THE INFLUENCE OF
DARWIN ON PHILOSOPHY
And Other Essays in Contemporary
Thought
BY
JOHN DEWEY
_Professor of Philosophy in Columbia University_
[Illustration]
NEW YORK
HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY
COPYRIGHT, 1910,
BY
HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY
_Published April, 1910_
PREFACE
An elaborate preface to a philosophic work usually impresses one as a
last desperate effort on the part of its author to convey what he feels
he has not quite managed to say in the body of his book. Nevertheless,
a collection of essays on various topics written during a series
of years may perhaps find room for an independent word to indicate
the kind of unity they seem, to their writer, to possess. Probably
every one acquainted with present philosophic thought--found, with
some notable exceptions, in periodicals rather than in books--would
term it a philosophy of transition and reconstruction. Its various
representatives agree in what they oppose--the orthodox British
empiricism of two generations ago and the orthodox Neo-Kantian idealism
of the last generation--rather than in what they proffer.
The essays of this volume belong, I suppose, to what has come
to be known (since the earlier of them were written) as the
pragmatic phase of the newer movement. Now a recent German critic
has described pragmatism as, “Epistemologically, nominalism;
psychologically, voluntarism; cosmologically, energism; metaphysically,
agnosticism; ethically, meliorism on the basis of the Bentham-Mill
utilitarianism.”[1] It may be that pragmatism will turn out to be all
of this formidable array; but even should it, the one who thus defines
it has hardly come within earshot of it. For whatever else pragmatism
is or is not, the pragmatic spirit is primarily a revolt against that
habit of mind which disposes of anything whatever--even so humble an
affair as a new method in Philosophy--by tucking it away, after this
fashion, in the pigeon holes of a filing cabinet. There are other vital
phases of contemporary transition and revision; there are, for example,
a new realism and naturalistic idealism. When I recall that I find
myself more interested (even though their representatives might decline
to reciprocate) in such phases than in the systems marked by the labels
of our German critic, I am confirmed in a belief that after all it is
better to view pragmatism quite vaguely as part and parcel of a general
movement of intellectual reconstruction. For otherwise we seem to have
no recourse save to define pragmatism--as does our German author--in
terms of the very past systems against which it is a reaction; or, in
escaping that alternative, to regard it as a fixed rival system making
like claim to completeness and finality. And if, as I believe, one of
the marked traits of the pragmatic movement is just the surrender of
every such claim, how have we furthered our understanding of pragmatism?
Classic philosophies have to be revised because they must be squared
up with the many social and intellectual tendencies that have
revealed themselves since those philosophies matured. The conquest
of the sciences by the experimental method of inquiry; the injection
of evolutionary ideas into the study of life and society; the
application of the historic method to religions and morals as well
as to institutions; the creation of the sciences of “origins” and
of the cultural development of mankind--how can such intellectual
changes occur and leave philosophy what it was and where it was? Nor
can philosophy remain an indifferent spectator of the rise of what
may be termed the new individualism in art and letters, with its
naturalistic method applied in a religious, almost mystic spirit to
what is primitive, obscure, varied, inchoate, and growing in nature
and human character. The age of Darwin, Helmholtz, Pasteur, Ibsen,
Maeterlinck, Rodin, and Henry James must feel some uneasiness until
it has liquidated its philosophic inheritance in current intellectual
coin. And to accuse those who are concerned in this transaction of
ignorant contempt for the classic past of philosophy is to overlook
the inspiration the movement of translation draws from the fact that
the history of philosophy has become only too well understood.
Any revision of customary notions with its elimination--instead of
“solution”--of many traditionary problems cannot hope, however, for
any unity save that of tendency and operation. Elaborate and imposing
system, the regimenting and uniforming of thoughts, are, at present,
evidence that we are assisting at a stage performance in which
borrowed--or hired--figures are maneuvering. Tentatively and piecemeal
must the reconstruction of our stock notions proceed. As a contribution
to such a revision, the present collection of essays is submitted. With
one or two exceptions, their order is that of a reversed chronology,
the later essays coming first. The facts regarding the conditions of
their first appearance are given in connection with each essay. I
wish to thank the Editors of the _Philosophical Review_, of _Mind_,
of the _Hibbert Journal_, of the _Journal of Philosophy, Psychology,
and Scientific Methods_, and of the _Popular Science Monthly_, and
the Directors of the Press of Chicago and Columbia Universities,
respectively, for permission to reprint such of the essays as appeared
originally under their several auspices.
JOHN DEWEY
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY,
NEW YORK CITY, March 1, 1910.
CONTENTS
PAGE
THE INFLUENCE OF DARWINISM ON PHILOSOPHY 1
NATURE AND ITS GOOD: A CONVERSATION 20
INTELLIGENCE AND MORALS 46
THE EXPERIMENTAL THEORY OF KNOWLEDGE 77
THE INTELLECTUALIST CRITERION FOR TRUTH 112
A SHORT CATECHISM CONCERNING TRUTH 154
BELIEFS AND EXISTENCES 169
EXPERIENCE AND OBJECTIVE IDEALISM 198
THE POSTULATE OF IMMEDIATE EMPIRICISM 226
“CONSCIOUSNESS” AND EXPERIENCE 242
THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE PROBLEM OF KNOWLEDGE 271
THE INFLUENCE OF DARWINISM ON PHILOSOPHY[2]
I
That the publication of the “Origin of Species” marked an epoch in
the development of the natural sciences is well known to the layman.
That the combination of the very words origin and species embodied
an intellectual revolt and introduced a new intellectual temper is
easily overlooked by the expert. The conceptions that had reigned
in the philosophy of nature and knowledge for two thousand years,
the conceptions that had become the familiar furniture of the mind,
rested on the assumption of the superiority of the fixed and final;
they rested upon treating change and origin as signs of defect and
unreality. In laying hands upon the sacred ark of absolute permanency,
in treating the forms that had been regarded as types of fixity and
perfection as originating and passing away, the “Origin of Species”
introduced a mode of thinking that in the end was bound to transform
the logic of knowledge, and hence the treatment of morals, politics,
and religion.
No wonder, then, that the publication of Darwin’s book, a half century
ago, precipitated a crisis. The true nature of the controversy is
easily concealed from us, however, by the theological clamor that
attended it. The vivid and popular features of the anti-Darwinian row
tended to leave the impression that the issue was between science
on one side and theology on the other. Such was not the case--the
issue lay primarily within science itself, as Darwin himself early
recognized. The theological outcry he discounted from the start,
hardly noticing it save as it bore upon the “feelings of his
female relatives.” But for two decades before final publication he
contemplated the possibility of being put down by his scientific peers
as a fool or as crazy; and he set, as the measure of his success,
the degree in which he should affect three men of science: Lyell in
geology, Hooker in botany, and Huxley in zoology.
Religious considerations lent fervor to the controversy, but they did
not provoke it. Intellectually, religious emotions are not creative but
conservative. They attach themselves readily to the current view of
the world and consecrate it. They steep and dye intellectual fabrics
in the seething vat of emotions; they do not form their warp and woof.
There is not, I think, an instance of any large idea about the world
being independently generated by religion. Although the ideas that rose
up like armed men against Darwinism owed their intensity to religious
associations, their origin and meaning are to be sought in science and
philosophy, not in religion.
II
Few words in our language foreshorten intellectual history as much
as does the word species. The Greeks, in initiating the intellectual
life of Europe, were impressed by characteristic traits of the life of
plants and animals; so impressed indeed that they made these traits the
key to defining nature and to explaining mind and society. And truly,
life is so wonderful that a seemingly successful reading of its mystery
might well lead men to believe that the key to the secrets of heaven
and earth was in their hands. The Greek rendering of this mystery,
the Greek formulation of the aim and standard of knowledge, was in
the course of time embodied in the word species, and it controlled
philosophy for two thousand years. To understand the intellectual
face-about expressed in the phrase “Origin of Species,” we must, then,
understand the long dominant idea against which it is a protest.
Consider how men were impressed by the facts of life. Their eyes fell
upon certain things slight in bulk, and frail in structure. To every
appearance, these perceived things were inert and passive. Suddenly,
under certain circumstances, these things--henceforth known as seeds
or eggs or germs--begin to change, to change rapidly in size, form,
and qualities. Rapid and extensive changes occur, however, in many
things--as when wood is touched by fire. But the changes in the living
thing are orderly; they are cumulative; they tend constantly in one
direction; they do not, like other changes, destroy or consume, or
pass fruitless into wandering flux; they realize and fulfil. Each
successive stage, no matter how unlike its predecessor, preserves
its net effect and also prepares the way for a fuller activity on
the part of its successor. In living beings, changes do not happen
as they seem to happen elsewhere, any which way; the earlier changes
are regulated in view of later results. This progressive organization
does not cease till there is achieved a true final term, a τελὸς, a
completed, perfected end. This final form exercises in turn a plenitude
of functions, not the least noteworthy of which is production of germs
like those from which it took its own origin, germs capable of the same
cycle of self-fulfilling activity.
But the whole miraculous tale is not yet told. The same drama is
enacted to the same destiny in countless myriads of individuals so
sundered in time, so severed in space, that they have no opportunity
for mutual consultation and no means of interaction. As an old
writer quaintly said, “things of the same kind go through the same
formalities”--celebrate, as it were, the same ceremonial rites.
This formal activity which operates throughout a series of changes and
holds them to a single course; which subordinates their aimless flux to
its own perfect manifestation; which, leaping the boundaries of space
and time, keeps individuals distant in space and remote in time to a
uniform type of structure and function: this principle seemed to give
insight into the very nature of reality itself. To it Aristotle gave
the name, εῖδος. This term the scholastics translated as _species_.
The force of this term was deepened by its application to everything
in the universe that observes order in flux and manifests constancy
through change. From the casual drift of daily weather, through the
uneven recurrence of seasons and unequal return of seed time and
harvest, up to the majestic sweep of the heavens--the image of eternity
in time--and from this to the unchanging pure and contemplative
intelligence beyond nature lies one unbroken fulfilment of ends.
Nature as a whole is a progressive realization of purpose strictly
comparable to the realization of purpose in any single plant or animal.
The conception of εῖδος, species, a fixed form and final cause,
was the central principle of knowledge as well as of nature. Upon
it rested the logic of science. Change as change is mere flux and
lapse; it insults intelligence. Genuinely to know is to grasp a
permanent end that realizes itself through changes, holding them
thereby within the metes and bounds of fixed truth. Completely to
know is to relate all special forms to their one single end and good:
pure contemplative intelligence. Since, however, the scene of nature
which directly confronts us is in change, nature as directly and
practically experienced does not satisfy the conditions of knowledge.
Human experience is in flux, and hence the instrumentalities of
sense-perception and of inference based upon observation are condemned
in advance. Science is compelled to aim at realities lying behind and
beyond the processes of nature, and to carry on its search for these
realities by means of rational forms transcending ordinary modes of
perception and inference.
There are, indeed, but two alternative courses. We must either find the
appropriate objects and organs of knowledge in the mutual interactions
of changing things; or else, to escape the infection of change, we
_must_ seek them in some transcendent and supernal region. The human
mind, deliberately as it were, exhausted the logic of the changeless,
the final, and the transcendent, before it essayed adventure on the
pathless wastes of generation and transformation. We dispose all too
easily of the efforts of the schoolmen to interpret nature and mind in
terms of real essences, hidden forms, and occult faculties, forgetful
of the seriousness and dignity of the ideas that lay behind. We dispose
of them by laughing at the famous gentleman who accounted for the
fact that opium put people to sleep on the ground it had a dormitive
faculty. But the doctrine, held in our own day, that knowledge of the
plant that yields the poppy consists in referring the peculiarities
of an individual to a type, to a universal form, a doctrine so firmly
established that any other method of knowing was conceived to be
unphilosophical and unscientific, is a survival of precisely the same
logic. This identity of conception in the scholastic and anti-Darwinian
theory may well suggest greater sympathy for what has become unfamiliar
as well as greater humility regarding the further unfamiliarities that
history has in store.
Darwin was not, of course, the first to question the classic philosophy
of nature and of knowledge. The beginnings of the revolution are in
the physical science of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
When Galileo said: “It is my opinion that the earth is very noble
and admirable by reason of so many and so different alterations and
generations which are incessantly made therein,” he expressed the
changed temper that was coming over the world; the transfer of interest
from the permanent to the changing. When Descartes said: “The nature
of physical things is much more easily conceived when they are beheld
coming gradually into existence, than when they are only considered as
produced at once in a finished and perfect state,” the modern world
became self-conscious of the logic that was henceforth to control
it, the logic of which Darwin’s “Origin of Species” is the latest
scientific achievement. Without the methods of Copernicus, Kepler,
Galileo, and their successors in astronomy, physics, and chemistry,
Darwin would have been helpless in the organic sciences. But prior
to Darwin the impact of the new scientific method upon life, mind,
and politics, had been arrested, because between these ideal or moral
interests and the inorganic world intervened the kingdom of plants and
animals. The gates of the garden of life were barred to the new ideas;
and only through this garden was there access to mind and politics. The
influence of Darwin upon philosophy resides in his having conquered the
phenomena of life for the principle of transition, and thereby freed
the new logic for application to mind and morals and life. When he said
of species what Galileo had said of the earth, _e pur si muove_, he
emancipated, once for all, genetic and experimental ideas as an organon
of asking questions and looking for explanations.
III
The exact bearings upon philosophy of the new logical outlook are, of
course, as yet, uncertain and inchoate. We live in the twilight of
intellectual transition. One must add the rashness of the prophet to
the stubbornness of the partizan to venture a systematic exposition of
the influence upon philosophy of the Darwinian method. At best, we can
but inquire as to its general bearing--the effect upon mental temper
and complexion, upon that body of half-conscious, half-instinctive
intellectual aversions and preferences which determine, after all, our
more deliberate intellectual enterprises. In this vague inquiry there
happens to exist as a kind of touchstone a problem of long historic
currency that has also been much discussed in Darwinian literature.
I refer to the old problem of design _versus_ chance, mind _versus_
matter, as the causal explanation, first or final, of things.
As we have already seen, the classic notion of species carried with it
the idea of purpose. In all living forms, a specific type is present
directing the earlier stages of growth to the realization of its own
perfection. Since this purposive regulative principle is not visible
to the senses, it follows that it must be an ideal or rational force.
Since, however, the perfect form is gradually approximated through the
sensible changes, it also follows that in and through a sensible realm
a rational ideal force is working out its own ultimate manifestation.
These inferences were extended to nature: (_a_) She does nothing in
vain; but all for an ulterior purpose. (_b_) Within natural sensible
events there is therefore contained a spiritual causal force, which
as spiritual escapes perception, but is apprehended by an enlightened
reason. (_c_) The manifestation of this principle brings about a
subordination of matter and sense to its own realization, and this
ultimate fulfilment is the goal of nature and of man. The design
argument thus operated in two directions. Purposefulness accounted for
the intelligibility of nature and the possibility of science, while
the absolute or cosmic character of this purposefulness gave sanction
and worth to the moral and religious endeavors of man. Science was
underpinned and morals authorized by one and the same principle, and
their mutual agreement was eternally guaranteed.
This philosophy remained, in spite of sceptical and polemic outbursts,
the official and the regnant philosophy of Europe for over two thousand
years. The expulsion of fixed first and final causes from astronomy,
physics, and chemistry had indeed given the doctrine something of
a shock. But, on the other hand, increased acquaintance with the
details of plant and animal life operated as a counterbalance and
perhaps even strengthened the argument from design. The marvelous
adaptations of organisms to their environment, of organs to the
organism, of unlike parts of a complex organ--like the eye--to the
organ itself; the foreshadowing by lower forms of the higher; the
preparation in earlier stages of growth for organs that only later had
their functioning--these things were increasingly recognized with the
progress of botany, zoology, paleontology, and embryology. Together,
they added such prestige to the design argument that by the late
eighteenth century it was, as approved by the sciences of organic life,
the central point of theistic and idealistic philosophy.
The Darwinian principle of natural selection cut straight under this
philosophy. If all organic adaptations are due simply to constant
variation and the elimination of those variations which are harmful
in the struggle for existence that is brought about by excessive
reproduction, there is no call for a prior intelligent causal force
to plan and preordain them. Hostile critics charged Darwin with
materialism and with making chance the cause of the universe.
Some naturalists, like Asa Gray, favored the Darwinian principle
and attempted to reconcile it with design. Gray held to what may be
called design on the installment plan. If we conceive the “stream of
variations” to be itself intended, we may suppose that each successive
variation was designed from the first to be selected. In that case,
variation, struggle, and selection simply define the mechanism of
“secondary causes” through which the “first cause” acts; and the
doctrine of design is none the worse off because we know more of its
_modus operandi_.
Darwin could not accept this mediating proposal. He admits or rather he
asserts that it is “impossible to conceive this immense and wonderful
universe including man with his capacity of looking far backwards and
far into futurity as the result of blind chance or necessity.”[3] But
nevertheless he holds that since variations are in useless as well as
useful directions, and since the latter are sifted out simply by the
stress of the conditions of struggle for existence, the design argument
as applied to living beings is unjustifiable; and its lack of support
there deprives it of scientific value as applied to nature in general.
If the variations of the pigeon, which under artificial selection give
the pouter pigeon, are not preordained for the sake of the breeder, by
what logic do we argue that variations resulting in natural species are
pre-designed?[4]
IV
So much for some of the more obvious facts of the discussion of design
_versus_ chance, as causal principles of nature and of life as a whole.
We brought up this discussion, you recall, as a crucial instance. What
does our touchstone indicate as to the bearing of Darwinian ideas
upon philosophy? In the first place, the new logic outlaws, flanks,
dismisses--what you will--one type of problems and substitutes for
it another type. Philosophy forswears inquiry after absolute origins
and absolute finalities in order to explore specific values and the
specific conditions that generate them.
Darwin concluded that the impossibility of assigning the world to
chance as a whole and to design in its parts indicated the insolubility
of the question. Two radically different reasons, however, may be
given as to why a problem is insoluble. One reason is that the problem
is too high for intelligence; the other is that the question in its
very asking makes assumptions that render the question meaningless.
The latter alternative is unerringly pointed to in the celebrated
case of design _versus_ chance. Once admit that the sole verifiable
or fruitful object of knowledge is the particular set of changes that
generate the object of study together with the consequences that then
flow from it, and no intelligible question can be asked about what,
by assumption, lies outside. To assert--as is often asserted--that
specific values of particular truth, social bonds and forms of beauty,
if they can be shown to be generated by concretely knowable conditions,
are meaningless and in vain; to assert that they are justified only
when they and their particular causes and effects have all at once been
gathered up into some inclusive first cause and some exhaustive final
goal, is intellectual atavism. Such argumentation is reversion to the
logic that explained the extinction of fire by water through the formal
essence of aqueousness and the quenching of thirst by water through the
final cause of aqueousness. Whether used in the case of the special
event or that of life as a whole, such logic only abstracts some
aspect of the existing course of events in order to reduplicate it as
a petrified eternal principle by which to explain the very changes of
which it is the formalization.
When Henry Sidgwick casually remarked in a letter that as he grew older
his interest in what or who made the world was altered into interest in
what kind of a world it is anyway, his voicing of a common experience
of our own day illustrates also the nature of that intellectual
transformation effected by the Darwinian logic. Interest shifts from
the wholesale essence back of special changes to the question of
how special changes serve and defeat concrete purposes; shifts from
an intelligence that shaped things once for all to the particular
intelligences which things are even now shaping; shifts from an
ultimate goal of good to the direct increments of justice and happiness
that intelligent administration of existent conditions may beget and
that present carelessness or stupidity will destroy or forego.
In the second place, the classic type of logic inevitably set
philosophy upon proving that life _must_ have certain qualities and
values--no matter how experience presents the matter--because of some
remote cause and eventual goal. The duty of wholesale justification
inevitably accompanies all thinking that makes the meaning of special
occurrences depend upon something that once and for all lies behind
them. The habit of derogating from present meanings and uses prevents
our looking the facts of experience in the face; it prevents serious
acknowledgment of the evils they present and serious concern with the
goods they promise but do not as yet fulfil. It turns thought to the
business of finding a wholesale transcendent remedy for the one and
guarantee for the other. One is reminded of the way many moralists and
theologians greeted Herbert Spencer’s recognition of an unknowable
energy from which welled up the phenomenal physical processes without
and the conscious operations within. Merely because Spencer labeled his
unknowable energy “God,” this faded piece of metaphysical goods was
greeted as an important and grateful concession to the reality of the
spiritual realm. Were it not for the deep hold of the habit of seeking
justification for ideal values in the remote and transcendent, surely
this reference of them to an unknowable absolute would be despised in
comparison with the demonstrations of experience that knowable energies
are daily generating about us precious values.
The displacing of this wholesale type of philosophy will doubtless not
arrive by sheer logical disproof, but rather by growing recognition
of its futility. Were it a thousand times true that opium produces
sleep because of its dormitive energy, yet the inducing of sleep in
the tired, and the recovery to waking life of the poisoned, would not
be thereby one least step forwarded. And were it a thousand times
dialectically demonstrated that life as a whole is regulated by a
transcendent principle to a final inclusive goal, none the less truth
and error, health and disease, good and evil, hope and fear in the
concrete, would remain just what and where they now are. To improve our
education, to ameliorate our manners, to advance our politics, we must
have recourse to specific conditions of generation.
Finally, the new logic introduces responsibility into the intellectual
life. To idealize and rationalize the universe at large is after
all a confession of inability to master the courses of things that
specifically concern us. As long as mankind suffered from this
impotency, it naturally shifted a burden of responsibility that
it could not carry over to the more competent shoulders of the
transcendent cause. But if insight into specific conditions of value
and into specific consequences of ideas is possible, philosophy must
in time become a method of locating and interpreting the more serious
of the conflicts that occur in life, and a method of projecting ways
for dealing with them: a method of moral and political diagnosis and
prognosis.
The claim to formulate _a priori_ the legislative constitution of the
universe is by its nature a claim that may lead to elaborate dialectic
developments. But it is also one that removes these very conclusions
from subjection to experimental test, for, by definition, these results
make no differences in the detailed course of events. But a philosophy
that humbles its pretensions to the work of projecting hypotheses for
the education and conduct of mind, individual and social, is thereby
subjected to test by the way in which the ideas it propounds work out
in practice. In having modesty forced upon it, philosophy also acquires
responsibility.
Doubtless I seem to have violated the implied promise of my earlier
remarks and to have turned both prophet and partizan. But in
anticipating the direction of the transformations in philosophy to
be wrought by the Darwinian genetic and experimental logic, I do not
profess to speak for any save those who yield themselves consciously
or unconsciously to this logic. No one can fairly deny that at present
there are two effects of the Darwinian mode of thinking. On the one
hand, there are making many sincere and vital efforts to revise our
traditional philosophic conceptions in accordance with its demands. On
the other hand, there is as definitely a recrudescence of absolutistic
philosophies; an assertion of a type of philosophic knowing distinct
from that of the sciences, one which opens to us another kind of
reality from that to which the sciences give access; an appeal through
experience to something that essentially goes beyond experience. This
reaction affects popular creeds and religious movements as well as
technical philosophies. The very conquest of the biological sciences by
the new ideas has led many to proclaim an explicit and rigid separation
of philosophy from science.
Old ideas give way slowly; for they are more than abstract
logical forms and categories. They are habits, predispositions,
deeply engrained attitudes of aversion and preference. Moreover,
the conviction persists--though history shows it to be a
hallucination--that all the questions that the human mind has asked
are questions that can be answered in terms of the alternatives that
the questions themselves present. But in fact intellectual progress
usually occurs through sheer abandonment of questions together with
both of the alternatives they assume--an abandonment that results from
their decreasing vitality and a change of urgent interest. We do not
solve them: we get over them. Old questions are solved by disappearing,
evaporating, while new questions corresponding to the changed attitude
of endeavor and preference take their place. Doubtless the greatest
dissolvent in contemporary thought of old questions, the greatest
precipitant of new methods, new intentions, new problems, is the one
effected by the scientific revolution that found its climax in the
“Origin of Species.”
NATURE AND ITS GOOD: A CONVERSATION[5]
A group of people are scattered near one another, on the sands of an
ocean beach; wraps, baskets, etc., testify to a day’s outing. Above the
hum of the varied conversations are heard the mock sobs of one of the
party.
_Various voices._ What’s the matter, Eaton?
_Eaton._ Matter enough. I was watching a beautiful wave; its lines were
perfect; at its crest, the light glinting through its infinitely varied
and delicate curves of foam made a picture more ravishing than any
dream. And now it has gone; it will never come back. So I weep.
_Grimes._ That’s right, Eaton; give it to them. Of course well-fed and
well-read persons--with their possessions of wealth and of knowledge
both gained at the expense of others--finally get bored; then they
wax sentimental over their boredom and are worried about “Nature” and
its relation to life. Not everybody takes it out that way, of course;
some take motor cars and champagne for that tired feeling. But the
rest--those who aren’t in that class financially, or who consider
themselves too refined for that kind of relief--seek a new sensation in
speculating why that brute old world out there will not stand for what
you call spiritual and ideal values--for short, your egotisms.
The fact is that the whole discussion is only a symptom of the leisure
class disease. If you had to work to the limit and beyond, to keep
soul and body together, and, more than that, to keep alive the soul of
your family in its body, you would know the difference between your
artificial problems and the genuine problem of life. Your philosophic
problems about the relation of “the universe to moral and spiritual
good” exist only in the sentimentalism that generates them. The
genuine question is why social arrangements will not permit the amply
sufficient body of natural resources to sustain all men and women in
security and decent comfort, with a margin for the cultivation of their
human instincts of sociability, love of knowledge and of art.
As I read Plato, philosophy began with some sense of its essentially
political basis and mission--a recognition that its problems were those
of the organization of a just social order. But it soon got lost in
dreams of another world; and even those of you philosophers who pride
yourselves on being so advanced that you no longer believe in “another
world,” are still living and thinking with reference to it. You may
not call it supernatural; but when you talk about a realm of spiritual
or ideal values in general, and ask about its relation to Nature in
general, you have only changed the labels on the bottles, not the
contents in them. For what makes anything transcendental--that is,
in common language, supernatural--is simply and only aloofness from
practical affairs--which affairs in their ultimate analysis are the
business of making a living.
_Eaton._ Yes; Grimes has about hit off the point of my little
parable--in one of its aspects at least. In matters of daily life you
say a man is “off,” more or less insane, when he deliberately goes
on looking for a certain kind of result from conditions which he has
already found to be such that they cannot possibly yield it. If he
keeps on looking, and then goes about mourning because stage money
won’t buy beefsteaks, or because he cannot keep himself warm by burning
the sea-sands here, you dismiss him as a fool or a hysteric. If you
would condescend to reason with him at all, you would tell him to look
for the conditions that will yield the results; to occupy himself
with some of the countless goods of life for which, by intelligently
directed search, adequate means may be found.
Well, before lunch, Moore was reiterating the old tale. “Modern science
has completely transformed our conceptions of Nature. It has stripped
the universe bare not only of all the moral values which it wore alike
to antique pagan and to our medieval ancestors, but also of any regard,
any preference, for such values. They are mere incidents, transitory
accidents, in her everlasting redistribution of matter in motion; like
the rise and fall of the wave I lament, or like a single musical note
that a screeching, rumbling railway train might happen to emit.” This
is a one-sided view; but suppose it were all so, what is the moral?
Surely, to change our standpoint, our angle of vision; to stop looking
for results among conditions that we know will not yield them; to turn
our gaze to the goods, the values that exist actually and indubitably
in experience; and consider by what natural conditions these particular
values may be strengthened and widened.
Insist, if you please, that Nature as a whole does not stand for good
as a whole. Then, in heaven’s name, just because good is both so plural
(so “numerous”) and so partial, bend your energies of intelligence
and of effort to selecting the specific plural and partial natural
conditions which will at least render values that we do have more
secure and more extensive. Any other course is the way of madness; it
is the way of the spoilt child who cries at the seashore because the
waves do not stand still, and who cries even more frantically in the
mountains because the hills do not melt and flow.
But no. Moore and his school will not have it so: we must “go back of
the returns.” All this science, after all, is a mode of knowledge.
Examine knowledge itself and find it implies a complete all-inclusive
intelligence; and then find (by taking another tack) that intelligence
involves sentiency, feeling, and also will. Hence your very physical
science, if you will only criticise it, examine it, shows that its
object, mechanical nature, is itself an included and superseded element
in an all-embracing spiritual and ideal whole. And there you are.
Well, I do not now insist that all this is mere dialectic
prestidigitation. No; accept it; let it go at its face value. But
what of it? Is any value more concretely and securely in life than it
was before? Does this perfect intelligence enable us to correct one
single mis-step, one paltry error, here and now? Does this perfect
all-inclusive goodness serve to heal one disease? Does it rectify one
transgression? Does it even give the slightest inkling of how to go to
work at any of these things? No; it just tells you: Never mind, for
they are already eternally corrected, eternally healed in the eternal
consciousness which alone is really Real. Stop: there is one evil, one
pain, which the doctrine mitigates--the hysteric sentimentalism which
is troubled because the universe as a whole does not sustain good as a
whole. But that is the only thing it alters. The “pathetic fallacy” of
Ruskin magnified to the _n_th power is the _motif_ of modern idealism.
_Moore._ Certainly nobody will accuse Eaton of
tender-mindedness--except in his logic, which, _as_ certainly, is not
tough-minded. His excitement, however, convinces me that he has at
least an inkling that he is begging the question; and like the true
pragmatist that he is, is trying to prevent by action (to wit, his
flood of speech) his false logic from becoming articulate to him. The
question being whether the values we seem to apprehend, the purposes
we entertain, the goods we possess, are anything more than transitory
waves, Eaton meets it by saying: “Oh, of course, they are waves; but
don’t think about that--just sit down hard on the wave or get another
wave to buttress it with!” No wonder he recommends action instead
of thinking! Men have tried this method before, as a counsel of
desperation or as cynical pessimism. But it remained for contemporary
pragmatism to label the drowning of sorrow in the intoxication of
thoughtless action, the highest achievement of philosophic method, and
to preach wilful restlessness as a doctrine of hope and illumination.
Meantime, I prefer to be tender-minded in my attitude toward Reality,
and to make that attitude more reasonable by a tough-minded logic.
_Eaton._ I am willing to be quiet long enough for you to translate your
metaphor into logic, and show how I have begged the question.
_Moore._ It is plain enough. You bid us turn to the cultivation, the
nurture, of certain values in human life. But the question is whether
these are or are not values. And that is a question of their relation
to the Universe--to Reality. If Reality substantiates them, then indeed
they are values; if it mocks and flouts them--as it surely does if what
mechanical science calls Nature be ultimate and absolute--then they are
_not_ values. You and your kind are really the sentimentalists, because
you are sheer subjectivists. You say: Accept the dream as real; do not
question about it; add a little iridescence to its fog and extend it
till it obscure even more of Reality than it naturally does, and all
is well! I say: Perhaps the dream is no dream but an intimation of the
solidest and most ultimate of all realities; and a thorough examination
of what the positivist, the materialist, accepts as solid, namely,
science, reveals as its own aim, standard, and presupposition that
Reality is one all-exhaustive spiritual Being.
_Eaton._ This is about the way I thought my begging of the question
would turn out. You insist upon translating my position into terms of
your own; I am not then surprised to hear that it would be a begging
of the question for _you_ to hold my views. My point is precisely
that it is only as long as you take the position that some Reality
beyond--some metaphysical or transcendental reality--is necessary to
substantiate empirical values that you can even discuss whether the
latter are genuine or illusions. Drop the presupposition that you read
into everything I say, the idea that the reality of things as they are
is dependent upon something beyond and behind, and the facts of the
case just stare you in the eyes: Goods _are_, a multitude of them--but,
unfortunately, evils also _are_; and all grades, pretty much, of both.
Not the contrast and relation of experience _in toto_ to something
beyond experience drives men to religion and then to philosophy; but
the contrast _within_ experience of the better and the worse, and the
consequent problem of how to substantiate the former and reduce the
latter. Until you set up the notion of a transcendental reality at
large, you cannot even raise the question of whether goods and evils
are, or only seem to be. The trouble and the joy, the good and the
evil, is _that_ they are; the hope is that they may be regulated,
guided, increased in one direction and minimized in another. Instead
of neglecting thought, we (I mean the pragmatists) exalt it, because
we say that intelligent discrimination of means and ends is the sole
final resource in this problem of all problems, the control of the
factors of good and ill in life. We say, indeed, not merely that that
is what intelligence _does_, but rather what it _is_.
Historically, it is quite possible to show how under certain social
conditions this human and practical problem of the relation of good and
intelligence generated the notion of the transcendental good and the
pure reason. As Grimes reminded us, Plato----
_Moore._ Yes, and Protagoras--don’t forget him; for unfortunately we
know both the origin and the consequences of your doctrine that being
and seeming are the same. We know quite well that pure empiricism leads
to the identification of being and seeming, and that is just why every
deeply moral and religious soul from the time of Plato and Aristotle to
the present has insisted upon a transcendent reality.
_Eaton._ Personally I don’t need an absolute to enable me to
distinguish between, say, the good of kindness and the evil of slander,
or the good of health and the evil of valetudinarianism. In experience,
things bear their own specific characters. Nor has the absolute
idealist as yet answered the question of _how_ the absolute reality
enables him to distinguish between being and seeming in one single
concrete case. The trouble is that for him _all_ Being is on the other
side of experience, and _all_ experience is seeming.
_Grimes._ I think I heard you mention history. I wish both of you
would drop dialectics and go to history. You would find history to be
a struggle for existence--for bread, for a roof, for protected and
nourished offspring. You would find history a picture of the masses
always going under--just missing--in the struggle, because others have
captured the control of natural resources, which in themselves, if not
as benign as the eighteenth century imagined, are at least abundantly
ample for the needs of all. But because of the monopolization of Nature
by a few persons, most men and women only stick their heads above the
welter just enough to catch a glimpse of better things, then to be
shoved down and under. The only problem of the relation of Nature to
human good which is real is the economic problem of the exploitation
of natural resources in the equal interests of all, instead of in the
unequal interests of a class. The problem you two men are discussing
has no existence--and never had any--outside of the heads of a few
metaphysicians. The latter would never have amounted to anything,
would never have had any career at all, had not shrewd monopolists
or tyrants (with the skill that characterizes them) have seen that
these speculations about reality and a transcendental world could be
distilled into opiates and distributed among the masses to make them
less rebellious. That, if you would know, Eaton, is the real historic
origin of the ideal world beyond. When you realize that, you will
perceive that the pragmatists are only half-way over. You will see
that practical questions _are_ practical, and are not to be solved
merely by having a theory _about_ theory different from the traditional
one--which is all your pragmatism comes to.
_Moore._ If you mean that your own crass Philistinism is all that
pragmatism comes to, I fancy you are about right. Forget that the
only end of action is to bring about an approximation to the complete
inclusive consciousness; make, as the pragmatists do, consciousness
a means to action, and one form of external activity is just as
good as another. Art, religion, all the generous reaches of science
which do not show up immediately in the factory--these things become
meaningless, and all that remains is that hard and dry satisfaction of
economic wants which is Grimes’s ideal.
_Grimes._ An ideal which exists, by the way, only in your imagination.
I know of no more convincing proof of the futile irrelevancy of
idealism than the damning way in which it narrows the content of actual
daily life in the minds of those who uphold idealism. I sometimes think
I am the only true idealist. If the conditions of an equitable and
ample physical existence for all were once secured, I, for one, have
no fears as to the bloom and harvest of art and science, and all the
“higher” things of leisure. Life is interesting enough for me; give it
a show for all.
_Arthur._ I find myself in a peculiar position in respect to this
discussion. An analysis of what is involved in this peculiarity may
throw some light on the points at issue, for I have to believe that
analysis and definition of what exists is the essential matter both
in resolution of doubts and in steps at reform. For brevity, not from
conceit, I will put the peculiarity to which I refer in a personal
form. I do not believe for a moment in some different Reality beyond
and behind Nature. I do not believe that a manipulation of the logical
implications of science can give results which are to be put in the
place of those which Science herself yields in her direct application.
I accept Nature as something which is, not seems, and Science as her
faithful transcript. Yet because I believe these things, not in spite
of them, I believe in the existence of purpose and of good. How Eaton
can believe that fulfilment and the increasing realization of purpose
can exist in human consciousness unless they first exist in the world
which is revealed in that consciousness is as much beyond me as how
Moore can believe that a manipulation of the method of knowledge can
yield considerations of a totally different order from those directly
obtained by use of the method. If purpose and fulfilment exist as
natural goods, then, and only then, can consciousness itself be a
fulfilment of Nature, and be also a natural good. Any other view is
inexplicable to sound thinking--save, historically, as a product of
modern political individualism and literary romanticism which have
combined to produce that idealistic philosophy according to which the
mind in knowing the universe creates it.