THE POLEMICAL PERIOD
After the publication of the _Studies in Logical Theory_, Dewey entered
upon what may be called the polemical period of his career. He joined
forces with James and Schiller in the promotion of the new movement
called 'Pragmatism.' The _Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and
Scientific Methods_, instituted at Columbia University in 1904, the same
year in which Dewey accepted a professorship in that institution, became
a convenient medium for the expression of his views, and every volume of
this periodical will be found to contain notes, discussions, and
articles by Dewey and his followers, bearing on current controversy. He
also published many articles in other journals, technical and popular.
In 1910, the most important of these essays were collected into a
volume, published under the title, _The Influence of Darwin on
Philosophy, and Other Essays_. For purposes of discussion, these essays
may be divided into two classes: those of a more constructive character,
setting forth Dewey's own standpoint, and those which are mainly
polemical, directed against opposing standpoints, chiefly the
idealistic. The constructive writings will be given first consideration.
The essay on "The Postulate of Immediate Empiricism," first published in
the _Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific Methods_, in
July, 1905, and later reprinted in the volume of collected essays,
offers a convenient point of departure. Dewey observes that many of the
difficulties in current controversy can be traced to presuppositions
tacitly held by thinkers as to what experience means. Dewey attempts to
make his own presuppositions explicit, with the object of clearing up
this confusion.
"Immediate empiricism," he says, "postulates that things--anything,
everything, in the ordinary or non-technical use of the term
'thing'--are what they are experienced as. Hence, if one wishes to
describe anything truly, his task is to tell what it is experienced as
being."[212] The idealists, on the contrary, hold "that things (or,
ultimately, Reality, Being) _are_ only and just what they are _known_ to
be or that things are, or Reality _is_, what it is for a conscious
knower--whether the knower be conceived primarily as a perceiver or as a
thinker being a further, and secondary, question. This is the
root-paralogism of all idealisms, whether subjective or objective,
psychological or epistemological."[213] Knowing is merely one mode of
experiencing, and things may be experienced in other ways, as, for
instance, aesthetically, morally, technologically, or economically. This
follows Dewey's familiar division of the processes of experience into
separate 'functions' or activities. It becomes the duty of the
philosopher, following this scheme, to find out "_what_ sort of an
experience knowing is--or, concretely how things are experienced when
they are experienced _as_ known things."[214]
Dewey fails, in this essay, to draw a distinction which is highly
important, between knowledge as awareness and knowledge as reflection.
This results in some confusion. For the present, he is concerned with
knowledge as awareness. He employs an illustration to make his meaning
clear; the experience of fright at a noise, which turns out, when
examined and known, to be the tapping of a window shade. What is
originally experienced is a frightful noise. If, after examination, the
'frightfulness' is classified as 'psychical,' while the 'real' fact is
said to be harmless, there is no warrant for reading this distinction
back into the original experience. The argument is directed against that
mode of explaining the difference between the psychical and the physical
which employs a subjective mind or 'knower' as the container of the
merely subjective aspects of reality. Dewey would hold that mind, used
in this sense, is a fiction, having a small explanatory value, and
creating more problems than it solves. The difference between psychical
and physical is relative, not absolute. The frightful noise first heard
was neither psychical nor physical; it was what it was experienced as,
and the experience contained no such distinction, nor did it contain a
'knower.' The noise _as known_, after the intervention of an act of
judgment, contained these elements (except the 'knower'), but the thing
is not merely what it is known as. There is no warrant for reading the
distinctions made by judgment back into a situation where judgment was
not operative. The original fact was precisely what it was experienced
as.
Dewey's purpose, though not well stated, seems to be the complete
rejection of the notion of knowledge as awareness, or of the subjective
knower. He discovers at the same time an opportunity to substantiate his
own descriptive account of knowing (or reflection) as an occasional
function. The two enterprises, however, should be kept distinct.
Granting that the subjective knower of the older epistemology should be
dismissed from philosophy, it does not follow that Dewey's special
interpretation of the function of reflection is the only substitute.
The principle of immediate empiricism, Dewey says, furnishes no positive
truth. It is simply a method. Not a single philosophical proposition can
be deduced from it. The application of the method is indicated in the
following proposition: "If you wish to find out what subjective,
objective, physical, mental, cosmic, psychic, cause, substance, purpose,
activity, evil, being, quality--any philosophic term, in short--means,
go to experience and see what the thing is experienced _as_."[215] This
recipe cannot be taken literally. Dewey probably means that each concept
has, or should have, a positive empirical reference, and is significant
only in that reference. He is a firm believer, however, in the
descriptive method. In a note, he remarks that he would employ in
philosophy "the direct descriptive method that has now made its way in
all the natural sciences, with such modifications, of course, as the
subject itself entails."[216] This remark calls for closer examination
than can be made here. It may be said in passing, however, that
'scientific description' is by no means so simple a method of procedure
as Dewey would seem to indicate. 'Scientific description,' as actually
employed, is a highly elaborated and specialized method of dealing with
experience. The whole subject, indeed, is involved, and requires
cautious treatment. Dewey's somewhat ingenuous hope, that the
identification of his method with the methods of science will add to its
impressiveness, is in danger, unfortunately, of being vitiated through
the suspicion that he is, after all, not in close touch with the methods
of science.
Dewey employs the descriptive method chiefly as a means for
substantiating his special interpretation of the judgment process. His
use of the method in this connection is well illustrated by an article
called "The Experimental Theory of Knowledge"[217] (1906), in which he
attempts "to find out _what_ sort of an experience knowing is" through
an appeal to immediate experience. "It should be possible," he says, "to
discern and describe a knowing as one identifies any object, concern, or
event.... What we want is just something which takes itself as
knowledge, rightly or wrongly."[218] The difficulty lies not in finding
a case of knowing, but in describing it when found. Dewey selects a case
to be described, and, as usual, chooses a simple one.
"This means," he says, "a specific case, a sample.... Our recourse is to
an example so simple, so much on its face as to be as innocent as may be
of assumptions.... Let us suppose a smell, just a floating odor."[219]
The level at which this illustration is taken is significant. Is it
possible to suppose that anything so complex, varied, myriad-sided as
that something we call knowledge, can be discovered and described within
the limits of so simple an instance?
Dewey employs the smell in three situations, the first representing the
'non-cognitional,' the second the 'cognitive,' and the third the
genuinely 'cognitional' situation. The first, or 'non-cognitional'
situation is described as follows: "But, let us say, the smell is not
the smell _of_ the rose; the resulting change of the organism is not a
sense of walking and reaching; the delicious finale is not the
fulfilment of the movement, and, through that, of the original smell;
'is not,' in each case meaning is 'not experienced as' such. We may
take, in short, these experiences in a brutely serial fashion. The
smell, _S_, is replaced (and displaced) by a felt movement, _K_, this is
replaced by the gratification, _G_. Viewed from without, as we are now
regarding it, there is _S-K-G_. But from within, for itself, it is now
_S_, now _K_, now _G_, and so on to the end of the chapter. Nowhere is
there looking before and after; memory and anticipation are not born.
Such an experience neither is, in whole or in part, a knowledge, nor
does it exercise a cognitive function."[220]
It will be seen at once that this is not a description of an actual
human experience, but a schematic story designed to illustrate a
comparatively simple point. In this situation the person concerned does
not deliberately and consciously recognize the smell as the smell of a
rose; he is not aware of any symbolic character in the smell, it does
not enter as a middle term into a process of inference. In such a
situation, Dewey believes, it would be wrong to read into the smell a
cognitive property which it does not, as experienced, possess.
In the second, or 'cognitive' situation, the smell as originally
experienced does not involve the function of knowing, but turns out
after the event, as reflected upon, to have had a significance. "In
saying that the smell is finally experienced as _meaning_ gratification
... we retrospectively attribute intellectual force and function to the
smell--and this is what is signified by 'cognitive.' Yet the smell is
not cognitional, because it did not knowingly intend to mean this; but
is found, after the event, to have meant it."[221] The moral is, as
usual, that the findings of reflection must not be read back into the
former unreflective experience.
In the truly 'cognitional' experience the smell is then and there
experienced as meaning or symbolizing the rose. "An experience is a
knowledge, if in its quale there is an experienced distinction and
connection of two elements of the following sort: _one means or intends
the presence of the other in the same fashion in which itself is already
present, while the other is that which, while not present in the same
fashion, must become so present if the meaning or intention of its
companion or yoke-fellow is to be fulfilled through the operation it
sets up_."[222] In the 'cognitional' situation, the smell is then and
there experienced as signifying the presence of a rose in the vicinity,
and the rose must be experienced as a present fact, before the meaning
of the smell is completely fulfilled and verified.
It will be seen at once that this description of knowing follows the
lines laid down by James in his chapter on "Reasoning" in the
_Principles of Psychology_. In the process of reasoning the situation is
analyzed; some particular feature of it is abstracted and made the
middle term in an inference. The smell, as thus abstracted, is said to
have the function of knowing, or meaning, the rose whose reality it
evidences.
Dewey's treatment of knowledge, however, is far too simple. The function
of meaning, symbolizing, or 'pointing' does not reside in the abstracted
element as such; for the context in which the judgment occurs determines
the choosing of the 'middle term,' as well as the direction in which it
shall point. The situation as a whole has a rationality which resides in
the distinctions, identities, phases of emphasis, and discriminations of
the total experience. Rationality expresses itself in the organized
system of experience, not in particular elements and their 'pointings.'
Taken in this sense, rationality is present in all experience. The
smell, in Dewey's first situation, is not 'cognitional' because the
situation as a whole does not permit it to be, if such an expression may
be used. The intellectual drift of the moment drives the smell away from
the centre of attention at one time, just as at another it selects it to
serve as an element in judgment. It is only with reference to a system
of some kind that things can be regarded as symbols at all. Things do
not represent one another at haphazard, but definitely and concretely;
they imply an organization of elements having mutual implications. One
thing implies another because both are elements in a whole which
determines their mutual reference. This organization is present in all
experience, not in the form of 'established habits,' but in the form of
will and purpose.
In the course of his further discussion, which need not be followed in
detail, Dewey passes on to a consideration of truth. Truth is concerned
with the worth or validity of ideas. But, before their validity can be
determined, there must be a 'cognitional' experience of the type
described above. "Before the category of confirmation or refutation can
be introduced, there must be something which _means_ to mean something
and which therefore can be guaranteed or nullified by the issue."[223]
Ideas, or meanings, as directly experienced, are neither true nor false,
but are made so by the results in which they issue. Even then, the
outcome must be reflected upon, before they can be designated true or
false. "_Truth and falsity present themselves as significant facts only
in situations in which specific meanings and their already experienced
fulfilments and non-fulfilments are intentionally compared and
contrasted with reference to the question of the worth, as to
reliability of meaning, of the given meaning or class of
meanings._"[224] This makes the whole problem of truth a relatively
simple affair. The symbol and its 'pointing' are taken as a single,
objective fact, to be tested, and, if verified, labelled 'true.'
Meanings, after all, are not so simple as this scheme would imply.
As the intellectual life of man is more subtle and universal than Dewey
represents it to be, so is truth, as that which thought seeks to
establish, something deeper-lying and more comprehensive. Ideas are not
simple and isolated facts; their truth is not strictly their own, but is
reflected into them from the objective order to which they pertain. The
possibility of making observations and experiments, and of having ideas,
rests upon the presence in and through experience of that directing
influence which we call valid knowledge, or truth. An idea, to be true,
must fit in with this general body of truth. Not correspondence with its
single object, but correspondence with the whole organized body of
knowledge, is the test of the truth of an idea. The attempt to describe
knowledge as a particular occurrence, fact, or function, is foredoomed
to failure. It should be noted also that Dewey's 'description,'
throughout this essay, is anything but a direct, empirical examination
of thought. He presents a schematized picture of reality which, like an
engineer's diagram, leaves out the cloying details of the object it is
supposed to represent.
The sceptical and positivistic results of Dewey's treatment of knowledge
are set forth in an article entitled "Some Implications of
Anti-Intellectualism," published in the _Journal of Philosophy,
Psychology, and Scientific Methods_, in 1910.[225] This was not included
in the volume of collected essays published in the same year, but may be
regarded as of some importance.
After some comments on current anti-intellectualistic tendencies, Dewey
proceeds to distinguish his own anti-intellectualism from that of
others. This type "starts from acts, functions, as primary data,
functions both biological and social in character; from organic
responses, readjustments. It treats the knowledge standpoint, in all its
patterns, structures, and purposes, as evolving out of, and operating in
the interests of, the guidance and enrichment of these primary
functions. The vice of intellectualism from this standpoint is not in
making of logical relations and functions in and for knowledge, but in a
false abstraction of knowledge (and the logical) from its working
context."[226]
The manner in which this exaltation of the "primary" functions at the
expense of knowledge affects philosophy is indicated in the following
passage: "Philosophy is itself a mode of knowing, and of knowing wherein
reflective thinking is much in play.... As a mode of knowledge, it
arises, like any intellectual undertaking, out of certain typical
perplexities and conflicts of behavior, and its purpose is to help
straighten these out. Philosophy may indeed render things more
intelligible or give greater insight into existence; but these
considerations are subject to the final criterion of what it means to
acquire insight and to make things intelligible, _i. e._, namely,
service of _special_ purposes in behavior, and limit by the _special_
problems in which the need of insight arises. This is not to say that
instrumentalism is merely a methodology or an epistemology preliminary
to more ultimate philosophic or metaphysical inquiries, for it involves
the doctrine that the origin, structure, and purpose of knowing are such
as to render nugatory any wholesale inquiries into the nature of
Being."[227]
In the last analysis, this appears to be a confession, rather than an
argument. It is the inevitable outcome of the functional analysis of
intelligence. Thought is this organ, with these functions, and is
capable of so much and no more. The limit to its capacity is set by the
description of its nature. The nature of the functionalistic limitation
of thought is well expressed in the words 'special' and 'specific.'
Since thought is the servant of the 'primary' modes of experience, it
can only deal with the problems set for it by preceding non-reflective
processes. These problems are 'specific' because they are concrete
problems of action, and are concerned with particular aspects of the
environment. Dewey's formidable positivism would vanish at once,
however, if his special psychology of the thought-process should be
found untenable. Thought is limited, according to Dewey, because it is a
very special form of activity, operating occasionally in the interest of
the direct modes of experiencing.
Probably every philosopher recognizes that speculation cannot be allowed
to run wild. Some problems are worth while, others are artificial and
trivial, and some means must be found for separating the sound and
substantial from the tawdry and sentimental. The question is, however,
whether Dewey's psychology furnishes a ground for such distinctions.
Again, it should be noted that, in spite of the limitations placed upon
thought by its very nature, as described by Dewey, certain philosophers,
by his own confession, are guilty of "wholesale inquiries into the
nature of Being." If thought can deal only with specific problems, then
there can be no question as to whether philosophy _ought_ to be
metaphysical. It is a repetition of the case of psychological _versus_
ethical hedonism.
Modern idealists would resent the imputation that there is any
inclination on their part to deny the need for a critical attitude
toward the problems and methods of philosophy. Kant's criticism of the
'dogmatists' for their undiscriminating employment of the categories in
the interpretation of reality, established an attitude which has been
steadily maintained by his philosophical descendants. The idealist, in
fact, has accused Dewey of laxity in the criticism of his own methods
and presuppositions. The categories of description and natural selection
by means of which his functionalism is established, it is argued, are of
little service in the sphere of mind. And while Dewey accepts an
evolutionary view of reality in general, the idealist has found
evolutionism, at least in its biological form, too limited in scope to
serve the extensive interests of philosophy. Dewey is right in opposing
false problems and fanciful solutions in philosophy; but these evils are
to be corrected, not by functional psychology, but by an empirical
criticism of each method and each problem as it arises.
It has been seen that, even in these more constructive essays, Dewey's
position is largely defined in negatives. What might be expected, then,
of the essays which are primarily critical? Perhaps the best answer will
be afforded by a close analysis of one or more of them. Idealism, as has
been said, receives most of Dewey's attention. There are three essays in
_The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy_, which bear directly against
idealism. One, "The Intellectualist Criterion of Truth," is directed
against Bradley; another, "Experience and Objective Idealism," is a
historical discussion of idealistic views. The third, which is broadest
in scope, is entitled "Beliefs and Existences." This was originally
delivered as the presidential address at the meeting of the American
Philosophical Association in December, 1905, and was printed in the
_Philosophical Review_ in March, 1906, under the title, "Beliefs and
Realities."
Dewey begins with a discussion of the personal and human character of
beliefs. "Beliefs," he says, "look both ways, towards persons and
towards things.... They form or judge--justify or condemn--the agents
who entertain them and who insist upon them.... To believe is to ascribe
value, impute meaning, assign import."[228] Beliefs are entertained by
persons; by men as individuals and not as professional beings. Because
they are essentially human, beliefs issue in action, and have their
import in conduct. "That believed better is held to, asserted, affirmed,
acted upon.... That believed worse is fled, resisted, transformed into
an instrument for the better."[229] Beliefs, then, have a human side;
they belong to people, and have a character which is expressed in the
conduct to which they lead.
On the other hand, beliefs look towards things. "'Reality' naturally
instigates belief. It appraises itself and through this self-appraisal
manages its affairs.... It is interpretation; not merely existence aware
of itself as fact, but existence discerning, judging itself, approving
and disapproving."[230] The vital connection between belief as personal,
and as directed upon things, cannot be disregarded. "We cannot keep
connection on one side and throw it away on the other. We cannot
preserve significance and decline the personal attitude in which it is
inscribed and operative...."[231] To take the world as something
existing by itself, is to overlook the fact that it is always somebody's
world, "and you shall not have completed your metaphysics till you have
told whose world is meant and how and what for--in what bias and to what
effect."[232]
But philosophers have been guilty of error here. They have thrown aside
all consideration of belief as a personal fact in reality, and have
taken "an oath of allegiance to Reality, objective, universal, complete;
made perhaps of atoms, perhaps of sensations, perhaps of logical
meanings."[233] This Reality leaves no place for belief; for belief, as
having to do with human adventures, can have no place in a cut and dried
cosmos. The search for a world which is eternally fixed in eternal
meanings has developed the present wondrous and formidable technique of
philosophy.
The attempt to exclude the human element from belief has resulted in
philosophical errors. Philosophers have divided reality into two parts,
"one of which shall alone be good and true 'Reality,' ... while the
other part, that which is excluded, shall be referred exclusively to
belief and treated as mere appearance...."[234] To cap the climax, this
division of the world into two parts must be made by some philosopher
who, being human, employs his own beliefs, and classifies things on the
basis of his own experience. Can it be done? We are today in the
presence of a revolt against such tendencies, Dewey says; and he
proposes to give some sketch, "(1) of the historical tendencies which
have shaped the situation in which a Stoic theory of knowledge claims
metaphysical monopoly, and (2) of the tendencies that have furnished the
despised principle of belief opportunity and means of reassertion."[235]
Throughout this introduction Dewey speaks with considerable feeling, as
if the question were a moral one, rather than a disquisition concerning
the best method of dealing with the personal aspects of thought. His
meaning, however, is far from being apparent. What does it mean to say
that a Stoic theory of knowledge holds a monopoly in modern philosophy?
In what sense has the philosophy of the past been misanthropic? _Is_
Humanism a product of the twentieth century? Dewey's assertions are
broad and sweeping; too broad even for a popular discourse, let alone a
philosophical address. Perhaps his attitude will be more fully expressed
in the historical inquiry which follows.
Dewey begins this inquiry with the period of the rise of Christianity,
which, because it emphasized faith and the personal attitude, seemed in
a fair way to do justice to human belief. "That the ultimate principle
of conduct is affectional and volitional; that God is love; that access
to the principle is by faith, a personal attitude; that belief,
surpassing logical basis and warrant, works out through its own
operation its own fulfilling evidence: such was the implied moral
metaphysic of Christianity."[236] But these implications had to be
worked out into a theory, and the only logical or metaphysical systems
which offered themselves as a basis for organization were those Stoic
systems which "identified true existence with the proper object of
logical reason." Aristotle alone among the ancients gave practical
thought its due attention, but he, unfortunately, failed to assimilate
"his idea of theoretical to his notion of practical knowledge."[237] In
the Greek systems generally, "desiring reason culminating in beliefs
relating to imperfect existence, stands forever in contrast with
passionless reason functioning in pure knowledge, logically complete, of
perfect being."[238]
Dewey's discussion moves too rapidly here to be convincing. He does not
take time, for instance, to make a very important distinction between
the Greek and Hellenistic philosophies. He does not do justice to the
purpose which animated the Greeks in their attempt to put thought on a
'theoretical' basis. His confusion of Platonism with Neo-Platonism is
especially annoying. And, most assuredly, his estimate of primitive
Christianity needs corroboration. Probably Christianity, in its
primitive form, did lay great stress upon individual beliefs and
persuasions, but it was expected, nevertheless, that the Holy Spirit
working in men would produce uniform results in the way of belief. When
the uniformity failed to materialize, Christianity was forced, in the
interests of union, to fall back upon some objective standard by which
belief could be tested. After this was established, an end was made of
individual inspiration. From the earliest times, therefore, it may be
said, Christianity sought means for the suppression of free inquiry and
belief, a proceeding utterly opposed to the spirit of ancient Greece.
"I need not remind you," Dewey continues, "how through Neo-Platonism,
St. Augustine, and the Scholastic renaissance, these conceptions became
imbedded in Christian philosophy; and what a reversal occurred of the
original practical principle of Christianity. Belief is henceforth
important because it is the mere antecedent in a finite and fallen
world, a temporal and phenomenal world infected with non-being, of true
knowledge to be achieved only in a world of completed Being."[239]
Through the hundreds of years that intervened before the world's
awakening, the 'Stoic dogma,' enforced by authority, held the world in
thrall. And still Dewey finds the mediaeval Absolutism in many respects
more merciful than the Absolutism of modern philosophy. "For my part, I
can but think that mediaeval absolutism, with its provision for
authoritative supernatural assistance in this world and assertion of
supernatural realization in the next, was more logical, as well as more
humane, then the modern absolutism, that, with the same logical
premises, bids man find adequate consolation and support in the fact
that, after all, his strivings are already eternally fulfilled, his
errors already eternally transcended, his partial beliefs already
eternally comprehended."[240] Dewey takes no note of the fact that
philosophy, as involving really free inquiry, was dead during the whole
period of mediaeval predominance.
The modern age, Dewey continues, brought intelligence back to earth
again, but only partially. Fixed being was still supposed to be the
object of thought. "The principle of the inherent relation of thought to
being was preserved intact, but its practical locus was moved down from
the next world to this."[241] Aristotle's mode of dealing with the
Platonic ideas was followed, and Spinoza was the great exponent of "the
strict correlation of the attribute of matter with the attribute of
thought."
But, again, the modern conception of knowledge failed to do justice to
belief, in spite of the compromise that gave the natural world to
intelligence, and the spiritual world to faith. This compromise could
not endure, for Science encroached upon the field of religious belief,
and invaded the sphere of the personal and emotional. "Knowledge, in its
general theory, as philosophy, went the same way. It was pre-committed
to the old notion: the absolutely real is the object of _knowledge_, and
hence is something universal and impersonal. So, whether by the road of
sensationalism or rationalism, by the path of mechanicalism or objective
idealism, it came about that concrete selves, specific feeling and
willing beings, were relegated with the beliefs in which they declare
themselves to the 'phenomenal.'"[242] Feeling, volition, desiring
thought have never received the justice due them in the whole course of
philosophy. This is Dewey's conclusion. Little can be said in praise of
his historical survey. There is scarcely a statement to which exception
could not be taken, for the history of philosophy is not amenable to
generalized treatment of this character.
The reader turns more hopefully toward the third part of the essay, in
which he is promised a positive statement of the new theory which does
full justice to belief. "First, then, the very use of the knowledge
standpoint, the very expression of the knowledge preoccupation, has
produced methods and tests that, when formulated, intimate a radically
different conception of knowledge, and of its relation to existence and
belief, than the orthodox one."[243]
But after this not unpromising introduction, Dewey falls into the
polemical strain again. The argument need not be followed in detail,
since it consists largely in a reassertion of the validity of belief as
an element in knowledge. The general conclusion is that modern
scientific investigation reveals itself, when examined, as nothing more
that the "rendering into a systematic technique, into an art
deliberately and delightfully pursued, the rougher and cruder means by
which practical human beings have in all ages worked out the
implications of their beliefs, tested them, and endeavored in the
interests of economy, efficiency, and freedom, to render them coherent
with one another."[244] This is presumably true. If no more is implied
than is definitely asserted in this passage, the reader is apt to wonder
who would deny it.
Dewey again claims for his theory the support of modern science.
"Biology, psychology, and the social sciences proffer an imposing body
of concrete facts that also point to the rehabilitation of
belief...."[245] Psychology has revised its notions in terms of
beliefs. 'Motor' is writ large on the face of sensation, perception,
conception, cognition in general. Biology shows that the organic
instruments of the intellectual life were evolved for specifically
practical purposes. The historical sciences show that knowledge is a
social instrument for the purpose of meeting social needs. This
testimony is not philosophy, Dewey says, but it has a bearing on
philosophy. The new sciences have at least as much importance as
mathematics and physics. "Such being the case, the reasons for ruling
psychology and sociology and allied sciences out of competency to give
philosophic testimony have more significance than the bare denial of
jurisdiction."[246] The idealists, apparently, have been the worst
offenders in this connection. "One would be almost justified in
construing idealism as a Pickwickian scheme, so willing is it to
idealize the principle of intelligence at the expense of its specific
undertakings, were it not that this reluctance is the necessary outcome
of the Stoic basis and tenor of idealism--its preoccupation with logical
contents and relations in abstraction from their _situs_ and function in
conscious living beings."[247]
In conclusion, Dewey warns against certain possible misunderstandings.
The pragmatic philosopher, he says, is not opposed to objective
realities, and logical and universal thinking. Again, it is not to be
supposed that science is any the less exact by reason of being
instrumental to human beliefs. "Because reason is a scheme of working
out the meanings of convictions in terms of one another and of the
consequences they import in further experience, convictions are the
more, not the less, amenable and responsible to the full exercise of
reason."[248] And finally, Dewey assures the reader that the outcome of
his discussion is not a solution, but a problem. Nobody is apt to
dispute that statement.
This very unsatisfactory essay is, nevertheless, a fair specimen of the
polemical literature which was produced by Dewey and others during these
years. Pragmatism was trying to make converts, and the _argumentum ad
hominem_ was freely employed. If the opposition was painted a good deal
blacker than was necessary, the end was supposed to justify the evident
exaggeration. And so, in this essay, after accusing his contemporaries
of adherence to tenets that they would have indignantly repudiated,
after a wholesale and indiscriminate condemnation of idealism, Dewey
concludes with--a problem. This period of propaganda is now quite
definitely a thing of the past. Philosophical discussion, especially
since the beginning of the great war, has entered upon a new epoch of
sanity, and, perhaps, of constructive effort.
FOOTNOTES:
[212] _The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy_, p. 227.
[213] _Ibid._, p. 228. In connection with the discussion which follows
see Bradley "On Our Knowledge of Immediate Experience," in _Essays on
Truth and Reality_, Chapter VI.
[214] _Ibid._, p. 229.
[215] _Op. cit._, p. 239.
[216] _Ibid._, p. 240.
[217] _The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy_, pp. 77-111.
[218] _Ibid._, p. 77.
[219] _Ibid._, p. 78.
[220] _Op. cit._
[221] _Ibid._, p. 84.
[222] _Op. cit._, p. 90. Author's italics.
[223] _Op. cit._, p. 87.
[224] _Ibid._, p. 95. Author's italics.
[225] Vol. VII. pp. 477-481.
[226] _Ibid._, p. 478.
[227] _Op. cit._, p. 479.
[228] _Influence of Darwin on Philosophy_, p. 169.
[229] _Ibid._, p. 170.
[230] _Ibid._, p. 171.
[231] _Ibid._
[232] _Ibid._
[233] _Ibid._, p. 172.
[234] _Op. cit._, p. 175.
[235] _Ibid._, p. 177.
[236] _Ibid._, p. 17?.
[237] _Op. cit._, p. 179.
[238] _Ibid._
[239] _Op. cit._
[240] _Ibid._, p. 180.
[241] _Ibid._, p. 181.
[242] _Op. cit._, p. 183.
[243] _Ibid._, p. 184.
[244] _Ibid._, p. 187.
[245] _Ibid._, p. 189.
[246] _Op. cit._, p. 190.
[247] _Ibid._, p. 191 f.
[248] _Ibid._, p. 194.