SOME HISTORICAL FACTORS IN PHILOSOPHICAL RECONSTRUCTION
Francis Bacon of the Elizabethan age is the great forerunner of the
spirit of modern life. Though slight in accomplishment, as a prophet of
new tendencies he is an outstanding figure of the world's intellectual
life. Like many another prophet he suffers from confused intermingling
of old and new. What is most significant in him has been rendered more
or less familiar by the later course of events. But page after page is
filled with matter which belongs to the past from which Bacon thought he
had escaped. Caught between these two sources of easy disparagement,
Bacon hardly receives his due as the real founder of modern thought,
while he is praised for merits which scarcely belong to him, such as an
alleged authorship of the specific methods of induction pursued by
science. What makes Bacon memorable is that breezes blowing from a new
world caught and filled his sails and stirred him to adventure in new
seas. He never himself discovered the land of promise, but he proclaimed
the new goal and by faith he descried its features from afar.
The main traits of his thought put before our mind the larger features
of a new spirit which was at work in causing intellectual
reconstruction. They may suggest the social and historical forces out of
which the new spirit was born. The best known aphorism of Bacon is that
Knowledge is Power. Judged by this pragmatic criterion, he condemned the
great body of learning then extant as _not_-knowledge, as pseudo- and
pretentious-knowledge. For it did not give power. It was otiose, not
operative. In his most extensive discussion he classified the learning
of his day under three heads, delicate, fantastic and contentious. Under
delicate learning, he included the literary learning which through the
influence of the revival of ancient languages and literatures occupied
so important a place in the intellectual life of the Renaissance.
Bacon's condemnation is the more effective because he himself was a
master of the classics and of all the graces and refinements which this
literary study was intended to convey. In substance he anticipated most
of the attacks which educational reformers since his time have made upon
one-sided literary culture. It contributed not to power but to ornament
and decoration. It was ostentatious and luxurious. By fantastic learning
he meant the quasi-magical science that was so rife all over Europe in
the sixteenth century--wild developments of alchemy, astrology, etc.
Upon this he poured his greatest vials of wrath because the corruption
of the good is the worst of evils. Delicate learning was idle and vain,
but fantastic learning aped the form of true knowledge. It laid hold of
the true principle and aim of knowledge--control of natural forces. But
it neglected the conditions and methods by which alone such knowledge
could be obtained, and thus deliberately led men astray.
For our purposes, however, what he says about contentious learning is
the most important. For by this, he means the traditional science which
had come down, in scanty and distorted measure to be sure, from
antiquity through scholasticism. It is called contentious both because
of the logical method used and the end to which it was put. In a certain
sense it aimed at power, but power over other men in the interest of
some class or sect or person, not power over natural forces in the
common interest of all. Bacon's conviction of the quarrelsome,
self-displaying character of the scholarship which had come down from
antiquity was of course not so much due to Greek science itself as to
the degenerate heritage of scholasticism in the fourteenth century, when
philosophy had fallen into the hands of disputatious theologians, full
of hair-splitting argumentativeness and quirks and tricks by which to
win victory over somebody else.
But Bacon also brought his charge against the Aristotelian method
itself. In its rigorous forms it aimed at demonstration, and in its
milder forms at persuasion. But both demonstration and persuasion aim at
conquest of mind rather than of nature. Moreover they both assume that
some one is already in possession of a truth or a belief, and that the
only problem is to convince some one else, or to teach. In contrast, his
new method had an exceedingly slight opinion of the amount of truth
already existent, and a lively sense of the extent and importance of
truths still to be attained. It would be a logic of discovery, not a
logic of argumentation, proof and persuasion. To Bacon, the old logic
even at its best was a logic for teaching the already known, and
teaching meant indoctrination, discipling. It was an axiom of Aristotle
that only that which was already known could be learned, that growth in
knowledge consisted simply in bringing together a universal truth of
reason and a particular truth of sense which had previously been noted
separately. In any case, learning meant _growth_ of knowledge, and
growth belongs in the region of becoming, change, and hence is inferior
to _possession_ of knowledge in the syllogistic self-revolving
manipulation of what was already known--demonstration.
In contrast with this point of view, Bacon eloquently proclaimed the
superiority of discovery of new facts and truths to demonstration of the
old. Now there is only one road to discovery, and that is penetrating
inquiry into the secrets of nature. Scientific principles and laws do
not lie on the surface of nature. They are hidden, and must be wrested
from nature by an active and elaborate technique of inquiry. Neither
logical reasoning nor the passive accumulation of any number of
observations--which the ancients called experience--suffices to lay hold
of them. Active experimentation must force the apparent facts of nature
into forms different to those in which they familiarly present
themselves; and thus make them tell the truth about themselves, as
torture may compel an unwilling witness to reveal what he has been
concealing. Pure reasoning as a means of arriving at truth is like the
spider who spins a web out of himself. The web is orderly and elaborate,
but it is only a trap. The passive accumulation of experiences--the
traditional empirical method--is like the ant who busily runs about and
collects and piles up heaps of raw materials. True method, that which
Bacon would usher in, is comparable to the operations of the bee who,
like the ant, collects material from the external world, but unlike that
industrious creature attacks and modifies the collected stuff in order
to make it yield its hidden treasure.
Along with this contrast between subjugation of nature and subjection of
other minds and the elevation of a method of discovery above a method of
demonstration, went Bacon's sense of progress as the aim and test of
genuine knowledge. According to his criticisms, the classic logic, even
in its Aristotelian form, inevitably played into the hands of inert
conservatism. For in accustoming the mind to think of truth as already
known, it habituated men to fall back on the intellectual attainments of
the past, and to accept them without critical scrutiny. Not merely the
medieval but the renaissance mind tended to look back to antiquity as a
Golden Age of Knowledge, the former relying upon sacred scriptures, the
latter upon secular literatures. And while this attitude could not
fairly be charged up against the classic logic, yet Bacon felt, and with
justice, that any logic which identified the technique of knowing with
demonstration of truths already possessed by the mind, blunts the spirit
of investigation and confines the mind within the circle of traditional
learning.
Such a logic could not avoid having for its salient features definition
of what is already known (or thought to be known), and its
systematization according to recognized canons of orthodoxy. A logic of
discovery on the other hand looks to the future. Received truth it
regards critically as something to be tested by new experiences rather
than as something to be dogmatically taught and obediently received. Its
chief interest in even the most carefully tested ready-made knowledge is
the use which may be made of it in further inquiries and discoveries.
Old truth has its chief value in assisting the detection of new truth.
Bacon's own appreciation of the nature of induction was highly
defective. But his acute sense that science means invasion of the
unknown, rather than repetition in logical form of the already known,
makes him nevertheless the father of induction. Endless and persistent
uncovering of facts and principles not known--such is the true spirit of
induction. Continued progress in knowledge is the only sure way of
protecting old knowledge from degeneration into dogmatic doctrines
received on authority, or from imperceptible decay into superstition and
old wives' tales.
Ever-renewed progress is to Bacon the test as well as the aim of genuine
logic. Where, Bacon constantly demands, where are the works, the fruits,
of the older logic? What has it done to ameliorate the evils of life, to
rectify defects, to improve conditions? Where are the inventions that
justify its claim to be in possession of truth? Beyond the victory of
man over man in law courts, diplomacy and political administration, they
are nil. One had to turn from admired "sciences" to despised arts to
find works, fruits, consequences of value to human kind through power
over natural forces. And progress in the arts was as yet intermittent,
fitful, accidental. A true logic or technique of inquiry would make
advance in the industrial, agricultural and medical arts continuous,
cumulative and deliberately systematic.
If we take into account the supposed body of ready-made knowledge upon
which learned men rested in supine acquiescence and which they recited
in parrot-like chorus, we find it consists of two parts. One of these
parts is made up of the errors of our ancestors, musty with antiquity
and organized into pseudo-science through the use of the classic logic.
Such "truths" are in fact only the systematized mistakes and prejudices
of our ancestors. Many of them originated in accident; many in class
interest and bias, perpetuated by authority for this very reason--a
consideration which later actuated Locke's attack upon the doctrine of
innate ideas. The other portion of accepted beliefs comes from
instinctive tendencies of the human mind that give it a dangerous bias
until counteracted by a conscious and critical logic.
The mind of man spontaneously assumes greater simplicity, uniformity and
unity among phenomena than actually exists. It follows superficial
analogies and jumps to conclusions; it overlooks the variety of details
and the existence of exceptions. Thus it weaves a web of purely internal
origin which it imposes upon nature. What had been termed science in the
past consisted of this humanly constructed and imposed web. Men looked
at the work of their own minds and thought they were seeing realities
in nature. They were worshipping, under the name of science, the idols
of their own making. So-called science and philosophy consisted of these
"anticipations" of nature. And the worst thing that could be said about
traditional logic was that instead of saving man from this natural
source of error, it had, though attributing to nature a false
rationality of unity, simplicity and generality, sanctioned these
sources of delusion. The office of the new logic would be to protect the
mind against itself: to teach it to undergo a patient and prolonged
apprenticeship to fact in its infinite variety and particularity: to
obey nature intellectually in order to command it practically. Such was
the significance of the new logic--the new tool or organon of learning,
so named in express opposition to the organon of Aristotle.
Certain other important oppositions are implied. Aristotle thought of
reason as capable of solitary communion with rational truth. The
counterpart of his celebrated saying that man is a political animal, is
that Intelligence, _Nous_, is neither animal, human nor political. It is
divinely unique and self-enclosed. To Bacon, error had been produced and
perpetuated by social influences, and truth must be discovered by social
agencies organized for that purpose. Left to himself, the individual can
do little or nothing; he is likely to become involved in his own
self-spun web of misconceptions. The great need is the organization of
co-operative research, whereby men attack nature collectively and the
work of inquiry is carried on continuously from generation to
generation. Bacon even aspired to the rather absurd notion of a method
so perfected that differences in natural human ability might be
discounted, and all be put on the same level in production of new facts
and new truths. Yet this absurdity was only the negative side of his
great positive prophecy of a combined and co-operative pursuit of
science such as characterizes our own day. In view of the picture he
draws in his New Atlantis of a State organized for collective inquiry,
we readily forgive him his exaggerations.
Power over nature was not to be individual but collective; the Empire,
as he says, of Man over Nature, substituted for the Empire of Man over
Man. Let us employ Bacon's own words with their variety of picturesque
metaphor: "Men have entered into the desire of learning and
knowledge,... seldom sincerely to give a true account of their gift of
reason, to the benefit and use of men, but as if they sought in
knowledge a couch whereon to rest a searching and wandering spirit; or a
terrace for a wandering and variable mind to walk up and down with a
fair prospect; or a tower for a proud mind to raise itself upon; or a
fort or commanding ground for strife and contention; or a shop for
profit and sale; and not a rich storehouse for the glory of the creator
and the relief of man's estate." When William James called Pragmatism a
New Name for an Old Way of Thinking, I do not know that he was thinking
expressly of Francis Bacon, but so far as concerns the spirit and
atmosphere of the pursuit of knowledge, Bacon may be taken as the
prophet of a pragmatic conception of knowledge. Many misconceptions of
its spirit would be avoided if his emphasis upon the social factor in
both the pursuit and the end of knowledge were carefully observed.
This somewhat over-long résumé of Bacon's ideas has not been gone into
as a matter of historic retrospect. The summary is rather meant to put
before our minds an authentic document of the new philosophy which may
bring into relief the social causes of intellectual revolution. Only a
sketchy account can be here attempted, but it may be of some assistance
even barely to remind you of the direction of that industrial, political
and religious change upon which Europe was entering.
Upon the industrial side, it is impossible, I think, to exaggerate the
influence of travel, exploration and new commerce which fostered a
romantic sense of adventure into novelty; loosened the hold of
traditional beliefs; created a lively sense of new worlds to be
investigated and subdued; produced new methods of manufacture, commerce,
banking and finance; and then reacted everywhere to stimulate invention,
and to introduce positive observation and active experimentation into
science. The Crusades, the revival of the profane learning of antiquity
and even more perhaps, the contact with the advanced learning of the
Mohammedans, the increase of commerce with Asia and Africa, the
introduction of the lens, compass and gunpowder, the finding and opening
up of North and South America--most significantly called The New
World--these are some of the obvious external facts. Contrast between
peoples and races previously isolated is always, I think, most fruitful
and influential for change when psychological and industrial changes
coincide with and reinforce each other. Sometimes people undergo
emotional change, what might almost be called a metaphysical change,
through intercourse. The inner set of the mind, especially in religious
matters, is altered. At other times, there is a lively exchange of
goods, an adoption of foreign tools and devices, an imitation of alien
habits of clothing, habitation and production of commodities. One of
these changes is, so to speak, too internal and the other too external
to bring about a profound intellectual development. But when the
creation of a new mental attitude falls together with extensive material
and economic changes, something significant happens.
This coincidence of two kinds of change was, I take it, characteristic
of the new contacts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Clash of
customs and traditional beliefs dispelled mental inertia and
sluggishness; it aroused a lively curiosity as to different and new
ideas. The actual adventure of travel and exploration purged the mind of
fear of the strange and unknown: as new territories geographically and
commercially speaking were opened up, the mind was opened up. New
contacts promoted the desire for still more contacts; the appetite for
novelty and discovery grew by what it fed upon. Conservative adherence
to old beliefs and methods underwent a steady attrition with every new
voyage into new parts and every new report of foreign ways. The mind
became used to exploration and discovery. It found a delight and
interest in the revelations of the novel and the unusual which it no
longer took in what was old and customary. Moreover, the very act of
exploration, of expedition, the process of enterprising adventure into
the remote, yielded a peculiar joy and thrill.
This psychological change was essential to the birth of the new point of
view in science and philosophy. Yet alone it could hardly have produced
the new method of knowing. But positive changes in the habits and
purposes of life gave objective conformation and support to the mental
change. They also determined the channels in which the new spirit found
exercise. Newfound wealth, the gold from the Americas and new articles
of consumption and enjoyment, tended to wean men from preoccupation
with the metaphysical and theological, and to turn their minds with
newly awakened interest to the joys of nature and this life. New
material resources and new markets in America and India undermined the
old dependence upon household and manual production for a local and
limited market, and generated quantitative, large scale production by
means of steam for foreign and expanding markets. Capitalism, rapid
transit, and production for exchange against money and for profit,
instead of against goods and for consumption, followed.
This cursory and superficial reminder of vast and complicated events may
suggest the mutual interdependence of the scientific revolution and the
industrial revolution. Upon the one hand, modern industry is so much
applied science. No amount of desire to make money, or to enjoy new
commodities, no amount of mere practical energy and enterprise, would
have effected the economic transformation of the last few centuries and
generations. Improvements in mathematical, physical, chemical and
biological science were prerequisites. Business men through engineers of
different sorts, have laid hold of the new insights gained by scientific
men into the hidden energies of nature, and have turned them to account.
The modern mine, factory, railway, steamship, telegraph, all of the
appliances and equipment of production, and transportation, express
scientific knowledge. They would continue unimpaired even if the
ordinary pecuniary accompaniments of economic activity were radically
altered. In short, through the intermediary of invention, Bacon's
watchword that knowledge is power and his dream of continuous empire
over natural forces by means of natural science have been actualized.
The industrial revolution by steam and electricity is the reply to
Bacon's prophecy.
On the other hand, it is equally true that the needs of modern industry
have been tremendous stimuli to scientific investigation. The demands of
progressive production and transportation have set new problems to
inquiry; the processes used in industry have suggested new experimental
appliances and operations in science; the wealth rolled up in business
has to some extent been diverted to endowment of research. The
uninterrupted and pervasive interaction of scientific discovery and
industrial application has fructified both science and industry, and has
brought home to the contemporary mind the fact that the gist of
scientific knowledge is control of natural energies. These four facts,
natural science, experimentation, control and progress have been
inextricably bound up together. That up to the present the application
of the newer methods and results has influenced the means of life rather
than its ends; or, better put, that human aims have so far been affected
in an accidental rather than in an intelligently directed way,
signifies that so far the change has been technical rather than human
and moral, that it has been economic rather than adequately social. Put
in the language of Bacon, this means that while we have been reasonably
successful in obtaining command of nature by means of science, our
science is not yet such that this command is systematically and
pre-eminently applied to the relief of human estate. Such applications
occur and in great numbers, but they are incidental, sporadic and
external. And this limitation defines the specific problem of
philosophical reconstruction at the present time. For it emphasizes the
larger social deficiencies that require intelligent diagnosis, and
projection of aims and methods.
It is hardly necessary to remind you however that marked political
changes have already followed upon the new science and its industrial
applications, and that in so far some directions of social development
have at least been marked out. The growth of the new technique of
industry has everywhere been followed by the fall of feudal
institutions, in which the social pattern was formed in agricultural
occupations and military pursuits. Wherever business in the modern sense
has gone, the tendency has been to transfer power from land to financial
capital, from the country to the city, from the farm to factory, from
social titles based on personal allegiance, service and protection, to
those based on control of labor and exchange of goods. The change in
the political centre of gravity has resulted in emancipating the
individual from bonds of class and custom and in producing a political
organization which depends less upon superior authority and more upon
voluntary choice. Modern states, in other words, are regarded less as
divine, and more as human works than they used to be; less as necessary
manifestations of some supreme and over-ruling principles, and more as
contrivances of men and women to realize their own desires.
The contract theory of the origin of the state is a theory whose falsity
may easily be demonstrated both philosophically and historically.
Nevertheless this theory has had great currency and influence. In form,
it stated that some time in the past men voluntarily got together and
made a compact with one another to observe certain laws and to submit to
certain authority and in that way brought the state and the relation of
ruler and subject into existence. Like many things in philosophy, the
theory, though worthless as a record of fact, is of great worth as a
symptom of the direction of human desire. It testified to a growing
belief that the state existed to satisfy human needs and could be shaped
by human intention and volition. Aristotle's theory that the state
exists by nature failed to satisfy the thought of the seventeenth
century because it seemed by making the state a product of nature to
remove its constitution beyond human choice. Equally significant was
the assumption of the contract theory that individuals by their personal
decisions expressing their personal wishes bring the state into
existence. The rapidity with which the theory gained a hold all over
western Europe showed the extent to which the bonds of customary
institutions had relaxed their grip. It proved that men had been so
liberated from absorption in larger groups that they were conscious of
themselves as individuals having rights and claims on their own account,
not simply as members of a class, guild or social grade.
Side by side with this political individualism went a religious and
moral individualism. The metaphysical doctrine of the superiority of the
species to the individual, of the permanent universal to the changing
particular, was the philosophic support of political and ecclesiastical
institutionalism. The universal church was the ground, end and limit of
the individual's beliefs and acts in spiritual matters, just as the
feudal hierarchical organization was the basis, law and fixed limit of
his behavior in secular affairs. The northern barbarians had never
completely come under the sway of classic ideas and customs. That which
was indigenous where life was primarily derived from Latin sources was
borrowed and more or less externally imposed in Germanic Europe.
Protestantism marked the formal breaking away from the domination of
Roman ideas. It effected liberation of individual conscience and worship
from control by an organized institution claiming to be permanent and
universal. It cannot truly be said that at the outset the new religious
movement went far in promoting freedom of thought and criticism, or in
denying the notion of some supreme authority to which individual
intelligence was absolutely in bonds. Nor at first did it go far in
furthering tolerance or respect for divergency of moral and religious
convictions. But practically it did tend to disintegration of
established institutions. By multiplying sects and churches it
encouraged at least a negative toleration of the right of individuals to
judge ultimate matters for themselves. In time, there developed a
formulated belief in the sacredness of individual conscience and in the
right to freedom of opinion, belief and worship.
It is unnecessary to point out how the spread of this conviction
increased political individualism, or how it accelerated the willingness
of men to question received ideas in science and philosophy--to think
and observe and experiment for themselves. Religious individualism
served to supply a much needed sanction to initiative and independence
of thought in all spheres, even when religious movements officially were
opposed to such freedom when carried beyond a limited point. The
greatest influence of Protestantism was, however, in developing the
idea of the personality of every human being as an end in himself. When
human beings were regarded as capable of direct relationship with God,
without the intermediary of any organization like the Church, and the
drama of sin, redemption and salvation was something enacted within the
innermost soul of individuals rather than in the species of which the
individual was a subordinate part, a fatal blow was struck at all
doctrines which taught the subordination of personality--a blow which
had many political reverberations in promoting democracy. For when in
religion the idea of the intrinsic worth of every soul as such was
proclaimed, it was difficult to keep the idea from spilling over, so to
say, into secular relationships.
The absurdity is obvious of trying in a few paragraphs to summarize
movements in industry, politics and religion whose influence is still
far from exhausted and about which hundreds and thousands of volumes
have been written. But I shall count upon your forbearance to recall
that these matters are alluded to only in order to suggest some of the
forces that operated to mark out the channels in which new ideas ran.
First, there is the transfer of interest from the eternal and universal
to what is changing and specific, concrete--a movement that showed
itself practically in carrying over of attention and thought from
another world to this, from the supernaturalism characteristic of the
Middle Ages to delight in natural science, natural activity and natural
intercourse. Secondly, there is the gradual decay of the authority of
fixed institutions and class distinctions and relations, and a growing
belief in the power of individual minds, guided by methods of
observation, experiment and reflection, to attain the truths needed for
the guidance of life. The operations and results of natural inquiry
gained in prestige and power at the expense of principles dictated from
high authority.
Consequently principles and alleged truths are judged more and more by
criteria of their origin in experience and their consequences of weal
and woe in experience, and less by criteria of sublime origin from
beyond everyday experience and independent of fruits in experience. It
is no longer enough for a principle to be elevated, noble, universal and
hallowed by time. It must present its birth certificate, it must show
under just what conditions of human experience it was generated, and it
must justify itself by its works, present and potential. Such is the
inner meaning of the modern appeal to experience as an ultimate
criterion of value and validity. In the third place, great store is set
upon the idea of progress. The future rather than the past dominates the
imagination. The Golden Age lies ahead of us not behind us. Everywhere
new possibilities beckon and arouse courage and effort. The great
French thinkers of the later eighteenth century borrowed this idea from
Bacon and developed it into the doctrine of the indefinite
perfectibility of mankind on earth. Man is capable, if he will but
exercise the required courage, intelligence and effort, of shaping his
own fate. Physical conditions offer no insurmountable barriers. In the
fourth place, the patient and experimental study of nature, bearing
fruit in inventions which control nature and subdue her forces to social
uses, is the method by which progress is made. Knowledge is power and
knowledge is achieved by sending the mind to school to nature to learn
her processes of change.
In this lecture as in the previous one, I can hardly close better than
by reference to the new responsibilities imposed upon philosophy and the
new opportunities opened to it. Upon the whole, the greatest effect of
these changes up to date has been to substitute an Idealism based on
epistemology, or the theory of knowledge, for the Idealism based on the
metaphysics of classic antiquity.
Earlier modern philosophy (even though unconsciously to itself) had the
problem of reconciling the traditional theory of the rational and ideal
basis, stuff and end of the universe with the new interest in individual
mind and the new confidence in its capacities. It was in a dilemma. On
the one hand, it had no intention of losing itself in a materialism
which subordinated man to physical existence and mind to
matter--especially just at the moment when in actual affairs man and
mind were beginning to achieve genuine rule over nature. On the other
hand, the conception that the world as it stood was an embodiment of a
fixed and comprehensive Mind or Reason was uncongenial to those whose
main concern was with the deficiencies of the world and with an attempt
to remedy them. The effect of the objective theological idealism that
had developed out of classic metaphysical idealism was to make the mind
submissive and acquiescent. The new individualism chafed under the
restrictions imposed upon it by the notion of a universal reason which
had once and for all shaped nature and destiny.
In breaking away from antique and medieval thought, accordingly, early
modern thought continued the older tradition of a Reason that creates
and constitutes the world, but combined it with the notion that this
Reason operates through the human mind, individual or collective. This
is the common note of idealism sounded by all the philosophies of the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, whether belonging to the British
school of Locke, Berkeley and Hume or the Continental school of
Descartes. In Kant as everybody knows the two strains came together; and
the theme of the formation of the knowable world by means of a thought
that operated exclusively through the human knower became explicit.
Idealism ceased to be metaphysical and cosmic in order to become
epistemological and personal.
It is evident that this development represents merely a transitional
stage. It tried, after all, to put the new wine in the old bottles. It
did not achieve a free and unbiased formulation of the meaning of the
power to direct nature's forces through knowledge--that is, purposeful,
experimental action acting to reshape beliefs and institutions. The
ancient tradition was still strong enough to project itself
unconsciously into men's ways of thinking, and to hamper and compromise
the expression of the really modern forces and aims. Essential
philosophic reconstruction represents an attempt to state these causes
and results in a way freed from incompatible inherited factors. It will
regard intelligence not as the original shaper and final cause of
things, but as the purposeful energetic re-shaper of those phases of
nature and life that obstruct social well-being. It esteems the
individual not as an exaggeratedly self-sufficient Ego which by some
magic creates the world, but as the agent who is responsible through
initiative, inventiveness and intelligently directed labor for
re-creating the world, transforming it into an instrument and possession
of intelligence.
The train of ideas represented by the Baconian Knowledge is Power thus
failed in getting an emancipated and independent expression. These
become hopelessly entangled in standpoints and prepossessions that
embodied a social, political and scientific tradition with which they
were completely incompatible. The obscurity, the confusion of modern
philosophy is the product of this attempt to combine two things which
cannot possibly be combined either logically or morally. Philosophic
reconstruction for the present is thus the endeavor to undo the
entanglement and to permit the Baconian aspirations to come to a free
and unhindered expression. In succeeding lectures we shall consider the
needed reconstruction as it affects certain classic philosophic
antitheses, like those of experience and reason, the real and the ideal.
But first we shall have to consider the modifying effect exercised upon
philosophy by that changed conception of nature, animate and inanimate,
which we owe to the progress of science.