experiment goes without saying. It permits, sooner or later it may
require, every alleged sacrosanct principle to submit to ordeal by
fire--to trial by service rendered. From the standpoint of _a priorism_,
it is hopelessly anarchic; it is doomed, _a priori_, to failure. From
its own standpoint, it is itself a theory to be tested by experience.
Now experiments are of all kinds, varying from those generated by blind
impulse and appetite to those guided by intelligently formed ideas. They
are as diverse as the attempt of a savage to get rain by sprinkling
water and scattering thistledown, and that control of electricity in the
laboratory from which issue wireless telegraphy and rapid traction. Is
it not likely that in this distinction we have the key to the failure or
success of the experimental method generalized into a philosophy of
life, that is to say, of social matters--the only application which
procures complete generalization?
An experimental philosophy differs from empirical philosophy as
empiricism has been previously formulated. Historical empiricisms have
been stated in terms of precedents; their generalizations have been
summaries of what has previously happened. The truth and falsity of
these generalizations depended then upon the accuracy with which they
catalogued, under appropriate heads, a multiplicity of past occurrences.
They were perforce lacking in directive power except so far as the
future might be a routine repetition of the past. In an experimental
philosophy of life, the question of the past, of precedents, of origins,
is quite subordinate to prevision, to guidance and control amid future
possibilities. Consequences rather than antecedents measure the worth of
theories. Any scheme or project may have a fair hearing provided it
promise amelioration in the future; and no theory or standard is so
sacred that it may be accepted simply on the basis of past performance.
But this difference between a radically experimental philosophy and an
empiristic philosophy only emphasizes the demand for careful and
comprehensive reflection with respect to the ideas which are to be
tested in practice. If an _a priori_ philosophy has worked at all in
Germany it is because it has been based on an _a priori_ social
constitution--that is to say, on a state whose organization is such as
to determine in advance the main activities of classes of individuals,
and to utilize their particular activities by linking them up with one
another in definite ways. It is a commonplace to say that Germany is a
monument to what can be done by means of conscious method and
organization. An experimental philosophy of life in order to succeed
must not set less store upon methodic and organized intelligence, but
more. We must learn from Germany what methodic and organized work means.
But instead of confining intelligence to the technical means of
realizing ends which are predetermined by the State (or by something
called the historic Evolution of the Idea), intelligence must, with us,
devote itself as well to construction of the ends to be acted upon.
The method of trial and error or success is likely, if not directed by a
trained and informed imagination, to score an undue proportion of
failures. There is no possibility of disguising the fact that an
experimental philosophy of life means a hit-and-miss philosophy in the
end. But it means missing rather than hitting, if the aiming is done in
a happy-go-lucky way instead of by bringing to bear all the resources of
inquiry upon locating the target, constructing propulsive machinery and
figuring out the curve of trajectory. That this work is, after all, but
hypothetical and tentative till it issue from thought into action does
not mean that it might as well be random guesswork; it means that we can
do still better next time if we are sufficiently attentive to the causes
of success and failure this time.
America is too new to afford a foundation for an _a priori_ philosophy;
we have not the requisite background of law, institutions and achieved
social organization. America is too new to render congenial to our
imagination an evolutionary philosophy of the German type. For our
history is too obviously future. Our country is too big and too
unformed, however, to enable us to trust to an empirical philosophy of
muddling along, patching up here and there some old piece of machinery
which has broken down by reason of its antiquity. We must have system,
constructive method, springing from a widely inventive imagination, a
method checked up at each turn by results achieved. We have said long
enough that America means opportunity; we must now begin to ask:
Opportunity for what, and how shall the opportunity be achieved? I can
but think that the present European situation forces home upon us the
need for constructive planning. I can but think that while it gives no
reason for supposing that creative power attaches _ex officio_ to
general ideas, it does encourage us to believe that a philosophy which
should articulate and consolidate the ideas to which our social practice
commits us would clarify and guide our future endeavor.
Time permits of but one illustration. The present situation presents the
spectacle of the breakdown of the whole philosophy of Nationalism,
political, racial and cultural. It is by the accident of position rather
than any virtue of our own that we are not sharers in the present
demonstration of failure. We have borrowed the older philosophy of
isolated national sovereignty and have lived upon it in a more or less
half-hearted way. In our internal constitution we are actually
interracial and international. It remains to see whether we have the
courage to face this fact and the wisdom to think out the plan of action
which it indicates. Arbitration treaties, international judicial
councils, schemes of international disarmament, peace funds and peace
movements, are all well in their way. But the situation calls for more
radical thinking than that which terminates in such proposals. We have
to recognize that furtherance of the depth and width of human
intercourse is the measure of civilization; and we have to apply this
fact without as well as within our national life. We must make the
accident of our internal composition into an idea, an idea upon which we
may conduct our foreign as well as our domestic policy. An international
judicial tribunal will break in the end upon the principle of national
sovereignty.
We have no right to cast stones at any warring nation till we have asked
ourselves whether we are willing to forego this principle and to submit
affairs which limited imagination and sense have led us to consider
strictly national to an international legislature. In and of itself, the
idea of peace is a negative idea; it is a police idea. There _are_
things more important than keeping one's body whole and one's property
intact. Disturbing the peace is bad, not because peace is disturbed, but
because the fruitful processes of cooperation in the great experiment of
living together are disturbed. It is futile to work for the negative end
of peace unless we are committed to the positive ideal which it cloaks:
Promoting the efficacy of human intercourse irrespective of class,
racial, geographical and national limits. Any philosophy which should
penetrate and particulate our present social practice would find at work
the forces which unify human intercourse. An intelligent and courageous
philosophy of practice would devise means by which the operation of
these forces would be extended and assured in the future. An American
philosophy of history must perforce be a philosophy for its future, a
future in which freedom and fullness of human companionship is the aim,
and intelligent cooperative experimentation the method.
THE END
INDEX
Absolutism, 89, 112, 115, 124
America, philosophy in, 123-132
"Americanism," 124
Anti-Semitism, 100-101.
_A priori_, 39-44, 126, 129
Authority, 52-54
Bentham, 56
Bergson, 4
Bernhardi, 34-35, 52, 118
Bourdon, 107-108
Burke, 93-94
Chamberlain, 101 n.
Cosmopolitanism, 67, 75, 85, 99
Culture, 91
Descartes, 92
Despotism enlightened, 53
Dialectic, 70, 118
Duty, 24, 50-57
Education, 14, 72, 73
Empiricism, 41, 43, 126-129
Enlightenment, the, 37-39, 59, 92, 103
Eucken, 36, 55
Evolution, 112
Fichte, 68-80, 85-87
Formalism, 51
Freedom, 18, 25, 30, 33-35, 47, 51, 71, 115.
French Revolution, 57, 94, 103
French thought, 52, 91-94, 95, 100
Germania, 104
Germany, 14-16, 28, 29-31, 32-33, 36, 71, 78-81, 84-85, 88, 91-93,
94-98, 106-107
Haym, 107
Hegel, 94-95, 107-120, 125
Heine, 17, 18, 76, 83, 84-85
Herder, 112
History, 5-6, 59-67, 98-102, 107-119, 121
Hoffman, 81
Idealism, 28, 39, 70, 82, 107, 123, 130
Ideas and action, 3-15, 123-132
Individualism, 49, 72
Intelligence, 54-56, 126-128
Jena, 68
Kant, 19-40, 47-58, 59-67, 119-121
Kultur, 62-64
Lange, 78
Lasalle, 77
Law, 20-25, 116
Leibniz, 59, 112
Luther, 16, 27, 71, 87
Marx, 6, 110 n.
Militarism, 52
Napoleon, 67, 78-79
Nationalism, 67, 81, 86, 87, 115
Nietzsche, 28, 34, 58
Pantheism, 77, 82
Parliaments, 117
Personality, 48
Pfleiderer, 105
Philosophy, 7-18, 123-132
Property, 74
Psychology, Social, 82
Race, 100-101
Religion, 20-21, 26-27, 95
Rights, 52, 57
Romanticism, 81, 104, 122
Rousseau, 61, 91
Schelling, 82 n.
Scholar, 72
Science, 21-23, 28
Socialism, 74-75
Social motives, 60-61
Society, 64-65
State, 64-65, 66-67, 73-77, 110-118
Subjectivism, 49, 81
Supersensible, 23-25
v. Sybel, 78-80
Tacitus, 104
Taine, 14
Universalism of Germany, 36, 106-107
_Urvolk_, 101-102
Utilitarianism, 57-58
_Volks-seele_, 82
War, 35-36, 89, 97, 118-120
World-heroes, 112
DEWEY AND TUFTS'S ETHICS
By JOHN DEWEY, Professor in Columbia University, and JAMES H.
TUFTS, Professor in the University of Chicago. (_American
Science Series._) 618 pp. 8vo. $2.00.
G. H. PALMER, _Professor in Harvard University_: It is a scholarly and
stimulating production, the best, I think, for college use that has yet
appeared. Indeed, from no other book would a general reader obtain in so
brief a compass so wide a view of the moral work of to-day, set forth in
so positive, lucid and interesting a fashion. Twenty years ago the book
could not have been written, for into it have gone the spoils of all the
ethical battles of our time. While I often find myself in dissent from
its opinions, I see that whoever wishes to comprehend the deeper social
tendencies of recent years will do well to study this book, and that he
will carry away from his reading as much enjoyment as instruction.
PROFESSOR NORMAN WILDE of the _University of Minnesota_ in _Journal of
Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods_: If this is not the ideal
text-book in ethics for which we have been waiting so many years, it is,
at least, a very good substitute for it. Certainly no more valuable
fruit of the recent ethical revival has been produced than this, nor one
which will itself produce more future good, for it is bound to be but
the first of a new type of texts. It marks the end of the abstract,
speculative treatises and the beginning of the positive studies of
established human values. The moral life is presented as a reality about
which there can be no more question than about the reality of the
physical life, and, indeed, as that in which the latter finds its
completion and explanation. Theories and systems are strictly
subordinated to the facts and are not presented until the facts are
clearly given. No student can rise from the study of this book feeling
that he has been engaged with questions of purely academic interest. On
the contrary, he can not but realize that it is the origin and solution
of the problems of his own life with which he is here concerned. Reality
is the dominant note of the book.
THE OUTLOOK: In several respects this work, among the many of its kind
appearing in recent years, is eminently valuable, especially for the
ample treatment given to ethics in the world of action in civil society,
admidst the relations of political, economic, and family life. To trace
the growth of morality, and to discover its laws and principles, with a
view to their application to present social conditions and problems for
progressive moral development, is the proper aim of ethical science as
here unfolded. . . . The many ethical questions raised by present
economic conditions are treated with admirable fulness and perspicacity.
HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY
NEW YORK
BERGSON'S CREATIVE EVOLUTION
_Translated from the French by Dr. Arthur Mitchell_
$3.00 net, by mail $3.17
"Bergson's resources in the way of erudition are remarkable, and in the
way of expression they are simply phenomenal. . . . If anything can make
hard things easy to follow it is a style like Bergson's. It is a miracle
and he a real magician. Open Bergson and new horizons open on every page
you read. It tells of reality itself instead of reiterating what
dusty-minded professors have written about what other previous
professors have thought. Nothing in Bergson is shopworn or at
second-hand."--_William James._
"A distinctive and trenchant piece of dialectic. . . . Than its entrance
upon the field as a well-armed and militant philosophy there have been
not many more memorable occurences in the history of ideas."--_Nation._
"To bring out in an adequate manner the effect which Bergson's philsophy
has on those who are attracted by it let us try to imagine what it would
have been like to have lived when Kant produced his 'Critique of Pure
Reason.'"--_Hibbert Journal._
"_Creative Evolution_ is destined, I believe, to mark an epoch in the
history of modern thought. The work has its root in modern physical
science, but it blooms and bears fruit in the spirit to a degree quite
unprecedented. . . . Bergson is a new star in the intellectual firmament
of our day. He is a philosopher upon whom the spirits of both literature
and science have descended. In his great work he touches the materialism
of science to finer issues. Probably no other writer of our time has
possessed in the same measure the three gifts, the literary, the
scientific, and the philosophical. Bergson is a kind of chastened and
spiritualized Herbert Spencer."--_John Burroughs in the Atlantic
Monthly._
HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY
PUBLISHERS NEW YORK
BY WALTER LIPPMANN
DRIFT AND MASTERY
_2nd Printing, $1.50 Net_
THEODORE ROOSEVELT _in The Outlook_:
"No man who wishes seriously to study our present social, industrial and
political life can afford not to read it through and through and to
ponder and digest it."
WILLIAM MARION REEDY _in The St. Louis Mirror_:
"When 'A Preface to Politics' was published, I ventured the opinion that
it was the best book on politics since Walter Bagehot's 'Physics and
Politics.' Now he has followed it with 'Drift and Mastery,' an even more
brilliant performance."
A PREFACE TO POLITICS
_3rd Printing, $1.50 Net_
_The Boston Transcript_:
"'A Preface to Politics' is its own complete and sufficient
justification. In many respects it is the ablest brief book of its kind
published during the last ten years. It has the supreme virtue of
clearness aided by a style that is incisive and compelling."
THE STAKES OF DIPLOMACY
_4th Printing, cloth, $1.35 Net; paper, 60 cts. Net_
J. B. KERFOOT _in Life_:
"It is a real joy to find it of the same order as 'A Preface to
Politics.' It deals with human nature involved in international human
relations impersonally, yet brings significances personally home to us.
A book that widens horizons and quickens consciousness."
HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY
PUBLISHERS NEW YORK
TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES
Ellipses match the original. A row of asterisks represents a thought break.
Words in italics in the original are surrounded with _underscores_.
The following corrections have been made to the text:
Page 53: duty must get[original has gets] its subject-matter
somewhere
Page 110: wisdom is like "[quotation mark missing in the
original]the bird of Minerva
Page 134: _Volks-seele_[original has _Volk-seele_], 82
Typographical errors in the book reviews have been retained as printed.
End of Project Gutenberg's German philosophy and politics, by John Dewey