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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, 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