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  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