The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy, and Other Essays in Contemporary Thought

Part 1

THE INFLUENCE OF DARWIN ON PHILOSOPHY

And Other Essays in Contemporary Thought

BY JOHN DEWEY Professor of Philosophy in Columbia University

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.” 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

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.

Part 2

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.

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.

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