PRAGMATISM AND HUMAN ACTIVITY
It requires now but a slight degree of penetration to see that beneath
this entire matter of an apparent opposition between our “theoretical”
and our “practical” satisfaction, and beneath much of the pragmatist
insistence upon the “consequences” of ideas and of systems of thought,
there is the great question of the simple fact of human action and of
its significance for philosophy. And it might truly be said that the
raising of this question is not merely another of the more or less
definitely marked features of Pragmatism, but in some respects it is
one outstanding characteristic.
For some reason or other, or for some strange combination of reasons,
the phenomenon that we call “action”[167] (the activity of man as
an agent) and the apparently simple facts of the reality and the
intelligibility of action have long been regarded as matters of
altogether secondary or subordinate importance by the rationalism
of philosophy and by the mechanical philosophy of science. This
Rationalism and this ostensibly certain and demonstrable mechanical
philosophy of science suppose that the one problem of human thought is
simply that of the nature of truth or of the nature of reality (the
reality of the “physical” world) as if either (or each) of these things
were an entity on its own account, an absolutely final finding or
consideration. That this has really been the case so far as philosophy
is concerned is proved by the fact even of the existence of the many
characteristic deliverances and concessions of Rationalism in respect
of Pragmatism to which reference has already been made in the preceding
chapter. And that it has also been the case so far as science is
concerned is proved by the existence of the many dogmatic attempts of
many natural philosophers from Holbach to Haeckel to apply the “iron
laws” of matter and motion to the reality of everything else under
heaven,[168] and of everything in the heavens in spite of the frequent
confessions of their own colleagues with regard to the actual and the
necessary limits and limitations of science and of the scientific
outlook.
Only slowly and gradually, as it were, has the consideration come into
the very forefront of our speculative horizon that there is for man as
a thinking being _no_ rigid _separation_ between theory and practice,
between intellect and volition, between action and thought, between
fact and act, between truth and reality.[169] There is clearly volition
or aim, for example, in the search after truth. And there is certainly
purpose in the attention[170] that is involved even in the simplest
piece of perception, the selection of what interests and affects us
out of the total field of vision or experience. And it is equally
certain that there is thought in action--so long, that is to say, as
action is regarded as action and not as impulse. Again, the man who
wills the truth submits himself to an imperative just as surely as does
the man who explicitly obeys the law of duty. It is thus impossible,
as it were, even in the so-called intellectual life, to distinguish
absolutely between theoretical and practical considerations--“truth”
meaning invariably the relations obtaining in some “sphere,” or order,
of fact which we separate off for some purpose or other from the
infinite whole of reality. Equally impossible is it to distinguish
absolutely between the theoretical and the practical in the case of the
highest theoretical activity, in the case, say, of the “contemplation”
that Aristotle talks of as the most “godlike” activity of man. This
very contemplation, as our Neo-Hegelian[171] friends are always
reminding us, is an activity that is just as much a characteristic of
man, as is his power of setting his limbs in motion.
We have referred to the desire of the pragmatists to represent, and
to discover, a supposedly deeper or more comprehensive view of human
nature than that implicitly acted upon by Intellectualism--a view that
should provide, as they think, for the organic unity of our active and
our so-called reflective tendencies. This desire is surely eminently
typical of what we would like to think of as the rediscovery by
Pragmatism for philosophy, of the active, or the volitional, aspects of
the conscious life of man, and along with this important side of our
human nature, the reality also of the activities and the purposes that
are revealed in what we sometimes speak of as unconscious nature. The
world we know, it would hold, in the spirit and almost in the letter
of Bergson, lives and grows by experiment,[172] and by activities and
processes and adjustments. Pragmatism has doubtless, as we pointed out,
been prone to think of itself as the only philosophy that can bake
bread, that can speak to man in terms of the actual life of effort
and struggle that he seems called upon to live in the environment in
which he finds himself. And, as we have just been insisting, the main
ground of its hostility to Rationalism is the apparent tendency of the
latter to treat the various concepts and hypotheses that have been
devised to explain the world, and to render it intelligible, as if they
were themselves of more importance than the real persons and the real
happenings that constitute the world of our experience.[173]
If it were at all desirable to recapitulate to any extent those
phenomena connected with Pragmatism that seem to indicate its
rediscovery of the fact of action, and of the fact of its meaning
for philosophy, as its one outstanding characteristic, we may point
to such considerations as the following: (1) The fact of its having
sought to advance from the stage of a mere “instrumentalist” view
of human thought to that of an outspoken “humanism” or a socialized
utilitarianism. (2) The fact of its seeking to leave us (as the outcome
of philosophy) with all our more important “beliefs,” with a general
“working” view of the world in which such things as religion and
ideals and enthusiasm are adequately recognized. Pragmatism is really,
as we have put it, more interested in belief than in knowledge, the
former being to it the characteristic, the conquering attitude of man
to the world in which he finds himself. (3) Its main object is to
establish a dynamical view of reality, as that which is “everywhere
in the making,” as that which signifies to every person firstly that
aspect of the life of things in which he is for the time being
most vitally interested.[174] (4) In the spirit of the empirical
philosophy generally its main anxiety is to do the fullest justice
to all the aspects of our so-called human experience, looking upon
theories and systems as but points of view for the interpretation of
this experience, and of the great universal life that transcends it.
And proceeding upon the theory that a true metaphysic must become
a true “dynamic” or a true incentive to human motive, it seeks the
relationships and affiliations that have been pointed out with all the
different liberating and progressive tendencies in the history of human
thought. (5) It would “consult moral experience directly,” finding
in the world of our ordinary moral and social effort a spiritual
reality[175] that raises the individual out of and above and beyond
himself. And it bears testimony in its own more or less imperfect
manner to the autonomous element[176] in our human personality that,
in the moral life, and in such things as religious aspiration and
creative effort and social service, transcends the merely theoretical
descriptions of the world with which we are familiar in the
generalizations of science and of history.
Without attempting meanwhile to probe at all deeply into this
pragmatist glorification of “action” and its importance to philosophy,
let us think of a few of the considerations that may be urged in
support of this idea from sources outside those of the mere practical
tendencies and the affiliations of Pragmatism itself.
There is first of all the consideration that it is the fact of action
that unites or brings together what we call “desire” and what we
call “thought,” the world of our desires and emotions and the world
of our thoughts and our knowledge. This is really a consideration of
the utmost importance to us when we think of what we have allowed
ourselves to call the characteristic dualism[177] of modern times, the
discrepancy that seems to exist between the world of our desires and
the impersonal world of science--which latter world educated people
are apt to think of as the world before which everything else must
bend and break, or at least bow. Our point here is not merely that
of the humiliating truth of the wisdom of the wiseacres who used to
tell us in our youth that we will anyhow have to act in spite of all
our unanswered questions about things, but the plain statement of the
fact that (say or think what we will) it is in _conscious action_
that our desires and our thoughts _do_ come together, and that it is
there that they are both seen to be but partial expressions of the
one reality--the life that is in things and in ourselves, and that
engenders in us both emotions and thoughts, even if the latter do
sometimes seem to lie “too deep for tears.” It is with this life and
with the objects and aims and ends and realities that develop and
sustain it that all our thoughts, as well as all our desires, are
concerned. If action, therefore, could only be properly understood, if
it can somehow be seen in its universal or its cosmic significance,
there would be no discrepancy and no gap between the world of our
ideals and the world of our thoughts. We would know what we want,[178]
and we would want and desire what we know we can get--the complete
development of our personality.
Again there is the evidence that exists in the sciences of biology and
anthropology in support of the important role played in both animal and
human evolution by effort and choice and volition and experimentation.
“Already in the contractibility of protoplasm and in the activities of
typical protozoons do we find ‘activities’ that imply[179] volition
of some sort or degree, for there appears to be some selection of
food and some spontaneity of movement: changes of direction, the
taking of a circuitous course in avoidance of an obstruction, etc.,
indicate this.” Then again, “there are such things as the diversities
in secondary sexual characters (the ‘after-thoughts of reproduction’
as they are called), the endless shift of parasites, the power of
animals to alter their coloration to suit environment, and the complex
‘internal stimuli’ of the higher animals in their breeding periods
and activities, which make us see only too clearly what the so-called
struggle for life has been in the animal world.”...
Coming up to man let us think of what scientists point out as the
effects of man’s disturbing influence in nature, and then pass from
these on to the facts of anthropology in respect of the conquest
of environment by what we call invention and inheritance and free
initiative. “In placing _invention_,” says a writer of to-day in a
recent brilliant book, “at the bottom of the scale of conditions
[_i.e._ of the conditions of social development], I definitely break
with the opinion that human evolution is throughout a purely natural
process.... It is pre-eminently an _artificial construction_.”[180] Now
it requires but the reflection of a moment or two upon considerations
such as the foregoing, and upon the attested facts of history as to
the breaking up of the tyranny of habit and custom by the force of
reflection and free action and free initiative, to grasp how really
great should be the significance to philosophy of the active and the
volitional nature of man that is thus demonstrably at the root not only
of our progress, but of civilization itself.
If it be objected that while there cannot, indeed, from the point
of view of the general culture and civilization of mankind, be any
question of the importance to philosophy of the active effort and
of the _active thought_ that underlie this stupendous achievement,
the case is perhaps somewhat different when we try to think of the
pragmatist glorification of our human action from the point of view
of the (physical?) universe as a whole.[181] To this reflection it
is possible here to say but one or two things. Firstly, there is
apparently at present no warrant in science for seeking to separate
off this human life of ours from the evolution of animal life in
general.[182] Equally little is there any warrant for separating
the evolution of living matter from the evolution of what we call
inanimate matter, not to speak of the initial difficulty of accounting
for things like energy and radio-active matter, and the evolution and
the devolution that are calmly claimed by science to be involved in
the various “systems” within the universe--apart from an ordering and
intelligent mind and will. There is therefore, so far, no necessary
presumption against the idea of regarding human evolution as at least
in some sense a continuation or development of the life that seems to
pervade the universe in general. And then, secondly, there is the
familiar reflection that nearly all that we think we know about the
universe as a whole is but an interpretation of it in terms of the life
and the energy that we experience in ourselves and in terms of some of
the apparent conditions of this life and this energy. For as Bergson
reminds us, “As thinking beings we may apply the laws of our physics to
our world, and extend them to each of the worlds taken separately, but
nothing tells us that they apply to the entire universe nor even that
such affirmation has any meaning; for the universe is _not made_ but
is _being made continually_. It is growing perhaps indefinitely by the
addition of new worlds.”[183]
On the ground, then, both of science and of philosophy[184] may it
be definitely said that this human action of ours, as apparently
the highest outcome of the forces of nature, becomes only too
naturally and only too inevitably the highest object of our reflective
consideration. As Schopenhauer put it long ago, the human body is the
only object in nature that we know “on the inside.” And do or think
what we will, it is this human life of ours and this mind of ours that
have peopled the world of science and the world of philosophy with
all the categories and all the distinctions that obtain there, with
concepts like the “(Platonic) Ideas,” “form,” “matter,” “energy,”
“ether,” “atom,” “substance,” “the individual,” “the universal,” “empty
space,” “eternity,” “the Absolute,” “value,” “final end,” and so on.
There is much doubtless in this action philosophy, and much too in the
matter of the reasons that may be brought forward in its support, that
can become credible and intelligible only as we proceed. But it must
all count, it would seem, in support of the idea of the pragmatist
rediscovery, for philosophy, of the importance of our creative action
and of our creative thought. And then there are one or two additional
general considerations of which we may well think in the same connexion.
Pragmatism boasts, as we know, of being a highly democratic[185]
doctrine, of contending for the emancipation of the individual and his
interests from the tyranny of all kinds of absolutism, and all kinds
of dogmatism (whether philosophical, or scientific, or social). No
system either of thought or of practice, no supposed “world-view” of
things, no body of scientific laws or abstract truths shall, as long as
it holds the field of our attention, entirely crush out of existence
the concrete interests and the free self-development of the individual
human being.
A tendency in this direction exists, it must be admitted, in the
“determinism” both of natural science and of Hegelianism, and of
the social philosophy that has emanated from the one or from the
other. Pragmatism, on the contrary, in all matters of the supposed
determination, or the attempted limitation, of the individual by what
has been accomplished either in Nature or in human history, would
incline to what we generally speak of to-day as a “modernistic,”
or a “liberalistic,” or even a “revolutionary,” attitude. It would
reinterpret and reconstruct, in the light of the present and its needs,
not only the concepts and the methods of science and philosophy, but
also the various institutions and the various social practices of
mankind.[186]
Similarily Pragmatism would protest, as does the newer education
and the newer sociology, against any merely _doctrinaire_ (or
“intellectualistic”) conception of education and culture, substituting
in its place the “efficiency” or the “social service”[187] conception.
And even if we must admit that this more or less practical ideal of
education has been over-emphasized in our time, it is still true, as
with Goethe, that it is only the “actively-free” man, the man who can
work out in service and true accomplishment the ideal of human life,
whose production should be regarded as the aim of a sound educational
or social policy.
We shall later attempt to assign some definite reasons for the failure
of Pragmatism to make the most of all this apparently justifiable
insistence upon action and upon the creative activity of the
individual, along with all this sympathy that it seems to evince for a
progressive and a liberationist view of human policy.
Meantime, in view of all these considerations, we cannot avoid making
the reflection that it is surely something of an anomaly in philosophy
that a thinker’s “study” doubts about his actions and about some of
the main instinctive beliefs of mankind (in which he himself shares)
should have come to be regarded--as they have been by Rationalism--as
considerations of a greater importance than the actions, and the
beliefs, and the realities, of which they are the expression. Far be
it from the writer to suggest that the suspension of judgment and the
refraining from activity,[188] in the absence of adequate reason and
motive, are not, and have not been of the greatest value to mankind
in the matter of the development of the higher faculties and the
higher ideals of the mind. There may well be, however, for Pragmatism,
or for any philosophy that can work it out satisfactorily, in the
free, creative, activity of man, in the duty that lies upon us all of
carrying on our lives to the highest expression, a reason and a truth
that must be estimated at their logical worth along with the many other
reasons and truths of which we are pleased to think as the truth of
things.
Short, however, of a more genuine attempt on the part of Pragmatism
than anything it has as yet given us in this connexion to justify this
higher reason and truth that are embodied in our consciousness of
ourselves as persons, as _rational agents_, all its mere “practicalism”
and all its “instrumentalism” are but the workaday and the utilitarian
philosophy of which we have already complained in its earlier and
cruder professions.[189]
After some attention, then, to the matter of the outstanding critical
defects of Pragmatism, in its preliminary and cruder forms, we shall
again return to our topic of the relatively new subject-matter it has
been endeavouring to place before philosophy in its insistence upon the
importance of action, and upon the need of a “dynamic,” instead of an
intellectualistic and “spectator-like” theory of human personality.
APPENDIX TO CHAPTER IV
PHILOSOPHY AND THE ACTIVITY-EXPERIENCE
[In an article upon the above title in the _International Journal of
Ethics_, p. 1898, I attempted to deal with some aspects of the problem
that I have just raised in the preceding chapter. I venture to append
here some of the statements that I made then upon the importance of
action and the “activity-experience” to the philosophy of to-day. I
am inclined to regard them (although I have not looked at them until
the present moment of passing this book through the press) as a kind
of anticipation and confirmation of many of my present pages. Part
of my excuse, however, for inserting them here is a hope that these
references and suggestions may possibly be of service to the general
reader. The extracts follow as they were printed.]
I. It requires no very profound acquaintance with the trend of
the literature of general and specialized philosophy of the last
twenty-five years to detect a decidedly practical turn in the recent
speculative tendencies of philosophy and philosophers. The older
conception of philosophy or metaphysics as an attempt to state (more
or less systematically) the value of the world for thought is being
slowly modified, if not altogether disappearing, into the attempt to
explain or to grasp the significance of the world from the stand-point
of the moral and social activity of man. The philosophical student must
be to some extent conscious of the difference in respect of both tone
and subject-matter between such books as Stirling’s _Secret of Hegel_,
E. Caird’s _Critical Philosophy of Kant_ (the first editions of both
works), Green’s _Prolegomena to Ethics_, and the most recent essays
and books of Professors A. Seth[190] and James[191] and Ward[192]
and Sidgwick[193] and Baldwin,[194] and of Mr. Bosanquet[195] and
the late Mr. Nettleship,[196] and between--to turn to Germany--the
writings of Erdmann and Kuno Fischer and Zeller and F. A. Lange, and
those of Gizycki, Paulsen, Windelband, Eucken, Hartmann, Deussen,
Simmel, and--in France--between the writings of Renouvier and Pillon
and Ravaisson, the “Neo-Kantianism” of the _Critique Philosophique_
(1872–1877), and those of Fouillée, Weber (of Strassburg), Séailles,
Dunan, and others, and of general writers like de Vogüé, Desjardins,
and Brunetière, and of social philosophers like Bouglé, Tarde, Izoulet,
and so on. The change of _venue_ in these writers alone, not to speak
of the change of the interest of the educated world from such books
as Huxley’s _Hume_ and Renan’s _L’Avenir de la Science_ and Du Bois
Reymond’s _Die Sieben Welträthsel_, and Tyndall’s _Belfast Address_,
to the writings of Herbert Spencer (the Sociology and the general
essays on social evolution), Kidd, Nordau, Nietzsche, Mr. Crozier
(his important _History of Civilization_), and Demolins,[197] and the
predominance of investigations into general biology and comparative
psychology and sociology over merely logical and conceptual philosophy
seem to afford us some warrant for trying to think of what might
be called a newer or ethical idealism, an idealism of the will, an
idealism of life, in contradistinction to the older or intellectual
(epistemological, Neo-Kantian) idealism, the idealism of the intellect.
Professor A. Seth,[198] in his recent volume on _Man’s Place in the
Cosmos_, suggests that Mr. Bradley’s treatise on _Appearance and
Reality_ has closed the period of the absorption or assimilation of
Kanto-Hegelian principles by the English mind. And there is ample
evidence in contemporary philosophical literature to show that even
the very men who have, with the help of Stirling and Green and Caird
and Bradley and Wallace, “absorbed and assimilated” the principles
of critical idealism are now bent upon applying these principles to
the solution of concrete problems of art and life and conduct. Two
things alone would constitute a difference between the philosophy of
the last few years and that of the preceding generation: An attempt
(strongly[199] accentuated at the present moment) to include elements
of _feeling_ and _will_ in our final consciousness of reality, and a
tendency (inevitable since Comte and Hegel’s _Philosophy of History_)
to extend the philosophical synthesis of the merely “external,” or
physical, universe so as to make it include the world of man’s action
and the world that is now glibly called the “social organism.”[200] A
good deal of the epistemological and metaphysical philosophy of this
century has been merely cosmological, and at best psychological and
individualistic. The philosophy of the present is, necessarily, to a
large extent, sociological and collectivistic and historical. Renan
once prophesied that this would be so. And many other men perceived the
same fact and acted upon their perception of it--Goethe and Victor Hugo
and Carlyle, for example.
To be sure, any attempt to draw lines of novel and absolute separation
between writers of to-day and their immediate predecessors would be
absurd and impossible, just as would be the attempt to force men who
are still living and thinking and developing, into Procrustean beds
of system and nomenclature. The history of the philosophy of the
last half of this century constitutes a development as continuous
and as logical as the philosophy of any similar period of years
wherein men have thought persistently and truly upon the problems of
life and mind. There were in the ’sixties men like Ulrici and Lotze
(Renouvier, too, to some extent) who divined the limitations of a
merely intellectual philosophy, and who saw clearly that the only way
to effect a reconciliation between philosophy and science would be
to apply philosophy itself to the problems of the life and thought
of the time, just as we find, in 1893, Dr. Edward Caird writing, in
his _Essays on Literature and Philosophy_, that “philosophy, in face
of the increasing complexity of modern life, has a harder task laid
upon it than ever was laid upon it before. It must emerge from the
region of abstract principles and show itself able to deal with the
manifold results of empirical science, giving to each of them its
proper place and value.” Professor Campbell Fraser, while welcoming and
sympathetically referring to (in his books upon Berkeley and Locke)
the elements of positive value in English and German idealism, has
throughout his life contended for the idea (expressed with greatest
definiteness in his Gifford Lectures on _The Philosophy of Theism_)
that “in man, as a self-conscious and self-determining _agent_,” is
to be found the “best key we possess to the solution of the ultimate
problem of the universe”; while Professor Sidgwick, by virtue of his
captivating and ingenious pertinacity in confining philosophical
speculation to the lines of the traditional English empiricism,
and in keeping it free from the ensnaring subtleties of system and
methodology, has exercised a healthful and corrective influence
against the extremes alike of transcendentalism and naturalism. And
it would be rash to maintain that all the younger men in philosophy
show an intention to act upon the idea (expressed by Wundt, for
instance, in his _Ethik_) that a metaphysic should build upon the
facts of the moral life of man; although we find a “Neo-Hegelian” like
Professor Mackenzie[201] saying that “even the wealth of our inner
life depends rather on the width of our objective interests than on
the intensity of our self-contemplation”; and an expounder of the
ethics of dialectic evolution like Professor Muirhead quoting[202] with
approval the thought expressed by George Eliot in the words, “The great
world-struggle of developing thought is continually foreshadowed in the
struggle of the affections seeking a justification for love and hope”;
and a careful psychologist like Mr. Stout[203] deliberately penning
the words,[204] “Our existence as conscious beings is essentially an
activity, and activity is a process which, by its very nature, is
directed towards an end, and can neither exist nor be conceived apart
from this end.” There are, doubtless, many philosophers of to-day who
are convinced that philosophy is purely an intellectual matter, and
can never be anything else than an attempt to analyze the world for
_thought_--an attempt to state its value in the terms of thought.
Against all these and many similar considerations it would be idle to
set up a hard and fast codification or characterization of the work of
the philosophy or philosophers of to-day. Still, the world will accord
the name of philosopher to any man--Renan, for example, or Spencer or
Huxley or Nordau or Nietzsche--who comes before it with views upon the
universe and humanity that may, for any conceivable reason, be regarded
as fundamental. And on this showing of things, as well as from many
indications in the work of those who are philosophers by profession,
it may be said that the predominating note of the newer philosophy is
its openness to the facts of the volitional and emotional and moral
and social aspects of man’s life, as things that take us further
along the path of truth than the mere categories of thought and their
manipulation by metaphysic and epistemology.
II. The Newer Idealism does not dream of questioning the positive
work of the Kantian and Neo-Kantian and Neo-Hegelian idealists. It
knows only too well that even scientific men like Helmholtz and
Du Bois Reymond, that “positive” philosophers like Riehl and Laas
and Feuerbach and others have, through the influence of the Kantian
philosophy, learned and accepted the fact of there being “ideal” or
psychical or “mind-supplied” factors in so-called external reality.
There are among the educated men of to-day very few Dr. Johnsons who
ridicule the psycho-physical, or the metaphysical, analysis of external
reality, who believe in a crass and crude and self-sufficient “matter”
utterly devoid of psychical attributes or characteristics. True,
Herbert Spencer has written words to the effect that “If the Idealist
(Berkeley) is right, then the doctrine of Evolution is a dream”; but
then everything in Spencer’s philosophy about an “actuality lying
behind appearances” and about our being compelled “to regard every
phenomenon as a manifestation of some Power by which we are acted
upon,” is against the possibility of our believing that, according to
that philosophy, an unconscious and non-spiritual “matter” could evolve
itself into conscious life and moral experience. The philosophers
of to-day have indeed rejoiced to see Kant’s lesson popularized by
such various phases and movements of human thought as psychophysical
research, art and æsthetic theory, the interest in Buddhism (with its
idealistic theory of the knowledge of the senses), and the speculative
biology of Weismann and others. That people generally should see that
matter is, for many reasons, something more than mere matter, is to
the student of Kant a piece of fulfilled prophecy. And by a plea for
a return to reality and life and sociability from conceptualism and
criticism and speculative individualism no philosophical scholar for
one moment contemplates, as even conceivable, an overlooking of the
idealistic interpretation of the data of the senses supplied by Locke
and Berkeley and Hume, or of the idealistic interpretation of the data
of science and understanding supplied by Kant’s “Copernican” discovery.
Any real view of the universe must now presuppose the melting down
of crass external reality into the phenomena of sense and experience
and the transformation of inorganic and organic nature into so many
_planes_ or _grades_ of being expressive of the different forms
(gravitation, cohesion, vital force, psychic force) in which cosmic
energy manifests itself.
Equally little does the Newer Idealism question the legitimacy or the
actual positive service of the “dialectic” of Hegel (as Archimedean
a leverage to humanity as was the “concept” of Socrates or the
“apperception” of Kant) that has shown the world to be a _system_
in which everything is related to everything else, and shown, too,
that all ways of looking at reality that stop short of the truths
of personality and moral relationship are untrue and inadequate. To
use the words of Professor Howison, of California, in the preface to
the first edition of Professor Watson’s[205] latest volume (a book
that connects the idealism of Glasgow and Oxford with the convictions
of the youth of the “Pacific Coast”), the “_dominant tone_” of the
militant and representative philosophy of to-day, is “affirmative and
idealistic. The decided majority ... are animated by the conviction
that human thought is able to solve the riddle of life positively; to
solve it in accord with the ideal hopes and interests of human nature.”