passivity are encouraged. Individuals are led
to concentrate in moral introspection upon their own
vices and virtues, and to neglect the character of the
environment. Morals withdraw from active concern
with detailed economic and political conditions. Let us
perfect ourselves within, and in due season changes in
society will come of themselves is the teaching. And
while saints are engaged in introspection, burly sinners
run the world. But when self-hood is perceived to be an
active process it is also seen that social modifications are
the only means of the creation of changed personalities.
Institutions are viewed in their educative effect : with
reference to the types of individuals they foster. The in
terest in individual moral improvement and the social
interest in objective reform of economic and political
conditions are identified. And inquiry into the meaning
of social arrangements gets definite point and direction.
We are led to ask what the specific stimulating, foster-
SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY 197
ing and nurturing power of each specific social arrange
ment may be. The old-time separation between politics
and morals is abolished at its root.
Consequently we cannot be satisfied with the general
statement that society and the state is organic to the
individual. The question is one of specific causations.
Just what response does this social arrangement, po
litical or economic, evoke, and what effect does it
have upon the disposition of those who engage in it?
Does it release capacity? If so, how widely? Among
a few, with a corresponding depression in others, or in
an extensive and equitable way? Is the capacity which
is set free also directed in some coherent way, so that
it becomes a power, or its manifestation spasmodic and
capricious? Since responses are of an indefinite di
versity of kind, these inquiries have to be detailed and
specific. Are men s senses rendered more delicately sen
sitive and appreciative, or are they blunted and dulled
by this and that form of social organization ? Are their
minds trained so that the hands are more deft and cun
ning? Is curiosity awakened or blunted? What is its
quality : is it merely esthetic, dwelling on the forms and
surfaces of things or is it also an intellectual search
ing into their meaning? Such questions as these (as
well as the more obvious ones about the qualities con
ventionally labelled moral), become the starting-points
of inquiries about every institution of the community
198 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY
when it is recognized that individuality is not originally
given but is created under the influences of associated
life. Like utilitarianism, the theory subjects every form
of organization to continual scrutiny and criticism.
But instead of leading us to ask what it does in the way
of causing pains and pleasures to individuals already
in existence, it inquires what is done to release specific
capacities and co-ordinate them into working powers.
What sort of individuals are created?
The waste of mental energy due to conducting discus
sion of social affairs in terms of conceptual generalities
is astonishing. Plow far would the biologist and the
physician progress if when the subject of respiration is
under consideration, discussion confined itself to bandy
ing back and forth the concepts of organ and organism :
If for example one school thought respiration could
be known and understood by insisting upon the fact that
it occurs in an individual body and therefore is an
" individual " phenomenon, while an opposite school in
sisted that it is simply one function in organic inter
action with others and can be known or understood
therefore only by reference to other functions taken in
an equally general or wholesale way? Each proposition
is equally true and equally futile. What is needed is
specific inquiries into a multitude of specific struc
tures and interactions. Not only does the solemn
reiteration of categories of individual and organic or
SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY 199
social whole not further these definite and detailed in
quiries, but it checks them. It detains thought within
pompous and sonorous generalities wherein controversy
is as inevitable as it is incapable of solution. It is true
enough that if cells were not in vital interaction with
one another, they could neither conflict nor co-operate.
But the fact of the existence of an " organic " social
group, instead of answering any questions merely marks
the fact that questions exist: Just what conflicts and
what co-operations occur, and what are their specific
causes and consequences? But because of the persist
ence within social philosophy of the order of ideas that
has been expelled from natural philosophy, even sociolo
gists take conflict or co-operation as general categories
upon which to base their science, and condescend to em
pirical facts only for illustrations. As a rule, their
chief " problem " is a purely dialectical one, covered up
by a thick quilt of empirical anthropological and his
torical citations: How do individuals unite to form so
ciety? How are individuals socially controlled? And
the problem is justly called dialectical because it springs
from antecedent conceptions of " individual " and
" social."
Just as " individual " is not one thing, but is a
blanket term for the immense variety of specific re
actions, habits, dispositions and powers of human nature
that are evoked, and confirmed under the influences of
200 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY
associated life, so with the term " social." Society is
one word, but infinitely many things. It covers all the
ways in which by associating together men share their
experiences, and build up common interests and aims;
street gangs, schools for burglary, clans, social cliques,
trades unions, joint stock corporations, villages and
international alliances. The new method takes effect in
substituting inquiry into these specific, changing and
relative facts (relative to problems and purposes, not
metaphysically relative) for solemn manipulation of
general notions.
Strangely enough, the current conception of the state
is a case in point. For one direct influence of the
classic order of fixed species arranged in hierarchical
order is the attempt of German political philosophy in
the nineteenth century to enumerate a definite number
of institutions, each having its own essential and im
mutable meaning; to arrange them in an order of " evo
lution " which corresponds with the dignity and rank
of the respective meanings. The National State was
placed at the top as the consummation and culmination,
and also the basis of all other institutions.
Hegel is a striking example of this industry, but he is
far from the only one. Many who have bitterly quar
relled with him, have only differed as to the details of
the " evolution " or as to the particular meaning to be
attributed as essential Begriff to some one of the
SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY 201
enumerated institutions. The quarrel has been bitter
only because the underlying premises were the same.
Particularly have many schools of thought, varying
even more widely in respect to method and conclusion,
agreed upon the final consummating position of the
state. They may not go as far as Hegel in making the
sole meaning of history to be the evolution of National
Territorial States, each of which embodies more than
the prior form of the essential meaning or conception of
the State and consequently displaces it, until we arrive
at that triumph of historical evolution, the Prussian
State. But they do not question the unique and su
preme position of the State in the social hierarchy.
Indeed that conception has hardened into unquestion
able dogma under the title of sovereignty.
There can be no doubt of the tremendously important
role played by the modern territorial national state.
The formation of these states has been the centre of
modern political history. France, Great Britain, Spain
were the first peoples to attain nationalistic organiza
tion, but in the nineteenth century their example was fol
lowed by Japan, Germany and Italy, to say nothing of
a large number of smaller states, Greece, Servia, Bul
garia, etc. As everybody knows, one of the most im
portant phases of the recent world war was the struggle
to complete the nationalistic movement, resulting in the
erection of Bohemia, Poland, etc., into independent
202 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY
states, and the accession of Armenia, Palestine, etc., to
the rank of candidates.
The struggle for the supremacy of the State over
other forms of organization was directed against the
power of minor districts, provinces, principalities,
against the dispersion of power among feudal lords as
well as, in some countries, against the pretensions of an
ecclesiastic potentate. The " State " represents the
conspicuous culmination of the great movement of social
integration and consolidation taking place in the last
few centuries, tremendously accelerated by the concen
trating and combining forces of steam ad electricity.
Naturally, inevitably, the students of political science
have been preoccupied with this great historic phe
nomenon, and their intellectual activities have been di
rected to its systematic formulation. Because the con
temporary progressive movement was to establish the
unified state against the inertia of minor social units
and against the ambitions of rivals for power, political
theory developed the dogma of the sovereignty of the
national state, internally and externally.
As the work of integration and consolidation reaches
its climax, the question arises, however, whether the na
tional state, once it is firmly established and no longer
struggling against strong foes, is not just an instru
mentality for promoting and protecting other and more
voluntary forms of association, rather than a supreme
SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY 203
end in itself. Two actual phenomena may be pointed to
in support of an affirmative answer. Along with the
development of the larger, more inclusive and more uni
fied organization of the state has gone the emancipation
of individuals from restrictions and servitudes previ
ously imposed by custom and class status. But the in
dividuals freed from external and coercive bonds have not
remained isolated. Social molecules have at once recom-
bined in new associations and organizations. Compul
sory associations have been replaced by voluntary ones ;
rigid organizations by those more amenable to human
choice and purposes more directly changeable at will.
What upon one side looks like a movement toward in
dividualism, turns out to be really a movement toward
multiplying all kinds and varieties of associations :
Political parties, industrial corporations, scientific and
artistic organizations, trade unions, churches, schools,
clubs and societies without number, for the cultivation of
every conceivable interest that men have in common. As
they develop in number and importance, the state tends
to become more and more a regulator and adjuster
among them; defining the limits of their actions, pre
venting and settling conflicts.
Its " supremacy " approximates that of the con
ductor of an orchestra, who makes no music himself but
who harmonizes the activities of those who in producing
it are doing the thing intrinsically worth while. The
204 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY
state remains highly important but its importance
consists more and more in its power to foster and co
ordinate the activities of voluntary groupings. Only
nominally is it in any modern community the end for the
sake of which all the other societies and organizations
exist. Groupings for promoting the diversity of goods
that men share have become the real social units. They
occupy the place which traditional theory has claimed
either for mere isolated individuals or for the supreme
and single political organization. Pluralism is well
ordained in present political practice and demands a
modification of hierarchical and monistic theory. Every
combination of human forces that adds its own con
tribution of value to life has for that reason its own
unique and ultimate worth. It cannot be degraded
into a means to glorify the State. One reason for the
increased demoralization of war is that it forces the
State into an abnormally supreme position.
The other concrete fact is the opposition between the
claim of independent sovereignty in behalf of the terri
torial national state and the growth of international
and what have well been called trans-national interests.
The weal and woe of any modern state is bound up with
that of others. Weakness, disorder, false principles on
the part of any state are not confined within its boun
daries. They spread and infect other states. The same
is true of economic, artistic and scientific advances.
SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY 205
Moreover the voluntary associations just spoken of do
not coincide with political boundaries. Associations of
mathematicians, chemists, astronomers ; business corpo
rations, labor organizations, churches are trans-national
because the interests they represent are worldwide. In
such ways as these, internationalism is not an aspiration
but a fact, not a sentimental ideal but a force. Yet
these interests are cut across and thrown out of gear by
the traditional doctrine of exclusive national sover
eignty. It is the vogue of this doctrine, or dogma,
that presents the strongest barrier to the effective for
mation of an international mind which alone agrees
with the moving forces of present-day labor, commerce,
science, art and religion.
Society, as was said, is many associations not a single
organization. Society means association ; coming to
gether in joint intercourse and action for the better
realization of any form of experience which is aug
mented and confirmed by being shared. Hence there
are as many associations as there are goods which are
enhanced by being mutually communicated and partici
pated in. And these are literally indefinite in number.
Indeed, capacity to endure publicity and communication
is the test by which it is decided whether a pretended
good is genuine or spurious. Moralists have always in
sisted upon the fact that good is universal, objective, not
just private, particular. But too often, like Plato,
206 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY
they have been content with a metaphysical universality
or, like Kant, with a logical universality. Communi
cation, sharing, joint participation are the only actual
ways of universalizing the moral law and end. We in
sisted at the last hour upon the unique character of
every intrinsic good. But the counterpart of this
proposition is that the situation in which a good is
consciously realized is not one of transient sensations
or private appetites but one of sharing and communi
cation public, social. Even the hermit communes with
gods or spirits; even misery loves company; and the
most extreme selfishness includes a band of followers
or some partner to share in the attained good.
Universalization means socialization, the extension of
the. area and range of those who share in a
good.
The increasing acknowledgment that goods exist and
endure only through being communicated and that asso
ciation is the means of conjoint sharing lies back of the
modern sense of humanity and democracy. It is the
saving salt in altruism and philanthropy, which with
out this factor degenerate into moral condescension and
moral interference, taking the form of trying to regu
late the affairs of others under the guise of doing them
good or of conferring upon them some right as if it
were a gift of charity. It follows that organization is
never an end in itself. It is a means of promoting asso-
SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY 207
elation, of multiplying effective points of contact be
tween persons, directing their intercourse into the modes
of greatest fruitfulness.
The tendency to treat organization as an end in itself
is responsible for all the exaggerated theories in which
individuals are subordinated to some institution to
which is given the noble name of society. Society is the
process of associating in such ways that experiences,
ideas, emotions, values are transmitted and made
common. To this active process, both the individual
and the institutionally organized may truly be said to
be subordinate. The individual is subordinate because
except in and through communication of experience
from and to others, he remains dumb, merely sentient,
a brute animal. Only in association with fellows does
he become a conscious centre of experience. Organiza
tion, which is what traditional theory has generally
meant by the term Society or State, is also subordinate
because it becomes static, rigid, institutionalized when
ever it is not employed to facilitate and enrich the con
tacts of human beings with one another.
The long-time controversy between rights and duties,
law and freedom is another version of the strife between
the Individual and Society as fixed concepts. Freedom
for an individual means growth, ready change when
modification is required.
It signifies an active process, that of release of.
208 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY
capacity from whatever hems it in. But since society
can develop only as new resources are put at its dis
posal, it is absurd to suppose that freedom has positive
significance for individuality but negative meaning for
social interests. Society is strong, forceful, stable
against accident only when all its members can function
to the limit of their capacity. Such functioning cannot
be achieved without allowing a leeway of experimenta
tion beyond the limits of established and sanctioned
custom. A certain amount of overt confusion and ir
regularity is likely to accompany the granting of the
margin of liberty without which capacity cannot find
itself. But socially as well as scientifically the great
thing is not to avoid mistakes but to have them take
place under conditions such that they can be utilized to
increase intelligence in the future.
If British liberal social philosophy tended, true to the
spirit of its atomistic empiricism, to make freedom and
the exercise of rights ends in themselves, the remedy is
not to be found in recourse to a philosophy of fixed
obligations and authoritative law such as characterized
German political thinking. The latter, as events have
demonstrated; is dangerous because of its implicit
menace to the free self-determination of other social
groups. But it is also weak internally when put to the
final test. In its hostility to the free experimentation
and power of choice of the individual in determining
SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY 209
social affairs, it limits the capacity of many or most
individuals to share effectively in social operations, and
thereby deprives society of the full contribution of all
its members. The best guarantee of collective efficiency
and power is liberation and use of the diversity of indi
vidual capacities in initiative, planning, foresight,
vigor and endurance. Personality must be educated,
and personality cannot be educated by confining its
operations to technical and specialized things, or to the
less important relationships of life. Full education
comes only when there is a responsible share on the part
of each person, in proportion to capacity, in shaping
the aims and policies of the social groups to which he
belongs. This fact fixes the significance of democracy.
It cannot be conceived as a sectarian or racial thing nor
as a consecration of some form of government which
has already attained constitutional sanction. It is but
a name for the fact that human nature is developed only
when its elements take part in directing things which
are common, things for the sake of which men and
women form groups families, industrial companies,
governments, churches, scientific associations and so on.
The principle holds as much of one form of association,
say in industry and commerce, as it does in government.
The identification of democracy with political democ
racy which is responsible for most of its failures is, how
ever, based upon the traditional ideas which make the
210 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY
individual and the state ready-made entities in them
selves.
As the new ideas find adequate expression in social
life, they will be absorbed into a moral background, and
will the ideas and beliefs themselves be deepened and
be unconsciously transmitted and sustained. They will
color the imagination and temper the desires and af
fections. They will not form a set of ideas to be ex
pounded, reasoned out and argumentatively supported,
but will be a spontaneous way of envisaging life. Then
they will take on religious value. The religious spirit
will be revivified because it will be in harmony with men s
unquestioned scientific beliefs and their ordinary day-
by-day social activities. It will not be obliged to lead a
timid, half-concealed and half-apologetic life because
tied to scientific ideas and social creeds that are con
tinuously eaten into and broken down. But especially
will the ideas and beliefs themselves be deepened and
intensified because spontaneously fed by emotion and
translated into imaginative vision and fine art, while
they are now maintained by more or less conscious ef
fort, by deliberate reflection, by taking thought. They
are technical and abstract just because they are not as
yet carried as matter of course by imagination and
feelings.
We began by pointing out that European philosophy
arose when intellectual methods and scientific results
SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY 211
moved away from social traditions which had consoli
dated and embodied the fruits of spontaneous desire and
fancy. It was pointed out that philosophy had ever
since had the problem of adjusting the dry, thin and
meagre scientific standpoint with the obstinately per
sisting body of warm and abounding imaginative beliefs.
Conceptions of possibility, progress, free movement and
infinitely diversified opportunity have been suggested by
modern science. But until they have displaced from
imagination the heritage of the immutable and the once-
for-all ordered and systematized, the ideas of mech
anism and matter will lie like a dead weight upon the
emotions, paralyzing religion and distorting art. When
the liberation of capacity no longer seems a menace to
organization and established institutions, something
that cannot be avoided practically and yet something
that is a threat to conservation of the most precious
values of the past, when the liberating of human capacity
operates as a socially creative force, art will not be a
luxury, a stranger to the daily occupations of making
a living. Making a living economically speaking, will
be at one with making a life that is worth living. And
when the emotional force, the mystic force one might
say, of communication, of the miracle of shared life
and shared experience is spontaneously felt, the hard
ness and crudeness of contemporary life will be bathed
in the light that never was on land or sea.
212 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY
Poetry, art, religion are precious things. They can
not be maintained by lingering in the past and futilely
wishing to restore what the movement of events in
science, industry and politics has destroyed. They are
an out-flowering of thought and desires that uncon
sciously converge into a disposition of imagination as a
result of thousands and thousands of daily episodes and
contact. They cannot be willed into existence or
coerced into being. The wind of the spirit bloweth
where it listeth and the kingdom of God in such things
does not come with observation. But while it is im
possible to retain and recover by deliberate volition old
sources of religion and art that have been discredited, it
is possible to expedite the development of the vital
sources of a religion and art that are yet to be. Not
indeed by action directly aimed at their production, but
by substituting faith in the active tendencies of the day
for dread and dislike of them, and by the courage of
intelligence to follow whither social and scientific
changes direct us. We are weak today in ideal matters
because intelligence is divorced from aspiration. The
bare force of circumstance compels us onwards in the
daily detail of our beliefs and acts, but our deeper
thoughts and desires turn backwards. When philoso
phy shall have co-operated with the course of events and
made clear and coherent the meaning of the daily detail,
science and emotion will interpenetrate, practice and
SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY 213
imagination will embrace. Poetry and religious feeling
will be the unforced flowers of life. To further this
articulation and revelation of the meanings of the cur
rent course of events is the task and problem of philoso
phy in days of transition.
INDEX
INDEX
Absolute reality, 23, 27
Absolutism, 97, 190; Kant
and, 99
Abstract definition, 20
Abstractions, 149-150, 174
Absurdities, 10
Achievements, 194
Action, kind of; 80
Adult life, 185, 186
America, 41
Amoeba, 91
Animals, dramatisation in
primitive life of man, 4
Antiquity, 33
Apprehension, 142
Aquinas, 55, 106
Argumentation, 81, 132
Aristotle, 13, 17, 19, 55; Bacon s
charge against, 30-31, 36;
distinction in ends, 171; ex
perience, 79, 80; forms, 105;
on change, 107; on philosophy
as contemplation, 109, 110;
on slavery, 191; theory of the
state, 44; ultimate reality, 106
Art, 34, 103, 211, 212
Artisan, 15; knowledge, 110
Associations, 205; voluntary,
203
Astronomers, 65, 113
Astronomy, 75
Athenians, 13, 19
Augustine, St., Ill
Authority, 48, 139, 195; final,
161; seat of, 160. See also
Final good
Bacon, Francis, 28, 81, 97;
criticism of the learning of
his day, 29-30; experience, 97-
98 ; " knowledge is power,"
29; summary of ideas, 29
Being, perfect, 111
Being and non-being, 107
Beliefs and facts, 12
Bentham, 166, 182, 188
Bergson, 71
Berkeley, 50
Biology, 75, 84
Bliss, 111, 112
Bosanquet, 134
Bradley, 107
Bruno, 66
Business, 41, 43, 183
Butler, Bishop, 21
Capital, 43
Capital and labour, 191
Capitalism, 41, 182
Castes, material, 59
Casuistry, 166
Causation, 63
Causes, 59, 60
Certainty, 21, 22
Change, ancient idea of, 57;
existing view, 113; law of the
universe, 61; Plato and Aris
totle on, 107; progress and,
116
Chemistry, 75
Child life, 91-92, 184
Christian mediaeval philosophy,
17, 19
Christian theology, 111
Church, 47; universal, 45
Classes, 75, 152, 155; in the
ancient conception of the
world, 59
217
218
INDEX
Classic conception of philoso
phy, 17, 22, 24, 74, 105
Classification, 152, 169
Common sense, 100
Communication at a distance,
118, 120
Comte, Auguste, 10
Conceptions, 81, 144, 145; re
construction in, moral, 161;
truth, 156
Concrete cases, in morals, 161;
in social philosophy, 188
Concreteness, ,150
Condillac, 81
Conduct, 80; right course, 163
Conflict, 108, 138, 140; of ends,
166
Conscience, 46
Consequences, investigating,
163-164
Conservatism, 18, 33, 40, 100
Constant, 61
Contemplation, 109, 111
Contract theory of the state,
45
Control, 42, 64
Co-operation in research, 37
Cosmogonies and cosmologies, 9
Cosmology, 70, 75
Craftsmen, 12, 13
Criteria, 77
Crusades, 39
Cults, 8; consolidation, 9
Custom, 17, 161
Dante, 55
Darwin, 75
Deduction, 148
Delusions, 139
Democracy, 47, 186, 206; of
facts, 66; significance, 209
Demonstration, 20, 21, 31; dis
covery vs., 32
Descartes, 50
Desires, 110, 111; frustration,
104
Details, 141
Development, Aristotle s use of
term, 57, 58
Diagnosis, 142
Direction, 176
Disagreeable, 103
Discipline, 103, 104, 184
Discord, 108
Discovery, contacts of 16th and
17th centuries, 39; demon
stration vs., 32; logic of, 31,
33; moral, 174
Distance, 118-119, 120
Doctrines, 8; consolidation, 9
Dogma, 145, 159
Dreams, 119, 120, 139; world of, 7
Dualism, 173
Duties and rights, 207
Earth, ancient conception, 55;
relation to universe, 66
Economic ends, 171-172
Education, 125, 183, 209
Efficient cause, 59, 60
Emotion, 103, 210
Empirical and rational, 81, 87
Empiricists, 78, 82
Ends, conflicting, 166; fixed, 70;
intrinsic and instrumental,
170, 172-173; means and, 72-
73; values, 175
English empiricism, 99
Environment, 10; life and, 84
Epistemology, 49, 70, 123, 126
Errors, 35
Esthetic and practical, 66
Estheticism, 115-116, 117, 180;
science and, reconciling, 127
Ether, 55, 56
Ethical theory, 161
Europe, nationalistic movement,
201; social cause of intellec
tual revolution in 16th and
17th centuries, 38-39
Evil, problem of, 177
Evolution, in Aristotle, 58; of
the state, 200-201
Existence, two realms, 22
INDEX
219
Experience, 32; as a guide in
science and moral fife, 78;
basis of old notion of, 79;
changed conceptions, 77;
classic notion and modern,
81; combined doing and suf
fering, 86; evil result of un
imaginative conception of,
100-101; Greek, 79; modern
appeal to, 48; new conception,
83; Plato, 92; principles and,
48; self-regulative, 94-95;
true " stuff " of, 91
Experimental method, 13
Experimentation, 42
Exploration, 39, 40
Facing facts, 140, 141, 143
Facts, 10, 98
Falsity, 158
Family principle, 189; in the
world at large, 61-62
Fanaticism, 168
Fancy. See Imagination
Fear, 40
Feudalism, 43, 45; of the uni
verse in ancient conception,
59, 61-62
Fighting, 15
Final cause, 59, 60, 68
Final good, 161-162, 183; exist
ence of a single good ques
tioned, 162
Fine arts, 126
Finite, 107
Finite and infinite, 66
Fire, 11, 56, 86
Fixed ends, 165
Flux, 57, 108
Formal cause, 59, 60
Forms of Aristotle, 105
Free will, 196
Freedom, law and, 207; re
ligious, 46
Future, 48
Future aim of philosophy, 26
General notions, in morals, 161;
in social philosophy, 188
Generalities, 174; social affairs
and, 198
Generalisations, 10, 151
Geology, 75
German political philosophy,
200, 208-209
German rationalism, 99
Germans, system, order, docil
ity, 98-99
Germany, 19
God, 10, 109
Golden Age, 48
Good. See Final good
Goodness, 179
Greeks, 9, 13, 19, 66, 67, 126;
ethical theory, 161; religion,
105; science and arts, 93
Growth, 184; of knowledge, 31;
moral, 177
Happiness, 179
Healthy living, 166, 167, 177
Heavens, ancient conception,
56
Hegel, 19, 106, 189, 190; con
ception of the state, 200, 201 ;
logic, 134
Helvetitis, 81
Hierarchical order, 59
"Higher" ends, 172
Hindoos, 126
History, Hegel s conception,
201
History of philosophy, 25
Hobbes, 88, 188
Homo faber, 71
Human aims, 42, 43
Human life, "real" and
"ideal," a live issue, 128
Humanism and naturalism, 174
Humanity, 206
Hume, 50, 83, 89
Hypotheses, 22, 145
Hysteria, 139
Ideal, changed conceptions, 103;
220
INDEX
problem of relation to the
real, 130; real and, a human
issue, 128
Ideal realm, classic and modern
conceptions contrasted, 118
Idealism, 129; epistemological,
49, 51; theological, 50; tragic
kind, 129-130
Ideality, one with reality, 111;
philosophic conception, 106
Ideas of Plato, 105
Idols, 36
Ills, 169; philosophy and, 177-
178
Imagination, 211; empirical
knowledge and, 73, 74; re
shaping power, 103, 106
Independence, 110; social, 185
India, 41
Individual, 36, 45, 51; concept
as something given, 193; in
social and moral sense, 194;
social and, 199; state and,
190, 191
Individualism, 50; political, 45,
46; religious, 46; religious
and moral, 46
Induction, 34
Industrial revolution and scien
tific revolution, 38, 41
Industry, movements, 47;
science and, 38, 41, 42
Infinite, 66, 67
Initiative 46, 209
Innate ideas, 35, 82
Inquiry, 174; free, 146; impar
tial, 147; methods in moral
ills, 170
Insincerity, 20
Instability, 107
Institutions, 196; true starting-
points of inquiry about, 197
Instrumental ends, 171
Intellect, 6
Intellectual somnambulism, 140
Intellectualism, 117
Intelligence, 36, 51; as inquiry
into consequences, 163-164 ;
definition, 96
Interest, 194-195
International interests, 204, 205
Intrinsic good, 170, 206
Introspection, 196
Invention, 39, 42, 49, 122
Investigation, 147
Ipse dixit method, 166
Irresponsibility, 97
James, William, 21; Pragma
tism, 38
Judea, 9
Judgment, 133; moral, 176;
standards, 175
Kant, 50, 83, 98, 206 ; his philoso
phy and German character,
98-99
Kinship, 62
Knowledge, conception as be
holding, 115; degrees, 108;
empirical as organ of imagi
nation, 73, 74; existing prac
tice, 112; modern view of
right way to get it, 113; posi
tive, 12; positive vs. tradition,
16; practical and operative,
121, 122; sensations and, 87,
88, 89; spectator conception,
112, 117
" Knowledge is power," 29, 42, 51
Law, 61, 64; freedom and, 207;
reason and, 98. See also Final
good
Learning, Bacon s three kinds,
29
Licentiousness, 163
Life, 167, 211; environment and,
84-85
Literary culture, 39
Locke, 35, 50, 81, 89, 152;
philosophic empiricism, 82
Logic, a science and an art,
135; apparatus, 20, 21; char
acter, 132, 134; importance,
INDEX
221
138; in morals and politics,
138; inconsistencies, 134; new,
36; of discovery, 33; of dis
covery vs. that of argumen
tation, 31; theory, chaotic
state, 133
Logical system, 9
Lotze, 134
Making a living, 211
Man, perfectibility, 49; primi
tive, 4, 5; savage and civilized,
85; tool-maker, 71
Marcus Aurelius, 106
Materialism, 50, 70, 73, 171, 182
Mathematics, 137, 149
Matter, 72, 211
Means and ends, 72-73
Mechanics, 67, 69; Greeks and,
67
Mechanism, 211
Mechanisation of nature, 71-72
Mediaeval Christianity, 17, 19,
126
Meliorism, 178
Memory, 1, 6, 103; emotional
character, 2; individual and
group, 8; primitive, 3
Metaphysics, 17, 124, 126
Methods, 149; social philosophy,
193; true, 32
Middle Ages, 47, 64, 132
Military art, 15
Mill, J. S., 132
Mind, pure, 111
Miracles, 125
Mistakes, 175
Modern thought, 52; Bacon as
founder, 28; early, 49, 50.
See also Thought
Mohammedans, 39
Moral ends, 169
Moral life, 165
Moral science. See under
Science
Morality, pragmatic rule, 163;
standard of judgment, 176
Morals, 126, 169; politics and,
197
\
National state, 200; end or in
strument, 202-203; role of
the modern, 201
Nationalistic movement, 201
Natural Science. See tinder
Science
Naturalism and humanism, 174
Nature, contrast of ancient and
modern conceptions, 53-54 ;
inquiry into, 32, 37, 48, 49;
loss of poetry when consid
ered as mechanism, 69; pro
found change in man s atti
tude to, 115; value of
mechanisation, 71-72; web im
posed on, 35-36
Neglect, 97
Neo-Platonism, 111
New World, 39
Non-being, 107
Noumenal reality, 23
Nous, 36
Obliviscence of the disagree
able, 103
Observation, 140
Optimism, 178
Opportunity, 211
Organic society, 187
Organisms, 86
Organisation, 206-207
Oriental nations, 127
Origin of philosophies, 5, 18, 24 5
25
Pantheon, Greek, 105
Past, 212
Perfectibility of mankind, 49
Perfection, 177
Personality, 47, 189, 209
Persuasion, 31
Pessimism, 178
Phariseeism, 176
222
INDEX
Phenomenal reality, 23
Philosophy, emancipation, 123;
function, 111, 122; future aim
and scope, 26; hard and fast
alternatives of English and
German schools, 99-100; his
tory, 25; opportunities, 49;
origin, 5, 18, 24, 25; practical
nature, 121; proper province,
24, 124 work, 18
Physician, 168
Physics, 75
Plato, 13, 14, 17, 19, 188, 205;
dramatic sense, 15; experi
ence, 79, 92; ideas, ideal
realm, 105; on change, 107;
social arts, 94; ultimate real
ity, 106
Pleasure, 181
Plotinus, 106
Pluralism, 204
Poetry, 7, 8, 103, 212
Political changes, 43
Political organisation, 44
Politics, 125; morals and, 197;
movements, 47
Possession of knowledge, 31
Potentiality, Aristotle s use of
term, 57, 58
Practical and esthetic, 66
Pragmatism, 38
Pretensions, 21
Primitive man, 4
Principles, 81, 163; criteria of
experience, 48
Probability, 21
Production, 181
Progress, 42, 48, 116, 211:
Bacon and, 32, 34; economic
and moral, contrast, 125
Proof, 20
Property, 182, 189
Protestantism, 46
Proudhon, 189
Prussian State, 190, 201
Psychology, 83, 135; change in,
84; malicious, 82
Pure reason, 78
Questioning, 17. See also In
quiry
Radicalism, 18, 19, 100
Rank, 63
Rationalism, 97; rigidity, 98
Rationalists, 87, 88, 89
Rationalisation, 97, 102
Real, changed conceptions, 103;
ideal and, a human issue, 128;
problem of relation to the
ideal, 130
Reality, 23, 27; classic concep
tion, 105; nomenal vs. phe
nomenal, 23; ultimate, 106;
ultimate, one with ideality,
111
Reason, 83, 174; as a faculty
separate from experience, 95;
as re-adjusting intelligence,
96; changed conceptions, 77
Reasoning, 32
Reconstruction of philosophy,
52; essential, 51; historical
factors, 28; in moral concep
tions, 161; scientific factor,
53; social philosophy and,
187; specific present problem,
43; value of a solution of
the dilemma ofi reason and
experience, 101
Re-creation, 51, 180
Reform, 179, 180; starting-
point, 196
Relativity of sensations, 88
Religion, 103, 211, 212; move
ments, 47
Religious freedom, 46
Religious spirit, 210
Renaissance, 29
Research, 42 ; co-operative,
37
Responsibility, 163
Revolution of thought, 60
Rights and duties, 207
INDEX
223
Rome, 9
Ruler and subject, 44; in
nature, 64
Rules of conduct, 165
Sailors, 11
Salvation, 112
Santayana, George, on Locke,
82
Satisfaction, 157
Savage, 85, 176
Scholasticism, 30
Science, 14, 23; advance in, 5,>;
co-operative pursuit, 37 ;
estheticism and, reconciling,
127; human value, 173; indus
try and, 38, 41, 42; natural,
42, 48; open world of, 61;
origin, 12; picture of uni
verse, 64-65; relation to ex
perience, 95; separation of
natural and moral, 173; so-
called, 36; traditional, 30
Scientific revolution, 53
Self-delusion, 140
Self-interest, 194-195
Sensations, 84; as points of re
adjustment, 89; relativity, 88
Senses, 84, 87
Sentimentalism, 73
Shakespeare, 94
Slavery, 191
Social belief, 26
Social development, 43
Social evils, 182. See also Ills
Social philosophy, reconstruc
tion, 187; reconstructive im
pact, 193
Social unit, real, 204
Social welfare, 180
Sociality, 185
Society, 200, 205; defect of
usual theories about. 188; in
dividuals and, three views,
187-188; philosophy and, 124
Socrates, 14, 17
Soldiers, 139
Sophists, 13, 14
Space, 118-119, 120
Spinoza, 106
Standards, 175
State, Aristotle s theory, 44;
contract theory, 45; current
conception, 200; importance,
204; individual and, 190, 191;
modern, 44; origin, 44; su
premacy, 202, 203
Subject and ruler, 44; in nature,
64
Success, 179
Suggestions, 3, 6, 7
Summum Conum. See Final
good
Supernaturalism, 47
System, 98, 99
Telegraph, 120
Telephone, 120
Terminology, 21
Theories, 144, 145; validity,
156
Theory and practice, 140
Things as they are, 115
Thinking, habits, 74, 75. See
also Thought
Thomas, St. See Aquinas.
Thought, 117; good and bad
thinking, 136; instrumental
nature, 145-146; its origin in
difficulties, 138-139; kinds,
135; logic and, 134; place,
96; systems, 145
Tolerance, 46
Tradition, 14; positive knowl
edge vs., 16
Transitoriousness, 106
Travel, 39, 40
Trouble, 138, 140
Truth, as utility, 157; denning,
159-160; logical conception,
156-157; old and new, 33, 34;
pragmatic conception, 156,
159; test of, nature of, 155,
166; why the modern concep
tion is offensive, 157, 158
224
INDEX
Unity, 108
Universal, 64
Universe, closed conception, 54
Utilitarianism, defects, 181 ;
merit, 180; need of recon
struction, 183
Utility, 157
Valves, 15
Verification, 156
Virtues, 164
Vision, 21
War, 204
War, world, lesson, 129; na
tionalistic phase, 201 ; " real "
and "ideal" in, 128
Wealth, 40, 42, 125
Wind, 11
Work, 181
Workingmen, 139
World, closed and open con
ceptions, 54, 60-61; modern
conception as material for
change, 114; nomenal and
phenomenal, 23
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