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 V
 
 MOVEMENTS OF THOUGHT 
 
 IN THE 
 
 NINETEENTH CENTURY
 
 THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS 
 CHICAGO, ILLINOIS 
 
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 SHANGHAI
 
 MOVEMENTS OF THOUGHT 
 
 IN THE 
 
 NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 GEORGE H. MEAD 
 
 Late Professor of Philosophy, The University of Chicago 
 EDITED BY 
 
 MERRITT H. MOORE 
 
 Professor of Philosophy 
 Knox College 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS 
 CHICAGO • ILLINOIS
 
 COPYRIGHT 1936 BY THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO 
 
 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. PUBLISHED APRIL I936 
 
 SECOND IMPRESSION NOVEMBER I938 
 
 COMPOSED AND PRINTED BY THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS 
 CHICAGO, ILLINOIS, U.S.A.
 
 
 C^ 
 
 PREFATORY NOTE 
 
 ^S YET, comparatively little has been done by way of 
 /-\ synthetic studies of nineteenth-century thought as a 
 -^ -^ whole. This situation is aggravated in that what is 
 available for the use of the student, or other interested persons, 
 is of relatively little value because of lack of time, lack of train- 
 ing, or other reasons. To date, the most extensive single work 
 on this period is /IVTerz^four- volume work History of European 
 Thought in the Nvneieenth Century. But of this work the length 
 alone makes its widespread use unlikely, and in some instances 
 unfeasible, except for specific problems considered apart from 
 their wider significance. Added to this is the difficult nature of 
 the text. It is so detailed, so complex, as of course the thought 
 of the century was, that the uninitiated are apt to find it more 
 baffling than helpful. On the other hand, some work of a more 
 popular nature has been done, but largely by French and Ger- 
 man writers. Much of this material is untranslated, and so rela- 
 tively unavailable to a large number of persons who would 
 otherwise make use of it. Again, not a small part of the bibliog- 
 raphy on the nineteenth century relates to works on particular 
 phases of the thought of the period. Among these are Royce's 
 The Spirit of Modern Philosophy^ Levy-Bruhl's excellent work 
 on the History of Modern Philosophy in France^ and Ruggiero's 
 European Liberalism. These are limited in scope. 
 
 Thus Professor Mead's lectures on the "Movements of 
 Thought in the Nineteenth Century" are peculiarly apt, for a 
 number of reasons. They are inclusive. Even a brief perusal of 
 the Table of Contents is sufficient to indicate the catholicity of 
 their scope. I think it may truly be said that few significant 
 thought developments have been neglected. The lectures are also 
 relatively simple. Being designed, as they were, for undergradu- 
 ate students in the University of Chicago, they are presented 
 
 [ v1 
 
 320G31
 
 PREFATORY NOTE 
 
 from a point of view which such students can readily grasp. This 
 is a great boon to the general reader who wishes a picture of 
 the thought of the century as a whole. Again, their develop- 
 ment does not go into such detail as to hide general tenden- 
 cies. Finally, Mr. Mead's penchant for turning old problems 
 around in such a way as to bring new hght on them keeps his 
 lectures from being repetitious. These factors all lead to the 
 cumulative value which these lectures have as one goes through 
 them. One cannot read them with any care without having a 
 real sense of what went on in the century immediately before 
 our own. 
 
 Of course, when these lectures were given, Mr. Mead had 
 not designed them for publication. They are classroom lec- 
 tures, reported in the form of student notes — but of an excep- 
 tionally complete and exact nature. They have the value and 
 deficiencies of the purpose for which they were intended. In this 
 case, however, the former completely outweigh the latter. Per- 
 haps, had Mr. Mead himself prepared them for publication, 
 they might have been presented in a somewhat different form. 
 It is, I think, unHkely that he would have made any significant 
 changes — the material is too good as it stands. These lectures 
 make up a course that was presented numerous times. In this 
 process they were subject to constant growth of insight and con- 
 sequent revision. Thus, it is no idle statement to say that they 
 represent their author's mature views. As the reader of them in 
 their present form will discover for himself, these views are 
 worthy of conscientious study. 
 
 At least in part, the publication of this volume grows out of 
 Mr. Mead's untimely death. He had, during his life, been 
 peculiarly unwilling to soHdify his thought in the form of pub- 
 lished works. It seemed regrettable, however, that a mind of 
 such penetration, such power, one that had such an influence 
 on colleagues, students, and friends, should be left without 
 record for posterity. Thus, under the instigation of his son. Dr. 
 Henry Mead, and his daughter-in-law. Dr. Irene Tufts Mead, 
 plans were made to collect available material suitable for publi-
 
 PREFATORY NOTE 
 
 cation. This was undertaken in conjunction with the Drs. 
 Mead and, at their request, by Professor Arthur E. Murphy. At 
 his suggestion I was asked to co-operate with the plan through 
 the editing of notes on the nineteenth century. 
 
 With the exception of the second half of the chapter on Berg- 
 son, the material of the book is taken from stenographic notes 
 prepared for Mr. Alvin Carus. It is one of a number of sets 
 of such notes taken for him in various courses offered by Mr. 
 Mead. No one could have asked for better material with which 
 to work. Changes of content were almost wholly unnecessary. 
 The bulk of the problem was one of mechanical rearrangement 
 of material into chapters. This presented some difficulty. Mr. 
 Mead had a very effective teaching habit of advancing cyclically 
 through his subject matter. The result was a good deal of repe- 
 tition. But each time he came back to a problem it was set in 
 a slightly new frame. In editing the material, there has been 
 a question as to how far this repetition should be retained and 
 to what extent the notes should be condensed and carried along 
 without backtracking. Both methods have been used, I trust 
 with some degree of success. 
 
 Half of the material for chapter xiv on Henri Bergson is from 
 notes of Mr. George A. Pappas. These were not stenographic, 
 and the difficulty in regard to their use was increased. It was 
 necessary to fill them out, to complete unfinished sentences, 
 and, in some cases, to guess at the meaning and significance 
 of brief notations. This led to a dual difficulty. On the one 
 hand, I wished to be true to Mr. Mead's point of view. At the 
 same time I had to remember that it was Bergson who was being 
 interpreted and that it was necessary to avoid obvious misrepre- 
 sentations of his position. I trust I have had reasonable success 
 in meeting these demands. In so far as possible, I have tried to 
 phrase this material as Mr. Mead would have. 
 
 The character of these notes very aptly brings us to a discus- 
 sion of the value of student notes in general as we have utilized 
 them in this volume and in the preservation of other of Mr. 
 Mead's material. The problem hardly arises in connection with 
 
 fviil
 
 PREFATORY NOTE 
 
 Mr. Murphy's preparation of the Carus Lectures. These lec- 
 tures were given with the intention of expansion and later pubH- 
 cation. This Mr. Mead's untimely death precluded, and it was 
 necessary that the task be completed by another. No such 
 situation existed in thecaseof the series of which this is a part. It 
 is true that after his death great quantities of notes and papers 
 in various stages of completion were found among Mr. Mead's 
 effects. There was no indication that any of them were being 
 arranged for publication, however. What justification is there, 
 then, for our having undertaken their preservation in this form, 
 other than that of sentimentaHty? 
 
 My answer to that question is dual. On the one hand, there 
 is the matter of historical precedent. It is a fact more or less 
 widely known among students of philosophic works that, but 
 for the utilization of student notes and other material prepared 
 primarily for classroom purposes, many of our philosophical 
 classics would not exist. This is the case specifically with at least 
 part of our collections of the works of Epictetus, Aristotle, Leib- 
 nitz, Kant, Fichte, and Hegel. Certainly, then, to utilize such 
 notes is not to exceed the bounds of decorum. Furthermore, it 
 is doubtful if much, or any, of the subject matter gathered from 
 the material of the writers mentioned above had the great 
 virtue of being stenographic. With the single exception referred 
 to, all the notes utilized in the preparation of this volume, and 
 most, if not all, that composing the contents of the others of this 
 series, may be regarded as verbatim recordings of Mr. Mead's 
 lectures. The amount of error in such transcription is relatively 
 slight, consisting primarily in such details as misspelled names, 
 and so on, which a little care enables one to detect and to cor- 
 rect. I think we may ignore any criticism of our procedure, so 
 far as this ground is concerned. 
 
 The other justification for the preservation of the material in 
 published form is to be found in its worth as throwing light on 
 the problems with which it deals. Here our evaluation cannot 
 be so objective. In this connection I can simply repeat what I 
 have said earher in this Preface. It is a fact that Mr. Mead did
 
 PREFATORY NOTE 
 
 not specifically intend the publication of this material as it now 
 stands. It was the consensus of opinion among his students and 
 his colleagues that it should be published. In this opinion his 
 family and friends concurred. This is, I concede, not an unim- 
 peachable argument for proceeding with their publication. It 
 certainly gives an initial probability to the judgment that they 
 contain material which is, and will continue to be, of value to 
 students of philosophic problems. The nature and source of the 
 contents has been specifically indicated. Having this in mind, 
 the reader must make his final evaluation for himself. There is 
 no question about this being the work of an original mind. We 
 might wish Mr. Mead himself had put it in final form. That 
 wish is vain. Even in its present form, the material has that sug- 
 gestive and interpretative value of which I have spoken above. 
 
 My debt to Drs. Henry and Irene Mead and to Mr. Murphy 
 for considering me in connection with this undertaking I cannot 
 estimate. If, when I first started on the work, I was not as 
 great an admirer of Mr. Mead as were some others of his stu- 
 dents and colleagues (both of which it was my good fortune to 
 be), my rereading and re-working of these lectures has made me 
 that. I am also grateful to Mr. Charles W. Morris, particularly 
 for placing at my disposal material that he gathered after he took 
 up the work when Mr. Murphy left the University of Chicago, 
 and for valuable assistance and corrections in the preparation 
 of the manuscript. 
 
 I wish also to acknowledge my debt to my wife and to Miss 
 Edna Lorraine Evans for assistance in preparing the manu- 
 script. The preparation of the final typewritten copy was the 
 work of Miss Lucille Hogan and Miss Gertrude Venable. The 
 Index is the work of Mr. Vincent Tomas. 
 
 To my friend and colleague. Dr. L. W. Elder, I wish to ex- 
 press an especial indebtedness. 
 
 Merritt Hadden Moore 
 
 Knox College 
 November i, 1933 
 
 IX
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 WHILE it would certainly be an oversimplification, it 
 would not be a misstatement to say the thesis which 
 underlies these lectures, and which Mr. Mead is most 
 interested in bringing home to his reader is this: Science, with 
 it s demand for freedo m, with its demand for t he substi tution o f 
 rational auth ority for _the_arbitrarv authority whi ^h characte r- 
 ized the rne dieval period, Ts~the outstan dTH g'lact not simpl y of 
 tlie"^ nineteenth century hut o f all tho ught since, and including 
 ffipkpnaj<;«;an^f ^ (nr mo dem scicncc brought in the Renaissance 
 itself. If one gets the full import of what is meant by this state- 
 ment, one will have discovered the key through which entry 
 may be made into the new approaches which Mr. Mead brings 
 to the study of the movements of thought and also to his 
 original, and sometimes abstruse, contributions to philosophic 
 thought. One finds a continuous flow of such statements as this: 
 Science is the surest knowledge we have. A striking feature of 
 his analysis of social movements is his analogy between pro- 
 cedure in these fields and in what we regard as the sciences 
 properly so-called. For example the doctrines of Hobbes, Locke, 
 and Rousseau are dealt with as alternative hypotheses in the 
 effort to give a scientific theory of the state. In each case 
 departure is made from laws thought to be universal. To these, 
 exceptions are found. In the light of these exceptions we must 
 make a modification of our hypotheses. The genius of the re- 
 search thinker is, however, that, instead of waiting to have the 
 exceptional instance turn up, he bends his whole energy to 
 ferreting out particular cases for an explanation of which our 
 accepted theory is inadequate. A swift review of the develop- 
 ment of Mr. Mead's analysis of the correlation of thought move- 
 ments in the century with which our immediate study is con- 
 cerned will indicate that he neatly exemplifies his thesis.
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 I 
 
 Since I have indicated the central place of research science in 
 Mr. Mead's thought, the reader will not be surprised if I point 
 out that in this particular set of lectures the development cen- 
 ters around the problem of methodology. A traditional story 
 about Mr. Mead's courses that was handed down from one gen- 
 eration of students to another at the University of Chicago was 
 that he always went back to Aristotle and, if any particular 
 class was lucky, it might have the good fortune of having him 
 finally get through to contemporary problems, the implication 
 clearly being that he seldom did so. Needless to say, that was an 
 exaggeration. However, his analysis of movements in the nine- 
 teenth century does begin with medieval thought, and it might 
 quite as well have gone back to Aristotle, for it begins with a 
 statement of the substance-attribute relation which was the 
 foundation of Aristotelian science. This concept plays the dual 
 role of a background against which the nineteenth-century 
 metaphysics is developed, founded, as it is, on the subject-object 
 relation, and as the ground of serious problems which serve as 
 the soil in which the thought of the last century took root and 
 found nourishment. 
 
 The rationalism which colors European thought since 1600, 
 and which pervades our contemporary scientific period through 
 the assumptions of the knowability of nature, of the uniformity 
 of nature, and, consequently of the universality of natural laws, 
 is rooted in medieval theology. Picturing the universe as carry- 
 ing out the purposes of a divine, rational being, any irrational 
 element was excluded automatically, since God not only was 
 intelligent but had the power to make his intelligence effective. 
 From this source come the rationalistic characteristics of mod- 
 ern science. Galileo, Copernicus, Kepler, and Newton, to men- 
 tion only four, applied mathematics to the universe with an 
 almost naive trust. Mathematics, the most rational of our 
 disciplines, would fit a rational world. 
 
 This worked in two directions. On the one hand it led to a 
 rather remarkable success in the study of physical processes. On 
 
 \ xii 1
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 the other hand it led to the b ifurcation of nature. The church 
 was unconcerned with the physical world. This world was mere- 
 ly the stage on which the drama of man's salvation was played. 
 And the play was the thing. The scientist could muddle around 
 with the material to his heart's content so long as his theories 
 did not trespass on the domain of the soul, did not carry over 
 into the realm o f value s. Methodologically, Galileo and his suc- 
 cessors found values were irrelevant to their study. They ig- 
 nored them as subjective. Under the double impulsion referred 
 to above, values were taken from the world and made subjec- 
 tive, put into men/sjieads. This attitude, which made the physi- 
 cal world rational and mathematical, but which left the realm of 
 values, including man's moral life and freedom, as attributes of 
 soul stuff, was made into a philsophy by Descartes. But what 
 had been started was not to be so easily stopped. Carrying the 
 logic of the situation through to its inexorable conclusion, the 
 empiricist reduced the attributes of the physical world to the 
 same status that Descartes had reduced values. Primary, as well 
 as secondary, qualities became attributes not of physical but of 
 spiritual substance. Ending with the annihilating skepticism 
 of Hume, the rational universe of science, with its universal and 
 necessary principles, and the soul, the bearer now of all attri- 
 butes, became nothing more than the habitual association of cer- 
 tain ideas of a perceiver. The substance of the soul having been 
 wiped out, the attributes no longer had any ground to adhere to. 
 To this problem, Immanuel Kant proposed an answer, but 
 it did not take the form of a reinstatement of substances. The 
 basis for the universality and necessity required by a rational 
 science is found in the mind itself. Man, the subject hav ijTig_cer- 
 tain experience, not a substance bearing certain attributes, im- 
 poses~on his experiences certain forms which make them ra- 
 tional. True, Kant limited the application of these forms to 
 phenomena and was himself a skeptic, as far as the possibility 
 of knowledge of the noumena was concerned. We can — indeed, 
 our practical, active needs require that we must — postulate cer- 
 tain things of the realm which lies behind the experienced. The
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 formal character of phenomenal knowledge saved science, for, 
 on the basis of the forms of the mind, it was again possible to 
 defend the notion of universal and necessary truths as apphed to 
 experience. But such a science is phenomenalistic. 
 
 What of values? Kant felt impelled to make judgments in 
 this field as universal as our phenomenal judgments. It is this 
 aspect of his system that brings Mr. Mead to speak of him as 
 the philosopher of the revolution, a rather startling thing to 
 say of the staid and orderly little German professor. 
 
 Let us go back a moment. When the scientist of the Renais- 
 sance carried over from the teachings of the church the notion 
 of a rational universe, he posited this as an assumption. He set 
 it up as a postulate for the guidance of his thinking. But he 
 came more and more to realize its postulational character. 
 When the church had set up this same concept, it had framed 
 it in the form of an arbitrary dogma. As such it was imposed 
 on the thought of the time.\The essence of the conflict which 
 is referred to in the general term 'the revolution" is the conflict 
 between the rational authority of the budding science and the 
 arbitrary authority of the church. 
 
 Apphed to society, this means simply that man tried to find 
 in human nature itself the rational basis for the state and all 
 correlative human institutions. The older theory was that kings 
 served by divine right. The church was God's agent on earth. 
 Therefore the church could dictate on social and political mat- 
 ters. Its authority was arbitrary, it rested on the church's rela- 
 tion to God. There was no basis for an appeal above that au- 
 thority; it was arbitrary. The revolution challenged that au- 
 thority and endeavored to substitute in place of it a rational au- 
 thority; it attempted to show that the order of society flowed 
 from the rational nature of man, and from the rational char- 
 acter of society itself. This is the way out for Hobbes, Locke, 
 and Rousseau. Such a solution is impossible, however, unless it 
 can be shown that man's vohtions have a rational character. 
 When Hume seemingly destroyed the universal character of 
 such volitions by reducing to a set of habitual associations the 
 
 [xiv]
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 rational substance in which such values and volitions inhered, 
 he sounded the death knell of the revolution. Man could not 
 build a rational state on the basis of his own rational nature be- 
 cause his so-called "universal and necessary" principles were 
 mere habits of thinking. Therefore, when Kant gave new foun- 
 dation to the universality of scientific judgments, he saved ra- 
 tionalism; when he went on to give universality to man's voli- 
 tions, to values, he saved the revolution. On the basis of Kant's 
 philosophy, a rational order or society became possible, and for 
 the arbitrary authority of the church or any other institution 
 could be substituted a rational authority based on human 
 nature. \ 
 
 In making man a sovereign, in making him a lawgiver, Kant 
 not only justifies a movement that had gone before and was 
 rapidly coming to a head in the French Revolution, he also laid 
 the basis for future development. Historically, the political' 
 revolution failed. With this failure came the endeavor to turn . 
 the clock back, to recapture the past with its values, its order, | 
 its seeming stability. This attempt is romanticism. The failure ■ 
 to build an actual society on the foundation of liberty, equality, 
 and fraternity led to a sense of defeat. To offset this, efforts 
 were made to transplant the past into the present. 
 
 In the field of thought this took the form of an attempt to 
 interpret the present in terms of what had gone before. Men 
 could not get back to the past because, for better or for worse, 
 they had lived through the experience of revolution. They 
 could not see the old order as it had been seen by those who 
 Hved in it. That made them aware of two things. On the one 
 hand, they became sensitized to themselves; they became self- 
 conscious of their predicament. On the other hand, they saw 
 themselves as the outgrowth of what had gone before. 
 
 When they attempted to formulate this position in theoretical 
 terms, they found that Kant offered suitable concepts. In the 
 first place, Kant re-established the objectivity of experience " 
 through the nature of the self. The self legislates; it makes its 
 world. Men had lost their moorings in the defeat of the revolu-
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 tionary hope. They no longer felt at home In their world. They 
 were strangers to the present and sought solace in the old order 
 which, though arbitrary, was nevertheless rational. But lo — 
 were one to follow Kant, he could have a rational world, for 
 the world is what we make it to be. We, as selves, determine 
 what the world is; it is the objectification of ourselves. In the 
 words of Schelling, man and nature are identical. Thus man is 
 as much at home with the universe as he is at home with him- 
 self, and since man is rational the universe will be also. 
 
 In the second place, with the emphasis on the self the notion 
 of activity, of process, of development and evolution, begins to 
 replace the earlier picture of static forms. The categories of sub- 
 ject and object replace those of substance and attribute as 
 the ultimate metaphysical concepts; the notions of change and 
 development replace those of static forms and universal types. 
 This latter is beyond Kant. We are now in the company of 
 the romanticists. Yet, it was Kant's emphasis on the role of 
 the self as giving universality to experience that made this de- 
 velopment possible. That he rejected it in the repudiation of his 
 disciple Fichte simply indicates he failed to see the implications 
 of his own position. The problem posed by the skepticism of 
 Hume, and which Kant met with his critical philosophy, was 
 answered by the romanticists through the identification of the 
 ^,|-object of knowledge with the self in the very process of knowing. 
 Nature and man are one. The self and the not-self, reason and 
 nature, are one whether regarded from the point of moral ex- 
 perience, as in Fichte, or of the aesthetic experience, as in 
 Schelling, or of the logical experience, as in Hegel. Nature de- 
 velops through processes identical to those through which the 
 self develops. 
 
 /TRe transition from Kant to Hegel is a shift from an explana- 
 tion of the world in terms of static forms to one utilizing the 
 notion of an evolutionary process. For Hegel, the formal princi- 
 ples through the medium of which experience becomes intel- 
 ligible give way to a process through which the forms them- 
 selves arise in the course of experience. The logic of the new 
 
 [xvi] 

 
 fone i\ 
 5, the / 
 es of ' 
 
 INTReDUCTION 
 
 direction in thinking is one of a dynamic process rather than one 
 of fixed quantities. In other words, the Romantic ideaHsts were 
 doing within the field of philosophy what Lamarck and Darwin 
 were doing for biology. 
 
 The science of the Renaissance was based upon the problem 
 of the juxtaposition of simple physical particles as these were 
 brought together and torn apart as a result of motion. That 
 these combinations were manifest in groupings having the 
 characteristics of common objects distinguishable from one an- 
 other through their forms was entirely irrelevant to this earlier 
 statement. The forms of trees, stones, persons, are imposed on 
 the physical elements arbitrarily. They have no significance in 
 the interpretation of physical reality. What the theory of evo- 
 lution gives is a description of the process through which the 
 forms themselves arise. As Mr. Mead points out, the title of one 
 of Darwin's books was The Origin of Species^ in other words, 
 origin of forms. The earlier science based on the ultimates 
 matter and motion was saved, after Hume's destructive blast, 
 by Kant, who said that the form of objects is a projection in 
 experience of certain forms native to the mind itself. This leaves \ 
 us with the possibiHty of a phenomenal science but without any 
 clue as to the nature of things-in-themselves. The Romantic 
 and absolute idealists who follow Kant find the nature of the 
 thing-in-itself in the unfolding of our experience. Darwin and 
 Lamarck carry the same general idea over into the problem of 
 the appearance of forms in the biological world as a consequent 
 of a life-process which is constant but which adapts itself from 
 time to time in such a way as to enable it to persist under 
 changed conditions. Each of these men has his own theory as to 
 how the adaptation occurs. They agree in the fact of a constant 
 life-process with the particular forms of any given era depend- 
 ent upon the conditions under which the life-process goes on at 
 any given time. 
 
 This same general notion receives further philosophic de- 
 velopment in vitalism, the most recent comprehensive state- 
 ment of which is to be found in the position of the contemporary
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 French philosopher Henri Bergson. Thus the idea of evolution 
 gradually becomes completely general and bids fair to supplant 
 in all fields of thought both the Aristotelian science of fixed 
 forms and the early mechanical science of matter and motion; 
 it becomes a basic assumption applicable to every problem 
 from the development of the physical world to that of political 
 societies. 
 
 II 
 
 Turning to another phase of the development of ideas in 
 the nineteenth century, Mr. Mead traces the correlation be- 
 tween problems in the field of social and economic phenomena 
 and other phases of scientific development. Here particularly we 
 find exemplified the author's abihty to restate the relations 
 among the various factors of a movement in such a way as 
 to throw the whole problem into a new perspective. Rejecting 
 the common association of the Industrial Revolution with 
 the discovery of large deposits of easily available coal and 
 iron, coupled with the unaccountable increase of inventive 
 genius, Mr. Mead shows us these diverse roots of the move- 
 ment: the expansion of markets, due, on the one hand to 
 the opening of new fields through the explorations that marked 
 the early modern period and continued through the movements 
 toward empire, and, on the other hand, to a sudden rather un- 
 accountable increase in the population of Europe; changes in 
 the agricultural practices of England which released numerous 
 peasants from the land and made them available for labor of 
 other types; the appearance of factory towns as a result of tak- 
 ing production out of the home and bringing the means of pro- 
 duction together in plants where the division of labor and the 
 application of increasingly adequate machinery made it possible 
 to turn out goods in sufficient quantities to meet the growing 
 demand. 
 
 Out of the new situation two expressions of the scientific 
 temper of the modern age arise. One of these is the develop- 
 ment of an economic theory and a social theory capable of ac- 
 
 [ xviii 1
 
 INTR@BUCTI»N 
 
 counting for the new phenomena; the other, the appearance of 
 new scientific concepts which meet needs arising in the inven- 
 tion of new processes of production. 
 
 In the work of Adam Smith and of Malthus we find the roots 
 from which the orthodox economic theory flowered. According 
 to the former, the market is a point of exchange of goods in 
 which each party to the exchange profits, in the sense that he 
 gives something he has but does not want for something the 
 other party to the bargain has and in turn does not want. With 
 their release from the land an increasingly large number of men 
 had their ability to work (their labor) to exchange for money 
 (for wages). No longer being bound to a lord or to the land, as 
 he had been in the feudal society, the individual could sell his 
 labor in the market in return for the money which he needed 
 and wanted. Theoretically, this was a situation in which a bar- 
 gain was reached which was to the advantage of both parties. 
 But Malthus indicated this: the tendency is for population to 
 increase geometrically while the increase in the food supply is 
 only arithmetical. Thus, since labor is one of the costs of pro- 
 duction, and since, in the interests of profits, the cost of produc- 
 tion must be reduced as much as possible, the tendency is for 
 labor to underbid its competition, with the result that soon the 
 price of labor has been forced down to a starvation level. The 
 outlook from the point of view of orthodox theory was, there- 
 fore, very dismal. 
 
 However, this theory is inadequate. It breaks down at two 
 points: man can consciously control population increase and 
 the production of food; through voluntary organizations of 
 workers it becomes possible also to keep wages above the 
 starvation level. Out of these inadequacies of the orthodox view 
 arise two social philosophies of significance — utilitarianism and 
 the socialistic theory of Karl Marx. In these Mr. Mead sees 
 the attitude of research science at work again. Science ad- 
 vances through the conflict of universals, "theories," with 
 "brute facts." This relationship is discoverable in this problem. 
 The difference between the two suggested answers lies mainly 
 
 f xix 1
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 in their direction. The utilitarians, with the background of 
 English empiricism, which had reduced scientific laws to the 
 psychological habits of association, was an opportunistic philos- 
 ophy of society which gave a very practical rule of thumb for 
 distinguishing what of that carried over from the past should be 
 retained and what should be rejected. Marx's theory is more 
 ambitious. A fusion of Hegelian metaphysics and the orthodox 
 economic doctrine, Marx's position points to the dialectic of 
 the economic process. This process leads inevitably to a revo- 
 lution in which workers, aware of the international character 
 of their problems, unite throughout the world to set up a new 
 social order. As Mr. Mead points out, that movement lost 
 ground seriously in the nationalistic disaffection of socialists in 
 1 9 14. He also indicates the scientific inadequacy of this move- 
 ment by calling attention to the fact that socialism never ac- 
 curately depicted either the actual conditions or the actual 
 wishes of the laborer. It thus becomes one more social theory, 
 perfectly legitimate as such, which breaks down against par- 
 ticular facts. Out of this breakdown arises a new conception 
 and the replacement of revolutionary socialism by the liberal 
 doctrine of social evolution. 
 
 What Mr. Mead especially wants us to see in this connection 
 is that our thinking takes the same form whether in the field of 
 economic or political theory or in that of science properly so 
 called. In each case we start with some theory, some universal. 
 This we retain and extend until such time as we find some par- 
 ticular fact which does not conform to the law, or the hypothesis 
 as it is given. The result is a modification of the theory so that 
 it deals adequately with the exceptional instance, where this is 
 possible, or, if such modification is impossible, to the rejection 
 of the theory. 
 
 Laws of this sort are clearly of a type distinct from those 
 
 formulated under the inspiration of absolutism and authority. 
 
 The laws of science are not dogmas: they are postulates. The 
 
 "Vi method of research science always conflicts with fixed dogmas; 
 
 and, as Mr. Mead is anxious to have us see, so far the former
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 has always been successful whenever these two methods have 
 had occasion to lock horns. 
 
 The Industrial Revolution touches science in another way too. 
 When the entrepreneur began to use the extensive application of 
 machinery to meet his productive needs, he found that he was 
 in want of some concept which would enable him to discover the 
 comparative efficiency of different machines, various forms of 
 power, and so forth. In other words, he needed a general con- 
 cept of the unit of work. With this incentive, the problem was 
 attacked by the scientists of the period; and the outcome of 
 their activity was the formulation of the idea of energy. This 
 concept, now one of the most significant and extensively applied 
 in the whole gamut of scientific notions, made its appearance 
 as a bookkeeping conception of the physical world! It enabled 
 the producer to compare his alternative means of production, his 
 sources of power, in terms of the units of work available in each. 
 
 Instances might be pointed out at some length of this sort of 
 reciprocal stimulus in which the scientist has found his incen- 
 tive in a problem posed by the producer, and, on the other 
 hand, where the entrepreneur has applied to his problems in- 
 formation discovered by the scientist in the solution of his prob- 
 lems. These we will disregard, for there remain two other rami- 
 fications of modern scientific thought which must be indicated. 
 
 As was pointed out when we indicated that the roots of our 
 idea of a rational world go back to the Middle Ages, the modern 
 scientist is committed to the thesis that the world can be under- 
 stood. The most common formulation of this commitment is 
 found in the statement and acceptance of laws of nature. The 
 success which has attended the reduction of natural phenomena 
 to basic uniformities has led to the postulation of an explana- 
 tion of the world in which each event is determined by its rela- 
 tion to pthers. This has led commonly to the assumption that 
 the extension of scientific knowledge implies a mechanistic_ 
 philosophy which reduces man, as everything else, to a phase 
 in a process carried on inevitably and unavoidably. At this 
 point Mr. Mead protests with the rather unique, and somewhat 
 
 XXI
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 paradoxical, view that the more the processes of nature can 
 be described in terms of laws, the greater is man's freedom. 
 This follows from the fact that our control over nature is pro- 
 portionate with our understanding of it. Mechanical science 
 does not mechanize human conduct. Rather, it gives man free- 
 dom; for the more we know of the processes governing our en- 
 vironment, the greater is our ability to get control over it. 
 Thus, instead of being the end of attempts to explain man and 
 his institutions in terms of ends, mechanical science becomes a 
 guaranty of the successful attainment of those ends. The reason 
 this seeming paradox can be maintained carries us back to an 
 appreciation of what modern science is doing. Research science 
 approaches problems. In its attempt to solve its problems, it 
 uses certain postulates. It does not, however, present these 
 postulates as a systematic account of the world in any particu- 
 lar aspect. The concepts it employs are recognized solely be- 
 cause of their fruitfulness. 
 
 Out of this phase of the scientific attitude develops the second 
 point of influence mentioned above. Science has given rise to 
 philosophic movements. In the nineteenth century both prag- 
 matism and realism arise out of science. The former relates to 
 the method of science. In the preceding paragraph it was said 
 that science recognized certain concepts because of their fruitful- 
 ness. Couple with that another characteristic of science since 
 the Renaissance, the utilization of observation to discover the 
 "brute fact" which makes necessary the modification of sci- 
 entific concepts, and you have the background out of which de- 
 veloped William James's radical empiricism on the one hand 
 and John Dewey's instrumentalism on the other. Such other 
 forms of Pragmatism as that of Hans Vaihinger spring more 
 directly from previous philosophical movements, notably the 
 metaphysic of English empiricism and the phenomenalism of 
 Immanuel Kant's theory of knowledge. Among these various 
 forms of the pragmatic position, Mr. Mead's own thought at- 
 taches definitely to those which spring from an analysis of 
 what is involved in research science. 
 
 [ xxii 1
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 But, besides pragmatism, another type of philosophy — modern 
 reaHsm — springs directly from modern science. Here an attempt 
 of a definitely philosophic sort is made to supplement sci- 
 entific conclusions. It has already been indicated that the 
 scientist as such makes no attempt to give any systematic ac- 
 count of the universe as a whole or of any particular aspect of 
 it based on his postulates, on his observations, or on his conclu- 
 sions. But the human mind has always wished to know more; 
 it has always sought some statement of the nature of the uni- 
 verse either as a whole or in its different aspects. The reahst 
 of the nineteenth century and of our own generation is among 
 those who make the attempt to supply the answer to this re- 
 putedly more ultimate question. 
 
 In the lecture in which he deals with realism Mr. Mead 
 stresses particularly a rather special phase of this movement, 
 its interest in logic, an interest reflected especially in the work 
 of Mr. Bertrand Russell and Mr. Alfred North Whitehead. 
 The logic of traditional rationalism had been concerned with 
 formal, classificatory aspects of reahty. This goes back to Aris- 
 totle. During the nineteenth century, however, the question of 
 logic became a matter of vital concern as reflecting central hopes 
 and ends of various movements. Romanticism, for example, 
 comes to an articulate head in the idealistic, dynamic logic of 
 Hegel; pragmatism finds its intellectual feet in the utiHtarian 
 or instrumentalistic logic of Mr. John Dewey. 
 
 Realism is interested in a very different approach to the prob- 
 lem of reality than either of the movements just mentioned. 
 Recognizing the two phases of experience, the formal and the 
 material, the realist proposes to deal with the formal without 
 reducing it, as the English empiricists and Kant had, either to 
 associated states of consciousness or to forms characteristic of, 
 and projected by the mind itself. The realist conceived of the 
 forms as relations existing objectively. These relations are "out 
 there" quite as much as the object related. We think them; but 
 that would be impossible if there were not something there to be 
 thought. The logical interest of the realist becomes, therefore,
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 an interest in breaking up the object of knowledge into its 
 various elements, together with the connections or relations that 
 hold them together. The logical forte of realism is analysis. 
 Thus appears again the problem of the individual. To the con- 
 sideration of this problem Mr. Mead devotes the last chapter of 
 the book, making it also the point of introduction of the con- 
 temporaneously important idea of relativity. Here Mr. Mead 
 leans toward Mr. Whitehead rather than toward Mr. Russell. 
 
 Ill 
 
 So I have attempted to indicate some of the ways in which 
 Mr. Mead's analysis of the thought movements of the nine- 
 teenth century centers around the scientific movement of the 
 period, the movement which gives the key for interpreting this 
 rich and complex period. In the following sections of this In- 
 troduction two things remain to be noted. In the first place, 
 we must discover what phases of the thought of the period have 
 not been included. Secondly, and primarily for those who read 
 this volume without having read The Philosophy of the Present, 
 edited by Mr. A. E. Murphy, and Mind, Self, and Society, 
 edited by Mr. C. W. Morris, some hint must be given as to 
 what is involved in Mr. Mead's notion of the past and his 
 theory of the self, both of which are significantly referred to in 
 the present work. 
 
 Perhaps the most important of the omissions is the lack of 
 any mention of the pessimists, Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, 
 and of the movement known as "positivism." The latter omis- 
 sion is somewhat cared for in the material which forms the Ap- 
 pendix of this volume. In the analysis of French philosophy 
 August Comte, at least, is given a fairly adequate treatment. 
 Of course, it is, to a certain extent, true that positivism exerted 
 a rather local and temporary influence. Yet, as expressed by 
 Saint-Simon and Comte, it indicated a live interest in the 
 philosophic implications of the success of the methods of sci- 
 ence, particularly as these bore on the possibility of a true sci- 
 entific approach to the problems of society. These interests are
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 congenial to Mr. Mead; and yet for some reason, on which 
 speculation would be both in vain and useless, he neglected this 
 doctrine in his analysis of nineteenth-century movements as a 
 whole. 
 
 It is trite to indicate that the present volume makes no pre- 
 tense of such catholicity as is found in Merz's monumental, four- 
 volume work on History of European Thought in the Nineteenth 
 Century. Apparently, Mr. Mead saw the purpose of his course 
 as twofold. On the one hand, he wished to demonstrate the or- 
 ganic continuity of ideas. Therefore he emphasized the sig- 
 nificance of the thought of the Renaissance for the period we are 
 considering. He also wished to select from the numerous fields 
 and developments in the last century the tendencies which par- 
 ticularly demarcated the genius of that period and which carry 
 over into the present scene. To do this in a course of approxi- 
 mately forty-five lectures is something of a task. On the other 
 hand, as I had already indicated, Mr. Mead's thought centers 
 primarily around the development of research science and the 
 ramifications of this discipline in other fields. These limits are 
 indicated not with an intention to censure but only to assist 
 the reader in his orientation to the material which follows. 
 
 Nonetheless, one is struck with the absence of any mention of 
 Nietzsche and Schopenhauer. As reflecting the negative side of 
 Romantic and absolute idealism, the least that can be said is 
 that they exerted a widespread influence in the last century. If 
 one may apply the Hegelian dialectic to the question, one may 
 say that Schopenhauer is the antithesis which carries Hegelian- 
 ism itself into a position demanding a new synthesis. No doubt 
 both thinkers would have rebelled at being thus intimately 
 linked together in the inexorable logic of a system. Within 
 limits, it is no doubt true that Hegel thought of his own philos- 
 ophy as the crowning synthesis. On the other hand, Schopen- 
 hauer did not take kindly to his neglect by the optimistic ideal- 
 ists who were his contemporaries. Yet, it is not an injustice to 
 treat his pessimism as Romantic idealism's negative side. 
 
 A further significance of Schopenhauer's thought is indicated 
 
 [xxv]
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 succinctly by Mr. DeWitt H. Parker in the Introduction to 
 his Httle volume of selections from Schopenhauer's writings.' 
 In this statement he indicates a very real influence of Schopen- 
 hauer on the contemporary representative of the philosophy of 
 irrationalism, M. Henri Bergson. Whether or not there is direct 
 influence of the sort indicated by Mr. Parker, irrationalism is a 
 persistent tendency and is deserving of a consideration usually 
 minimized by those sharing the more usual predilection to ra- 
 tionalism. To have failed to deal with Schopenhauer seems like 
 a real oversight. 
 
 Mr. Mead mentions neo-Kantianism and the newer ideal- 
 istic movements in Germany, England, and America, only to 
 indicate that Hegel remained a force in the latter two coun- 
 tries after his influence had died out in Germany. Fechner, 
 Paulsen, Windelband, Eucken, Miinsterberg, T. H. Green, 
 Bradley, and Bosanquet are scarcely mentioned. Wundt ap- 
 pears in his role as one of the founders of modern, experimental 
 psychology, a movement to the consideration of which Mr. 
 Mead devotes a considerable amount of space. Along with 
 these individuals may be cited the neglect of the study of value 
 which is rooted in this period and is a focal point of heated dis- 
 cussion in our generation. The field of aesthetics is scarcely 
 touched, and then primarily as related to the metaphysical 
 connotations of Schelling's philosophy. Ethical theory is men- 
 tioned only where it appears as an adjunct of considerations 
 of dominant social and political theories. The development of 
 French philosophy receives attention only in the material in- 
 corporated as an Appendix. 
 
 As a treatise dealing with movements of thought other than 
 philosophic, as it does wherever these illustrate the genius of 
 research science, the following omissions should be noted. 
 Beyond the use of their material to indicate the advance of 
 scientific method, Mr. Mead does not trace the details in the 
 development of physical and biological theories of the period. 
 
 ' Schopenhauer: Selections, edited by De Witt H. Parker (New York: Charles Scrib- 
 ner's Sons). 
 
 [ xxvi ] 
 
 I
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 The philosophic oflfshoot of the emphasis on evolutionary ideas 
 — vitalism — is dealt with significantly only as it appears in the 
 work of M. Henri Bergson. This is a little odd, for in some ways 
 this movement, centering around Eucken, Fechner, and Driesch 
 on the Continent, and appearing also in England in the latter 
 part of the century, is significantly and pecuharly related to 
 certain forces at work during this era. Mathematical theory is 
 unmentioned except as related to recent developments in 
 logical theory. Theories of education and of the state appear 
 only as related to social, pohtical, and economic ideas. Move- 
 ments in literature and art in general receive attention only as 
 illustrative material. 
 
 Again let me indicate that these omissions are mentioned, 
 not as criticisms, but solely to indicate to the reader points at 
 which the present work will need to be supplemented. 
 
 IV 
 
 We come now to the final sections of this Introduction, in 
 which we shall attempt to give some indication of the meaning 
 of Mr. Mead's doctrines in regard to the nature of the self 
 and of the past. These are treated respectively in the volumes 
 edited by Mr. Murphy and by Mr. Morris, which were men- 
 tioned above. Since they both play a part in the development 
 of the ideas of the present volume, some attention must be 
 given them here. Had one asked Mr. Mead what problems were 
 of pecuHar interest to him, and with which he found himself led 
 to deal in something other than the usual way, he might well 
 have indicated the problem of the nature of the self and the 
 problem of the past. 
 
 As a study deahng with thought in the preceding century, 
 this volume must reflect, at least by implication, Mr. Mead's 
 theory of the past. The pursuit of history brings one inevitably 
 into intimate grips not only with the past as a fact but also with 
 the whole question of evidence, of divergent interpretations, of 
 the continuity of movements from one period to another, and 
 so on. True to the basic approach to the problem with which 
 
 [ xxvii ]
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 this series of lectures is concerned, he treats the problem of the 
 past as an instance of the application of the methods of re- 
 search science. At least in the primary conception of his theory 
 on this matter, the statement that each generation recreates 
 the past, that for each age a new and different Caesar crosses 
 the Rubicon, must have come to Mr. Mead from his awareness 
 that theories of historical interpretation are broken on the same 
 type of exception, of "brute fact," that gives rise to problems 
 in scientific research. Our knowledge of the past is transmitted 
 in the form of theories, of universals, just as the knowledge of 
 nature is transmitted under the form of natural laws. In each 
 field the discovery of new data, the uncovering of new monu- 
 ments, bring exceptional cases which require that our concepts 
 be reconstructed. The study of history, the problem of the past, 
 thus becomes nothing more or less than a single instance of the 
 scientific approach to any problem whatsoever. 
 
 Perhaps in the present volume this character of the past is 
 best evidenced in the treatment of romanticism. In its attempt 
 to turn the clock back, to catch again and give living expression 
 to the spirit of the Middle Ages, romanticism illustrates Mr. 
 Mead's contention that the past exists for either an individual 
 or an age only in so far as they project themselves back into the 
 period in which they are interested. Now, such projection al- 
 ways presupposes a present experience. Thus, in the case of the 
 romanticists, the return to the past carried with it the sense of 
 defeat which followed the collapse of the revolution. Whether 
 they liked it or not, they returned to the past sadder and wiser 
 men. Having lived through the revolution and its failure, the 
 men of the new day saw the earher period as it was impossible 
 for the medievalists themselves or for the exemplars of the life 
 of reason, who followed them, to have seen it. Thus we see, 
 first, that the romantic interpretation of the Middle Ages is 
 different from the experience of that age by those who lived in 
 it; secondly, that the romantic interpretation of the Middle 
 Ages is markedly different from that of the Age of Enlighten- 
 ment, which immediately preceded the period of the revolution. 
 
 f xxviii 1
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 In this single case we not only see the impossibility of an 
 identical past for successive ages; we also see that the process 
 through which each period determines the nature of the past 
 is simply the method of research science applied to a type of 
 problem with which we do not ordinarily associate it. In other 
 words, the problem of the past and of research science are one — 
 the novelty being the particular, exceptional event which re- 
 quires modification of our theory; the form being the theory, 
 the universal which we posit as the condition of our having a 
 thread, a guiding idea in our interpretation. 
 
 The position indicated here is not a denial of the past in the 
 sense of a solipsistic absorption of the past and the future in the 
 momentary experience of an instantaneous, "knife-edge" pres- 
 ent. Just as the scientist recognizes that his researches deal with 
 real objects, although admitting he does not know their nature 
 completely, that his theories about them will be subject to con- 
 tinuous modification as new data are presented, and that in the 
 end the object will be distinctly different from the object with 
 which he started, so the student of the past, the historian in par- 
 ticular, is dealing with a series of events really antecedent to any 
 particular present, but a series of events which is successively 
 described in quite different terms as our interpretative theories 
 change, as the experience of the race is accumulated, and as new 
 data present themselves. In this process the new past is different 
 from the old, just as for the scientist the new object differs from 
 the one it replaces. In neither case is the problem simply that of 
 seeing what is "out there." Seeing, in any significant sense, de- 
 pends upon our looking, and looking reflects the whole system 
 of interests, theories, purposes, and ideals that leads us to seek 
 one, rather than another, nature in the thing under considera- 
 tion. This is true of all phases of scientific research as it is of 
 all human endeavor. Completely impartial observation is never 
 achieved. The dice are always loaded in favor of some prefer- 
 ence. No matter how rigidly we may attempt to check and 
 counterbalance the personal equation, our considerations are 
 guided by theories which we expect to have to modify or to 
 
 [ xxix 1
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 completely reject. Indeed, Mr. Mead indicates one aspect of the 
 research method as involving conscientious efforts to break 
 down the very theories which guide our investigations at any 
 given time. In connection with the theory of the past, Mr. 
 Mead does not deny the fact of pastness. He never suggests 
 any alternative to the fact that a real Caesar crossed a real 
 Rubicon. What he does insist upon is that for each age there is 
 a different Caesar and a different Rubicon, because of divergent 
 ideational backgrounds with the resultant projection on the past 
 of different interpretative hypotheses. 
 
 Belonging, as he does, to the group closely associated with 
 Mr. Dewey, and having been deeply influenced by the early 
 works of Mr. Whitehead, Mr. Mead had no place for an abso- 
 lute, static time composed of an infinite number of distinct and 
 separate "knife-edge" moments. Time is a process. As process, 
 it is change. The past is a part of time. Since what is true of 
 the whole is true also of its parts, the past, too, must be char- 
 acterized by fluidity, by change. If one agrees with Mr. Mead 
 in giving up the absolutistic notion of time which we inherit 
 from the nineteenth century, one has no alternative but to ac- 
 cept the consequences of this shift of position; one must acqui- 
 esce to some sort of relativism. It is in part this substitution of 
 relativism for absolutism in the interpretation of concrete tem- 
 poral experience that makes Mr. Mead's doctrine seem, at least 
 at first, so strange and difficult to understand. Most of us have 
 not caught the full implications in the shift of point of view. 
 Or we may see and accept rationally what is involved in the 
 change without having as yet made our emotional peace with 
 the new approach. Relativism is not, as yet, a part of our un- 
 consciously accepted assumptions. We still fit into the abso- 
 lutistic niche of the preceding century. Should the new move- 
 ment, which was so strong in the first quarter of our century, 
 permeate our thinking as that of Newton did the thinking of our 
 forebears, a new Z,eitgeist will become manifest which will ac- 
 cept, as self-evident, theories which give us pause. 
 
 In any case, we can admit the practical significance of 
 
 [ XXX 1
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 Mr. Mead's doctrine: history exists only to the extent that indi- 
 viduals put themselves back into the past; this being the case, 
 there is no alternative to the conclusion that the past as an ob- 
 ject of historical study differs from age to age, for the individuals 
 of any given period never bring to their criticism the same 
 background, the same interests, the same accumulation of 
 racial experience as do the individuals of different periods, 
 
 V 
 
 We come now to Mr. Mead's treatment of the problem of the 
 self. This problem is the subject matter of the volume edited 
 by Mr. Morris as the first of the group of which this is the 
 second. The problem is also considered at some length in the 
 material composing the present volume, where we meet it in two 
 connections, first in the analysis of the Romantic movement, 
 which, as we have just seen, also throws light on the problem of 
 the past, and in a later chapter dealing with the problem of 
 society, for in Mr. Mead's mind the processes of social move< 
 ment and that of the development of selves were inseparable. 
 
 The crux of the author's doctrine of the self is the portrayal 
 of the process through which the self appears as a result of the 
 assumption of various roles, first of one person, then of another, 
 then of another. Out of this procedure one comes gradually to 
 see one's own role as it is demarcated from those of other per- 
 sons whose roles one has temporarily assumed. Thus, self- 
 awareness is achieved, for, by distinguishing its own role, its own 
 part from the role of others, the self becomes conscious of itself 
 as distinct from other selves. In this statement we see that Mr. 
 Mead carries over into the study of this problem the modern 
 emphasis upon a dynamic process as over against the ancient 
 static statement. Just as he rejects the atomistic notion of 
 "knife-edge" presents in the analysis of time, so he rejects the 
 notion of isolated, atomic selves. Selves come into being 
 through a process of self-conscious interaction and interpene- 
 tration with other selves. 
 
 At first sight this process may seem as difiicult to understand 
 
 f xxxi 1
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 as was the theory of the past in its first statement. As in the 
 case of the latter, illumination comes through the exemplifica- 
 tion of the process in the movement of thought; and once 
 again, as I have already indicated, the Romantic movement is 
 the point of departure. 
 
 The essence of romanticism is its attempt to turn back the 
 clock, to clothe itself in the forms and ideas of the medieval 
 period, to assume and play out the role of another age. This was 
 achieved to the extent that a considerable amount of the trap- 
 pings of the earlier period was brought out to be admired and 
 worn again — if not actually, then vicariously through the litera- 
 ture and through the general ideas and ideals of the later period. 
 The revolution had not brought about many physical changes 
 in Germany; but the conquering armies of France, under the 
 leadership of Napoleon, did bring them. At first, as a result of 
 the infectious force of the enthusiastic and conquering French- 
 men, who, on their march away from Paris, enjoyed one sweep- 
 ing victory after another, these changes were regarded as being 
 all for the good. But, when the tide of battle turned, when the 
 staggered, broken, bewildered horde moved back toward Paris 
 after the defeat at Moscow, a very dififerent feeling was en- 
 gendered by their presence. The ideal had collapsed. The revo- 
 lution had failed, together with all that it had set into motion. 
 The present turned out to be a mean age, one of disillusionment, 
 of disappointment. The sense of defeat weighed heavily on all 
 those who had so recently given their souls to the forces emanat- 
 ing from France. With both their immediate past and their 
 newborn hopes shattered and stripped away, men staked what 
 hope remained on a return to a still more distant past, that of 
 medieval feudalism. 
 
 Much as they desired this old order, much as they attempted 
 to identify themselves with it, an inevitable difficulty stood in 
 their way — they came back to this old order with different eyes. 
 The revolution had failed; and the men who had seen this 
 failure, who had shared in the defeat, could not have been un- 
 marked by their experience. And they were not unmarked. 
 
 [ xxxii ]
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 They might put on medieval garb, they might emulate and eulo- 
 gize the troubadours, they might in any number of ways attempt 
 the desired identification; but they failed to attain it. They 
 could put on the clothes, but they could not make them fit. The 
 garments had been cut to the form and stature of another age, 
 and they hung ill-fitting and awkward from new shoulders. It 
 was like the play of children ransacking old trunks and putting 
 on the finery, playing the roles of another era. The result of such 
 activity may be quaint, it may stir one's memory, but it re- 
 mains incongruous — the old clothes do not belong. So the ro- 
 manticists could turn back the clock, they could dig into the 
 forgotten past and attempt its resurrection, but they could not 
 belong to it. Yet, having made the experiment, having played 
 the role of another time, they came back to their own age with a 
 self-consciousness of their own position, of their own role that 
 they would not otherwise have had. In trying to be someone 
 else, they had collectively discovered themselves. 
 
 Here, in this historical movement, we find reflected what for 
 Mr. Mead is the basic element in the development of the self. \ 
 The self is a process. It is not an entity; it is an achievement. \ 
 Not only do we iDeoome aware of ourselves, but we become I 
 selves only by assuming roles, by playing the part of others. 
 When a self has done this, it not only is in a position to criticize 
 the self whose role it has taken, but — and this is the important 
 point — it is also in a position to criticize itself. The other self 
 becomes a standard of comparison, so to speak. When playing 
 at being someone else, the self realizes its own nature at the 
 same time it realizes the nature of the person whose role is 
 being played. 
 
 In this connection one important difference between the 
 philosophy of Mr. Mead and that of the romanticists must be _ 
 noted. The latter found in this process a metai5hysical theory 
 in which the ultimate identification of the self and non-self in 
 an absolute spirit became possible. For them this is not only 
 the process of individual development but is identical with the 
 movement which permeates and governs the whole universe. 
 
 f xxxiii 1 
 
 "1
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 The individual self thus becomes the universe writ small. Mr. 
 Mead is not interested in the metaphysical connotations of the 
 process. His interest is in the impHcations this view may hold 
 for social psychology. He turns to the process indicated to dis- 
 cover the genesis of persons as distinct from biological organ- 
 isms, to find the root of the socially important virtue of sym- 
 pathy, and to indicate the development through which we as 
 individuals become aware of social Hfe. Again, as in his theory 
 of science and in his doctrine of the past, he posits the existence 
 of objects. The not-self, the other selves through the assump- 
 tion of whose roles the new self is generated, are not objects 
 dependent upon the processes of a subject which plays its part. 
 Indeed, it cannot be, for there must be other selves whose roles 
 can be taken before the business of taking roles is conceivable. 
 At this point the position we are considering breaks cleanly 
 away from metaphysical doctrines. 
 
 "^ In his treatment of the self Mr. Mead makes a great deal of 
 
 what in grammar is called the "reflexive mood." This is the 
 
 (mood of self-awareness. The self has no significance unless it 
 
 can turn back upon itself, can become its own object, distin- 
 
 iWuish itself in a milieu of other selves. Until this can be done, 
 
 I the self cannot be made significant for the psychological and 
 
 { Sociological problems which are Mr. Mead's major concern at 
 
 this point. That this self-awareness is not only possible but 
 
 a fact he finds indicated in the achievement of a reflexive form 
 
 in language, the form which recognizes the self as both subject 
 
 and object of an experience. 
 
 Whatever one may finally come to think of this doctrine, one 
 must recognize it as a fruitful hypothesis. With Mr. Mead's 
 profound respect for the scientific method and for the technique 
 and successes of research science, not only would he himself have 
 thought of this position as a hypothesis, but he would have 
 wished criticism of it to be made in this Hght. Its fruitfulness as 
 a hypothesis is indicated especially in chapters xvi and xvii 
 of the present volume. 
 
 The immediate implications of this theory for social psy- 
 
 f xxxiv 1
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 chology are at once apparent. It is only through the utiHzation 
 of social media that selves appear at all. Indeed, it is not an 
 overstatement to speak of the self as a society of selves. In the 
 process of "playing at" one role and then another we not only 
 become aware of our own role but find that we are potentially 
 any one of the selves whose part we have been taking. This is 
 shown overtly in the commonly recognized fact that in shifting 
 from one social group to another we become "different" per- 
 sons. This does not involve any elaborate theory of the dis- 
 sociation of personality. The thing is much more common, 
 much more normal, than the phenomenon indicated by that 
 phrase. We notice in others and in ourselves that, in moving 
 from one group to another, responses so divergent from those 
 we call "normal" are induced that we say, with literal truth, 
 the person in question is hardly recognizable as the same per- 
 son in these various manifestations of his self, in the different 
 roles which divergent situations call out. 
 
 The ability to be a new person in this sense, however, goes 
 back to the fact that the self involved has already become 
 famihar with the part to be played. Each role has been taken 
 previously in play, in mimicking, as a result of esteem or for 
 some other reason, until the self gets the "feel" of a role and it 
 may be assumed becomingly when circumstances call it forth. 
 In this way the self is both enriched and made more flexible. Be- 
 ing a social milieu in miniature, the self can adapt itself to new 
 situations in such a way as to make adequate social responses. 
 
 This matter of assuming roles is significant in another con- 
 nection also. Not only does "playing at" one person and then 
 another enrich the social experience of the self involved; not 
 only is this the medium through which the self becomes aware 
 of its own nature in opposition to those other selves whose roles 
 it takes; it is also the basis for the sympathy which every social 
 theory requires as the basis of co-operative effort toward 
 socially desirable ends, a sympathy for which every theory of 
 social psychology must give an account. The traditional device 
 at this point is to have recourse to a social instinct, or to bi- 
 
 [ XXXV ]
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 furcate behavior into acts motivated either by selfish or by al- 
 truistic desires. Each of these theories involves serious diffi- 
 culties, as the history of personal and social ethics shows. On 
 the basis of Mr. Mead's theory we have a possible solution 
 of this difficulty also. In the process he describes, we not only 
 play the part of other selves; we also become aware of their 
 significance, of their difficulties, and of their limitations. Hav- 
 ing at least vicariously put ourselves in the other person's 
 shoes, we are in a position to sympathize with him. We have 
 played his part, and we know what he has to face. We can put 
 ourselves in his position again and again, and each time see how 
 we would be affected by it, see what we would be likely to do if 
 we were in his place. Consequently, we can understand his be- 
 havior. The more roles we can assume in this fashion, the wider 
 will be our sympathy, and the more significant will be our social 
 responses. To be able to deal with this aspect of our behavior 
 without having to have recourse to special instincts or other 
 devices seems a real contribution to the social psychology of our 
 times. 
 
 VI 
 
 There is one further point to be advanced as showing the 
 worth of these various doctrines of Mr. Mead. One criterion 
 commonly agreed upon for testing scientific theories is the way 
 in which they correlate the findings of various fields. We have 
 already indicated that the position developed in this group of 
 lectures indicates a certain identity between the interpretation 
 of historical movements and of social phenomena. For example, 
 we pointed out that, historically, the social process is graphi- 
 cally represented in the Romantic movement. In the chapter on 
 individualism this same theory of the development of selves is 
 significantly applied to the problem of the individual. Further- 
 more, the same movements which indicate his social theory have 
 done double service through illuminating Mr. Mead's doctrine 
 of the past. One might go still further to indicate that these 
 may all be related in two directions: first, through his ac- 
 ceptance of the method of research science as underlying all 
 
 [ xxxvi 1
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 significant developments in thinking; and second, through his 
 basic assumption that the description of experience in every 
 field is to be made in terms of processes rather than in terms of 
 absolutes. In this further step a still more pertinent unity is 
 introduced into his whole thought structure, and such special 
 unities as have been indicated above are derived rather than 
 ultimate. In any case, the fact remains that the views presented 
 in this volume do stand together in such a way that a grasp of 
 that which pertains to one field will illuminate one's endeavor 
 to see what Mr. Mead is driving at in some other connection. 
 
 Merritt Hadden Moore 
 
 xxxvii ]
 
 TABLE OF CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER PACE 
 
 I. From Renaissance to Revolution i 
 
 ^ II. Kant — The Philosopher of the Revolution .... 25 
 
 III. The Revolution Breaks Down; Romanticism Is Born . 51 
 
 IV. Kant and the Background of Philosophic Romanticism . 66 
 V. The Romantic Philosophers — Fichte 85 
 
 VI. The Romantic Philosophers — Schelling . . ... 1 1 1 
 
 VII. The Romantic Philosophers — Hegel 127 
 
 VIII. Evolution Becomes a General Idea 153 
 
 l(X. The Industrial Revolution — The Quest for Markets . 169 
 
 :. X. The Social Renaissance — Utilitarianism 199 
 
 X[. The Social Renaissance — Karl Marx and Socialism . 215 
 
 XII. Industry a Boon to Science — Mechanism the Handmaid of 
 
 Finality 243 
 
 XIII. Modern Science Is Research Science 264 
 
 XIV, Science Raises Problems for Philosophy — Vitalism; Hen- 
 ri Bergson 292 
 
 XV. Science Raises Problems for Philosophy — Realism and 
 
 Pragmatism 3^^' 
 
 XVI. The Problem of Society — How We Become Selves . 360 
 
 XVII. Mind Approached through Behavior — Can Its Study Be 
 
 Made Scientific? 3^6^ 
 
 •JCVni. Individuality in the Nineteenth Century 405 
 
 Appendix. French Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century .418 
 
 Index 5^^ 
 
 [ xxxix
 
 CHAPTER I 
 FROM RENAISSANCE TO REVOLUTION 
 
 THE general political, social, and institutional back- 
 ground of the period of the Enlightenment is the Ren- 
 aissance. The former falls in a general way in the 
 eighteenth century. Immediately back of it lies the Renaissance 
 and the philosophy of Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibnitz. The 
 philosophy of the eighteenth century gathers particularly about 
 a published presentation of Leibnitz' philosophy made by 
 the German philosopher, Wolff. It was a somewhat superficial 
 statement, and it presented the world from the point of view of 
 what is termed "rationalism." There is one phase of this 
 rationalism to which I particularly want to call your attention, 
 namely, that it is an inheritance from an earlier period and 
 came into European thought by way of Christianity. \The con- 
 ception of the world as a rational order came through the 
 theology of the church. The doctrine was built around the 
 gospel of Jesus and the conception of St. Paul when he under- 
 took to formulate the Jewish theory in such a form that it 
 would be made universal. 
 
 With the advent of Christianity came the conception of a 
 world created by a God who was infinitely intelligent and who 
 had infinite power. Everything that such a deity created, every- 
 thing that he did, must be the expression of that intelligence, 
 and nothing could resist its expression. You can see that there 
 could be nothing accidental or irrational in such a world. Of 
 course, it might not be rational to us. An infinite mind would 
 have purposes and methods of which we could not conceive 
 with our finite intelHgence. Particularly there would be pur- 
 poses which would be carried out in later periods. We cannot 
 see what these purposes are. Therefore the world may appear to 
 us to be irrational; but actually, having been created by an 
 
 [I]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 intelligence that has infinite power and an infinite understand- 
 ing, it must be rational clear through. 
 
 This conception, as I have said, was of a world which was 
 fashioned to carry out God's purposes. The first expression of 
 these purposes was found in bringing into existence men with 
 souls, who were free to sin and who were condemned to death 
 because of their sin. Back of this view lay the philosophy and 
 history of St. Augustine. The world was thrown up, so to speak, 
 as the scene in which the drama of the fall and the salvation of 
 man was to be enacted. It had just the relation to the drama 
 that the theater has. It had no purpose except as the scene in 
 which the drama could be enacted. After it was enacted, the 
 heavens were to be rolled up like a scroll. The history of the 
 world was simply a device of the Deity for the carrying-out of 
 this program. We have expression of this picture in the poetry 
 of Milton. God determines to replace the fallen angels by hu- 
 man souls, and for this purpose he takes out of the chaos matter 
 from which he fashioned the world. The value of the world cen- 
 tered in men's faith, in their souls, in what they experience. 
 
 In the light of this view St. Augustine, who Hved at about the 
 time of the fall of Rome, undertook, as Milton did later, to 
 justify the ways of God to man on the basis of what he con- 
 ceived to be the inspired scriptures. He undertook to show 
 what God had tried to do, in so far as God revealed it to man. 
 
 As we have seen, the history of the world constitutes a sort of 
 drama. It begins with the creation of the world as depicted in 
 Genesis. Here man is presented as a free moral agent. He falls 
 from grace, he sins, and the punishment of sin is death; but God 
 elects to offer salvation to man through the ultimate sacrifice of 
 his son, if man will accept the means of grace. On that author- 
 ity St. Augustine undertakes to arrange the whole of human 
 history: it advances from the fall of man up to the appearance 
 of Christ, and his crucifixion, suffering, and mediation. From 
 that time on, the world presents the opportunity for man's sal- 
 vation. It was created for that purpose. 
 
 This much we know about the world and about God's inten-
 
 FROM RENAISSANCE TO REVOLUTION 
 
 tion: he made the world out of nothing; he created it in six days 
 and placed man in it; man sinned, fell from grace, and God in 
 his infinite mercy set up his plan of salvation through the 
 appearance of Christ. From that time on, the world existed in 
 order that the sons and daughters of Adam and Eve might have 
 the opportunity of being saved. When this opportunity had 
 been offered, the drama, so to speak, would be completed. Then 
 the world was to be burned up, the scroll prepared, and those 
 lost in hell were to go on suffering through eternity. That is the 
 picture which St. Augustine portrayed. 
 
 But it assumes a perfectly definite end. And it assumes 
 another power besides that of God, and one which runs counter 
 to God, and that is man's free will. This is present because God 
 saw fit to create it. Of course, he created it with the possibility 
 of man sinning. Even the devils in hell speculated; but the 
 assumption was that God had infinite knowledge, and he knew 
 what the result of his creation would be. But there was in the 
 world a principle which could oppose itself even to the infinite 
 power because God placed it there. He saw fit to create indi- 
 viduals with such powers. There should be suffering and misery 
 due to man's sinning. It was part of God's chastisement for sin. 
 The world was, on the face of it, irrational. It was a world 
 created by an infinite God, a perfect deity, but still one in 
 which evil and imperfection could appear because man could 
 exercise his choice. Man was responsible for the evil and for the 
 accompanying suffering which came with sin. He could elect to 
 use the means of grace which God gave him to be saved, or he 
 could refuse and be lost. The picture of the world from that 
 standpoint was most comprehensively given by Dante; but we 
 have the same picture of it in Milton's Paradise Lost and Para- 
 dise Regained, having therein beings that were able to choose 
 contrary to God's law, consequently introducing the element of 
 evil into the world. It was natural, then, that the world should, 
 on the face of it, be irrational. 
 
 The medieval world was conceived of as being inhabited not 
 only by men and women but by evil and good spirits. It was a 
 
 [3]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 world shot through with what we might call "magic." The 
 science of the Middle Ages is simply a history of magic, but here 
 again the conception was that God was utilizing these spirits for 
 his purposes. You have a fitting picture of it in Goethe's Faust. 
 That world, as we look back on it, was all shot through with 
 magic and historiology. There was the conception of it as seem- 
 ing to be absolutely irrational. Yet this evil is overcome in the 
 end by God, and everything which is for the highest glory of 
 God is fully rational. 
 
 This attitude was entirely different from that of the ancient 
 world. If we look back to the great systematic philosopher of 
 the ancient world, Aristotle, we find that he regarded the world 
 as provided with "forms." That is an Aristotelian technical 
 term which answers in a certain way, on the biological side, to 
 our term "species"; on the logical side, to our term "concept." 
 It answers to the nature of things, that about things which is 
 known. For example, it is that which goes to make up a tree, 
 that which constitutes the nature of a spade, a house, or a chair. 
 A spade is any object which we recognize as having a certain 
 nature. Aristotle recognized such noble objects, such forms, in 
 nature in so far as nature was rational. Objects which have cer- 
 tain exact characters, certain qualities by means of which we 
 can make them out and from which we can deduce certain con- 
 sequences, can be defined. In this way we find objects in the 
 world from which we can deduce logical consequences. 
 
 But Aristotle recognized also that there was a great deal in 
 the world which was not rational. A tree, for example, seldom 
 reaches its proper symmetry. Animals are subject to all sorts of 
 defects and monstrosities. His explanation of this, in so far as 
 he did explain it, was that the "matter" in the world somewhat 
 resisted the "forms." In any case he recognized not only that 
 there was a rational character but that some things were irra- 
 tional, accidental — something was present that could not be 
 accounted for. 
 
 I The ancient world assumed that there was absolute perfection 
 in tRe heavens. But the ancient scientist and philosopher recog- 
 
 [4]
 
 FROM RENAISSANCE TO REVOLUTION 
 
 nized an accidental character of affairs on the surface of the 
 earth. They accepted a world in which there was not only a 
 rational order but an irrational something that could not be ex- 
 plained, something that just happened. If the assumption were 
 pushed far enough, we should find it to be resolvable into 
 contingent elements. Hume later made this the basis for his 
 skeptical philosophy.; 
 
 The medieval world, as over against Aristotle's, had nothing 
 jn it that was irrational. It was this medieval view which passed 
 down through the Renaissance to the world of modern science. 
 Galileo in particular drew upon this conception of the absolute 
 rationality of the world, that is, the view that everything that 
 happens can be explained. The assumption which he used was 
 that God works through natural forces, As an infinitely rational 
 being he must act uniformly in accordance with what Galileo 
 terms the"rational lawof nature"; and he must act in a most per- 
 fect fashion, that is in a mathematical fashion. God is conceived 
 of as the supreme mathematician. Objects have certain ways in 
 which they move in reference to one another. These must be 
 expressed and carried out in accordance with mathematical law. 
 If we find out what the important processes of nature are, we 
 also discover the laws which represent their various relations; 
 we find out the laws by means of which God works. For exam- 
 ple, one can look at a highly complicated machine without un- 
 derstanding it or knowing its purpose, and yet one can be con- 
 fident that everything in it was arranged by a mechanic in 
 accordance with natural law. Now God has a perfect mind; and 
 the most rational manner in which to exercise a mind, from the 
 point of view of the physicist of the Renaissance period, was to 
 make mathematical use of it. It was thought, then, that laws 
 could be found in the world which could never be broken, 
 that uniformities could be discovered which would be abso- 
 lute, because that must be the way in which a perfect mind 
 would work. 
 
 The attitude of Galileo and also of the early modern philos- 
 ophers was that God inevitably presented a world to man which 
 
 [5]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 was so devised that man could understand nature. This marks 
 the passage from what we might call the "theological dogma" 
 to the basic postulate of modern science. We state this postu- 
 late in terms of the uniformity of nature; we assume that 
 nature may be comprehensively arranged in uniform series. 
 We still have that confident faith. Our knowledge comes back 
 to nature. We assume that there is a world in which there 
 are the laws of nature, but we have no assurance of it. This 
 is one of the great contributions of the medieval period to 
 the modern world, and it is a contribution which has been of 
 increasing importance as science pushed its investigations fur- 
 ther and further into nature. 
 i/ The eighteenth century was the century of the triumph of 
 
 mathematical analysis. The Copernican theory had been ac- 
 cepted by the scientists, and thus mathematical analysis was 
 carrkd both to the heavens and to the earth. This analysis, 
 which Galileo really initiated, was carried further and fur- 
 ther and always with distinguishing success. Men had found a 
 ^, language in which they could read the world; it was a mathe- 
 matical language. The point I am emphasizing is that the plan 
 of things was devised by an infinitely intelligent being who did 
 everything in a most perfect fashion. Every detail would be 
 carried out in the manner of a perfect mechanic. If God were a 
 mechanic, he would construct a world perfectly worked out. 
 
 This medieval faith in the uniformity of nature became, as I 
 have said, the background of the thinking of the modern world. 
 It did not belong to the ancient world. From the point of view 
 of the former there is nothing in the world which is accidental. 
 Everything is taken care of by God, and everything he does 
 is done in an absolutely perfect fashion. His methods are those 
 which express themselves in mathematical form. It was to 
 that faith that the scientist of the Renaissance period turned to 
 unravel the facts of nature. We talk sometimes about the uni- 
 formity of nature being demonstrated by the law of probabih- 
 ties; and if we try to find what the line of the argument is, we 
 discover a number of uniformities. Together they represent the 
 
 [6]
 
 FROM RENAISSANCE TO REVOLUTION 
 
 uniformity of nature. If we ask why we find them, it is because 
 we have already assumed the uniformity; we have taken it as 
 our major premise that n ature is uniform. If nature is not uni- 
 form, of course our argument falls to the ground. But you can- 
 not prove the uniformity of nature by assuming it in advance. 
 It is a postulate; it has never been proved. If we look for the 
 origin of the concept, we find it not in Greek philosophy but in 
 Christian theology. At the present time science does not go 
 back to a theological doctrine; it accepts the postulate of uni- 
 formity on a pragmatic basis. We state natural laws; our mod- 
 ern science assumes the world is rational in the sense that we 
 can explain that which we find in terms of the uniformities of 
 the laws of nature. We go on with perfect confidence because 
 so far this view has always worked. It is a postulate which 
 cannot very well be overthrown. If the laws of nature break 
 down, we can assume that there is some other uniformity which 
 we have not found as yet. It is a postulate for us since we have 
 taken over the fundamental assumption of an infinite creator 
 who has fashioned the world in a perfect way with a purpose of 
 his own. That was definitely the attitude of Renaissance sci- 
 ence; and, if you want an interesting account of it, you will find 
 it in Mr. Whitehead's Science and the Modern World. In the 
 early part of the book you will find a very adequate and admi- 
 rable presentation. In this period the world had become more 
 and more definitive and scientific in its attitude. This is one of 
 the things that we do not think of; and consequently, because 
 we do not think of it, we do not realize that it is there. But it 
 has had a very profound effect. 
 
 When men in the Renaissance period turned to an intensive 
 study of nature, they found that their most efficient tool was 
 mathematics; it was that which enabled them to reach simple 
 elements and to discover what the uniformities were in the events 
 in which these simple elements appeared. Thus, if the world 
 was perfectly ordered, it was ordered by a perfect mathema- 
 tician. God was the great mechanic, not because his ethical or 
 his moral ends were at all of a mechanical character, but because 
 
 [7]
 
 ^ 
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 the means by which these were carried out were inevitably the 
 most perfect. If God created the world for the fall and the sal- 
 vation of man, as he did from the point of view of the Middle 
 Ages, he would create it in a mathematical fashion so that a 
 mathematical statement of it could be given, 
 v/ This rationalistic conception of a mathematically ordered 
 world was a postulate which was almost a dogma. Those of you 
 who have followed the development of the philosophy of 
 Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibnitz, know how they gave to 
 the mathematical interpretation of nature an almost religious 
 value. Descartes' conception was of a world in which reality 
 was that which was clearly and distinctly perceived; in which 
 truth was that of which the mind had immediate and clear 
 conception. Clearness and distinctness were his criteria for 
 truth. He pushed his analysis further than it had ever gone 
 before, carrying it over into analytical geometry. Here he used 
 the mathematical statement of the process of motion itself, di- 
 viding motion up into an infinite number of accelerations. Gali- 
 leo showed that bodies fall with a uniformly increasing velocity. 
 Descartes carried on this mathematical conception in order to 
 reach elements which could be arranged into uniform series. 
 Scientists were occupied with this analysis for a century and a 
 half. 
 
 This general attitude freed the scientist; it freed him from the 
 dogma of the church. He was studying the indefinite matter in 
 which the church was not interested. The church was interested 
 in man's soul and its salvation, and the material scene in 
 which the drama took place was of no value itself. 
 
 I want to call your attention at this point to the fact that in 
 the ancient world the atomic doctrine was fully presented but 
 was not made use of. Our science has gone ahead through the 
 use of this atomic conception of matter. Not only do we have 
 atoms, but we divide the atoms up into electrons and protons. 
 The avowed purpose of Epicurus in his presentation of this idea 
 was to free men's minds of superstitions. There was no reality 
 outside of weight, size, and shape. That was all there was. 
 
 [8]
 
 FROM RENAISSANCE TO REVOLUTION 
 
 Through this doctrine he hoped to free the minds of his disciples 
 from the fear of death. But the philosophers who undertook to 
 find values in the world were unwilling to adopt this theory. In 
 fact, no other school did adopt this Democritean doctrine. 
 
 Trees and houses, and other things, as our science conceives 
 of therti; are made up of electrons. But a tree is not simply a 
 dejfinLte number of ultimate physical particles. Something else 
 is responsible for the tree. There is, as Aristotle says, a certain 
 nature in the tr ee which brings about its development into a 
 tree . When various phenomena in the world are taking place 
 around us, we try to analyze them in order to understand 
 them. We are always seeking simplicity in our modern scien- 
 tific method. But what has been done with the unities in the 
 content of the world? There is something more than atoms. 
 What right have we to take the particles of the tree and say that 
 they constitute the tree itself? These particles are really con- 
 nected with the climate, the solar system, and other things. All 
 the particles have relationships with all the other particles in 
 the universe. A field of force surrounds every particle in the uni- 
 verse. There is no justification for our taking a particular group 
 of them and saying that these constitute a tree. To make this 
 clear we have to go back again to the medieval period, to the 
 time of Abelard. There is a certain nature of the tree which 
 develops in the tree itself, until it takes on the form of the fully 
 actualized tree. What Abelard substituted for this was the con- 
 cept which we have of the tree. The tree is the matter. You can 
 conceive of the tree as made up of just matter. But our concept 
 of the tree, or the value that it has for us, with its color, its 
 leaves and foliage, and its bark, is a concept which we form. 
 That concept we find in the tree in so far as it is in our mind to 
 begin with. Then there are certain likenesses which exist. The 
 philosophers of the Renaissance were more or less free to deal 
 with the physical world as made up of physical particles. 
 They could seek after this simplicity. If they were asked what 
 the other attributes of the so-called physical world were, they 
 would say that they were put into men's minds as impressions.
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 colors, sounds, tastes, and odors. The atoms and molecules had 
 no color in themselves. What you have there, what you con- 
 ceive of, are vibrations. When you strike the retina, you arouse 
 color; it comes from the mind itself. The secondary qualities 
 exist in the mind. Space, form, and motion — these alone were 
 supposed to belong with the objects themselves. The second- 
 ary qualities, those which come through the eye, the ear, and 
 the palate belong to the mind. We transfer these qualities 
 to things, and so more and more of the world is put into the 
 consciousness of individuals. This is particularly true of the 
 meanings of things, e.g., that which goes to make up a tree. The 
 characters which we state in terms of the concept of a tree exist 
 in the minds of men, and they had previously existed in the 
 mind of God. The determination of other characters, those 
 which Aristotle found in nature, could be put into the con- 
 sciousness of individuals. 
 
 One of the reasons why it was relatively easy to transfer these 
 attributes to the consciousness of the individual is another of 
 the gifts of Christianity. The whole universe is created simply 
 as a scene in which the drama of the soul, which is independent 
 of the setting, could be enacted. Would this human soul act 
 virtuously or viciously? Would it use the means of grace pro- 
 vided for it, or would it fall from grace? Everything bore upon 
 the fall and salvation of man. The human soul had an infinite 
 Hfe, a life of blessedness or a life of suffering. It was essential 
 even to the perfection of God. It was thus relatively easy to 
 carry over the important characters of the world into the con- 
 sciousness of man, and the work of the scientist was made easy. 
 First of all he comes to realize that God is a great mathemati- 
 cian. In the second place the indefinite world, the indefinite 
 matter, in themselves have no value except in so far as they ex- 
 press the laws of God. And in the third place the conscious- 
 ness of individuals is the very reason for the existence of the 
 world. The world is there only for the sake of the individual. 
 
 Going back to the point which I have already made: the 
 world was created for a specific purpose, and this purpose was to 
 
 f lol
 
 FROM RENAISSANCE TO REVOLUTION 
 
 be carried out by the agencies which God placed on the earth. 
 Those agencies were centered in the church. It was a living 
 source of inspiration. God spoke through this agency as he had 
 spoken through the Holy Writ. The church was inevitably the 
 source of authority. The period in which the medieval world 
 expressed itself most completely was during the twelfth and 
 thirteenth centuries. We have the picture of the world as the 
 theologian, the philosopher, the churchman, and the layman 
 conceived it. It was a world created for a certain definite pur- 
 pose. The salvation carried out by God and, after the sacrifice 
 of his son, by the institution of the church itself was passed on 
 to man through the church. This was an outside authority. It 
 was an authority which came from an infinite deity; it was an 
 authority which was not to be comprehended in its operation. 
 God did not explain what all his purposes were; he told only 
 enough to guide men in their conduct. Aside from that, his 
 purposes transcend men's conduct. The institutions of the 
 family and of the state themselves came from God. He estab- 
 lished them and all other institutions. The schools and the uni- 
 versities were the means by which man could comprehend the 
 will of God. This will is arbitrary. When you call in a physician, 
 his comprehension is presumably better than yours; otherwise 
 you would not call him in. He speaks with authority, but he 
 does not speak with an arbitrary authority. When you call upon 
 the engineer who builds a bridge or a skyscraper, you are not 
 making use of an arbitrary authority, because the ground of 
 the authority lies in the knowledge which you yourself can in 
 some sense grasp. But the authority of the church came from 
 an infinite deity, an infinite mind, whose knowledge you could 
 not comprehend. You had to accept it simply because God 
 spoke and gave his authority through the church. This author- 
 ity got its expression not simply in the church but in the 
 state. The sword was placed in the hands of the king by God 
 himself. All institutions were conceived of as established by 
 God. In so far as the institution reflected God's purpose, man 
 had to accept the institution; it spoke with the authority that 
 
 [II]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 came to it from the church itself. This embodied itself in the 
 so-called Holy Roman Empire. The Holy Roman Empire had 
 at its head the emperor, who was crowned by the pope. We 
 know that empire died out and went to pieces; it became, as it 
 were, neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire. But that con- 
 ception belonged to practically all men's minds during that 
 period. 
 
 The points which I have been bringing out are points which 
 we are apt to overlook in the background of the thought of the 
 later Renaissance period. It was a period of fundamental revo- 
 lution — a period of breaking away from the conceptions of the 
 authority of the church, an authority which was arbitrary. It is 
 this latter which makes revolutions almost necessary. The atti- 
 tude of revolution which marks the early modern period was 
 one against the arbitrary authority of the medieval institutions, 
 an authority which came to them as supposedly inspired by 
 God, given by God, and given with reference to ends and pur- 
 poses which lay beyond the purview of man so that he was un- 
 able to criticize those institutions or to reform them: he had 
 to receive them as they were. This was the fundamental con- 
 ception which belonged to the medieval period; its institutions, 
 were fundamentally church institutions. In the mind of the 
 medieval period the state derived its authority from the church 
 and from God through the church. The transcendent character 
 of the divine purpose also carried with it the necessarily arbi- 
 trary character of the institution as such. Men could not de- 
 termine what the authority of the institution should be from 
 its function in the community. One could not say that the ad- 
 ministration of the institution should have such and such au- 
 thority in order to bring about certain results which men pre- 
 sented as desirable. They had to look to the purposes of God in 
 the establishment of these institutions, and so the authority of 
 the institutions was necessarily arbitrary. The reaction against 
 this came on the basis of a description of human nature as hav- 
 ing in it a rational principle from which authority could proceed. 
 This rational principle was presented by Rousseau as the recog- 
 
 [12]
 
 FROM RENAISSANCE T0 REVOLUTION 
 
 nition of rights which were the end of the individual and which 
 could be made universal because in asserting his rights the indi- 
 vidual recognized them as belonging to others also. 
 
 The reaction against arbitrary authority is one which took 
 place, on the political side, in the French Revolution; and we 
 shall see that Rousseau expressed the gospel of this revolution 
 in his Contrat social. He undertook to find in man's own nature "if* 
 the basis for the institutions of society. He undertook to find in 
 man's rational nature the basis for the state as the sovereign 
 authority. It was not necessary to go outside of man's own 
 nature to get the basis for such an authority. On this ground, 
 in so far as a member of the community both enacts and obeys 
 the laws of the community, a rational state is possible. If 
 laws express the will of the whole community, the individual is 
 able both to enact them and to obey them as a member of the 
 community. And such laws could express the will of the whole 
 community in so far as they expressed the rights of the members 
 of that community, for rights exist only in so far as they are 
 acknowledged, and only to the extent that those who claim them 
 acknowledge them in the person of others. That is, no man can 
 claim a right which he does not recognize for others. No man 
 can claim a right who does not at the same time affirm his own 
 obligation to respect that right in all others. In so far, then, as 
 legislation can be an expression of the rights of individuals, that 
 legislation can flow from the whole community because it will 
 take on the form of that which is universal. If men are capable 
 of recognizing rights as well as of claiming them, then they are 
 capable of forming a community, of establishing institutions 
 whose authority will lie within the community itself. 
 
 The revolution gathered about the rights of man. That has 
 been perpetuated in the Declaration of Independence and the 
 statement that men are born free and equal. The great and out- 
 standing illustration of such rights is property. No one can 
 make a claim to property except as he admits it in others. 
 
 When men came to conceive the order of society as flowing 
 from the rational character of society itself; when they came to 
 
 [13]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 criticize institutions from the point of view of their immediate 
 function in preserving order, and criticized that order from the 
 point of view of its purpose and function; when they approached 
 the study of the state from the point of view of political science; 
 then, of course, they found themselves in opposition to the me- 
 dieval attitude which accepted its institutions as given by God 
 to the church. The medieval monarch ruled by divine right. In 
 England, where the Puritan government was to be a regime of 
 sense, it was still assumed that the form of the state was de- 
 termined from without. With the revolution this form was 
 brought within the rational power of man himself in society so 
 that institutions could be criticized and discussed to determine 
 what they were designed to accomplish, and to see how far they 
 did accompHsh what they set out to do. 
 
 This general attitude is rationalistic, and is expressed spe- 
 cifically in three accounts of government — those of Hobbes, 
 Locke, and Rousseau. These are roughly dated about as fol- 
 lows: Hobbes about the time of the Puritan Revolution; Locke 
 by that which passes in English history as the Revolution, that 
 is, the disturbance in which the Stuarts were sent across the 
 channel and Parliament brought over William and Mary as the 
 sovereigns of England; and Rousseau by the French Revolution. 
 
 The work of these three men undertakes to justify these 
 revolutions. In one sense, of course, the doctrine of Hobbes 
 is not a justification of revolution. On the contrary, it is a 
 criticism of it. But in criticizing it Hobbes attempted to go 
 back to a study of human nature and to discover from that 
 study what sort of a state ought to exist. He does not go out- 
 side of that which man's reason can compass in order to ac- 
 count for the institution. The result which he reached as a 
 consequence is much like that of the medieval community. 
 From Hobbes's point of view every human being is necessarily 
 selfish, seeking for what he wants; and this brings to the com- 
 munity an inevitable conflict between all the individuals who 
 are seeking what they want. When they seek the same thing, 
 they are at war. This picture is given by Hobbes in his Levia- 
 
 [14]
 
 FROM RENAISSANCE TO REVOLUTION 
 
 than. [The conception of the state arises out of the social con- 
 tract. The individual has natural rights, which spring from his 
 own impulses and desires. But if one gathered together a group 
 of such individuals and the desires of all were set into opera- 
 tion, one would find that the different people would often desire 
 the same thing and would come to blows. A community estab- 
 lished upon the basis of natural rights would lead to what 
 Hobbes called "a war of all against all." It was because of this 
 anticipated result that he advocated the absolute monarch. This 
 was the Leviathan; it was not the absolute monarch that be- 
 longed to the catholic tradition, the tradition of Christendom, 
 but one set up by individuals who were unable to agree with one 
 another. The individual was, from Hobbes's point of view, too 
 entirely individualistic for the success of any but an autocratic 
 state. Yet you find in him, in his reason, the principle of social 
 organization. 
 
 This seems actually to have been the result of the attempts 
 made in the revolution to establish a state on a rational basis. 
 Men fell out with one another; there was turmoil, internecine 
 warfare; and the final solution was found in the Leviathan, in the 
 form of Napoleon, who took all the power into his own hands. 
 And that seemed to be the only solution that could be presented 
 at the time.]^ 
 
 Going from Hobbes to Locke, we find that the latter had a 
 different view of human nature. He assumes that property, for 
 example, arises naturally from man's adding value to natural 
 objects by means of his own labor. If an individual has added 
 this value to the natural object, then it becomes his property. 
 And Locke assumed that men will recognize this as regards the 
 product not only of their own labor but also of the labor of 
 others. He assumes that man is naturally social, that he has an \/ 
 interest in the good of others since all are found in social rela- 
 tionships with each other — in their families and their neighbor- 
 hood. So from Locke's standpoint there is material for the build- 
 ing up of a society based upon human nature. What is needed 
 
 ' Taken from student notes of the Summer Quarter of 1928. 
 
 [15]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 primarily is some sort of an impartial authority, which all will 
 recognize, to overcome the disputes which will arise over prop- 
 erty, over the rights of individuals in their social relations. But 
 he assumes that, if these disputes are settled from a standpoint 
 which all recognize, this authority will also be recognized. It is 
 the court, then, that is really central in Locke's conception of 
 human society, a court which will settle disputes in accordance 
 with the accepted principles that are to be found in human 
 nature itself. 
 
 When we reach Rousseau, we have a somewhat different 
 approach to the problem. It is an approach which was de- 
 termined by the political situation in France. The authority 
 there lay entirely with the monarch. All powers came back to 
 him, and all the authority which the different administrators of 
 the state exercised came from the king. He was the monarch, 
 and everyone else was a subject of the monarch. Rousseau ap- 
 proached the problem from the current fiction of a social con- 
 tract in order to see how a community could be established in 
 which the authority could rest in the people themselves. The 
 king, as the monarch in France, was proving inadequate to the 
 task which belonged to him. For example, he maintained orders 
 which served no function in the community and which had all 
 the privileges of the old feudal caste. Among these privileges 
 was that of high taxation. The king was unable to rid the state 
 of this incubus. There were advances in the administration of 
 the community, but it was still unsatisfactorily administered 
 and was criticized by the active intellects of the time. This was 
 done indirectly, for example, by Montesquieu in his Esprit des 
 lois, a special study of the old Roman order and of the English 
 order which serves as a critique of the orders which existed in 
 France. 
 
 But could the authority be brought back to the people them- 
 selves? This idea presented the seeming paradox of people being 
 both sovereign and subject, and this Rousseau undertook to 
 solve. How can the people be both? The answer he presents to 
 this is that the people may be sovereign in so far as they exercise 
 
 I 16 I
 
 FROM RENAISSANCE TO REVOLUTION 
 
 a volonte generale. If they exercise this general will, each is a 
 sovereign. On the other hand, each is a subject in so far as he 
 obeys the laws which the general will enacts. He can be both 
 subject and sovereign if his will is the will of the community. 
 
 This assumption, as over against Hobbes's, is that there can 
 be such a general will, that a man as an individual in the com- 
 munity can act not simply as a representative of himself or for 
 himself but for the whole community if his will is identical with 
 the will of the other members of the community. This not only 
 presupposes common interests, which were emphasized by 
 Locke, but it presupposes that the very form of the will which 
 man exercises is universal, that is, a man wills something only in 
 so far as he puts himself in the place of everyone else in the com- 
 munity and in so far as he accepts the obhgations which that 
 act of will carries with it. A striking illustration of this is found 
 in property. If one wills to possess that which is his own so that 
 he has absolute control over it as property, he does so on the 
 assumption that everyone else will possess his own property 
 and exercise absolute control over it. That is, the individual 
 wills his control over his property only in so far as he wills the 
 same sort of control for everyone else over property. 
 
 That represents the difference between the attitude of a ra- 
 tional being in a society and that of the man whose strength or 
 cunning is able to hold on to something. When the latter wills 
 to hold on to something, he does it despite everyone else. It is 
 his by his strong arm. He does not will that others shall main- 
 tain possession of their property. On the contrary, he is ready 
 to take things away from everyone else. To will to hold on to 
 what he has on the basis that might is right is to will to deprive 
 everyone else of his property just in so far as he has the oppor- 
 tunity to get it. There is a fundamental difference between 
 these two acts of volition. To will on the basis of power threat- 
 ens everyone else in the community with the loss of that which 
 he has, because the power of one person is greater than that of 
 another. On the other hand, when a person comes forward 
 and says, "This property is mine, I propose to maintain it as 
 
 [17]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 property," he can do it only in so far as he can present evidence 
 that it is his property on bases which everyone else recog- 
 nizes; it is property only in so far as everyone's possessions are 
 property. In this sense property is something universal. The 
 type of possession guaranteed by might is quite particular. 
 
 There can be, then, a type of volition which is not, as Hobbes 
 conceived of it, individual in the sense of grasping for what one 
 wants. It can be a demand simply for that which belongs to the 
 individual in the same sense as the same sort of possession be- 
 longs to everyone else. What one wants is possession guaranteed 
 by the community itself. He wants property; he does not want 
 mere possession. Possession may be nine-tenths of the law, but 
 it does not become valuable unless it is the law. One cannot call 
 upon the community to support it, cannot depend upon the in- 
 stitutions of the community to back his claim, unless that pos- 
 session does constitute the law, unless that sort of possession on 
 the part of anyone else would give him property rights. A com- 
 munity in which the voHtions of the different members would be 
 of this universal character would, in the nature of the case, be 
 one made up of both sovereigns and subjects. The volition of 
 each would be the volition of all in so far as his acts were univer- 
 sal, not simply because they happen to agree, but because 
 what they set up is that which is guaranteed by all. What 
 makes property extremely valuable in the community is that it 
 does give to each man a right which everyone else recognizes, 
 which no one can take away. If the volitions of the members of 
 the community take on the form of rights which are acknowl- 
 edged and recognized by everyone, the community is made up 
 of individuals who are both sovereign and subject. 
 
 Of course, there are details in the doctrine of the Contr at social 
 which call for discussion. This conception of the universal will, 
 which could be the will of the individual and yet the will of all 
 the community, is of one which is universal not simply be- 
 cause of the number of people who get together and who 
 have the same ideas but because that which is willed is 
 willed by everyone in the community; it is because what is 
 
 [i8]
 
 FROM RENAISSANCE TO REVOLUTION 
 
 willed gets its value through its being the common will. In 
 other words, this is the nature of a right as such, and it does not 
 exist unless this is recognized. On the other hand, we see in the 
 case of property no such thing as a right which does not carry 
 with it necessarily certain obligations. One cannot assert his 
 right without at the same time asserting his obHgation to recog- 
 nize other people's property. One cannot assert his rights to 
 property without at the same time recognizing his duties toward 
 that property. Otherwise it will not be property but mere pos- 
 session; mere possession is not property. 
 
 Again, if one seeks for enhghtenment, he seeks that for which 
 he realizes all others must also seek. He is trying to find that 
 which has meaning for everyone, that which has value only in so 
 far as it is generally received, generally recognized. What are 
 the so-called laws of nature to a community which is ignorant of 
 them ? What is the value of a great work of art in a community 
 which is bHnd to it? What is the meaning of enlightenment in 
 general? If everyone is bound down by superstition, what is the 
 good of one's own private enlightenment if it exists for no one 
 else? Education, which, of course, is the source of enlighten- 
 ment, must be general if it is to have the value which ought to 
 belong to it. One may, of course, exist in a class by himself to 
 which other classes are subservient, not a part of his own com- 
 munity. But in so far as one has social relations with others, 
 one's own enlightenment has value for him only to the extent 
 that it is shared by others who have social relationships with 
 him. If you are in the midst of a stampede of cattle, it is of no 
 use for you to know the purpose of their stampede. They do not 
 know it themselves. An enlightenment has no value unless it 
 is universal. Of course, one may use the ignorance of others 
 for one's own advantage. But enlightenment as a social affair 
 must be universal to have any meaning. 
 
 The values which lie behind the organization of the institu- 
 tions of the community must be universal values; and in so 
 far as the will of individuals confirms these values and makes 
 them the basis of those institutions, it is what Rousseau called a 
 
 [19]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 volonte generale. This principle does not go back to a simple rule 
 of majorities. The rule of majorities may be the most satisfac- 
 tory means we have of expressing this general will, but it will be 
 a faulty one at best. If we seek for an expression of what we 
 mean by this, we find it in what is called "public opinion," that 
 is, that attitude which is itself a universal attitude, which goes to 
 make up the character of the individual. When there is an effec- 
 tive pubHc opinion, one that really expresses the attitude of 
 everyone in the community, one recognizes it as one that has 
 and will have authority. It may be that such a universal opinion 
 cannot be reached. Or it may be that enhghtened individuals 
 within the community can recognize what is the meaning of the 
 social situation, can bring it home to the consciousness of the 
 people in the community, enlighten them, and thus give leader- 
 ship. We may have to muddle along with a very inadequate ex- 
 pression of such a general will, but we assume that the authority 
 of our institutions lies in the rational nature of the individuals 
 which make up society. This point of view we have taken over 
 from the revolution. We do not assume that the institution de- 
 pends upon an outside authority. We do not assume that human 
 beings have been trained in certain habits, like trick animals in 
 a circus. We assume that there flow from man's own rational 
 nature judgments and volitions which are or can be universal 
 in character, and that it is this which makes human institu- 
 tions possible; that one wills for himself what he wills for every- 
 one; that one obeys the voHtions of others because he iden- 
 tifies them with his own volitions. That is what lies back of 
 what we call, in general, democratic institutions. The form of 
 democracy is not essential to the doctrine. What is essential is 
 the assumption that men are sufficiently enlightened to recog- 
 nize that their own volitions in great social matters will be iden- 
 tical with those of others who are so enhghtened that when one 
 wills such things as property, enlightenment, and security, these 
 things will be recognized as public ends which are also the ends 
 of the individual. As a result of this, the individual will will 
 for himself what is good for others. 
 
 [20l
 
 FROM RENAISSANCE TO REVOLUTION 
 
 Back of this point of view lay the doctrine of rights. In this 
 sense a man's own voHtions give laws for society, and only in so 
 far as the individual's volitions do give laws for society is a 
 society possible which does not depend upon some external 
 authority. Tjiis is a society in which the individual is the source 
 of the institutions. A society is possible in the sense of the old 
 empire, the ancient world, a society estabhshed by force. Such 
 a society is possible, but a society which springs from the citizen 
 . himself is possible only in so far as the citizen can give laws for 
 the community; and he can give laws only to the extent that his 
 volitions are an expression of the rights which he recognizes in 
 others, only in so far as he expresses the volition of others be- 
 cause they affirm rights which the others recognize in him to the 
 extent that he affirms them for himself. 
 
 The rights which Rousseau recognized are few in number. 
 They are those which gather about property, about the simplest 
 social institutions such as the family, the rights of education, 
 and the general right of liberty, that which is embodied in our 
 Declaration of Independence. 
 
 /-liberty became the slogan for the French Revolution. It; 
 was naturally the gathering ground in the fight against arbi- 
 trary authority. It carried with it the assumption that, if men 
 were free, their interests would be common interests. That, 
 you see, is what is implied in the conception of rights — that the 
 interests of men are, after all, common interests. Even such an 
 interest as that of possession becomes a common interest when 
 one recognizes it as property. If v/hat one wants is not simply 
 possession but property, then one wants something that is uni- 
 versal, because that which he wants involves his recognition of 
 the possession of property by others. That is, he wants that 
 which is recognized by everyone; and of course he can demand 
 that of others only in so far as he recognizes their property 
 rights. What is essential for a community is common interests. 
 This was represented in the slogans of the French Revolution, 
 not simply by liberty, but by the others — equality and frater- 
 nity. These all imply that the interests of men are common 
 
 [21]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 interests, that that which one person wants is something which 
 other persons want and which, at the same time, he wants them 
 to have. 
 
 Now that can be formulated, as John Stuart Mill later formu- 
 lated the idea of liberty, in the assumption that one wants free- 
 dom of action on his own part in so far as it will not interfere 
 with freedom of action on the part of other people. This is some- 
 what vague; it cannot be put into a clear-cut formula as is the 
 case with property, yet it lies behind most of our judgments in 
 our demand for freedom of action. A person is free to act pro- 
 viding he does not tread on someone else's toes. One wants free- 
 dom, but he should ask only for that which he is willing to grant 
 to others. If he asks for the opportunity to express himself, he 
 must at the same time recognize the rights of others to express 
 themselves, and his freedom must not encroach upon the free- 
 dom of others. 
 
 One can make a general statement out of this; but the diffi- 
 culty is to give it in clear-cut outlines, to make it clear just 
 what this sort of freedom is. We can discover it in certain cases, 
 as in the freedom of the ballot, of the vote; freedom of ex- 
 pression, of speech. In these cases you can make a definite 
 statement that that which you want you must recognize in the 
 rights of others. But if one attempts to make it the basis for the 
 order of society, one will find that it is negative, not positive. 
 Possession is positive. And if you ask that your possession 
 should be the sort which you recognize in everyone else, then 
 you can formulate it in the law of property, as it has been formu- 
 lated in all communities in one way or another, and, of course, 
 more exactly in the more highly civilized communities. But it is 
 very difficult to start off with a conception of freedom and make 
 it the basis for the organization of society, for the concept is in 
 itself negative, asking simply that the individual shall be free 
 from restraint. But you have to recognize that you cannot ask 
 for freedom if that freedom will put you in the position of 
 enslaving someone else, of encroaching upon his freedom of 
 action. 
 
 [22 1
 
 FROM RENAISSANCE TO REVOLUTION 
 
 Turning to the conception of equality, we have a still more 
 difficult doctrine, but it does, at least, have positive content. 
 Freedom taken by itself is negative. Equality is the doctrine 
 that each person shall have at least the same poHtical standing 
 as every other person. It may, of course, be carried over from 
 the political to the economic field, where we demand that every 
 person shall have the same property as another. It can even be 
 taken over into other fields, in which, however, it is more diffi- 
 cult to define. But in the field of politics one can define it in 
 terms of the right to vote and the counting of votes so that one 
 person shall count for one and only one. That is something that 
 can be stated in positive fashion, in terms of democracy. Democ- 
 racy is the rule of counted votes, and consequently the rule of 
 the majority. This is a simple conception and in it, in the appli- 
 cation of the revolutionary principles, we come back to a 
 quality of a political character — that in which each individual 
 counts for one and only one and which, in the exercise of the 
 vote, the counting of a ballot, leads to government by the ma- 
 jority. The question then remains, of course, as to whether this 
 conception, if it is so simple, can be made the basis for the 
 organization of the community. The rule of the majority which 
 this leads to is not necessarily the rule of the community. Fifty- 
 one per cent is a majority, but it does not necessarily express the 
 desires of the community as a whole. It is an external state- 
 ment. Yet it may be the best working method that we have for 
 getting at what does represent the will of the community. 
 
 The remaining idea, that of fraternity, is still more gene ral. 
 It comes back to the attitude of neighborliness, the identifica- 
 tion of ourselves with others, a common emotional interest in 
 others. This comes under the general term "sympathy." It is 
 very vague, and it is only under very exceptional conditions that 
 it becomes universal. These are just the conditions which a uni- 
 versal religion undertakes to establish. It can establish it only 
 in certain ways, in certain periods, under particular conditions; 
 but the conception is one to which all universal religions come 
 back. In so far as all are creatures of one creator, in so far as all 
 
 [23]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 are children of one father, belonging, therefore, to a single family, 
 we get this conception of fraternity. But we can see how varied 
 and elaborate are the conditions by which it is universalized. It 
 has been true in religion, as elsewhere, that people have to de- 
 pend upon their sense of hostility to other persons in order to 
 identify themselves with their own group. This idea has been 
 found to be much too vague to be made the basis for the organ- 
 ization of the state. 
 
 24
 
 CHAPTER II 
 
 KANT— THE PHILOSOPHER OF THE 
 REVOLUTION 
 
 ROUSSEAU'S conception, which I have stated in as brief 
 a fashion as possible, had a very great influence on 
 - Kant, in the development of his doctrine. As I have 
 indicated, Rousseau's Contrat social yj3.s really the gospel of the 
 French Revolution. It was good rhetoric and took hold on great 
 groups of people. It was simply stated, so that the ideas could 
 pass into untrained minds. His abstract idea that the rights 
 of all the individuals in the community were the basis of the 
 state, was put into common terms. If you can put the action of 
 the state in terms of the rights of individuals, you can make the 
 members of the state both subject and sovereign, and it is not 
 necessary to set up a monarch in whom all rights rest. Hobbes 
 talked about natural rights, but they were only the rights of 
 might. Such rights would all have to be handed over to a single 
 man if there was to be any order in the state. But rights which 
 are acknowledged and which have value only in so far as they 
 are acknowledged, rights which carry with them the condition 
 of obligations, can be enacted only in a democratic community. 
 If the people want property, then they want that which every- 
 one recognizes, which everyone in some sense possesses, which 
 everyone wishes to maintain. This conception, of course, can 
 be carried over from property to other institutions in the com- 
 munity. In that sense it can be made universal. This character 
 of the community is something which flows from the character 
 of human nature itself, from its rational character. Rousseau 
 said that rights, in this sense, are universal, that is, rational. 
 In so far as the voHtions of the community are in these terms, 
 they can be made the laws for all. 
 
 What Kant did was to go a step farther and say that all our 
 
 [25]
 
 vX 
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 volitions should be of this same universal character. He gen- 
 eralized the position of Rousseau; he made it the basis of his 
 moral philosophy. Rousseau indicated that the legislation of the 
 community should have the form of the expression of rights. 
 In so far as it did have that form, it made political structure 
 possible. Kant went on to say that every act which a rational 
 being carries out should take on this universal form. For him 
 morality, as such, consists in giving a universal character to 
 every act. In so far as an act does not have this character, it is 
 amoral. That is, if a man seeks for something which he does 
 not at the same time recognize as lying within the pursuit of 
 other persons, if he seeks something simply for himself, he is, to 
 that extent, selfish, immoral. Kant undertook to identify this 
 doctrine with the Golden Rule. His position was that man, in 
 his social nature, could give laws to society in so far as his 
 own end was a universal end. What this means has been illus- 
 trated through the concept of property as over against mere 
 possession. 
 
 Rousseau referred to those situations which gather about 
 property, which gather about the defense of the community 
 against the power that attacks it from the outside, about the 
 institution of the family, about the duties and rights of en- 
 lightened education. He selected those rights which everyone 
 recognized and insisted that in the community these ought to be 
 universal in character. They should be universal because it is 
 only in so far as they are universal that they have any value. 
 An enhghtenment that is confined to a single mind only, which 
 cannot be maintained over against another person on the basis 
 of a rationally accepted doctrine, is of no value, is not truth. 
 A thing is true if it is in such a form that you can convince 
 another rational person that it is true; otherwise it is not true. 
 A family would have no meaning unless the relations of the 
 father and mother and children were relations which were recog- 
 nized by the community itself as a means of ordering the inter- 
 relations of men and women and the care of children, and unless 
 they were the same for all members of the community. 
 
 [26]
 
 THE PHILOSOPHER OF THE REVOLUTION 
 
 ant went on to say that every act which is moral should 
 _ on this universal form. He put this in the form of a cate- 
 gorical imperative: So act that the maxim of your action can,,^^ 
 be made a universal law. That is, act in every case as you do 
 with reference to property. When you demand that you should 
 have possession of your own property, you are demanding that 
 everyone else should have possession of his own property. This 
 should be the basis of all conduct, and on this basis Kant 
 founded his moral theory. He undertook to show that the 
 human being could be a lawgiver because he is rational; could 
 be a sovereign because he is rational, because he can give 
 a universal character to his volitions. Everyone would then be 
 a lawgiver, but only in so far as he took account of the duties 
 arising out of his volitions so that he would also be subject to 
 the laws that he himself gave. Man's intellect, in proportion 
 as it is rational, is a lawgiving intellect. It can create society 
 by being universal in character. In this sense, because he gen- 
 eralized this principle of Rousseau's, Kant may be considered 
 the philosopher of the revolution. 
 
 We have seen how Rousseau's principle was generalized by 
 Kant into his categorical imperative, in the affirmation that the 
 individual should make a general principle out of the maxim 
 of his act, to use Kant's terminology. One should ask himself, 
 when he is on the point of willing anything, whether he can also 
 will that everyone else should will the same thing under the 
 same conditions. Then he would discover whether or not his 
 volition is universal. For example, if one wills to tell a lie, if 
 he asks himself if he would will that everyone under the same 
 conditions should tell a lie, he will see that this would lead to 
 evident contradiction, because, if everyone should lie under 
 those same conditions, then no one would believe anyone else 
 and there would thus be no purpose in the he. 
 
 What I have been trying to bring out is that the will of the 
 community must take on some such form as that expressed in 
 terms of property. It has to have an economic statement of 
 some such form as that. It is that which makes the will of the 
 
 [27]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 individual the will of all, the volonte generale. If you get that sort 
 of an expression, you have the basis for the organization of the 
 community. And Kant, as we have seen, tried to reach this 
 simply by making it the basis for a moral doctrine. That is, 
 Kant said, if you could make your act formally right, it 
 would also be right in content. And the illustration he gives 
 is his best illustration; it is that you cannot make a lie right 
 because you cannot make a lie universal; it contradicts itself. 
 You have that turned around the other way in the statement 
 of the Cretans. They had a bad reputation as to veracity in 
 the ancient world. It was said, "All Cretans are liars." But 
 suppose the statement that all Cretans are liars is made by a 
 Cretan. He belongs to the group that are liars. Therefore his 
 statement about the Cretans is a lie and the Cretans are not 
 all liars. That is, the proposition runs into a contradiction. 
 Kant conceived that you could use such a rule as that to deter- 
 mine all moral conduct. All you have to do is to try to make 
 the maxim of your act the truth for everyone under the same 
 conditions. The result seems to be that one should use this 
 universality of one's act as a test of its morality. This is Kant's 
 assumption, that if you would only make your act universal 
 you could test it. If it involves a contradiction, it is wrong. 
 
 Kant did not succeed in that. He did not succeed even with 
 reference to lying. There are many situations in which lying 
 is not immoral. Sometimes it is highly moral, as in the typical 
 case of the man who deceives an assassin trying to murder 
 someone. We talk about morality in warfare, and, of course, 
 warfare is a game in which you have to deceive your enemy. The 
 general, the military strategist, succeeds by deceiving his 
 enemy. And then we have the whole list of white lies that we 
 always tell — cases where we feel we are justified in deceiving a 
 person who insists on knowing something he has no right to 
 know, where we give a reason which is good but which is not 
 the real reason, in order to save somebody's feelings. There are 
 all grades between the whiteness of truth and the blackness of 
 lying. It is not possible to draw a hard and fast line between 
 
 [28 1
 
 THE PHILOSOPHER OF THE REVOLUTION 
 
 them. If everyone insisted on telling the truth all the time, 
 society itself would perhaps become impossible. When Kant 
 tried to work out other matters on the principle of the cate- 
 gorical imperative, such as the case of a man who wants to com- 
 mit suicide in order to relieve himself from suffering from a 
 disease and his friends from the care they will have to give him, 
 or the case of the man who is too lazy to work although he has 
 competence, I think the principle broke down pretty definitely. 
 
 What Kant was appealing to were values. He was not con- 
 sidering simply the universal form. He was considering also 
 what the values are that give significance to life. These were 
 what Kant really came back to. What the problem is, then, 
 to come back to my former position, is to give a universal 
 form to the interests of man in society. We can do that in the 
 very abstract case of property in such a form that that which 
 you possess is something which you want every other person to 
 possess. A familiar illustration of that is the desire to have 
 property itself widely distributed in the community. We say 
 the person has a stake in the community. He cannot want to 
 preserve that which he has without at the same time willing 
 that others should preserve what they have. So the conserva- 
 tive who wants to keep the present order is anxious for a rela- 
 tively wide distribution of property so that everyone, having 
 a definite stake in the preservation of that order, will also want 
 to preserve it. The interests of such a community must be uni- 
 versal in their character, which means that they shall be of 
 such a form that when a person wills something for himself he 
 is willing the same for others. 
 
 But, of course, the difficulty is in stating that specifically. 
 It can be stated, as we have seen, in relation to property and 
 also with reference to truth by the spreading of enlightenment. 
 Truth is valuable only in a community where it has universal 
 acceptance. If a thing is not recognized as true, then it does 
 not function as true in the community. People have to recog- 
 nize it if they are going to act on it. For example, we expect 
 a person to be familiar with the laws of the community — 
 
 [29]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 the essential, fundamental principles. People have to be fa- 
 mihar with these and recognize them as universal. We are 
 anxious to have universal education so that everyone may 
 recognize the operation of natural laws. We depend on other 
 persons knowing what we know. Otherwise knowledge has no 
 advantage. Of course, I can get special advantage by knowing 
 something in advance of someone else as regards the stock 
 market; but in order to get advantage from even that type of 
 information, it must become part of the knowledge of others as 
 well. If I shut away my knowledge, I might get a certain satis- 
 faction out of knowing something that would be of value if 
 others knew it; but to give it actual value it has to become a 
 part of the knowledge of all. There is a story of Frederick the 
 Great, who was much beset by people who wanted honors given 
 them. One man in particular, whom Frederick did not consider 
 worthy, requested a particularly desired post. Finally he was 
 told, "You can have this post on one condition." The man 
 said that he would take it under any condition, and the emperor 
 said, "I will grant you a privy counselorship, but under the con- 
 dition that you shall never tell anyone of it at any time." The 
 value of holding an office is in its recognition by other persons. 
 So the knowledge which you have is of value only in so far as 
 it is universal in character — only in so far as, being affirmed, 
 everyone will accept it. The perfect form of your knowledge is 
 that you can put it to proof; it is that which everyone every- 
 where must accept. That is the ideal, although it may never 
 be reached with reference to truth; but that is the goal toward 
 which knowledge proceeds. 
 
 What our different states undertake to do, so far as they are 
 democratic, is to give rights which shall be universal in their 
 character. Our laws try to state the rights and the privileges 
 of individuals in such a form that they are universal — not that 
 everyone now possesses them equally, but that everyone under 
 the same conditions would have the same rights. 
 
 But Kant took this position not only in regard to man's 
 will in society, that is, that man gives laws to society through 
 
 [30]
 
 THE PHILOSOPHER OF THE REVOLUTION 
 
 the extension of his will; he also affirmed that man gives laws 
 to nature. In his Critique of Pure Reason he approached this 
 principle from another angle and carried it much further. There 
 Kant undertook to show how it is possible for us to build what 
 he called "synthetic judgments a priori." The beginning of that 
 is that one should be able to state that a straight hne is the 
 shortest distance between two points. There you have a propo- 
 sition in which "straight line" is subject and "shortest distance 
 between two points" is predicate. You can analyze the idea of 
 "straight line," and you will not find in it that of the shortest 
 distance between two points; and you can analyze "the short- 
 est distance between two points," and this will not convey the 
 idea of "straight line." Yet, you make the judgment that a 
 straight line is the shortest distance between two points. This 
 is a synthetic judgment because it puts together ideas which are 
 not already contained in each other. When you say that man is 
 a rational animal, you have already defined man as rational, 
 and it is no great trick to ascribe the same predicate that you 
 already have in the subject. That is an analytic judgment. 
 But the synthetic goes further than the analytic. It takes two 
 ideas, neither of which is contained in the other, and affirms 
 that these ideas belong together. 
 
 But where do we get our intellectual authority for this as- 
 sertion? How are synthetic judgments a priori possible? In the 
 Critique of Pure Reason Kant contends that they are a priori 
 because in this connection, as in the categorical imperative, he 
 came back to a type of experience which determined in advance 
 what the forms of things should be. This lies both in the forms 
 of space and time and in those of the understanding, that is, the 
 logical forms. Those which belong to the sensations he called 
 the "aesthetic," and those which belonged to the understanding 
 he termed the "judgment." In this division, and in the argument 
 that flows from it, Kant was trying to meet the skepticism of 
 Hume. He said that Hume had wakened him from his dog- 
 matic slumber. 
 
 Hume's skepticism said that all our knowledge seems to be 
 
 [31]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 simply an organization of our impressions and ideas — impres- 
 sions meaning sensations, and ideas mainly images. Sensations, 
 as such, are simply the states of our own consciousness. Locke 
 had recognized this in regard to secondary qualities — color, 
 sound, taste, and odor. These do not belong to the object 
 outside; and if they convey those characters to the object, we 
 ought to recognize that they come from us. Berkeley went a 
 step farther and said this relation was true not only of second- 
 ary qualities but also of primary qualities — of extension, of mo- 
 tion, and of solidity — that is, of those qualities pertaining to the 
 occupancy of space. When one feels of a desk, one gets a sense 
 of its solidity, its extension, and its mobility. But this is just 
 a feeling of the individual. It is impossible to distinguish be- 
 tween this sensation and that of the color of the desk, as sensa- 
 tions. Locke admitted that the color did not belong to the desk 
 but was simply an impression made upon us through light that 
 reaches us from the desk. Berkeley says its extension is just 
 another impression of the same kind. 
 
 In other words, Berkeley, who is called a subjective idealist, 
 went a step farther than Locke and said that the world of ex- 
 tension is nothing but a world of our impressions. He asked 
 why we should assume that this spatial order, which comes to 
 us both through vision and the sense of touch, should not be re- 
 garded as relative to our sensitivities as well. What is the space 
 about us but the impressions made upon us of things that we 
 will say are ordered in a certain fashion? What evidence have 
 we that that which causes these impressions has any other char- 
 acter than that given in our experience? We say that a vibra- 
 tion of a certain amplitude is responsible for the color red. That 
 is, red is the feeling or the experience which we have when the 
 retina is hit by those particular vibrations. With another vibra- 
 tion you have the impression of violet. Well, Berkeley asked, 
 why should we assume that that which causes in us the sensation 
 of extension is extended, if that which causes in us a sensation 
 of red is not itself red? If this latter is not the case, why should 
 that which causes in us impressions of extension in three dimen- 
 
 [32]
 
 THE PHILOSOPHER OF THE REVOLUTION 
 
 sions itself be extended in three dimensions? Is there any reason 
 for giving any particular authority to the primary qualities 
 which we deny to the secondary qualities? And being sure that 
 the answer to that question was in the negative, he went on to 
 seek what the cause of our impression could be and, being a 
 bishop, found it is the Deity who produces in us sensations of 
 extension though he himself is not extended. Berkeley was very 
 sure that there must be such a power, for he said that there 
 could be no effect without a cause and that our attitude toward 
 these impressions, whether primary or secondary, is a passive 
 attitude. Therefore, it could not be a cause. No man can create 
 a sunset. The sunset is there. One can recall sunsets he has 
 seen, a number of them, and picture in his imagination some- 
 thing that he has never seen on land or sea; but the pigments 
 he uses are those which he has taken from past experience. 
 Man is passive with regard to these sensuous experiences; there- 
 fore the cause of them must lie outside of him, in God, said 
 Berkeley. 
 
 Hume pushes on and asks where Berkeley gets his evidence 
 for causation. His only answer is that we have been in the habit 
 of expecting things to happen in the future in the same order as 
 they have happened in the past. The sun has risen regularly 
 in the past, and we expect it to continue to do so. But the only 
 result we can reach from analysis is the juxtaposition of two 
 events, sunrise and sunset, so that if one has uniformly suc- 
 ceeded the other we expect this succession to continue in the 
 future. In other words, Hume, in his turn, went one step farther 
 than Berkeley, and asked him what evidence he had that there 
 must be a cause. Why could not these things just happen? He 
 analyzed the concept of causation, and what he found was that 
 we expect those things to succeed each other which have suc- 
 ceeded each other in the past. That was all Hume could find 
 in the so-called "law of causation." If things have succeeded 
 each other in the past in a certain uniform way, then we expect 
 this relation to continue in the future. If that is all that can 
 be found out about the law of causation, it does not take us 
 
 [33]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 outside of our experience at all. Locke assumed that we could 
 go outside of our experience of color and sound into a world of 
 moving physical particles which cause such impressions as those 
 of color and sound. Berkeley assumed that we could get outside 
 of our experience of an extended matter to a God which caused 
 in us the experience that we called an experience of extended 
 matter. Hume showed that the law of causation, which led 
 Locke to say that vibrations from outside produced in us a cer- 
 tain succession of color or sound, and that led Berkeley to as- 
 sume that the sensation of extension must be produced by God, 
 lies inside of experience and that there is no way of getting out- 
 side of that experience. 
 
 Hume also undertook to show that the so-called "self" is noth- 
 ing but an association of certain groups of our impressions, our 
 states of consciousness; that especially those which come to us 
 from our own body, and those which are associated with certain 
 other impressions, such as our own name, get firmly linked 
 together. But that is nothing but another object, another thing. 
 It is the most important thing in our experience, but it arises 
 as any other object arises. From the standpoint of empirical 
 philosophy this task involved nothing but the organization of a 
 certain succession of color, of form, of feel, so organized together 
 that when you see a color you naturally think of a certain feel. 
 We see these in different situations, when they impress us some- 
 what differently, and we recall experiences that were true in 
 the past. Our organization of these qualities is in such a per- 
 manent fashion that they become, for us, a fixed object. Hume 
 assumed that the self arose also in this fashion. The baby has 
 sensations — pleasure and pain, warmth. The sensations from 
 his own body get associated together. If he moves his arms, he 
 gets certain sensations; if he moves his arms again, he gets the 
 same sensations. These get permanently organized together, 
 particularly about the sensations which are pleasurable and 
 painful. The infant finds itself addressed by certain words, cer- 
 tain names. Certain experiences come when it responds in a cer- 
 tain fashion. Out of this arises the association of a set of ex- 
 
 [34]
 
 THE PHILOSOPHER OF THE REVOLUTION 
 
 periences which make another object, an object which the in- 
 fant comes to call the self. He identifies it with the "I," the 
 "me." From that standpoint there is no functional relationship 
 between the subject and the object. The subject is simply an- 
 other object. It is a central object about which the experiences 
 of the individual develop. But there are other objects which 
 also become central under other conditions. Over against this 
 empirical conception Kant brought in the idea of a transcenden- 
 tal self which was a sort of functional unity. But the empiricist 
 comes back to the experience of a self. And the empiricist as- 
 sumes that in order that there may be an object, there must be a 
 subject. The two involve each other. For Kant this subject-ob- 
 ject relationship, however, is not static; it is not such a relation- 
 ship as that spoken of in which certain impressions are made on 
 the mind, in which physical things in some fashion impress a 
 consciousness which lies inside the mind. It is not that sort of a 
 relationship, but one in which we have one phase of a process 
 necessarily leading to another phase, and that phase leading 
 back to the first. This is the typical situation in a subject- 
 object relationship. 
 
 The position which Kant took was a more or less natural 
 development of the position reached by the English empiricists. 
 Their result was skeptical, at least it was in Hume's state- 
 ment. He undertook to show that there could be no knowledge 
 of an object. Objects as such were broken up into sensations 
 and images, or impressions and ideas, to use his words. He 
 analyzed objects simply into a set of these impressions and 
 ideas, and the connections between them were those of associa- 
 tion. The connectivity then also belonged to experience, and, 
 for Hume, was psychological in character. That is, there is no . 
 way of getting from these impressions and ideas over to an ob- 
 ject which lies outside of them and is supposed to be the cause 
 of them. He analyzed the idea of causation and carried it back 
 to the simple expectancy that the succession of impressions and 
 ideas that has taken place in the past shall continue in the 
 future. He could find no ground for this except in a habit, a 
 
 [35]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 habit which he recognized as being so strong that we could not 
 avoid acting upon it. But in no way could we get outside of 
 impressions and ideas. 
 
 Kant's reaction against skepticism was against the skepticism 
 of Hume. What Hume had pointed out was that the world 
 which arises in experience is relative to the sensitivity of the 
 individual. We live in a world of color, sound, taste, and odor. 
 But the world has color and sound only if the individual has 
 normal vision and hearing. If we had other organs of taste 
 and smell, the world would have other tastes and odors. We 
 can readily conceive that if the structure of the retina were 
 different the world would have an entirely different set of colors. 
 We can live with a person who is color-blind without discovering 
 that fact. He refers to certain colors, which exist for us as 
 yellows, as reds. And there is no way of detecting this except by 
 a set of colored yarns in the psychological laboratory by which 
 you can find out that a certain color is different for him. Our 
 world is relative to our own sensitivities. We can go back of 
 those particular sensitivities to what we call the physical causes 
 of those sensations, and we can, for example, identify different 
 colors with certain rates of vibration which are not dependent 
 upon our sensitivity. So we can go back to something which we 
 assume to be there in independence of this relation to our eyes 
 and ears. We feel hot and cold, and our theory is that there is 
 simply a movement of molecules which are imperceptible to 
 vision or feeling except in the sense of temperature. But motion 
 is not the warmth that we feel, and the lack of motion is not 
 the cold that we feel. We assume, also, that there is a world of 
 physical things that have mass, that move, that have a certain 
 shape and form — characteristics which Locke called the "pri- 
 mary qualities," while the secondary qualities admittedly 
 belong only within our experience. But the former, too, 
 can be stated in terms of our consciousness, as sensations, 
 and as the images of those impressions which Locke called 
 "ideas." .^ 
 
 The result of the Humean skepticism, which was the natural 
 
 [36I
 
 THE PHILOSOPHER OF THE REVOLUTION 
 
 product of this view, was to destroy the passage from a subjec- 
 tive world over to something outside. With this went all neces- 
 sary science. Our concepts of the laws of causation, of sub- 
 stance and attribute, to mention only two, are found to be 
 nothing but associations of ideas, in the Humean sense of that 
 term. But science seems to dispute this, and Kant undertook to 
 justify the approach of science. He insists that there is such a 
 thing as science and such a thing as necessity. And he tries to 
 find out how these are possible. We have, we will say, the state- 
 ment of a straight line being the shortest distance between two 
 points. Accept Euclid, and you have propositions starting off 
 with certain axioms and reaching certain results. We accept 
 these as necessarily true. Kant asks. How is this possible? He 
 insists that we do accept them and that out of such propositions 
 all our necessary sciences arise. His answer is that there are 
 certain forms of the mind itself — for example, space with its 
 structure, and time with its structure — so that that which takes 
 place must occur according to the forms of that mind in which 
 they appear. Mind, then, gives these forms and, to that extent, 
 gives laws to nature. In this way Kant reached the same posi- 
 tion in regard to nature at large that he reached in regard to 
 human society, namely, that it is the mind that gives laws to 
 nature. So we see again that he was the philosopher of revo- 
 lution all the way around. 
 
 In the end the problem boils down to this: Is necessity 
 possible within the world of experience? Hume says that causa- 
 tion, the supposed instance par excellence of necessity, must be 
 considered as simply a set of relations between different experi- 
 ences. Kant agrees that our world is made up of such experi- 
 ences. But, from the fact that we do live in a world of ex- 
 periences, Hume drew the conclusion that there could be no 
 such things as laws of nature because the most famous of them ' 
 all, that of causation, is nothing but a set of happenings, con- 
 nections in our experience, in which one impression succeeds 
 another according to our habit of expectation. That is, we say 
 that we have always found that swans are white, and wherever 
 
 [37] 

 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 we find the form of a swan we find the white color; so we lay 
 down a law of nature that swans must be white. And then some- 
 one goes to Australia and finds black swans. All our laws of 
 nature are nothing but certain uniform associations, certain 
 experiences which are invariably connected with each other. 
 There may be a succession which is contrary to that. This is 
 what was found in a somewhat intricate sort of fashion in the 
 case of observations recently made in regard to the position of 
 stars during an eclipse. Light is susceptible to changes in direc- 
 tion. In so far as light offers such response to a change in di- 
 rection, it has what the physicists call "mass." Now, mass can 
 be measured in accordance with Newton's laws. The path of the 
 light of a star passing the edge of the sun ought to be shifted 
 a certain amount, depending upon the mass of the sun and the 
 mass of the ray of light, and so forth. On the Newtonian basis, 
 you can figure out how much it ought to be shifted. Einstein 
 has another theory of gravitation. He says that the amount of 
 the shift ought to be twice that predicted on the Newtonian 
 theory. On observation, it was found that Einstein was right. 
 The only facts that you have in this case are the position of the 
 light of the star in its relation to the rim of the sun. By means 
 of photography this can be measured. All facts, the so-called 
 "data" of any subject, are nothing but certain experiences 
 that the observer has in their relation to each other. The 
 relation which is found at any given time on the basis of such 
 investigations may be found to be all wrong a few generations 
 later. In fact, we can be pretty sure this will happen. More 
 recent theories of scientists have replaced older theories. Cer- 
 tain facts remain the same, but the theories have been replaced. 
 Can there be any such thing as universahty and necessity 
 which belong to the laws of nature in a world which is a world 
 of experience, a world of certain uniformities.'' You ask a sci- 
 entist what a law of nature is, and he says it is nothing but 
 a uniformity. But when you ask just where that uniformity 
 is found, the answer is that it is found in the experience of 
 men who observe. They have certain impressions, and they find 
 
 [3^
 
 THE PHILOSOPHER OF THE REVOLUTION 
 
 that these are uniform. Can you have such a thing as universal- 
 ity and necessity under such a condition? 
 
 Hume says it is evident you cannot; your statement boils 
 down to the fact that certain things happen and you cannot tell 
 that others will not happen. But the fact that things have hap- 
 pened in a certain order forms in you and me the habit of ex- 
 pecting them to happen in that order. That is what the laws of 
 nature — causation, for example — are. Now Hume described the 
 world as a world of experience in which the so-called laws of. 
 njituXQ^SlQ nothing but our habits of expecting things to happen 
 in the future as they happened in the past. Berkeley accepted 
 Locke and went him one better; Hume accepted Berkeley and 
 went him one better; and Kant accepted Hume and went him 
 one better, but along a little different line. 
 
 What Kant pointed out was that we have in the mathematical 
 sciences results that are necessary and universal. Yet they be- 
 long to a world of experiences. We believe that the angles of a 
 triangle are equal to two right angles, that a straight line is the 
 shortest distance between two points, that seven and five make 
 twelve. We believe these things, and, if other people did not, 
 we should still continue to believe them; we should call .the 
 others irrational. Kant took the position that these things are 
 necessarily true. But how can they be necessarily true? Kant's 
 answer is that our minds give laws to nature. If there is only 
 brie mold in the pantry and you know that there will be pudding 
 for supper, you know, a priori, that it will have a certain form. 
 That is what Kant would call a piece of "transcendental logic." 
 You know in advance what form the pudding must take because 
 there is only one form available. You can give a law which will 
 include all puddings that are to be as long as you can control 
 the number of molds there are in the kitchen. Well, similarly, 
 Kant said that what we call space and time are nothing but 
 forms of our sensibilities. The experiences that we have, then, 
 will take on the forms of space and time, and we can argue that 
 all the experiences we can possibly have must take on those 
 forms because they are the forms of the mind. And he also as- 
 
 [39]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 serted that the mind — "judgment," as he called it — has certain 
 other forms, which he called the "categories." The two most 
 important — there were twelve altogether — are those of sub- 
 stance and causality. Anything that we sense in terms of space 
 and time, because these are the forms of our sensibilities, we 
 have to think of in terms of substance and attribute, and cause 
 and effect. We think of them in terms of substance and causal- 
 ity as well as in terms of space and time because we cannot help 
 it. The former are forms of the judgment; the latter are forms 
 of the sensibilities. 
 
 Kant had another faculty, that of "reason," whose function 
 was higher than either of the two mentioned. But all I am 
 trying to do here is to point out the sense in which Kant could 
 refer to the human mind as giving laws to nature. Just as con- 
 trol over the molds can give laws of the form of puddings, so the 
 forms of the mind can give laws to any experience which man 
 may have. These laws are necessary and universal for all pos- 
 sible experiences. They do not go beyond experience, but they 
 can give laws for all possible experiences. Thus Kant finds 
 necessity and universality within the limits of a world of ex- 
 perience such as Hume had set up. 
 
 Kant's affirmations in regard to these forms of space and 
 time have been somewhat shattered by the non-Euclidean 
 geometries. He assumed that the sum of the angles of a triangle 
 is equal to two right angles and could not be otherwise. We 
 know, of course, that a spherical triangle does not conform to 
 this law. But we can say that he was not talking about a curved 
 line triangle but of one composed of straight lines. But if the 
 space on the surface of a sphere can be curved, why cannot all 
 space be curved? In fact, we are living on the surface of a 
 sphere. Our ancestors had to find out that we were not living 
 on a plane. If a man at that time had followed the line of vision 
 and kept on going until he came back to the point where he 
 started, he would have been put up against it to explain it. Is 
 there any reason why the space which is curved on the surface 
 of the earth should not be curved throughout? One of the con- 
 
 [40]
 
 THE PHILOSOPHER OF THE REVOLUTION 
 
 ceptions given by mathematicians is that of a moving collection 
 of planes, stacked up one on top of another. Suppose all those 
 planes were curved ones, because we know certain geometries 
 work out this way, then the axiom that parallel lines will not 
 meet except at infinity has to be abandoned and we have dif- 
 ferent geometries based upon the theory that you can draw 
 more than one line parallel to another. 
 
 Kant's supposition was that he could get hold of the forms of 
 the mind in terms of which experience must be presented, and 
 that, if he could, then he could give universal and necessary 
 laws to nature. So, he conceived of man's mind as giving laws 
 to nature itself. The starting-point was that man's nature is 
 rational; therefore it can give laws to society, provided those 
 laws expressed man's rights. He generalized this position and 
 conceived of man as giving laws to nature as well as to society. 
 He accepted Hume's statement that knowledge must lie within 
 experience. But what he insisted upon was that there are nec- 
 essary objects in experience, that there is universality in it. 
 And he undertook to show, by a transcendental solution, how 
 these things were possible. By "transcendental" Kant meant 
 that he could form, in advance of an experience, a judgment as 
 to what that experience could be. It was transcendent in the 
 sense that it transcended the experience itself. His explanation 
 of this was, as we have seen, that the mind had certain forms 
 into which this experience must fall, so that one could be sure 
 in advance that our experience would be subject to the struc- 
 ture and laws of space and time, because these were forms of 
 our sensibility, and subject also to the categories of substance 
 and attribute, of cause and effect, because these are forms of 
 the judgment. We cannot think in other terms than these. 
 Therefore, these forms are given in advance of experience, and 
 they are necessarily given because everything that occurs in 
 experience must take on these forms. The result of this process 
 is what Kant would call an "object." 
 
 In this way Kant assumed that he had rescued science as a 
 source of universal and necessary knowledge. We have geome- 
 
 [41]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 try because the form of space is a form of the sensibility. We 
 have laws of arithmetic because these are involved in the very 
 order of succession as given in time. We have the laws of the 
 understanding, those which give us substance and attribute, 
 cause and effect, those which give us necessity and probability. 
 These are what give us the universal and the particular. They 
 are all forms of the understanding, and any experience which 
 we have must take these forms. Of course, there is a large part 
 of our experience which is contingent for us. That is we cannot 
 tell, in advance, what colors, sounds, tastes, and odors we will 
 have; but we do know in advance that, whatever particular 
 ones they are, they must occur in a world of space and time, 
 for nothing can appear outside these forms of the sensibihty. 
 We do not know, in advance, what the substantial character of 
 an object will be; but we know that we cannot think except 
 in terms of substance and attribute. We have to think of a thing 
 as having substance; and its qualities, its characters, are at- 
 tributes which inhere in that substance. We cannot tell in ad- 
 vance what the cause of an event will be, but we know in ad- 
 vance that every event must have some cause. So there is 
 given to us in the very forms of the mind the necessity and uni- 
 versality of laws, particularly those of mathematics and of 
 mathematical physics. And our empirical experience, the content 
 of our sensuous experience, will all fall into these forms. But 
 forms do not determine what the content will be. They determine 
 how we shall experience that content when we do experience 
 objects, but we cannot tell in advance what particular experi- 
 ence we shall have. We do know in advance what form it must 
 take, because the forms of experience are given to the world by 
 the mind itself. In that sense Kant could legitimately speak of 
 the mind giving laws to nature as well as to society. We have 
 already indicated how this later is accomplished through his 
 carrying-out of the doctrine of Rousseau. 
 
 This notion of Kant's came back to a very subtle and 
 somewhat obscure analysis of judgment. Kant asked why ob- 
 jects are units, and where that unity comes from. He ac- 
 
 [42]
 
 THE PHILOSOPHER OF THE REVOLUTION 
 
 cepted the Humean analysis of the object into its various ele- 
 ments. Take such an object as a tree or a house. You can 
 analyze it into the different experiences you have. Color, feel, 
 extension, all the different sensations are associated with each 
 other; but the house or tree or animal is something more than a 
 compiling of such impressions and images. It is a unit; it has a 
 certain unity. A heap of sand has very little, if any, unity. Of 
 course, you can regard it as a single thing, but you are more 
 apt to consider it as a conglomeration of separate grains of sand. 
 A house, however, has a perfectly definite unity. All the differ- 
 ent parts belong together; they have a definite relationship to 
 one another, a relationship which arises from the uses to which 
 the house is put. An animal has a definite unity. It has varied 
 organs, but all these are organized in the unity of its life- 
 processes. It is a living thing in which all the parts have cer- 
 tain functions. Any object that is a thing has a certain unity, 
 and Kant's problem is to discover where that unity comes from. 
 It is not a mere sticking-together of difl^erent pieces. If you 
 break an object up into sensations and ideas and then stick 
 them together by the law of association, you still do not get the 
 unity of the object. 
 
 Now Kant could find only one source of unity in experience. 
 He found this in the judgment, in the statement, "I judge that 
 this is such and such a thing; this is a house." That is, one 
 judges the house from the point of view of its uses. There are 
 the dining-room, the kitchen, the bedrooms, the drawing-room, 
 all looked at from the point of view of the processes of living. 
 One sees house, thinks house, perceives house, in terms of the 
 life that goes on in relation to it, just as one sees, perceives, and 
 thinks an animal in terms of the hfe-processes that take place 
 through all its organs. This unity is, as Kant insisted, some- 
 thing more than a mere association together of one experience 
 after another. It is an organization, a holding-together of experi- 
 ences within an experience of a certain form. We see that when 
 we are confused by some object, when we cannot grasp what it 
 is, cannot make any unity out of it, it is only a set of different 
 
 [43]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 sensations. Then suddenly we grasp its meaning and everything 
 takes its place with reference to everything else. You can see 
 what the organization is, what the purpose of it is, what the 
 structure of it is. Well now, that grasping of these different ele- 
 ments, these different parts into a whole, as Kant conceived it, 
 is an act of judgment. I judge this to be a table. I judge the 
 object which I see outside the window to be a tree. I relate all 
 the different parts of the object to each other, relate them in 
 certain definite ways, spatially, temporally, in terms of sub- 
 stance and attribute, cause and effect. I organize these wholes 
 in the process of my perceiving them. One of the experiments 
 of the psychological laboratory is that of a dark box in which a 
 spark is introduced so that suddenly when the spark is there you 
 get a confused picture of something on the side of the box. Then 
 the electric contact is made again and there is another spark, 
 and you get a sense of structure. After a number of repetitions 
 you see a perfectly distinct picture. You have organized what 
 you see into the relations of a landscape, of a cathedral, or 
 of a castle. You see it as a whole; you put it together. Our per- 
 ception is just such a process as that. It is an organizing of the 
 different elements of experience together. We get a clue to a 
 thing; and then, as soon as we get that clue, things fall into their 
 different relationships to each other. 
 
 Unity such as this, Kant said, is essentially that of judgment. 
 It is found even in perception. We look at an object in the dis- 
 tance which is somewhat confused through the misty air, and, 
 by putting our attention to it, we finally get an outline, such as 
 a house; and then we can see it more clearly, grasp it for certain 
 as a house. We are looking for the face of an acquaintance in a 
 crowd, and we can finally identify it. There is the image which 
 we have of that particular face. Our perception is a process of 
 organizing different elements into a whole. It always has a cer- 
 tain sort of unity. And this is more than the mere sum of the 
 parts. If you break up your perception into different elements 
 Hke parts of a jig-saw puzzle and simply match them up to- 
 gether, you do not get a picture. You must get them organized 
 
 [44]
 
 THE PHILOSOPHER OF THE REVOLUTION 
 
 in a certain way. Someone organizes the different notes in a 
 melody, and we get the whole of the melody. One organizes the 
 ideas which come, we will say, in an address which one is hear- 
 ing; and they begin to take shape, they begin to have relation- 
 ships to each other, and one gets the line of the argument. So, 
 also, one gradually grasps the plot of a play he is seeing. Our 
 knowledge is a process of relating different elements together 
 and giving unity to them. That unity, in Kant's conception, 
 comes back to the judgment as such. 
 
 ^ack of all perception, of all thought, of all conception, lies 
 this high judge. As he did to most of his ideas, Kant gave a 
 ponderous construction to this, calling it the "transcendental 
 a priori unity of apperception." It is a priori because it is 
 something which is given in advance of experience; it is trans- 
 cendental because it is imposed on, and not derived from, ex- 
 perience — it is necessary. That is, our experience consists in 
 judging. So far as it is an experience, it is an experience of 
 things having a unity which does not come from the content 
 but from the process of experiencing, as in perception and 
 thought. It is something that is given in advance of the actual 
 experience. We do not know what things we are going to see; 
 but, if they are intelligible experiences, everything will have a 
 certain unity which comes from our experiencing it. So, the 
 transcendental unity of apperception, as Kant conceives it, is 
 not simply the association of one sensation or image with an- 
 other but the organization of them — of the appearance of a 
 face into that of an acquaintance, of the dim outHnes of an ob- 
 ject into a house. It is more than perception, in the sense of 
 having sensations. Our perception is a structure, and Kant 
 called it "apperception." 
 
 Now this transcendental unity of apperception, Kant said, 
 comes back to the fact of judgment, to an "I judge." Such an 
 I or "ego" that judges is, as we have seen, transcendental, that 
 is, something given in advance of perception. In Kant's earlier 
 speculation he spoke of a transcendental self that he conceived 
 of as being given in experience. But he was committed to find- 
 
 [45]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 ing objects only in experience. Forms of experience could be 
 given in advance, but they do not become an object until the 
 latter actually appears in experience. Thus, this transcendental 
 self was for Kant just a function of experience, not something 
 actually given. The transcendental self was not a thing. The 
 selves of our experience are empirical. We have certain feelings. 
 We have certain memories. We have feelings of our bodies, the 
 images we see of ourselves in the looking-glass. We have the 
 experience of our relationships to others, family relationships, 
 friendships, national relationships. All these just happen to us. 
 They are empirical. They lie within experience. These selves 
 are like other objects that appear in experience, tables, chairs, 
 trees, and houses. They are empirical in character. 
 
 These empirical objects are there in experience, but they have 
 reference to something beyond themselves. Such a thing as this 
 table before me, Kant would say, just as it is, is made up out 
 of our sensations and our memories of experiences we have had 
 in the past of similar wooden surfaces. It is all organized to- 
 gether in the forms of space and time, that is, in the forms of our 
 sensibilities; it is organized as substance. We will say that the 
 wood is a substance and that it has certain qualities. One type 
 of wood has one quality, and another type of wood has another 
 quality. The wood has certain relations, and these we organize 
 into a table. But we always imply that there is something which 
 lies behind this actual experience which we have of the table. We 
 have the actual experience of a table whenever we come into 
 the room, and it ceases when we leave the room. We remember 
 it and expect to have the same experience when we enter the 
 room again. We think of a something that does not get into 
 experience, a something which is still there when we are out of 
 the room. We think of something which transcends experience, 
 something which Kant called a "thing-in-itself," a ding an sich; 
 that something which is not in experience but which experience 
 implies. 
 
 Our science gives us a "thing-in-itself," though not quite in 
 the Kantian sense, of course. We think of the table as made up 
 
 [4^
 
 THE PHILOSOPHER OF THE REVOLUTION 
 
 of molecules, of these molecules as made up of atoms, of atoms 
 as made up of electrons and protons. We say that they are 
 responsible for the different experiences we have. If they 
 vibrate in a certain way, we get a certain color. Well, what 
 about the ultimate particle itself, the electron? We go over to 
 the physics laboratory and are shown a model of the atom, 
 with protons and some electrons at the center. We think of 
 atoms as little galaxies like the solar system, the sun represented 
 by a proton at the center, and the planets by electrons revolving 
 around the proton, little stellar groups. That is what goes to 
 make up the atom. We think of them in terms of spatial rela- 
 tions and of the color which they have. But they cannot them- 
 selves have any color, for they are responsible for color. They 
 could not be responsible for color and be colored themselves. 
 The electron is too small to subtend a wave of hght anyway. It 
 could not be colored, and it is too small to be felt. Now, such 
 objects could not possibly be experienced, and yet, in a certain 
 sense they are the things which we do experience. A thing that 
 could not possibly be experienced and yet is the thing that is 
 experienced is what Kant called a "thing-in-itself." It is not 
 dependent upon us for its existence. It is, rather, something 
 upon which our experience may be thought to depend. W^e 
 assume that there is a world of things-in-themselves and that 
 they are not experienced — in fact, they are supposed to be the 
 conditions of experience. A world of things-in-themselves is im- 
 plied in experience. But Kant insists that, inasmuch as they 
 cannot be experienced, we cannot possibly know them. If we 
 could know them, we would experience them, that is, they would 
 fall under the forms of our sensibiHty and no longer be the con- 
 ditions of experience. Color is a process of experience. All our 
 knowledge is a process of experience. One says he knows; that 
 means he is experiencing color, feeling, locality. If we experience 
 the particles of which the physicist and chemist speak, those 
 ultimate electrons or matter which lie beyond objects, we have 
 to assume something which is responsible for that experience. A 
 "thing-in-itself," says Kant, cannot be experienced; we cannot 
 
 [47]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 know it. We may assume such a "thing-in-itself," but that 
 assumption cannot be an act of knowledge. 
 
 Kant accepted that position from Hume. You can have nec- 
 essary knowledge in the world of experience itself. That is, you 
 know that our experience must always take on the forms of 
 space and time, of substance and attribute, cause and effect. 
 But you cannot possibly know anything beyond that experience. 
 You may have to postulate a world of things-in-themselves, but 
 you cannot know such a world. This is the result of Kant's 
 Critique of Pure Reason. He analyzed experience, coming back 
 to what was necessary and universal in it, that which made 
 science possible. 
 
 But that holds only for experience. If the mind has such forms 
 as those of which we have been speaking, then our experiences 
 must take on these forms. Our judgments are judgments about 
 past experiences, they are not judgments about a world which 
 is the condition of our having experiences; we are assuming a 
 world that we cannot possibly experience, and so one which we 
 cannot know. We can give laws to the world of our experience, 
 the laws of our own mind; but those laws hold only for experi- 
 ence, only for possible experience in the future. We can make a 
 universal judgment that any experience we have must evidence 
 these laws, but this judgment holds only for experience itself. 
 We cannot know a world which lies outside of experience. Kant 
 called this world of experience "phenomenal." It implies some- 
 thing beyond itself of which it is the appearance. Just as I have 
 said, we can assume that the world has order, is the appear- 
 ance of something. But of what it is the appearance we can 
 never know. We cannot even know that there is anything there. 
 We can postulate it, but we cannot know it. 
 
 But this postulation is something that takes us over into 
 conduct. We are continually acting. Our experience has been 
 of a world composed of seemingly solid matter; but we can 
 analyze that into the space of sensibihty. Our world is spatially 
 organized; we find that organization is a form of the mind. 
 It is a world in which there are uniformities; we find that those
 
 THE PHILOSOPHER OF THE REVOLUTION 
 
 come back to the forms of cause and effect, and that is a law 
 of the mind. We are postulating that experience will continue. 
 We are putting our feet right into the future, so to speak. 
 We are expecting that our experience will continue as it has 
 continued. We know, or at least we assume, in advance that if 
 experience continues it will be of a certain sort. 
 
 But will it continue? Is there a world of "things-in-them- 
 selves" that starts this experience of the world .^ What evidence 
 is there for that? Kant says there is none. All our evidence 
 holds simply for experience. We are asking for a world upon 
 which experience depends. We will always postulate such a 
 world; and we will always postulate that that world is intelli- 
 gible, is intelligently organized, just as our experience is intelli- 
 gently organized. Our conduct carries with it such a postulation 
 as this: Our intelligent conduct will be justified by our later ex- 
 perience. But will we have further experiences? That is some- 
 thing we cannot tell, although we postulate possible experiences 
 as having intelligent order. 
 
 What is more interesting from Kant's standpoint is that we 
 postulate a responsibihty on our own part for our own conduct. ' 
 That is, we regard ourselves as responsible; and therefore we / 
 must postulate that we are free morally, that we can act as we j 
 feel we ought to act. Kant says we cannot prove that. In fact, i 
 when we look at our conduct, we always put it into terms of the 
 law of cause and effect. We explain an act by saying that such 
 and such motives were acting upon us. As we regard the act it- 
 self, we explain it, bring it under the law of cause and effect, 
 and yet we continually accept the responsibility for our own 
 conduct. And that acceptance of responsibility carries with it 
 the postulate of freedom. If there is such freedom, it must not 
 belong to this world of appearance for, in it, every event is 
 caused by a preceding event, comes under the law of cause and 
 effect. If the self is responsible, it must be because that self is 
 noumenal, a "thing-in-itself." Now we cannot know that. Kant 
 says this reality belongs to a world which we cannot experience, 
 a world which is responsible for our experience. But we are al- 
 
 [49]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 ways making a postulate that we are responsible. Conduct car- 
 ries with it a set of postulates which cannot be proved but 
 which we cannot avoid. We also assume that the world of 
 "things-in-themselves," which we cannot know, is an ordered, 
 intelligible world. Our very conduct carries that assumption 
 with it. We cannot help assuming that we are responsible for 
 our conduct, that we can act freely within our experience as 
 such. Our conduct seems to be determined by previous events. 
 If we can act freely, it must be because there are noumenal 
 selves not bound by this law of understanding. We are always 
 postulating that. In conduct we postulate selves which are 
 noumenal, not phenomenal, selves that belong to the world of 
 "things-in-themselves." We postulate that, just as we may say 
 that scientists postulate electrons. The scientist can never get 
 direct evidence of these in perception but, nonetheless, he as- 
 sumes that there are such things. So we assume that there is 
 such a thing as a self which is not bound to the law of cause and 
 effect — a self which is responsible. This postulate of the self is 
 involved in our action, in our conduct. It is something we can- 
 not know, for knowledge is confined to experience. Experience 
 is always of things that are caused, as such. But our conduct 
 constantly postulates a free self. By way of this self, then, we 
 go over to an assumed world of "things-in-themselves." 
 
 50
 
 CHAPTER III 
 
 THE REVOLUTION BREAKS DOWN; 
 ROMANTICISM IS BORN 
 
 WE HAVE been considering the political revolution 
 and the roles of Rousseau and Kant as philosophers 
 of it. The former gave a popular vogue to its doc- 
 trines; the latter incorporated its principles into a speculative 
 system..; The undertaking^ o f the revolution, as we h ave seen,^ 
 was t o substitute for the arbitra ry authority o f the old i nstitu- 
 tion s one that was based upon rati onal pri nciples; one whic h 
 was found^as presented in the theo ry of Rousseau, in the rights 
 of man. The assumption was that one could deduce from the 
 essential rights of man the structure of political institutions to_ 
 take the place of the older institutions. The rights of man were, 
 as we have seen, universal in that the individual in asserting his 
 own right, in the very nature of the case, recognizes and as- 
 serts the same right for others. In so far, then, as the legisla- 
 tion of a popular assembly is confined to the rights of men, one 
 can reach that volonte generale, that general will of Rousseau 
 in which the individuals are both subjects and sovereigns; the 
 will which gives laws for all in the very form of the right as such; 
 and which also recognizes that right, accepts it as that to which 
 it must conform. The undertaking of the French Revolution 
 was to establish a government, a state, a political society on the 
 basis of such rights. The assumption was that it was possible to 
 deduce the whole structure of the state from what were recog- 
 nized as universal rights. 
 
 But the political revolution broke down. In France one con- 
 stitution after another was undertaken without the result of 
 
 a stable and secure government. Out of the insecurity arose 
 the opportunity of Napoleon. By the exercise of military pow- 
 er, which he controlled for the time being, he was able to set 
 
 [51]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 up the imperialism which dominated France and Europe for 
 fifteen years. The hold imperialism had on France was that, 
 in a certain sense, Napoleon appeared as the champion of 
 the Revolution. The opponents of France were undertaking 
 to set up the old order again — the divine right of kings, the 
 right of the church in its medieval claim — and Napoleon was the 
 leader of the armies of France that defeated them one after the 
 other. For this reason he was regarded as the champion of the 
 Revolution. There was another sense also in which he was its 
 champion — where the armies of France went, the old order 
 broke down, particularly in Germany. The old medieval order 
 had remained in the latter country more than in any other. In 
 France, at least there had been an attempt to introduce admin- 
 istrative efficiency. At least the feudal power had been centered 
 in the monarch. Although feudal privileges remained with the 
 whole upper class, the power had passed over into the hands of 
 the king, so that administrative efficiency became possible. In 
 Germany, however, there was no central monarch. We must 
 remember that Germany, more than any other country, had 
 suffered from the conception of the Holy Roman Empire. The 
 German monarchs of earlier centuries had tried to establish 
 themselves as the Roman emperors; and, in doing that, their 
 eyes were constantly fastened on the lands beyond the Alps. 
 The interest which centered in this establishment of an empire, 
 in the securing of the iron crown on the part of the German 
 contestant, had detracted from the development of a national 
 German state, so that Germany remained broken up into an 
 indefinite number of little feudal states, with a few powerful 
 states in the midst. And the monarchs of the little communities 
 made the same claims for themselves that the monarchs of the 
 larger communities — Prussia and Austria — made. Now, wher- 
 ever the armies of France went, this old order crumbled and 
 people rejoiced at the freedom that came as a result of this 
 breakdown. This was especially true in the Rhine Valley, so 
 that there was a strong sympathy with the movements of Na- 
 poleon and even a strong feeling of attachment to him. In that 
 
 [52]
 
 THE REVOLUTION BREAKS DOWN 
 
 sense we can speak of Napoleon as the champion of the Revolu- 
 tion as over against those who undertook to set up the old order 
 again. 
 
 But the order that he set up was Imperialistic. It was an 
 order in which he was a dictator, and it became more and more 
 tyrannical in its character, particularly in suppressing popular 
 institutions. It was identified with the militaristic regime. Only 
 so long as Napoleon was fighting could it live. He could not 
 establish himself in the sense of a French king, could not attach 
 himself to the older traditions of the French monarch. There 
 had to be fighting for him to maintain his place. And in the 
 nature of the case, the regime broke down as France was worn 
 out, as strong men were sacrificed on the battlefield. 
 
 This was the situation because of the failure of the French 
 Revolution. And out of this failure arose the imperialism of Na-. 
 poleon. To the extent that this imperialism did not go back to 
 the old order, it regarded itself as supporting the Revolution. It 
 went back to the acceptance of the community as such. That is. 
 Napoleon had the support of France behind him in the form 
 of a plebiscite. His imperial throne rested not upon the 
 divine right of kings but on the support of the people them- 
 selves. But the constitution of his state depended upon his own 
 will. He was the dictator. And yet, in very many respects he did 
 carry out the Revolution. Particularly, he carried out the prin- 
 ciples of political revolution involved in the dispossessing of 
 the privileged classes, bringing the land back to the peasants 
 themselves. This was the most important effect of the French 
 Revolution and of the reformation under Louis XVIII. In that 
 respect there is a parallelism between it and the Russian Revolu- 
 tion. The Russian Revolution put the land in the hands of the 
 peasants, even though the communistic doctrine does not recog- 
 nize private property. In the same way, we may say that the 
 French Revolution put the ownership of land into the hands of 
 the peasants; and, although the old order was reinstated, no at- 
 tempt was made to change that fundamental reconstruction. 
 Eiirtkermore,^ we have seen that the imperialism of France was a 
 
 [S3]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 military organization of France against her enemies, and one 
 which was triumphant for fifteen years. It made France the 
 dominating power in Europe and gave that glory to the French 
 army and the French nation which was so sweet in the mouths 
 of the Frenchmen of the period. But it was not an establish- 
 ment of the state on the principles which were drawn from the 
 social contract as Rousseau presented it. In that sense it was a 
 failure; and after Napoleon finally was defeated, France went 
 back in some sense to the old order, as did the rest of Europe. 
 
 The French had undertaken to establish a state, apolitical 
 society on the bare principle of political equality, with such an 
 ideal of universal form as that of truth or of property. As we 
 know, they did not succeed. It is not necessary for us to follow 
 out the history of the failures of the different constitutions 
 which were established, or of the conflict of interests which led 
 to the final collapse of the French Revolution in its political 
 form. Out of it rose Napoleonism, the imperialism of France. 
 First of all, it was a dictatorship which established order, secu- 
 rity in the community, which was of primary importance. You 
 can get an organization of all where you have one single law- 
 giver who has behind him a force to enforce the law. It is the 
 simplest way of dealing with politically disturbed conditions. 
 Napoleon was, first of all, able to make himself a dictator, by 
 the somewhat ruthless use of power. 
 
 But, of course. Napoleon was also one of the world's greatest 
 military geniuses, and France was attacked by the reactionary 
 governments of Europe. The victories of Napoleon over these 
 enemies, who were the enemies of the Revolution as well, were, 
 in a certain sense, victories for the principle of revolution. 
 Actually, there was dictatorship and tyranny as there had been 
 before the Revolution. In some sense there was more severe 
 political tyranny. But after all,JMapoleon was fighting against 
 the foes of the Revolution, that is, against those who wished to 
 bring back the institution of the divine right of kings, of the old 
 feudal order, of the ecclesiastical power. Those who wished to 
 maintain this old order were fighting against the powers in 
 
 [54]
 
 THE REVOLUTION BREAKS DOWN 
 
 France which gave expression to the Revolution. Even England 
 joined with the others, although the English government was 
 quite liberal in character, as indicated by Burke's reflections 
 on the French Revolution, which were very influential. And 
 Napoleon in fighting these powers was, from the point of view 
 of France and liberals throughout the world, the champion 
 of the Revolution, not because he himself was interested in es- 
 tablishing a democracy on the contrary, but because he was an 
 enemy of those who were determined to have the Revolution 
 wiped out. He was the enemy, at least, of the enemies of 
 France; and he was the victor over their armies. His power, 
 then, was, first of all, that of a dictator who established secu- 
 rity. And in the second place, he had the enthusiasm of vic- 
 torious France behind him. 
 
 Of course, it was not simply the principle of revolution 
 that was involved here. It was the principle of nationalism as 
 well. Medieval Europe and the remains of medieval Europe 
 that we find in the eighteenth century had very little place for 
 what we term "nationalism." Take Austria, for example. It 
 was composed of an indefinite number of different communities, 
 different races, speaking different languages. That which was 
 common to most of them was their religion. But the different 
 groups were racially, linguistically, historically, different; and 
 yet they were all organized into a single monarchy. There was 
 an economic ground for this organization which we are recogniz- 
 ing in the troubles of Europe at the present time. Those within 
 the communities bought from and sold to each other, produced 
 and distributed in such a fashion that the organization of this 
 Austrian empire did answer to certain very important economic, 
 demands. The process of setting up commercial treaties be- 
 tween the different communities and different states that have 
 arisen out of the Austrian empire is a very difficult thing. But 
 still there was a single state, made up out of different groups 
 which now make up a whole set of different societies, and 
 societies which had a vivid sense of their own entities and of 
 their hostility to others. 
 
 iss]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 ^he beginning of this nationalism can be found in the vic- 
 tories of Napoleon, in the sense of the superiority of the French 
 armies and of the French nation. And this sense of superiority 
 which comes with the conflict of a certain group that is united 
 in its language, in its history — this sense of solidarity which we 
 call "nationalism" — might be said to have had its beginning in 
 the imperiahsm of Napoleon. There had been nationalism be- 
 fore, but no such vivid nationalism as that characterizing the 
 history of England in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, 
 for example. 
 
 The breakdown of the old feudal institutions in France 
 helped the development of this nationaUstic spirit.' In so far as 
 it equalized everyone, it left everyone a Frenchman. The 
 emigres^ that belonged to the old regime, felt more at home 
 with their own class abroad than among the Frenchmen who 
 had driven them out. People of various classes might feel 
 more at home among the same class abroad. Just in so far as 
 there had been a leveling process that had brought everyone to 
 the same level, there was the opportunity for the development 
 of nationalism. Nationalism is a leveling conception. Each one 
 has his position simply as a member of a certain nation. We do 
 not get the sense of nationalism in its most vivid form where 
 castes, or classes, are present. We get the most vivid sense of 
 it in situations where everyone can stand upon the same level. 
 VRevolution, in so far as it breaks down social castes, is favorable 
 to the development of nationalismv 
 
 ''What gave Napoleon his power, then, was, first of all, his 
 capacity for introducing order, security, into the state; in the 
 second place, his victories over the enemies of France and the 
 French Revolution; and, in the third place, the power that 
 came with these victories over all the armies of Europe, the abil- 
 ity to stand as a dominant power on the Continent. 
 
 But the French Revolution as an undertaking had definite- 
 ly broken down. If the armies of Napoleon had crushed the 
 enemies of the Revolution, they had not established its prin- 
 ciples in the French state. They had established another 
 
 [56]
 
 THE REVOLUTION BREAKS DOWN 
 
 empire, the Napoleonic empire. There was a definite sense of 
 defeat, then, as far as the Revolution was concerned. After the 
 defeat of Napoleon the emperors of Russia and of Austria and 
 the kings of Prussia and of England undertook to wipe out the 
 Revolution and put things where they had been before. Of 
 course, they could not do that; it was impossible to re-establish 
 the old housekeeping after the breakdown of the old, moth- 
 eaten furniture of the medieval period. But an attempt was 
 made in that direction, going back to the old order of things. 
 
 There came a sense of defeat, after the breakdown of the 
 Revolution, after the failure to organize a society on the basis 
 of liberty, equality, and fraternity. And it is out of this sense 
 of defeat that a new movement arose, a movement which in 
 general terms passes under the title of "romanticism." 
 
 I have said it was impossible to re-establish the old order of 
 things, passionately as many men wanted it. But that desire 
 did lead to a very intense interest in that old order. England, 
 of course, was unwilling to accept the power of France, the im- 
 perialism of Napoleon. Prussia, too, arose as a nation not 
 simply to re-establish the old order but also to drive the French 
 out of their country. Thus, owing to the revolution itself, na- 
 tionalism had arisen in other communities. But they were put- 
 ting down the French Revolution, for it was out of that Revolu- 
 tion that Napoleon had arisen. In England the sentiment for the 
 revolution, as depicted in Dickens' The Tale of Two Cities and 
 in the eloquence of Burke, was in peril. (The revolution was sup- 
 posed to be that which tore society down, the savageness of the 
 Days of Terror. It was supposed to represent the actual disinte- 
 gration of society, and people turned from it in terror and looked 
 for those institutions which had been in existence before the 
 French Revolution had arisen. So there was a turning to the old 
 world with a certain passionate attachment. There was a re- 
 vival of medievalisri^.yi 
 
 This revival was one of the aspects of romanticism^ You re- 
 member that from the barbarians who came in to destroy the 
 Roman Empire we have kept the term "vandal" as a term ap- 
 
 [57]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 plying to a barbarous community which destroys everything be- 
 fore it. The term "Goth" had exactly the same meaning, and 
 "Gothic" was appHed disparagingly to the architecture of the 
 medieval period from the time of the Enlightenment as such, the 
 time of the turning-away from the obscurantism of the medieval 
 period. But in this latter period we find a return to the medieval 
 attitude, and the term "Gothic" took on the same meaning that 
 it has for us — that of a certain type of architecture which we 
 consider very beautiful. This is just an illustration of the atti- 
 tude that was taken at the time. With the breakdown of the 
 revolution came this attempt to re-establish the old order. The 
 clock was turned back; the Holy Alliance was established be- 
 tween the monarchs of Austria, Russia, Prussia, and England, 
 in an attempt to safeguard this old order. 
 
 1 What I want to point out is that this return to the old order 
 was very different from the old order as it had existed before 
 the revolutionary upheaval. Men came back to something 
 which was regarded through different eyes than before. It was, 
 in the first place, treasured in so far as it represented a security 
 which had been so rudely shaken in the revolutionary upheaval. 
 It was precious in a sense in which it had never been precious 
 before. Previously, it had been accepted as a matter of course, 
 as the normal status of society. The evils of it had led to the 
 revolution itself. But now it appeared as security, as that which 
 seemingly had been lost and now was recovered. Thus it as- 
 sumed a glamor. 
 
 '^ But there was another aspect of this reaction, that which gives 
 it its peculiar, its romantic, flavor: this is that men came back to 
 it from the standpoint of new individuals, new selve^. Europe 
 had been through the revolution. As an undertaking to estab- 
 lish things on the basis of the new political entity, the citizen, 
 the political individual who was supposed to stand on his own 
 feet, so to speak, this movement was felt not simply in France 
 but in all Europe as well. It was represented by such vivid 
 imaginations as those of the young Wordsworth and Coleridge, 
 by a feeling for a new life, an assertion of a self that could stand 
 
 [58I
 
 THE REVOLUTION BREAKS DOWN 
 
 on its own feet, on its rights. There was the same movement 
 in America, of course. Here had been the reflection of the 
 gospel of Kant, of the skepticism of Voltaire. Here too had 
 arisen a new individual. In liberal England the revolution did 
 not appear in the violent form in which it took place in France. 
 In the former, as we have already seen, the revolution had, in a 
 certain sense, taken place in the Puritan upheaval which sent 
 the Stuarts out, brought William and Mary in, and which 
 established a representative institution. Parliament, as the final 
 authority. Parhament went over to the people. It might put 
 on the throne a monarch who ruled by divine right, but it was 
 Parliament that put him there, and he could remain there only 
 with the support of Parliament. Thus, in a certain sense the 
 revolution had taken place in England, but it had left an organ- 
 ization of diff"erent interests. It was not yet a democratic struc- 
 ture. In France the attempt had been made to set up a demo- 
 cratic structure coming back to the political man — a man with 
 rights. 5]he Englishman was still what he was by virtue of his 
 social status, because of his connection with the great organiza- 
 tions of industry and of trade. He did not take his position as a 
 human being who had political rights. The Americans came 
 and presented that doctrine in England at that time. There 
 were repercussions of the French Revolution in England, but it 
 did not sweep over England in any such sense as it did over 
 France. Still the sentiment was there and elsewhere in Europe 
 —in Germany, in Italy, in Spain. And that spirit meant that 
 the individual looked at himself as having his own rights, re- 
 garded himself as having his own feet to stand on. This gave 
 him a certain independence which he did not have before; 
 it gave him a certain self-consciousness th at he neve r had 
 iieforeTl 
 
 It IS "this self-consciousness that he took with him when he 
 went back to consider again the old world to which he was re- 
 turning. He came back with a difi^erent self-consciousness from 
 that with which he had left it. He looked at it through differ- 
 ent eyes. He did not look at it with hostile eyes; he wanted at 
 
 [59]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 least the order, the security, of the old order re-established. The 
 attempt to set up a new state on a democratic basis had failed. 
 People now wanted to get rid of that. They came back again 
 to the old order; but they came back as different individuals, 
 and they now looked at the old order from another point of 
 view. They had become self-conscious in regard to it. 
 
 /What the Romantic period revealed, then, was not simply a 
 past, but a past as the point of view from which to come back 
 at the self. One has to grow into the attitude of the other, come 
 back at the self, to realize the self; and we are discussing the 
 means by which this was done. Here, then, we have the makings 
 of a new philosophy, the Romantic philosophy..! 
 
 First of all, the discouraged self that had undertaken to re- 
 build the world on the basis of rights, the self that had followed 
 out the gospel of Rousseau in attempting to reconstruct 
 society on the basis of what was universal in the individual, on 
 the basis not only of that which he found in himself but which 
 he recognized in others, found that the undertaking had failed. 
 It was not possible to build up a new community on the ab- 
 stract rights of men. Of course, in a certain sense it may be 
 said that America succeeded in this attempt where France had 
 failed. One finds the same abstractions in the Declaration of 
 Independence that one finds among the doctrinaires of the 
 French Revolution. But the American community was not built 
 up on the Declaration of Independence. This instrument was a 
 banner of liberty flung forth to the world; but the government 
 that was set up was based on the liberal institutions that had 
 been carried over from England and had gone through the fire 
 of the long colonial period. When the Constitution was finally 
 formulated, it was an expression of the political institutions 
 which were an inheritance from the mother-country, institutions 
 the technique of which was to be found in the common law. 
 The American government was not an institution built up on 
 abstract rights. When the French undertook to do this, they 
 found that they did not have the material with which to work. 
 They broke down the imperialism of Napoleon and took charge 
 
 [6o1
 
 THE REVOLUTION BREAKS DOWN 
 
 of the chaotic situation which resulted. But they had no basis 
 upon which to undertake to build up a new state whose author- 
 ity should be based upon the reason of the individual; and their 
 plans failed. The individuals who undertook it returned from 
 the quest in the discouraged condition that characterizes the 
 breakdown of revolutions. This was the situation all over Eu- 
 rope, for, while the revolution had centered in France, the 
 movement spread over the whole continent. 
 
 But, though the self had failed in its undertaking, it was still 
 there with its own point of view; and it now turned to the past. 
 Its first, almost passionate, endeavor was to get back to this 
 past, to get rid of the horrors of the imperialism of France and 
 of the collapse of the Revolution, to set up the old order again, 
 and thus get back the security that came with it, get back the 
 values that seemed to have been lost. But when these were put 
 in place again, the house refurnished, the process was undertak- 
 en from the point of view of a sophisticated self that was aware 
 of its own defeats, that was interested not only in getting the 
 house refurnished but interested in the inhabitant, in itself. 
 There is a self-consciousness about the process which distin- 
 guishes this movement from the medieval situation that it was 
 undertaking to re-establish. There is that bitter attitude about 
 the beginning of the Romantic period, but with it there came 
 unexpected treasures. The old world was discovered, and it 
 was highly interesting, exciting, as presented, for example, in 
 Goethe, and in Schiller's Die Rduber. Thus we come to a new in- 
 terest in a medieval world that had been thought to be nothing 
 but dust and ashes. Once again it becomes a living affair. It is 
 portrayed in the attitude of the pageant, of the drama, the atti- 
 tude of living over the old life where one assumes now one role 
 andnow another. 
 
 \ And with this came the further discovery, not only of the old 
 world but of the self. Men had gotten the point of view from 
 which to look at themselves, to realize and enjoy themselves. 
 That is, of course, the attitude which we find in the romantic 
 individual, in the romantic phases of our own existence. We 
 
 f6il
 
 ! 
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 come back to the existence of our self as the primary fact. That 
 Is what we exist upon. That Is what gives the standard to 
 values. In that situation the self puts Itself forward as Its ulti- 
 mate reahty. This is characteristic of the romantic attitude in 
 the Individual and of this peribdy 
 
 Of course, we have many llTuslratlons of it. For example, the 
 Byronic poetry; that affirmation of the self in which the eye is 
 thrown aesthetically upon the heavens, in which the self swal- 
 lows everything else. In Bryon this is presented with a certain 
 cynicism. The attitude is expressed in a Mephistophelean ex- 
 perience, but in it the self asserts itself; it is there over against 
 the world, against God, against the devil; it is there as the 
 primary thought with reference to which everything else must 
 be oriented. That is the starting-point in such Byronic ex- 
 perience, the attitude which is implied in the use of the term 
 Byronic. 
 
 The romantic experiences to which we have referred are also 
 presented in Scott, and in the attitude toward Gothic archltec- 
 -ture. Those attitudes are a result of the journey'ortHFself into 
 tHe past. It is a reconstruction of the self through the self's as- 
 suming the roles of the great figures of the past. That is what 
 gives the peculiar flavor to romantic literature, a character that 
 we recognize at once in contrasting the novels and poetry of 
 Scott with Malory's Morte d' Arthur or his Chronicles. In these 
 latter there is a simple, direct attitude, while in the hero of 
 Scott you have a self-consciousness which is historically out of 
 place but which gives a flavor to the whole romantic experi- 
 ence. There the self is used as the point of orientation in its 
 own reconstruction. What we recognize in Scott, as over against 
 the figures in the Chronicles, is self-consciousness, awareness of 
 self, an attitude which is entirely out of place in the naivete of 
 those medieval knight-errants. The hero of the Scottish novel 
 would have been perfectly at home in the period of Scott him- 
 self, had he taken his armor ofi^. He has the consciousness, the 
 background of a modern individual; and, largely for this reason, 
 he was all the more picturesque when put into the garments of 
 
 f62l
 
 THE REVOLUTION BREAKS DOWN 
 
 the medieval period. This whole thing is caricatured in Mark 
 Twain's A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur s Court. 
 
 Perhaps the most vivid and the most moving picture that we 
 can get of this in English literature is to be found in the writings 
 of Carlyle. He, as well as Coleridge, De Quincey, and a small 
 group of Englishmen, came under the influence of Romanticism. 
 His early contacts were with Goethe, who, Hke Schiller, was 
 very much influenced by the Romantic philosophy. The influ- 
 ence which particularly moved Carlyle, though, was that of 
 Schelling, although Fichte too had his influence, as is shown par- 
 ticularly in Sartor Resartus. If you read that, you will get a 
 more or less emotional reflection of the Fichtean philosophy. 
 The responsibihty which is depicted as lying in man, and which ', 
 makes him a creative center in the universe, which identifies i 
 the individual with the Absolute Self in the universe, is Fich- 1 
 tean. » 
 
 Europe discovered the medieval period in the Romantic pe- 
 riod, then; but it also discovered itself. In fact, it discovered 
 itself first. Furthermore, it discovered the apparatus by means 
 of which this self-discovery was possible. The self belongs 
 to the reflexive mode. One senses the self only in so far as 
 the self assumes the role of another so that it becomes both 
 subject and object in the same experience. This is the thing ' 
 of great importance in this whole historical movement. It 
 was because people in Europe, at this time, put themselves 
 back in the earlier attitude that they could come back upon 
 themselves. When they had done this, they could contrast 
 themselves with the earlier period and the selves which it 
 brought forth. As a characteristic of the romantic attitude we 
 find this assumption of roles. Not only does one go out into 
 adventure taking now this, that,- or another part, living this 
 exciting poignant experience and that, but one is constantly 
 coming back upon himself, perhaps reflecting upon the dulness 
 of his own existence as compared with the adventure at an 
 earlier time which he is living over in his imagination. He has 
 got the point of view from which he can see himself as others 
 
 [63]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 see him. And he has got it because he has put himself in the 
 place of the others. 
 
 From the standpoint of the earlier period the structure of 
 things was moth-eaten, riddled with worms. It was breaking 
 down and people were looking for something new to take its 
 place. When, in its turn, this new order had proved itself 
 to be a deception, they tried to go back to the past. But when 
 they came back, they were different individuals. They were 
 now looking for something in the old order that was precious, 
 something that had never been recognized in it before. And, in 
 doing this, they were in an essentially self-conscious attitude. 
 That is, they were aware of themselves in the whole process. 
 Now, it is this self-conscious setting-up of the past again that 
 constitutes the romanticism of this period. It made the past a 
 different past. In the first place, people who had hardly been 
 willing to accept it before were willing to accept it now, and 
 to accept it as a pageant. It gave them an emotional experience 
 which was novel, exciting. It created a different past from that 
 which had been there before — a past which was discovered, into 
 which a value had been put which did not belong there before. 
 This value was security, the security of an old order which 
 people thought they had lost and which they now had recovered 
 again. But this was a value which had not been recognized there 
 before, and it gave to the self which discovered it a content 
 which it had not had before. That content, as I have said, was pri- 
 marily an emotional one. It was the feel of the thing that men 
 got out of this experience. And there was also the freedom that 
 came to the self in traveling back into the past, assuming one 
 role after another, fl am particularly anxious to bring out this 
 difference in the attitude of men toward the old order. They re- 
 turned to it with a sense of rej-ief because the French Revolution 
 had meant disturbance, the most considerable war that had 
 been waged in Europe for a long time, together with all that goes 
 with continuous warfare. What followed it was a return to the 
 security of the past, a setting-up of that again, so that men 
 came back to the past with an appreciation which they did not 
 
 [64]
 
 THE REVOLUTION BREAKS DOWN 
 
 have of it in the earher period. Furthermore, the self that ex- 
 amined this past and savored it, enjoyed it, was a different self 
 from that of the period of revolution. 
 
 We have been discussing the romantic period as a passage 
 from the period of the revolution. The latter undertook to find 
 in the rational nature of man the authority for institutions, 
 as over against the arbitrary authority which belonged to the 
 medieval conception of the institution — -whether of the church, 
 the state, the school, or the family. The pevolu-tioiv— ufide^: — 
 took, in -its--QppDsLtiQn-tQ--tb4s— a^^trary-authomyy to find an 
 authorlty^iiithe rationa l na ture of ma tt- himsclf. • Of course, this 
 turned particularly about the- political revolution. In this con- 
 nection-an-attempt .was jnade to set up a state on the basis of 
 what-were-considered the -rights of man; to develop rationally, 
 from the theory of these natural rights, what the order of the 
 state should be, to find that which was universal, which was 
 recognized in the attitude of every member of the community. 
 What do you find in the attitude of every member of the com- 
 munity which he asserts as his right and which he recognizes as 
 the rights of others.'' What do you find there as the basis for the 
 organization of the state? The answer to that question was the 
 undertaking of the revolution, in an attempt to set up the state 
 on the basis of universal rights. But, as we have seen, the revo- 
 lution broke down and we find the Romantic period taking its 
 place. 
 
 As representatives of this latter movement in Germany we 
 have Schiller and Goethe, especially in their earlier productions. 
 Their presentation of the medieval period which was so attrac- 
 tive, so vivid, so full of color, and, on the other hand, that sense 
 of novelty in the self which came from the assumption of differ- 
 ent roles, that, I say, is what constituted the romanticism of this 
 period. / 
 
 65
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 
 KANT AND THE BACKGROUND OF 
 PHILOSOPHIC ROMANTICISM 
 
 THE self of the Romantic movement is attached to the 
 Kantian self with which we have already become ac- 
 quainted. We have it very interestingly presented in 
 Schiller's Aesthetic Letters^ which is one of the early romantic 
 developments of the Kantian doctrine. The Kantian self, as we 
 have seen, had two aspects. One aspect is purely formal as it 
 appeared in the transcendental unity of apperception, that uni- 
 fying power which holds together, constructs our percepts, makes 
 them different from bare sensations, and gives unity to them. 
 But this unity was a pure function from Kant's standpoint, it 
 was not an entity, was not a spiritual being; it was just a func- 
 tion of unity. The other aspect of this self, we have seen, appears 
 in the Critique of Practical Reason. Kant reaches it by way of 
 his postulates. We :fimi-jQ.urs_dves.-SLC£eptiiig. responsibility for 
 ourown actioiis^ We could not lay any such responsibility upon 
 ourselves unless we were free, unless actions were our ownCFrom 
 Kant's standpoint, the very fact of the acceptance of respon- 
 sibility carries with it the postulation that men are free. But 
 in the world of experience — the Kantian world of experience — 
 everything is subject to the laws of the mind, those of the 
 sensibilities — space and time — and those of the understand- 
 ing — the categories. What takes place there takes place in 
 accordance with the laws of cause and effect. Every effect is a 
 necessary result of its antecedent causes. Thus, freedom cannot 
 be found in the world of experience as we know it. Kant's 
 assumption is that we must postulate a self which, so to speak, 
 lies in a different realm from that of the phenomenal, namely, in 
 the noumenal world of "things-in-themselves." He has proved 
 
 I 66 1
 
 KANT AND PHILOSOPHIC ROMANTICISM 
 
 to his own satisfaction that we cannot know anything of this 
 latter world, but we find ourselves continually postulating such 
 a world. A self, then, that belongs to the world of "things-in- 
 themselves," the noumenal world, is the implication of the 
 Critique of Practical Reason. It is a self that must be constantly 
 postulated and that cannot be known. What took place in the 
 Romantic period along a philosophical line was to take this 
 transcendental unity of apperception, which was for Kant a 
 bare logical function, together with the postulation of the self 
 which we could not possibly know but which Kant said we 
 could not help assuming, and compose them into the new ro- 
 mantic seff. ; 
 
 Kant's nearest approach to this came not in the first two 
 critiques but in the third, the Critique of Judgment. What he 
 points out in that critique is that in Hfe, in vital phenomena, we 
 cannot help assuming some sort of an end which determines the 
 nature of the process that goes on. That is, he brought up the 
 conflict between what is known as the teleological and the 
 mechanical interpretations of nature. Our physics and chemis- 
 try undertake to state the nature of the Hving process in 
 terms of the necessary succession of cause and effect. What 
 takes place does so because of what has occurred before. On 
 the other hand, the biologist talks about functions, about 
 the life-process maintaining itself. He deals with all the func- 
 tions — respiration, the circulation of the blood, the assimila- 
 tion of food — from the point of view of the maintenance of the 
 species. There is an end, that is, which lies ahead. The life that 
 is to be lived by the species is to be maintained; it exercises a 
 control over the living process. Kant pointed out that in our 
 perception, our judgment on living things, we are always assum- 
 ing some sort of an end which determines what takes place. 
 What he is referring to here is not any metaphysical conclusion 
 that can be drawn from this, but that the very object as we 
 know it, the animal or the plant, is perceived as carrying with it 
 its future ends and purposes. We perceive a plant as something 
 more than a mere congeries of atoms and molecules. W^e per- 
 
 [67]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 ceive a tree as getting moisture from the earth, constructing the 
 starch necessary for the building of its tissues, turning it into 
 sugar, and so forth, as processes essential to its being a tree. 
 These processes together are what a tree is. There is something 
 more in this than in the sort of statement, the mechanical 
 account, that the physicist and the chemist can make. 
 
 And then Kant turned his attention to the field of aesthetics, 
 of beauty. There our process of perception constructs that 
 which is itself pleasing, agreeable to our aesthetic taste, and 
 which is not the same as perception. It goes out beyond the 
 mere physical object, the mere sensations themselves, and cre- 
 ates them in such a fashion that one shall get a certain sort of 
 delighted response in connection with the object. There is a 
 creative process that puts things together in such a fashion that 
 we can enjoy them. And that enjoyment is a thing which is in- 
 volved in our aesthetic appreciation. 
 
 The judgment, then, which is involved in the recognition of 
 the life-process of plant and animal, the judgment in our recog- 
 nition of that which is in itself beautiful, is, in a sense, some- 
 thing which seems to go beyond the world as it is presented in 
 the Critique of Pure Reason , the world of science, with its neces- 
 sity, which is a priori. It even goes beyond the mere affirmation 
 of responsibility which we find in the Critique of Practical Rea- 
 son. It reconstructs the world from the observation of certain 
 ends and purposes— those involved in the very processes of liv- 
 ing, on the one hand, and those involved in art, on the other 
 hand. 
 
 \ As I have said, it was, perhaps, from these three different 
 points that the new doctrine of Romantic idealism grew, or to 
 which it attached itself: first was Kant's transcendental unity 
 of apperception; second was the self, the free self which our 
 moral attitude postulates; and third was the experience as 
 depicted in the Critique of Judgment which sets up a sort of 
 end or purpose as determining the life-process of living things, 
 and which determines the structure of that which dehghts 
 our aesthetic tastes. These were the points around which
 
 KANT AND PHILOSOPHIC ROMANTICISM 
 
 grew up the philosophy which succeeded Kant,/ One of the 
 earHest expressions of it is found in Schiller's B'riefe iiber die 
 asthetische Erziehung des Menschen. These are a study of the 
 aesthetic experience in so far as it expresses this new or romantic 
 self. The new self, as we have seen, appears actually, in the 
 experience of Europe, at the time when people deliberately 
 opened their chests to regain the treasure which belonged to the 
 past but which people now felt, for the first time, might be 
 valuable. 
 I In this connection it is interesting to see that here we have, 
 perHaps for the first time, an expression of our modern historic 
 attitude. That is, people were turning back to the past and were 
 interested in that past as a means of appreciating present condi- 
 tions. The philosophical representative of this historic phase of 
 the movement was Herder, with his presentation of earlier con- 
 ditions which were to be found among more primitive people. 
 There was a going-back to the earlier legends and stories and 
 myths that gather around histories, such as the Cid in Spain, 
 and the early French heroes; a going-back to those figures which 
 lay in the memory of the race, of the nation. This process is to 
 be found in the early history of the Romantic movement. In 
 England it is found in the legends of King Arthur and his Round 
 Table. / 
 
 This historical interest attaches itself to the same movement 
 of the self back into the past. What one has is just such a tran- 
 scendental unity of apperception as Kant's phrase implies. That 
 is, the self looked back at its own past as it found it in history. 
 It looked back at it and gave the past a new form as that out of 
 which it itself had sprung. It put itself back into the past. It 
 lived over again the adventures and achievements of those old 
 heroes with an interest which children have for the lives of their 
 parents — taking their roles and realizing not only the past but 
 the present itself in that process. The old stories were brought 
 back in their archaic form. That form had the same fascination 
 for people that old garments have for children. People turned 
 back into the past, became interested in it, and got an interest 
 
 [69]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 which showed itself not simply in the pageant, in the story, in 
 the myth, but also in getting the historical connections, seeing 
 how the present had grown out of the past. As I have said, we 
 have in that the beginning of our whole modern historical inter- 
 est. It had not, as yet, taken on its scientific technique, it had 
 not yet gathered together all its periods; but it was the begin- 
 ning of that scientific movement. 
 
 What I want to bring out, in this connection, is that this 
 interest arises only through the new self going back into the 
 past. It is only because this new self had gone back into the 
 past that such an organized past arose at all. We know, for 
 example, the difi^erence between the histories which are written 
 at the present time and the old chronicles, and we marvel that 
 people could have been wiUing simply to put down a set of 
 events, the accounts of certain battles, the crowning and death 
 of kings, a mere statement of the meetings of ecclesiastical coun- 
 cils, all these being bare bones without flesh. And yet we have 
 to recognize that history does not exist except in so far as the 
 individuals of the present in some sense put themselves back 
 into the past. It is only in a process of memory — memory of the 
 people, if you like — that history can be created. And such a 
 reconstruction of the past is possible only when we have, so to 
 speak, reached some such point that we can become aware of 
 ourselves. Thus, all the moments which come with the develop- 
 ment of adolescence are what make adolescence a romantic peri- 
 od. The child up to the age of twelve does not have a past in any 
 such sense as a child who perhaps only two or three years later 
 has a very definite past. There have been, of course, a succes- 
 sion of days, seasons, years, of periods of vacation out of school, 
 but the past is there simply in those detached events which 
 lie behind. When he goes through the later period — the roman- 
 tic period, if you like — the child more or less suddenly discovers 
 this past. He discovers it in his reaction against the order of 
 things in the family, the school, and the community. He is in 
 more or less of an attitude of opposition; and in this attitude he 
 goes back over the past, and generally he has a set of grievances 
 
 [70I
 
 KANT AND PHILOSOPHIC ROMANTICISM 
 
 which he recognizes. This attitude which belongs to adolescence 
 is essential if the past is to have a definite structure. Otherwise, 
 it is just taken for granted, it is just there; but now it becomes a 
 part of the individual himself. He creates it. Thus in the 
 Romantic period a new self arose, an adolescent, self-con- 
 scious self. It turned back upon its past, lived it over again, 
 took up this and that incident and presented them from its own 
 pr£sent standpoint. 
 
 V What I want to make clear is that such a past as that of which 
 I have been speaking is always the creation of a new self, one 
 that has attained content that it did not have before. I want to 
 attach that romantic attitude as we find it in Europe to the 
 attitude which we all have passed through in our own romantic 
 eras. It is a perfectly natural development. It is that of a self 
 that has become aware of itself and turns back upon its own 
 past in order to hold onto that self and, so to speak, create that 
 past as its own. This was the atmosphere of the Romantic 
 period. It is presented vividly in the discussion of Fichte and, 
 more particularly of Schelling, in Royce's The Spirit of Modern 
 Philos opJi^T '/ 
 
 The revolution had attempted to define the principles for the 
 reconstruction of society as these are found in the rational nature 
 of the individual. Kant generalized this and undertook to find^ 
 in the mind of the individual the principles for the organization^, 
 of nature itself. This position of man had been abandoned in| 
 one sense in the breakdown of the French Revolution, but the 
 self that turned to the old order as a result of this breakdown 
 was a very different one than existed originally under this old 
 order. It had taken on a critical attitude. It was in that sense 
 independent. It looked upon the old order, as it accepted it 
 again, from the point of view of one who had rejected it but was 
 again taking it up with more or less definite acceptance. 
 
 There is a story of the transcendental period in this country 
 which is illustrative of this. It is a story about Margaret Fuller, 
 one of the transcendentalists gathered about Emerson. This, of 
 course, was the Romantic period as it found philosophical ex- 
 
 [71]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 pression in America. Margaret Fuller said, "I accept the uni- 
 verse." To this Carlyle rejoined, "Begad, she'd better!' vJ^s 
 represents the attitude of the Romantic period. It accepted an 
 order of things that was there. Its acceptance was a part of the 
 romantic attitude itself. The mind went back to the old order 
 but in a different sense. It went back to it and found something 
 which the mind accepted, and in this the self that accepted the 
 old order was a very different self from that which had existed 
 under the old order, a self which had accepted that order with- 
 out questioning. It is this different self which is the important 
 cliaracteristic of this Romantic period^^ 
 
 A good illustration of it can be found in the aesthetic attitude 
 toward religious ritual. This is the romantic return to the old 
 religious order. The self sought for that which was aesthetic, 
 attractive in the ritual itself; it was not interested in the dogma 
 as such. The dogma of the church was accepted, but the inter- 
 est of the individual did not he in the dogma. It lay in the 
 ritual, the form which united people together in the process of 
 worship, which was expressed in the architecture of the church, 
 in the pageantry of the ritual itself. This appealed directly to 
 the religious response and became characteristic of the rehgious 
 response during the Romantic period. This response comes back 
 to the individual, to his aesthetic approval or disapproval. In 
 the end, one gets to the point at which he says, "I like this or I 
 do not like this." Of course, there is a great deal more than that 
 in the aesthetic judgment; but at the bottom, one does reach 
 that attitude. That is, one gets back to the direct response of 
 the individual as a basis for judgment. There may be an objec- 
 tive beauty, something that is there independently of the man 
 who appreciates it; but it exists for him only in so far as he is 
 aware of it. Dogma, of course, directly binds man's reason in 
 so far as he accepts it. And this acceptance, from the point of 
 view of reason, is not based upon one's own rational comprehen- 
 sion of the dogma. It transcends the reason of man. It was said, 
 "One believes because the thing believed is impossible." The 
 Trinity, the transubstantiation, were mysteries that transcend- 
 
 [72]
 
 KANT AND PHILOSOPHIC ROMANTICISM 
 
 ed the reason of man. Yet, man accepted the dogmas. He did 
 not undertake to determine whether he should accept them or 
 not by their rational character. Dogmas are given by God. They 
 come to man through inspiration, through God's agent on earth 
 — the church — and man accepts them because of his relation to 
 God. Thus dogmas do not appeal directly to man for their sup- 
 port, do not appeal to his reason for their acceptance. But an 
 aesthetic response, on the other hand, always depends upon the 
 individual himself. One responds to them or one does not. And 
 in so far as the revival of religious experience characterized the 
 Romantic period, and in so far as its revival was one in which the 
 aesthetic element was dominant, it inevitably emphasized the 
 individual's response. One found within himself the emotional 
 reason for responding to this ritual. One found in himself that 
 which gave the basis for his acceptance of the churchT^ 
 
 There is something of this same attitude in the response to the 
 old political order in so far as it still continued to exist. It had a 
 romantic flavor. Men brought back the pageantry of things. 
 They could not reinstate the knight-errant, for the methods of 
 fighting had driven him from the field; but still they were very 
 much interested in him. He became the object of romance. 
 Novels of the type written by Scott were written about the 
 knight and about the feudal order. And it was the aesthetic re- 
 sponse to this order that was of peculiar importance during the 
 period. It was highly interesting, it was fascinating; and, where 
 one went back into it, as did those who had seen the revolution 
 fail, one was able to get a delight out of it which did not belong 
 to the earlier period itself. In that sense the Romantic period 
 rediscovered the Middle Ages. It discovered the aesthetic val- 
 ues in the past that gave the peculiar flavor to it. 
 
 Turning again to the philosophical aspects of romanticism, 
 we find the relation of subject to object more fundamental than 
 that of substance and attribute. The way to this lies, of course, 
 through Kant's doctrine. Substance and attribute, cause and 
 effect, are just categories of the mind. Kant did not speak of 
 them as expressions of an Absolute Self, but as forms of the mind 
 
 [73]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 itself. The Romantic school, on the other hand, comes back to a 
 Self that is infinite, divine, absolute — one that inevitably has a 
 not-self as its object. That is the nature of the self, that it 
 should have an object; and this latter as an object is a not-self. 
 We cannot have the one without the other; there is no self with- 
 out its not-self. The self must have a world within which it 
 lives. You can set up an absolute substance in the Spinozistic 
 sense, make everything simply a part of it, and there is nothing 
 which is opposed to it as a not-substance. But if you make the 
 relation between subject and object the central one, you come 
 back to a self which is a subject. But this self cannot be thought 
 of without a not-self, that is, without an object. Furthermore, 
 this relation cannot be presented in static terms. If you are to 
 have an infinite self it must be all-inclusive; you cannot set up a 
 not-self. If you are to reach that outside, you will have to do it 
 in terms which are not static, but dynamic in import, in terms 
 of a process. The self must set up its own not-self. But if it does 
 set it up as a not-self, it must eventually identify this not-self 
 with itself. 
 
 Thus, when we come back to the self, which is the dominant 
 conception of the Romantic period, we reach that which must 
 have a relationship with something else beyond itself. The self 
 does not exist except in relation to something else. The word 
 "itself," you will recognize, belongs to the reflexive mode. It is 
 that grammatical form which we use under conditions in which 
 the individual is both subject and object. He addresses himself. 
 He sees himself as others see him. The very usage of the word 
 implies an individual who is occupying the position of both sub- 
 ject and object. In a mode which is not reflexive, the object is 
 distinguished from the subject. The subject, the self, sees a tree. 
 The latter is something that is different from himself. In the 
 use of the term "itself," on the contrary, the subject and object 
 are found in the same entity. This very term "itself" is one 
 which is characteristic of a romantic phase of consciousness. 
 Romanticism turns about a vivid self-consciousness. The ro- 
 manticist sees things through the guise of his own emotions. Not 
 
 [74]
 
 KANT AND PHILOSOPHIC ROMANTICISM 
 
 only that, but he himself bulks larger in his own experience than 
 do other things. He assesses them, evaluates them, in terms of 
 himself. He sets himself up as the standard of values, or at 
 least his own standard of values is that which is dominant in his 
 calculations. That is characteristic of the romantic experience. 
 Whether we find it in such a Romantic period as this which 
 we are considering, or in the period gone through in our own 
 lives, that assessing of things in terms of one's own feeling, 
 one's assertion that a thing is valuable because it is valu- 
 able is characteristic of the Romantic period. The self some- 
 times becomes inordinately prominent in the experience of 
 such an individual. We have to assure people, at that stage, 
 that it is transient, that they will pass through it, and that 
 things will have a different value a little later. [Ttl s a period in 
 which the self itself and the relation of things to this self are the 
 important factors in experience. I again want to refer to the 
 peculiar aspect of this self, namely, that it is both subject and 
 object. The individual under these circumstances, then, is apt 
 to be subjectivistic, self-centered, turned in upon himself. I just 
 used the words "turned in upon himself." That is perhaps not 
 characteristic of the Romantic period. The romantic attitude is 
 rather the externalizing of the self. One projects one's self into 
 the world, sees the world through the guise, the veil, of one's 
 own emotions. That is the essential feature of the romantic 
 attitude. The self-centered attitude may be one which is any- 
 thing but romantic. It may be a hard, selfish attitude, or, on the 
 other h and, a very conscientious attitude. Neither of these is 
 romantic. I 
 
 The r omantic attitude is the ability to project one's self upon 
 the world, so that the world is identified in some fashion with 
 the self. At least the world has value to the individual only in 
 terms of himself. I have referred, in this connection, to the sub- 
 ject-object relationship. At least here in self-consciousness one 
 has both the subject and the object given in the immediate expe- 
 riencexand^_i.fj:pu think of it, it is an attempt to get the subject 
 and the. object together, so to speak. That has been the goal of 
 
 [75]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 epistemological thought in philosophy in so far as it has at- 
 tempted to solve the problem of knowledge. How can we assure 
 ourselves of the validity of our knowledge? How can we be sure 
 that what we see and hear is there; that the meanings of things 
 that we grasp are really the meanings that belong to them in the 
 universe outside? That has been the search of philosophy, to 
 get the justification for our knowledge as it appears in expe- 
 rience. Philosophy, throughout its whole existence, has been 
 fighting with the dragon or bogy of skepticism that arises out of 
 the negative answer to this problem. 
 
 The philosophy of the Romantic period grew out of the last 
 two critiques of Kant, the Critique of Practical Reason and the 
 Critique of Judgment. In a sense these belong rather to the peri- 
 od of the revolution. They tried to define the rational nature of 
 man as the ground for his conduct and for the order of society. 
 Kant generalized the position involved in the theory of natural 
 rights, which was that one could claim for himself only that 
 which he recognized equally for others. And Kant gave a gener- 
 alization of this as the basis for his moral doctrine, the categori- 
 cal imperative — that every act should be of such a character 
 that it could be made universal for everyone under the same 
 conditions. Kant said that this judgment was one which carried 
 with it the sense of responsibility. As a rational being, one found 
 himself responsible for making such universal judgments; that 
 is, one assumed the responsibility of acting as he would wish 
 everyone else to act under the same conditions. If he should act 
 in that way, he must have the freedom so to act; otherwise he 
 would not be responsible for his act. The sense of responsibiUty 
 in man, then, leads to the postulate that he is free. In Kant's 
 theory of experience, however, there could be no freedom. 
 Everything came under the law of cause and effect. If man's will 
 is free, it must be that his will, his self — the self — embodies in it- 
 self such a responsible will; it must be that it belongs to the 
 world of "things-in- themselves," and not to the world of our im- 
 mediate, our phenomenal experience. But the order of the world 
 as it appears in experience is a mechanical order. That is, it is an 
 
 [7M
 
 KANT AN» PHILOSOPHIC ROMANTICISM 
 
 order in which the effect is the necessary result of the preceding 
 cause — in which, therefore, the idea, the end, the purpose that a 
 person could have, all the idea or purpose involved in life, is such 
 that it can have no causal value. There can be no final cause in 
 a mechanical world. And yet, as Kant pointed out, our whole 
 understanding of that which is living, and our whole under- 
 standing of that which is beautiful, which is art, implies ends. 
 There is a determining purpose. There is something in our com- 
 prehension of the world which transcends the order of the 
 world as science presents it to us. And this something would 
 have to be found in the realm of "things-in-themselves," the 
 noumenal world. 
 
 fWell now, the Romantic movement, as I have said, grew out 
 of this phase of the Kantian doctrine. Kant thought of a mind 
 which gives laws to nature. But these laws which the mind 
 gives to nature are simply the forms of the mind, the molds into 
 which experience inevitably falls. If the mind has a certain 
 form, then its experience must take on that form. We postulate 
 freedom on the part of the individual, but we cannot know it. 
 We cannot know ourselves in our freedom. We cannot help 
 postulating that we are free, but our knowledge of ourselves is 
 always a knowledge of cause and effect. For example, if a person 
 considers one of his acts, he inevitably explains it in terms of the 
 reasons for his conduct, and those reasons are expressed in terms 
 of his motives. One's explanation itself is one which seems to 
 wipe out the freedom which he attaches to his own conduct. One 
 feels responsible for one's acts, and yet they are explicable in 
 terms of cause and effect. This is a paradox, one of the antino- 
 mies that Kant says we cannot avoid. One does not, then, give 
 laws to nature in the sense that the self is the source of them. 
 The laws are already there, embodied in the mind itself — not in 
 the empirical self, the self which is the concern of psychology, 
 but in the one that ha^_to be postulated as lying back of the 
 forms, a self which is freeO 
 
 In other words, the problem that lies back of skepticism and 
 of the empirical school, and that to which Kant gave his critical 
 
 [77]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 answer, was met by the romanticists by the indentification of the 
 object of knowledge and the very process of knowledge in so far 
 as that was found in the self. Kant had to postulate that the 
 self must be a thing-in-itself; or, at least, he had stated that this 
 was a postulate that conduct involved. All our conduct in- 
 volves the assumption that the self is a cause, and that the con- 
 duct which results from this cause is accompanied by a sense of 
 obligation. Obligation implies freedom, and freedom implies 
 causation on the part of the self. But, from Kant's standpoint, 
 this self could not enter into the field of knowledge; it could be 
 only a postulate. 
 
 In dealing with this problem, the Romantic scho ol wen t back 
 to the experience of a self as involving itself as an obj ect. This is 
 the experience which corresponds to the reflexive mode to which 
 I was referring. In that mode, you will remember, the self is 
 present as a subject only in so far as it is present as an object, 
 and is present as an object only in so far as it is present as a 
 subject. There cannot be one without the other. Our self-con- 
 sciousness involves both of these essential characteristics. If, 
 now, one can make this relationship of subject and object a 
 primary relation in experience, one more fundamental_than 
 those of substance and attribute, cause and effect, then it can be 
 said that we have, in self-consciousness, the self presented- as 
 both subject and object. 
 
 This relationship guarantees the reality of our knowledge. It 
 does this not simply in the sense that there are certain experi- 
 ences there, certain impressions and ideas, but in the sense that 
 there is a self there that finds an object in itself. That was the 
 position of the romantic idealist that distinguished him from 
 the position of Kant or of Descartes. /JCant affirmed that the 
 self was postulated as an ultimate entity. It was a reahty, but 
 it could not possibly be known. Descartes affirmed that the self 
 must exist because we think; and because we think, we must be. 
 But he did not posit an immediate experience of the self in this 
 thinking. It is to the experience of the self as such that the 
 romanticist goes back — that experience in which the self is the 
 
 [78]
 
 KANT ANB PHIL#S®PHIC ROMANTICISM 
 
 most real thing, the most poignant reahty in experience. Then 
 the romanticist undertakes to carry back all experience, at least 
 all cognitive experience, to this immediate experience of the self. 
 All other experiences flower out of this one. I 
 
 Now, the romanticist, on coming back to the experience of the 
 self, found not only the evidence of existence which Descartes 
 has signalized in his Cogito ergo sum^ that is, found evidence not 
 only of the ego or self, but also found in that self an object of 
 knowledge such as Kant affirmed could not be found through in- 
 trospection. It is this which gives the peculiar character to Ro- 
 mantic philosophy. It comes back to an experience in which 
 both subject and object are immediately given. In introspec- 
 tion — that is, in the introspection of the English empiricists, 
 Locke, Berkeley, and Hume^ — one is dealing only with states of 
 consciousness, with impressions and ideas, or sensations and 
 images, but not directly with the self. Hume undertook to show 
 that the empirical self is simply an association of these states 
 of consciousness. That is, it is not primary, but secondary. It 
 is a congeries of some importance, an importance that gath- 
 ers about the significance that comes from the body. This 
 self was analyzed by Hume into a set of relations, of associa- 
 tions. It was not an object of knowledge. That is, it was not 
 given as an object of knowledge in the process of knowledge, 
 and there was no way of reaching it, as knowledge, in that 
 process. The states of consciousness were those out of which the 
 self was built up; they were simply associated together into a 
 self. The self was not given first with the states dependent 
 upon it. The states of consciousness — that is, the impressions 
 and ideas — were present, and they became associated with each 
 other in a certain pattern which constituted the self. If you 
 undertook to analyze this group of impressions and ideas, you 
 saw that they were simply associated together as those im- 
 pressions and ideas which, when brought together, go to make 
 up a table, tree, or any other object. Kant took this same posi- 
 tion as far as the empirical self was concerned. Such an object 
 was simply the organization of our so-called inner experiences, 
 
 [79]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 although Kant said that these fall under the categories of sub- 
 stance and attribute, cause and effect. But these categories be- 
 long to the mind, they do not actually reveal the self as an 
 entity, as a composition of these impressions and ideas. 
 
 The Romantic philosophers, like their predecessors, came 
 back to the age-old problem of knowledge: How can one get 
 any assurance that that which appears in our cognitive experi- 
 ence is real? The skepticism to which we have referred had 
 shattered all the statements, all the doctrines, of the medieval 
 philosophy. It had even torn to pieces the philosophy of the 
 Renaissance. As we have seen, it had destroyed the substantial 
 structure which had been presented in such a magnificent 
 fashion by Spinoza. It had shattered the natural structure of 
 the world which the Renaissance science had presented in such 
 simphcity and yet such majesty, that causal structure that led 
 Kant to say that there were two things that overwhelmed him, 
 the starry heavens above and the moral law within. This pic- 
 ture of a world which was the expression of simple but universal 
 laws had also been shattered by the skepticism of Hume, and 
 the only antidote that Kant could present was the postulate of 
 conduct. 
 
 This is the old problem of assuring one's self of the reality 
 of one's cognitive experience, that our world_was not such^stuff" 
 as dreams were made of, that it was there as we know it, was 
 there again for this new philosophy to try its teeth upon. And 
 the romanticists approached it, of course, from the point of 
 view of the self, but a self which was not simply an associa- 
 tive experience. The self to which they came back was the p re- 
 supposition of such an experience, a self which was the most 
 real thing in the experience of the moment. The assurance was, 
 first of all, largely temperamental — an emotional experience. It 
 was the assurance that the adolescent has that he is the most 
 important element in the whole universe, an assurance which 
 leads him to test everything from the point of view of his own 
 judgment. It was that assurance, but it was something more 
 too. It was an assurance that was backed up by this discovery 
 
 I80I
 
 KANT AND PHILOSOPHIC ROMANTICISM 
 
 that one can, by taking the role of the other, come back upon 
 himself and secure himself as a given object of knowledge. It 
 was this, I say, which was the center of the Romantic phi- 
 losophy; and it was by using this point of view, this leverage, 
 that the romanticists undertook to deal with the problem of 
 knowledge. 
 
 It is interesting to contrast this philosophy with that of 
 Spinoza, because he exerted a profound influence upon thinkers 
 of this period who were not technically philosophers — such men 
 as Goethe, for example. Spinoza's philosophy was Uke the phi- 
 losophy of the Romantic school in that it was monistic. That is, 
 it came back to the conception of a single principle, a single 
 divine principle from which all that appears in experience must 
 be thought of as arising, or within which all that was found in 
 experience could be conceived of as placed and ordered, getting 
 its reality from this fundamental principle. The Spinozistic ap- 
 proach was from the point of view of substance. Spinoza's 
 EthicSy his principal philosophical work, starts with the defini- 
 tion of this divine principle as the causa sui, the cause of itself, 
 that which is responsible for itself, which does not look else- 
 where for the reason for its existence. This was conceived of as 
 a fundamental substance which had an indefinite, infinite num- 
 ber of attributes, one of which was extension and another con- 
 sciousness, or thought, as Spinoza expressed it. I have brought 
 that out to show that the positions of subject and object are in i 
 these different respective philosophies. Spinoza's conception is( 
 as I have said, of a divine, substantial Being which exhibits itself / 
 in the form both of extension and of thought. The world as we i 
 think it, as we are conscious of it, is the same God, under the as- 
 pect of consciousness, as is the world of extension. It is the same 
 reality from two points of view. There is then a necessary point- 
 for-point relationship between the two. That is the Spinozistic 
 doctrine. Here you see the relationship between a subject that 
 knows and an object that is known. That relationship of sub- 
 ject and object belongs to the attributes of the one substance. 
 The relation between them, then, must be a one-to-one rela- 
 
 fSil
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 tionship. That is, everything that appears in extension must 
 also appear in thought, and vice versa. Here is, among other 
 things, the beginning of the paralleHstic doctrine so widely used 
 in psychologies of today. But the subject-object relationship is 
 one that follows from the attributes of this substance. ] Sub- 
 stance and attribute have to be accepted, first of all, as the 
 fundamental character of reality; and it follows from this that 
 there should be a mind that knows an object, but it is the same 
 substance expressed both in the mind and in the obje^.l 
 (if one wanted to make a statement to bring this out from a 
 more concrete psychological standpoint, it would be a distinc- 
 tion between the sensation and that which is sensed, or what 
 modern psychology refers to as the "sensum," and the sensation 
 as the sensing. We can take it from either approach, either as 
 that sensed or as the sensing. In somewhat the same fashion 
 we may say that Spinoza conceived of this fundamental reality 
 both as that which is extended, and as that of which we are con- 
 scious. Both are the same substance. 
 
 The romanticist comes back to a different form of experience, 
 that which is referred to in grammatical construction, as I have 
 pointed out above, as the reflexive mode. In this mode of ex- 
 perience we have both the subject and the object given in the 
 same process. Then, seemingly at least, we have something of 
 which we can be sure. If we know ourselves, we seem to have a 
 case of knowledge which can be depended upon. It is going back 
 in one sense, of course, to Descartes' syllogism or inference, "I 
 think, therefore I am." But Descartes was simply assuring him- 
 self of the existence of himself. What the romanticist is doing is 
 assuring himself of the existence of the object of his though^ In 
 his thinking, Descartes started off from the knowledge that he 
 existed; but whether that which he thought about existed was 
 another question, and he had a long metaphysical probe before 
 he got an answer to that question which satisfied him, and 
 which, incidentally, has not satisfied most philosophers who 
 have succeeded him. All the romanticist maintained was 
 that this attitude to which I am referring is an attitude that 
 
 [82I
 
 KANT AND PHILOSOPHIC ROMANTICISM 
 
 assures him, not only that he exists in his own thinking, but 
 also that the object of his thought exists, or that not only he 
 exists in his consciousness but the object of his consciousness 
 also exists. Where Descartes could assure himself simply of the 
 existence of consciousness itself in the process of self-aware- 
 ness, the Romantic philosopher assured himself of the exist- 
 ence of that of which he was conscious. Not only the think- 
 er that thinks, but also that about which he thinks, exists 
 in this reflexive mode. For Descarte s, I am conscious and there- 
 fore exist; for the romanticist, I am conscious of myself and 
 therefore this self, of which I am conscious, exists and with it 
 the objects it knows. The object of knowledge, in this mode at 
 least, is given as there with the same assurance that the thinker 
 is given in the action of thought. 
 
 If one can make this reflexive situation the central position 
 in one's philosophy, if one can come back immediately to the 
 consciousness of self instead of to substance and attribute, one 
 can say that this consciousness of self is at the center of the uni- 
 verse. In this, one has, so to speak, a test — a philosopher's 
 stone — by means of which one can determine what is given in 
 knowledge. It was, of course, a very sympathetic attitude for a 
 Romantic age.CThat is just what a romanticist does. All values 
 are those whicnTiefeels as a part of himself. Out of this ex- 
 perience, in which the mind, the soul, the individual, is both 
 subject and object, the romanticist builds a universe. The self 
 of this mode becomes the assured center of the universe, that 
 out of which the world is to be buHp^ 
 
 I have just pointed out the elements of this identification be- 
 tween the self and the not-self. The very unity is assumed in 
 our experience. It is a unity which comes from the very process 
 of experience. The latter may be composed of an indefinite 
 number of diff'erent elements, and yet it appears as a unit, 
 organized and related with reference to our own organism. 
 Thus, the very unity of the object is the unity of the self. The 
 great sphere of the heavens is a projection of the sphere of the 
 eye; the straight line is a projection of the line of vision; our 
 
 [83]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 sensuous world is the structure of our very process of sensation. 
 We cut out, so to speak, the world in which we are to act. The 
 content of perception is taken back to the content of our own 
 sensation; the organization and content of the object can be 
 taken back to the self. Yet, the perception is not the sensation; 
 the object is not the self. In fact, the self can appear in experi- 
 ence only in so far as there is a not-self which yet has this very 
 content and form of the self. As I have been saying, the funda- 
 mental opposition to which these romantic idealists came back 
 was this opposition between subject and object, with the as- 
 sumption of a fundamental identity between them. The self and 
 the not-self are opposed to each other, and yet they are identi- 
 cal. Whether you take it from the point of view of morahty, as 
 Fichte did, or from the point of view of the artist's intuition, 
 with Schelling, or from that of thought, as Hegel worked it out, 
 there is always this opposition between the self and the not- 
 self; and yet underneath this opposition lies the assumption of 
 their identity. 
 
 84
 
 CHAPTER V 
 THE ROMANTIC PHILOSOPHERS— FICHTE 
 
 WE HAVE looked at the movement which we have 
 been discussing, namely, Romantic idealism, from 
 the point of view of its philosophic background, that 
 is, Kant's critical philosophy. We have looked at it also from 
 the standpoint of the political revolution, which failed in its 
 first undertaking. The after-effect of this revolution was to 
 emphasize the self-consciousness of the individual of the period. 
 In the first place, Rousseau had undertaken to find in man the 
 principles upon which he could reconstruct the state, substitut- 
 ing a rational form of the state for the arbitrary form which be- 
 longed to the medieval system. This, as we have seen, proved 
 an immediate failure, and the Napoleonic imperialistic regime 
 came in to take the place of this attempted rational state. I 
 have said that the effect of this was to throw individuals back 
 upon themselves. Theoretically, they undertook to go back to 
 the old regime. And, returning to the regime from the stand- 
 point of their own self-consciousness, they discovered in it what 
 they had not discovered before, namely, what is called its "ro- 
 mantic tang." They discovered the medieval period and all the 
 fascination of its pageantry, of the characteristic figures of the 
 period — the knight-errant, the saint, the magician, and the 
 learned man — and they discovered the adventure that went 
 with it. They went back into that old pageantry with a fasci- 
 nation which it had never had for them before. That is the 
 romantic phase of the movement, this return to the old world 
 from the point of view of the new self-consciousness. 
 
 On the philosophical side, this meant the return to the old 
 rationalistic world, especially as Kant had left it, from the point 
 of view of the self regarded as a thing-in-itself. Just, as in some
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 sense, this older world was reconstructed from the point of 
 view of their romantic imagination, so a return was made to the 
 transcendental philosophy of Kant from the point of view of 
 Fichte's self, the self of ScheUing, and that of Hegel, the ro- 
 mantic self which was identified with the Absolute Self, in which 
 individuals were conceived as mere finite expressions of this 
 larger Self. An attempt was made to deal with the problem 
 that philosophy presented from this standpoint. And we can 
 find that out of which this problem arose, or at least the ma- 
 terials it used, in Kant's antinomies. 
 
 Those antinomies represented for Kant the attempts of the 
 mind, its reason and understanding, to go beyond experience, 
 beyond the phenomenal world, to a noumenal world which it 
 was necessary for Kant to postulate. Every attempt of that 
 sort, according to Kant, meant an antinomy, a contradiction 
 in the terms that were used. For him these antinomies served 
 as the sign of warning that the mind had got beyond the limit 
 of its own legitimate use. The only path, as Kant saw it, by 
 means of which one could leave the field of experience, with its 
 fixed forms, was through the postulates of conduct. Here one 
 did not profess to know, in that one knew that one could not 
 know; but, nonetheless, one postulated a world of things-in- 
 themselves, and particularly postulated a free will, that is, a 
 self that is free and which could, for that reason, assume obliga- 
 tions. 
 
 The Romantic idealist started from this postulate not as a 
 postulate but as something which is directly given in experience 
 — not only given in the sense of obligation, which Kant recog- 
 nized, but given also in conduct, in the experience of freedom. 
 Romanticism also recognized antinomies, that is, it recognized 
 that the passage from the conduct of the self, this free self, over 
 into the field of experience took place over contradictions or op- 
 positions. 
 
 There are three attempts to deal with the problems to which 
 this situation gives rise — those of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. 
 In a certain sense these represent a progression, a development. 
 
 [86 1
 
 THE ROMANTIC PHILOSOPHERS— FICHTE 
 
 That of Fichte is an attempt to solve the problem of the self 
 and its object in terms of moral experience; Schelling deals with 
 it from the point of view of aesthetic or artistic experience; and, 
 most fundamental of all, Hegel deals with it in terms of logical 
 experience, the experience of thought. 
 
 In a certain sense, there is an advance in these three under- 
 takings. The common problem is that of bringing the world 
 which seems to be independent of the self into the experience of 
 the self. It is quite true that in any self-experience we have both 
 subject and object. But it does not follow that the experience 
 that one has of one's self is veritable. One is often deceived in_ 
 regard to himself. This is especially true in a romantic mood. 
 But at least the self is there as an object in experience. One 
 senses himself as there, and he is there in the attitude which he 
 has at the time. The object is there, and the subject is there. 
 The two are brought together./But now the problem arises, 
 can that mode be used to bring over into the self the world 
 which is seemingly not the self? Can the world which is inde- 
 pendent of the self be brought into its self-experience? The ex- 
 perience which we depend upon for the direction of our conduct, 
 that which we call "objective," has to do with things that are 
 not ourselves. We have to find out about them. They are in 
 some sense foreign to us. We have to learn their ways; learn 
 what nature is, what its laws are. CarLthis world of reality out- 
 side of uSj^ the world with which we have become acquainted, 
 be brought into this relation of subject and object which we have 
 in self-consciousness? This, I say, was the problem of the ro- 
 mjinticisti^.j This was the problem, the adventure which called 
 these thinkers. Given a subject and an object of knowledge in 
 the self-experience itself, can one go out to the great universe 
 that dominates the self, that precedes and antedates it, that 
 outlasts it, that is so independent of it, and capture that uni- 
 verse and make it a part of one's own self-experience? 
 
 The Romantic idealists came back to the process of the self. 
 We have seen the background of this. The self was looked at 
 not as a static affair; it was not conceived of in the medieval 
 
 [87I
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 sense as a soul that was born into the world with the body and 
 changed the body, a self that was endowed by a divine fiat. 
 Rather, the self was looked upon as a certain process, something 
 that is going on. 
 
 The first characteristic of this process which Fichte laid stress 
 upon was that it involved a not-self. The very existence of the 
 self implies a not-self; it implies a not-self which can be iden- 
 tified with the self. You have seen that the term "self" is 
 a reflexive affair. It involves an attitude of separation of the 
 self from itself. Both subject and object are involved in the self 
 in order that it may exist. The self must be identified, in some 
 sense, with the not-self. It must be able to come back at itself 
 from outside. The process, then, as involved in the self is the 
 subject-object process, a process within which both of these 
 phases of experience lie, a process in which these different 
 phases can be identified with each other — not necessarily as the 
 same phase but at least as expressions of the same process. This, 
 you see, makes a different thing out of knowledge than does the 
 copy theory. 
 
 The copy theory of knowledge goes back to ancient thought. 
 It assumes that the object impresses its form on the mind. A 
 favorite analogy, of course, is from vision. In some way the form 
 of the object impresses itself on the retina, and from the retina 
 on the mind itself. The camera obscura of the eye has served 
 unwittingly on the part of philosophy as determining knowledge 
 from the impressions of experience. As Aristotle thought of it, 
 the form of the thing in some way floated through the eye into 
 the mind. It impressed itself there on the mind. Sometimes the 
 mind was spoken of as a wax tablet on which the form was im- 
 pressed. This is an analogy of which the empiricist made use. 
 It is a static theory of knowledge. Knowledge is simply the re- 
 ception of a certain form impressed upon the mind. The object 
 in this case does not necessarily involve the subject. It involves 
 the mind as something on which it can be impressed. As far as 
 the doctrine is concerned, that mind might be subject or not. 
 
 The first attack made upon the problem, the one made by
 
 THE ROMANTIC PHILOSOPHERS— FICHTE 
 
 Fichte, was through the development of the Kantian principles 
 into the philosophy of romanticism. Specifically, he utilized the 
 moral experience which was the center of the Kantian meta- 
 physics. In this moral experience, as we have seen, the individ- 
 ual identifies himself with his duty. In this philosophy Fichte 
 took a step beyond Kant. Kant never got beyond the formal 
 character of conduct. Our conduct is moral, he says, in so far as 
 it is universal. We test it by seeing whether or not we can make 
 a universal law out of the maxim of our act. The Fichtean posi- 
 tion is one that goes beYQnd this and identifies the self with the 
 task to be performed. fThis Fichte presents as the reality of the 
 moral experience — that one finds before him something to be 
 done and then, in the doing, finds himself identified with it. It 
 is not only a task: it is his task. He is involved in it. And the 
 accomplishment of the task, the doing of the duty, realizes the 
 individual. It is just in so far as one does what he has to do 
 that he becomes really moral. It is only in so far as he identifies 
 himself with an undertaking that he achieves himself. We speak 
 of this process as the "development of character," and we speak 
 of "character" as the core of one's personality. Now, character 
 is attained only in so far as one does identify himself with the 
 situation which presents itself before the moral vision. Selfhood 
 is attained in a process in which the individual identifies him- 
 self with his task. The individual realizes himself in that 
 processT^ 
 
 This is the point of approach in Fichte's philosophy. For the 
 individual the world is always a task to be accomplished. It is 
 not simply there by chance, as something that just happens. 
 It is there because one realizes it as a field for one's endeavors. 
 It is not a world simply in so far as there are sensations, in so 
 far as there is the movement of masses of bodies. It is a world, 
 a real thing, just to the extent that one constructs it, that one 
 organizes it for one's action. The objects about one are means 
 of conduct. They take on meaning in proportion as one uses 
 them as means. The ground is something to tread upon. The 
 objects about one are all implements. The universe is a field of 
 
 [89I
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 action. It is organized only in so far as one acts in it. Its mean- 
 ing lies in the conduct of the individual; and when one has built 
 up his world as such a field of action, then he realizes himself as 
 the individual who carried out that action. \That is the only- 
 way in which he can achieve a self. One does not get at himself 
 simply by turning upon himself the eye of introspection. One 
 realizes himself in what he does, in the ends which he sets up, 
 and in the means he takes to accomplish those ends. He gets the 
 rational organization out of it, sees a relationship between 
 means and ends, puts it all together as a plan; and then he 
 realizes that the plan of action presented in this situation is an 
 expression of his own reason, of himseljll And it is not until one 
 has such a field of action that he does secure himself. This 
 process, according to Fichte, is what is continually taking place. 
 The self throws up the world as a field within which action 
 must take place; and, in setting up the world as a field of action, 
 it realizes itself. 
 
 This is, of course, just putting into philosophical form the re- 
 discovery of the medieval period as that in which the self could 
 imaginatively act and then come back upon itself. In this the 
 process is carried out in a dramatic fashion, under an aesthetic 
 mood. Fichte raises it to a process within a moral world in 
 which the individual organizes the world into a field in which he 
 must act. 
 
 . However, the problem is not yet solved. It is true that the 
 meaning which our world has does lie in what we are going to 
 I do with it. The meaning of the world is not to be found in its 
 atoms and molecules, in its electrons. Their framework, whether 
 they shall take on the form of trees or of men, depends upon the 
 experience of those who inhabit the world. You can look on it as 
 just a congeries of electrons, but that does not make the universe 
 that we inhabit. All the meaning of Hfe is something that de- 
 pends upon living beings, upon conscious beings, beings with 
 eyes that paint the world in its colors, with ears that give it its 
 resonances. It is this world that arises out of the individuals 
 that live in it. And yet, this world of physical things is there, 
 
 [90]
 
 THE ROMANTIC PHILOSOPHERS— FICHTE 
 
 and it is there seemingly before the self comes into existence in 
 it. In fact, it seems to be a condition for the existence of the self. 
 Fichte simply assumed that the Absolute Self, which is the or- 
 ganization of all selves, built up such a world, set it up as the 
 field of endeavor, that it might realize itself. But there is an in- 
 dependence about this world. It is the scene of endeavor, but 
 still it is a scene that has to be given before endeavor, in order 
 that the latter can take place. Our scientific picture of the world 
 is independent of the individual who inhabits it. He comes into 
 it, and it may be the scene of his endeavor. It may take on his 
 values, the values of society, but still it is there in advance of 
 him. It does not seem to be dependent upon him in any way. 
 
 This was the period in which evolutionary thought first ap- 
 peared. It was presented first in the hypothesis of Lamarck, 
 later in that of Darwin. Thus, the conception was before men; 
 and that conception holds that man and all that man means — 
 his self-consciousness, his values — are dependent upon the prior 
 development of a physical universe — the appearance of con- 
 tinental masses which kept the earth from being completely 
 immersed. It is quite possible, quite conceivable, of course, that 
 the water might have covered everything. There is enough 
 water to cover the whole of the earth if the continents should 
 be plunged into the depths of the sea. Had this been the case, 
 man, of course, would not have appeared. What life there would 
 have been would be the vertebrates in the ocean, and perhaps 
 not even these. There might have been only unicellular forms 
 that float upon the surface of water. It would seem to be 
 simply by chance, then, that the world developed such a species 
 as man. After all, it is our scientific knowledge — the most clear 
 knowledge that we have — that presents man as an accident and 
 not as an essential product of the nature of the universe. 
 
 Of course, it is true that on the moral side man is the center 
 of the universe. The moral world is there because of man, for, 
 if there was no self-consciousness, there would be no morality, 
 no claim that one could make upon another, no society with its 
 contentions, customs, and laws. Morality is dependent upon 
 
 [91]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 man; and as long as Fichte remained within his moral phi- 
 losophy, he could conceive of the self as responsible for the 
 world. But when he attempted to make the development of the 
 world itself simply a phase of the moral experience of man, he 
 found himself in a clash with the surest knowledge that we have. 
 The attempt to build up science, knowledge, out of this moral 
 experience was not successful on Fichte's part. 
 
 Of course, Fichte had attempted this on the basis of the de- 
 velopment of a dialectical argument which goes a step beyond 
 what Kant called his "transcendental logic." Kant, you remem- 
 ber, said that there was an analytic logic that simply breaks up 
 an idea into its different parts and then affirms one of those 
 parts of the conception — for example, the conception of man as 
 having essentially an animal nature, and of that animal nature 
 as being, in its very essence, mortal. You cannot think of an 
 animal or of man without also thinking of mortality as a part 
 of them. That, says Kant, is the pure analytic process, a process 
 in which you are merely confirming an idea of an object which 
 already belongs to it in the very conception of the object itself. 
 If you say, "Socrates is a man," you already state, in the con- 
 ception of Socrates as a man, the idea of mortality. But, Kant 
 contends, when we come to the sort of judgment with which he 
 started, that is, the judgments that we find in the axioms of 
 Euclid, we come upon judgments that are of a different type. 
 Kant's illustration was of a straight line being the shortest 
 distance between two points. You can analyze the idea of a 
 straight line as much as you want and you will not find in it the 
 idea of the shortest distance between two points. This latter is 
 something added to the former idea; and Kant asked how such 
 judgments, which he called "synthetic judgments a priori," 
 could be formed. It is easy enough, he said, to see how we can 
 form empirical judgments involving something new. You find 
 out something about your friends, you add to your ideas about 
 them through experience; but that is not the process of syn- 
 thetic judgments a priori but of synthetic judgments a pos- 
 teriori. That is, they are empirical judgments, in which we find 
 
 [9^1
 
 THE ROMANTIC PHILOSOPHERS— FICHTE 
 
 something that we did not find before, but something that has 
 been given through experience. But judgments such as the 
 Euclidian axioms are judgments that stand at the beginning of 
 your science. You have them as postulates with which you can 
 start. Kant's explanation of this is in the forms of the mind 
 which determine the nature of our experiences. They are, so to 
 speak, the capital with which our science operates. These forms 
 are given in advance of experience and make such synthetic 
 judgments a priori possible. Now this sort of logic Kant dis- 
 tinguishes from the other analytic type by calling it transcen- 
 dental. Thus we can affirm everything of our experience which 
 belongs to the structure of the forms of the sensibility and of the 
 understanding. At least, Kant thought so. He was quite sure 
 that he had the whole structure of our possible experience, that 
 he had anatomized the whole of our experience and could show 
 just what its form was and must continue to be. But this de- 
 scription is static. According to it, the forms are all there and 
 nothing is added to them. They do not require any process of 
 development. 
 
 Fichte's world was not one of static forms. It was a world in 
 which there was opposition between the self and a not-self which 
 took the form of a task that had to be done, an obstacle that had 
 to be overcome^ He undertook particularly to show that moral 
 conduct consists in the assimilation of the not-self to the self. 
 He assumed that the self set up, posited, a world that was a 
 not-self and that this not-self had to become the self. That is 
 the antimony which Fichte says has to be overcome in moral 
 conduct. This is the central point in his position. The very 
 thing that we feel we must do is the thing that seems foreign to 
 us. It represents interests which we do not recognize, which are 
 not our own. And yet we feel the moral necessity of making 
 them our own. Effort that has to be expended is effort not 
 simply in doing something but effort expended in making some- 
 thing one's own interest which at first is not an interest. And 
 yet one recognizes that this interest which is not one's own 
 ought to be a part of one's self. One has certain obligations to 
 
 [93]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 the group to which he belongs. These are duties which really 
 make him a part of the community. They cannot be divorced 
 from the person. He is a free member of the community, but 
 on the condition that he exercises the rights and the duties of 
 citizenship. It is this that makes him a free member of the com- 
 munity. There could not be any community unless the indi- 
 vidual did do his duties, and yet he finds them to be a nuisance. 
 He does not want to take the trouble to vote, to enter into a 
 campaign. He wants to do other things that he feels are identi- 
 fied with himself, things which he is interested in doing. And 
 yet he wants to be a member of a democratic community, and 
 he wants to have the rights of citizenship, with all that citizen- 
 ship means. That is something which is not the self and yet 
 which is essential to the self. That is the attitude which we all 
 recognize as appearing in our moral life. Moral conduct con- 
 sists in so assimilating this obligation that it becomes a real 
 interest of the individual and not just a disagreeable duty. It is 
 to that phase of the moral life that Fichte comes back in en- 
 deavoring to present this view of his in regard to the nature of 
 the self, namely, that it constantly transcends the not-self which 
 is to be made part of the selTT ^ 
 
 The antinomical contradiction is there, but it is in a different 
 form from the Kantian one which indicates the limits beyond 
 which knowledge cannot go. Fichte says the contradiction rep- 
 resents an actual step in the development of reality, of the 
 self. The self grows by overcoming those obstacles, by mak- 
 ing them its own interests. That assumption that reality is a 
 process of development, the development of the self, is the first 
 step in the idealistic dialectic. This is what reality is. And this 
 development takes place over obstacles or contradictions. 
 
 Fichte can, of course, point to other phases besides that moral 
 phase to which I have just referred, but this is the one that is 
 central to his position. He can point particularly to the very 
 nature of the self. The self is a type of experience which we at- 
 tain only by becoming, in a certain sense, not-selves. That is, 
 we cannot get the experience of ourselves as selves except in so 
 
 [94]
 
 THE ROMANTIC PHILOSOPHERS— FICHTE 
 
 far as we take the attitude of another and regard ourselves from 
 that point of view. There may be the experience of pleasure, of 
 pain; there may be the presence of colors and sounds about us; 
 and yet these do not become ours in the sense that we recognize 
 them as ours unless we can in some sense distinguish ourselves 
 from other selves. We have to realize ourselves by taking the 
 role of another, playing the part of another, taking the attitude 
 of the community toward ourselves, continually seeing ourselves 
 as others see us, regarding ourselves from the standpoint of 
 those about us. This is not the self-consciousness that goes with 
 awkwardness and uneasiness. It is the assured recognition of 
 one's own position, one's social relations, that comes from being 
 able to take the attitude of others toward ourselves. We cannot 
 recognize our rights in demanding them of others without being 
 ourselves in their place and recognizing their rights. W^e have to 
 put ourselves in place of the other to recognize the self. Here 
 again Fichte can come back to a character of the self which in- 
 volves a not-self. There must be a not-self in order that the 
 self may exist. 
 
 CFichte's idealism, like that of others of this Romantic ideal- 
 istic school, is what is called "Absolute Idealism." That is, it 
 assumes that there is an Absolute Self of which our selves are 
 mere finite expressions. We have seen that, for Kant, the con- 
 ceptions of the infinite and the finite represent one of the antin- 
 omies or group of antinomies that indicate the limits of our 
 possible knowledge. For Fichte it represents the relationship 
 between the finite self and the Absolute Self. He said that the 
 self could not posit itself as a finite self without at the same 
 time positing an infinite, unconditioned, and Absolute Self. To 
 posit one's self as finite involves identifying one's self with the 
 Absolute. As Fichte expressed it in a picturesque way, 'T cre- 
 ate God every day." It is the very experience of realizing one's 
 self as a finite self that involves the assurance of the identity 
 or centering of the self in the Absolute Self.'^ 
 
 Fichte lived during the early part of the nineteenth century, 
 when Germany was under the domination of Napoleon. The 
 
 [95]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 French were in control, and naturally there arose among the 
 Germans a national sense of opposition to this invasion of the 
 outsider within their borders; and there arose among them the 
 national movement which finally, in conjunction with the move- 
 ments in other countries, drove the French out of Germany and 
 led to the defeat of Napoleon. It was a great national and moral 
 movement in Germany, and Fichte was one of its spokesmen. 
 In Berlin, where he had been appointed professor of philosophy, 
 he delivered a series of addresses to the German people, in which 
 he summoned them to their task. They were very stirring ad- 
 dresses, and called out echoes throughout the whole of Ger- 
 many. They emphasized a new type of national life, one that 
 was not expressed in the relation of the Hohenzollerns to their 
 subjects. 
 
 Frederick the Great was the man who had, up to this time, 
 administered Prussia from the top down. He was a monarch 
 who recognized himself not simply as monarch of the state but 
 also as the state. His control was absolute. He took his sub- 
 jects with him into various wars in which they had no immediate 
 interest and which were of doubtful moral character — those 
 wars in which Poland was defeated, in which Prussia seized 
 Silesia from Austria, wars of the Austrian Succession, wars in 
 which Frederick was fighting for the aggrandizement of his 
 house and of his kingdom, but wars which were not an expres- 
 sion of a popular movement. They were not wars that grew out 
 of an expression of a demand of the people for an interest with 
 which they identified themselves. The immediate successors of 
 Frederick did not have his genius or his power; but, nonetheless, 
 there grew up under the conditions of the new period an ideal 
 of a national life that could defend itself against the invader and 
 estabhsh itself again on its own, new national basis. It was out 
 of this movement that the nation at arms arose. The army of 
 Frederick the Great was an army which he chose from among 
 the people for the purposes of his miHtary undertakings. This 
 new movement was the one in which universal military service, 
 with the nation as such in arms, appeared for the first time. 
 
 [96]
 
 THE ROMANTIC PHILOSOPHERS— FICHTE 
 
 Furthermore, there was behind this movement a recognition 
 that there must be intelhgence, a popular inteUigence, one that 
 did not come simply from the populace up or from the top 
 down, but which permeated the nation as a whole. With this 
 military service went popular education; and for a few intensive 
 years there grew up in Prussia a national Hfe which made an 
 entirely different power out of it, one that was able to cope with 
 the genius of Napoleon and with his armies. 
 
 The immediate political and social background of Fichte, 
 then, was the war in which the western and eastern states drove 
 Napoleon out of Germany and Austria. With this background, 
 Fichte appealed very vividly to the national sense of the Prus- 
 sians, presenting this task to them as one which the people 
 themselves had to undertake. He pictured a German nation 
 which had certain definite duties before it which it must meet, 
 but meet with intelligence, comprehension, with a recognition 
 that morality rests upon intelligence. It was distinctly a his- 
 torical situation in which the people had to create their own 
 approach, and create it in terms of a task which they had to 
 fulfil. They had to reaHze themselves in that task. It is, of 
 course, in such a movement of defensive warfare that, in the 
 past, a nation has come most completely to consciousness of it- 
 self, has achieved a national self-consciousness in fulfiUing such 
 a duty as that of meeting an enemy already within its borders, 
 an enemy already breaking down the organization of its own 
 state. Here, then, is a task which has to be accomplished, 
 something that has to be done, in the face of danger and suffer- 
 ing of every sort. And in that there is attained national self- 
 consciousness which does not exist under ordinary conditions. 
 Under the latter, we buy and sell, we carry out our usual social 
 processes. In a vague sort of way we all know that we are 
 members of the same community, but we are not conscious of 
 it. We find ourselves in more or less hostile relations with our 
 competitors, and we do not identify ourselves with the com- 
 munity as a whole. But in other moments, such as this of 
 which I have been speaking, when the community has to defend 
 
 [97]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 itself against an enemy that has already taken possession, 
 people get together in a common undertaking, identify them- 
 selves with each other, and get that larger self-consciousness to 
 which Fichte was appealing. This occurs in just that sort of a 
 situation which I have expressed metaphysically as the self 
 realizing itself in the not-self, finding its not-self in the duty 
 which it has to perform, and in doing that duty, in making it 
 its own, reaching a higher self-consciousness than it had before. 
 Warfare is not the only way in which that has been achieved in 
 the past, but it is one of the most common ways. It seems to be 
 the easiest way in which people can recognize themselves as 
 belonging to the same community, the same group. This they 
 achieve in that attitude of defense against a common enemy. 
 And it was just such a situation that lay behind Fichte and 
 which he put into his form of the Romantic philosophy. 
 
 This situation he conceived to be not only the very process of 
 national consciousness but also that of the universe itself. This 
 very not-self, this separation, so to speak, of the task from the 
 person who has accomplished it, is what Fichte comes back to, 
 to explain the world as something that is there over against the 
 self and which the self cannot control, or at least for which the 
 self does not seem to be responsible. [The moral situation to 
 which I have referred is one in which, to a certain extent, we do 
 create our own field in so far as we assume a certain task. But 
 the world itself is a world of physical things, is one which is not 
 the self. It is a not-self in a different fashion. The task which 
 one does not want to assume is a not-self. But that it is a task 
 at all is due to the fact that we accept it as a task. We accept the 
 universe. The moral universe, like the physical, is there because 
 we do accept it. If we did not have a moral attitude toward it, 
 it would not be there. But, seemingly, the physical world is 
 there anyway, and that was the problem that Fichte had to 
 work out philosophically.^ 
 
 How could he take this moral point of view over into the 
 situation in which the individual does not set up a not-self as 
 a task and then overcome it? How was he to identify this 
 
 [9«]
 
 THE ROMANTIC PHILOSOPHERS— FICHTE 
 
 subject-object relation with that of our cognitive experience, 
 with that of the world we are aware of about us? Can these two 
 be brought together? That was his problem. How could he take 
 our awareness of a world there independently of us and identify 
 it with this moral attitude in which the individual does set up 
 a task which, for the time being, hes outside himself but with 
 which he later identifies himself? That, as I say, was the task 
 of Romantic philosophy as Fichte presented it, or as it presented 
 itself to Fichte. He must make the subject-object relation as it 
 appears in our moral experience a relation of the knower to the 
 known, a relation between that which we sense and the organ- 
 ism which senses it, a relation between that which we think and 
 the mind that thinks it. Can one identify this relation with the 
 moral relation? Fichte undertakes to do this, and it is an un- 
 dertaking in which he was only partially successful. The picture 
 he presents of the world is that of a task, a picture of a not-self 
 which in a certain sense is foreign to the individual. It is some- 
 thing that has to be overcome, and, being overcome, is made a 
 part of the self. If, now, Fichte could conceive of the world in a 
 moral sense, he could conceive of it in some sense as the creation 
 of that self. 
 
 Remember how Kant left this problem? For Kant there was 
 a world of science, of knowledge. Of course, science is nothing 
 but exact knowledge. The world is determined by the very 
 characters which the mind has stamped on it. The mind gives 
 these laws not by choice but because they reflect its structure. 
 They are parts of its own structure; they are molds, so to 
 speak, in which experience falls when it comes to the mind. 
 But the mind does not give itself those laws in the same sense 
 in which a man regards himself as giving the character to his 
 act. Here he feels his own responsibility, for he recognizes 
 the act as coming from his own initiative. Thus he is responsi- 
 ble for his act in a way in which he is not responsible for the 
 laws of nature which are given in the forms of his sensibility 
 and of his understanding. 
 
 But Fichte conceived of the world as being essentially moral, 
 
 [99]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 not simply as something that is known. It has moral significance, 
 for it presents kself as a task, as an accomplishment that must 
 be carried outQif the self could be free, if it could have initiative 
 in its moral conduct, then, if the world was a moral world, it 
 could be the creation of the self. The self could be free in giving 
 its task, just as it is free in doing or not doing its task. And yet 
 the world is, of course, independent of any one finite individual's 
 self. That is, in some sense we find the world given. We are 
 born into it; we die, and it remains behind us. How is it possible 
 to conceive of the self as creating such a world ? From the moral 
 standpoint one does, in a certain sense, create his immediate 
 world. That is, one makes it his own task. One finds himself in 
 the midst of an immediate environment, something that is 
 there; but he organizes it from the point of view of his own 
 responsibility^ That responsibility may be infinitesimal as com- 
 pared to the'whole universe, but still that universe exists for 
 one as that for which he is in some sense responsible. He has to 
 get his day's work done. He has to select out and organize 
 this world about him in such a way that he can carry out 
 his task. The ground on which he treads, the means of trans- 
 portation which he selects, the building he enters, and the 
 apparatus that he uses are all organized by him with reference 
 to his particular function. It is only in so far as it is there, 
 organized in this way that he can act on it, that he can do his 
 duty. One is always organizing one's world with reference to 
 one's duty, with regard to the function which he has to carry 
 out. He looks at the world from the standpoint of the means 
 which he can make use of to carry out his function. That may 
 be a small part of the world, but for him it is the ground upon 
 which he can tread. Everything is, in his mind, organized with 
 reference to carrying out the act which is his own. 
 
 So much for the world so far as the particular individual is 
 concerned. If we extend this response and take in all the indi- 
 viduals in society, we can see that they can all, in some sense, 
 create the world in which that society lives, caUing out the 
 ideas that belong to that society. All men are, in some sense, 
 
 f loo 1
 
 THE ROMANTIC PHILOSOPHERS— FICHTE 
 
 organized in so far as they belong to a single society; and as that 
 society clears its land, sows its crops, builds its buildings, it cre- 
 ates a world in which it can definitely live, and each man has 
 his part in that society as a whole. 
 
 Now what the philosophical imagination of Fichte did was to 
 go beyond this conception which united man with society, and 
 to conceive of the man as an integral part of the universal Self, 
 that Self which created the universe. We are all of us, as St. 
 Paul says, parts of one another. That is true. We all of us have 
 content which belongs to us only in so far as we share the self- 
 hood of others. We see ourselves as others see us. The society 
 that we belong to gives us our peculiar selves. We belong to that 
 society. We are what we are because we belong to that society, 
 and yet that society is nothing but an organization of selves. 
 TNow, what Fichte did was to conceive of an Absolute Self which 
 IS just such an organization of all selves; an in finite Self which is 
 the organization of all finite selves. Then, just as society sets 
 its^faskis fnrtermsljf'tlie act of all its members, so this infinite 
 and Absolute Self sets the task for itself in terms of all the func- 
 tions of all the finite selves that go to make it up. The universe 
 as such is, then, the creation of this Absolute Self in the same 
 sense as cultivated areas and great metropolitan areas are cre- 
 ated by the society that lives in them. This Selfjxeates its own 
 world, and it creates it as a set of things to be donej Fields are 
 cultivated to be reaped, to grow the grain that can be harvested. 
 The means of transportation, the tasks that have to be carried 
 out on the part of the personnel, everything of this sort, is an 
 expression of the function of some member of society. Now 
 then, enlarge this conception so that you can conceive of an 
 Absolute Self that is made up out of an infinite number of differ- 
 ent selves, and the universe as the expression of that Self, as a 
 casting-up, so to speak, of a place in which that Self can act, as 
 the expression of the task which that Self has to carry out, and 
 you get Fichte's conception of an Absolute Self of which all indi- 
 viduals are merely separate parts. In this view we are all parts 
 of God. We each have a finite part in an infinite creative power. 
 
 [lOl]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 Organized in the one Self we, together with an infinite number 
 of other selves, create the universe. And for Fichte this creation 
 is moral, for he conceives of the world as an obligation, as a 
 task which the Absolute Self has to carry out, has to fulfil. 
 
 This, then, is the point of view from which Fichte built his 
 philosophy. And we have seen that it goes back to a point in 
 Kant's philosophy. Fichte assumed that the self is causal, pro- 
 ductive, creative. It is, however, in the moral realm that these 
 characteristics apply to it. Accepting Kant's two postulates, 
 that in the moral realm we determine our conduct and that the 
 mind, through its forms, determines the character of nature, 
 Fichte turned to the moral world and found it to be the field 
 of action. It is what it is in order that the self may act. And, 
 without going back to the metaphysics of it, we do find that 
 situation in our own experience to a very considerable degree. 
 When we make a moral decision, we have more or less definitely 
 determined the character of the situation. If a man, for ex- 
 ample, assumes that he is under obligation to undertake a cer- 
 tain duty in the community— that, for example, he should go 
 and be a watcher at the polls — he places this over against each 
 of the other of his different obligations. He has to relate them 
 all to one another. If he carries out this duty, he may place 
 himself in considerable danger. He has to consider what that 
 danger would mean. He has to relate it to his other obligations. 
 He has to consider, on the other hand, what his duties as a 
 citizen are. In doing all this he constructs a certain definite 
 field which has the form which in some sense he gives to it. 
 That is, those values as related to each other are values which 
 express the man. What he does will be an expression of the man 
 himself. If he is of a timid nature, he tends to avoid obligations 
 that come to him from outside, and prefers to let somebody 
 else carry on the public functions of the community; and the 
 chances are that he will construct the sort of situation in which 
 his own immediate interests will bulk larger than any others, 
 while those of the public will be given an insignificant character. 
 The sort of a world in which he will live will be very different 
 
 [ 102 ]
 
 THE ROMANTIC PHILOSOPHERS— FICHTE 
 
 from that of a man who recognizes his pubHc duties, who comes 
 forward even under conditions of considerable risk, stand- 
 ing on his own legs refusing to be jolted, taking the duties 
 that come with the occasion, and playing the part of a good 
 citizen. His world will be a different world from that of the 
 other. The comparative values which they give will make out 
 of their actions and out of the objects upon which they act two 
 very different sorts of situations. Each creates a definite field of 
 action by the attitude that he takes. 
 
 Now this is true, of course, in another sense in regard to our 
 sense perception. Our vision, our attitude, our contact ex- 
 periences, do determine in some sense the sort of world in which 
 we live; but over this we have no control. If we have eyes, we 
 live in a world of colors. If we are colorblind, these colors are 
 perhaps Hmited to only two. If we have islands of deafness, 
 there are certain parts of the sounding world that are shut off 
 from us. In the other case, the moral case, the man also de- 
 termines the sort of world he lives in. He builds up the world in 
 terms of his duties, his obligations, and thus makes it of one 
 sort or another. 
 
 It is to this sort of constructive character of the world that 
 Fichte comes back. And here, I can say in passing, his phi- 
 losophy branches off from Kant's, which was entirely formal in 
 character. Fichte recognizes this constructive character, as was 
 shown in the illustration above. A man builds up a world in 
 which the self-government of the community can take place, in 
 which the political rights of the individual are respected. There 
 are certain values which are identified with himself, and his 
 conduct tends to build up such a world as that. In this sense his 
 conduct is creative. What the situation is depends upon our- 
 selves. We may have the souls of rabbits and retire from every- 
 thing that involves risk, live in a little world which is secure 
 from danger; or we may have a sense of moral adventure and go 
 out to live in a broader, wider world^ It depends upon the indi- 
 vidual as to what kind of a world he fives m.J Fichte, in going 
 back to Kant's self as a creative power, identified that creative 
 
 [103]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 power with the moral impulse, the impulse to map out a world 
 which constitutes one's duty. 
 
 And here Fichte comes back to that moral self that I have 
 already referred to by way of illustration. The duty that arises 
 before a man at the time of an election is distinctly a not-self. 
 He does not want to take the time, run the risks, go to all the 
 inconvenience which the occasion requires. This is something 
 that distinctly lies outside of himself at the time. He is inter- 
 ested in his immediate environment, in an immediate occupa- 
 tion, and here is something which presents itself from outside. 
 For the time being, it is distinctly, definitely, not the self that 
 the man is up to that time. If he accepts this as a duty, builds 
 up this world in which he feels he ought to act, he is definitely, 
 perhaps, for the time being, unwillingly, identifying himself 
 with it. What it comes back to in the end is that a man cannot 
 keep his self-respect and not accept these obligations. He can- 
 not let somebody else do what he ought to do. He feels that he 
 has to identify himself with this particular situation. He has to 
 make it his own. This is definitely what takes place in such a 
 situation. First of all the task appears as a not-self, as some- 
 thing outside of himself. He has to come to terms with it. It is 
 disagreeable, foreign to his own immediate interests; but it is 
 just through recognizing it as, for the time being, foreign to his 
 own interests that he can get an idea of himself, that he can 
 come to a higher self-consciousness than he had before. He 
 comes to see himself as a person shirking his duties in the com- 
 munity, as a person "letting George do it," refusing to take 
 over the tasks that belong to him. He sees himself in this situa- 
 tion from the point of view of this not-self which he created 
 when he set up this particular task before him; and by identify- 
 ing himself with the not-self, he definitely becomes a larger, a 
 more effective self than he was before. 
 
 It is in that sort of a process that the individual recognizes 
 a not-self, and from the point of view of that not-self that he 
 recognizes the self that answers to it. Then, through the actual 
 doing of the duty, through the accompHshment of his task, the 
 
 [ 104 1
 
 THE ROMANTIC PHILOSOPHERS— FICHTE 
 
 individual becomes a larger self. Fichte assumed that that 
 process, a subject-object process, was the fundamental one in 
 the universe. Therefore, he was not concerned with the rela- 
 tion of substance and attribute. This dynamic process, which 
 is opposed to Kant's static account of the problem, Fichte found 
 in the moral experience of the individual. If a self is to be a 
 self, it must achieve this in the identification of itself with the 
 not-self, thus overcoming any opposition between the self and 
 that which lies outside of it. This is the fundamental process 
 of the universe from Fichte's point of view. In its duty the 
 self recognizes itself as a not-self, then it identifies itself with 
 the not-self and so becomes a larger and more effective self. 
 Thus, from Fichte's standpoint, the relation of the subject and 
 the object, in the moral sense, is the fundamental relation in the 
 universe. 
 
 Of course, the basic metaphysical relation is that of subject 
 and object. Fichte wanted to distinguish the philosophy of the 
 Romantic school from that of the philosophy which, in some 
 sense, largely influenced this movement, namely, that of 
 Spinoza. He found the distinction between these two in this: 
 for Spinoza, as has already been said, the fundamental relation 
 was that of substance and attribute, while for the Romantic 
 school the fundamental metaphysical conception is that of sub- 
 ject and object. Spinoza said that there could be but one sub- 
 stance. He defined substance as that which is the cause of 
 itself. From this definition there could be only one such sub- 
 stance. Fichte's philosophy too, like that of the other roman- 
 ticists, centers in the conception of one Ultimate Being; but 
 in this case it is described as an Absolute Self in which all finite 
 selves center. Fichte insisted that the self is created in its moral 
 conduct. But what reference has this to the universe? The 
 latter exists about us seemingly not as the result of our own 
 experience, of our creation. It is there in advance of us and will 
 be there when we are gone. It has an infinite extent, and we are 
 finite and ephemeral creatures. In what sense, then, can we be 
 its creators? 
 
 [105]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 The three different attempts made to answer that question 
 are those of Fichtej Schelhng, and Hegel. The first attempt was 
 a severely moral one. It does not, perhaps, present itself in the 
 guise of adventure, the romantic attitude. The justification 
 which Fichte gave for this attitude is that which I have been 
 presenting. We are under obligation to identify ourselves with 
 this world which is there before us. That is, the world exists as a 
 field of moral endeavor. The reason that it seems to be so inde- 
 pendent of us is that it is a duty, something that has to be done, 
 in a certain sense an obstacle to be overcome. But when the 
 duty has been done, then that which was foreign has been identi- 
 fied with the self. I have described this process in regard to the 
 duties of citizenship. The process is, of course, from Fichte's 
 point of view, a moral self-experience, that of meeting a world 
 which is not the self and making it the self. The duty which is 
 done ceases to be the not-self and becomes the self. And not 
 only is this true, but it is only from the point of view of what 
 was the not-self that one is able to realize the self. First of all, 
 one may regard one's self from the standpoint of disapproba- 
 tion. He sees the thing he ought to do and does not want to do. 
 He sees that he ought to love, but actually he hates. This is that 
 division which St. Paul presents so poignantly. The "other 
 man" has to be overcome in some sense. One looks at himself 
 from the standpoint of duty. And then there comes approba- 
 tion from the standpoint of the achieved self, the quiet con- 
 science which indicates that the individual, the self, is at peace 
 with himself. Thus it is revealed that it is only from the point of 
 view of the not-self that the individual can reach himself. It 
 is not simply that one grasps the world in making it himself, in 
 doing his duty, but that one grasps himself in identifying himself 
 with that duty. He gets a standard from which to judge himself 
 when he identifies himself with the duty he ought to do. Then 
 he can pass judgment on himself. When the duty is done, he can 
 be at peace. He has in this way identified himself with the 
 object. 
 
 It is not only an adventure in capturing the universe, so to 
 
 f 106I
 
 THE ROMANTIC PHILOSOPHERS— FICHTE 
 
 speak, and bringing it within the range of a self-experience, but 
 it is also an adventure in discovering one's self, a mutual ex- 
 perience both for the world and for the self. That is an experi- 
 ence which we go through with unaffected by the sense of duty. 
 It is a step beyond the position of Kant. You remember, Kant 
 sets up a categorical imperative. One must make the maxim for 
 one's act a universal law, and one must act solely from his sense 
 of respect for law, not from inclination. For Kant, immorality 
 is only that conduct which is motivated without this respect for 
 law, this sense of duty. We must do what we are to do from a 
 sense of duty. From Kant's standpoint, if an act is done from 
 inclination it is not moral. It is not necessarily immoral, but 
 it is non-moral. Epigrammatically, Schiller put it thus, "How 
 can I be sure if I am right in loving and assisting my friends? 
 If I do it from affection, I am doing it from inclination and may 
 be wrong. If I am to be sure, I must hate them. Then, at least, 
 I will know that when I assist them I do so from a sense of 
 duty." But the Romantic moraHst goes a step beyond Kant. 
 His doctrine is: So succeed in identifying yourself with your 
 duty that it becomes your inclination. Your friends are your- 
 self, and you can assist them with the real affection that goes 
 with friendship. It is true that, at least in moral experiences in 
 which there is a problem involved, we go through exactly such 
 an experience as this to which Fichte comes back, the experi- 
 ence, that is, in which the world takes the form of a task to be 
 performed. If it is to be done, then everything takes its rela- 
 tionship to that task. The whole thing is simply a field within 
 which the task is to be carried out. The world as it was, and 
 as it is to be, is there as the field in which this very disagreeable 
 thing has to be gone through with. It is a field of moral under- 
 taking and endeavor. Now, after the task has been performed 
 and we have come to realize it in terms of our own self, then this 
 attitude of separation, of division, is overcome and we do identi- 
 fy ourselves with the very interests that we have gone into. 
 
 [ 107]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 Take the situation, let us say, which is represented in the 
 experience of Father Damien, a Cathohc missionary who went 
 to the leper settlement on the Hawaiian Islands and lived 
 among them, identified himself with them. It is a picture, at 
 least to the outside world, of a person who is acting the part of 
 a martyr. He gave himself up to the case of those who had a 
 loathsome disease and shut himself up there practically for life. 
 In fact, eventually he died of the disease. This is a striking illus- 
 tration of a sensational sort of the way in which duty may ap- 
 pear to a man as something which is utterly foreign to all his 
 inclinations. He is called upon to identify himself with that 
 from which he instinctively withdraws. Duty is that which is 
 outside of everything identified with the individual himself. In 
 the medieval period one of the ways of laying up treasure in 
 heaven was to wash the feet of a leper. That is the sort of 
 situation in which, seemingly, the duty is something which is 
 just a task, which is not a part of the individual self. 
 
 Take another picture; that of the scientist who is intensely 
 interested in the study of leprosy. He is interested in identifying 
 the microorganism responsible for it. He welcomes the oppor- 
 tunity to go and work, and to live among the lepers, to carry 
 out this task of his. He is dealing with a disease to be overcome. 
 He carries with him the modern weapons by means of which 
 this dread villain can be overcome, and he goes joyously to the 
 battle. It is not a task which is put upon him that is not him- 
 self. It is a task he has sought. He has asked for the oppor- 
 tunity to go out there and live among the lepers. It is true that 
 part of his panoply is defensive. He takes the proper aseptic 
 precautions against the disease; but, nevertheless, here is the 
 task of caring expressed in a much more profound way than 
 Father Damien could. The enthusiastic research man is com- 
 pletely absorbed in his duty, in the thing he has to do. 
 
 Put the two figures together, so to speak. First of all, here 
 is something that has been done that is not one's self, and yet 
 one can enthusiastically identify one's self with it. It is that ex- 
 perience which is at first something outside of one's self but 
 
 f 108I
 
 THE ROMANTIC PHILOSOPHERS— FICHTE 
 
 which can become identified with one's self — such an experience 
 as that which Father Damien seized upon, which accomplishes 
 the goal of the Romantic philosophy/It is the experience of 
 bringing the world within the range of the experience of self- 
 consciousness, that experience in which the object of conscious- 
 ness has the position of the self of which consciousness is aware, 
 the position in which both subject and object are one. To the 
 extent that this can be attained, the romanticist can put the 
 subject-object relationship in place of that of substance and 
 attribute?) 
 
 \This is the sort of situation that could be presented at the 
 time of Fichte because Germany, in its fight with Napoleonic 
 imperialism, was going through the throes of coming to national 
 self-consciousness. The people as a whole were getting self- 
 conscious. They were learning their history, the history of the 
 political situation in which they lived, learning it in terms of a 
 nation which was subject, which had lost sovereignty over it- 
 self, which was a vassal of Napoleon. They came to realize the 
 duty that the nation owed to herself — to free herself from these 
 bonds. That duty had to come in terms of a national self- 
 consciousness, of seeing the situation in terms of being German. 
 And Fichte's addresses to the German people were calling them 
 to become aware of themselves in this way. He presented it as 
 their duty to do so. Fichte had a very vivid sense of that mis- 
 sion which the German people have so definitely carried on. 
 And he called on them to have that sort of clear, objective con- 
 sciousness which belongs to science, but to reach it through a 
 sense of national self-consciousness. How far those two can be 
 brought together is another question, but Fichte undertook to 
 arouse that national self-consciousness in terms of intelligence, 
 of scientific endeavor, as well as to arouse the people to a sense 
 of moral obligation:; There was, of course, even at this time, 
 more popular education in Germany than elsewhere in the 
 world and more satisfactory apparatus for bringing about popu- 
 lar training intelligence. Germany's political history had been 
 one in which she had been deprived of the national self-con- 
 
 [ 109]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 sciousness which had come much earlier to the French, the 
 Enghsh, and the Spanish. The Germans, having been deprived 
 of it, found this the time, at a somewhat belated period, for the 
 development of national self-consciousness. And they got it at 
 the moment of meeting the enemy, of throwing the enemy out 
 of their borders. It was at a proper time, then, that Fichte 
 presented this task of Romantic philosophy to the German 
 people. 
 
 [no]
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 
 THE ROMANTIC PHILOSOPHERS— SCHELLING 
 
 ^ HAVE been presenting the philosophical problem of Ro- 
 I mantic idealism. It was^n attempt to state the world 
 -^ of knowledge, the world as known, in terms of a subject- 
 object relation as that appears in the experience of the self. The 
 statement that Fichte gave of this was that of the moralist. 
 The view we are about to consider, that of Schelling, was given 
 from the point of view of the artist. In each case the self is in 
 some sense responsible for its object. In each you can show the 
 self realizing itself in the not-self. And the relation of the self 
 and the not-self can be identified with the realization of the self 
 in the not-self. One can identify that with the subject-object 
 relationship. That is, the self as the subject is responsible, and 
 the attitude for which it is responsible appears definitely as the 
 not-self, as the objects It is something that for the time being 
 is foreign to the self. In each case it is a task that has to be per- 
 formed. But when the task has been completed, it has been 
 made a part of the self. In the moral situation, which Fichte 
 emphasized, this relationship of subject and object is one in 
 which, first of all, the self realizes itself from the point of view 
 of a moral attitude, from the point of view of its obligations. 
 The subject-object relation, however, is one in which the task, 
 in being accomplished, becomes essentially a part of the self. 
 That is, the duty one does identifies that experience with the 
 self; the self has made it its own. 
 
 In the case of the artist, the attitude which Schelling empha- 
 sized, the stress lies in the recognition that the self discovers its 
 ideas, its meanings in the world, in its object. The artist finds 
 himself in the object. In this he finds the meaning of the world; 
 and, of course, at the same time he finds his own meaning. As 
 
 [III]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 an artist he is creative. He constructs his objects, his world, and 
 yet that which he works on in this construction is the not-self. 
 But it is constructed in terms of the idea, of the meaning, of the 
 artist. He stands over against his material. It is that in which 
 his meaning is to be found; he has to find his meaning, his own 
 ideas, in the material with which he has to work. Thus the ob- 
 ject is his own idea; it is his own construction. It is this atti- 
 tude which Schelling presented, with the constant insistence 
 that this meaning, this idea, is identical with the nature of the 
 self. 
 
 Before we can get a background for Schelling's approach to 
 this problem, we have to come back to another phase of the 
 Kantian doctrine and the romantic development of it. Kant, 
 you remember, assumed that our knowledge, in so far as it is 
 reliable, belonged only to the field of experience. He assumed 
 that we can make certain judgments which are necessary 
 and universal, but only for experience, and that we can know 
 nothing of that which lies outside of experience. But, if, 
 as he assumed, it is true, that there must be certain forms 
 of the mind into which our experience must enter, then we 
 can make certain judgments for all possible experiences. Just 
 because the forms are there which every experience must 
 take, we can say in advance that any experience whatsoever 
 will have these forms. So our necessary and universal judg- 
 ments are judgments for experience only; they do not hold 
 for what lies beyond experience. In particular, they do not 
 hold for the noumenal world which we assume but of which 
 we can get no knowledge. Kant said that if we try to go 
 beyond the field of possible experience we are made aware 
 of that fact by falling into contradictions, antinomies. If we 
 transcend the field of possible experience, we find ourselves 
 caught at once in these traps, traps which seem to be there to 
 keep the unwary phenomenalist from treading upon noume- 
 nalistic ground. 
 
 For example, if one tries to get back to a cause which shall 
 be the cause of everything — a first cause — he finds that he 
 
 [111]
 
 THE ROMANTIC PHILOSOPHERS— SCHELLING 
 
 reaches contradictions. When we extend our Hne of causation, 
 as we do in experience, we always find an antecedent cause for 
 every effect and we are always justified in assuming a prior 
 cause ad infinitum. That is as far as we choose to carry it. 
 Every event that appears in the field of experience is the result 
 of some previous event or group of events. Well now, if we 
 say there must be some cause that is the cause of this experi- 
 ence but which lies outside of it, some primal cause, we force 
 ourselves by this same logic to set up some antecedent cause, 
 because we have brought the system within the field of causal- 
 ity. W^e set up a first cause, and yet we have to postulate an- 
 other cause as the cause of the first cause. Thus we find our- 
 selves entrapped in one of Kant's antinomies. 
 
 Or, suppose we try to get behind our experiences to the 
 matter which is the ground of those experiences. As far as ex- 
 perience is concerned, we get hold of this matter and we crum- 
 ble it in our fingers, and then we take particles so small we 
 can hardly see them and bring them under the microscope. 
 Finally, we get to the limit of ultra-microscopic vision and the 
 imagination comes into play, and we imaginatively subdivide 
 these particles, and so on. We are moving toward a limit which 
 shall be the final element. That is, the world is made up of 
 particles; at least, that is the way we experience it. If it is any- 
 thing, it must be made up out of ultimate elements because 
 what we have in the universe as a whole is not a sum of nothings 
 but a sum of somethings. So, the final element that we reach 
 must be something; but if we come to the final element by way 
 of our crumblings, we can always continue the process of sub- 
 division indefinitely. To Kant, this shows the impossibihty of 
 getting beyond the field of possible experience. We can imagine 
 ourselves getting at smaller and smaller units, continually sub- 
 dividing matter with which we are dealing; and yet the assump- 
 tion of our experience is that things are made up of particles 
 that have some extension. Thus we find another antinomy 
 which results from the continued subdivision. We move toward 
 
 [113]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 the limit of the indivisibly small; and yet we cannot imagine a 
 particle so small but what it could still be divided. 
 
 And, if we undertake to move in the other direction to the 
 farthest Hmits of the stellar system, we find nebulae which, ac- 
 cording to our present system of measurements, are millions of 
 light-years away. And we will say that that represents the hori- 
 zon of our stellar world. But when we reach that boundary, we 
 find more space beyond. There is not any limit there, and yet 
 our movement is always toward a limit. But the limits which 
 we tentatively set up can always be transcended. And so we 
 reach another antinomy. 
 
 Then Kant finds still another antinomy involved in moral 
 conduct, namely, that all our conduct is explicable in terms of 
 cause and effect, that we express every one of our actions in 
 terms of the motives from which they spring, and yet we carry 
 a sense of responsibility for our conduct which implies that it 
 is not caused by these preceding events but through the volition 
 of a free self. So we have the impossibility, the antinomy, that 
 is due to the causal determination of our acts by preceding 
 events and at the same time the assurance of our own obliga- 
 tion, of the causal relation between ourselves and our acts. 
 Again, we assume that the world in which we are living is in- 
 telligible and ordered, and that this order which we find is due 
 to some plan or purpose. That assumption is deeply ingrained 
 and finds its expression in our views of nature. Since it is an 
 ordered affair, it must have been ordered by some intelligent 
 being. We set up the assumption of a deity, an intelligent 
 being, who is responsible for the world having the order, the 
 symmetry that it has. But when we try to come back to any 
 mind that itself has ordered such a world, we find that we have 
 put it outside of the very field of experience within which we 
 had located it. In order to understand such a being, we have 
 to locate it within the field of experience. But if we bring it 
 into this field, we have made God a part of experience and then 
 we must find a cause for God, since everything in experience 
 falls under the idea of causation. 
 
 I114]
 
 THE ROMANTIC PHILOSOPHERS— SCHELLING 
 
 ^ Jiant's general theory of these antinomies is that we are try- 
 ing to explain experience by getting outside of experience, and 
 yet every attempt to do that is an attempt lying within the field 
 of experience. We cannot be both inside and outside of experi- 
 ence at the same time. That attempt is, says Kant, the basis for 
 these antinomies. The moment we become involved in such a 
 fundamental contradiction we can be sure that we are trying 
 to know something that it is impossible for us to know, some- 
 thing that lies outside the limits of our possible knowledge. 
 When we reach such a point, we have to turn to faith rather 
 than to knowledge. And this faith, in Kant's sense, is the ac- 
 ceptance of the postulates of our conduict7\ 
 
 We find ourselves acting, and inevitably our action does 
 present a transcendence of our immediate experience. The 
 latter stops at the moment in which it is taking place. The next 
 moment that is added to it does not lie in experience, and the 
 reasons for it do not He in experience. We have to get outside 
 of our experience in order to reach the moment into which we 
 are always entering. We are always putting our foot out into 
 a world which is as yet not experienced. Now what is the world 
 that continually lies just beyond, just over the threshold of 
 experience and knowledge? The only thing that we can set up 
 in regard to it is the postulate of our continually acting within 
 it. The human being cannot see ahead. He cannot see what is 
 going to happen. The only thing he can do is to look back and 
 then into the future. Then he can say something of what the 
 future is going to be, for, if it is experience — that is, if he is going 
 to know it as a part of the field of experience — it will take on 
 the forms of his own mind. But what the actual content of it is 
 going to be he can never tell. Our insurance companies try to 
 make a guess at it, and they can do it within sufficiently de- 
 terminable hmits to put it on a business basis. Also, prudent 
 people can determine what, in general, their lives are going to 
 be. But our attitude toward the future is always of the sta- 
 tistical sort. That is, it is highly probable that things that have 
 happened in the past — like the rising and setting of the sun, the
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 experience of colors, sounds, and so forth — will happen in the 
 future. We think these are probable future occurrences, but 
 we have no evidence of it outside of this statistical estimate. 
 When things have happened, we can turn back on them and 
 analyze them; but what is going to happen is something of 
 which we can never get hold. There is always some sort of 
 novelty about what happens in the most commonplace sort of 
 an experience and the most ordinary sort of an action, always 
 a tang of novelty about whatever takes place. That novelty is 
 something which cannot possibly be predicted. We can predict 
 something that is going to be strange and novel, but its very 
 strangeness indicates that there are some features about it which 
 depend upon its entering into experience before they can be 
 known. Even what can be predicted — that you are going to 
 meet your friend at the station, that you are going to read a 
 book — always carries with it something which is different from 
 what could possibly have been anticipated. Novelty is always 
 present. There is something in respect to the future in regard 
 to which we can only make postulates. We assume that it will 
 be of an ordered, intelligible sort; and yet with every breath we 
 are stepping into a world that has a novel element in it. 
 
 And that novelty, I should say, extends with regard not only 
 to what we call the future, it also extends to the past. We speak 
 of the past as irrevocable. What has happened has happened; 
 what has been spoken has been spoken. But when we come to 
 historians, whose work it is to discover what actually was 
 spoken, what actually did happen, we find we get different ac- 
 counts. This is particularly true when we look at what took 
 place in the past from the point of view of two succeeding gen- 
 erations. We find that each generation has a different history, 
 that it is a part of the apparatus of each generation to recon- 
 struct its history. A different Caesar crosses the Rubicon not 
 only with each author but with each generation. That is, as we 
 look back over the past, it is a different past. The experience 
 is something like that of a person climbing a mountain. As he 
 looks back over the terrain he has covered, it presents a con- 
 
 [ii6]
 
 THE ROMANTIC PHILOSOPHERS— SCHELLING 
 
 tinually different picture. So the past is continually changing 
 as we look at it from the point of view of different authors, 
 different generations. It is not simply the future which is novel, 
 then; the past also is novel. The world is continually changing 
 in ways in which we cannot predict. Of course, we may be able 
 to predict that it will change, but we cannot tell what sort of 
 world it is going to become. For example, it would have been 
 impossible, on the basis of the Newtonian theory, to have pre- 
 dicted the doctrine of Einstein. It would have been impossible, 
 on the basis of the old biologies, to have predicted the Darwin- 
 ian hypothesis. No one could have predicted the Copernican 
 universe on the basis of the system set up by Ptolemy. The 
 world is continually blossoming out into a new universe, and in 
 this generation we have had fundamental conceptions brought 
 forward that entirely change the character of the physical uni- 
 verse. Take such experiences as those represented in the quan- 
 tum theory, a theory in accordance with which reality has to be 
 regarded as both continuous and discontinuous. You are 
 brought up against something that in the nature of the case you 
 cannot predict. But we go right on without any disturbance 
 from that front. We are pleased to have these revolutions take 
 place in our theories, gratified to have our universe fall down 
 so that it is replaced by a new one. We erect institutions called 
 universities and invite research professors at high salaries who 
 wreck our universities and substitute others in their place. And 
 it appears to us to be perfectly right and natural. 
 
 It seems as if the world which lies beyond our actual ex- 
 perience will continue to be just the sort of ordered world we 
 live in, and we hope a better one. These are the postulates of 
 our conduct. We are always postulating something about what 
 is going to happen, something which determines our own con- 
 duct. That is the attitude which Kant says we have to take in 
 regard to the world of reality. We cannot know things as they 
 are in themselves. The moment we reach the edge of our own 
 knowledge, we find ourselves caught in an antinomy. But if we 
 go ahead as we should go ahead, as, indeed, we must go ahead, 
 
 [117I
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 and act on the basis of the assumption that the universe is going 
 to continue to be rational and that we have our part to play in 
 it by being moral individuals, then we should take these postu- 
 lates which we make, but which we cannot prove, and make 
 them the basis of our action. This is, of course, the principle of 
 Kant's Critique of Practical Reason. 
 
 (^ow, Kant said there are certain postulates that go with this 
 assumption of our moral conduct. The first two I have indi- 
 cated already. First, we are responsible, moral beings and we 
 have to accept responsibility for our acts. Second, the world has 
 a rational character that transcends our experience. As I have 
 said, we take the world and set it in that rational order; and yet 
 we expect that someone in_ this generation or the next will set 
 it in an entirely different way( That is, there is some sort of 
 an order that transcends any statement that we can make of 
 our experience, that goes beyond it. We find ourselves in an 
 ordered world, a world which requires an ordering inteUigence. 
 These two postulates come from our conduct: our freedom of 
 will, together with our moral responsibility, and the intelligent 
 God that directs the world in accordance with reason, knowl- 
 edge. When we take this point of view, we always find that 
 the new world becomes rational. It is irrational from the point 
 of view from which we have taken it, outside of the field of 
 experience, but it is more rational than the other. 
 
 I Kan t's third postulate is rather curious. He said that, since 
 we are rational beings, our conduct must always be rational^ 
 You remember the form which he gives to his categorical rrfi- 
 perative: So act that you can make a universal law out of the 
 maxim of your act. This categorical imperative is practically 
 the only one that Kant can set up, but there are some others 
 that can be drawn from it. The test in question is, you see, that 
 we should make our conduct perfectly universal. If we are to 
 make it universal, it must not depend upon our inclinations. We 
 must not act for our own interest or for our own pleasure. We 
 must not act for our own immediate, particular ends, for our 
 conduct must always be universal and the motive for it must 
 
 [118I
 
 THE ROMANTIC PHILOSOPHERS— SCHELLING 
 
 be respect for law. Universality is the very core of Kant's 
 morality. But our inclinations, unfortunately, are not univer- 
 sal; they are very particular affairs. We may say to ourselves 
 that when we are hungry we should eat; but Kant's reason for 
 it must be that it is good hygiene, not because we particularly 
 want a beefsteak at the moment, not in order to get rid of a 
 gnawing sensation, not for the sake of pleasure or for the avoid- 
 ance of pain, but because it is our duty to eat. This is the only 
 reasQji why we should ever act on anything. 
 rWell, here we seem to have two parallel lines. One must al- 
 ways~act with reference to a universal, while one's inclinations 
 are always with reference to some particular. But, says Kant, 
 what we look forward to is moral perfection; and that can be 
 achieved only in situations in which the individual's own nature 
 seeks what his conscience tells him he ought to seek. Our nature 
 is made up of inclinations for particular things, and our con- 
 science tells us always to act in a universal fashion and from 
 respect for law. Now how and where are we going to bring these 
 parallel lines together? Only in infinity. Therefore our conduct 
 requires the postulate that we have an eternity within which to 
 reach that perfection. The very break in our nature between 
 the particularity of our inclinations and the universality of our 
 conscience, of our reason, seemingly presents to us an immortal- 
 ity of the self, of the soul, because only in eternity can we pos- 
 sibly bring together two such divergent tendencies as an in- 
 clination for particular satisfactions and a conscience that de- 
 mands that we should act only from respect for law. These 
 postulates, then, lead to freedom of the will, the existence of 
 God, and the immortality of the soul. But you see Kant's phi- 
 losophy reaches these not by deduction but by postulation. 
 He says these postulates are involved in intelligent conduct. 
 Thus, it is only by postulation that we can get beyond experi- 
 ence. In this way we can get beyond it, but this is not by knowl- 
 edge. If we try to reach this end through knowledge, we find 
 ourselves involved in an antinomy.-- 
 
 The contradiction that Fichte set up was that of the opposi- 
 
 [119]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 tion of duty to inclination, the very opposition which Kant 
 made the ground for his doctrine of immortality. The thing that 
 we have to do, that we ought to do, is the thing that we do 
 not want to do. It involves an effort. From the point of view 
 of Kant we can never be sure that we are moral unless, as 
 others pointed out, we are doing something we do not want to 
 do. The moment you do something you want to do, you had 
 better look out. The chances are you are being immoral. Es- 
 sentially, the opposition seems to lie between what you have to 
 do and what you ought to do at times of great stress, at strenu- 
 ous moments in life. That is the characteristic of our duty. Not 
 that everything we do not want to do we ought to do, but that 
 what we ought to do is something that we do not want to do. 
 We have to overcome the obstacle before us if we are to ac- 
 complish what we ought to accomplish. But, says Fichte, when 
 we have done that, it becomes a part of our own nature. We 
 have attained the knowledge we ought to attain. We have the 
 education, the training, that we have forced ourselves to get; 
 and, if we have made it a part of ourselves, it is what we really 
 want. That is, it is when we look back at it. That is the dialec- 
 tical process by means of which the self is constantly creating 
 the world. There is a contradiction between what one wants 
 and what one ought; but if the contradiction is overcome, then 
 the individual advances to a new world. 
 
 Thus, the antinomy took on another character in the Ro- 
 mantic philosophy than that which it had for Kant, just as his 
 noumenal world took on a new character. Kant said we have 
 to postulate the self as noumenal, and the romanticists said 
 that that is exactly what we are. We are at the center of real- 
 ity. The self is the creative element of the universe. The/frm-te 
 self is one phase of the Absolute Self, of God himselft(_Xhe 
 antinomies which Kant set up as indications that we are going 
 beyond the range of possible knowledge become, for the ro- 
 manticist, the very process of creation. The antinomy in knowl- 
 edge, instead of being the indication that we are trying to know 
 something that we cannot know, is the very process by means of 
 
 [ 120]
 
 THE ROMANTIC PHILOSOPHERS— SCHELLING 
 
 which knowledge itself arises. The antinomy is a stage in the 
 process of knowledge. 
 
 This process is called after the term which was used in the 
 old Greek speculation — "the dialectic." Of course, what "the 
 dialectic" means is a process of discussion, conversation in which 
 the ancient Sophist sought to entrap his opponent in a contra- 
 diction. That was the "outdoor sport" of the Athenian, dis- 
 cussing some question with the first person he met, and trying 
 to catch him in a contradiction in his statement. And the 
 Sophists were those who could play the game to the best ad- 
 vantage. Socrates was the supreme Sophist because he could 
 catch the professional Sophists at their own tricks. But for 
 Socrates the process was not simply a game; it was a means for 
 getting back to certain fundamental realities. For example, he 
 would ask a man what justice is; and when the man undertook 
 to define "justice," he would point out contradictions in his 
 statements. This little game is presented to us in the opening 
 sections of Plato's Republic. The absolute definition of "jus- 
 tice" is rendering to a man what belongs to him. This is a good 
 workaday conception. Socrates then asks, "Well, suppose some- 
 body had given you his sword. It would be justice to give it 
 back? Certainly. But, suppose the person had developed a 
 suicidal mania and was intent on killing himself, would it then 
 be just to return the sword?" And his opponent has to admit 
 that it would not be just under that condition. In other words, 
 his definition breaks down. And so on. What Socrates under- 
 took to show was that, if you are criticizing definitions of "jus- 
 tice," you must be criticizing them from some standpoint. 
 There must be such a thing as justice; otherwise you could not 
 criticize definitions of it. You may not be able to define this 
 thing, but evidently you have some idea of a perfect justice 
 which is the basis for your very criticism. That is what Socrates 
 undertook to show was the case. He tried to show that there 
 must be "ideas" — in the Greek sense — of these moral perfections 
 or we would not be able to point to them as being such. The 
 very conflicts involved in these definitions indicate some per- 
 
 [121]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 feet definition. And then Socrates, in ironical fashion, said that 
 he did not know what this perfect justice was, but that evident- 
 ly the person he was talking with knew, because he was criticiz- 
 ing every definition brought up. Thus, in asking the person for 
 the basis for his criticism, he caught the Sophist at his own 
 game. 
 
 What I want to point out is that here we have the dialectic 
 as a means of advancing from contradictions to a truth. That 
 is what the old process was, at least as Socrates worked it. The 
 Sophist used it continually. He undertook to tear it down by 
 means of the contradiction that he introduced. For example, 
 what is the reason for obeying laws.^ They are nothing but en- 
 actments of the people in power. If one man becomes dominant, 
 he will make laws to suit himself. If the majority of the people 
 make the laws, they make them in the interest of the majority, 
 to the disadvantage of the minority. The laws are always to the 
 advantage of those in power, then why obey them? To avoid a 
 penalty, of course. There is no such thing, then, as justice as 
 such. That is the way the Sophist proceeded. Socrates took 
 their method but utilized the contradictions as a means of reach- 
 ing the truth. 
 
 /As Kant left the antinomies, they were simply the indications 
 of the mind's attempts to push its knowledge beyond the field of 
 experience. Wherever it did that, it got caught in an antinomy. 
 What the romanticist endeavors to show is that these antinomies 
 are really steps by which we are going beyond experience. Of 
 course, we do go beyond experience very day, every minute. 
 We go into the past; and, as we look at the past from the point 
 of view of the present minute, it is a different past from that 
 which we viewed from the standpoint of the previous minute. 
 The world is continually developing, says the Romantic ideal- 
 ist, by a process which he calls a "dialectic," a process which 
 involves these contradictions, but a process which overcomes 
 them in a continual synthesis?^' 
 
 Let us take, then, the steps^hich led from Fichte to Schelling 
 and Flegel. Is there a phase of self-consciousness which can be 
 
 [122]
 
 THE ROMANTIC PHILOSOPHERS— SCHELLING 
 
 responsible for the world as an object? This is the question 
 which all the romanticists asked. The answer that Fichte gives 
 is found in the moral nature in so far as the world is the scene 
 of the duty of man. But the world is there before man; it is 
 prior to his duty. The moral aspect may be the most important 
 aspect of it after man appears. One may even conceive of it as 
 being the purpose for which the world exists. But you have to 
 presume the existence of the world before the moral self ap- 
 pears. Can the romantic attitude present the world as an object 
 which appears to us when we are not in the moral attitude? Can 
 the world be presented as an object for other than the mo 
 phases of our nature? That is, can you find that it has the same 
 many faceted existence that we have? This is the question that 
 the romanticists asked when it was found that the answer that 
 Fichte gave was inadequate. 
 
 The first answer to this further question was given by Schel- 
 ling. He takes the point of view of the artist rather than that 
 of the moralist. The artist discovers himself in his ideas, in 
 the material with which he works. For the function of the 
 artist — or rather, I should say, the process of the artist — is not 
 simply that of taking dead material and fashj.oning his idea in 
 it. He discovers the idea in the material itself] He finds the 
 form in the clay which he is molding, and it is only as he molds 
 that he finds out what the form is in his own mind. He may 
 have worked that out in imagination before coming to the ma- 
 terial, before getting his hands on the clay; but, as a rule, it is 
 the process of working with the material that brings to the 
 artist's mind what it is he is trying to present. [The artistic pro- 
 cedure, the experience of the artist, is a discovery of his own 
 ideas. 
 
 What Fichte was not able to do with the moral conception 
 was to present the world as known. He could present it as a 
 field of duty; but when he tried to state that in terms of knowl- 
 edge, his statement was inadequate.1 He was faced with the 
 problem of finding the content of knowledge, or the object of 
 knowledge in the object of duty, starting with the Kantian as- 
 
 [ 123]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 sumption that the self is causal in its conduct and that it be- 
 longs, in that sense, to the world of things-in-themselves. He 
 found the essence of duty to lie in the presentation of the task 
 or obstacle that had to be overcome, and he identified this not 
 only with the moral act but also with the process of self- 
 consciousness, of being conscious of one's self. In this process 
 lay the possibility of realizing one's self. But what has this to 
 do with the problem of knowledge.^ yTs^the object of knowledge 
 something that presents itself as a task, as an obstacle? On the 
 face of it, this does not seem to be the case. Our objects of 
 knowledge are about us; they are there as the world in which 
 we live, move, and have our being. As such, they are not there 
 seemingly as obstacles. There are, of course, tasks to be under- 
 taken, duties to be done in which we have to recognize the 
 nature of things; and some of our tasks, including that of gain- 
 ing knowledge, are severe and difficult undertakings. But is 
 knowledge, as such, of the nature of a duty that has to be done, 
 of a task that has to be accomplished? That does not seem to be 
 the nature of it. 
 
 Schelling recognized this and so he approaches the general 
 problem from another angle. For him the world, as over against 
 the Absolute, was that in which the artist found his idea, 
 realized himself. He took the artistic attitude, that of artistic 
 intuition, as Fichte has taken the moralist's attitude. Accord- 
 ing to Schelling, the point of departure is the attitude of the 
 artist, that experience in which the artist discovers himself, 
 discovers his own idea in the materials with which he is work- 
 ing. The artist gives himself to nature and finds in it the very 
 ideas which he himself is trying to bring to consciousness. He 
 turns to the society about him; he finds in social relations and 
 in the history of the past those ideas which he is seeking to ex- 
 press. So Schelling conceived of the x'^bsolute . elf turning to 
 nature or finding iruciature an objective expression, an external 
 expression of the self^ 
 
 What Fichte insisted upon was that this world as known is 
 identical with the self that knows. And he carried out some 
 
 [ 124]
 
 THE ROMANTIC PHILOSOPHERS— SCHELLING 
 
 very subtle and profound analyses to establish his point. Of 
 course, some of this work had been done in the empirical analy- 
 sis of the English school. They had discovered in the ideas of 
 Locke, in his philosophy of sensations and ideas, the very stuff 
 of the world. For them, however, the self was a mere organiza- 
 tion of such experiences. To some of them the self was a mere 
 bundle of impressions, particularly those centering about the 
 body and about our social relations. Certain groups of these 
 impressions and ideas which remained relatively permanent be- 
 came the self in experience. 
 
 But the Romantic philosophy pointed out that the self, while 
 it arises in the social experience, also carried with it the very 
 unity that makes society possible, which makes the world pos- 
 sible. At least from their point of view, it is impossible to re- 
 duce the self to the world, for the very unity of the world comes 
 from the self. It is our thinking, our perception of the world, 
 that gives it its unity. In our experience there is great diversity 
 and multiplicity of sensations and experiences, but in our cog- 
 nition these are all organized. That organization, according to 
 the Romantic idealists, taking their cue from Kant, comes from 
 the self. It is the self which organizes this world; but when it has 
 organized it, it has really organized that which is identical with 
 itself, it has organized its own experiences. It has, in one phase 
 of its nature, discovered what it is in another phase. 
 
 Here, as I have said, Schelling turns back to the artist's ex- 
 perience for his analogy. The artist finds himself before a land- 
 scape, we will say, and in this he finds all the multiplicity of 
 color, of form, of moving and stationary objects, and these 
 take on a certain definite shape. The whole thing gets balance. 
 The different parts of the landscape become arranged with 
 reference to each other. But it is the mind of the artist that has 
 organized it into this whole. He has discovered in it that unity M 
 and organization which belong to himself. He has discovered 
 in it the sensations which are his own. He has discovered not 
 only the landscape but himself as well. What he has hold of is 
 his own experience, the expression of himself. I 
 
 [125]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 Now, it is upon this identity of the object, that we grasp in our 
 process of knowledge, that is, in our intuition, with the self that 
 grasps it, that Schelling laid his whole stress. It is there to start 
 with, but the process of knowledge identifies the content with 
 the self. His position went under the name of Identit'dtsphiloso- 
 phie, "the philosophy of identity"; and his whole undertaking 
 was that of showing the identity of the object of knowledge with 
 the self that knows. Nature, for Fichte, was the process of the 
 self coming to consciousness of itself. The same subject-object 
 relation is present in Schelling's philosophy, but for Fichte's 
 moral statement he substitutes the analogy of the process of the 
 artist. The assertion of identity on the part of Schelling came 
 back to the reality of the artist's intuition, his seeing nature 
 through his own idea, through that which gives the unity and 
 meaning to it. 
 
 126
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 
 THE ROMANTIC PHILOSOPHERS— HEGEL 
 
 HFN HIS criticism of this use of the artist's intuition, Hegel 
 I insisted that SchelHng had left out of his philosophy an ac- 
 -^ count of the process by means of which this identification 
 of the self with its object takes place; he left out of his phi- 
 losophy a statement of the process by means of which the identi- 
 fication of the self and the object could be effected. Hegel's 
 criticism of ScheUing's philosophy is that it is a bare asser- 
 tion of identity instead of being an actual presentation of the 
 process by means of which the self and the object can be identi- 
 fiedj/ 
 
 You will remember that I mentioned earher that romanticism 
 is a philosophy of evolution, of process. It was the background 
 for the development of the theory of evolution. Back of this 
 latter conception lies the assumption of a living process which 
 takes on successively different forms. The assumption of all 
 evolutionary thought is that life, as a physiological process, is 
 the same whether in a complex or in a simple form, in plant or 
 in animal. It is a single living process as such. And this process 
 takes on a multitude of different forms. This is the background 
 for ScheUing's philosophy of identity; the Hving form persists 
 and is identical, although it appears in different forms. 
 
 But what Schelling did was to assert this identity of the 
 process and its expression of the self and its object without 
 working out the detail of it. In another field Lamarck — and, 
 with even more success, Darwin — presented a picture in terms 
 of which the detail of the process could be worked out. Darwin 
 showed a life-process appearing in different forms; and he 
 showed these differences as expressing the life-process now in 
 this environment, now in that. Then he was able to show how, 
 
 [ 127]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 through variations, a new form might conceivably arise which 
 would be better fitted to meet the exigencies of a new environ- 
 ment. Take such a situation as that which appeared during the 
 glacial epoch, when a great ice sheet came down over Europe 
 and America. It brought with it a different climate, different 
 hving conditions; and the forms that survived had to change 
 their characters. The woolly elephant, the hairy hippopotamus 
 — forms of the sort of which we find the remains — were adjust- 
 ments to a new environment. In that gradually changing cH- 
 mate, those forms survived which were able to grow such coats 
 of hair as would enable them to withstand the cold. For some 
 reason forms that could live on certain foods survived over 
 those that could not. Forms which belonged to marshy areas 
 gave way as the swamps dried out, and those forms which could 
 migrate over greater distances took the place of those which 
 could not. Such a picture is presented by Professor Marsh in 
 his statement of the development of the horse here in America 
 from a five-toed animal which gradually gave way to one with 
 a single toe in the form of a hard hoof which enabled it to travel 
 farther so that it could live on more sparsely scattered grass, 
 and thus had a decided advantage over other forms. Back of all 
 these pictures lies the assumption of a life-process going on in 
 different environments in which it takes on first one form and 
 then another, wherein it has to become a different object in its 
 relationship to the world within which it lives. The world and 
 the form have, then, an identical content. The adjustment of 
 the one to the other gives rise to the appearance of the different 
 forms. 
 
 What Hegel insisted upon was that here is a process going 
 on, a subject-object process, and that this process must ex- 
 hibit the differences which we find in the world as we know it. 
 We cannot simply come back to the assertion that the world 
 is identical with the self that knows it. We must be able to 
 show in the process of knowledge itself the identity which is 
 known to exist between the subject and its object, between the 
 form and the world in which it has to live. Hegel, then, lays 
 
 [ 128 1
 
 THE ROMANTIC PHILOSOPHERS— HEGEL 
 
 greater stress upon the dialectic than did Fichte and Schelling. 
 He takes over, so to speak, the antinomies of Kant, those seem- 
 ing contradictions into which thought was plunged when it 
 tried to transcend the phenomenal world and get over to the 
 standpoint of things-in-themselves. The antinomies from the 
 point of view of these Romantic philosophers were not simply a 
 warning that the mind had gotten beyond the limits of its 
 knowledge; they were the actual process by means oL^which 
 the object itself arose in the subject-object process. /That is, 
 the fundamental contradiction, or antinomy, for this school was 
 that of the subject and object; and they were looking for the 
 process by means of which they could pass over from the one 
 to the other and achieve a larger self than that with which they 
 started as a result. 
 
 Fichte had attempted to solve the contradiction by reference 
 to the nature of the experience of the moral self, by pointing out 
 what is involved in doing one's duty. ScheUing attempted the 
 same thing through reference to the intuition of the artist. 
 What Hegel undertook to do was to show how this opposition 
 between subject and object could be overcome, in some sense, 
 by means of the recognition of the nature of the process of 
 thought itself. In biological evolution we overcome the opposi- 
 tion between the identity of the life-process in all forms and the 
 diversity of the living forms themselves by studying the process 
 as it is taking place7\ We examine unicellular forms floating on 
 the surface of the sea; we find other bits like these become 
 colony forms living on the bottoms and in shallow water holes. 
 Out of these have arisen bilateral forms which move toward 
 their food with bilateral symmetry. We see how these have 
 come out of the water to live on land; how plants and animals 
 adjust themselves, especially in regard to their chemical needs, 
 to one another, taking on successively different forms during the 
 process. [Now, Hegel attempted to set up a picture similar to 
 this as it applied to the thought processes, to the process of 
 knowing, and possibly of all sensing, perceiving, and thinking. 
 He set out to follow this through as an identical process having 
 
 [ 129]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 different expressions. In this process we have another instance 
 of the contradiction between subject and object, but at the same 
 time we see an identity of the t wo.\ 
 
 As illustrative of this fact, take Hegel's statement in his 
 Phdnomenologie des Geistes^ which is one of his earliest philo- 
 sophical works, in which he said that under the simplest situa- 
 tions a person simply identifies something as here. There is a 
 house here, and there is a tree over there. That is the only 
 thing one can say: "Here is the house; there is the tree." 
 But, if one shifts his position, he finds himself saying, "The 
 tree is here and the house is there." The only statement that 
 one can make under the new condition leads to the contra- 
 diction of the statement made before. One says the time now 
 is such and such o'clock, and writes this down as 10:30 o'clock. 
 Later one looks at the clock and finds that it is not 10:30 but 
 3:30, and the assertion made about the time now contradicts 
 itself. Evidently, in our perception the here and the now are 
 determined by the position of the observer. What was here is 
 there, and what was there is here. What was now is then, and 
 what was then is now. This shift depends simply upon the 
 location of the self. You have a process in which you have to 
 distinguish between yourself which is here and the object which 
 is there. But you cannot maintain that position, that distinc- 
 tion, because you shift your own position. It is only in so far 
 as you get back to the fundamental process of your experience 
 that you can get some sort of an expression of the identity of 
 these opposing positions. You have to bring back all these ex- 
 periences, the experiences of this point and of that, of this 
 moment and of that, to a self-process which is continually going 
 on, taking on now this form, now that. When we pass from one 
 situation over into another, we are denying any statements that 
 we made before in the previous situation. We are putting our- 
 selves at this moment in opposition to ourselves of a moment be- 
 fore. But we overcome the opposition of this fact by realizing 
 that there is an identical subject-object relation which persists 
 throughout. The stuff of the process is the same in both cases; 
 
 [130]
 
 THE ROMANTIC PHILOSOPHERS— HEGEL 
 
 but now it takes on this form, now that, just as biological evo- 
 lutionists find this animal a living form and this other animal 
 another living form. They are diverse, and yet each exhibits 
 the same living process. 
 
 Hegel took the identity revealed in the subject-object rela- 
 tionship and sought to show that this identity persists in all the 
 different forms of thought. This always brings him back to a 
 contradiction. But what he shows is that this contradiction, in- 
 stead of leading to a simple destruction of thought itself, leads 
 to a higher level on which the opposing phases are overcome. 
 That is, in the total process he discovers what he calls a "thesis," 
 an "antithesis," and a "synthesis." In other words, he adds a 
 third, a unifying, step to Kant's twofold antinomies. The most 
 abstract expression of this is that which Hegel presents with 
 respect to the very bare idea of Being itself. There can be no 
 more abstract conception than that of Being. We cannot say 
 that it has any sort of being. We cannot describe it. It has no 
 particular quality or quantity. We can say nothing of it but 
 that it is. We have to empty out everything that could be put 
 into Being in order that we may get back to just Being itself. 
 But that, said Hegel, is not a definition of Being, but one of Not- 
 Being. If you have given up every possible qualification which 
 you can give to the idea of Being, you simply have a statement 
 of Not-Being. The very idea of Being, taking simply the bare 
 idea, brings with it the conception of Not-Being, of Nothing. 
 Being and Nothing are identical, and yet in sharp contradiction 
 to each other. 
 
 But this opposition does not, from the Hegelian standpoint, 
 lead simply to the destruction of these ideas. Being and Not- 
 Being are simply the two phases of Becoming. What becomes 
 is Being, but what was before the Becoming is Not-Being. As I 
 say, then, if you try to define Being from the Hegelian point of 
 view, you find a situation which is practically a description of 
 Not-Being and seems to contradict and destroy Being itself. 
 But, if you can get hold of these as moments in a process instead 
 of thinking of them as the same, you find that you have a con- 
 
 [131]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 ception which harmonizes with what was previously a pure con- 
 tradiction. In and of themselves, Being and Not-Being are con- 
 tradictory; taken as moments in a process, they represent Be- 
 coming. Here we get a synthesis. It is in this process of bring- 
 ing together subject and object that Hegel finds contradictions, 
 but finds them as phases which lead to a synthesis or a higher 
 expression of the self. 
 
 Hegel undertakes to carry out in detail the process by means 
 of which the object appears both as the construction of the self 
 and also as the not-self. He undertakes to carry this out in de- 
 tail, and he calls it "logic." If we want to get an illustrative 
 instance of this point of view of Hegel's, we can find it in the 
 attitude of the research scientist. As I shall point out, Hegel 
 does not do entire justice to this position; but still, it is the posi- 
 tion which he is trying to present. 
 
 Let us take, for example, the discovery of the typhoid-fever 
 germ. Before it was isolated, typhoid fever was known simply 
 as a contagious disease. That is, it was spread through contact. 
 A person who had the disease carried it to someone who did not 
 have it. That was the theory of it. It was not known just what 
 the nature of this contagion was, but it was assumed that where 
 the disease spread there had always been contact between the 
 person who had the disease and the person who became infected. 
 Now let us suppose that a sporadic case of fever appears, that 
 is, a case in which there has been no contact. No one else in the 
 community has it, and this individual is a person who lives in 
 the community, has not come in from the outside. He has had 
 no contact with an infected person, and yet he comes down with 
 typhoid fever. There you have, we will say, a contradiction be- 
 tween the actual experience of the physician or the health officer 
 and the theory which is current with regard to the spread of 
 typhoid fever. 
 
 There is a conflict there. The scientist under such circum- 
 stances sets out to find out what the meaning of this contradic- 
 tion is. He gathers other instances, in so far as he can find them. 
 He finds sporadic cases not only in his own community but else- 
 
 [ 132]
 
 THE ROMANTIC PHILOSOPHERS— HEGEL 
 
 where. As other cases come up, he plots them on a map. He 
 puts a pin on the map at the location of every house in which 
 the disease appears. Then, let us say, he finds these pins all 
 run along the line of a water course, or a milk route, or along 
 the paths of persons who go to a certain market. That suggests 
 to him that there is some sort of cause for the disease which is 
 not necessarily given by contact but may be carried in the 
 water, the milk, or the food from the market. And we assume 
 that investigation is carried on until the microorganism which is 
 the carrier of the disease, the cause of it, is finally identified. 
 That is, the research scientist starts from a conflict, a contradic- 
 tion. The contradiction in this case is that between the accepted 
 theory in regard to the transfer of a contagious disease and the 
 facts of the disease as it appears. There is a contagious disease, 
 and yet no contact. This involves a conflict, for we are dealing 
 with a disease which is both contagious and not contagious. 
 You see, the procedure of the scientist is one in which he goes 
 from what we may call the thesis and the antithesis to a syn- 
 thesis in which both the others are taken up. It may be true 
 that the disease is directly conveyed from one person to another. 
 The microorganism may be transmitted directly. It is also 
 possible that the disease may be considered contagious in the 
 sense that may be conveyed by the organism through a stream 
 of water or through milk, that is, by means of a carrier where 
 no direct contact is made between the person who has the dis- 
 ease and the person who becomes infected. The conception of 
 the microorganism is, you see, one which synthesizes these oc- 
 currences of typhoid fever so that the conflict which we first 
 come to is overcome. In the former instance the appearance of 
 a sporadic case was in direct conflict with the theory of con- 
 tagious disease. If, now, we assume or can prove that the dis- 
 ease is conveyed by a microorganism, we can bring out and ex- 
 plain all the cases that have been explained by contact and also 
 the sporadic cases that have seemed to be in conflict with the 
 theory. A synthesis is constructed which takes up the opposing 
 situations — the thesis and the antithesis — and unifies them. 
 
 [ ^33]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 The abstract statement of this is the one I have given above 
 in the first movement of the HegeHan logic. In this Hegel at- 
 tempted to present Being, showing that the definition which he 
 gave of it also, and inevitably, presented the definition of Not- 
 Being. Being and Not-Being seem to be in conflict with each 
 other. Yet, if you take bare Being by itself, you give it no 
 content; and what you have defined as Being is also Not-Being. 
 But the conception of Becoming is definitely one in which both 
 Being and Not-Being appear. That which arises, which has 
 arisen, is Not-Being as over against that which exists, which is 
 Being. Thus a synthesis of the two opposites is established. 
 This is a highly abstract statement of the type of problem 
 which I have just given. 
 
 The definition, the thesis, in the case of contagious diseases is 
 one which does not take into account the sporadic case. If you 
 try to bring the latter into the statement, you have a carrying of 
 disease without contact. In other words, you find yourself in a 
 contradiction. Well, now, the passage from one of these to the 
 other through the conception of the microorganism enables you 
 to state both the contact experience, where the disease is actual- 
 ly transferred from the one who has it to another who has not, 
 and also the sporadic case, in which no direct contact between 
 persons is made. The difference between Hegel's abstract state- 
 ment and the illustration I have used is that Hegel assumes that 
 the statement which is made of Being carries with it the oppos- 
 ing statement of Not-Being. That is, he assumes that his uni- 
 versal will always have in it the opposite of itself. The opposi- 
 tion which is found in the case of the illustration I have used is 
 not between two universals; it is not between the theory of con- 
 tagion, that is, the carrying of the disease by actual contact, 
 and the very opposite of that. That is not the conflict. It lies 
 rather between the theory of contagion and the actual incident 
 in experience, the sporadic case. That is, the conflict lies be- 
 tween the universal and an exception to that universal. That 
 is where the problems in science always arise. They do not arise 
 between the theory expressed in a law, for example, and the very 
 
 [134]
 
 THE ROMANTIC PHILOSOPHERS— HEGEL 
 
 opposite of that law. The conflict arises between the theory of 
 the law and some particular observation, some particular so- 
 called "fact" which is in conflict with that law. It is a conflict, 
 then, not between universals but between the universal and the 
 particular. If we put it into the terminology of logic, it is a con- 
 flict between a universal affirmative and a particular negative 
 proposition. The sporadic case is an instance of getting a dis- 
 ease without contact, but you do not set up a universal proposi- 
 tion which says that no cases of disease are conveyed by contact. 
 What you show is that, while there may be some cases in which 
 it is conveyed by contact, there are at least some in which it is 
 not. The scientific problem appears, then, in the form of an 
 exception to an accepted law. And the conflict which the sci- 
 entist, the research man, undertakes to solve is that between the 
 exception and the law — not that between one law and another, 
 OQ£-universal and another. 
 
 \ The general criticism of this point is, as I have already indi- 
 cated, that Hegel assumed that our development, including the 
 development of science, takes place through the conflict of uni- 
 versals, of ideas with each other. Actually, it takes place 
 through the conflict of universals, or laws, and some particular 
 event, some exception. If we make this reservation in regard 
 to the Hegelian doctrine, we may still say that Hegel is correct 
 in the assumption that the development of our knowledge takes 
 place through conflict. It takes place through the appearance 
 of problems and the solution of these problems. You have a 
 thesis and an antithesis, and then you advance to a synthesis. 
 Reflection is a process of solving problems. What we call our 
 "reflective intelligence" is brought out in regard to some excep- 
 tion to what we have been in the habit of believing. We put all 
 our views, our ideas, our methods of conduct, into universal 
 form. We recognize that these universals are likely to be sub- 
 ject to exceptions, but we are in the habit of acting in that way. 
 We expect things to happen in a universal fashion. But when 
 an exception arises to that, then we are presented with a prob- 
 lem; we have something which we have to think out reflec-
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 tively. And that thinking involves the presentation of a hy- 
 pothesis. , 
 
 Themustration which we used before made use of the concep- 
 tion of a microorganism in water, milk, or food stuffs. These can 
 be ingested by a person together with the organism and so con- 
 vey the disease. Another highly interesting, sensational illustra- 
 tion of this situation is the case of yellow fever. In this case the 
 disease is conveyed from one person to another through the in- 
 termediation of the mosquito. The person having the disease 
 takes the organism into his own body, and there this microor- 
 ganism runs a certain portion of its Hfe-cycle. Then it is con- 
 veyed to some other victim at a later stage. The assumption 
 was that yellow fever was a filth disease. That is, if you clean up 
 a district, you can keep it free from yellow fever. Senator Wood 
 went to Havana and cleaned up the city. He cleaned up the 
 houses, the streets, the sewers — everything. But yellow fever 
 continued. It was already known that the mosquito was a car- 
 rier of malarial fever. Therefore, the hypothesis was presented 
 that this might be true of yellow fever, and it was tested out and 
 found to be the case. 
 
 The Hegelian synthesis, in these cases, is the hypothesis 
 which will reconstruct the older theory, harmonize it with the 
 facts. The hypothesis is a construct in the mind of the scientist. 
 He does not spin it, so to speak, out of himself, as a spider spins 
 his web. He takes facts that are there, meanings that are as- 
 sured; and then he finds some suggestion that will give him 
 new hypotheses, new ways of looking at the situation in ques- 
 tion, in such a fashion that it will take up both the facts belong- 
 ing to the older law and these new exceptions. Out of these two 
 the new hypothesis is made. In this sense, then, Hegel is cor- 
 rect in his assumption that our knowledge grows through the 
 giving of problems — problems which arise out of contradictions 
 in our knowledge. But, as I have said, he was not correct in 
 assuming that this conflict is one between universals. It is not 
 that. It comes when there is an exception that conflicts with 
 a law and leads to the appearance in the mind of the scientist 
 
 [136]
 
 THE ROMANTIC PHILOSOPHERS— HEGEL 
 
 of a hypothesis which will solve his problem. And the hy- 
 pothesis does arise out of the mind of the thinker, the scientist. 
 It is a creation of the self. And when it has been created, it 
 carries with it a new world. 
 
 Thus the world has been rebuilt over and over again. Since 
 the period of the Renaissance entirely new conceptions of 
 matter and of motion have come to take the places of the older 
 conceptions given in the Aristotelian doctrine. We have 
 changed the world from a Ptolemaic to a Copernican one. The 
 sphere of the heavens has changed from a most limited universe 
 to an indefinitely great universe. During the last half-century 
 we have been busy at the task of reconstructing the universe 
 all the way down in terms of space and time. We are continual- 
 ly reconstructing the world. That reconstruction is something 
 that comes out of men's minds, out of their heads. It comes 
 from the process of thinking. It involves the thought of Coper- 
 nicus, of Kepler, of Newton, of Einstein, to give us these new 
 views of the world, these new worlds. We did not stumble upon 
 them. These men were not simply more open-eyed than others. 
 The process of advance consists in thinking out some hypothesis 
 that will solve a given problem. When this hypothesis has been 
 thought out, it has to be tested, of course. I do not mean that 
 the scientist can sit back in his chair to create a new world to 
 take the place of the old. He can create a new idea of the world, 
 and then he can take that idea out and see if it corresponds with 
 the facts of experience; and, if it does agree with the facts of 
 experience, it becomes the world as we live it. When we say the 
 sun does not move about the earth, we accept this contradiction 
 of the senses because of the thinking of such men as Pythagoras, 
 Aristarchus, Copernicus. They had to think things out before 
 the world which revolves on its own axis could take its place 
 in our experience as a great sphere in heaven revolving about 
 the sun. Which it is, the one or the other, depends upon the 
 actual thinking of scientists. Then they take this thought 
 of theirs and bring it into the field of experience and see if it 
 
 [ 137]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 agrees with the facts. But the idea is theirs, their creation, the 
 product of their creative intelHgence. 
 
 ( All this is what Hegel really comes back to. The world of our 
 ex^rience is a world which we are continually creating in our 
 thought. The astonishing thing is that such rapid reconstruc- 
 tions have taken place in recent times, such rapid reconstruc- 
 tions of fundamental ideas, such as those of matter and motio 
 These changes go on without our being disturbed about thexru 
 We naturally think of matter simply as subdivided stuff 
 such as we can get between our thumb and finger. We break 
 it up as far as we can under the microscope and with the 
 imagination, but we always come out with something that we 
 might get between our thumb and fingers if they were only 
 small enough. But now we have come to conceive of matter 
 in terms of energy. Mass itself has to be stated in terms of 
 electromagnetism. We conceive of motion as that which goes 
 on with certain velocities. Motion has been recognized for some 
 time as relative; but now we find that motion itself varies in 
 terms of distance covered and time passed in reference to the 
 observer, and it also depends upon whether or not the observer 
 is himself moving. The very distance covered is greater in one 
 consentient state than in another. Such fundamental contradic- 
 tions as that go into the very structure of the most primordial 
 things in the world. This reconstruction is going on all the 
 time. We expect it. We build our science on the theory of re- 
 search. We assume that the world we know today will not be the 
 world of our grandchildren. If it is, our descendants will have 
 been poor scientists; if they cannot prove that we are wrong, 
 they will be poor progeny. The business of science is to continu- 
 ally reconstruct its world. Science is a research procedure. Re- 
 search does grow out of problems. Problems are exceptions to 
 laws, rules — exceptions to the theory of the universe that we 
 have accepted in the past. And the solution of these problems 
 and the new worlds that come with them have to come out of 
 the minds of men. 
 f Tn the philosophy of Hegel the development of mind is the 
 
 ^'"~- [138]
 
 THE ROMANTIC PHILOSOPHERS— HEGEL 
 
 same thing as the development of the world. Fundamentally, it 
 is the position of absolute idealism that this relation between 
 the mind and nature constitutes things, that all relations, as 
 such, are essentially aspects of that relation. It is thinking that 
 relates things. This is a statement of absolute idealism, of 
 course, because the world ultimately goes back to the Absolute 
 Self which constructs and continually maintains the world 
 through a process of thinkTngTti That is the metaphysical prin- 
 ciple of this idealism — the woria is the expression of the thought 
 of^he Absolute. 
 
 /^s_an object, then, the world answers to the subject, which is 
 the self. And the relationship between the object and the sub- 
 ject, as it appears in these relations, is just that of the subject to 
 the object; and this is a process. Just as thought itself is a proc- 
 ess, so the world to the Absolute is essentially a process that is 
 going on; and that process is the mind of the Absolute. It is a 
 process that constitutes things, and the process is one with the 
 Absolute SeTfry 
 
 The romantic phase of this idealism, as we have seen, places 
 emphasis upon the self, and especially upon the emotional ex- 
 pressions that belong to the self as such. Of course, there have 
 been idealisms prior to that of the Romantic school. There has 
 been the idealism of Plato, of the Neo-Platonists, of Leibnitz; 
 but in the idealism of none of these was the center of reality 
 the self, although for them, too, the relations of things were the 
 relations of thought. \Ttls the self-process, the realization of the 
 self through the not-selfT^nd the construction of the latter by 
 the former which gives the peculiar romantic character to the 
 idealism of which I am speaklnjg./ 
 
 [The world, then, is a creation of thought; it arises out of the 
 process of thinking. That is the subject-object relation as Hegel 
 presented it. It is a relationship in which the self finds conflicts 
 in its world and then reconstructs this world through a syn- 
 thesis, through a hypothesis, and finally advances to a new con- 
 flict. This is a statement of what goes on in science, in the 
 process of the evolution of thought. It parallels the process of
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 organic evolutiog. In the latter we have forms, animals, and 
 plants that have certain habits, certain ways of living in the 
 world. And then something happens, some geologic change oc- 
 curs so that the animal can no longer get hold of the object that 
 it eats as food. It meets a problem in obtaining nourishment; 
 it meets a new enemy, a parasite, a microorganism. Something 
 happens in its world which makes it run counter to the world 
 in which it has been living. If we can conceive of a sufficiently 
 successful mutation, we can perhaps find the solution of this 
 problem within a single generation. What seems most often 
 actually to take place are gradual changes, but the result of 
 these changes is that there arises a new type of animal or plant 
 which is adjusted to these changed surroundings. But with this 
 arises a new world, for the animal or plant determines its world, 
 its environment, in terms of its life-process. If an animal has 
 eyes, it has an environment that has color; if it has ears, it lives 
 in a world of sounds; if it has taste, its environment is sapid; 
 if nostrils, its world is odorous. Change the animal and you 
 change the environment, the world in which that animal lives. 
 Give the animal a different digestive tract, and you have a new 
 food. You may say the object is there before the animal, but 
 it is not there as food. The animal comes with a stomach that 
 can digest only certain things, and so determines its own world. 
 Its own sensitiveness, its own methods of reaction, its own 
 fashion of dealing with the world make a new world out of it. 
 Thus we see that evolutionary advance means the solving of 
 problems. The problem is put up to the individuals, to plant 
 or animal, in terms of life and death; and the solution has to 
 come in the appearance of some new form, a variant that springs 
 from the older form. And with the new form comes another en- 
 vironment, an environment that is dependent upon the new 
 form itself. 
 
 This is an opposition which appears in another manner in our 
 thinking. It appears, for example, in the modern theory of rela- 
 tivity. The world within which the individual finds himself is a 
 world in which he finds himself at rest while objects about him 
 
 [140]
 
 THE ROMANTIC PHILOSOPHERS— HEGEL 
 
 are in motion. Those objects which are at rest belong to the 
 same consentient frame as the self. To a man on Mars the 
 planet Mars would be at rest instead of in motion. The earth 
 would be moving about the sun and spinning on its own axis. 
 To a man on the sun, the sun would be at rest and all the planets 
 and suns would be whirling about it. And it could not be said 
 that any one of these structures is the correct one. If you say 
 that the position of a hypothetical man on the sun is the correct 
 position, then you have to ask as to the movement of the sun it- 
 self, for the sun is moving. Then you say, well, we will take the 
 co-ordinates of the fixed stars and set them up as a fixed frame of 
 reference while everything else moves within that frame. Then 
 you soon find that the stars are not fixed and that you cannot 
 get any object at rest which can be made a co-ordinate within 
 which all motion can take place. Absolute motion is gone; abso- 
 lute rest is gone. Motion and rest are to be stated from the 
 point of view of the observer. That, in some sense, determines 
 what the world in perspective shall be. 
 
 I bring up this modern situation simply to indicate what lay 
 back of the Romantic philosophy. It is a statement of the world 
 from the point of view of the individual, varying as it appears 
 in the experience of different groups of individuals. Yet, the 
 fundamental assumption is that the world is the same world 
 for all. The world that we see is the same world that a man on 
 Mars may see if there is a man there, the same world that would 
 be seen by a man on the sun. And yet all these worlds are de- 
 pendent upon those different individuals and their positions. 
 The process of perception, of thought, of organization, deter- 
 mines what the world shall be; and yet these different worlds, 
 from these different standpoints, are in some sense identical. 
 You can see that the problem remains the same. 
 
 The problem remains the same, but it is differently ap- 
 proached. We have left behind the Romantic philosophers' 
 solution to it. The problem with which they were dealing now 
 appears in a different form. There are different worlds in the 
 experience of different individuals, and these different worlds 
 
 [141]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 are determined by the very process of sensing, of thinking, in 
 the individuals. It is our thought, our perception, which deter- 
 mines the world in which we live, so that the world of each is in 
 some sense different from that of the others, and yet it is identical. 
 It is the same world; it must be the same world. There would 
 be no meaning to our conversation, no coherence in our own 
 thought in regard to the world about which we are all of us 
 conversing, if it were not the same. If that in the perception of 
 the individual which gives different persons different worlds 
 were not, in some sense, organized into a single process, there 
 would be no meaning. The opposition, then, between the world 
 as it appears as an absolute object, if there is such a thing, and 
 the self that knows it, is a real problem, a problem differently 
 stated from the point of view of different philosophers at the 
 present time. Einstein, for example, gives one type of state- 
 ment, which is followed by Eddington; Whitehead gives an- 
 other sort of statement. The problem is stated differently at 
 different times in an attempt at its solution. The general prob- 
 lem now is presented in the form of an Einsteinian statement. 
 We find the assumption that each sentient individual puts a 
 certain frame of reference on the world so that the world has 
 that particular form, just as if one looked through a curved 
 glass. Then the world is subject to the curvature of the glass. 
 If we look through plain glass, the world is another world. The 
 world itself is dependent upon the perception of the individual. 
 Yet the assumption remains that these worlds are all identical. 
 There we see the fundamental problem which was present 
 for the Romantic philosophers in the opposition between the 
 subject and the object. As I said before, what they were doing 
 was to give a philosophy of evolution, because such a philos- 
 ophy assumes that the development of the world is a process 
 of meeting problems. We carry the conception of evolution over 
 into life and even into inorganic processes. We speak of the 
 evolution of a star out of a nebula. First it is a whirling mass; 
 then it breaks into a double star; finally the stellar body passes 
 from its neighborhood and branches out into spiral form. Each 
 
 [142]
 
 THE ROMANTIC PHILOSOPHERS— HEGEL 
 
 one of these steps is the solution of a problem presented to this 
 particular form. Evolution is the process of meeting and solv- 
 ing problems. What the Romantic idealist attempted to do was 
 to take this idea over into the field of thought. He recognized 
 that what the human intelligence does is to meet problems and 
 solve them, and that in doing this the individual mind is con- 
 stantly recreating its world. Thus, what gives the peculiar char- 
 acter to this Romantic philosophy is the assumption that each 
 mind is only a phase of an Absolute Self, so that our thinking is 
 just a phase of the thinking of the Absolute Self. The process, 
 however, that is, the important part of it, at least, is one in 
 which conflict arises. In the philosophy of Hegel this appeared 
 as the conflict between the thesis and antithesis, which is over- 
 come in a synthesis. As he worked it out, Hegel's dialectic is a 
 very abstruse, a very complicated, theory. But it is one which 
 can be applied to every phase of life, and not only to the theory 
 of knowledge. It can be applied to the theory of the state, the 
 theory of law, to history, to theology, and, of course, as we have 
 been showing, to science. It is a grandiose statement that had 
 astonishing success for a time, during which it seemed to be the 
 last word in philosophy. 
 
 There was, however, a surprising lapse of interest in this 
 Hegehan dialectic. I have pointed out that this dialectic failed 
 to agree with the scientific method. Hegel undertook to show 
 that advance took place through conflicts between universals, 
 whereas scientific procedure is the result of conflicts between 
 universals and exceptions to them. Hegel undertook to show 
 what the development of science must be, but he made himself 
 ridiculous as a result of certain rash assumptions which he made 
 as to what the development of science must be. The Hegelian 
 dialectic did not devise a statement of scientific method. His 
 method was one worked out in science itself, that is, the method 
 of the scientist was worked out in science itself — that of the ap- 
 pearance of the exception and the statement of this in terms of 
 the definite problem, the working-out of some hypothesis, and 
 then the testing of that. That is the scientific method, and it 
 
 [143]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 cannot be stated in terms of the Hegelian dialectic. After all, 
 the world is essentially a scientific world; and any philosophy 
 which fails to express, to make use of scientific method, is a 
 philosophy that is out of place. And the Hegelian doctrine, not- 
 withstanding its astonishing success for the moment, lapsed 
 simply because there was no real use for it. 
 C Ho wever, there was one field of endeavor in which it did 
 obtain a more lasting success, and that was in the theory of 
 the state. Hegel's assumption was that we are all parts of the 
 Absolute Self. Any view that the individual has is, however, 
 finite, limited, incomplete, and consequently untrue when taken 
 by itself. It would have to be supplemented by those of all the 
 other selves organized in the Absolute Self. Hegel assumed that 
 the community was a closer approach to the Absolute than was 
 the individual. The highest form of the Absolute on earth 
 was, in his mind, the state, so that the state represented a high 
 form of intelligence, higher than that which the individual pos- 
 sessed. On this basis it was the duty of the individual to sub- 
 ject himself to the state. Hegel's doctrine was well received by 
 the Prussian court, which agreed with its absolutistic attitude, 
 with the absolutistic philosophy which lay behind itpit was a 
 statement which expressed some of the organization and disci- 
 pline of the Prussian community — a government of the indi- 
 vidual, an intelligence higher than that of the individual him- 
 self, a government from above down. The Hegelian statement 
 did fit in very well with the theories of the Prussian state, for 
 the Prussian state was very highly organized from the point of 
 view of its trained intelligence. It was a bureaucracy. It had a 
 monarch. As Hegel said, a monarch was just as necessary as the 
 dotting of the "i." The real state was the organization of the 
 bureaucracy itself with the trained intelligence that was behind 
 it. This was worked out pretty definitely in the Prussian state 
 by Frederick the Great. It was not autocratic but bureau- 
 cratic, having in its bureaus highly trained servants of the state 
 itself, so that the state came to represent in the minds of the 
 members of the community a higher type of intelligence than 
 
 [ 144]
 
 THE ROMANTIC PHILOSOPHERS— HEGEL 
 
 that found in the individual. And there was a devotion on the 
 part of the individual to the state, a willingness to subject him- 
 self just because the state itself seemed to represent this higher 
 type of intelligence. This, you see, was quite in accord with the 
 Hegehan conception of the Absolute Self, and of the state as a 
 higher expression of that Self than was found in the individual. 
 (^\\e Hegelian doctrine was successful, and exercised consid- 
 erable influence in another field also. This other field was 
 history, especially the philosophy of history. This whole Ro- 
 mantic movement was a very vivid stimulus to historical re- 
 search and interest. It started off with a romantic interest 
 and led on into an interpretation of present conditions in 
 terms of past changes, and a correlative interpretation of past 
 changes in terms of present conditions. This new historical 
 interest in a process that had been going on leading up to pres- 
 ent conditions, this backward look over the process from the 
 point of view of present conditions, was what gave a peculiar 
 interest and vividness to the historical sciences in all fields. It 
 had back of it, of course, the evolutionary theories to which we 
 have already referred. I have stated that the Hegelian dialectic 
 was essentially an evolutionary theory, a recognition, that is, 
 that new forms arise out of conflicts of old forms. In order to 
 explain present forms, it is necessary to recognize the function 
 of the old form and to discover the point at which it broke 
 down, so to speak. This breakdown opened the door to the 
 appearance of new forms. The Darwinian doctrine of evo- 
 lution afforded an excellent hypothesis for the statement of 
 this in concrete biological processesTlThe history of institu- 
 tions could be explained similarly. On the basis of this doctrine 
 you could find what the function of the old feudal institu- 
 tions was, what the function of the organization of primi- 
 tive society was. You could identify their functions in all the 
 different forms of these institutions, and then you could show 
 how the institution in one form broke down and a new form 
 arose out of it. For example, you have the blood revenge as 
 a method of control in the interrelationship of clans within a
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 tribe, then the repression of the attack of one individual upon 
 another through blood revenge, and the recognition that this 
 very revenge is one that attacks the life of the tribe itself, for 
 it sets up a vicious circle in which the punishment of one murder 
 leads to another — the shedding of blood had itself to be again 
 avenged. Out of this arose a method of rude justice, the court, 
 with the taking-over of the administration of justice, of its own 
 assessment of the crime and a penalty that should attach to it. 
 There you have a conflict of interests, and yet you can trace the 
 same function through them all. And then you have arising out 
 of this the next form, which takes up the interest which lay 
 back of the avenger's mind and the interest, later, of the com- 
 munity in the life of all its members and of fusing them into a 
 body of law, with courts and their functionaries that should en- 
 force that law. 
 
 I have pointed out that Hegel starts in his logic with the con- 
 ception of Being and Not-Being, with the advance from this 
 to Becoming. We find the same dialectical process in the devel- 
 opment of his own thought and in the history of the race. There 
 is an advance from quality to quantity, from quantity to meas- 
 ure, from measure to the physical thing, and so on up to the 
 "idea" in the Hegelian sense. You have in the individual the 
 development of one idea into another. That is the process 
 of the history of philosophy. You also find the development of 
 one cultural movement into another. That is the process of the 
 philosophy of history. In other words, we find the same process 
 in tlie history of man that we find in Hegel's logic. 
 ^^^CTlliis conception of the philosophy of history and of the his- 
 tory of philosophy is important in Hegel's philosophy. His as- 
 sumption in this connection is that the development of human 
 society follows the same set of categories as those which appear 
 in logic. Reality develops, as we have seen, through Being, 
 quality, quantity, measure, physical things, and so on up to 
 the "idea." When we come to analyze the object of knowledge, 
 we find that it passes through these difi^erent stages. In other 
 words, the categories develop themselves. To return, for a mo- 
 
 [146]
 
 THE ROMANTIC PHILOSOPHERS— HEGEL 
 
 ment, to Kant, you remember he conceived of the categories as 
 forms of the mind given in advance of experience. Hegel as- 
 sumes that the categories are forms which themselves arise 
 through an inevitable process which shows their implication 
 from one to another. This is, of course, the most general state- 
 ment that could be given to evolutionary principles, and in this 
 sense we can refer to one philosophy of the Romantic move- 
 ment, that is, Hegel's, as definitely a philosophy of evolution. 
 He traced the development of our ideas as they appeared in hu- 
 man history, following out the appearance of Being, as he con- 
 ceived it, in the Milesian school of Greek philosophy, and fol- 
 lowed it all out in detail from then on.- 'He had to force mat- 
 ters a bit to get the historical development into the framework 
 of his own logic, but he succeeded fairly well. He not only un- 
 dertook to do this for the development of ideas in Greek philoso- 
 phy and in the Greek community but was able also to give a 
 statement for all the essential Christian dogmas as these ap- 
 peared both in history and in logic. 
 
 I have tried to trace the historical background of this posi- 
 tion. It reflects the importance that the self had reached after 
 the French Revolution, when men were thrown back upon 
 themselves, after the warfare of the French Revolution, and 
 their return, perhaps with the sense of defeat but still with a 
 heightened sense of themselves, to the old world which they 
 had left behind, and to a rediscovery of this world when they re- 
 visited it in this character of the self. That is what constitutes 
 the romantic character of this period, the emphasis upon the 
 self, making the self the center of reality, conceiving the world 
 as that which the self sets up, and sets up, so to speak, for the 
 purpose of reahzing itself, of putting itself into the not-self in 
 order to realize itself. 
 
 In a very definite sense we can speak of this philosophy also 
 not only as an evolutionary one but as one which is social in its 
 character. Its most important result is to be found in the in- 
 terest taken in human institutions, especially in the evolution 
 of these institutions. Remember that these institutions had 
 
 [147]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 been thought of in the medieval period as given by God. They 
 were there as forms of social organization which were, in some 
 sense, given in advance of man, in the mind of God. They were 
 fixed, just as Kant's categories were fixed. This latter impor- 
 tant effect of the Hegelian doctrine was one not so evidently 
 dialectical in its character. It found its expression in the study 
 of social institutions; it laid emphasis upon history as that within 
 which the forms of society have arisen, upon the study of an- 
 cient history not simply for the recording of bare political events, 
 not simply as the scene for the appearance of great historical 
 characters, but as that process within which the very forms of 
 later society had arisen through a really evolutionary process. 
 This approach to history was very much stimulated by the 
 HegeHan doctrine; and although the Hegelian character was 
 largely lost, the impetus which it gave was of very great impor- 
 tance. 
 
 /What Hegel undertook to do, and in a great measure did do, 
 was to show that institutions, as such, arose in the social proc- 
 ess. It is in this process itself that institutions come into 
 being. Of course, this gave a new standpoint from which to 
 interpret, to understand, to criticize, these institutions. You 
 can go back to the history of them, see how they have arisen out 
 of particular conditions, see that they represent ideas that take 
 on different forms in different situations. Then you are in a 
 position to consider the form which the institution has at pres- 
 ent, to see how far that form may be changed. One can study 
 the institutions as he can study animal and vegetable forms. 
 One can realize that the form of the institution is an expression 
 of the period, and that, as each period demands change, that 
 change can be brought about in the institution itself. / 
 
 There was a very vivid interest in the study of human 
 institutions. I have pointed out the vivid interest in history as 
 such. It was carried over to the study of institutions. The 
 Roman law, which was the background for the whole legal 
 practice on the Continent, was presented from this standpoint; 
 the ancient city was studied from this standpoint. And the 
 
 [148]
 
 THE ROMANTIC PHILOSOPHERS— HEGEL 
 
 laws of institutions, the family, the various governmental forms, 
 the schools, were all looked at from the point of view of such 
 a process of evolution; they were all looked at from the stand- 
 point of structures which arose in a process, and which simply 
 expressed that process at a certain moment. They were struc- 
 tures which carried within themselves contradictions, prob- 
 lems jyhich must lead to further reconstructions. 
 'Crhis, of course, was carrying over revolution into evolution. 
 What the political movement had undertaken was a revolution 
 which should sweep away the old forms and substitute rational 
 structures for them. Its leaders sought a state built absolute- 
 ly upon the principles of reason, upon the rights of man. 
 What such a philosophy as the one we are now examining 
 presented was a long history of institutions which were adjust- 
 ing themselves to the changes which were constantly taking 
 place. If one could get into the structure, the movement, the 
 current of the process, so to speak, then not only could one 
 recognize in that a very gradual change but one could become 
 a part of that change. One could recognize what the change 
 must be, and set out to bring it about."! 
 
 Thus evolution was brought in as a conception which was 
 very important from the point of view of the institution. An- 
 other very important development which we will consider later 
 in greater detail was that of the economic structure of society. 
 There we have to go back to the so-called Industrial Revolution. 
 In the period of Hegel that revolution had, in a measure, taken 
 place; and Karl Marx undertook to interpret it from the point 
 of view of what we call "socialistic propaganda." W^e will come 
 back to that later. This was, however, one of the phases of the 
 H^elian dialectic which lasted after Hegel. 
 
 <The two most important expressions of the Hegelian philos- 
 ophy were to be found, then, in the interpretations of human 
 institutions, and, more particularly, in this Marxian theory of 
 the state which was both socialistic and communistic. The 
 latter found its expression in the Communist Manifesto of 1847. 
 These are the two fields within which the Hegelian dialec- 
 
 [ 149]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 tic did maintain itself. One was that of economic doctrine, 
 the economic interpretation of history, as expressed in Marxi- 
 an socialism, the dialectical materialism which has had added 
 impulse of life through the control which the Communists, 
 the Bolsheviki, have obtained in Russia\ On the other hand, 
 a new lease on life was given the Hegelian dialectic in Eng- 
 land, not in the labor group, which answered relatively late 
 to such a movement, but in the universities. Among them there 
 grew up a definite Neo-Hegelian school that found in the dia- 
 lectic something of a program which was not only philosophical 
 but also social. T. H. Green is the representative of this latter 
 phase of it. The religious field also came to be regarded as a pos- 
 sible field for the development of the dialectic. The interpreta- 
 tion which Hegel had given of ecclesiastical and doctrinal his- 
 tory appealed to the liberal theologian in England, especially to 
 those within the established church. Anything can be explained 
 by this dialectic. pNot only that, but a great deal could also be 
 explained away while still seeming to keep the meaning of that 
 which could be regarded as having one form in one age and an- 
 other form in another age. The dialectic opened the way toward 
 a comparative history of dogma, of ecclesiastical institutions. It 
 opened the way to the history of religion, with the interpreta- 
 tion of earlier religious forms and beliefs in terms of their func- 
 tion in the life of the community, i 
 
 That sort of interpretation ofliTstory, then, in which there is 
 found a continuance of function in organic process with the con- 
 tinual appearance of new forms, was a recognition which came 
 very naturally through the Hegelian dialectic. It was carried 
 over, as I said, in English thought in these two interests — one, 
 a study of old institutions on the ecclesiastical and doctrinal 
 side, the setting-out of the function of the doctrine, as over 
 against its form, the interpretation of the particular form that 
 doctrine took under particular conditions; and, on the other 
 hand, it opened up a new world through a new approach to the 
 social problem, the relation of the individual to the community, 
 which was expressed particularly in the Neo-Hegelian philosophy 
 
 [150]
 
 THE ROMANTIC PHILOSOPHERS— HEGEL 
 
 of Green at Oxford. Here we have the identification of the 
 individual with the community made a process not so much 
 for the subordination of the individual to the state, as it was 
 in the political philosophy of Hegel, but as an identity of the 
 individual with the community, with a sort of inspiration for 
 individual endeavor toward social ends. This identification of 
 the individual with the community was very characteristic of 
 the philosophy which was used in the political philosophy of 
 Hegel for its statement of the subordination of the individual to 
 the state. One could turn this the other way, recognize that the 
 individual was what he was through his relation to the com- 
 munity. He owed himself to the community itself; he had a 
 devotion to the community. And not only that, but one could 
 recognize that in the reaction of the individual in the com- 
 munity arose those situations out of which changes took place. 
 The individual could become the social reformer, one who could 
 stand out in inadequate situations and point the way to higher 
 syntheses. It is possible to take either attitude in the identifica- 
 tion of the individual with the community — either the sub- 
 ordination of the individual to the state or the recognition that 
 the individual is the means by which advance takes place. 
 
 There was, then, a very considerable revival of interest in 
 England along these two Hnes; and the Hegelian school not only 
 became, for the time being, the dominant school in English 
 philosophy but it remains a very strong influence up to the 
 present time, though more recently, of course, it has been dis- 
 placed by the Realistic movement. 
 
 What I wanted to point out with reference to the labor move- 
 ment and with reference to this history of institutions in 
 society, particularly its development in England, was a con- 
 tinued life of Hegelian doctrine. After it left the philosophical 
 chairs in Germany, it lapsed quite suddenly in German universi- 
 ties; but it had new Hfe in England and in America. Royce, for 
 example, is one of those Neo-Hegelians to whom we have 
 referred. Dewey, in his early development, was another. The 
 Romantic school was represented by the Concord school, by 
 
 [150
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 Emerson and others of that group. They were parallel, really, 
 with the interest reflected in England, first of all in Coleridge 
 and then in Carlyle. However, the real Neo-Hegelian move- 
 ment belonged to a somewhat later date than these last-men- 
 tioned men, when it came as a sort of transplanting of the 
 Hegelian doctrine from German soil to the Anglo-Saxon com- 
 munity. 
 
 152
 
 CHAPTER VIII 
 EVOLUTION BECOMES A GENERAL IDEA 
 
 PASSING as we have from Kant over to the Roman- 
 tic ideahsts, we proceed from a conception of static forms 
 which are originally given, and which serve as the whole 
 basis of Kant's transcendental philosophy, to an idea of the de- 
 velopment of the forms through a process, an evolutionary proc- 
 ess. Kant conceived of the basic forms of the world as being 
 given in the character of the mind itself. The forms of space and 
 time — given in the sensibility, the forms of the understanding — 
 given in the categories, and the forms of the reason, all there are 
 in advance of experience. If the object, as such, arises under 
 Kant's doctrine, it is because of certain contents of the sensi- 
 bility passing into these forms. That is what makes it an ob- 
 ject. It is not an object for our cognitive experience unless it 
 has these forms that give it its reality. Sensuous experience it- 
 self, unless it takes on some form, has no meaning, no reality; it 
 cannot be known except in so far as the experiences have some 
 form. And in the Kantian doctrine, the form is given in ad- 
 vance. This is what Kant expressed in terms of the "tran- 
 scendental logic," the term "transcendental" meaning the logical 
 pre-existence of the form to the object. This concept, you see, 
 belongs to pre-evolutionary days. The logical pre-existence of 
 the form to the object cannot be stated in terms of process; 
 therefore it falls outside of evolutionary ideas. In order that 
 there might be an object there, Kant, as over against the empiri- 
 cists, said that the form must be there originally, in advance. 
 The latter undertook to show how an object might arise out of 
 the mere association of different states of consciousness. Kant 
 insisted tha t, in order for there to be an object, the form must 
 be there first. ',
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 But the Romantic idealists changed all that. For them, the 
 forms arose in the very process of experience, in the process of 
 overcoming antinomies, overcoming obstacles. We are responsi- 
 ble for the forms. In other words, we have, in experience, not a 
 pouring of the characters of our sensibility — colors, sounds, 
 tastes, odors — into certain fixed forms, but a process of experi- 
 ence in which these very forms arise. fUogic, as the romanticists 
 conceived of it, was a dynamic, not a sTatic, affair— not a simple 
 mapping-out of judgments which we can make because of the 
 forms which the mind possesses, but a process in which these 
 very forms themselves arise./ 
 
 The process of experience' according to these ideahsts, creates 
 its own forms. Now this has a very abstruse sound, of course; 
 but what I want to call your attention to is that it is nothing 
 but an abstract statement of the principle of evolution. These 
 Romantic idealists were undertaking in the field of philosophi- 
 cal speculation what Darwin and Lamarck were undertaking in 
 the field of organic phenomena at the same period. What the 
 Romantic idealists, and Hegel in particular, were saying, was 
 that the world evolves, that reality itself is in a process of evo- 
 lution. 
 
 This was a different point of view from that which char- 
 acterized the Renaissance science of which I have previously 
 spoken. This Renaissance science started off with just as simple 
 elements as it could. It started with mass and motion. And 
 Newton defined "mass" first as a quantity of matter; but, as 
 that involved a conception of density and there was no way of 
 telling just how dense your matter was, he had to get another 
 definition. And he found it in terms of inertia, that is, the re- 
 sponse which a body offers to a change of state in either its rest 
 or its motion. If you want to measure the mass of a body, you 
 measure its inertia. You see how much force is necessary to set 
 it going, and so forth. And in that way you measure its mass, 
 so that mass is really measured in terms of accelerations, that 
 is, accelerations that you add to motions of a body. We come 
 back to these simple conceptions of mass and motion; but we 
 
 [154]
 
 EVOLUTION BECOMES A GENERAL IDEA 
 
 really define our mass in terms of certain sorts of motion, that 
 is, velocities, accelerations. With these very simple conceptions 
 the physicist undertook to build up a theory of the world. New- 
 ton gave the simple laws of mass and motion, and then, on the 
 basis of mathematics, worked out an entire mechanics, which up 
 to within a very short time has been the classical theory of the 
 physical world. On the basis of this physical theory, there is 
 just so much motion; there is just so much mass; there is just 
 so much energy in the universe. When the system was more 
 fully worked out, as it was in the nineteenth century, the prin- 
 ciples of the conservation of energy were added to those of New- 
 ton, although they were implied in his system anyway. 
 
 Now, such a world as this is made up simply of physical par- 
 ticles in ceaseless motion. That is all there is to it. We speak of 
 the different objects about us — trees, houses, rivers, mountains 
 — all varied, all part of the infinite variety of nature — but what 
 this science does is to break them up into ultimate physical par- 
 ticles, molecules, atoms, electrons, and protons. The object is 
 nothing but a congeries of these; and, as already stated, the re- 
 lationship between the particles in one object and in another 
 object are just as real and just as important as the relations 
 found between the particles within any single object itself. For 
 you, the tree is something that exists by itself. W^hen it has been 
 cut down, it is so much lumber. The stump continues to exist 
 as a thing by itself. And yet, from the point of view of mechani- 
 cal science, the relationship between atoms and electrons in 
 the stump of the tree with those in the star Sirius is just as real 
 as the relations existing between the electrons in the trunk 
 of the tree. The trunk is not an object there because of the 
 physical definition that you give to it. Every field of force 
 that surrounds every electron is related to every other field of 
 force in the whole universe. We cut our objects out of this 
 world. The mechanical world reduces to a mass of physical 
 particles in ceaseless motion. So far as such a world can be said 
 to have any process of its own, it is that which is represented in 
 the term "entropy."
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 With the appearance of steam engines, people tried to work 
 out the theory of them. And a Frenchman, Sadi Carnot, had 
 the happy idea of thinking of the heat which was responsible for 
 the formation of steam as flowing down hill through different 
 degrees of temperature. When the steam was hot, its expansive 
 power was great; and then, as it lost heat, it lost its power to ex- 
 pand. As it flowed down the hill of temperature, it lost its 
 power. Of course, energy is not lost in the universe. It is just 
 dispatched into surrounding objects. Thus, Carnot was able to 
 work out a theory of steam engines which hinged upon this 
 knowledge of energy flowing down a temperature hill. You put 
 your piston rod into this stream and it will work the engine; 
 but when it is at the bottom of the hill, it can do no more work. 
 The mill cannot be turned by water that has passed. Well, now, 
 this presented a picture of the whole universe as just a congeries 
 of atoms in the sort of motion that was called "heat." If you 
 set any sort of motion going, you know that you use up energy 
 by friction in some way or other— that you produce heat. The 
 whole universe seems to be running down toward a condition 
 in which this motion will be evenly distributed through the en- 
 tire universe. All manifestations of energy are due to the fact 
 that they are on high levels, so to speak; but, given time 
 enough, in the course of millions of years, everything will get 
 evened out and all the particles will be in a fairly quiescent con- 
 dition, with a slight, even motion of a Brownian sort distributed 
 throughout the whole universe. That is the conception of en- 
 tropy. That is the goal of the universe, if it has one, in which 
 there will be some kind of energy evenly distributed throughout. 
 We can be very thankful that we do not exist at that time. Of 
 course, we could not exist then in any meaningful sense. That 
 mechanical conception which science presents has no future — or 
 a very dark one, at best. Not dark in the sense of catastrophies, 
 for those are always exciting; but dark in the very monotony of 
 the picture. The conception of entropy is anything but exciting. 
 Such a universe would answer only to an infinite sense of ennui. 
 
 The scientific conception, the mechanical conception, of the 
 
 [156]
 
 EVOLUTION BECOMES A GENERAL IDEA 
 
 world did not seem to be one that gave any explanation to the 
 form of things. As I have said, science does not justify us in tak- 
 ing a tree, a plant, an animal, a house, as separate objects by 
 themselves. As we know, from the scientific standpoint there is 
 no difference between Hfe and death- — simply a shifting of ener- 
 gies. From the scientific standpoint, the forms of things have 
 no real significance. Of course, if you start off with a certain 
 thing, given a certain form, you can use scientific technique to 
 analyze it; but your abstract mechanical science, that to which 
 Newton gave form, does not account for any object, does not 
 account for the acceptance of one object rather than another. 
 
 It was Kant who took the first step toward a theory of the 
 heavenly bodies. He was very devoted to the mechanical 
 science of his period; but his imagination carried him a step 
 farther, and he tried to conceive how the present form of 
 the heavens might have arisen out of earlier forms. His state- 
 ment was one that really got its scientific formulation in La- 
 place's conception of the solar system as a great nebula, in- 
 tensely hot to begin with, and which gradually cooled down. 
 Kant had to assume a whirling nebula which cooled down and 
 resulted in a series of rings moving about the center as it con- 
 densed, gradually developing into a system of bodies of un- 
 specific form. The velocity of the bodies on the outside of the 
 system would keep them from moving in toward the center, and 
 out of these rings the planets would arise. That is the sugges- 
 tion which Laplace took from Kant and made into an expla- 
 nation of the way in which the solar system arose. This was 
 the first step toward a theory of the evolution of the heavens. 
 
 But what I now want to present is something different from 
 this picture which mechanical science gives of the universe. It 
 is an attempt to state an object in a certain form, and to show 
 how that form might arise. If you think of it, that is the title 
 of Darwin's book. The Origin of Species ^ "species" being nothing 
 but the Latin word for form. What is the origin of these forms 
 of things.^ Mechanical science does not offer any explanation of 
 them. Anyway, from the point of view of mechanical science, 
 
 [157]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 the form has no meaning. All that this science says about a 
 particular form is that in referring to a certain object you are 
 isolating a certain group of physical particles, taking them off 
 by themselves. Really, they are related to all physical parti- 
 cles. But the universe that we know is more than particles. 
 It is a world of forms. Now, the question is, where do these 
 forms come from? Certain of the principal forms, Kant said, 
 come from the very structure of our own minds. The theology 
 of the period said the forms of animals and plants go back to 
 a creative fiat of God. He gave the earth its form and all the 
 stellar bodies their forms and their motions, as well as those 
 of the plants and animals on them. And that, of course, was 
 the point from which the descriptive sciences of the time — bi- 
 ology, botany, and zoology — started. They assumed species of 
 plants and animals which had been created by God when he 
 made the earth. 
 
 What Darwin undertook to show was that some of these 
 forms must conceivably have arisen through natural processes. 
 But how could the forms as such have arisen? Mechanical sci- 
 ence could not explain them, because, from the point of view of 
 mechanical science, form does not exist. There are only two ob- 
 jects^ — one the world as a whole, and the other the ultimate 
 physical particles out of which it is made. All the other so-called 
 "objects" are objects that our perception cuts out. That is, we 
 distinguish the chair from the table and ignore the relations be- 
 tween them because we want to move them about, we want to 
 sit on the one and write on the other. For our purposes, then, 
 we distinguish them as separate objects. Actually, they attract 
 each other as physical particles, parts of a single, all inclusive 
 electromagnetic field. The forms are not explained by the me- 
 chanical science of the period. The biological and other sciences 
 — such as cosmology, astronomy — all explained certain forms 
 which they found, in so far as they did account for them, by 
 saying that they were there to begin with. And even Kant as- 
 sumes that the forms of the mind are there to begin with. 
 
 Now the movement to which I am referring, under the term 
 
 [158I
 
 EVOLUTION BECOMES A GENERAL IDEA 
 
 "theory of evolution," is one which undertakes to explain how 
 the forms of things may arise. Mechanical science cannot ex- 
 plain that. It can break up forms, analyze them into physical 
 particles; but it cannot do more than that. Biological science 
 and astronomical science both start with certain forms as given. 
 For example, Laplace's conception is of rapidly revolving, hot 
 nebular bodies which were present to start with. Biological sci- 
 ence started with certain living forms; geology, with definite 
 types and forms of rocks. These sciences classify things in ac- 
 cordance with the forms that are found. But they do not gen- 
 erally undertake to show how the forms arise. There is, of 
 course, the science of the growing form, embryology. But this 
 is a recent science. It accounts for the way in which the adult 
 arises out of the embryo. The older theory of biology assumed 
 the form already there; it even conceived of a complete man as 
 given in the very cells from which the form of the embryo de- 
 veloped. The assumption was that the form was there as a pre- 
 condition of what one finds. This is Aristotelian science. It is 
 also essentially Kantian. We have seen how we conceived of the 
 forms of the mind as given as the precondition of our experience. 
 
 Now, Lamarckian and Darwinian evolution undertook to 
 show how, by a certain process, forms themselves might come 
 into being, might arise. Starting with the relatively formless, 
 how could one account for the appearance of forms? Lamarck 
 started with the hypothesis that every activity of the form al- 
 tered the form itself, and the form then handed on the change 
 to the next generation. As a picturesque example, assume that 
 the progenitors of the giraffe wanted, or had, to feed off the 
 leaves of trees, and so stretched their necks. They handed this 
 stretched neck on to their longer-necked offspring. The inheri- 
 tance of so-called "acquired characteristics" was Lamarck's 
 suggestion to account for the appearance of forms. He assumed, 
 as did Darwin, that you start with relatively formless proto- 
 plasm, and he went on to show the process by means of which 
 forms might arise from that which was relatively formless. 
 
 In the previous chapter we were discussing Romantic ideal- 
 
 [159]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 ism, and we pointed out that it was a development or an ex- 
 pression of the spirit of evolution, of the definite entrance of the 
 idea of evolution into Western thought. Indeed, we spoke of 
 Hegel's philosophy as a "philosophy of evolution." This highly 
 abstruse speculative movement is simply a part of this general 
 movement toward the discovery of the way in which the forms 
 of things arise, of origins. As a scientific undertaking, it was not 
 helped out by the physical science of the time. It had to make 
 its own way, and this it did to an amazing extent. In later gen- 
 erations it became a guiding idea in practically all investiga- 
 tions. 
 
 I mentioned earlier the distinction between the conception of 
 evolution that belonged to the older, the ancient thought, that 
 which got its classical expression in the Aristotelian doctrine, 
 and the evolutionary theory of this period. The Aristotelian 
 evolution was the development of the so-called "form," the na- 
 ture of the thing which was already present. It presupposed the 
 existence of the form as something that was there. In this con- 
 ception a metaphysical entity was thought of which existed in 
 and directed the development of the form. The species — 
 which is the Latin word for the Greek term "form" — was ac- 
 tually conceived of as a certain nature that supervised the 
 development of the seed of the embryo into the normal adult 
 form. Under the conception of Christian theology this form was 
 thought of as existing first in the mind of God, then as appearing 
 in the plants and animals and various other objects that he cre- 
 ated, and finally as arising in our minds as concepts. The form, 
 however, was not thought of exactly in the Aristotelian sense as 
 existing in advance, as being an entelechy, the nature of the 
 object existing in advance of the actual animal or plant. 
 
 The difference between that conception of evolution and the 
 modern conception is given, as I have already pointed out, in 
 the very title of Darwin's book. The Origin of Species, that is, 
 the origin of forms. It is an evolution of the form, of the nature, 
 and not an evolution of the particular animal or plant. What 
 this theory is interested in is the evolution of the nature of the 
 
 [160I
 
 EVOLUTION BECOMES A GENERAL IDEA 
 
 object, of the form, in a metaphysical sense. It is this which 
 distinguishes the later theory of evolution from the former, 
 namely, that the actual character of the object, the form or the 
 nature itself, should arise instead of being given. 
 
 As you may remember, Darwin got the suggestion for his 
 hypothesis from Malthus' doctrine of population. This was an 
 attempt to show the relationship which exists between popula- 
 tion and the food supply, and what effect this relationship may 
 have on the future of the race. Of course, Malthus' statement 
 was greatly disturbed by the introduction of machine produc- 
 tion; this upset many of his calculations, if not the theory as a 
 whole. Yet, it is interesting as an attempt to state in definite 
 ways what the experience of the race will be in the light of a 
 single factor in its environment, that is, the food supply. 
 
 Darwin became very much interested in this problem, and it 
 led him to undertake to explain certain variations which take 
 place in forms as being due to the pressure of population. In 
 nature there are always more forms born into the world, more 
 plants and animals, than can possibly survive. There is a con- 
 stant pressure which would lead to the selection of those vari- 
 ants which are better adapted to the conditions under which 
 they must live. This process of the culling-out of these better- 
 adapted forms would, in time, lead to the appearance of new 
 forms. What lies back of this conception is the idea of a process, 
 a life-process, that may take now one, and now another, form. 
 The thing of importance is that there is a distinction made be- 
 tween this life-process and the form that it takes. This was not 
 true of the earlier conception. In it, the life-process was thought 
 of as expressed in the form; the form had to be there in order 
 that there might be life. 
 
 The idea of which I have just spoken I have referred to as 
 Darwinian. The same idea lies back of the conception of La- 
 marck. He assumes a life-process which may appear in one form 
 or another, but which is the same process whatever form it takes 
 on. The particular form which it does assume depends upon the 
 conditions within which this life-process is run. Thus we find 
 
 [i6i]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 the same fundamental life-process in plants and in animals— in 
 the amoeba, in man, and in every form between. It is a process 
 that starts in the separation of carbon and oxygen. These two, 
 in the form of carbon dioxide, exhaled by animals as a by-prod- 
 uct of the assimilation of food, are found in water solution in 
 plants as carbonic acid. Through the mediation of the action 
 of chlorophyl cells and light this eventually becomes food, in 
 the form of various sugars and starches. These starches are 
 then carried to tissues that expend energy, that burn up and set 
 free energy in the life of plant or animal, get rid of waste prod- 
 ucts, set up the means of reproduction, and so pass on from one 
 plant or animal to another, from one generation to another. 
 The essentials of that life-process are the same in all living 
 forms. We find it in unicellular forms, in multicellular forms. 
 The only difference is that in the case of the latter we find a 
 differentiation of tissues to carry out various functions; we find 
 different groups of cells that take up one of the phases of the 
 life-process and specialize in that — the lungs take in air, oxygen; 
 another group of cells becomes the means of the circulation of 
 the blood; others take over the functions of ingestion, of loco- 
 motion, of secreting fluids that make digestion and reproduc- 
 tion possible. In other words, separate groups of cells carry on 
 different parts of the life-process. The whole process, however, 
 is the same as that which goes on in unicellular forms. That, you 
 see, is involved in this conception of evolution — a life-process 
 that flows through different forms, taking on now this form, now 
 that. The cell, as a single entity in the whole, remains funda- 
 mentally what it was in the unicellular form. All living cells 
 bathe in some fluid medium; those cells on the outside of us are 
 dead. Living cells are those which are bathed in the fluids of the 
 body, such as the blood or lymph. They are the only ones which 
 are alive, and they carry over into the body some of the original 
 sea from which our original unicellular existence migrated. 
 These cells went from the surface to the bottom, and there mul- 
 ticellular forms arose. From the bottom of the sea to man, they 
 had to bring this precious fluid in which alone cells can live. 
 
 I 162 1
 
 EVOLUTION BECOMES A GENERAL IDEA 
 
 This was first found in plants. And animals then came and lived 
 upon the plants; but the life-process has flowed through all, and 
 remains the same life-process. 
 
 Given such a conception as this, it is possible to conceive of 
 the form of the plant or the animal as arising in the existence of 
 the life-process itself. It is very important that we should get 
 the conception of evolution that is involved in it and distinguish 
 it from the earlier conception, especially if we are to understand 
 the appearance of this conception in its philosophic form. We 
 are concerned with a theory which involves a process as its 
 fundamental fact, and then with this process as appearing in 
 different forms. 
 
 Now, the Romantic ideahsts, who first developed a philoso- 
 phy of evolution, came back, of course, to our experience of our- 
 selves — that reflexive experience in which the individual real- 
 izes himself in so far as, in some sense, he sees himself, hears 
 himself. He looks in the glass and sees himself; he speaks and 
 hears himself. It is the sort of situation in which the individual 
 is both subject and object. But in order to be both subject and 
 object, he has to pass from one phase to another. The self in- 
 volves a process that is going on, that takes on now one form 
 and now another — a subject-object relationship which is dynam- 
 ic, not static; a subject-object relationship which has a process 
 behind it, one which can appear now in this phase, now in that. 
 
 To get the feeling for this Romantic ideahsm, one must be 
 able to put himself in the position of the process as determin- 
 ing the form. And it is for this reason that I have said what I 
 have in regard to evolution. That does not get us as deep into 
 our experience as the subject-object relationship does. Logical- 
 ly, it is of the same character, namely, a process in this case, a 
 life-process, going on that takes now one form and now another. 
 The process can be distinguished from the form; yet it takes 
 place within the different forms. The same apparatus for di- 
 gestion has to be there; the same apparatus for expiration, for 
 circulation, for the expenditure of energy, have to be there for 
 the life-process to go on; and yet this life-process may appear 
 
 [163]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 now with this particular apparatus and now with that. In your 
 thought you can distinguish the process from the form. And yet 
 you can see that there must be forms if the process is to take 
 place. We have spoken of the unicellular animal as having no 
 form in that sense. That statement is not entirely correct. We 
 know that there is a high degree of organization of molecular 
 structure in the cell itself. We can follow it out in a vague sort 
 of way. There is also structure there. You cannot have a proc- 
 ess without some sort of a structure; and yet the structure is 
 simply something that expresses this process as it takes place now 
 in one animal and now in another, or in plants as over against 
 animals. That life-process that starts off with carbon dioxide, 
 with water and carbonic gas, goes on through plant and animal 
 life and ends up as carbon dioxide, in the carbonic acid gas and 
 water that we breathe out. That process is something we can 
 isolate from the different organs in which it takes place, and 
 yet it could not take place without some sort of organ. We can 
 separate the process from particular organs by recognizing them 
 in one or another animal, in one or another plant. But we could 
 not have the process if there were not some structure given, 
 some particular form in which it expresses itself. 
 
 ilf, then, one is to make a philosophy out of this evolutionary 
 movement, one must recognize some sort of process within 
 which the particular form arises. In the biological world this 
 process is a Hfe-process, and it can be definitely isolated as the 
 same process in all living forms, because in the scientific de- 
 velopment of physics and chemistry, as well as of physiology, 
 we are able to find out what this life-process is, that is, to think 
 of the life-process apart from the particular form in which it 
 goes on — to separate, in other words, such a function as the 
 digestive process from the digestive tract itself;) to be able to 
 realize that the ferments essential to digestion, the breaking- 
 down of starches and proteins through these ferments, and the 
 organization, the synthesis, of these into organic products which 
 the animal can assimilate, goes on in the amoeba, which has no 
 digestive tract at all. The importance of the digestive tract is 
 
 [164]
 
 EVOLUTION BECOMES A GENERAL IDEA 
 
 dependent upon the life of the particular group of cells that go 
 to make up an animal. The problem presented to the animal 
 form is the conversion of edible protoplasm, which is found in 
 plants, into an assimilable form. The plant had to protect its 
 fluid by cellulose. In order to get at the fluid, the animal has 
 to be able to digest away the cellulose. Such an animal as the 
 ox has to have a very complicated apparatus within itself; it 
 sets up a whole series of bacteriological laboratories and brings 
 into them microorganisms that set up ferments to get rid of the 
 cellulose that surrounds the edible protoplasm in its food. The 
 digestive tract of the animal is, then, an adaptation to the sort 
 of food which these hving cells feed upon. The animal has to 
 have a structure which will enable it to get at the edible proto- 
 plasm itself. On the other hand, the tiger, which lives on the ox, 
 has a rather simple assimilative problem on his hands. The ox 
 has done the work, and the tiger can feed on his flesh. Of course, 
 we are in the position of the tiger, except that we take the ox 
 from the stockyards! The point is that our digestive system, 
 like that of the tiger, can be much more simple than the ox's. 
 Our whole life-process is not devoted to digesting away cellulose 
 that surrounds food. 
 
 This indicates the way in which the form arises, so to speak, 
 within the life-process itself.'lThe form is dependent upon the 
 conditions under which the life-process goes on. It is the same 
 process, but it meets all sorts of difficulties. It has to have a par- 
 ticular apparatus in order that it may meet each of these up- 
 cropping difficulties. Such a life-process as this, which is the 
 same in all these forms, was entirely unknown to the ancient 
 physiologist. He could look at the animal only from the out- 
 sideT'He could see what were the function of the mouth and the 
 feet, of the various limbs and external organs; but he could not 
 get inside the animal and discover this process that was flowing 
 on, that was taking on these diff"erent outer forms as the plant 
 or animal needed a certain apparatus to enable it to live under 
 certain conditions. It is essential to science and to the philoso- 
 phy of evolution that it should recognize as basic to all a certain 
 
 [165I
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 process that takes place, and then that it should undertake to 
 show the way in which the forms of things arise in the operation 
 of this process. 
 
 \The question as to whether a Darwinian or Lamarckian hy- 
 pothesis is to be accepted is not really of such great impor- 
 tance. The important thing about the doctrine of evolution is 
 the recognition that the process takes now one form and now 
 another, according to the conditions under which it is going on. 
 That is the essential thing. One must be able to distinguish the 
 process from the structure of the particular form, to regard the 
 latter as being simply the organ within which a certain function 
 takes placgjCLLthe conditions call for a certain type of organ, 
 that orgaiTmust arise if the form is to survive. If conditions call 
 for an organ of another sort, that other sort of organ must arise. 
 That is what is involved in the evolutionary doctrine. The ac- 
 ceptance of the Darwinian hypothesis is simply the acceptance 
 of Darwin's view that selection under the struggle for existence 
 would pick out the organ which is necessary for survival. The 
 heart of the problem of evolution is the recognition that the 
 process will determine the form according to the conditions 
 within which it goes^om] If you look at the life-process as some- 
 thing which is essenttaTin all forms, you can see that the outer 
 structure which it takes on will depend upon the conditions 
 ujftdeiLjwhich this life-process runs on. 
 
 '^^— Now, if you generalize this, make a philosophic doctrine out 
 of it, you come back to some central process which takes place 
 under different conditions; and the Romantic idealists under- 
 took to identify this process, first of all, with the self-not- 
 self process in experience, and then to identify this self-not-self 
 process with the subject-o,bject process. They undertook to 
 make these one and the -same. | The subject-object relationship 
 is, from the philosophical standpoint, and especially from the 
 epistemological standpoint, the more fundamental one. But the 
 self looms up very importantly here, as you can see, for it is a 
 self that is a subject. As I pointed out above, the object was in 
 some sense explained by the empiricist. [If you are to put the 
 
 [ 166I
 
 EVOLUTION BECOMES A GENERAL IDEA 
 
 object into the subject-object process, you have to find a subject 
 that is involved in the presence of the object. The old doctrine 
 assumed that the world was there and that human beings later 
 came into it. In other words, according to this view, the object 
 was there before the subject. The appearance of the subject 
 seems to have been purely accidental, incidental. The object 
 might just as well be there without the subject being there. But, 
 what the Romantic idealists insisted upon is that you cannot 
 have an object without a subject^ You can see very well that 
 you cannot have a subject without an object, that you cannot 
 have a consciousness of things unless there are things there of 
 which to be conscious. You cannot have bare consciousness 
 which is not consciousness of something. lOunexperience of the 
 self is one which is an experience of a world, of an object. The 
 subject does involve the object in order that we may have con- 
 sciousness. But we do not as inevitably recognize that the sub- 
 ject is essential to there being an object pres£*rt-.' According to 
 our scientific conception, the world has arisen through millions 
 of years, only in the last moments of which have there been any 
 living forms; and only in the last second of these moments have 
 there been any human forms. The world was there long before 
 the subjects appeared. What the Romantic idealist does is to 
 assume that for these objects to be present there must be a sub- 
 ject. In one sense this might be said to be reflecting the philo- 
 sophical dogma that the world could not be present unless 
 created by a conscious being. But this pfoiil^i^ is something 
 more profound than a philosophical dogma.^ It is the assumption 
 that the very existence of an object, as such, involves the exist- 
 ence of a subject to which it is an object.,' 
 
 Well, if we are to find an instance ofthat in which the object 
 involves a subject, as well as the subject involving an object, we 
 can come back to the self. The self can exist as a self only in so 
 far as it is a subject. And significant objects can exist only as 
 objects for a subject. We can see that the self-process of the 
 Romantic idealists — this fusion of the two phases of experience, 
 the self-experience on the one hand and the subject-object ex- 
 
 [167]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 perience on the other hand — was one which enabled them to in- 
 sist not only that the subject involved an object but also that 
 the object involved a subject. This, then, was the central proc- 
 ess for them: the self, the not-self, are expressions of a single 
 process, and in this also is found the subject-object relationship 
 in which both terms are always mutually involved. Just as there 
 can be no self without a not-self, so there can be no subject 
 without an object, and vice versa. 
 
 rOne more word about evolution. We have a statement of the 
 human animal as having reached a situation in which he gets 
 control over his environment. Now, it is not the human animal 
 as an individual that reaches any such chmax as that; it is so- 
 ciety. This point is cogently insisted upon by Hegel, the last of 
 the Romantic idealists. The human animal as an individual 
 could never have attained control over the environment. It is a 
 control which has arisen through social organizationTj The very 
 speech he uses, the very mechanism of thought which is given, 
 are social products. His own self is attained only through his 
 taking the attitude of the social group to which he belongs. He 
 must become socialized to become himself. So when you speak 
 of this evolution, of its having reached a certain climax in 
 human form, you must realize that it reaches that point only in 
 so far as the human form is recognized as an organic part of the 
 social whole. Now, there is nothing so social as science, nothing 
 so universal. Nothing so rigorously oversteps the points that 
 separate man from man and groups from groups as does science. 
 There cannot be any narrow provinciaHsm or patriotism in sci- 
 ence. Scientific method makes that impossible. Science is in- 
 evitably a universal discipline which takes in all who think. It 
 speaks with the voice of all rational beings. It must be true 
 everywhere; otherwise it is not scientific. But science is evolu- 
 tionary. Here, too, there is a continuous process which is 
 taking on successively different forms. It is this evolutionary 
 aspect of science which is important in the philosophy of the 
 contemporary French philosopher, Henri Bergson, whose work 
 we will consider later. 
 
 f 168I
 
 CHAPTER IX 
 
 THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION— THE 
 QUEST FOR MARKETS 
 
 I HAVE pointed out, in a general way, the great changes that 
 toolc place in France during the Revolution. The soil 
 passed over from the feudal lord to the peasant who 
 worked the soil. In England this process had never taken place 
 on any such scale. On the contrary, the development of agri- 
 culture in England tended to bring more and more of the allot- 
 ments of land into the hands of single farmers, single land- 
 owners. The lands could be worked more profitably that way. 
 The processes of agriculture which were being introduced in 
 England could be worked more profitably on large holdings than 
 on the little holdings that the tenant had been able to work. 
 The older, medieval production had been intensive rather than 
 extensive. It was built up by old feudal conditions and had no 
 relationship to farming proper. If this was to be changed, it 
 was necessary to bring the scattered holdings together under a 
 single head. The result of this was that more and more of the 
 tenants became farm laborers, and the direction of farming 
 passed from the hands of the peasant into the hands of the 
 larger farmers. Where in France he worked them himself, in 
 England the allotments that belonged to the peasant passed 
 under the control of the landowner or the large farmer, and the 
 farmer was taken out of that direct control over the process of 
 . agriculture which was characteristic of conditions in France. 
 / Under proper methods of farming there was no need for the 
 nnmber of hands that were required under the older method. 
 The land could be more profitably operated by a smaller num- 
 ber of men. Thus there grew up a surplus of population upon 
 
 [169]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 the land. This is one of the conditions that favorably prepared 
 the ground in England for the rapid development of what is 
 called the Industrial Revolution.] 
 
 We find a very varied background out of which this economic 
 change took place. First of all, there are the markets, the 
 growing-up of voluntary organizations for the distribution of 
 goods, which were able to adjust themselves to new demands. 
 We have the development of the credit system, which had 
 grown up under other conditions and for other purposes, being 
 carried over into business. We have a change in the religious 
 attitude, which brings a certain discipline of mind into the 
 process of business. And then we have the flowering of the so- 
 called Industrial Revolution, in which production is taken away 
 from the home and is carried over into more favored situations 
 in the factory, in which the artisan's occupation is taken to 
 pieces, broken up into a whole series of different tasks, and these 
 tasks given over, as far as possible, to machines driven by 
 water power, steam power, and, later, electricity, so that the 
 man in occupation becomes a part of a vast machine production. 
 This is the process which was taking place and of which the 
 shifts in population connected with the Industrial Revolution 
 are only parts. 
 
 The shift of population, of course, followed the factory. With 
 the older textile industry, the spinning and weaving went on in 
 the homes. The capitalist sent his employees about, carrying 
 certain of the raw materials which they brought back as finished 
 products. With the factory, the different looms were brought 
 to a single place where they could be driven by power. The 
 population inevitably followed the loom to the factory, and 
 in the great industrial centers we have the building of the 
 factory city. This took the individual definitely away from the 
 soil. All feudal privilege, all feudal organization, all feudal ad- 
 ministration, gathered about the relation of the individual to the 
 soil. The feudal lord was one who was lord over his land. He 
 held it, perhaps, under another, and he under another, until 
 they came to the highest; but the individual belonged to the 
 
 [ 170]
 
 THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION 
 
 soil. The social organization was determined by this relation- 
 ship tp the soil. 
 
 ^he breakdown of this feudal system and the concentration 
 of large units of population around the new factories are the 
 features of the Industrial Revolution which are spoken of most 
 often. Back of this, however, lay the development of the larger 
 market, a market which required production on a larger scale. 
 Various social structures answered to this demand. What I 
 want to point out in this connection is that such a larger market 
 means, of course, a more highly organized society; it means 
 bringing people into closer relationship with each other in 
 terms of economic needs, supplies, and so making out of groups 
 which had been isolated from each other, partially unified 
 groups. That is the social organizing process that goes on in 
 economicsr 'It needs to be emphasized because in the economic 
 process itself we are apt to abstract from the total picture every- 
 thing except that which is involved directly in the process. For 
 example, when we are buying and selling, we consider only the 
 prices, their advantage or disadvantage. We put economic men 
 over against us, and we regard ourselves simply as economic 
 men. In business, religion is supposed to be abandoned. The 
 dictum oi caveat emptor is one that lies back of this attitude. It 
 answers to what we term the "materialistic" view of life. And 
 yet all the advances which have taken place in the modern world 
 have been dependent on this bringing people together in terms 
 of their needs, wants, and supplies as these are met in an eco- 
 nomic fashion. ( ^rKT this very abstraction of the economic from 
 the other social processes has been of great importance and of 
 great value. It is possible for people to buy and sell with each 
 other who refuse to have anything to do with each other other- 
 wise. That is, it is possible to hold people together inside of an 
 economic whole who would be at war otherwise. Economic 
 organization is of importance in holding together parts of a 
 society which might, without it, be distinctly and mutually at 
 varianceTylf you will take it, you will find this view of society 
 fromTh^perspective of economic development very interesting. 
 
 [171]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 I shall refer to it again when we come to the development of 
 socialism. 
 
 For our immediate purpose it is important that we have in 
 mind an outline of the conditions under which the Industrial 
 Revolution sprang up. It is a period in which an expansion of 
 an economic character was taking place with the development 
 of larger markets and the gradual development of methods of 
 production which would meet this larger demand. 
 
 This involved changes in social conditions which are to be 
 noted, in a general way, as characteristics of the Western world. 
 Among these is the appearance of arbitrary organizations of all 
 types in the midst of fixed institutions. Out of this arose in 
 large degree the medieval city, with its groups of individuals 
 not immediately connected with the soil. Under the old feudal 
 conditions, of course, the population was allotted to the soil, 
 belonged to it. The city, growing up first as the fortress, the 
 center for a garrison, and as a place in which the ecclesiastical 
 powers centered, tended to become more and more a trading 
 center; and there grew up guilds which supplied the immediate 
 needs of the community and, besides that, carried on the trading 
 which connected these communities with the wider economic 
 world. The growth of these different voluntary organizations 
 played a large part in the development of the industry of 
 the modern world and invited those mechanisms which respond- 
 ed to the demand. What was essential was the larger demand 
 and then a sort of a social mechanism that could answer to this. 
 L^Je find in the middle of the eighteenth century a very con- 
 siderable increase in population, which it is rather difficult to 
 explaiiij Unquestionably, the beginning of this lay in the earlier 
 part oT^the century and, of course, affected conditions, bringing 
 with it the larger markets at home and abroad of which I have 
 already spoken. I think no one has adequately pointed out just 
 what the conditions were that brought this about. Probably 
 to a large extent it represented improved conditions of health. 
 In other words, the death-rate probably decreased; and, with 
 the dropping of the death-rate, with a larger number of children, 
 
 [ 172]
 
 THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION 
 
 as well as adults, surviving, the population as a whole com- 
 menced to increase steadily. -With this increase came an in- 
 creased demand for occupation on the part of the populations, 
 together with an increase in the demand for goods/ Altogether 
 it is a very complex problem, but in general we can bring it back 
 to the development of larger markets and of institutions which 
 were sufficiently elastic and responsive to meet the needs of this 
 raarket. 
 
 rhave already pointed out what the characteristics of this 
 development were. The factory was the center at which produc- 
 tion was carried on under better economic conditions than those 
 found in the home. The most important of these changed con- 
 ditions was the subdivision of production into a number of 
 tasks. These could be carried on more rapidly by separate indi- 
 viduals, and so the process of creation was simplified. And, as 
 it was simplified, the way was opened for the machine; and with 
 this came the stimulus to invention. With this stimulus to in- 
 vention came also the demand for power with which to drive 
 the machines^ I will insist that this is not simply a question of 
 the unusuaFclevelopment of inventive power. We assume that, 
 by and large, each generation carries with it as much inventive 
 genius as any other, and that it belongs to one community as 
 much as to any other. The difference lies in the demand, a de- 
 mand that goes back to such a situation as this which I have 
 just presented, one in which production itself is analyzed, 
 broken up into a series of separate tasks which are made suf- 
 ficiently simple so that a good many of them can be carried on 
 by machines. The result is that the laborer tends to become 
 more and more a machine-tender, a person who keeps the ma- 
 chine going. He becomes a part of the machine activity. The 
 demand implies a difference between the new condition and 
 the old; it implies that the means of production which had been 
 used were not adequate. It implies a general shift in the eco- 
 nomic situation. Of course, it also implies that there are those 
 able to make use of such apparatus; that there is available 
 labor which can be utilized, can be put into new vocations. This, 
 
 [173]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 I say, is possible only where you can get power to drive the ma- 
 chine which is greater than mere man power. Water power, the 
 development of the steam engine with the demand for fuel such 
 as that provided by coal, the consequent development of the 
 coal industry — this whole process can be traced back to its be- 
 ginnings in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and that 
 not only in terms of a process but also in terms of the attitude 
 of mind, in terms of the industrial discipline of the community. 
 There are, of course, other changes which, perhaps, are made 
 too central, such as the development of iron and coal. Machin- 
 ery was essential to the development of the factory to its full 
 productivity. Machinery meant iron. The power to drive the 
 machine meant coal. And there in England, at that time, close 
 to the surface, was the ore and the coal. Conditions, then, were 
 very favorable to the flowering-out of this rapid productivity, 
 with all the changes that it carried with it. But this was a result, 
 not a cause of the wider movement. 
 
 r Of particular importance was the shift in the population, and 
 wTth~this the breakdown of the feudal conditions which still 
 persisted, on the social side, in England. Most of the population 
 had been governed by the squire and the curate, whose positions 
 were those determined by the whole feudal situation. The indi- 
 vidual peasant or farmer worked the soil belonging to another 
 person. He held it as a tenant. His position in the community 
 was determined by his relationship to the soil. While in France 
 there had developed a centralized government which took over 
 more and more of the control of production, in England there 
 grew up the squirarchy, a form of legal government through 
 the squire, that is, through the justice of the pe'aceJThis had 
 an astonishingly large part in the governmenfof England. It 
 was carried out by men, relatively untrained in matters of 
 law and administration. The squire and curate were central 
 figures of this period, and the peasant occupied a position of 
 subjection. The central power of the government expressed it- 
 self through the squire. He was an aristocrat. He had, of 
 course, higher courts above him; and when serious issues arose, 
 
 [174]
 
 THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION 
 
 he might be brought into a position in which his power would 
 be questioned; but under ordinary conditions the squire repre- 
 sented the government. It was a modern feudal condition, a 
 feudal condition, however, in which the feudal lord was himself 
 definitely interested in what was still the greatest form of pro- 
 duction, agriculture. The feudal lord was a great landowner and 
 one who introduced better methods of production. He was in- 
 terested not only in this production but also in the stabihty of 
 things, in the maintenance of peace. In this he was the repre- 
 sentative in his own district, representing the local government 
 as over against the central government. But his power was 
 very great, greater perhaps socially than it was in terms of ad- 
 ministration, than it was in legal terms, so that the average in- 
 dividual felt himself definitely under his superiors, and what he 
 produced came to him under conditions which were dictated 
 imjixe or less by the social order of which the squire was the head. 
 ^^Jhe changes to which we have referred shifted this relation by 
 moving the population, or portions of it, from the soil to the 
 city; and in the city the individual was under no feudal lord. 
 Here his task was one which he himself elected, or at least that 
 was what seemed to be the situation. He came as a day laborer. 
 As a day laborer he needed no skill. The skill which he had as a 
 weaver, for example, was of no service to him in working power- 
 driven machines. He came in, then, as a day laborer in return 
 for a wage, and the wage belonged to him not in terms of the 
 product of the soil but of his own effort He got money in return 
 for his services instead of for the products of the soil, and he got 
 it under no feudal conditions at all. This freed him, in a certain 
 sense. The wage was all too often a starvation wage, but it was 
 his own. It separated him from the soil. 
 
 There is one characteristic of the city as it appears in the 
 modern world as distinct from the city of the earlier Graeco- 
 Roman world — that is the appearance of voluntary organiza- 
 tions in the Western world. At first, the cities grew largely out 
 of fortified places, and these fortifications or garrisons led to 
 the appearance of groups of warriors who entered into volun- 
 
 [ 175 1
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 tary agreements with each other for various purposes which 
 they had in common. They could shift from one place to an- 
 other. Then there also appeared in the church various volun- 
 tary organizations, among the ecclesiastical representatives. 
 These were succeeded by the organizations out of which the 
 guilds arose, that is, those occupied in production; and they had 
 their own organization with something of their own control. In 
 all the groups — the warrior groups, church groups, industrial 
 groups, in the so-called university or school groups — we find, in 
 the Western community, voluntary organization. 
 
 [ Tsup pose we may explain these in part by the comparatively 
 chaotic conditions. The new communities grew up in the decay 
 of the old ones. The mechanism for the control of the com- 
 munity rotted out. New methods of control had to be built up 
 gradually. And they were built up, first of all, over against an 
 ideal situation. That is, Europe conceived of itself as belonging, 
 above all else, to the Holy Roman church. And, back of that, 
 lay the assumption of a political organization under the church, 
 the Holy Roman Empire. Each of these organizations carried 
 with it an assumption of an order of society which was not 
 realized. The church presupposed a community, a blessed com- 
 munity, in which the interest of one was the interest of all. In 
 it were devout worshipers of God, persons carrying out his 
 behests, utterly unselfish, having the nature of the so-called 
 "saint" of the period. This was the ideal which the church 
 presented, an ideal which was anything but satisfied with the 
 actual order of things^ During the so-called Dark Ages, Europe 
 was in a state of constant warfare between very little groups. 
 It was a period in the Western world in which there was such 
 chaos, such continuous, unmitigated hostility between little 
 groups as there has not been since. And yet, Europe had ac- 
 cepted the conception of the church. It was assumed that the 
 new world would exist in the New Jerusalem, in the world to 
 come. In this present world men were under probation. There 
 was an ideal of society, then, not yet realized, but one which 
 remained in men's minds. And the same situation existed in 
 
 [176]
 
 THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION 
 
 the political organization. There was one political head; and 
 all those under him, the various feudal lords, were subject to 
 the Roman emperor. The actual subjugation was largely fic- 
 titious, but this assumption lay in men's minds. Europe was a 
 community in which there were ideals of social organization 
 which were not actually realized. 
 
 But the fact that they were not realized was an essential 
 part of the life of the time. The world was supposed to have 
 been created by God that men might realize their ideals; and 
 God knowing that they would not realize them, that they would 
 sin, fall from grace, appointed such institutions as the church 
 and state that were to carry on, so to speak, until the day of 
 the Last Judgment. rTKe ^wor ld was not conceived of as being 
 the sort of place in which such a society as men conceived 
 could actually exist. But it was there as an ideal which ought 
 to exist; and because it did not exist, men were in a state of 
 sin. The institutions of the time were built up definitely with 
 reference to man's being in such a state of sin. That is, the ideal, 
 in one form or another, was a definite part of the life of the com- 
 munity, an ideal which was not realized. It is that situation, 
 and the comparative chaos of the period which lent itself to the 
 appearance of these voluntary organizations, of which we have 
 been speaking. 
 
 Perhaps the form of this with which we are most familiar is 
 the appearance of the different religious gro ups, of the so-called 
 "heresies" which were constantly arising.\ Men conceived of 
 themselves as having received inspiration from God. They un- 
 dertook to interpret the monuments of the church in a different 
 fashion than the church itself, and gathered together those who 
 agreed with the new interpretation. Thus, there arose new re- 
 ligious bodies. These were continually springing up throughout 
 the whole medieval period. For example, during the Reforma- 
 tion, we have the appearance of the Protestants. This was noth- 
 ing but another expression of the breaking-up of the community 
 into voluntary organizations. \The same thing took place on the 
 political side, particularly with the appearance of the free cities 
 
 [177]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 — cities that worked themselves out from under the control of 
 overlords, bought their privileges for themselves, bought the op- 
 portunity to pay their own way. And out of this arose cities 
 that were relatively free, which had their own peculiar place 
 within the Holy Roman Empire. And they grew up largely 
 about^ industrial conditionsTj 
 
 \^hat I want to point out with reference to these various 
 voluntary organizations^ — political, economic, mihtary, or among 
 the students of the different universities who gathered together 
 in national groups according to the different countries from 
 which they came or in accordance with their interests — is that 
 they came to play a part in the actual control of society. The 
 most striking example of such a process in our setting is the 
 pohtical party^he party that has no recognized place in the 
 constitution of the state and yet wh_ich is an essential part in 
 the government of the community. y Tha t is one characteristic 
 of the whole Western life, of the whole Western community — 
 the appearance of voluntary organizations gathering about the 
 ideals which lay back of the various institutions but which were 
 not definitely incorporated and expressed in them — the ideals 
 of the state, of the church, of the universrfyT^^In all these there 
 were voluntary organizations which grew up and came to play 
 a part in the actual control of the community, of the church, of 
 the school or university. One finds this in the Western com- 
 munity; one cannot find it in the Eastern. 
 
 The phase of this process in which we are interested at pres- 
 ent is the economic. The guilds as such were voluntary organ- 
 izations in which the artisans got together to control their 
 markets, their prices, and then got a more or less recognized 
 position, came into relationship with the feudal overlords or 
 with cities, won rights and privileges. With the peasants them- 
 selves it was relatively easy for new types of organizations to 
 arise. First of all, there were organizations of the sort of which 
 we have been speaking, that is, of weavers, spinners, persons 
 having a common interest in their occupation, who formed 
 groups in order to try to get hold of certain markets, to get 
 
 [ i7«]
 
 THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION 
 
 their goods bought for better prices, to estabHsh certain mo- 
 nopolies. 
 
 \.Siit5- relatively early, there arose within these organizations 
 the capitalist, who brought in a different type of economic struc- 
 ture. The form which appeared in the guild was a social struc- 
 ture in which men got together with common interests, protect- 
 ing each other, trying to get the best prices they could, trying 
 to control their markets, get better distribution for their goods. 
 But with the capitalist another situation arises, namely, that of 
 a person who has some accumulated wealth and who can use it 
 for purposes of increased production and distribution. With the 
 increase in the amount and the expense of apparatus, with the ad- 
 vantage which could be obtained by holding the product so that 
 it could be sold at a profitable time, ready capital was found to 
 be of great value. And with this accumulation of wealth there 
 arose the capitalist, who brought about the new structur e. _ | 
 
 Now, this is the process which we think of as having de- 
 veloped late in the eighteenth and early in the nineteenth 
 centuries. We can, however, trace it out very much earher. 
 There was a gradual development of the capitaHstic type of 
 industry, owing to changes in the social situation, owing to 
 advantages that would come to those who could gain control 
 over wealth for the production of apparatus and for the holding 
 of goods that were to be put on the market in order to get better 
 prices and in order to be able to get the goods to larger markets 
 and to markets at more distant points. For capitalistic enter- 
 prises we need only to go back to the commercial voyages of 
 Drake, during the reign of Queen EHzabeth. Queen Elizabeth 
 had a large proportion of the stock in the undertaking. Capital- 
 istic undertakings were going on, then, as early as this; the meth- 
 od of operation was developing, waiting simply for the situation 
 that would further its increase. 
 
 That situation was, as I have said, the development of larger 
 markets, especially for such goods as textiles, which could be 
 created in much greater quantities as the demand increased. 
 The sort of market that one gets in a closed community is fixed. 
 
 [ 179]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 Only a certain number of shoes can be worn, only a certain 
 amount of clothing is needed. The guild represented a group 
 that could answer to that particular demand. Standards could 
 be fixed. But there was no opportunity in such a situation for 
 the development of industry on any large scale. But when it be- 
 came possible to ship English cloth to Europe, to send it off 
 into Russia, down into Portugal, the markets naturally be- 
 came larger. When the market in England and Europe itself in- 
 creased, there was a tendency to develop this on a still larger 
 scale. The market was continually growing. There was also 
 the opening-up of the New World, with its treasure brought in 
 in the form of precious metal, and the beginning of a community 
 that demanded things also. This constant expansion of the 
 market and the increased number of things that could be pur- 
 chased on a large scale was dependent on apparatus for their 
 production. But the apparatus which was there was largely that 
 utilized for the markets belonging to these closed communities, 
 so that we have just the situation in which there would be a 
 growing stimulus to the inventor for the production of appa- 
 ratus that should lead to the production of goods on a large scale. 
 IThere was also growing up the capitalistic organization, 
 banking institutions that appeared largely in response to a de- 
 mand for national dynastic loans which monarchs had to put 
 through to carry on wars, which the church put through to sup- 
 port its manifold activities. Banking came to be regarded as a 
 legitimate form of usur]^. This contrasted with the previous at- 
 titude. In general, tKewhole of the medieval world was under 
 the influence of the doctrine of the church that usury was not 
 legitimate, that interest was illegitimate. If you borrowed 
 something, it was your duty to return it in as good condition 
 as received; but beyond that no claim could be made. Charging 
 interest was an outlawed practice. It was a curious thing, 
 though, that just at this time church officials themselves, as 
 well as monarchs, were borrowing on a large scale. That was 
 recognized as fairly necessary. But it was still not considered 
 legitimate for ordinary business. Here, again, you come back 
 
 [i8o]
 
 THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION 
 
 to the idea of a closed market, a situation in which there was 
 no call for capitalistic industry. The growth of this capitalistic 
 industry was one which corresponds to the process to which I 
 have been referring, one which had been taking place gradually 
 from the time of the Renaissance. 
 
 LIlIs- rather interesting to see that the Protestants, especially 
 the Calvinistic Protestants, were those who adjusted themselves 
 most rapidly to this economic chanj^' Luther's doctrine was 
 one that spread among the peasants. It was one which he car- 
 ried into the moral atmosphere which belonged to that phase of 
 the Reformation. It had been an attitude of the church; but it 
 was also retained as an attitude of the reformed dogma, which 
 came back, of course, to faith as over against works, to the 
 soul's immediate approach to God. But Lutheranism was large- 
 ly a peasant movement. It was not one that had any particular 
 sympathy with the making-up of the modern city. On the 
 other hand, the Calvinistic movementjs a city movement. Of 
 course, Calvin belongs to Geneva, IWhat the Calvinists recog- 
 nized was that men were put on earth, as we have seen, to 
 carry out their problem under the conditions that God set for 
 them. And Calvinists recognized business as part of these con- 
 ditions. Being strenuous in business meant serving the Lord. 
 As part of the dictum taken over by Calvin, it was recognized 
 that one could not carry on business, especially in the city, 
 without capital. As a result, Calvin was led to recognize the 
 legitimacy of interests And, interestingly, he took over some- 
 thing of the discipline of the church itself into business. There 
 was no difference between it in the two cases. The discipline 
 that belonged to the artisan was the determination of standards 
 of goods and produce. But there had not been any discipline 
 in the business which centered about money as such. This was 
 introduced into the picture by capitalism. The form of business 
 which we speak of as capitalistic grew up, in its earliest form, 
 in close connection with the doctrine of the Calvinists. It be- 
 longs to the Protestant groups, especially to the Calvinists, and 
 
 [181I
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 in the various new sects, as in England, which opposed them- 
 selves to the established church. 
 
 In order that the various processes of the new capitalistic 
 setup might be carried out, capital had to be provided. That is, 
 men had to find the means of production, and wealth had to be 
 paid into the hands of the producer in advance of the actual re- 
 turns. The credit system had to be worked out. The whole 
 banking process was carried over into industry, and it came to 
 be recognized as necessary that money which had been held in 
 the form of wealth should be utilized for production and that 
 such a mechanism as this had to be paid for just as much as the 
 machine had to be paid for. The result was that capital was ac- 
 cumulated and put into the hands of the producer so as to en- 
 able him to produce on a larger scale. The capitalist must pay 
 for the money that is put at his disposal. Calvinism, which was 
 the city form of the Reformation, recognized these needs of busi- 
 ness, and thus recognized the legitimacy of interest as against 
 usury. It is important to note that change, for it represents our 
 economic development from the medieval situation over into 
 the modern situation. 
 
 One of the striking illustrations which we have of this is in 
 Shakespeare's play. The Merchant of Venice^ a picture of the 
 old order against the new, Shylock representing a figure who 
 was objected to and yet recognized, in some sense, as a person 
 fitting into the needs of the community, but also as one in a 
 position to take advantage of his opportunity. There was a 
 struggle going on between the old order and the new. And it 
 was the Calvinistic group which recognized the change as it 
 was taking place and who came to regard the business process 
 as one which was instituted by God, one in which man was 
 called upon to carry out with vigor — it was his duty, laid upon 
 him by God. Man was to be strenuous in business, serving 
 the Lord. This was the motto of the Calvinist, and with it was 
 carried over into business the discipline of the religious life. 
 Men were to put into the former the same determination, the 
 same conscientiousness, as had marked their attitude toward the 
 
 I 182I
 
 THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION 
 
 latter. To a very considerable extent this discipline of the mod- 
 ern economic type, that which pursues the success of business 
 and which pursues it with determination and intelligence, was 
 carried over by the Calvinistic regime from its religious side into 
 the economic process. It is of very great interest to recognize 
 this passage. We do not find it in the Lutheran community, 
 in the older Catholic, ecclesiastical. Church of England group. 
 At first it was limited to the Calvinistic group, where the ap- 
 plication of their religious discipline taught that the individual 
 in all his tasks, even the most minute and the most material- 
 istic, could still be serving God if he carried out his duty con- 
 scientiously. It was a combination that played its part, not 
 only in England, but in American life in Puritanism, a com- 
 bination of conscientiousness and economic thrift, with the as- 
 sumption that the two go together, that man is put here to be 
 economically successful. The Puritans turned back to the Old 
 Testament and profited greatly by the Proverbs, under this new 
 interpretation. 
 
 Cjo we see clearly that the great changes taking place were 
 not those that appeared upon the surface. They pass in history 
 under the term of the Industrial Revolution, which is supposed 
 to have taken place during the end of the eighteenth century 
 and the beginning of the nineteenth. The study of economic his- 
 tory has made it evident that this process had already started 
 both on the Continent and in England much earlier. It goes 
 back to that period in which the agricultural industry of 
 England changed from the raising of grain to the raising of 
 sheep and the weaving of cloth. The development of the popu- 
 lation there turned its attention to the development of wool 
 and of the woolen industry. This naturally gave rise to the 
 cloth industry, to the spinning and the weaving of the wool, 
 which were processes that could be carried on in those days in 
 the houses of tenants on the land. The wholesale industry 
 was one of men who provided the wool, took it about to these 
 different houses, and then gathered it up afterward. There 
 was considerable capital involved in this; and out of this com- 
 
 [183]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 bination we have the development of capitaHsm, as we use 
 the term, together with the shift in industry itself from that of 
 the soil to that of the spinning and weaving of textiles^ Of 
 course, the development of other industries came along^t the 
 same time. The mining industries were quickened; the be- 
 ginning of the use of coal was appearing; and with the develop- 
 ment of new machines-at both ends of the process came the 
 stimulus to invention. Lflv^ntion is dependent, of course, in one 
 sense on the endowment of the inventor; but that sort of en- 
 dowment is, presumably, always present in approximately the 
 same degree in different periods. The question whether it gets 
 expression or not depends upon the demand for differences in 
 apparatus^> 
 
 If yotrlook back over the ancient world, you see a society 
 which for a thousand years or more had used practically the 
 same sort of tools, had used the same mechanisms of warfare, 
 of farming, of producing practical needs. Of course, we find a 
 gradual perfection in these. They vary all the way from the 
 crudities of a semi-barbarous period up to the highly organized 
 mechanisms of the factories of the period of Roman civilization. 
 And yet, actually, the tools used were essentially of the same 
 sort. We cannot find through the whole period of the ancient 
 world^we will say stretching through the whole Graeco-Roman 
 period — an invention which changed the process of life, not 
 even in the field of warfare. There, of course, stimulus was the 
 greatest. They had found out different modes of warfare. But 
 these different methods belonged to different nations. The 
 Persians, for example, used vast armies with chariots in front 
 and with more mobile forces in the wings. The power of the 
 army was in its mass; it simply rolled over its opponents, crush- 
 ing them out. The strength of the Greek army, on the other 
 hand, lay in the phalanx, in the close organization of the men. 
 It was smaller, could drive with lances right through the clumsy 
 Persian army, and then come back at it from the rear. The 
 Roman legion was a still more mobile organization. It was organ- 
 ized in small units called "maniples." Men were armed with 
 
 [184]
 
 THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION 
 
 javelins as missiles, and with short swords. They could penetrate 
 into the Greek phalanx and break it up. The Roman legion, 
 when broken, could come together again, because it was made 
 up of separate units. And the Roman legion was triumphant. 
 It was the most flexible, the most efi^ective, structure among the 
 armies of the ancient world. We find the same formation used 
 throughout the period of the Persian Empire, among the Greeks, 
 among the Romans. We find it perfected as we read the history 
 of it, but this is simply the perfection of an accepted order. Of 
 course, all the armies used some missile; but the missile was not 
 the important weapon. And there was no invention of new 
 types of missiles. It is a curious thing to pick up a book which 
 presents the antiquities of the medieval world and compare it 
 with the history of the armed forces of Europe from the be- 
 ginning of the world up to the later periods. We think of the 
 medieval world as rather static in character; and yet the armed 
 forces of Europe were changing radically throughout the whole 
 period in their methods of fighting, in the laying out of their 
 campaigns. In a comparatively short time they advanced from 
 the soldier who was lightly armed to the heavily armed knight, 
 who, when he fell from his horse, had to be helped on again. 
 Then we have the archer coming in and unhorsing the knight. 
 In such a book of antiquities we find very rapid changes not 
 only in the fashion of fighting but also in the fashion of dress. 
 And we find not only changes in fighting and dress but also in 
 arrangements for housing people. The ancient house was most 
 perfectly presented in the house of the god, the temple, which 
 reached perfection in the Greek architecture; but it was not a 
 different sort of house from that used for other purposes, for 
 living. The house of the feudal lord was the castle; it represents 
 changes from a mere hovel to a structure forty feet thick which 
 dominated the whole area. The change in the fashion of housing 
 is shown not only in these but also in the churches. The Greek 
 temple was the home of the god, a perfected house. The home of 
 the god of the medieval religion was a house into which the god 
 entered because it shut out the rest of the world. It was built to 
 
 [185]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 shut the world out. The light of the world without was brought 
 in through many-colored windows. The whole movement with- 
 in was a movement upward. The effect on the worshiping people 
 was to exclude the outside world. The Greek god was simply 
 the first citizen in the community; he invited others to come into 
 his house. Medieval Gothic architecture shut the rest of the world 
 out and tried to invite the population within; the church was the 
 house of a god against whom they had sinned and from whom 
 they must get mercy. In the expression of these ideas we have a 
 structure which is changing from generation to generation. 
 
 If we turn back to the feudal world, to the castle, we find it 
 expressing an idea. The feudal lord was not simply a man who 
 was in immediate political and military control over a certain 
 district, including the peasants or serfs, the tenants who be- 
 longed to the soil. He was also the representative of the Holy 
 Roman Empire. And it is interesting to see what hold this 
 ideal of the Holy Roman Empire had upon the whole population 
 of Europe. It was true then, as always, that it was "neither 
 Holy, nor Roman, nor an Empire"; and yet it had a romantic 
 hold upon the imagination of the people of Europe. They be- 
 lieved they belonged to it. They recognized it as a political order 
 that had to exist just as the community pictured in the gospels 
 of Jesus was a community that had to exist. It existed in man's 
 mind, even though unconsciously; and the feudal overlords 
 were the representatives of this empire. They were housed as 
 they were and defended as they were because they represented 
 it. That is the point I want to bring out — ^^he structure of 
 the medieval world expressed ideasTJ Of course, any house can 
 express an idea, that of living in it, of protection from the cli- 
 mate, of providing means of getting food, of bringing about 
 social life; but we do not think of a house as an idea, but simply 
 as a house within which these activities of various sorts have to 
 go on. And the same thing could be said of the religious life as 
 it took place in the Greek temple. One did not think of the 
 temple as expressing the ideas behind Greek religion. It was 
 a place where men met the gods, so to speak. A man merely 
 
 [ 186I
 
 THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION 
 
 met the god in his temple. The power of the god was mani- 
 fested there. But the church, as such, expressed an idea, an 
 idea which was not religion. It ought to have found expression 
 in rehgion, but it did not; so it was expressed in stone and mor- 
 tar, through the architecture, fjust as did the castle, so the 
 church expressed the idea of the Holy Roman Empire) 
 
 As an illustration of this take Goethe's Gotz von Berlichingen^ 
 and you will see the hold which these ideas had on medieval 
 Europe. The dominance of ideas which have to be expressed 
 and the expression of the ideas varies from generation to 
 generation, from artisan and artist of one period to another. 
 Where the idea is actually embodied in the apparatus itself, we 
 do not think about the idea as distinct from the structure; but 
 in the medieval world the idea was expressed as an idea. 
 
 xAU this is a part of the whole series of very interesting con- 
 ditions leading up to the appearance of the Industrial Revolu- 
 tion. What I want to warn you against is the assumption 
 that it suddenly appeared at the end of the eighteenth and 
 the beginning of the nineteenth century. You can trace it all 
 way back to the period of the Reformation and beyond. It 
 grew out of the gradual change in situation which led, first of 
 all, to a larger market that could utilize the voluntary organiza- 
 tion of which I spoke earlier, which could make use of the ap- 
 paratus already present — such as the growing presence of capi- 
 tal in connection with the obligations of the church and state. 
 
 W^hat is of particular interest in connection with this is the 
 assumption of a sort of economic community that lies behind 
 that whole economic process. Europe, of course, recognized it- 
 self as belonging to a single spiritual community, Christendom; 
 but that was largely broken up under feudal conditions, and 
 then there appeared national states, particularly those of Spain, 
 France, and England. Germany lagged behind. The larger 
 community was broken up, and warfare was a very large part 
 of the interrelation of these communities with each other. The 
 economic community, on the other hand, was a community 
 that looked for peaceful conditions. The individual might profit 
 
 [187]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 by war, but economic procedure looked for peaceful conditions. 
 Also, it brought together people who were separated nationally, 
 in language, in customs. The economic community brought 
 them together on a common basis. It was more universal in 
 one respect than the church. One could carry on economic proc- 
 esses with the infidel, with the man who was an outcast from 
 religious or political communities. One could carry on economic 
 processes with the savages. It was the most universal aspect of 
 the life of this period — more universal than the church itself, 
 so far as intercourse between peoples, between communities, 
 was concerned. It was, therefore, a process that abstracted very 
 largely from the fixed standards of the community. 
 
 We must keep clearly in mind the point which I presented 
 in the last chapter, because it had a very definite bearing upon 
 the appearance of Adam Smith's An Enquiry into the Nature 
 and Causes of the Wealth of Nations and the development of 
 the economic school of which Adam Smith was the great repre- 
 sentative. Hume belonged to the same period, and Smith 
 carried over some of the former's thought in his own discus- 
 sion of finance. A development of this point of view also took 
 place in France in the appearance of the physiocrats as over 
 against the mercantilists. In this doctrine we have the develop- 
 ment of a point of view which recognizes a form of community 
 that lies back of political and ecclesiastical organization. The 
 very title which Adam Smith gave to his work is illustrative of 
 this point of view — the wealth of nations, a wealth that be- 
 longed to nations, as if they constituted one community. It is a 
 reaction against what is called the "old mercantiHst political 
 economy." This economy was directed toward getting just as 
 much of the precious metals as possible. It was a political econ- 
 omy of the man who was the direct servant of a dynast, of a 
 monarch who had to finance a court and an army. Such a min- 
 ister looked toward the gathering of precious metals into the 
 realm. And any form of industry was fostered which would 
 bring precious metals in and hold them in the country where 
 tax-gatherers could get hold of them, the latter being, presum- 
 
 f 188 1
 
 THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION 
 
 ably, a desirable phase of the situation. The mercantilist looked 
 upon wealth in terms of precious metals and undertook to con- 
 trol industry and commerce so as to bring them into the realm. 
 Mercantilism did not go very deeply into conditions of pro- 
 duction and wealth themselves. What it was interested in was 
 a by-product of wealth. Under such conditions the monarch 
 might set up all sorts of monopolies and charge for them ex- 
 orbitantly. But in the end, this would only decrease the wealth 
 of the community. We have the political power endeavoring to 
 extract, as far as it could, what money could be got from the 
 economic processes of the community, endeavoring to control 
 production and commerce to bring in wealth. The physiocrat, 
 on the other hand, was one who at least carried his analysis fur- 
 ther. He went so far as to ask what the source of the wealth was. 
 And, as far as he could see, it came out of the ground. It came 
 out in the form of agriculture or in the form of the results of 
 mining. In one way or another the soil, or what lay under it, 
 was the source of all wealth. And it was of importance, if one 
 wished to gather the coin itself as a symbol of wealth, that one 
 should control the source from which that wealth came. That, 
 at least, was an advance upon this superficial character of the 
 mercantiHst doctrine which dealt with wealth simply in terms of 
 money and which tried to control industry and commerce so as 
 to produce the greatest amount of money. At least the physio- 
 crats recognized that governmental procedure which increased 
 the produce of the community was of more importance than 
 that which simply brought in gold and silver. 
 
 The conception which lies behind Adam Smith's An Enquiry 
 into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations is not that 
 of immediate sources of production of articles which become 
 wealth, but rather the process of exchange. It is the market 
 that lies behind the political economy of Adam Smith. And 
 not only the market in the particular community but the 
 world-market. The mercantilist thought of the money that 
 could be extracted by tax-gatherers. The physiocrats thought 
 of the soil as that out of which valuable articles which could 
 
 [189]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 be bought and sold arose. Adam Smith thought of wealth in 
 connection with a market within which exchange takes place. 
 Of course, there must be something to exchange. And this ex- 
 change must be profitable. The assumption of the mercantilists, 
 and the physiocrats, too, for that matter, had been that every 
 bargain was a battle of wits, that somebody was victorious and 
 someone else was defeated; that the nature of a bargain was that 
 between horse-traders. Someone got the best of the bargain and 
 got the better of his opponent. Adam Smith looked further than 
 that. He said a bargain, to be worth while, ought to be good for 
 both parties. He presented a picture of communities that pro- 
 duced more than they could use, and, in so far as they did pro- 
 duce more, they took the surplus into the world and traded it for 
 the surpluses of other nations. They took their own surpluses, 
 articles not valuable at home, into the world-market where per- 
 sons wanted them and where they bought up this surplus, the 
 articles over and above those which were wanted in their own 
 homes. Persons came together under those conditions who could 
 both profitably carry out a bargain. One has something that he 
 has produced beyond his own demand; another has something 
 which he has produced beyond his demand. They want to make 
 an exchange. After this is accomphshed, both are better off. 
 That conception is what lay at the bottom of the political econ- 
 omy of Adam Smith. It makes all sorts of assumptions, of 
 course, but it is a step beyond mere production with reference to 
 a fixed community such as the guild. It is a step beyond the po- 
 htical economy that simply looks to returns in the form of dol- 
 lars and cents. It is also a step beyond the doctrine of the physi- 
 ocrats that simply looked to the general source of wealth in a 
 community. It came back to the actual demand as it appears in 
 the market — a demand which implies production beyond the de- 
 mand of the community that produces, and a production that 
 is brought to the central market directly or indirectly, to be ex- 
 changed with the surplus of another community. Adam Smith 
 brought out this conception with its various implications in 
 An Enquiry into the Nature and Causes oj the Wealth of Nations. 
 
 [ 190]
 
 THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION 
 
 What was back of this conception was the possibihty of pro- 
 duction on a large scale. In order to make profitable the sort of 
 bargaining that Smith presented, one must produce something 
 which one does not want in order that it may be exchanged for 
 something that someone else produces that one does want; and 
 one must produce in wholesale fashion, beyond one's own de- 
 mand. This led to the establishment of the factory. And when 
 you have the factory, when persons can begin producing for a 
 market which goes beyond the needs of a single community, the 
 demand then comes for a division of labor. One man can do one 
 thing more rapidly than he can do several things. An artisan 
 carries his article through from the raw material to the finished 
 product. He cannot do all the necessary things as rapidly as a 
 man could carry out a single process. Divide a process up into 
 its various steps and then you get production at a greater rate. 
 Of course, as you subdivide the process, you invite the machine. 
 And, with the coming of the demand for the machine, there 
 comes the stimulus to the inventor. You may have a compli- 
 cated process, such as that of making an entire shoe, which, of 
 course, it is not possible to do with the machine, at least not at 
 first; but if you can make the process simple, the sewing of sim- 
 ple seams and so on, the machine can perhaps do it better than 
 man and does not tire as easily. The stimulus to the production 
 of machinery, then, comes with the demand for production on 
 a large scale, from the breaking-up of the process into simple 
 parts which a machine can do rapidly and better than a man. 
 First of all, one must have the means and such a market as that 
 which Adam Smith contemplated, where the surplus of one 
 community could be brought into exchange against the sur- 
 pluses of other communities; one must have the factory in 
 which production can take place on a large scale. When you 
 have these, there is a constant demand for apparatus which will 
 accomplish what man cannot accomplish. One must have divi- 
 sion of labor. One must divide a single process up into a set of 
 processes which can be brought within the range of the machine 
 process. That is what lies back of the problem of production. 
 
 [191]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 t Back of the whole thing lies the market, the economic situation 
 with the gradual building-up of a mechanism for it, with the 
 possible developments of the independent organizations such as 
 lie in the very genius of our Western institutions, and with the 
 building-up of all the financial apparatus lying behind the free- 
 ing of capital. That process which is traced back to, which is 
 summed up in, what we call the Industrial Revolution, is of in- 
 terest. But the final conception — perhaps not final, but that 
 which has been of dominant interest until recent days — is that 
 of the market which makes possible the exchange of surpluses 
 
 Thus we get a conception of wealth which makes possible a 
 world-economy process. We can see how the devout economist 
 of this period, such as John Bright, could be a pacifist who could 
 look toward the development of free trade and to the elimina- 
 tion of warfare because he had behind him a community which 
 took in all warring nations and whose activity was one which 
 meant production and not destruction. It is possible, of course, 
 to turn even such political economy over to hostile purposes, 
 but the first conception of it was of the development of a 
 peaceful economic process in which there would be a continued 
 development of wealth throughout the whole, that is, the inter- 
 national economic community. As I have said, in this concep- 
 tion of the market in which one trades what one does not want 
 with someone else who brings in what he does not want, each 
 wants what the other does not want, and ideally each party 
 profits in the exchange. 
 
 That conception of the bargain and that stimulus to produc- 
 tion were on a large scale; and out of that the factory, the 
 division of labor, the demand for apparatus, machinery, to pro- 
 duce on a large scale, all arose. And back of that lies the de- 
 mand for power. You cannot drive machinery with hand power, 
 and so we find a growing demand for steam. That is the way in 
 which the matter ought to lie in our minds. You cannot think 
 of the economic revolution as having arisen out of the produc- 
 tion of steam. If you do that, you take the very last element of 
 the process and set it up as the first. To deal with this process, 
 
 [ 192]
 
 THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION 
 
 you have to go back to the type of community, to the develop- 
 ment of the market, and then to the development of apparatus. 
 
 In our discussion of the Industrial Revolution we have 
 treated the two theories which were used in the interpreta- 
 tion of it. That of the orthodox Manchester school, whose 
 three important figures were Adam Smith, Ricardo, and Mal- 
 thus, was a social philosophy, especially as developed by the 
 Mills, who interpreted the economic doctrine of these men and 
 undertook to make a social philosophy, a utilitarian philosophy, 
 of it. The doctrine was one which undertook to deal with the 
 economic processes from the point of view of the market, the 
 determination of prices by the market in which the producers 
 exchanged their surpluses with each other and thus established 
 the prices of goods in more or less universal world markets, 
 and found in these prices the stimulus for production. The 
 process was one which led to the factory system, the inten- 
 sive production of those goods whose prices stimulated this pro- 
 duction. Thus we have a situation of supply and demand; and 
 perhaps in the end the demand is more important than the sup- 
 ply, because the supply springs up in response to the demand. 
 As there is a demand, the different means of production arise. 
 Especially in the invention of machinery this demand brings 
 the production of machines by means of which to answer this 
 demand. This impHes a social process going on in a community 
 in which the need of the community stimulates production, and 
 the determination of the prices is a way of registering this need. 
 
 The process of production is one that calls for a reduction 
 in expense, because what one is seeking, of course, is profit 
 over and above the cost of production, and the prices you can 
 get in the market determine this profit. Successful production 
 is that which leaves a margin, which will permit the accumu- 
 lation of wealth. The two phases of the process are the cost 
 of production, on the one side, and the price which can be 
 obtained for the article, on the other. The economic process is 
 one determined by the relation of supply and demand in the 
 market so adjusted that profit results to the producer. Well 
 
 [193]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 now, if any producer can bring down the cost of production, his 
 profit will be greater and the accumulation of wealth greater; 
 and then he can produce on a larger scale. So he tries to get 
 down the cost of production in all sorts of ways. If there is a 
 surplus of the means of production, of course, the price of these 
 means will go down. If there is plenty of ore, of coal, of raw 
 material, the price of the metal, of the coal, of the material, 
 will go down. One of the very large elements in the cost of pro- 
 duction is labor; and, of course, if there is a surplus of labor, 
 the price of labor will go down. What the producer seeks as far 
 as he can is a surplus of those articles which he is to use in his 
 production, for there lies the possibihty of getting a lower cost 
 and hence a larger profit. Inevitably, the producer must seek to 
 reduce his cost of production. The cost of production will de- 
 pend, of course, on the surplus of the article. If there is a sur- 
 plus over and above the demand, then the price of that com- 
 modity will drop. All this appHes just as logically to labor as 
 to anything else. 
 
 It is here that the Malthusian doctrine comes in. What Mal- 
 thus thought he had discovered was that population always in- 
 creased at a greater rate than the means of sustenance. In any 
 community the increase in population will be greater than the 
 increase in food supply. I noted the fact that sometime about 
 the middle of the eighteenth century there was a notable in- 
 crease in population in England and Europe, presumably be- 
 cause of a decrease in the death-rate. Malthus did not take into 
 account the relationship of the death-rate to the birth-rate. 
 However, he gathered figures which, as far as they went, seemed 
 to support his contention that the population, itself, by and 
 large, would always be greater than the supply of food and that 
 there must be a continual holding-down of the population by the 
 process of starvation. More children are born into the world 
 and more survive than can continue to survive with the food 
 supply available. Taken in terms of the birth-rate, the latter 
 will always be too large in proportion to the food supply. 
 
 Well, this offers to the manufacturer, to the producer, just 
 
 [ 194]
 
 THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION 
 
 the situation he wants, that is, a surplus of labor, one of the 
 main items in the cost of production. If you can get a surplus 
 of coal, iron, anything that enters into the cost, then the price 
 of that will sink and will reduce the price of production. Of 
 course, in the same fashion, if there are more laborers than 
 there are jobs, the price of the laborer will sink proportionately. 
 What Malthus' doctrine impHed was a surplus of labor which 
 would keep the price of labor at the level of a starvation wage, 
 for, after all, that would be the limit to which the price of labor 
 could sink. Otherwise the laborer would starve to death. If 
 there is a surplus of labor in the market, people would continue 
 to work under those conditions as well as they could, getting 
 just enough to keep alive. A starvation wage would be the limit 
 below which the price of labor could not sink, and the limit 
 toward which a Malthusian doctrine would inevitably carry it. 
 
 Here we have, then, the essential element of this doctrine, 
 which, you see, is more than an economic doctrine. It is a theory 
 of society in so far as society is bound to a method of production 
 which is constantly stimulated by demand. The means of pro- 
 duction, that is wealth, arise in proportion as there is a differ- 
 ence between the cost of production and the prices of the arti- 
 cles produced. If it costs you less to produce an article than 
 the price at which you sell it, you have accumulated wealth; 
 and then you can go on with the process of production. There 
 will be a constant tendency, then, to bring the price and the cost 
 of production closer and closer together. All the means by which 
 the cost of production can be reduced will serve to bring about 
 profit. 
 
 Freedom of exchange is that which will establish the world- 
 market, in which the prices of things will be definitely deter- 
 mined. If there is freedom for exchange, we will have, presum- 
 ably, the most helpful economic situation, for then those arti- 
 cles will be produced which are least expensive. Consequently, 
 the price of them can be brought down until it is a price in which 
 capital, as such, tends to pass into the hands of those who can 
 most intelligently utilize it. The price is being continually 
 
 [195]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 forced down by a free market. The cost of production must be 
 brought down if a profit is to be made possible. It is in a large 
 concern, where manufacturing is on a wholesale basis, where 
 the factory system can be carried through to its logical con- 
 clusion, where division of labor can take place to the limit, that 
 you get the lowest cost of production. As I have said, one of 
 the very large elements of the cost of production is the price 
 of labor. And, according to the Malthusian doctrine, this will 
 continually gravitate toward a starvation level. This is not a 
 cheerful view for society. It leads to that capitalistic class 
 into whose hands the capital itself will naturally gravitate, for 
 they are the ones who can most successfully utilize it in produc- 
 tion. The latter has to be carried on on a large scale, with expert 
 managers and engineers; and investments have to be made in an 
 expert fashion if capital is to be successfully utilized. The 
 tendency will be, then, for capital to gravitate into the hands of 
 those who can invest it most successfully, and then it remains 
 in the hands of those who can most successfully utilize it in pro- 
 duction by constantly keeping the cost of production down to its 
 lowest level. The so-called "iron laws" of nature, as exhibited 
 in economic conditions, then, seem to lead toward a picture of 
 the community in which its capitalistic class would inevitably 
 gain more and more of the wealth while the rest of the com- 
 munity would get closer and closer to a starvation wage, which 
 is rendered inevitable by the natural law which Malthus is sup- 
 posed to have discovered, namely, that reproduction in the com- 
 munity will always be greater than the food supply. 
 
 It is interesting that Darwin's theory of the survival of the 
 fittest came to him from reading the brochures of Malthus. 
 The latter's statement quite agreed with what the former had 
 seen in nature, namely, that among both plants and animals 
 there is always a larger number of young forms arising than 
 can survive. Something that inevitably follows, and about 
 which Darwin asked himself, was whether in the competition 
 of these young forms for a living there could be found any force 
 which would select particular forms rather than others; and 
 
 [196]
 
 THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION 
 
 the idea of the survival of the fittest occurred to him. He him- 
 self has related how this took place. It is one of the most fruit- 
 ful and important ideas that has come to man, and it occurred 
 to Darwin through his reading of Malthus' doctrine. Of course, 
 Malthus did not present him with the idea, but with a situation 
 out of which the idea could spring. If there is such a competi- 
 tion of young forms, then, presumably only those forms will 
 survive which are particularly adapted to the environment in 
 which they find themselves. If, as some biologists have com- 
 puted, there is a death-rate of 99.9 per cent among cutworms, 
 you can see that those that survive will be particularly adapted 
 to the surroundings in which they live. There is an enormous 
 overproduction, with the consequent survival of a relatively few. 
 That is the situation that this economic doctrine presented; 
 and it is interesting to see how one passes from a highly opti- 
 mistic view of human nature and society, as Adam Smith pre- 
 sented it, to a very sorry view which logically follows the work- 
 ing-out of his view by Ricardo and the addition of the Mal- 
 thusian theory in regard to population. As we have seen, x'\dam 
 Smith recognized a community in which a bargain of intellects 
 was always a good bargain and demanded that the hands of 
 government, in the form of restrictions on trade, should be taken 
 off so that such good bargains might take place. It was a doc- 
 trine directed against governmental interference, against mo- 
 nopolies, against the international life of the time, at least as 
 that existed in the form of actual and potential wars. Free pro- 
 duction on every side would bring people together under con- 
 ditions in which they could presumably most profitably ex- 
 change their goods, enabling those who could produce surpluses 
 of one sort to exchange them elsewhere for surpluses of another 
 sort. In order to reach this desirable result, all you had to do 
 was to let trade and the economic process alone. Do not inter- 
 fere with it. Do not allow monopolies to arise. Let people pro- 
 duce under those conditions in which they can most successfully 
 do so, and these will be most favorable to trade and society 
 itself. 
 
 [197]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 Now, carry out the doctrine of Adam Smith with its intense 
 production, figure in the cost of capital, and bring these two 
 sides of the shears together — on the one hand the cost of pro- 
 duction, on the other hand the price which will be continu- 
 ally going down with resultant curtailment of profit — and then 
 add to that Malthus' doctrine which provides society with a 
 surplus of population that has to be kept down continually by 
 starvation, and the capitaHstic picture so optimistic from Adam 
 Smith's point of view becomes very dark. 
 
 198
 
 CHAPTER X 
 THE SOCIAL RENAISSANCE— UTILITARIANISM 
 
 y4S WE have seen, the orthodox economic doctrine was 
 A-A very simple — take away all restrictions, and that pro- 
 ^ -^ duction will take place in any community which is most 
 economical, which is most productive. Each community will 
 produce that which it can produce better than others can. If it 
 undertakes to produce that which others can produce better, it 
 will destroy its own industries. The theory comes down to this: 
 simply remove all restrictions, and trade will follow the most 
 helpful channels. But in the actual processes of the various 
 countries themselves, it was found gradually to be a more com- 
 plex problem than it had been thought to be. The economic 
 doctrine, as such, in its simplicity broke down. It could not be 
 said that any other definite, clear-cut theory took its place. 
 This was one of those times when people were feeling their way. 
 The assumedly fixed situation that grew out of the Manchester 
 doctrine was seen not to be in accord with the facts. As a result, 
 it was practically abandoned. 
 
 It is in such a situation that opportunism arises. This is true 
 even in the most rigid form of the socialist dgf trine, which, with 
 utilitarianism, we are about to consider. [Just because people 
 could not tell what the so-called "fixed laws" of economic and 
 social processes were, they wanted to go ahead and bring about 
 results which they could see were really advantageous. They 
 wished to improve the conditions of the working man, to see 
 that he lived under proper conditions, to get rid ot the slums. 
 They initiated movements toward minimum wages, toward 
 dealing, through insurance systems, with those conditions with 
 which the laborer himself could not deal. These are all move- 
 ments which go with the pressure of labor itself in its organiza- 
 
 [ 199]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 tion. The result was that, if you look over the statistics of the 
 nineteenth century, you will find a gradual increase in wage, an 
 actually effective wage which does not answer to the economic 
 doctrine at all. You find also in various countries a falling-off in 
 actual increase of population, and a tendency toward a decrease 
 in the proportionate increase in population which seemed to 
 answer to the intelligence of the community itself. 
 
 That is the situation, then, which really led to a feeling of the 
 way in socialistic and other economic views toward improve- 
 ment at various points, with an attempt to set up a program of 
 what the order of society ought to be. There was, in other 
 words, a sense of progress without a definite conception of an 
 ideal order. People felt that they did not know where they 
 were going; but they were sure they were on their way, 
 and^hat changes which were advantageous could be brought 
 about. T^ 
 
 An economic law was presented by the Manchester school 
 which called for free trade as that which was most satisfactory 
 for economic production. But England was practically the only 
 country that adopted it. England, of course, was in a very fa- 
 vorable position for the operation of free trade. She had the 
 raw materials for building factories, she had coal and iron. But 
 she was in great need of other raw materials for the manufacture 
 of articles that she needed. She also needed, as she found very 
 soon, more food than could be produced in England. There had 
 to be, then, large importations, and, of course, large exporta- 
 tions. But England not only exported goods. With the increase 
 in capital, she exported capital itself as well. She needed to have 
 the channels open so that there should be freedom of movement 
 within and without. The other countries in Europe and America 
 adopted tariff laws of various types, and there were very varied 
 influences and motives behind these laws. Of course, they all 
 had to do with industries which they were supposed to protect. 
 They all protected the price of goods, but the reasons for 
 this protection varied. The customs union, for example, was 
 very important in bringing about the national organization of 
 
 f 200 1
 
 UTILITARIANISM 
 
 Germany. It brought together the different German countries 
 under a customs arrangement and opened the door to the polit- 
 ical union that took place later. An organization of its indus- 
 tries with reference to the various policies of the government 
 which could in a manner control the direction of production and 
 of trade was made possible through the tariff laws. That is, the 
 government in the manipulation of its tariff laws could open up 
 doors in various directions and close them in others. Particular- 
 ly within the country itself, it could give remissions from certain 
 types of tariff taxation. The control which a government ex- 
 ercises over its railroads, for example, enables it to help the 
 development of its industries. In Germany there gradually grew 
 up a governmentally controlled industry which was organized 
 with reference to its foreign trade and which became a definite 
 part of the foreign policy of the government itself. And, for this 
 a tariff system was necessary. In other countries there were, of 
 course, different interests which gathered about the different 
 trades that were affected by the tariff. In our own country there 
 was a real tariff policy which undertook, in the mind of the 
 greater part of the community, to protect the laborer against the 
 starvation wages of Europe. It gave the industries that were so 
 protected the advantage of higher prices. Under these condi- 
 tions there grew up, however, in America itself a type of organi- 
 zation of trade not directed by government but arising simply 
 out of the economic situation, the building-up of prices. I will 
 not go into a discussion of this except to point out that the tariff 
 situation proved to be far more complex than it was then pre- 
 sented in the orthodox economic doctrine. 
 
 Along with socialism we find the beginning of another social 
 theory which had as its objective the control of the social situa- 
 tions which were arising as a result of the complex changes that 
 followed from various economic practices, particularly as these 
 affected the living conditions of the great mass of workers. Ben- 
 tham was the originator of this latter movement. He was a man 
 who approached the needs of English society from the stand- 
 point of administrative reform, particularly of criminal reform. 
 
 \ 20I 1
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 What he wanted in a philosophy was such a statement of the 
 motives and ends of men as could be easily used in terms of gov- 
 ernment and also in other processes with which government had 
 to do. He found such a statement in utilitarianism, a position 
 which was already extant in the philosophy of Hume, and which 
 goes over, in one way or another, to Bishop Butler, at least in 
 connection with his theory of desire. 'These men found the mo- 
 tive of all conduct in a desire for pleasure and the avoidance of 
 pain. That was the statement that Bentham took up. 
 
 You can see how that fitted into a program for the reform of 
 criminal law. The sanction of the law is punishment; the motive 
 which operates is presumably the suffering which punishment 
 brings, or the relief from the fear of punishment which comes 
 from avoiding crime.'' Those motives are the sort to which this 
 type of philosophy would naturally turn. The suffering inflicted 
 upon the criminal was to be in proportion to the crime. The 
 more heinous the crime, the greater the suffering. And in so far 
 as punishment is supposed to be a preventive, the more heavy 
 the punishment the less likely the individual is to commit crime. 
 If you can state motives in terms of pains and penalties, you 
 seem to have hold of the springs of human conduct. It is an 
 overly simple, a superficial statement of human conduct; but it 
 is one which fits in perfectly well with a program of criminal re- 
 form. 
 
 I would not imply that this is the only interest which Ben- 
 tham had in his utilitarian doctrine. He regarded it as a means 
 of presenting the whole field of human nature. In its simplest 
 form it was a way of getting over from those interests which 
 were the dominant characteristics in earlier societies back into 
 what became a more democratic society. That is, what was de- 
 manded in an English society was the preservation of the old 
 order, with the values which the old order conserved. But, how- 
 ever much one may recognize the importance of keeping these 
 old values, one realizes also that they cannot ail be kept and 
 that some have to change. Then the question arises as to which 
 of these values ought to be kept and which ones changed. How 
 
 [ 202 1
 
 UTILITARIANISM 
 
 much change can one actually bring into the fixed order of 
 society? 
 
 To illustrate this, let me mention the problem of the impor- 
 tance which the preservation of game took in men's minds. In 
 itself seemingly a trivial matter, it carried with it a sense of pres- 
 tige as well as of the enjoyment of sport on the part of the priv- 
 ileged, the landed, classes. On the other hand, along with the 
 desire for satisfaction of a certain sort of sport, there was the 
 desire for getting food on the part of the poacher. This does not 
 seem to be anything that strikes very deep; and yet you find it 
 standing as a symbol for the old order and having, therefore, a 
 value way beyond anything that seems to be socially assessable. 
 
 In the face of such a conflict, what was the community to do? 
 It wants to preserve what is valuable in the old social order. 
 Here is a practice that the upper classes cling to, especially those 
 who have rights over the preservation of game. They demand it 
 as fiercely as anything else. Now the problem is to determine 
 what these values are, so that it can be seen which of them are 
 important and which are of less importance. What system of 
 evaluation can be introduced into a community which has to 
 change, to shift, to reform, many of its old practices, to abandon 
 many of its old institutions? That was the need which the most 
 intelligent in the community felt. They wanted some way of 
 assessing these values to find out what was worth while. 
 
 :The simplest statement that could well be made, however 
 inaHequate it was, was the utilitarian. When it came to such an 
 illustration as that which I have just given of poaching, they 
 would say that you must consider the relative values simply in 
 terms of the pleasure that those who exercise the sport get out of 
 it as over against the pains and penalties involved in poaching. 
 On this basis it can be said that one has greater value than the 
 other. ^Furthermore, you can go ahead on this basis and set up a 
 system, a quantitative system, which is the easiest sort of a sys- 
 tem to manage. When you put colors over against each other in 
 a color scheme, you find it very difficult to assess directly. You 
 can say that red and yellow have movement and life, while blue 
 
 [203]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 and violet are cold, and green is calm. But it is very difficult to 
 arrange these qualities so that they have a different, a definite, 
 meaning in a scale. You can get a vague scale, if you like, all the 
 way from the vividness of red and yellow around through the 
 calmness of green to the deadness of blue. But there is no. such 
 satisfactory basis for a schematism as can be found in a state- 
 ment of colors in terms of waves. Then you find that colors are 
 represented by waves of different lengths and that there are 
 long waves at one end of the spectrum and short waves at the 
 other end and that all the different colors can be arranged in 
 terms of amplitude of waves. 
 
 Now, in the same way, when you come to a statement of cer- 
 tain experiences as over against each other, some seem intensely 
 important, others trifling, and you try to arrange them with ref- 
 erence to each other — some fine, some vulgar. But what is the 
 way in which these experiences should be— may be — assessed.^ 
 If you take them in qualitative form, you find that it is difficult, 
 if not impossible, to arrange them on any satisfactory scale. 
 But, supposing you say we will consider simply the amount of 
 pain and pleasure a person gets out of each. Then you have 
 something that, at least on the face of it, can be quantitatively 
 ordered. One gives a greater amount of pleasure than the other. 
 Then you can add them up, make an algebraic sum of the pleas- 
 ures and pains — the pleasure positive, the pain negative — and 
 determine what the action ought to be. And, more important, 
 you can go into the community at large and say: "Here is the 
 experience of a single individual, but it is one of great impor- 
 tance to him. What does it mean to the community?" For 
 that purpose the thing you want to get at is the pleasure this 
 man gets as over against the privation of the whole community. 
 Here is a man who holds rights for the shooting of game. It 
 means everything to him — his prestige in the community, his 
 connection with an old line. It is of enormous importance to 
 him. What is that compared to need in the community, per- 
 haps starvation? What right is there in taking the amount of 
 pleasure of this man and saying that it is more important than 
 
 [204]
 
 UTILITARIANISM 
 
 
 the suffering of the rest of the community ? If stated in terms of 
 pleasure and pain, you have a way of assessing situations, espe- 
 cially of dealing with old privileges such as those which, in some 
 sense, marked the structure of English society of that time but 
 which needed to be reconstructed. 
 
 From that standpoint the utilitarian doctrine that stated 
 every case in terms of pleasure and pain was a very valuable 
 doctrine. The greatest good of the greatest number could be 
 set up over and against the good of the individual, and the great- 
 est good could be stated in terms of satisfactions and of discom- 
 forts and pams.;You see that, from that standpoint, we also 
 have a leveling doctrine. The advantage that the landlord gets 
 out of his position is something that belongs to him as a privilege 
 from the community. Is his enjoyment of more value than that 
 of others? How can we find this out? He is a privileged person 
 and should have certain satisfactions. Well, why should he have 
 them rather than somebody else, no matter how low on the 
 social scale the other may be? Jhe hedonistic statement is a 
 leveling statement. Each man counts for one and only one. One 
 man enjoys a picture; another, a game of football. How deter- 
 mine which is more valuable? It is the pleasure that the person 
 gets out of it that counts. The only thing to consider is the 
 pleasure of the one and the pleasure of the other. As Bentham 
 stated it, the pleasures of poetry and of pushpin, as pleasures, 
 are on the same level, even though pushpin is on die same level 
 as tiddly winks. It is pleasure that is of importance^ 
 
 Such a doctrine was a theory of great value in enabling people 
 to approach a situation which called for the reconstruction of 
 an old order. In this you can put Bentham and his followers 
 over against Carlyle. Carlyle wanted to keep the privileges of 
 the old order; he wanted to keep the values that attached to the 
 old order, to keep the old interests. But he recognized that in or- 
 der to do this he must substitute, for the old feudal captain, the 
 new captain of industry. He tried to deal with the situation as 
 though it were a new feudalism, and he failed in this attempt. 
 He felt the same problem as the utilitarians, that of the neces- 
 
 [205]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 sity of reconstructing society. What both of them needed was 
 some sort of thecjfy^h the basis of which such reconstructing 
 could take place. But the utilitarians certainly offered the more 
 workable theory. They set up a way of assessing the ends, the 
 values of life which could be satisfactorily used in a program of 
 reform. 
 
 I have already referred to Carlyle as giving in England a re- 
 flection of the German Romantic movement, the philosophical 
 movement which we have already discussed. Carlyle's own at- 
 titude was a feudal attitude. The value of that order was star- 
 ing him in the face. What he tried to bring to the attention of 
 England was that conditions had so changed that, if the older 
 order were to be preserved, it had to be in the form of a new type 
 of feudalism. A phrase was introduced that Carlyle made cur- 
 rent, a phrase which has a very different significance now — the 
 "captain of industry." He was a leader; one who led his la- 
 borers; one who was the head of the new economic community 
 as the squire was the head of the feudal community. Carlyle 
 looked for such a change to take place, for such leadership to be 
 set up. What he did not realize was that the economic situation 
 was one which had shaken loose the feudal figure, for the indi- 
 vidual laborer, no longer connected with the soil, could not be 
 made to have the same dependence upon an economic overlord 
 that the peasant had felt under his feudal overlord on the soil. 
 The same sort of personal relationship between the so-called 
 "captain of industry" and the laborer as had existed in the earlier 
 order could not be set up in the new situation. 
 
 While Carlyle was reactionary in the sense of wanting a new 
 feudal order, he was responsive and sympathetic to the condi- 
 tion of the laborer. When labor was brought into the factory 
 centers, there sprang up great cities in which men and women 
 lived in almost impossible conditions. And there sprang up fac- 
 tories built around the machine in which men, women, and 
 children worked under ever so hideous conditions. This was not 
 because people were heartless. It was due to the fact that con- 
 ditions changed so rapidly, because the factories had come into 
 
 [206I
 
 UTILITARIANISM 
 
 existence so quickly, because the machine brought its own so- 
 cial conditions with it; and men did not anticipate all this. They 
 could not foresee its meaning. The community regarded indus- 
 try as that which provided the morale of a laborer community. 
 It was assumed that no greater blessing could be given to the 
 child than to have this v/ork. The important thing was to get 
 the child started in the right habits and to maintain him in 
 them. To give the child a job as early as possible and to keep 
 him at it as long as possible was an act of kindness to the child. 
 He was getting habits of industry which would make him a suc- 
 cessful laborer. So the captain of industry would go into an or- 
 phan asylum and place children from there in slavery in the 
 factory, drive them to work with whips, keep them at it until 
 the children could not keep their eyes open. Women and chil- 
 dren were taken into industry under abominable conditions, 
 dragging as beasts of burden, the cars that carried the ore and 
 coal. The machine itself was allowed to determine the human 
 conditions of labor. I said this was done not because men were 
 heartless but because they had no idea of what this situation, 
 this industrial development, would mean — because they car- 
 ried over the standards of an entirely different economic situa- 
 tion into the new one. 
 
 Well, these conditions of an inadequate wage and wretched 
 living conditions were reflected in (Carlyle'^ writings. He re- 
 sponded to them; he saw something of what they meant. He 
 recognized that there was springing up an organization among 
 the laborers themselves. He wanted that organization headed 
 by the new feudal economic lord who took the place of the 
 feudal lord of the past. T have already referred to the character- 
 istic in our Western society of voluntary organization which 
 played so large a role in the development of the Western com- 
 munity. We meet it again in this industrial situation. The labor 
 union was organized and composed of laborers themselves in 
 their effort to protect themselves economically in any way they 
 could under these new conditions. Help did not come to them 
 from the more enlightened part of the community, the com- 
 
 [207 ]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 munity that could be so sympathetic toward the tenant. The 
 great people, those that gathered about the manor and about 
 the curate's house, and about the vicar, could care for the sick 
 among those on the land, and those in distressed condition; they 
 felt the responsibility for the tenantry. But in the city there 
 were no persons to take their place, and the community itself 
 did not respond to the conditions. It was left to the laborer to 
 assert himself, and he did so through voluntary organization as 
 in the past. The labor union sprang up. It expressed itself as an 
 organization of that type which appears when it is more or less 
 necessary to fight with violence. And it called forth the most 
 rigorous legislation which tried to crush it out. But the Western 
 world never succeeded in crushing it out. It grew in strength; 
 and finally England, through its Parliament, consented to con- 
 sider what these conditions were which sprang up about the 
 factory town. Then came that group of highly intelligent men 
 who gathered about Jeremy Bentham. The two most forceful 
 figures of this group were James Mill and John Stuart Mill, 
 father and son. 
 
 To see what these men were working against, it is necessary 
 to go back to conditions such as those indicated by the so-called 
 Industrial Revolution, in which children were taken into fac- 
 tories, driven to work, forced to remain at work twelve and 
 fourteen hours a day, under most unhealthful conditions and with 
 low wages. You have to go back to such conditions and to the 
 utter ignorance of the masses, and even beyond that to condi- 
 tions that existed in these great industrial centers. If you want 
 a vivid picture of the life in these centers, take the group of 
 books by Arnold Bennett, in which he tells the tales of The Five 
 Towns, in which he gives an account of his grandfather's Hfe 
 as a child, the way in which he had worked. There is the 
 most vivid statement I know of in literature of the suffering of a 
 child in industry in such a period, and you can multiply that 
 many thousand times and get a realization of the amount of 
 misery there was. 
 ^^'^rHe champion of feudalism, Carlyle, could do nothing but at- 
 
 f 208 1
 
 UTILITARIANISM 
 
 tack utilitarianism, terming it a scheme to take a world of 
 knaves and make a world of men out of them by an appeal to 
 their worst motjyeai.But he himself realized the conditions in 
 industry and assessed past and present and presented a picture 
 of conditions which must be changed. It is that sort of a picture 
 that we must get in our minds — a need for reconstruction on the 
 political side. We know all about the rotten boroughs, the sys- 
 tem of parliamentary representation that could not be consid- 
 ered representative by any stretch of the imagination, in which 
 the monarch and the ministers bid for the vote of each member 
 of Parliament by emoluments they had to offer. You have a 
 seemingly utterly rotten system which had been held too long 
 in its place by the fears of the French Revolution, sanctified by 
 the rhetoric of Burke. The reformation was long overdue in this 
 situation. 
 
 But how was this needed reform to be carried out ? How could 
 people determine what was to be kept and what scrapped? 
 These are problems to which utilitarianism certainly offered the 
 best answer at the time. As I said, it set up the individual as its 
 final element. It was, in that sense, democratic in character. 
 And it found a statement, "the greatest number," which was 
 very satisfactory for dealing with the evils and misery of society. 
 On the other hand, when it tried to state the great experiences 
 of life in terms of pleasure, it failed. The ends which we pursue 
 are not subjective ends. The great things of life are objective. 
 We may have a most vivid, most private inner experience; but 
 the things that are worth while are not pleasures and pains that 
 we have suffered. The greatest things are those for which we 
 sacrifice ourselves and thus realize ourselves. That phase of hu- 
 man endeavor the utilitarians could not present. For them the 
 end was always the pleasure that one got out of what he did. It 
 was not food one wanted, it was the pleasure one got from eating 
 it; it was not music from great artists one enjoys, but the pleas- 
 ure that one got out of music; it was not friends, not children, 
 not the person to whom one surrendered one's self, not the issue 
 to which one gave himself, that was the end of effort, but the 
 
 [209]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 satisfaction that one got out of working for others, out of giving 
 himself to a cause, out of devoting one's self to one's home and 
 children. It was the pleasure they got out of these things which 
 was the end for the utilitarians. This is a poor picture of human 
 nature; it is an unjust one. On the credit side of the balance the 
 utilitarian presents an utterly inadequate statement of the ends 
 of human endeavor. But if you turn to the debit side, and see 
 the miseries there, you realize that to appreciate them you have 
 to add them up. One must put himself into an actual sympa- 
 thetic suffering of the pains of others. It is pain itself that we 
 must get rid of. After all, all great religions gather about the 
 mitigation of suffering, and what the utilitarian doctrine gave 
 was a vivid statement of the amount of suffering going on that 
 ought to be got rid of. Over against that it presented the peace- 
 ful sum of pleasure of the few privileged individuals. The doc- 
 trine was, however, individualistic in England. It came back 
 to the pleasure and pain of the individual. 
 
 James Mill, Bentham's immediate successor, was a Scotch- 
 man with great force of character and an enormous capacity for 
 work. He came to England as many Scotchmen did at the end 
 of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries to 
 make his way. He had had training in Scottish reHgion, and he 
 became attached to Jeremy Bentham. Bentham was a peculiar 
 character; himself a squire, an owner of considerable property, 
 he was, nonetheless, a person who had a very vivid interest in the 
 change which was taking place in England, the change from the 
 feudal order over to the new order which we have been discuss- 
 ing. His immediate interest gathered about the administrative 
 changes, especially those taking place in criminal law. Criminal 
 law, of course, had been administered first of all by the feudal 
 lord, and in feudal fashion. It had been inadequately general- 
 ized for each community from the Renaissance on. What Ben- 
 tham saw was that it did not meet its own purpose. He saw the 
 repression that went with its application, and that this repres- 
 sion did not succeed in keeping down crime, that the penalty 
 was out of proportion to the crime. It was assumed that a heavy 
 
 [210]
 
 UTILITARIANISM 
 
 penalty stopped crime. Bentham saw rather that this frequent- 
 ly increased crime. The whole situation called loudly for some 
 intelligent study, and Jeremy Bentham turned his attention to 
 these old feudal conditions. If you want a picture of the criminal 
 conditions of England at that time, take Meredith's Egoist^ 
 which was written at the peak of his career. Here is a picture 
 of the squire in his autocratic situation, and of the radical under 
 these new economic situations. What you realize is that the 
 whole governmental control in any district was lodged in the 
 squire. He was the one who exercised all police power, who in a 
 certain sense represented national government at that point; 
 and, not only that, but he was father of his people about him. 
 He had both positions. For him, at that time, game laws seemed 
 more important than any others. They were important not at 
 all because he was interested in his hunting and fishing but be- 
 cause they represented his position from the time of the begin- 
 nings of the feudal order. The right to hunt, to preserve game, 
 was the sign of the man who was in power, and so it remained, 
 so that the poacher was a person who was undermining the order 
 of society. It seems to be a very trifling affair, but it was mag- 
 nified because it represented an attack on the center, on the 
 power of the administrator, upon the police power in the com- 
 munity. The part which fox-hunting played in that period is 
 brought out here, and in TroUope's novels, as well as in Ben- 
 tham's career. What we find difficult to realize is the symbolism 
 of this simple sport. It represented a right, a sort of social right 
 around which the meaning of the order of society gathered. 
 \JThe political and social revolution was in a certain sense di- 
 rected against the feudal lord, most of whose rights and powers 
 gathered about the social situation. It is for this reason that 
 
 . . ^arlyle^became so interesting as an interpreter of the situation. 
 
 ^sp- He wanted to preserve this feudal order. As I have already said, 
 in that sense he was a conservative. He wanted the social ar- 
 rangement adjusted so that the old order could pass over into 
 the economic situation. His book Heroes and Hero Worship 
 gives a picture of his social philosophy. The mass of the com- 
 
 [211]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 munity were to follow their leader, and there must be leaders 
 there. And the fierce gospel that Carlyle preached to England 
 was a gospel that was to call out these leaders who were to 
 realize their responsibility, who were to carry over into industry 
 that sense of responsibility for laborers that the feudal lords had 
 felt for their tenantry. But the laborer himself was still to be in 
 the hands of this economic overlord. He must be recognized, 
 his rights recognized, his hates and fears listened to; but he him- 
 self was to continue to be in the feudal situation of the older 
 world. For this, of course, it was necessary that strong and 
 sympathetic men should be brought up to undertake this sort 
 of work in the community. And Carlyle, in true romantic fash- 
 ion, went to history to find his appeal. His Heroes and Hero 
 Worship was followed by The Life a77d Letters of Cromwell, by 
 his History of Frederick the Great and other studies, in which he 
 was looking for strong men who should be leaders in the commu- 
 nity and who should carry over the order of things from the 
 earlier situation into this later situation?) 
 
 In this hurried fashion I have again gone over the different 
 features of the Industrial Revolution. I have done this in order 
 to show how the utiHtarian doctrine — and particularly that of 
 Jeremy Bentham — played such a large part in it. The interest 
 in this philosophy was part of the shift from the feudal to the 
 industrial order. We have seen how this same interest is found 
 in Carlyle, who was also an important factor in England at this 
 time. Carlyle and John Stuart Mill, the third significant mem- 
 ber of the Utilitarian school, may be set over against each other 
 as two characteristic figures of this period, at least up to the 
 middle of the nineteenth century. 
 
 The best, rather the simplest, statement of the utilitarian 
 doctrine is one many of you are famihar with — Mill's UtilL 
 Jarianism. It is a short statement but very desirable in its 
 way. What it does not reveal is the enthusiasm this doctrine 
 aroused. As Mill states it, it is more or less convincing. But you 
 cannot really think of the youth of the community being in- 
 spired by it. ^n order to realize the inspiration that it gathered 
 
 [212]
 
 UTILITARIANISM 
 
 about it, we have to realize that it did present a workable doc- 
 trine in social reform, that it was democratic in its implications, 
 that it allowed one man to count for one and only one, and, par- 
 ticularly, that it set up a very simple statement of what the 
 end of all social institutions should be — the good of the com- 
 munity. And when one asked what the good of the community 
 is, it could be said that it is an algebraic sum of pleasures and 
 pains of the community which should show how much pleasure 
 there is, and particularly how much misery therejs3When you 
 come to set this doctrine over in terms of pleasures, it loses its 
 effectiveness. As someone said, it seemed to express the idea of 
 the Englishman waking up in the morning and smacking his 
 lips over a breakfast of ham and eggs. That seems to present a 
 pretty ignoble end for society to seek. But on the other side — 
 that of the getting rid of misery — it becomes a doctrine which 
 can have behind it all the enthusiasm of social reform. The 
 starving of children, the suffering of men and women in fac- 
 tories under trying conditions, could be brought out and sim- 
 ply stated by it. They were sufferings which were not to be 
 glossed over because they belonged to lower orders, because the 
 world was such that there had to be suffering in it, because all 
 would be right in the world to come. You could not push things 
 aside for such reasons when distress could be stated in terms of 
 the actual summing-up of the amount of suffering that people 
 endured in the midst of long periods of strikes, of penury, of 
 business depressions. If this is brought out and added to all the 
 suffering together, you have something which would appeal 
 to what was finest in human nature at that time. So, while 
 utihtarianism put its stress on getting rid of pain, it could be an 
 idealistic doctrine, if it tried to. 
 
 What John Stuart Mill does is to present as highest those 
 pleasures which we commonly regard as most admirable, espe- 
 cially those connected with social ways of life — friendship, or- 
 ganization of family life, and particularly the pleasures that 
 come from the enjoyment of literature, of science, of satisfaction 
 of all our multiform curiosities. Mill assumed that we have an 
 
 [213]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 indefinite appetite for these. He was, of course, of a highly in- 
 tellectual nature himself. And he recognized in the beginning 
 of popular education in England the possibihty of changing the 
 attitude and interests of men. He had been, one might say, a 
 victim of a theory of education on the part of his father. He was 
 taught Greek almost before he was taught English. He studied 
 ancient languages as a very little child. He was trained by his 
 father, who was a very effective pedagogue. His father hit on 
 the scheme, since John Stuart was the oldest in the family, of 
 giving him lessons and then having him give the same lessons 
 to his younger brothers and sisters. He would then examine the 
 younger brothers and sisters to see how well Mill knew the les- 
 son. It was a time-saving and very effective method. There was 
 a system of education in England at that time which made use 
 of very much this same principle. When England faced the pos- 
 sibility of popular education, people were frightened by the bill 
 which would be presented. It did not seem possible to hire 
 enough teachers and to pay for them to give a common-school 
 education to every child, so that the first systems of education 
 were such systems as this. A certain number of children were 
 taught, and then they were allowed to teach so many more. It 
 was a system which at least aroused a demand for public edu- 
 cation, although it was thoroughly poor in its results. 
 
 [214]
 
 CHAPTER XI 
 
 THE SOCIAL RENAISSANCE— KARL MARX 
 AND SOCIALISM 
 
 THERE was another reaction to the Industrial Revolu- 
 tion besides that of the reform measures that grew out 
 of the group of utilitarians. They carried through a 
 series of reform measures which made English industry very 
 different from what it had been in the earlier period. The other 
 important social movement is that which was represented at 
 that time, and still is, by the name of Karl Marx, namely, 
 socialism. 
 
 His doctrine is a fusion of the political economy of the ortho- 
 dox Manchester school^ — the three leading exponents of which 
 are Adam Smith, Ricardo, and Malthus — with the dialectic of 
 the Hegelian philosophy — a strange marriage of minds. Eng- 
 land especially, in the feverish industrialism of this period, and 
 Germany, at least as represented by the romanticists, seemed 
 about as far removed from e5.ch other as any two types of 
 human experience could bef You remember that romanticism 
 represented, in a certain sense, Europe's seeking for the recovery 
 of an old world, a return to the past from the standpoint of a 
 defeated self that gave itself up to subtle speculation, satisfied 
 itself for its defeat by taking the whole universe into itself, 
 by identifying reality with the ego, with the self. On the other 
 hand, in the industrialism of England, in the sudden expansion, 
 the development of wealth, with the enormous increase in num- 
 bers in the community itself, you have the introduction of en- 
 tirely new interests which expressed themselves in the impor- 
 tance that came to England. With this came changes of a funda- 
 mental type in the whole community, that swept over the 
 country like an external affair, like a force, a conquering move- 
 
 [215]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 ment that caught people unaware. To bring together the eco- 
 nomic philosophy that lies behind this movement and the 
 philosophy that lies behind the Romantic school is what did 
 take place in the theory of Karl MarxTj Of course, he was a 
 refugee in London because its liberalism, of which he had little 
 theoretical appreciation, gave him refuge from the government 
 at home. He and Lassalle are the first great figures in the es- 
 pousal of the sociahstic doctrine in Prussia, and he was driven 
 out. 
 
 Perhaps the first thing we ought to realize in trying to under- 
 stand sociaHsm is something that I have referred to already, and 
 that is the larger society which this statement of political 
 economy brings with it. Not only all those who want to trade, 
 merely economic men, all standing for the time being upon 
 the same level, but the industries themselves, lost that na- 
 tional character which belongs to them in the theory of the 
 mercantihst and the physiocrat. The point of view of these po- 
 litical economists, you remember, was that the real interest in 
 the process lies in the money, the wealth, which could be 
 secured, largely by governments for their own purpose, and in 
 the uses to which the governments were going to put the money. 
 But that presumed an industry which did not have inelastic 
 boundaries, one which had to be conducted from the point of 
 view of world-markets. It was a theory of industry built up on 
 the doctrine that, by the very nature of the process, every bar- 
 gain had to be a good bargain. The markets were places where 
 the surpluses of one community could be exchanged with the 
 surpluses of other communities. Now, there is another side to 
 this internationaHsm which this doctrine carried with it, but 
 which it neither stressed nor clearly anticipated; that was the 
 International, the internationalism of labor. 
 
 The conditions under which people worked in factories were 
 not national conditions. The conditions under which the Eng- 
 lish tenant, the peasant, had woven cloth in the sixteenth cen- 
 tury and in the seventeenth century were conditions that were 
 peculiarly English. They could not be put against conditions 
 
 [216]
 
 KARL MARX AND SOCIALISM 
 
 that were found in other countries. They were determined by 
 conditions there. But the factory is largely international in its 
 character. We discover that, of course, in the development of 
 America. We brought in people from everywhere, under a free 
 immigration law, and successfully took them into the fac- 
 tory, and set them at work even before they could speak Eng- 
 lish. There are no national boundaries in the factory. And it 
 was the factory that was the center of the economic doctrine of 
 Adam Smith. Laborers everywhere had the same essential con- 
 ditions. Prices might differ; but from the point of view of the 
 price of labor, as presented in the theory of Adam Smith, those 
 differences inevitably disappeared. The price for labor, as for 
 anything else, is got by haggling in the market. The price of 
 labor is determined by supply and demand, as is the price of 
 everything else; and, if there is a greater demand elsewhere, the 
 population flows there and the price of labor comes down. That 
 was part of the doctrine. So you see that labor — the man, just 
 as an economic unit — was much the same wherever you found 
 it. The laborer was the same everywhere. 
 
 Here we have something of the situation to which I have just 
 referred in discussing the utilitarian doctrine. If this theory is 
 allowed to work without interference, the labor situation would 
 very soon become a wretched one. And misery is the same the 
 world over. If you take the privileged classes that secured the 
 votes in England, that is, the capitalist classes which could buy 
 their way into great landholdings and into peerages, you get a 
 different expenditure of money in one class than in another. 
 But if you come down to conditions under which people are 
 working under supervision, you find in one country or another 
 that that sort of industry levels things down tremendously. The 
 international character of the factory is what we must have in 
 mind to understand socialism. 
 
 We have to recognize these conditions in order to see the 
 stimulus out of which the doctrine of Karl Marx and Lassalle 
 arose. John Stuart Mill wrote a political thesis which brought 
 the doctrines of the orthodox school up to date in his own time. 
 
 [217]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 The text is a logical presentation of the doctrine; but it had a 
 whole series of footnotes, and very many of these are what 
 would be called "socialistic literature." That is, John Stuart 
 Mill recognized the inevitable effects of this process to which 
 I have referred, and particularly recognized that there has to 
 be a control over distribution and wealth in some fashion if 
 society is to be kept from the conclusion toward which it 
 seemed to be moving, that is, a conclusion in which the price 
 of the market of the article, and the cost of production, could 
 be brought just as close together as possible, with the greater 
 masses of people living at a starvation wage as laborers, while, 
 on the other hand, all the capital would tend to drift into the 
 hands of those who could most effectively utilize it for produc- 
 tion. John Stuart Mill felt that there had to be some sort of con- 
 trol over the distribution of wealth if this result was not to be 
 reached. It is the logical result of the theory itself. 
 
 iThe theory of Karl Marx was perhaps somewhat more heroic 
 than anything suggested in the footnotes of John Stuart Mill's 
 Political Economy. And it is logical. It portrays a process of 
 production: the cost of production, on the one side, and the 
 price, on the other, in a process in which these two sides of the 
 shears are being brought closer and closer together. It is evi- 
 dent that it is in the method of production that the key to the 
 situation is to be found. If you get this productive process into 
 the hands of the community, so that it could be utilized in the 
 interest of the community and not in the interests of those who 
 are producing for the sake of profit, then you can avoid this in- 
 evitable result. That is, you can if you lay aside the Mal- 
 thusian doctrine for the time being. Ilf you could control your 
 production, not with reference to the getting of profits simply, 
 but from the point of view of the welfare of the community it- 
 self, that is, from the standpoint of the consumption of goods 
 to the best advantage of the community, rather than for the 
 production of wealth as such, then you could have a situation 
 which would be relieved of the blackest side of the picture which 
 the Manchester school presented. 
 
 [218I
 
 KARL MARX AND SOCIALISM 
 
 In this connection we find two diflferent suggestions: one with 
 regard to the distribution of wealth in some fashion, and the 
 other with regard to the production of wealth; one which 
 might, for example, shut down the limit of the size of fortunes, 
 take steps toward such a distribution as would be more even so 
 far as wealth itself is concerned, and the other, which is more 
 radical, which would undertake to determine in whose hands 
 wealth itself, wealth used for production, that is, capital, is to 
 lie. If you can put it into the hands of the government which 
 simply represents the interests of the community and not the 
 interests of any particular class, not the interests of production 
 which seeks the lowest rate in order to pile up profit which 
 comes back to the hands of the capitalist, but production for the 
 sake of the community as a whole — if you can get all the capital 
 into the hands of the community in this fashion — then you could 
 have a possible solution of the difficulty, and that is the social- 
 istic suggestion. Capital must be controlled by the representa- 
 tives of the community, that is, by the government; it must 
 not be owned by the individual, but by the representatives of 
 the people as a whole. There must be no private ownership of 
 the means of production, because production is to he in the 
 hands of the community itself. 
 
 j In the theory of Karl Marx the world was pictured as inevitably 
 moving toward such a solution of the economic problem. Marx 
 presented a very logical — indeed, the only logical — solution. 
 Conditions would continue to get worse until this scheme was set 
 up; the poor would get poorer, and the rich, richer. The rich were 
 a mere handful; and the poor, the great mass in the community. 
 The clash between these must come sooner or later./ Of course, 
 the rich have all the advantages of the institutions of the com- 
 munity (they can maintain themselves in spite of being a minor- 
 ity), but conflict must inevitably come in the end if the commu- 
 nity is increasing in numbers and if the community gives a wage 
 which is inevitably pushed by laws of economics down to a 
 starvation level. If the community is in such a situation, the 
 few in whose hands lie the means of production would utilize 
 
 [219]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 them simply for more and more production in which the cost of 
 labor would be kept down just as much as possible in order that 
 it might be lower than the prices in the world-market. Such a 
 situation is one which cannot last forever in an intelligent com- 
 munity. It must be turned back from this process which is 
 grinding life out of the great mass of the community, and take 
 control over it; and if it takes control over it, a simple method 
 will be to get hold of these means of production and see that they 
 are not used for the sake of profits, but for the sake of consump- 
 tion. 
 
 Of course, what Adam Smith recognized was that you get a 
 production of those things that people want to consume, and 
 you get it in the cheapest and readiest form if you allow the 
 process to run itself. In the end this would simply ruin society. 
 The machine was to be allowed to go by itself awhile and then 
 could be brought, in some fashion, under the control of the 
 community by simply having capital left in the hands of the 
 community itself, that is, in the hands of its agent, the govern- 
 ment. 
 
 The world, then, was moving toward such a revolution as 
 Karl Marx pointed out in his Communist Manifesto in 1847, a 
 revolution in which the community must turn about and get 
 control of the means of production. Marx accepted the poHtical 
 economy of the Manchester school. He emphasized it; indeed, 
 he overemphasized the results to which I have referred. He 
 assumed that what was taking place was caused by iron 
 laws until the social intelligence of the community should come 
 in to correct these evils. But he had back of his doctrine not 
 simply the logical analysis of what the current political economy 
 implied. A Hegelian dialectic lay back of it too. And the social- 
 ism of the period is, for this reason, called "dialectical material- 
 ism/' 
 
 [__ r)f r nnrsPj this procedure toward a revolution which, as I 
 have indicated, carried with it the implication of a reorganiza- 
 tion, at once suggests the HegeHan dialectic, the conflict of 
 Being and Not-Being and the rising out of that of the process 
 
 [ 220 1
 
 KARL MARX AND SOCIALISM 
 
 of Becoming. You have the inevitable conflict; then, un- 
 doubtedly, with the crash that comes will come revolution; 
 and then another order of things will appear. Marx had his 
 training in the Hegelian school, and he found, in this process 
 which is going on, an instance of just this dialectic. Hegel him- 
 self had turned to society for the highest expression of the 
 spirit — a higher expression, you remember, than that to be 
 found in the individual. From his point of view, government 
 was an expression of the will of the community and of an intel- 
 ligence that was greater than the intelligence of the separate 
 individuals. The government, or the state, we will say, was a 
 higher expression of the intelligence or spirit than was the in- 
 dividual himself. There was a demand, then, on the part of 
 the Hegelian dialectic science that the individual should sub- 
 ordinate himself to the state, for the state represented a higher 
 range of inteUigence than could be found in the individual. 
 That which took place through the state is something that 
 could not take place through the action of the individual in so 
 far as he isolated himself from the state. Bring people together 
 in society, let them operate through the state, and they produce 
 something that is higher than that which the individuals by 
 themselves could possibly produce. Thus the Hegelian philos- 
 ophy called for the domination of the individual by the state, 
 not by the monarch, who was, from the HegeUan standpoint, 
 merely "the dotting of the 'i,' " an inevitable symbol in the 
 community, but by a power that was centered in Prussia at 
 that time in an efficient bureaucracy. Here one found that to 
 which the individual could subject himself because of its 
 greater degree of intelligence, its higher expression of the Abso- 
 lute Spirit\ 
 
 WhafKarl Marx puts in place of this political development, 
 or this expression of faith in the human spirit, is an economic 
 process. In other words, we have here the economic interpreta- 
 tion of history, which was the last word in the socialistic doc- 
 trine. The process which Adam Smith, Ricardo, and Malthus 
 had presented was a process which, of course, can be followed 
 
 [221 ]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 out in history. It was not only taking place immediately about 
 them but had been taking place in the past. It was due to the 
 development of the times that matters went ahead as rapidly 
 as they did throughout the whole of the Western world, and 
 particularly in England. Production was advancing by leaps 
 and bounds; it was going on in an intense fashion and had 
 been going on in an intense fashion from the beginning. The 
 schools attempted to establish the laws by which all economic 
 processes must take place. From an economic standpoint, the 
 world had always been subject to these same laws. Men had 
 only relatively recently discovered them, just as men had only 
 at the time of the Renaissance discovered the laws of physical 
 nature. And, as men could look back to the period before the 
 Renaissance and see how these laws had always operated, al- 
 though at that time men had not known them, so they could 
 look back from this period at the beginning of the nineteenth 
 century and see how these economic laws had always been 
 in operation, and one could interpret history from the stand- 
 point of these economic processes. Now, however, they could 
 not only look back into the past but they could look into the 
 future, toward this greater end — a revolution in which the com- 
 munity should take possession, gain control of the means of pro- 
 duction, and thus allow the community to express itself, 
 through the proper form of consumption. This was the picture 
 which Marx undertook to provide. 
 
 Hegel had gone back to the history of thought and had under- 
 taken to show what the various categories were that had arisen 
 in human history. He started with Greek philosophy and fol- 
 lowed his theory through to the Western world. He took the 
 different concepts that had arisen in men's minds, extracted 
 ideas, logical conceptions, and showed how they represented 
 steps in the Hegelian dialectic. He interpreted history from the 
 point of view of the development of logic — that is, of Hegehan 
 logic. 
 
 We have already mentioned the Hegelian development in the 
 socialism of Karl Marx, the so-called "economic interpreta- 
 
 [ 222 1
 
 KARL MARX AND SOCIALISM 
 
 tion" of history. At that time I contrasted it with the HegeHan 
 interpretation of history, using the term "logic" in the Hegehan 
 sense, j^hile Hegel stopped to find in the great movements of 
 the Western world the development of the fundamental cate- 
 gories of thought, Marx undertook to find the development of 
 an economic process in which revolutions succeed each other. 
 He undertook to interpret history in terms of such economic 
 revolutions, to interpret thus the pohtical changes that had 
 taken place in the world, to bring back every fundamental po- 
 htical change to an economic cause, and to place all in the 
 framework of the econorni^theory which he had taken over 
 from the Manchester schooLj 
 
 That economic theory, you remember, was one which as- 
 sumed an economic process in which the individual laborer's 
 wage, that which he got out of the process of production, was 
 inevitably forced down to a starvation limit, while the element 
 of profit, the difference between price and cost of production, the 
 accumulated wealth of the community, inevitably passed into 
 the hands of the relatively few who controlled industry. The 
 movement of this process was toward an ultimate revolution in 
 which the com^munity would take control of the processes of pro- 
 duction in the interests of the community as a whole. j^There 
 was, as in the Hegelian process, a dialectic in which there was an 
 inevitable conflict between the interests of the community and 
 the process by means of which those interests were carried out. 
 This led, as in the Hegelian dialectic, to a contradiction, with 
 a synthesis upon a higher level. Finally, you remember, the 
 Hegelian process reaches the Idee^ in which the content and the 
 process become one. So in Marx's development one reaches the 
 theory in which the community's interest becomes identified 
 with the economic process itself. That would be the socialistic 
 state toward which the political program of the Socialist party 
 worked."? 
 
 Thus, we have a picture of the development of the Hegelian 
 doctrine — partly Hegelian and partly of the orthodox economic 
 doctrine — as this appeared in the 1850's, in its formulation by 
 
 [223]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 Karl Marx and the part which it played in the organization of 
 labor in Europe. Its importance is due partly to the success 
 with which the labor group had been definitely organized by the 
 Manchester theory. 
 
 £What Karl Marx did was to take history and interpret it 
 fromThe point of view of the development of the economic 
 rather than of the logical process. Just as Hegel had centered 
 his account of history about the various logical categories, so 
 the Marxian historian centered it about the appearance of eco- 
 nomic laws. He undertook to explain all that had taken place 
 as forms of conflict, of revolutions which were expressions of the 
 economic situation which is moving toward a final revolution in 
 which the community should come, so to speak, to consciousness 
 of itself as an organization which controls every means of pro- 
 duction and thus becomes a really intelligent community, not 
 simply existing at the mercy of these laws, but controlling the 
 situation through the knowledge of their operation. Of course, 
 it is true of the laws of political economies, as it is of the laws of 
 nature, that you can control them only by obeying them; but 
 if you can obey them intelligently, you can control them. Well, 
 this is a picture which Marxian socialism presented as over 
 against the very optimistic picture which Adam Smith gave, 
 and the very much more shaded and doubtful account that 
 John Stuart Mill gav3 It is only fair to say that the latter, an 
 orthodox member of the Manchester school of economists, 
 recognized, as definitely as Marx did, that there had to be some 
 sort of control over the system as then presented. The interpre- 
 tation of the latter looked toward revolution. It favored the 
 bringing of matters to this conclusion. Let the poor get poorer 
 and the rich richer. Let the extremes emphasize themselves in 
 the community, and we will get nearer to revolution and so 
 get over the situation the sooner. Things must get worse be- 
 fore they can get better. This was Marx's inevitable assump- 
 tion. 
 
 I have pointed out that the socialist doctrine carried with it 
 an internationalism which was implied in Adam Smith's posi- 
 
 [224]
 
 KARL MARX AND SOCIALISM 
 
 tion, but which got a more definite statement in the doctrine of 
 sociaHsm. The latter stressed the condition of labor as a result 
 of the process of production rather than the process itself. The 
 laborer's condition as painted by Marx was one which was, of 
 course, the same wherever economic conditions were at work. 
 Men might differ in language and social institutions and tra- 
 ditions; but, just in so far as social laws were operative, men 
 found themselves facing the same difficulties. The same conflict 
 between price, on the one hand, and cost of production, on the 
 other, would inevitably tend to force down the cost of produc- 
 tion and the price of labor. These conditions must everywhere 
 operate in the same fashion; and labor always, therefore, must 
 be in the same condition and must have a common interest. 
 There must be a solidarity on the part of labor just in so far as 
 it came to consciousness of this situation. 
 
 It was in Germany that this program of the Marxian socialism 
 was first put into a political form. The Sozialdemokratische 
 Arbeiterpartei was organized there, and gradually increased in 
 numbers partly because of the appeal of the program itself and 
 partly because the government undertook to suppress it. It 
 increased to something like four milhon voters at one time. It 
 was a party which was, like other parties in the Reichstag, a 
 protest party. It did not accept the way of things. Its members 
 stood for a situation in which the present order should give way 
 and a new order appear with the social revolution. And, of 
 course, this socialistic party was to be found not only in Ger- 
 many but in all industrial countries. France at that time was 
 not so industrial as at present, so the socialistic party had no 
 such part in France then as it did in Germany and Austria. 
 But through the organization of the labor group an interna- 
 tional organization was made possible in Europe on the basis 
 of development of the Marxian program. It exercised a very 
 important influence. 
 
 It was assumed at the time that this international organiza- 
 tion of labor was so strong that it would make war impossible, 
 that the laborers of one country would be unwilling to pit them- 
 
 [225]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 selves against the laborers of another country. That theory was 
 dashed in 1914, however, when the socialistic party in Germany 
 organized itself with the government and, indeed, worked out 
 an adaptation of the governmental theory of the superiority of 
 Germany to all other countries, made itself essentially a part of 
 all the propaganda of the governmental dynast in Germany. 
 The international organization was not equal to the task of 
 dragging down the nationalistic sense in the separate communi- 
 ties, and the laborers found themselves in arms against each 
 other in a war which was more destructive of life than any 
 other war in history. And yet, since the war the re-establish- 
 ment of the International has been going on. It is not, of course, 
 what it was before the war. That is, labor's sense of solidarity 
 is not, as yet, as strong as it was before the war. Labor is now 
 feeling its way in the same way as other groups in the com- 
 munity are feeling their way without having a clear program 
 before them. 
 
 !Z!Xh^ international organization of labor as such was one of 
 the great — perhaps the greatest^ — movements that took place in 
 Europe in the last half of the nineteenth century. There was no 
 other great movement that swept all over Europe, taking hold 
 of the masses of the community as this movement did, passing 
 over national boundaries, over differences of speech, getting to- 
 gether the representatives of those who were economically the 
 lowest in the social scale, but who represented the great bulk of 
 the community, and organizing them in the interest of the pro- 
 gram which was essentially ideahstic, one in which the members 
 did not expect to have immediate advantages for themselv^sTT 
 They were looking toward a revolution that was to take place 
 in the future. Especially in the early days, it was thought that 
 it would be about a hundred or a hundred and fifty years before 
 this would occur, and yet people were sacrificing immediate in- 
 terests in support of this program. It was a great idealistic 
 movement which was essentially religious in its character. It is 
 difficult to overestimate the importance of such a movement as 
 this in bringing about, for the time being, at least, a sense of 
 
 [ 226 ]
 
 KARL MARX AND SOCIALISM 
 
 solidarity on the part of the members of the different commu- 
 nities of Europe, particularly in bringing to light problems which 
 the community had to face. 
 
 That is the other side of the movement that I want to empha- 
 size. On the one side we have this sense of solidarity among 
 the great masses of the laboring population throughout indus- 
 trial Europe; and on the other side, a definite presentation of 
 the problem which government has had to meet. The proj- 
 ect which a Marxian socialism set up was one which govern- 
 ments were quite unwilling to undertake, and one practically 
 abandoned in socialistic communities in Europe. The project 
 of control over industry in the interest of the community itself, 
 the recognition that business could not be regarded simply as 
 existing for profit, that the other functions of business — in other 
 words, what we call "public services" — have to be recognized, 
 and that this recognition is one which must be enforced, if not 
 by public opinion, then by political institution, has everywhere 
 faced stubborn resistance. Such an institution as the Interstate 
 Commerce Commission of this country is an illustration of the 
 response of the community to the sort of problem that has been 
 set up by the development of industry and so emphasized by 
 socialistic groups. They formulated a sharp outline of the prob- 
 lem, so that the government was forced to approach it from a 
 point of view that it had been unwilling to take before. 
 
 The great change as to the insurance of the labor group against 
 those conditions in which the laborer would be unable to meet 
 the demands which society and life put upon him is bound up 
 with the same movement. Take the condition in which the 
 laborer is out of work, falls sick, gets beyond the period in 
 which he is economically productive. The older community left 
 him to himself or to charity. The system of insurance insti- 
 tuted in Germany recognizes that it is the task, the duty, of 
 a community to care for those who are willing, but unable, to 
 labor, whatever the cause of the inability. It also recognizes 
 that the care given in the form of charity of one sort or another 
 was not only inadequate so far as the individual was concerned 
 
 [227]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 but expensive so far as the community was concerned. It was 
 far less expensive to institute such insurance as in Germany 
 than it was to leave the laborer under those conditions in 
 which he had found himself previously, where he was dependent 
 on either public or private charity. That situation, of course, 
 was recognized not only in Germany and in other countries 
 which introduced such insurance but finally in England. The 
 Asquith and Lloyd George governments carried through insur- 
 ance policies, now represented inaccurately by critics in Eng- 
 land as the "dole," as a means of dealing with unemployment. 
 It was recognized, then, that the community itself must defi- 
 nitely face the problems that its industry places upon it, and 
 face them not simply in the interest of labor but in the inter- 
 est of a community made up of laborers as such. 
 
 That this type of problem has been forced upon the com- 
 munity, forced into government programs, is in no small degree 
 due to the development of labor parties; and this was made 
 possible by the idealism of Karl Marx and those who followed 
 him. I call it "ideahsm." The philosophy, of course, is ordi- 
 narily termed "materialism." It makes the industrial process es- 
 sential in the community. But the movement is fundamentally 
 an idealistic movement, for it is one that has looked toward the 
 reorganization of society, toward a reorganization lying in the 
 future. Such a movement is exactly what we term "ideahstic," 
 and this movement certainly was of that sort. It is one of the 
 outgrowths of the Hegelian movement which we ought to 
 recognize particularly. I have run over its history up to the 
 present time so that you can put it in its relationship to this 
 theory. 
 
 I now wish to emphasize again, from a different aspect, the 
 international character of the labor movement. Finance and 
 production, especially as these were reflected in commerce, were 
 inevitably international. But that internationalism did not lead 
 to any sense of solidarity on the part of the financiers, on the 
 part of those involved in the financial process. Financiers in 
 England and those controlling capital in Germany, France, and 
 
 f 228 1
 
 KARL MARX AND SOCIALISM 
 
 America each retained a sense of his own national character; 
 and, while involved in an international financial activity, each 
 identified himself with the community to which he belonged. 
 The labor process was one, however, in which there grew up a 
 very considerable sense of solidarity of interests among the la- 
 borers themselves. The position, of course, of the laborer as rep- 
 resented both by Marxian socialism and the Manchester school 
 was one of necessary misery; and misery, as we know, loves 
 company. The laborer in the face of the threat of a starva- 
 tion wage felt himself supported by others in the same situation 
 in other countries. The movement toward a revolution which 
 would change this order of things was, then, an international 
 movement in which there was a sense of solidarity on the part of 
 the laborers themselves. How deep or superficial this sense of 
 soHdarity was can be found at the time of the World War, but 
 it was far deeper than any sense of identity or of solidarity of 
 interest on the part of the financial groups as such. The financial 
 groups in Germany and England were in very vivid competition 
 with each other. They were seeking world-markets and seeking 
 to oust each other in these world-markets, although they both 
 used the machinery of international finance. The laborers as 
 such had no sense of competition with each other. This is true 
 in regard to Europe pretty generally. 
 
 In the tariff program of American politics, on the other 
 hand, there was a very definite undertaking which had a con- 
 siderable success in aligning the interests of the American labor- 
 er over against labor in the European countries. The higher 
 American wage was presented as protected by tariffs, and the 
 laborer was taught to regard himself as in a favorable position. 
 The whole situation in America was one which did not lead to 
 the development of sociaHstic consciousness on the part of the 
 labor group. It has not done so up to the present time. In 
 England also it developed comparatively late. 
 
 While they say that the Labor party in England at the pres- 
 ent time has a definite socialistic program, it is one of the Fabian 
 sort, which does not undertake to map out just what steps are 
 
 [229]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 to be taken in later periods. That is, it does not present revo- 
 lution as something that must take place as a result of in- 
 evitable conflict. The changes can take place by gradual legis- 
 lation, and the exact form of these changes its program does not 
 attempt to work out. It may be called a socialistic program, 
 but one which differs at least from that of the Marxian group. 
 The difference to which I have just referred between the pro- 
 grams of the EngHsh Labor party and that of the Marxian 
 group is also reflected in socialistic thought in a later period. 
 Marx, of course, invented a definite program. This was worked 
 out in the program of the Sozialdemokratische Arbeiterpartei in 
 Germany, and it remained the dogma of that party for a num- 
 ber of years. Gradually, however, there arose an opportunistic 
 group in the Socialistic party, a group that sought to bring about 
 changes or an amelioration of conditions of laboring groups, an 
 amehoration not only in the fields of industry but also in the 
 social conditions of labor. There grew up groups of socialists 
 very much interested in municipal organization, who sought to 
 improve the housing conditions, the health conditions of the 
 labor group. In order to do that, they had to ally themselves 
 with governing groups in the community. As I stated before, 
 the logical position of the Social-Democratic party was that of 
 a protest party which refuses to work with the active political 
 parties of the countries. They always registered their protest. 
 But if they were undertaking to carry out any program, they 
 had to work with the dominant parties. In spite of itself, as the 
 opportunistic group grew in power, the date of the future rev- 
 olution, and the form that it should take, became less and less 
 definite in the minds of the socialists themselves. That is, to use 
 a current phrase, there was a tendency to substitute evolution 
 for revolution. It was assumed that a gradual process was tak- 
 ing place which would lead to some such result as that which 
 Marx had had in mind, but it did not necessarily have to 
 take place by means of a catastrophic overturning of things. 
 Especially it became more and more difficult to state just what 
 the future situation should be in the control of industry, a 
 
 [230 J
 
 KARL MARX AND SOCIALISM 
 
 change which was mirrored in such a type of socialism as guild 
 socialism. 
 
 There was an uneasy feeling that even a bureaucracy as 
 efficient as that of Germany was in some way not adequate to 
 the task of working industry, that there was something in indi- 
 vidual initiative, in the trying-out of possible methods of im- 
 provements in trade, which led to individual profit — something 
 that provided a motive that could not be obtained under a 
 bureaucratic direction of industry. While the German railroad 
 industry under its bureaucracy proved itself an efficient and 
 sound institution, it was realized that this was a very different 
 economic undertaking from that of the production of articles 
 that had to find markets and had to be produced at continually 
 reduced prices. That is, it was realized that bureaucratic 
 methods were fixed methods, or tended to fix themselves. There 
 was no such stimulus to scrap the old and introduce new 
 methods for the old as was found in private industry. The 
 bureaucrat does not like to scrap his apparatus. There was this 
 general feeling that, when it came to the control of industry, the 
 government as such had not as yet, at least, proved itself com- 
 petent. 
 
 Interest shifted to the question of the control within dif- 
 ferent industries or groups of industries which might be exer- 
 cised by labor itself, a communistic movement which regarded 
 labor as the whole owner of industry. Could industry be 
 brought into relationship with labor itself? Could labor actu- 
 ally exercise control? Would it be possible to get hold of differ- 
 ent types of industries which answered in a certain sense to the 
 old medieval guilds, in which there should be representation of 
 the labor interest? You get a shift of interest, you see, from 
 the control of the government over industry to a more im- 
 mediate and direct control by labor itself, or the possibility of 
 it. These were changes which went on and are going on at the 
 present time in the program of labor groups — a change which 
 answers to the breakdown of the old Hegelian dialectic even in 
 the field of political economy. 
 
 [231 ]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 Coming back to the Marxian development, we must conceive 
 of it as having two roots: one the political economy, the indus- 
 trial development which the Manchester school interpreted, 
 and the other the Hegelian dialectic. The statement which it 
 took from the Manchester school was of a process in which, 
 through supply and demand, through the keeping-down of 
 costs in the interest of the production of wealth, the price of 
 labor would inevitably be brought down to a starvation wage, 
 if, as it generally was, the Malthusian hypothesis was ac- 
 cepted. It was assumed that under favorable conditions there 
 would always be a surplus of laborers, as well as a surplus of 
 other articles essential for production, so that expansion could 
 take place as industry demanded it. There should be the op- 
 portunity for expansion. In order that there might be this op- 
 portunity, there should be a surplus which could be taken up 
 as the demand developed. A surplus of labor meant, of course, 
 persons out of jobs, who were therefore on the verge of starva- 
 tion. The ideal situation from the point of view of this political 
 economy, then, was one in which there was a line of men before 
 the factory seeking for jobs, many of whom could not obtain 
 any. The Malthusian doctrine, of course, fitted into this eco- 
 nomic demand. There would always be a surplus of population 
 beyond the means of sustenance, so that there always would be 
 those who were seeking for a wage even if it was at the starva- 
 tion level. 
 
 As we have seen, this interpretation, plus that of the gradual 
 passage of capital into the hands of those who were not suc- 
 cessful in the use of it, led to the assumption on the part of 
 this Marxian doctrine that the rich would continually grow 
 richer and the poor would keep on growing poorer up to the 
 point at which the community would cease to recognize this 
 form of production and industry would pass over into the hands 
 of the state. It was the demand of Marxian socialism that all 
 capital should be owned by the community in the form of the 
 state. All production should be directed by the state. It did not 
 abrogate private ownership; it was only a question of what 
 
 [232]
 
 KARL MARX AND SOCIALISM 
 
 should be owned. No capital, no means of production, should 
 be owned by the individual except his wage. That which came 
 to him in his function as laborer should be his own, and the 
 amount which that would be would presumably be determined 
 by the state in its function as producer. And production, then, 
 would take place not in the interest of laying aside more capital, 
 not in the interest of profit as such, but definitely in the interest 
 of the community itself. 
 
 The assumption of this doctrine is that the whole of history 
 had been moving toward a revolution and that back of the 
 great political movements of the past always lay an economic 
 motive. The development which was taking place was traced 
 by the socialists back to the gradual development of capital 
 out of more primitive conditions, and then out of this capitalism 
 it was assumed revolution itself would spring. There was al- 
 ways the contest between those who were producing and the 
 masses of the community; and this had expressed itself in con- 
 tinued opposition, contradictions. And what the dialectical ma- 
 terialism, as it was termed, attempted to say was that this 
 process was one in which there had been conflicts of opposites 
 with the appearance of a synthesis in which, for the time being, 
 these opposites were harmonized, and such that the final con- 
 flict, so to speak, from the economic standpoint would take 
 place in a shift of emphasis in which capitalism as such would be 
 abrogated and state control come in. 
 
 One can, of course, point to the seeming failures of the 
 Marxian state in Russia at the present time. There has been 
 great difficulty there in keeping economic processes going. 
 The Russians seem to have made enormous concessions to pri- 
 vate capital in order to keep their industries going. As I stated, 
 the Marxian doctrine, which is very definitely economic dogma 
 pushed into the Hegelian dialectic, gradually lost its hold 
 throughout Europe and in our two great industrial communi- 
 ties, Germany and England. In Germany there was the So- 
 zialdemokratische Arbeiterpartei that was inspired by the 
 Marxian doctrine; and under the leadership of Bebel and those
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 who followed him it still maintained the Marxian doctrine and 
 looked forward to revolution; it still played the part of the pro- 
 test party, one that refused to accept the operation of the gov- 
 ernment under then present conditions, one that was waiting for 
 a socialistic government. As I have already pointed out, this de- 
 votion to the Marxian dogma waned in the later history of 
 socialism in Germany. There grew up an opportunistic move- 
 ment, gathering pretty largely about the force of the socialist 
 party, to bring about various changes, reforms in the immediate 
 conditions. As you know, Bismarck tried to undermine social- 
 ism by introducing state insurance for those who fell sick, for 
 those who reached the old-age limit — insurance which would 
 protect the laborer under conditions in which he was not able 
 to protect himself. Then, as I said, the socialistic part, especial- 
 ly in the municipalities, wished to bring about better conditions 
 for labor. They could only do that, of course, in so far as they 
 worked with other parties. This gradually became the domi- 
 nant element in the socialistic party. When, after the war, the 
 opportunity came to the Socialists, who were the majority party 
 in the Reichstag, of carrying out a program which they had 
 produced in the past, namely, that of bringing about revolu- 
 tion, they became a relatively conservative party, unwilling 
 to put control of industry into the hands of the bureaucratic 
 state. 
 
 In English history socialism had been of a different char- 
 acter. The Marxian doctrine, although formulated in England 
 itself, never took hold of the English laborer in the early days. 
 In fact, in one sense it has not in the present day. Labor in 
 England never looked forward to revolution as such. In Eng- 
 land the laborer fought for better conditions and better wages, 
 but his weapon has been the trade-union and not a social- 
 istic party looking toward the reconstruction of the state it- 
 self. The conditions preceding the war, and those following 
 it, increased the representatives of the Labor party in ParHa- 
 ment, so that it became the second largest party. The Liberal 
 party lost largely to the Labor party and to the Conservative 
 
 [234]
 
 KARL MARX AND SOCIALISM 
 
 party, so that the two parties that stood over against each other 
 were the Conservative and the Labor parties. This develop- 
 ment of the Labor party centered about a program which was 
 worked out really by the Fabian socialists, the Webbs. Sidney 
 and Beatrice Webb were the ones who very largely drew it up, 
 but there were others involved in it. It was a program that 
 looked toward the various socialistic types of industries, those 
 in which competition is eliminated by the nature of the indus- 
 try itself. A public utility is successful only in so far as it has no 
 competitors. You cannot have several telephone systems com- 
 peting with each other and still have successful operation. And 
 the same is true, of course, of other so-called "utilities." Com- 
 petition — the breath of life from the point of view of the ortho- 
 dox system — has no place there. It is necessary, in the case of 
 such social industries, that there should be public control; and it 
 is perfectly possible to have public management in these cases. 
 It is possible, conceivably at least, for a state to pick out a good 
 manager. It may be a question whether it can select a success- 
 ful entrepreneur, a person who can take capital and build up 
 an industry; but it ought to be possible for an intelligent govern- 
 ment to select a good manager, and we have various illustrations 
 of this in government-directed business — notably the post- 
 office, and in Germany in the operation of the railroads as suc- 
 cessfully carried on by the government. Where you eliminate 
 competition, where the process of operation is one which has 
 already been well standardized, there it must be possible to 
 introduce public operation and a gradual control, through the 
 development of the income tax, through the distribution of 
 wealth in the community. 
 
 Speaking of the change which took place in the socialistic 
 doctrine and the orthodox economic conceptions, I have indi- 
 cated that it was a change from a program to opportunism. 
 The term "opportunistic" does not do entire justice to the shift 
 in attitude. It was not simply an attitude on the part of the 
 thinkers of various types to reach out for any chance advantage 
 that might be gained. There was always behind it the assump- 
 
 [235]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 tion that there was some sort of method or social process that 
 could be found out, and therefore some sort of method that 
 might be adopted so that these human institutions could be 
 adjusted to this process; that is, that there might be laws 
 which, if discovered, could be used to control social events. The 
 first assumption of the economic doctrine had been that certain 
 so-called "iron laws" of nature had been discovered which are 
 involved in the economic process, and that the only thing 
 one could do was to accept them and act in accordance with 
 them; that if one undertook to contravene them he got himself 
 into difficulties. It was like refusing to obey the law of gravita- 
 tion. One must obey in order to control. 
 
 What generally came out of the struggle, however, was a 
 gradual recognition that these laws did not have the form which 
 an earlier economic doctrine had given to them. That doctrine 
 led logically to the conclusions which Karl Marx drew from 
 them. That is, if one were to accept not only the laws of supply 
 and demand, those which control the price of things in the mar- 
 kets of the world, but accept also the process of competition, and 
 the Malthusian law, the results which Marx drew from them 
 were logical. However, out of the labor-union movement in 
 England and in this country, out of the processes which were 
 responsible for these movements, it was found that the price 
 of labor could be influenced by other considerations than those 
 of supply and demand, that it was possible to increase the price 
 of labor above a subsistence level. What had been overlooked 
 in the Marxian assumption was the greater productivity of 
 labor. It had also overlooked the various social conditions that 
 determine the fixing of the wage. Taking the laws of these first, 
 it was found that in the struggle between the labor unions and 
 the employers, in the discussion of the conditions under which 
 labor operated, there could grow up a public sentiment that was 
 effective in determining the price of labor, or at least that had 
 an influential part in determining the price of labor. Also, it 
 was slowly discovered that a wage which made possible mere 
 subsistence and which kept the laborers on the verge of starva- 
 
 [ ^36 ]
 
 KARL MARX AND SOCIALISM 
 
 tion was not a wage which produced the highest results; it was 
 not an economic wage. 
 
 The abstract doctrine we have been speaking of assumed that 
 man was Hke a machine: he could be bought and then he 
 would operate; but he could operate only on the basis of a sub- 
 sistence which he obtained in exchange for his labor, and which, 
 if inadequate, would render his performance inadequate also. 
 There were evidences of a social sort, of a physiological sort, 
 which entered into the determination of the wage which were 
 not presented in the first formulation of the economic doctrine 
 in question. 
 
 Then, too, there gradually grew up a recognition that Mal- 
 thus' law itself had not the necessary operation which was sup- 
 posed to belong to it. In the first place, there was evidence 
 which was to be found in France that population could be held 
 down, that, actually, increase did not take place in accordance 
 with the Malthusian law; and gradually in England itself there 
 grew up evidence that there was what has later come to be 
 called "birth control," which determines to considerable degree 
 the increase of population. That is, the human race does not 
 necessarily oversupply the world as forms lower than it do. Its 
 method for the control of population was of a different sort than 
 that which exists in lower forms. Man himself could determine 
 the actual increase. In other words, it was found that the so- 
 called "iron laws" did not have uniformity which belongs to a 
 so-called "law of nature," and men went back to the study 
 of human conditions, to study the process of production and 
 distribution, the economic process; and, as this investigation was 
 undertaken, it was found that the situations were very complex. 
 
 One result of this was the discovery of something of the same 
 assumption that belonged to the Hegelian doctrine, namely, 
 that the state had a higher intelligence than the individual. 
 Indeed, something of this sort was more or less implied. Why 
 should one assume that a bureaucratic state would be more 
 successful in the process of production than individual entre- 
 preneurs? One found, of course, in industry that a large number 
 
 [237I
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 of capitalistic undertakings failed where very few succeeded. 
 It was computed that something like ninety-odd per cent of 
 capitahstic undertakings were not successful. It was this, of 
 course, which led to the assumption that capital would flow 
 into the hands of those who were successful. Why should it be 
 assumed that the state in a bureaucratic fashion would be able 
 to draft ability which would enable it to carry on these indus- 
 tries successfully? Great industries have to work on a very 
 narrow margin if they work in accordance with economic laws, 
 and the Marxian doctrine was orthodox in its acceptance of 
 these laws. Something like a 5 per cent margin is what separates 
 a great industry from success or failure. It is always, so to 
 speak, near the edge — always has to maintain itself by a care- 
 ful consideration of its conditions and the situation within which 
 it operates, and on the basis of which it can succeed. As I said, 
 the assumption that the state could take over such a difficult 
 undertaking as the management of great industries and make 
 them successful, is an assumption that implies that the state 
 is going to control powers and capacities which it is very difficult 
 to secure under private management. The person who succeeds 
 is one who is selected out by a sort of process of competition, and 
 it is very difficult to determine from consideration of the indi- 
 vidual whether he will succeed or not. There is something of an 
 implication that the state as such has a higher intelligence than 
 the individual, if we assume that this industrial state is going 
 to be economically successful in its processes. 
 
 This type of program was, as I have suggested, socialistic in 
 character, but evolutionary rather than revolutionary. It was 
 the sort of program which the Labor party put up. It became 
 socialistic in the sense that it looked to the state to take over 
 production, but has never been socialistic in the sense of mak- 
 ing socialism a religion. The Marxian doctrine was essentially 
 a religion, had been in Germany and elsewhere in Europe, as 
 it is at present among the communists in Russia. That is, 
 it was conceived of essentially as an expression of the inteUi- 
 gence of the community. What this sociahstic doctrine has 
 
 [238]
 
 KARL MARX AND SOCIALISM 
 
 implied is that the economic process is the dominant process of 
 the community, and that this dominant process of the com- 
 munity is controlled by the intelligence of the community, that 
 if this process is developed to the proper level the community 
 will naturally take control over it. The religious life is essential- 
 ly a life of the individual in that of the whole group to which he 
 belongs, that is, in which the individual is subordinated to 
 the group, in which the individual realizes himself in the life 
 of the community. The socialist doctrine, then, was in this 
 sense a religious doctrine. It conceived of the life of the com- 
 munity as essentially an economic process. The individual was 
 realized in this great social process through the Industrial Revo- 
 lution. The control of the process was to pass into the hands 
 of the community, in which the individual was the essential 
 part. That is, the individual through the part which he played 
 in the various labor organizations, industrial organizations, was 
 the fundamental element in the state. And the individual, realiz- 
 ing himself in the life of the community, had definitely a religious 
 attitude toward the process itself. In other words, you can find 
 a parallelism between the statement of religion and the He- 
 gelian state, the state being nearer to God than the individual 
 in the community, the individual subordinating himself to the 
 state as a higher expression of spirit. This attitude, being of a 
 religious character, was, on the socialist side, expressed as an 
 economic process which is the essential life of the community, 
 and it is in so far as the individual, in his relationship to this 
 economic organization, subordinates himself to its highest ex- 
 pression in the state that he gets a realization of himself in the 
 group to which he belongs. That is, he gets essentially a re- 
 ligious attitude. 
 
 Now this attitude is one which you do not find in the English 
 Labor party, socialistic as it has in some sense become. Fabian 
 socialism is not a religious movement. It is one which looks 
 toward the meeting of all sorts of evils found in the industrial 
 communities by governmental action of different sorts. It feels 
 free to use the government in industrial situations as much as 
 
 [ 239 ]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 it is used in political situations, and in policing situations that 
 arise. The government can be utilized by the community to 
 meet economic conditions and to better these conditions. But 
 it does not assume that the economic process is the process in 
 which the intelligence of the community as such expressed it- 
 self necessarily. The development of socialism in England is, 
 in a certain sense, parallel with the development which took 
 place in Germany in the passage of dogmatic socialism into op- 
 portunistic socialism — one wiUing and desirous of utilizing the 
 powers of the state to bring about better conditions for labor 
 without endeavoring to state just what the organization of 
 society was going to be. The earlier sociaHsts proceeded as if 
 they had had a vision on the Mount which showed them what 
 the order of society should be. They felt they could work out 
 deductively what the order should be. It was that which they 
 held before themselves, waiting to bring about this great change 
 which, when the evolution of conditions had reached the proper 
 point, could be carried through. In place of this we have in Eng- 
 land a type of socialism which felt itself free to utilize the state 
 in a fashion it assumed to be legitimate. 
 
 The old doctrine called off the hand of the state from indus- 
 try. Adam Smith called for the abandonment of monopolies 
 which the state had allowed to grow up, the giving-way of 
 tariff, the opening of doors, the taking-off of political control of 
 industry, allowing industry to proceed with its own laws. That 
 is still the doctrine in the orthodox school. As over against this 
 you have the sort of development which has been taking place 
 not only in industrial Europe but also in America. Our Inter- 
 state Commerce Commission, for example, as I have already 
 mentioned in passing, is an expression of government in which 
 the control of industrial conditions, specifically the determina- 
 tion of rates, of the conditions under which transportation is 
 to take place, is in the hands of the state. We have established 
 other bureaus along the same lines, although they have not de- 
 veloped to the same extent or had the importance which the 
 Interstate Commerce Commission has. We have been behind 
 
 [240]
 
 KARL MARX AND SOCIALISM 
 
 England in the development of governmental control over pub- 
 lic utilities. We proceed very slowly in this country as com- 
 pared with England and Germany, the reason presumably 
 being found in the fact that our local governments are more 
 corrupt than local governments in England have been, so that 
 the community has been wary of introducing an opportunity for 
 the government control of great public utilities. For example, 
 in Chicago there was a time during which public sentiment 
 in the community as a whole was, by and large, for public 
 ownership of the transit system. At the present time sentiment 
 is active on quite the other side. The lack of confidence in our 
 municipal institutions as they are organized and conducted by 
 our present politicians is such as to make the community hesi- 
 tate to turn over operations of great public utilities to them, 
 and so this type of development of public control has advanced 
 very much more slowly in this country that it has in Europe. 
 
 The movement, however, is one whose general lines I have 
 sketched. We have at this time the somewhat sensational un- 
 dertaking in Russia to actually carry out the Marxian program, 
 the setting-up of a Marxian system as final, or an attempt to 
 carry it through in its detail, with, of course, as I have said, 
 very unsatisfactory results from the industrial standpoint, at 
 least up to the present time. Of course, there is a certain absurd- 
 ity in undertaking to carry out Marx's doctrine in Russia. Such 
 a doctrine gathers about the proletariat composed mainly of 
 factory laborers. Socialism has never been able to get hold of 
 agricultural labor, and 90 per cent of the laborers in Russia are 
 peasants, those living upon the soil. The Communist-Socialist 
 government has had to give way before the peasantry and turn 
 over control of the soil to the person who is, to all intents and 
 purposes, the owner of the soil which he cultivates. The place 
 in which to undertake an experiment such as is being carried out 
 in Russia would be in Germany or in England, great industrial 
 communities in which you have a large and relatively highly 
 intelligent proletariat in a socialistic sense, men who have had 
 training of a poHtical sort such as the socialists have had in the 
 
 [241]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 Social-Democratic party in Germany, and such as the EngHsh 
 laborers are getting. But what was clearly evident after the 
 war, when socialism had things in its own hands in Germany, 
 was an entire unwillingness to undertake any such experiment; 
 and, of course, the same thing is true in England. Laborers as 
 such were quite unwilling to undertake any revolutionary 
 process, any turning-over of the industry of the community to 
 control by the state, with the consequence that there has been 
 a serious slowing-up, if not actual discounting, of the effective- 
 ness of such a program. 
 
 [ 242]
 
 CHAPTER XII 
 
 INDUSTRY A BOON TO SCIENCE— MECHANISM 
 THE HANDMAID OF FINALITY 
 
 THE economic organization of society which we have 
 been discussing in the so-called Industrial Revolution 
 has been the source out of which some of the most im- 
 portant of our scientific conceptions and hypotheses have 
 arisen. The conception of energy is illustrative of this. This 
 conception was definitely revolutionary in modern science be- 
 cause it brought together fields which could not be stated in 
 terms of a mechanical science. Newton's statement was taken 
 from the heavens and, of course, was a generalization of Gali- 
 leo's law of the falling body fused with the observations of 
 Kepler and others, Newton gave a statement of the solar sys- 
 tem in terms of attraction, that is, of the movement of masses 
 with reference to each other; and he gave the laws for this solar 
 system. Then this system was carried to earth again and was 
 made the basis for the study of the phenomena that take place 
 about us. It was very fruitful in a field in which you could 
 locate actual masses, but people tried to carry over the concep- 
 tion into fields in which they could not actually locate the 
 different masses on account of the minuteness of the bodies. 
 What they wanted to do was to apply the simple law of New- 
 ton's statement to other physical processes. 
 
 For example, take such a process as heat, that is, of molecular 
 bodies moving at great velocities with reference to one another. 
 They are beyond the range of our observation. You cannot take 
 that problem and carry it over into the phenomena, because you 
 cannot get a statement of the positions of the bodies that will 
 enable you to work the law out. There were various uniformi- 
 ties which science could locate. Again, take the phenomenon of 
 
 [243]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 electricity. Here also are uniformities which could be deter- 
 mined. How were these different phenomena to be brought into 
 relationship with each other? They could not be stated simply 
 in terms of the movement of masses with reference to each other 
 as Newton could state the movement of planetary bodies, and 
 yet they must be made into a necessary idea. That is, you can 
 say how much work will be done, how much work is involved in 
 doing this or that thing, and yet not know how the atoms or par- 
 ticular masses are moving with reference to others. All we can 
 determine is just how much work is done in one situation and 
 how much is done in another. Then we have a basis for deter- 
 mining proportionate amounts of energy. We can look at the 
 whole process from the standpoint of energies, from the stand- 
 point of the amount of work done, and not try to determine just 
 what the positions of all the physical particles are in their move- 
 ments in relation to one another. Such an undertaking goes 
 beyond our vision. But you can still say that energy is ex- 
 pended; you can still say how much work is involved in bringing 
 about a certain situation, and how much can be developed. 
 
 The economist turns to the scientist and wants a theory for 
 his new servant, the steam engine. He says, "I want to know 
 how much work it can do." So the scientist takes the unit of 
 work and discovers the amount of energy. That is, he finds that 
 the machine can be depended upon for a certain number of units 
 of work done. Thus, in the physical world you can say that 
 energy is a bookkeeping conception. It takes electricity and 
 light, coal, expansive steam, and the revolving dynamo, and sets 
 up a certain unit by means of which it is able to put them all into 
 the same class, just as the economist takes all sorts of different 
 objects — ^the machinery, the soil, the plant, the workers — and 
 sets them all together, states them in terms of the amount of 
 labor necessary to get a given commodity. Work or energy, 
 then, is a bookkeeping conception taken over from the economic 
 doctrine, just as I have said the conception of the survival of 
 the fittest in the competition for existence is taken over by 
 Darwin from the economic situation presented by Ricardo and 
 
 [244]
 
 INDUSTRY A BOON TO SCIENCE 
 
 Malthus and generalized in the form of the hypothesis of evolu- 
 tion. It is very interesting to see the sources from which im- 
 portantly constructive ideas have arisen, to see what an organic 
 thing society is; how ideas that you find in one phase of it ap- 
 pear in some different form in another phase, but come back to 
 common sources. 
 
 The conception of energy, then, comes from the demand for a 
 theory of the steam engine. The thing about the steam engine 
 that interested people was exactly the amount of work that it 
 would do. The steam engine took the place of human arms. It 
 was more effective and more reliable. It did the work that la- 
 borers had done, and enabled the entrepreneur to make the work 
 of the laborer still more productive. Work in the form of labor, 
 of course, was an essential part of the economic doctrine. The 
 cost of production, which was essential to the conclusions of the 
 Manchester school, always came back to labor. The price of 
 anything could be given in terms of labor, in terms of the 
 amount of work necessary to produce it. Labor became a uni- 
 versal element in this equation. Labor was generalized in the 
 economic equation as that in terms of which the cost of any 
 particular article could be assessed. Of course, the success of 
 economic production was dependent on making this cost less 
 than the price. But in order to make your business a paying 
 one, you have to make a statement of the actual cost of your 
 production. And the ultimate element you come back to is 
 stated in terms of labor. That played a very large part in the 
 doctrine of political economy at that time. What was wanted 
 was a statement in terms of labor of everything that was being 
 done. The unit of labor really comes out of the economic doc- 
 trine. It is a bookkeeping term. You have to set up an equation 
 in regard to the process as a whole; you have to make your cost 
 of production no greater than the price you can get for your 
 article; and you have to state the cost of production in terms of 
 labor. Well now, if you are introducing machinery, you must 
 be able to state what the machine does in terms of the amount 
 of work accomplished. The unit was presented to science by 
 
 [245]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 political economy, and the conception of labor had the same 
 transferability that the conception of work had. Take any ob- 
 ject that is to be estimated in terms of manufacture and you 
 can state the whole cost of it in terms of labor. For example, if 
 you want to know the value of food, it comes back to the labor 
 that has to be expended on the ground. You can put the value 
 into terms of the amount of work done, the unit of which arises 
 out of the economic situation. 
 
 This conception led to the setting-up of a certain meta- 
 physics, to a theory of energy which Ostwald, a German chem- 
 ist, proposed, in which energy was regarded as being the ulti- 
 mate element. He tried to get rid of the conception of atomic 
 particles. With this in mind he wrote an elementary chemistry 
 in which he did do away with atoms entirely. Instead of talking 
 about the union of two portions of hydrogen with one of oxygen, 
 instead of talking about a certain number of atoms to be 
 brought into relation with each other in chemical combinations, 
 he simply stated the amounts in such terms as, "Take twice as 
 much of one as of the other," and up to a certain point he was 
 able to work out an adequate statement on these terms which 
 got rid of atoms. He simply stated the amounts in terms of 
 quantities. But he could not get beyond that point. In fact, 
 the so-called "carbon chemistry," which sets up the idea of 
 molecules in which the different relative positions of identical 
 atoms within the molecules give rise to different organic sub- 
 stances, made this undertaking impossible. What this German 
 chemist was trying to do was to set up a certain metaphysical 
 entity of energy and say this is the ultimate substance in the 
 universe. That in itself broke down; but the history of it, which 
 I have briefly given, shows a very interesting development of 
 such a scientific concept and the interrelationship of such a con- 
 ception with the social structure and social theory of the period. 
 
 Let us now bring up the other side of the life of Europe, 
 which we have in some sense neglected, and get a point of view 
 from which to interpret a good deal of what we have said by 
 turning back to its science. Throughout the whole of the nine- 
 
 [246]
 
 INDUSTRY A BOON TO SCIENCE 
 
 teenth century Europe was essentially scientific in its knowl- 
 edge achievements. The philosophies of the period which we 
 have studied, and which we will study in what follows, no longer 
 had the dogmatic attitude which belonged to earlier philoso- 
 phies. These earlier philosophies had been, in some sense, inter- 
 preted along intellectual lines of the dogma of the church, of its 
 philosophy of life; and where the church was the dominant 
 element in the life of the community, philosophy had a cor- 
 responding position. The importance of the church as the inter- 
 preter of the world, the interpreter of the lives of individuals 
 in accordance with the church as giving means of life to the indi- 
 vidual, as a philosophy of life to the man in the street, shifted; 
 and another form of interpretation, the scientific, appeared and 
 became more and more dominant. It is true that in some sense 
 in the back of the mind of these generations Hes a plan of sal- 
 vation presented in such form as that of Milton's Samson 
 Agonistes. That remains as a sort of pattern for the interpreta- 
 tion of the world, that is, the idea that there is some sort of 
 moral purpose which underlies the whole order of the universe, 
 and that this great moral purpose finds particular expression 
 in the life of man and in the history of man, and that, while it 
 may be impossible, as it was earlier assumed, to take the history 
 of that process as given in the chapters of Genesis and through- 
 out the Bible as the single strand upon which everything is to 
 be strung, it is still true that the moral purpose presented in the 
 doctrine of the church itself is still, in some sense, regarded as 
 identical with the purpose of the universe and that, if one is 
 right with God, he is in line with the natural development of 
 things about him. Some such feeling of the moral identity of 
 human history with that of the universe is a conception which 
 has come over from the ecclesiastical and doctrinal statements 
 of the church, and it still plays an important part in our view 
 of the world. In the form in which it was given by the church, 
 the literal statement of that was relatively simple: man sinned; 
 he came under the condemnation of God; he was saved by the 
 sacrifice of Christ. 
 
 [247]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 In the past there has been the otherworldliness of the great 
 rehgions. It has been in relationship to the world to come, that 
 is, in relationship to social ideals that could not be achieved in 
 this world, that men have been able to get together. The gospel 
 of Jesus presents a picture of a society in which the interests of 
 one are the interests of all, in which all regard themselves as 
 members of a single family. It is an ideal which has never, of 
 course, been realized on the face of the earth, and which never 
 can be, things remaining what they have been in the past. 
 Single groups living on that basis during the medieval period 
 had to be organized into cloisters. Men gave up property, fami- 
 ly life, to reach a situation in which there should be that sort of 
 identity of interest in this world. Such a society belongs in a 
 New Jerusalem. But men still kept this ideal, although they 
 might differ in all sorts of other things — even though they might 
 constantly be at war with one another. The salvation of the 
 individual soul was wrapped up in the good of the whole com- 
 munity, and this idea was inevitably that of another world. 
 
 Such a statement as this is, however, quite inconsistent with 
 the one which science gives. Nevertheless, for years the two 
 statements went along without coming into necessary conflict. 
 I have already indicated the independent position of science in 
 the modern world. In a certain sense the Renaissance scientist 
 took up the study of matter and motion as a field which led out- 
 side the immediate social interests and ecclesiastic interests of 
 the community. From the point of view of the church God had 
 created the world out of nothing to serve as the field in which 
 would be enacted the drama of man's fall and salvation. Sci- 
 ence could make its investigation without coming into conflict 
 with the doctrine of the church. It was to be assumed that an 
 infinitely wise God would work by means of uniform laws; that 
 he would have the ability and the interest of a supreme 
 mathematician. Thus science might find the way in which God 
 operates in the world without finding out his purposes. When, 
 however, the science which dealt with matter, the science of 
 Galileo, and especially his dynamics, which said that matter is 
 
 [248I
 
 INDUSTRY A BOON TO SCIENCE 
 
 nothing but inertia — mass as revealed in inertia — when this sci- 
 ence went on into the fields of biology, for example, the going 
 became more difficult. It was difficult because biology is a sci- 
 ence which is infinitely more complex than mechanics. If bi- 
 ology is to be reduced to mechanics, it is necessary to carry one's 
 view into very complex situations. Still it is possible to con- 
 ceive of plants, of animals, and of a physiological mind as 
 mechanical, and thus they could be understood, in terms of 
 what x^ristotle would have called an "efficient cause," as over 
 against a final cause, a form of understanding which had 
 proved itself of immense importance. Aristotle never realized 
 that by obeying nature one might control it by discovering uni- 
 form laws. From the time of the Renaissance on, the Western 
 world was controlling nature and using its forces by very com- 
 petent investigation of its laws and a complete willingness to 
 obey those laws in carrying out its own purposes, so that a 
 nature that seemed to be outside the ends and the purposes 
 of the creator of the world became more and more important 
 to society. A science which seemed to have abandoned and to 
 have carefully kept itself from theological inquiry in regard to 
 the meaning of the world was coming in by the back door, and, 
 by studying the mechanical order of things, was getting more 
 control of nature and bringing about tremendous changes and 
 becoming more and more important in man's mind. It con- 
 tinually rendered this type of explanation more and more at- 
 tractive — an explanation from the statement of the efficient 
 cause, from cause and effect and the uniform laws of nature, 
 as over against an explanation from the point of view of final 
 cause, of end, of purpose. Which form of explanation shall we 
 take? Why is the world here? Why are we here? Why should 
 we suffer, be restricted here and there? What is the end that 
 explains all? That earlier, teleological form of explanation was 
 set over against another form which undertakes to show how 
 things have happened, and why, because certain things have 
 happened in a given way, other things must necessarily follow. 
 That is a science of physical necessity, but one which did not 
 
 [249]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 carry with it necessity in so far as the conduct of man was con- 
 cerned. I have said that one gets control over nature by obeying 
 it. You find out how things must happen, and then you can use 
 things that happen in a necessary way to bring about your re- 
 sults. This very separation of mass, of the mechanical process 
 from other processes, psychological and social among others, left 
 people, in some sense, free to utilize these very social purposes. 
 
 What I want to bring out is that, while there had been a sort 
 of theological inquiry that is still perhaps present in man's 
 mind as to whether men are free or not, and questions of free- 
 dom of the will may still be discussed under sophomoric con- 
 ditions, the necessity which science presents had not, as yet, 
 carried with it control over human initiative. The more neces- 
 sary the statement of natural sciences can be made, the greater 
 freedom man has in reconstructing, in bringing about changes 
 in, his environment. 
 
 This paradox is of very great importance in our understand- 
 ing of the position of science in the Western world. Of course, 
 if, with Laplace, you say that everything that takes place is 
 simply a shift of physical particles moving in accordance with 
 absolute law, then you can conceivably have an equation in 
 which you have only to introduce the variables, including time, 
 and you can determine the position of the moon with reference 
 to the earth and sun, and so determine eclipses. You can con- 
 ceivably get equations which can determine the whole solar and 
 stellar system. Increase its generality, and all you have to do 
 is to introduce the variable time and you can tell just where 
 every physical particle will be at any possible moment in the 
 future as well as in the past. Seemingly, the whole world would 
 be absolutely fixed and determined. That is a conceivable state- 
 ment of this mechanical science. But what I am pointing out is 
 that the science which gave this sort of a view of the world is 
 the science which was enabling human initiative to reconstruct 
 its world entirely and, through the reconstruction of his environ- 
 ment, enabling man to make an entirely different society. You 
 get this paradox: a statement of the mechanical nature of 
 
 [250]
 
 INDUSTRY A BOON TO SCIENCE 
 
 everything, one which seems to include man also, which, at the 
 same time, gives man greater control over his environment, 
 greater freedom of action, and allows him to set up social ob- 
 jectives. 
 
 Man is a physical and biological organism. What he is is the 
 sum of all the physical particles that go to make him up. Ac- 
 cording to the statement we are now considering, if you can de- 
 termine where those particles are, you can determine just what 
 he will say and think. Such a doctrine gives you absolute neces- 
 sity in everything; and yet, in working out as complete a me- 
 chanical statement as is possible, you get one which gives man 
 a more complete freedom than he ever had in the past. The 
 best statement that you can get of the development of science 
 throughout this period, but especially during the early part, is 
 to be found in Merz's History of European Thought in the Nine- 
 teenth Century. 
 
 The Newtonian doctrine presented a picture of an orderly, 
 mechanical universe, one governed by mechanical laws, a uni- 
 verse of masses in motion. The laws of these motions in their 
 simplest forms could be given. The changes that took place, 
 if in a sufficiently simple situation, could also be traced out. 
 The method of analysis which grew out of the work of Leibnitz 
 and Newton — that of an infinitesimal calculus — sought always 
 to take as simple a situation as possible; and, if a sufficiently 
 simple situation could be found, it was discovered that the laws 
 of change could be determined. The picture, then, which was 
 presented of the physical universe was of one which was in mo- 
 tion, and in motion in accordance with simple laws, and that 
 which moved was mass. There were, of course, many features of 
 the physical universe which could not be brought under terms of 
 mass; but it was assumed, or at least hoped, that something 
 of this kind could be worked out, that such a mechanical state- 
 ment of things could be made universal. The picture which La- 
 place presented was of an equation which could determine where 
 all the physical particles of the universe would be at any one 
 moment if you simply introduced the variable of time. Such a 
 
 [251]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 picture was what men had before them. So far as they could get 
 into the intricate movements of things, the molecular move- 
 ments of things, the laws seemed to hold. It was, then, to be 
 assumed that such physical laws as these operated throughout 
 nature, and that the whole of nature could be regarded in terms 
 simply of masses in motion and could be brought under as 
 rigorous laws as those which science had already discovered. 
 
 There was, however, the biological field which seemed to 
 offer resistance to the entrance of physical law. The importance 
 of the Darwinian hypothesis was that it seemed to open the 
 door to a natural law in the development of physical forms. If 
 such a hypothesis could be accepted, the changes that took 
 place in animate nature would be due to causes operating from 
 behind, causes which were a posteriori. That is, you would not 
 have to assume a certain nature in plant or animal which de- 
 termined its growth, but that causes were operating, or rather 
 had been operating, which brought about results here as in in- 
 organic nature. Of course, men had discovered many parts of 
 the process of life which could be stated in physical and me- 
 chanical terms. Certain of the so-called "organic products" had 
 been produced artificially in the laboratory. It was perfectly 
 conceivable that changes which took place in living forms were 
 simply physical and mechanical changes, that men and animals 
 and plants were, as Descartes had guessed, nothing but ma- 
 chines so far as the life-processes were concerned. 
 
 Now Darwin's hypothesis came in to indicate how particular 
 forms might arise. All it asked for was indefinite variation on 
 the part of young forms, that every young form should vary in 
 some respect from the parent form. Then it asked that there 
 should be competition for life which should be sufficiently 
 strenuous that only the form best adapted to survive would sur- 
 vive. What Darwin pointed out was what had been suggested 
 in Malthus' doctrine, namely, that there were always more 
 young forms arising in nature than could possibly survive. 
 There must then be competition between these forms, and those 
 among them which were less fitted to survive under the condi- 
 
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 INDUSTRY A BOON TO SCIENCE 
 
 tions in which they found themselves would inevitably disap- 
 pear. Given this indefinite variation, one could fairly assume 
 that when the difference in the form answered to changes in the 
 environment a new form would arise which, under this competi- 
 tion, would maintain itself while all other forms would disap- 
 pear. In this way Darwin undertook to explain the appearance 
 of species. Back of it, as I have pointed out, was the recogni- 
 tion of a more or less identical life-process in all forms. The 
 biological form of the plant or animal was the adjustment of 
 this life-process to a particular environment. Suppose, now, 
 that this environment changes; there must be a corresponding 
 change on the part of the animal form if it is to survive. If we 
 grant these indefinite variations, we may assume that through 
 them some forms will be better able to adjust themselves to new 
 conditions, and so new forms may arise. 
 
 Here, you see, you have simply variations from behind, in- 
 definite variations due to the very processes of reproduction. 
 Given the changes which are taking place in the environment as 
 a result of geologic and climatic influences, it is possible to ac- 
 count for the development of plant and animal forms in me- 
 chanical terms. One could, in this way, get a picture of a 
 mechanical universe which was governed by absolute laws 
 which determined where all physical particles would be and 
 therefore what all the physical things would be and everything 
 that they would be doing, and, finally, every change that took 
 place. It was a picture of such a complete universe as this, with 
 its fixed laws, that is, in a certain sense, a counterpart of the 
 picture of a fixed order of society which grew out of the Man- 
 chester doctrine and was formulated by Karl Marx as the basis 
 for his socialist doctrine. Both of them belonged to their period. 
 
 The physical doctrine went somewhat the way of the eco- 
 nomic doctrine. In the first place, there were, as I have already 
 indicated, fields of experience, of nature, which could not be 
 brought under the terms of masses in motion. Light, for 
 example, presented serious difiiculties. It was recognized as an- 
 swering to some sort of wave process. The corpuscular theory, 
 
 [253]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 which Newton accepted, had been abandoned for the time being 
 (though it now seems to be coming back in one form in the 
 quantum theory); and some sort of a wave theory was found 
 to be best to account for the various phenomena of Hght. Well, 
 if light is a wave, it must presumably be a wave of something. 
 Sound could be resolved if we noted waves of air. One could 
 follow the waves on the ocean, in the water; and, in fact, the 
 theories of light made use of the laws of wave motion as they 
 could be investigated in liquids and gases. The assumption 
 naturally was, then, that there was something in motion, some- 
 thing answering to these so-called "waves" of Hght. It was 
 called "ether." The term is one which goes back to old Greek 
 speculation, though it had a different meaning there. This 
 ether did not exhibit itself in any other phenomenon so far 
 as known at that time. It was a substance that science set up 
 ad hoc for a particular purpose. The waves were not discovered 
 in the moving ether, but the mathematics of wave motion was 
 one which best answered to the phenomenon of light. So ether 
 was set up as something within which the waves might occur. 
 When it was set up, however, it had to be fitted into the 
 physical doctrine of the time. If it was a substance, it itself 
 presumably moved. If all the planetary bodies were moving 
 through it and the stars as well, it ought to respond to their 
 motion. If you set up a body moving through water, you not 
 only cause waves but affect the motion of the body itself. This 
 is true of all known liquids and gases. But no measurements 
 made have ever indicated any retardation of the motion of the 
 heavenly bodies on account of the friction of the ether. There 
 was no evidence which could be found of this ether being 
 dragged along except, perhaps, in one instance. In studying the 
 velocity of light passing through a moving liquid, it was found 
 that its velocity was somewhat reduced; and at that time the 
 first assumption that could be made for the reduction was that 
 the ether was being swept along with the moving water to some 
 degree. But apart from that, no evidence was found that ether 
 was carried along with the earth which was supposed to be 
 
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 INDUSTRY A BOON TO SCIENCE 
 
 passing through it. Of course, if it were, it would affect the hne 
 of light coming from the stars and should lead to a displacement 
 of their visual position. But no such displacement could be 
 found, so it was very difficult to place ether in the mechanical 
 theory of the universe. It was thought of as a something that 
 moved; but if it was a something, it ought to have inertia and 
 ought to exhibit itself in responses which it offered to bodies 
 moving through it, responses in the form of resistance. And 
 it did not do that. It could not very well be defined. When 
 men came to define the waves which arose in, or traveled 
 through, this suppositious ether, they found that they had to 
 define the ether itself; and they got some very strange defini- 
 tions. It was perfectly elastic, and yet how could you have such 
 a body as that and fit it into any of the physical theories of the 
 time.^ Thus it is seen that ether presented a very serious diffi- 
 culty in the field of the physical sciences. 
 
 Then came the phenomenon of electromagnetism. Of course 
 electricity, in one form or another, had been known for an in- 
 definite period. But it was only to some degree in the seven- 
 teenth, mainly in the eighteenth century, and in the nineteenth 
 that any scientific study of it was made. This study revealed 
 a phenomenon that approached light in its form. Maxwell 
 proceeded to deal with ether itself in terms which brought light 
 and electricity into the same field. Hertz carried these specula- 
 tions through and put them to experimental tests and showed 
 that the electrical wave was of a type similar to the light wave. 
 Then, of course, the field of electricity became one of the most 
 exciting fields of scientific investigation. There were, however, 
 various anomalies in it too: first, one in regard to ether, and a 
 further one, in that the element to which one could reduce 
 electricity under certain conditions was atomic in character. 
 In further investigations men came back to ultimate elements, 
 those out of which the electron has arisen. That is, you have a 
 statement of electricity in terms of waves and also in terms of 
 ultimate particles, bits of electrical jelly of some sort which act 
 like physical particles under some conditions. IMen found them-
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 selves driven to these different statements of electricity to ac- 
 count for various aspects of the total behavior of electrical 
 phenomena. I have said later investigation has carried this 
 same opposition within light itself. Certain phases of light, 
 brought out by the quantum theory, are dealt with from the 
 standpoint of ultimate elements; others, from the point of view 
 of the wave theory. 
 
 In other words, within physical theory itself, apart from ani- 
 mate life, the rigid doctrine was breaking down. The laws of 
 Newton within the world of mass and motion were invariable. 
 They could be applied under all conditions, so far as they could 
 be stated. The laws which Maxwell worked out for light and 
 electromagnetism were found not to be invariable. Problems 
 and difficulties of a serious character arose, then, in pushing 
 the scientific theory into this new field. There was a field in 
 which there seemed to be an operation of fixed laws, those of 
 masses in motion. But a part of this field was that which had 
 to do with the phenomena of light, electromagnetism, and elec- 
 trons; and these were not amenable to those laws. What a few 
 scientists undertook to do was to work out what changes would 
 have to be made in the formulas of science if this variability of 
 Maxwell's laws was to be maintained, and they reached rather 
 astonishing results. One result was that the elements of time 
 and space, the unit of measurement, would have to be changed 
 as the velocity of the moving body changed. It was not ad- 
 vanced as a physical theory. It was simply the bringing-out of 
 a mathematical theory which did apply to the measurement and 
 investigation of electromagnetic and light phenomena. If these 
 mathematical statements were worked out, a point was finally 
 reached where the units of space and time had to be changed. 
 From the point of view of a certain moving object, the units of 
 length and of time would have difl-'erent values from what they 
 would have with respect to some other object at rest, or moving 
 with a different velocity. 
 
 I want to call your attention especially to this. It was some- 
 thing that grew up, in a certain sense, earlier than the doctrine 
 
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 INDUSTRY A BOON TO SCIENCE 
 
 of relativity itself. It grew out of the necessity of giving a 
 mathematical statement to phenomena discovered in the fields 
 of light and electromagnetism. In order to give a satisfactory 
 mathematical statement to this, the scientists found themselves 
 giving a different value to the units of space and time in accord- 
 ance with the velocity with which the body was moving. The 
 Michelson and Morley experiment had been before the world 
 for some time. What Michelson and his colleague had under- 
 taken to do was to show evidence of an ether through which the 
 earth was moving. They undertook this by means of a relative- 
 ly simple experiment. Of course, if light is moving along 
 through an ether, you can also conceive of the ether as moving 
 in the other direction from that of the light swimming through 
 it. Now, set one beam of light moving through it in the direc- 
 tion of flow and another beam of light moving at right angles 
 to that direction, as in the situation of one man rowing up- 
 stream against the current and another man rowing across the 
 stream. Take the distance each would cover in a given time. 
 The man rowing upstream could not row as far as the man 
 rowing across. Thus, in the Michelson-Morley experiment it 
 was expected that this same difference would be found; but it 
 was not, and this negative result disturbed people. Fitzgerald 
 made the suggestion that this result would be met if we could 
 conceive of the earth as shortened in the diameter which was in 
 the same direction as that of the motion. That is, if the earth is 
 moving in a certain direction, we can conceive of the diameter 
 of the earth which hes in the direction of this motion as being 
 shortened. If we found the diameter was eight inches shorter 
 in that direction, then this Michelson-Morley experiment would 
 be exactly accounted for. As you can see, the required changes 
 are very minute. And the thing is, perhaps, not so inconceiv- 
 able if you think of matter itself as being electromagnetic in 
 character. What Fitzgerald did was simply to figure out what 
 the shortening of the earth would be in the direction of the 
 motion of the body itself, and he found that this shortening 
 would be very minute. Then came the discovery that the mathe- 
 
 [257]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 matical statement which had been given to these so-called 
 "measurements" of space and time fitted exactly into this 
 shortening of the body in the direction of its motion. The two 
 exactly agreed. And that was the statement which gave the 
 basis for Einstein's statement of relativity. 
 
 What I have tried to do has been to point out that we have 
 lines of development here which had been going on inside of 
 the physical theory itself. Relativity is a statement that has 
 grown up in the midst of it, not something that has been put 
 down upon a physical doctrine from the outside. It is a natural 
 development within the theory itself. It has been changing. 
 Here, again, we have a parallelism between the physical theory 
 and the economic theory. You start off with the assumption of 
 certain fixed laws which operate in nature, or in production and 
 distribution. Then you undertake to build up a theory of the 
 universe or of society on the basis of these, and you find that 
 there are various things that happen that do not fit in, and you 
 have to reconstruct your theory to deal with these situations. 
 The same thing, in a sense, happened in physical theory that 
 happened in economic theory. 
 
 Back of this development of science lies the vast difference 
 between a research science and any dogmatic statement of the 
 world. If you say within any science, "This is the way the 
 world is to be explained, and inside these limits you can carry 
 on your investigations, but you must not carry your problem- 
 seeking beyond them," the scientist is up in arms at once. He 
 insists that science can find its problems anywhere. He insists 
 that he can set up any postulate which will enable him to solve 
 his problems, and that that is the only test that can be brought 
 in, the only criticism that can be made. Science is tested by the 
 success of its postulates. It brings its hypotheses to the test of 
 experience itself; and if this test is met, then the doctrine is one 
 to be accepted until some flaw can be found in it, until some 
 new problem arises within it. There is, then, an inevitable con- 
 flict between a view of the world which is dogmatic and the 
 method used by science. Any dogmatic theory of the world is 
 
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 INDUSTRY A BOON TO SCIENCE 
 
 found to be in conflict with the scientific method. On the 
 other hand, we must not assume that because science makes 
 postulates it is itself dogmatic. Of course, that is the charge 
 very frequently and very unjustly made against science. Be- 
 cause science sets up such a postulate as that of the possible 
 mechanical statement of what goes on in the world, it is ac- 
 cused of setting up a dogma. But it simply says that, if we start 
 off with the mechanical process in explaining digestion, for ex- 
 ample, we will try to carry it through in this fashion. If we can- 
 not do this, we will try to find another explanation. But until 
 we fail, we are justified in setting up such a postulate. The 
 postulates of science are not dogmas; and as long as science 
 can pursue the solution of its problems in this fashion, it is 
 entirely justified in setting up such postulates. It is very im- 
 portant that we should realize the difference between a dogmatic 
 science and a research science, between dogma and postulate. 
 We should realize what is meant by the demand for scientific 
 freedom: that every problem that arises may be freely attacked 
 by the scientist; that he is justified in setting up any postulate 
 which will enable him to solve that problem; and that the only 
 test which shall be made is the success of his solution as de- 
 termined by actual experience itself. 
 
 Now, science, with its demand for freedom, is the outstand- 
 ing fact not simply of the nineteenth century but of all thought 
 since the Renaissance, for modern science brought in the 
 Renaissance itself. A definite method was introduced at that 
 time. Galileo in his study of falling bodies gives a classic 
 illustration of what is meant by "research science," and that 
 has been the method which has been applied in a wider and 
 wider field; and, just so far as it is brought in in any field, it has 
 found itself in conflict with fixed dogma. And, so far, science has 
 always been successful in its conflict with dogma. But we must 
 not assume that in this conflict science is putting up its own 
 dogma for the purpose of ruling out that with which it is in 
 conflict. Science is simply setting up postulates, and it is justi- 
 fied in setting them up until someone can show they are not 
 
 [259]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 tenable; and then it is perfectly ready to abandon them and to 
 adopt any other which will lead to the solution of the problem 
 in connection with which the difficulty is presented. 
 
 The mechanical doctrine which was dominant in the scientific 
 world of the nineteenth century was that of Newton, with its 
 conception of a mechanical process which could be determined 
 by laws of nature which presumably were inevitable and invari- 
 able. It took account only of the position of physical particles 
 in their relationship to each other as a whole. It did not deal 
 with the values which objects directly have in our experience — 
 those of sensation, for example, color, sound, taste, and odor. 
 But even as important, and perhaps more important, it did 
 not deal with the characters which belong to living organisms. 
 It simply stated the relative position of all physical particles in 
 their relationship to each other. In this doctrine there was no 
 reason for cutting out certain groups of these particles and deal- 
 ing with them as separate objects and finding in them a content, 
 a meaning which belonged to them themselves such as is found 
 in all living forms. What this science did do, however, and it is 
 well always to keep this in mind, was to state certain fixed con- 
 ditions under which these phenomena could appear. Take the 
 phenomenon of Hfe, for example. The physical and chemical sci- 
 ences could state what the conditions are under which life as we 
 feel it, see it, know it about us, can arise. In so far, of course, it 
 gives us control over the process of life. It is a statement of a 
 mechanical, as over against a teleological, view of the world. 
 It reduces the world simply to a congeries of physical particles, 
 atoms, and electrons; it takes all the meaning out of it. That 
 would be an unjust account of reality, for the development of 
 science has always gone hand in hand with the determination 
 of the conditions under which other characters could appear. 
 We never could have had the advances which we have had in 
 hygiene and medicine but for the mechanical statements which 
 are given in physics and chemistry. We never could have got 
 as close as we have to the life-process as a whole if it had not 
 been for this physical and mechanical statement. From the time 
 
 [2601
 
 INDUSTRY A BOON TO SCIENCE 
 
 of Bacon on, the slogan of science has been, "Knowledge is 
 power." That is, what we learn about nature enables us to con- 
 trol nature. Or, to use another of those expressions that belong 
 to that period, "We can control nature only by obeying nature." 
 Thus, while the mechanical science seems to have presented a 
 world the meaning of which was all emptied out, with nothing 
 but physical particles and their movements remaining, it has 
 actually enabled us to get far greater control than we ever had 
 before over the conditions under which men live as biological, 
 psychological, and social creatures. Thus, it helped to make the 
 ends of social activity much clearer. It is that point to which 
 I wish to draw your attention especially, a point which we 
 must continually keep in mind. Really the mechanical science 
 of this period has not mechanized human conduct. Rather, it 
 has given freedom. Humanity was never before so free in deal- 
 ing with its own environment as it has been since the triumphs 
 of mechanical science. The ability to look at the world in terms 
 of congeries of physical particles actually has enabled men to 
 determine their environment. 
 
 A simple review of the conditions with reference to health, to 
 disease, shows what has been accomplished in these directions 
 by means of scientific method. As I have already said, the food 
 environment is one of the greatest factors in changes which have 
 taken place in the evolution of living forms. Man has reached 
 the point where he can conceivably control his food environ- 
 ment. He is, of course, the only living form that has reached 
 that stage. Curiously enough, we find small beginnings of it in 
 the society of the ants — the beginnings of cultivation, the plant- 
 ing of mushrooms and other plants in their galleries, the import- 
 ing and conserving of certain insects which supply them with 
 glucose. This seems like the beginnings of human agriculture. 
 But human society has actually, or may actually, determine 
 what vegetation may grow about it. We cannot change the cli- 
 mate, but we can move about. We can get the products that 
 come from the various climates. We are in a position such as no 
 animal form has been, namely, that of controlling specifically 
 
 [261I
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 the environment in which we live. From the point of view of a 
 Darwinian evolution the various forms have arisen very largely 
 through the changes that have taken place in the environment, 
 climatic and biologic changes, the conflicts that have arisen 
 among vegetable forms; and all these changes have given rise to 
 new species. There we have the species more or less under the 
 control of the environment. But when we reach the human 
 form, we have one which determines what the environment 
 shall be. It cannot, of course, plant wheat in the Sahara 
 Desert; but it can determine what quantity of wheat shall be 
 produced and where it can be grown most successfully. It can 
 measurably control the flow of its streams. It can, to an amaz- 
 ing degree, determine what are the conditions under which life 
 shall take place. There we reach a certain culmination in the 
 evolutionary process. Other forms are more or less under the 
 control of their environments. But the human form turns about 
 and gets control over its environment. 
 
 What has given it that control in the great degree in which 
 it has been accomplished in these last three centuries has been 
 the scientific method, which has found its greatest expression in 
 the so-called "mechanical science." It is the scientific meth- 
 od by which the human form has turned around upon its en- 
 vironment and got control over it, and thus, as I have said, pre- 
 sented a new set of ends which control human conduct, ends 
 which are more universal than those which have previously 
 guided the conduct of the individual and of mankind as a whole 
 — the ends, for example, and the policy of the government, of a 
 group of governments, conceivably of the whole human race. 
 The human race can determine where it will live, what plants 
 and trees shall grow there. It can determine its own population. 
 It can set up a definite ideal as to what human stock shall be 
 bred, what the production shall be. It can definitely set about 
 making its own habitat and living in that habitat in accordance 
 with ends which it can itself work out. That has been the result 
 of the application of scientific method. It does, in a very marked 
 
 [262I
 
 INDUSTRY A BOON TO SCIENCE 
 
 degree, you see, alter the outlook of society. It has tended to 
 make a universal science. 
 
 This carrying-over of the conceptions of the physical and 
 mathematical sciences into biology, the working-out of some of 
 the most important phases of the life-process in mechanical 
 terms, the statement of that process from its beginning in the 
 transformation of carbonic acid gas into starch all the way 
 through the plant and animal forms up to its final appearance 
 in dioxideSj is a most important part of the scientific period we 
 have been discussing. This statement implied, as we have seen, 
 that the whole process could be stated in mechanical terms or 
 in terms of mechanical science. The process is very intricate; 
 and it is not actually possible, at least it has not been up to the 
 present time, to follow its phases out in detail. But, beginning 
 with a process which could be stated mechanically, and termi- 
 nating in the same, it was fair to assume that the whole process 
 could be so stated. Furthermore, we have seen that Darwin's 
 hypothesis made it possible to deal with the formation of 
 species in terms of natural causation. All that was needed for 
 this was the hypothesis which Darwin assumed, namely, the 
 indefinite variation of young forms, the presence of far more 
 forms than could actually subsist, a condition which brought 
 about competition for existence. This seemed to be all that was 
 necessary in order to account for the formation of the species 
 themselves. Agriculture and the breeding of farm animals and 
 of sport animals had indicated the very great phability of the 
 forms under the influence of selection. Nature seemed to pro- 
 vide such a selection in the competition for existence. The im- 
 portance of these points of view, as I wanted to bring out, is 
 that of the carrying-over of the mechanical sciences into the 
 field of biology. Of course, it left vast stretches which could 
 not be worked out; but it made such an assumption a perfectly 
 legitimate hypothesis for the purposes of research. 
 
 263
 
 CHAPTER XIII 
 MODERN SCIENCE IS RESEARCH SCIENCE 
 
 TT IS, of course, the research attitude which distinguishes 
 our modern science. It has flourished more intensively in 
 the last century and a half than ever before. There is one 
 phase of it that I wish particularly to point out in this connec- 
 tion. Research science approaches certain problems. It does not 
 undertake to give a systematic account of the world as a whole 
 in any specific field. In the earlier period the function of sci- 
 ence seemed to be that of presenting a systematic account of 
 the universe, including all living forms; and great interest was 
 centered in the mere statement of classes, families, genera, and 
 species. Interest centered in the picking-out of the proper types, 
 the selection of those characteristics which were best adapted 
 for classification. But the interest in science shifted from that 
 over to research work. Here we are thinking of biological sci- 
 ence in particular. This is, however, true of all modern science. 
 The research scientist starts from a specific problem that he 
 finds as an exception to what has been regarded as a law. Given 
 such an exception, he undertakes to present a hypothesis which 
 will lead to the solution of the problem. His work, then, starts 
 with the problem and ends with its solution. Now, what is in- 
 volved in the solution is that the exception itself shall be ac- 
 counted for, that a new statement shall be given which will over- 
 come the opposition which the problem suggests. 
 
 The illustration of this process that I have often used is that 
 of the sporadic appearance of a contagious disease. Before we 
 knew about the microorganisms that carried the disease, it was 
 assumed that the disease was carried by actual contact. A 
 sporadic case is an exception to the rule. Where no person has 
 the disease there can be no contact. The sporadic case, then, 
 
 [264]
 
 MODERN SCIENCE IS RESEARCH SCIENCE 
 
 is an exception. Now, the scientist starts off with a given point 
 of view, a given theory, a given technique; he finds an excep- 
 tion to this; then he sets about forming a hypothesis which, 
 on the basis of facts which he gathers together, will enable 
 him to connect this exception with the other facts which are 
 recognized and which can be established. Such a hypothesis 
 was that of a microorganism which can bring disease, which 
 itself is carried by a stream of water or in milk, or in some 
 such fashion. This is a satisfactory illustration of the research 
 method. It starts from an exception and undertakes to fashion 
 a hypothesis which will bring these conflicting causes into rela- 
 tionship with each other. 
 
 The research scientist does not guarantee the conceptions 
 with which he starts. He has worked on the theory that an in- 
 fectious disease of some sort goes from one person to another. 
 The common theory had been that there must be actual con- 
 tact between the man who has the disease and the person who 
 catches it. The scientist accepts this theory for the time being, 
 but only as a postulate. He does not accept it as something to 
 be taken in a dogmatic fashion. He accepts the clinical account 
 of the disease, the history of it, the way in which it presents it- 
 self — accepts it from the point of view of the science of the time 
 but not in a dogmatic fashion. He is perfectly ready to find 
 problems in all phases of his theory. In fact, the research sci- 
 entist is looking for problems, and he feels happiest when he 
 finds new ones. He does not cherish laws and the form in which 
 they are given as something which must be maintained, some- 
 thing that must not be touched. On the contrary, he is anxious 
 to find some exception to the statement of laws which has been 
 given. 
 
 Science starts with certain postulates, but does not assume 
 that they are not to be touched. There is no phase of the world 
 as we know it in which a problem may not arise, and the sci- 
 entist is anxious to find such a problem. He is interested not 
 merely in giving a systematic view of the world from a science 
 already estabhshed but in working out problems that arise. This 
 
 [265]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 is the attitude of research science. What I particularly want to 
 point out is that the assumptions which lie behind this. science 
 are only postulates. We assume, indeed, that the world is or- 
 dered in accordance with law, that processes in it are uniform. 
 Otherwise, of course, the world would not be knowable, at least 
 not in the sense in which science knows it. We know the world 
 in terms of laws, but we do not assume any certain laws to be 
 the final formulation. We expect these laws to be continually 
 changed. We would think any science barren which did not in 
 one generation give a different view than that held by the gen- 
 eration before. And, if that difference is a fundamental one, we 
 think science just that much more productive. 
 
 The distinction between the scientific postulate and the 
 dogma is the distinction between research science and the sci- 
 ence of Aristotle. Aristotle stated that it was the nature of 
 a heavy body to tend toward the center of the earth. He set 
 that up as a dogma, as his particular definition of a heavy body. 
 From that he could deduce any logical conclusion^ — for example, 
 that the heavier the body the greater the tendency toward the 
 center of the earth. If that is the case, then the velocity of the 
 falling body must be proportionate to its weight. There you 
 have a solution of a problem in a dogmatic fashion, deduced 
 from a dogma. 
 
 The scientific method is aptly illustrated by the procedure 
 of Galileo. Questioning in his mind, from instances he had seen, 
 whether or not this conclusion of Aristotle was true he took 
 bodies of different weights to the top of the leaning tower of 
 Pisa, dropped them, and found that their rate of fall was not in 
 proportion to their weight. Then he set up apparatus to dis- 
 cover whether or not he could find a law in accordance with 
 which they did fall. He did not start off from a given theory 
 which stated what the nature of the falling body was and then 
 undertake to deduce from that what its velocity must be. 
 Rather, he undertook to find out just what the velocity was, to 
 see if it agreed with this law or not; and, when it did not, he set 
 up a hypothesis that the velocities of faUing bodies vary with 
 
 [ 266 ]
 
 MODERN SCIENCE IS RESEARCH SCIENCE 
 
 the time of their fall. With as accurate an apparatus as he could 
 produce, he found that his results accorded with that hy- 
 pothesis. It became, then, a theory, if you like, to take the 
 place of the older Aristotelian dogma. 
 
 From the point of view of the scientist, Galileo's theory is a 
 postulate. He does not set it up as a statement of the nature of 
 the body, as Aristotle did. Galileo set it up as his postulate be- 
 cause it agreed with the facts. If, however, later observations 
 should show that it did not agree, then any scientist would be 
 only too glad to change the doctrine. All universals used by sci- 
 entists are postulates of this sort which are accepted as long as 
 they are in agreement with the facts. When they differ from the 
 facts of observation, they have to be reconstructed. We can say, 
 then, that science deals with hypothetical universals. Its con- 
 clusions are hypothetical propositions. If such and such a law 
 holds, such and such a result must follow. But scientific re- 
 search does not attempt to establish the law as something abso- 
 lutely given. 
 
 Of course, the old medieval attitude had been that of a giveis 
 form or statement of causation, a science inherited from Arn- 
 totle. And when Galileo suggested that bodies fall with veloci- 
 ties not in proportion to their weight, he was regarded as a 
 heretic. From this you can see that the change in attitude which 
 research science involved was very profound. While it starts off 
 with certain assumptions, these are regarded only as postulates, 
 and nothing more. They have no inherent virtue, no inherent 
 authority. 
 
 One of the basic postulates of the scientific view which I 
 have been presenting was the mechanical character of the uni- 
 verse, the assumption that we can, for example, state the whole 
 life-process in mechanical terms. Such an assumption is a postu- 
 late which the scientist makes, but it is only that in his eyes. 
 He is entirely justified in using it in that capacity until he can 
 hold to it no longer. The conflict, so far as there is one, is be- 
 tween a mechanical and a teleological view of the world. This 
 conflict has become peculiarly acute in biology. 
 
 [267I 
 
 y
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 If you are dealing with the force of a stream of water, you 
 look at it from a mechanical point of view— so much energy at 
 this point, the water falls so far, and so much energy is de- 
 veloped below. That is an account which is a posteriori, from 
 behind. However, if you undertake to deal with such phe- 
 nomena as the digestion and the assimilation of food, you start 
 off with the assumption of a certain function to be carried out. 
 This function is what would be called, in terms of an Aris- 
 totelian science, a "final cause." All this apparatus is there to 
 accomplish a certain purpose. If food is taken in, it must be 
 digested before it can be assimilated. The apparatus is there, 
 then, for this function. We set up the end as something which 
 is there to be carried out in order that a certain result may be 
 reached. In biology we proceed with mechanical causes, but we 
 have to have final causes in our interpretation of these. If we 
 try to go into the actual digestive process, we have to have 
 recourse to the chemical laboratory. We assume that the sort 
 of organism in question has to perform a certain function; but 
 when we come to state the operation of this function, we do not 
 state it in terms of final causes, but in mechanical terms. We 
 want to show that, if we have certain chemical substances pres- 
 ent in certain combinations and we add other substances, a cer- 
 tain change must occur which will lead to such and such a result. 
 That is, you explain the process from behind. You do not say, 
 "This must be digested, therefore it must be changed in such 
 and such a way." You say that this food is brought into contact 
 with certain substances and that therefore it must change. 
 You get an explanation that lies behind instead of in front. 
 That is, you have a mechanical, instead of a teleological, ex- 
 planation. 
 
 Another illustration of the difference between a teleological 
 and a mechanical explanation is found when you set about to ac- 
 count for a certain murder and you say that the man who had an 
 interest in the death of the murdered man was the cause of it. 
 It is the end which the man had in view. That is the explana- 
 tion of what takes place. If, however, the physician who is 
 
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 MODERN SCIENCE IS RESEARCH SCIENCE 
 
 called to account for the murder does so, he says a bullet 
 entered the body in a certain way and led to a given result. 
 There you get the mechanical statement, a statement in terms 
 of cause and effect. This effect is caused by another effect, and 
 so on. You have a set of causes and effects which follow one 
 another. If, on the other hand, you are interested in the case as 
 district attorney, you look to ends, rather than to causes and 
 effects — ends which the murderer had in view. The latter 
 wanted the person's life insurance or his property. That end, 
 the attorney says, explains the murder. That is, he gives a 
 teleological explanation, while the doctor who performs the 
 autopsy gives a mechanical explanation. 
 
 In biological science you bring in both these points of view. 
 We say that, in order for the plant or animal to live, it must 
 digest food that it takes in. This is an end that it must ac- 
 complish. Then you try to show how this takes place; and to 
 do so, you make use of a mechanical explanation. Well, the two 
 points that I brought out, that of the possible statement of life- 
 processes in mechanical terms and an account of the origins of 
 species, seem to take away the necessity of a teleological ex- 
 planation. If you could make a complete statement in mechani- 
 cal terms, you would not need to bring in the teleological ex- 
 planation at all. If you can show just what the position of all 
 the physical particles is, what changes they must go through, 
 what motions will take place, what reconstructions will occur, 
 you finally get a statement which you can understand, and one 
 which does not involve ends. The teleological statement, on the 
 other hand, in a certain sense, sets up your problem for you. 
 The animal has to digest his food. How does he do it? The 
 manner is stated in mechanical terms, but the problem is teleo- 
 logical. Now, supposing you could carry out the whole process 
 of living in mechanical terms, you would not have to bring in a 
 teleological statement at all. 
 
 That is the basis of the objections which have been offered 
 to the so-called "mechanical sciences"; they take the meaning 
 out of life, take out its end or purpose. And this objection, of 
 
 [269]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 course, was made all the more vivid in the contention over the 
 idea of evolution. Here, seemingly, you have a mechanical ex- 
 planation for the appearance of species and of their different 
 organs. All you ask for is a set of indefinite variations, a com- 
 petition for existences, a changing environment. All these can 
 be explained mechanically. Presumably, you can show, or at 
 least Darwin assumed that you can show, that every form must 
 vary in some way from its present form, and also that varia- 
 tions could be handed on to the next generation. Of course, this 
 assumption has been questioned. But it is the assumption which 
 Darwin's doctrine carried with it. It was necessary to recognize 
 the fact which every biologist did recognize, namely, that more 
 young forms are born than can possibly live. Consequently, 
 there must be a resultant competition for existence. You have 
 to recognize this competition that biology, together with ge- 
 ology, points out, namely, that the environment is constantly 
 changing, so that the adaptation of a form to one environment 
 does not adjust it to another. There you can explain the origin 
 of new forms by means of causes which lie behind. You do not 
 have to say that there is a creator having an idea of a form and 
 then fashioning it after that idea of his in order to carry out 
 some purpose which he has in mind. You can simply show that 
 causes operating in a certain way will lead to the appearance of 
 new forms, and so you can explain the latter mechanically. 
 
 It was that which led to the very vivid fight over evolution, 
 a fight which still continues in some parts of the world. Now, 
 what I am emphasizing is that such an appeal to a mechanical 
 explanation is a postulate that science makes. Its fundamental 
 postulate is that the world is knowable, and, if so, there must 
 be a reason for everything, and this reason will have a universal 
 form. Of course, science has to make that assumption, for it is 
 its business to know. Therefore, it must postulate that things 
 are knowable. And knowing is finding uniformities, finding 
 rules, laws. But we do not assume that the laws we have dis- 
 covered are the statements which persons are going to accept 
 later. We expect to have these laws changed. Now, one of the 
 
 [270]
 
 MODERN SCIENCE IS RESEARCH SCIENCE 
 
 assumptions that the biological sciences make is that they can 
 give a mechanical explanation to what goes on in the life- 
 process. Perhaps they may be mistaken about this. If they are, 
 they will be just as ready to recognize that as they are to recog- 
 nize any other exception. But it is a natural and a perfectly 
 legitimate postulate. We must go on assuming that we can give 
 physical and mechanical statements for everything that takes 
 place inside of us until we cannot accept these statements any 
 longer. We must make that postulate, but we must make it a 
 postulate and not set it up as a dogma. As long as we accept 
 such a statement as a postulate, we are entirely justified in it. 
 For it has been supported by the successes, the achievements, 
 of science. It opens a door to the understanding of the world. 
 There is, then, no real conflict between a mechanical and 
 a teleological account of the world or of the facts of life. The 
 scientist who approaches the problem of digestion inevitably 
 undertakes to make a chemical statement of what goes on. 
 He still takes the attitude that starches are digested so that the 
 Hfe of the form may be maintained. That is, he states the 
 process in teleological terms. Of course, if he carries evolution- 
 ary theory still further, he can say that this so-called purpose is 
 nothing but a mechanical process of the survival of one form 
 over another. But the particular form in which his problem 
 arises is teleological. How does the digestive process go on that 
 does enable life to continue? Take the question of the secretion 
 of the various glands of the body. W^hat we assume is that the 
 various processes that are taking place there have to result in 
 a nice adaptation to the conditions of the life-process, and that 
 the stimulation that comes particularly from the ductless glands 
 is essential to carry this out. We see that certain of the secre- 
 tions, such as that coming from the pancreas, enable the blood 
 to carry more sugar and to carry it in a form in which it can be 
 most readily turned into energy. The animal must expend en- 
 ergy rapidly. The sugar in the blood enables him to do that 
 most readily. But in order for it to be there, for it to be avail- 
 able, the system has to be tolerant of sugar. Therefore you have 
 
 [271 1
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 to have the pancreatic secretion. You see, you set the process 
 up in teleological terms and then explain it by finding actual 
 chemical processes that take place. You get a statement which 
 starts off in teleological form, and then you give a mechanical 
 account of it. 
 
 Science does not feel any conflict in such a statement. The 
 scientist is perfectly willing to accept the problem, and he looks 
 forward to as complete a mechanical statement of it as is pos- 
 sible. And he is perfectly justified in setting up this point of 
 view until it breaks down. He can say that, theoretically at 
 least, a mechanical statement can be made of the whole world. 
 But he does not necessarily assume that that will be an ade- 
 quate statement. The complete mechanical statement would not 
 take account of the end, of the purpose, to which we have re- 
 ferred. And that seems to be necessary to our comprehension 
 of the world. Yet there is no conflict between that teleological 
 statement of it, on the one hand, and the mechanical, on the 
 other. Science does not feel any conflict there. Therefore it has 
 welcomed every advance in mechanical science because it en- 
 ables it to give a statement, an explanation, of that which is 
 taking place. The more complete you can make your mechani- 
 cal statement, the more satisfactory you can make your ex- 
 planation. You must postulate that such a mechanical state- 
 ment of the universe can be made. And then, if you find that it 
 is not satisfactory, you can throw it over. But you must make 
 an assumption that such a mechanical statement can be made. 
 
 That is the attitude of our modern science. If science were 
 dogmatic, that is, of the Aristotehan type, then to postulate a 
 mechanical account of things would mean to abandon definitely 
 all final causes, all ends. We would have to set up a theory, a 
 philosophy, a theology, which would be of a mechanical sort. 
 That is the difference between the mechanical statement that is 
 suggested in the ancient world of Democritus and that of re- 
 search science of the present time. The scientist's use of the 
 mechanical explanation does not carry any dogma with it. He 
 is entirely justified in making a postulate that he can give such 
 
 [272]
 
 MODERN SCIENCE IS RESEARCH SCIENCE 
 
 a statement without being involved in assuming that there is 
 jio meaning in the world beyond this mechanical statement of 
 it. His attitude does not carry that assumption. It leaves the 
 whole question open. All the scientist assumes is that he can 
 make such a mechanical statement, and he gives evidence to 
 show that he can carry it out. The result is that research sci- 
 ence has been able to take over a mechanical theory of the 
 world and postulate such a theory without committing itself to 
 any philosophy based upon it. 
 
 You can find scientists who do admit such a mechanical phi- 
 losophy. In the middle of the seventeenth century a perfectly 
 definite materialism undertook to abandon everything except 
 the mechanical view of the world, not in terms of a postulate, 
 but in terms of a dogma. It assumed that consciousness, so- 
 called, was nothing but a secretion, in some sense, of the brain, 
 just as bile is a secretion of the liver, and that you could treat 
 it as any other physiological process. It assumed that there 
 was no end or purpose in the world, nothing but mechanical 
 procedure. What I am distinguishing between is the postulate 
 on the part of the scientist that he can find some statement, 
 some explanation, some solution, of his problem and such a 
 dogma as this that there is nothing but a mechanics of physical 
 particles in the universe. One does not imply the other. And 
 our science is free because it is able to make use of such a postu- 
 late without being committed to it as a dogma. What people 
 found was that such a statement of materialistic science, 
 when taken to be the end, did not mean anything. But, of 
 course, it exercised a very considerable influence as late as the 
 middle of the nineteenth century. Darwin seemed to make such 
 a dogma all the more practicable and plausible, and you find 
 certain so-called "evolutionists" taking such a view of the uni- 
 verse. For a time the question of evolution seemed to be the 
 question as to whether, as Disraeli said, you were on the side 
 of the monkeys or that of the angels. As for him, he was on the 
 side of the angels! That is a silly way of presenting the situa- 
 tion. If you get a mechanical statement which will account for 
 
 [ 273 1
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 the origin of species, so much the better. The mechanical state- 
 ment is a postulate you set up, and you must carry it out just 
 as far as you can, up to the point where it breaks down. And 
 nobody is happier than the scientist if it breaks down, for then 
 he will have another problem. He can make a postulate with- 
 out setting up a dogma. And a postulate of the mechanical ac- 
 count of the world is that which science sets up, but not a dogma 
 that answers to that. In science itself, there is no attempt to 
 set up a materialistic philosophy. 
 
 The development of science, then, during the last century, the 
 carrying-over of the statements of physics and chemistry to 
 everything that is going on, gave tremendous push to our under- 
 standing of the world. It also had this definite effect, to show 
 that science could tolerate no dogmatic statement. Science does 
 not attempt to set up a dogma, as I have already insisted; and, 
 of course, science cannot tolerate any other person's setting up a 
 dogma. If your theological account becomes a dogmatic ac- 
 count, then science cannot accept it. If you say that the world 
 was created in six days, and that creation started at some period 
 between four and five thousand years before Christ, as stated 
 in Bishop Ussher's calculations, you set up dogmatic statements 
 with which science is in inevitable conflict. Science will at once 
 turn about and ask for a justification of Bishop Ussher's calcula- 
 tions, will look up documents, ask what they are, where they 
 came from, who wrote them, and pull the dogma all to pieces. 
 If you set up a dogma of that sort, science inevitably under- 
 takes to find a problem in it. 
 
 The field of biblical dates is, of course, one in which we find 
 one of the most striking applications of scientific method during 
 the nineteenth century. It passes under the name of "higher 
 criticism." In the form in which it appeared, it started not with 
 the Bible but with Homer. There had been more or less discus- 
 sion of the Homeric texts way back in Alexandrian days. The 
 German schools set themselves to work on these texts and found 
 all sorts of problems. The solution which one clever Oxford 
 fellow gave was that the Iliad and the Odyssey were written 
 
 [274]
 
 MODERN SCIENCE IS RESEARCH SCIENCE 
 
 not by Homer but by another man of the same name! But 
 what they were at work upon was to disprove the theory that 
 these texts were written by any one man. They showed how 
 the works had arisen and how they became woven into the form 
 in which we have them at the present time. And that same sort 
 of interest was turned loose on the books of the Bible; and these 
 fell to pieces in exactly the same way, and the authors ascribed 
 to them were shown, many of them, to have been mythical. So 
 the dogmatic structure of the church, its theological structure, 
 inevitably came into conflict with science. 
 
 Thus we see that science has gotten away from metaphysical \ 
 dogma as to what the nature of things is, and goes back to the \ 
 ordering of events which it observes. It states its laws in terms / 
 of uniformities, but it is always ready to change any statement 
 it has made. 
 
 The acceptance of the scientific method is the most important 
 phase of the intellectual and spiritual life of the Renaissance. 
 I have been indicating what follows from that acceptance of 
 the scientific method, the method of research science. It is not 
 possible to set up any fixed statements of the laws of nature 
 which must hold under all conditions. All that can be said is 
 that up to the present time we have observed such and such 
 uniformities. We postulate that those uniformities will con- 
 tinue. If they do not, then we will restate the laws. Of course, 
 a still wider generalization, namely, that there are uniformities 
 in nature, lies back of this. In the form in which science uses 
 this postulate it seems to have come into the Western mind by 
 way of religious doctrine. The fundamental belief had been that 
 the world was created by an infinitely wise and omnipotent . 
 being who must have worked in an intelligent and intelligible J 
 fashion so that everything could be explained if one were only 
 able to get back to the fundamental situation. There was a \ 
 reason for everything. That is not, for example, the assumption \ 
 of an Aristotelian science, which admitted certain accidents in f 
 nature that could never be explained. There were uniformities, \ 
 but there were also exceptions which were just there as brute \ 
 
 [275]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 facts. The fundamental assumption that the world is explicable 
 is also an assumption that the world is intelligible, that is, that 
 we can know it. Knowledge is never a mere contact of our 
 organisms with other objects. It always takes on a universal 
 character. If we know a thing, explain it, we always put it 
 into a texture of uniformities. There must be some reason for it, 
 some law expressed in it. That is the fundamental assumption 
 of science. 
 
 The scientific statement of causation is an excellent illustra- 
 tion of this uniformity. Science, in its more dogmatic phase, 
 set up a universal law of cause and effect. Every effect must 
 have a cause; every cause, a like effect. The scientist found, 
 however, that an attempt to define causes was most difficult — 
 finally impossible, in the sense in which these terms had been 
 used. What could one consider to be the cause of any particular 
 event? Let us take again the illustration which I used before, 
 that of the assassin killing his victim. What is the cause of the 
 latter's death? From the point of view of the prosecuting at- 
 torney, it would be the action of the assassin himself. From the 
 point of view of the social psychologist, it would be the influ- 
 ences which had led to the murderer's taking such a step as that. 
 From the point of view of the physician, it would be the actual 
 entrance of the bullet into the victim's body, or the breaking 
 of a blood vessel. There are different causes; and when you at- 
 tempt to define causation as such, you are in great difficulties. 
 What science has done has been to substitute for the idea of 
 cause as a force simply a uniformity which has been discovered 
 in nature and which we may expect to continue. What we come 
 back to, then, is a theory of probabilities. The different causes 
 to which I have referred in this particular illustration are causes 
 that are determined by different interests. The prosecuting at- 
 torney has one interest, that of convicting the guilty person. 
 The social psychologist has an interest in determining the con- 
 ditions out of which such a crime arises. The physician has still 
 another interest in determining just what the situation within 
 the body of the victim is, what particular vital spot has been 
 
 [276]
 
 MODERN SCIENCE IS RESEARCH SCIENCE 
 
 reached by the bullet. You have sets of different interests, and 
 each interested person selects one phase or another of the situa- 
 tion and labels that the cause. What lies back of all these dif- 
 ferent views is a set of uniformities: those which led, for ex- 
 ample, to the officer's detecting and arresting the criminal; 
 those which led the social psychologist to form his judgment as 
 to the effect of social conditions on persons; those which led the 
 physician to identify certain conditions of the tissues with cer- 
 tain results. What the cause is in each case depends upon the 
 selection of some particular one of those conditions which is 
 of interest to the particular individual. And we call these the 
 "causes of the event." Generally, it is some condition which 
 can be changed in order to bring out a different result; but 
 you can see that, as the interests vary, the causation, in our 
 ordinary use of the term, will vary. Well, science in its general 
 statements is not interested in these changes which are to be 
 brought about, but it is interested in giving the uniformities 
 which lie back of what we term the cause, so that the so-called 
 laws of nature are the uniformities of nature. Any particular 
 cause is some one element, some one fact, some one event, in 
 such a uniform series. We expect that, if that or a like event 
 occurs, the corresponding event will follow upon it; and we fall 
 back upon our judgment of probabilities for justifying us in 
 that judgment. 
 
 But even that assumption of uniformity is a postulate. Sci- 
 ence has no absolute evidence that the world is explicable. It 
 has only discovered a minute number of the so-called laws of 
 nature. And yet, we go on the assumption that the whole of 
 nature is intelligible. It is a postulate upon which we act and 
 upon which science will undoubtedly continue to act, but no 
 absolute proof can ever be presented for it. Not even an induc- 
 tive proof can be given of it. It is impossible to say that, be- 
 cause we have found so many instances in which the operation 
 of nature is uniform, therefore it is probable that the whole of 
 nature is uniform. You cannot set that up, for you are assum- 
 ing the uniformity to start with. That is your major premise. 
 
 [277I
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 You can never prove that nature is uniform by means of an 
 inductive syllogism. But nonetheless, science sets up this postu- 
 late and will continue to set it up. Not to accept it would be to 
 surrender the results and undertakings of science, at least in 
 certain fields. The fact that science may not be successful in 
 certain fields does not disprove those postulates. No one can 
 ever really disprove this postulate of the uniformities of nature, 
 because it may be that we have not gone far enough. We could 
 always still recognize the possibility that there might be a reason 
 which we had not found yet. Science in its attempt to know 
 will always carry with it the assumption that the world is know- 
 able. However — and I must insist on this point — it remains 
 only a postulate, inevitable, if you like, but one for which no 
 absolute proof can be offered. 
 
 One of the results of the freedom which this gives science is 
 the introduction of new concepts, concepts which are recom- 
 mended because of their usefulness. I have already pointed out 
 to you the important part the steam engine played not simply 
 in the development of industrial production but also in the de- 
 velopment of physical theory. The theory of the steam engine 
 was first successfully attacked by Carnot, who, you remember, 
 conceived of the steam engine as doing work in a manner 
 analogous to that of the water wheel. It does work because the 
 heat may be conceived as running down from higher to lower 
 levels. As heat "runs down hill," it performs work just as water 
 does as it runs to lower levels. After heat has reached the low- 
 est level, it can do no more work. Having got down below the 
 level at which it can expand, its ability to perform work ceases. 
 You see here that the development of this theory was introduc- 
 ing a new scientific conception, new at least in the form in which 
 it was presented — a concept of work done. Carnot, bringing to- 
 gether the process of the water wheel and the steam engine, set 
 up this conception of the amount of work done as that which 
 could be used for computing these two methods of operation. 
 Of course, a unit had to be worked out, and the foot-pound was 
 proposed. This idea is of the amount of work done in raising a 
 
 [278]
 
 MODERN SCIENCE IS RESEARCH SCIENCE 
 
 pound weight through a distance of one foot. You could do 
 that by means of the water wheel or by means of the steam 
 engine. Then, answering to that unit, Carnot set up the idea of 
 energy. Here is a certain amount of work done- — done, of 
 course, in very different ways in the two mechanisms^ — but a 
 common result is achieved. As a means of computing the results 
 of these two operations, Carnot, and those who carried out his 
 theory, set up this conception of a unit of the amount of work 
 done, and then they set up a supposititious energy that answers 
 to this. There must be a certain amount of energy responsible 
 for doing this amount of work, no matter what the type of 
 mechanism used. It is a very interesting illustration of the in- 
 troduction of a new concept answering to a new scientific situa- 
 tion. 
 
 Of course, back of this new concept lay the ideas of force. If 
 you go back to Newton's mechanics and ask what a force is, 
 you are told that it is a cause of motion. If you try to state that 
 cause, you have to state it in terms of other motions; and a 
 force remains outside the field of your actual observations. Of 
 course, you can observe all the various motions. But energy, 
 you see, is something that is set up answering not simply to a 
 motion but to this conception of work done. This conception 
 was really introduced in an effort to work out a theory of the 
 steam engine. And one of the most important phases of the doc- 
 trine lies in this very conception out of which the situation 
 arose, that of bringing together the water wheel and the steam 
 engine as accomplishing the same thing, as having, therefore, 
 the same energy, that is, as responsible for the same amount of 
 work done. You think, then, of a steam engine as developing 
 a certain amount of energy, of the water wheel as developing 
 a certain amount of energy, the amount of energy being the 
 same in both cases. Energy is simply something stated in terms 
 of what it brings out, a certain amount of work. It is, then, 
 something that can be located in one situation and in another; 
 and it cannot only be located but it can be transferred from 
 one to another and another and another situation. Suppose you 
 
 [279]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 want to produce electric light. You take the energy that is 
 found in coal and transfer it to the revolution of your dynamo, 
 thus changing it into the energy of an electric current, and so 
 finally into the glowing filament. Thus, you have carried your 
 energy from one form to another. Having set up this unit of 
 work, having defined it in terms of energy, you can now go 
 back and discover the energy that is responsible for a given 
 amount of work now in this form, now in that, now in another. 
 It is a very good illustration of the way in which scientific con- 
 cepts arise. It is not simply the idea of a cause of motion which 
 really has to be pushed outside of the doctrine of physical 
 theory; it is a conception of something that can be regarded as 
 responsible for a particular sort of result, that is, of a particular 
 sort of work that is done. And then, when you have set up this 
 relationship, wherever you can get that amount of work done, 
 you can say you have just so much energy. 
 /" From this conception of energy which could be transformed 
 and found now in this form and now in that arose that great 
 generalization of the nineteenth century, the conservation of 
 energy — that there is always just so much energy only it takes 
 different forms. If you can find this energy now in one form, 
 now in another, then all that has happened is that it has been 
 transformed. In a sense this law of the conservation of energy 
 was proved. If you make this postulate, you can show in any 
 particular system which you set up that the same amount of 
 energy is present throughout the whole process. That is, a num- 
 ber of instances are given of a certain system in operation, and 
 it can be shown that the amount of energy in that system is 
 constant no matter what different forms it may take. I want 
 to point out this instance and put it in your minds along with 
 the other great generalization of the century — the hypothesis 
 of evolution. 
 
 What I have been saying about the scientific method appHes 
 also to the social situation, and makes it possible for the whole 
 community to grasp the ends of the community as a whole and 
 to make those ends the interest of the individual. That is con- 
 
 [2801
 
 MODERN SCIENCE IS RESEARCH SCIENCE 
 
 ceivable and, as we shall see later, is the basis not only of social 
 relations but of the appearance of selves. This community of 
 ends is often achieved. For example, in the matter of hygiene, 
 let the whole attention of the trained staff of the community be 
 turned toward the care of the health of the individual and you 
 reach the health of the community. And you can only reach 
 the health of the individual adequately by reaching the health 
 of the whole community. Save the individual, and you cherish 
 the good of the community. And you can accomplish the latter 
 only by saving the individual. This is the ideal of Christianity, 
 only in this case it must be the salvation not of the soul but of 
 the_bady. 
 
 The result of such a movement as that which we are consider- 
 ing is to get away from the abstractions which are involved in 
 this separation of soul and body, of mind and body, of the 
 spiritual and the physical. It is a phase of the influence of the 
 scientific method that I want to emphasize as over against the 
 seeming mechanical character of science. On the face of it, as 
 I say, it presents absolute necessity, a law which determines 
 where every physical particle should be at any moment through- 
 out the whole history of the universe. While this seems to be a 
 prison house for any intelligent effort, what it actually serves 
 to do is to present the apparatus for the control over the en- 
 vironment and for bringing larger and larger ends and ideals 
 within the vision of humanity. It is that side of it I wish to 
 bring out before I leave this seemingly mechanical science. 
 
 I now want to turn briefly to a discussion of the general 
 philosophical effect of this development of science. What I was 
 emphasizing was the scientific method and its import. In the 
 first place, that brought men back to observation. You re- 
 member that the scientific problem is one that arises out of the 
 exceptional event, something that is contrary to laws as they 
 have been accepted, so that attention is directed toward obser- 
 vation and toward a statement of the so-called "fact" in terms 
 of the problem that arises. It is well to recognize that observa- 
 tion is not simply an opening of one's eyes and seeing what 
 
 f28i 1
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 there is about, or opening one's ears and listening to what 
 may occur. It is always directed by some sort of a problem 
 which lies back in one's mind; it always expresses an interest 
 of some sort. We are looking for something that is relatively 
 novel. What we are trying to find are facts which are of the 
 same sort as those which have been noted. Now these facts al- 
 ways represent possible or implicit problems with which sci- 
 ence deals. We speak of them as "hard facts," because they 
 have been hard enough to break down some law, some accepted 
 idea. 
 
 For example, take the situation underlying the problem ot 
 perception. You recognize an acquaintance on the street, start 
 to speak to him, and then find he is not the right man, after 
 which you know there are differences that you did not note at 
 first. Now those differences represent the problem to you, the 
 problem of why you should have mistaken this man for your 
 friend. They are hard facts, they defeat the anticipated conver- 
 sation which you are going to have. They defeat the meeting 
 with the friend. You have run up against an obstacle. When 
 you recognize an acquaintance, you pay no more attention to 
 the actual features than is necessary for the recognition of the 
 person, that is, for allowing your conversation to go on. There 
 is no purpose in giving attention to more than that. You just 
 want enough to assure yourself that he is the person you think 
 he is. But, when you have started to speak to him and find he 
 is somebody else, then the differences stand out and you re- 
 member how your friend really looks, and you wonder why you 
 should have made such a mistake. Or you recognize certain 
 likenesses. 
 
 That is the character of the so-called "hard fact." And the 
 scientist is continually noting that which departs from the ac- 
 cepted view, the given laws. With him it is not a disappoint- 
 ment but an achievement, a new problem to work on. He ap- 
 proaches it with interest and excitement. It is a discovery of 
 something that is an exception to the view that has been held; 
 it is the getting of something novel. These facts, then, arouse 
 
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 MODERN SCIENCE IS RESEARCH SCIENCE 
 
 interest and observation. And they not only do that, but they 
 lead to the formation of a technique of observation. I have said 
 that scientific observation is not simply the opening of one's eyes 
 and seeing things as the images happen to fall on the retina. 
 What it isj is the recognition of the relationship of those things 
 which you see to the customary view. And you have to examine 
 facts from that standpoint. That is, you have to state them in 
 the form of a definite problem. In the case I have just given 
 from perception, you note that which makes you certain the 
 person you meet is not your friend. You have to make that 
 definite and clear. It might be an acquaintance who had had a 
 long illness, so that you hardly recognize him. You have to as- 
 sure yourself whether it is or is not the friend. You bring the 
 images, the facts, into relationship with your customary inter- 
 course. And then you may go to see what the likenesses were 
 that led you to make the mistake. Now, when you come to the 
 scientific situation, you have the so-called facts before you in 
 terms of their exceptional characters. And you have very care- 
 fully to define in what that exceptional character consists. 
 
 The illustration of the sporadic case of the infectious disease, 
 to which I have referred, shows this. You have believed, up to 
 the appearance of this problem, that disease was conveyed by 
 contact with someone who had it. Now you have a case in 
 which there is no contact. Your observation forces you, under 
 these circumstances, to make absolutely certain that there was 
 no such contact. You have to comb the neighborhood. You 
 have to make sure that the person who has now come down with 
 the disease was not a stranger who brought it from elsewhere. 
 You have to determine very accurately that this is an exception 
 to the law. You have to state the case in terms of the law and 
 show that it is an exception to it. And then, when you have that 
 stated, the first thing you do is to look around for other in- 
 stances. Now you have a way of defining your facts in terms 
 of this law, and you look for other sporadic cases and put these 
 down. This means that as a part of scientific method you must 
 observe that which runs counter to the currently accepted laws. 
 
 [283]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 To do this you give a very careful definition of the exceptional 
 instances in terms of the law, so that your observation is of cer- 
 tain particular characters. And given these, you are able to 
 gather all other similar instances. This enables you not only to 
 state your problem exactly but also to insert, so to speak, the 
 negative form of your hypothesis. It states your problem for 
 you: How does this sporadic case, or rather these cases, mapped 
 before me, arise in a district in which there were no other in- 
 stances of the disease? The reason for it, presumably, will have 
 something to do with the distribution of the cases, for these per- 
 sons have contracted the disease in some unknown manner. 
 There must be a common cause. You have no hypothesis, as 
 yet, as to what the cause is; but it must be a cause which can 
 operate in this series of instances. Therefore, you must have a 
 hypothesis which fits in with the facts. 
 
 This is what the scientific method of observation consists in: 
 it is the observing of that which runs counter to accepted 
 opinion, current laws; it is the statement of the so-called facts 
 in terms of their exceptional character; and then a gathering of 
 all other facts that you can get hold of which are of the same 
 sort and which will show you something of the nature of the 
 hypothesis that may possibly meet that situation. You find 
 that the cases of a disease are all located along a river. Then 
 you can say that the infection is very likely one which has 
 traveled along a water course. There you get the form of your 
 hypothesis. If you can find some infective microorganism that 
 can travel in water, you can test out your hypothesis. There is 
 just as much accurate technique in observation as there is in 
 experimentation. What experiment does is to take the hypothe- 
 sis that you have formed and see if it will fit in with the facts 
 which you have before you and other facts which you can 
 gather. Your experiment is especially constructed so as to 
 determine whether the hypothesis will agree with the facts. 
 You assume that something is to be found in water. You actu- 
 ally isolate a microorganism; you try it on a dog to see if that 
 particular microorganism will give rise to that particular disease 
 
 [284]
 
 MODERN SCIENCE IS RESEARCH SCIENCE 
 
 in the dog. Then, having got that into the dog, you recover the 
 microorganism from the dog itself and try it on another dog. 
 You examine those animals which have not the disease, and 
 prove to your self-satisfaction that they have not the organisms 
 in their systems. So you prove positively and negatively that, 
 where the organism is present, the disease is present, and, 
 where not, the disease is not. But your original observation has 
 to be as accurate as possible. You must define your facts in 
 terms of the accepted law in order to see in what way they are 
 exceptional. That is what we term the "scientific method." 
 
 What I was pointing out with reference to what is of particu- 
 lar importance from the general philosophical standpoint is that 
 these laws which are overthrown by the facts are laws which 
 had been accepted and have now disappeared as laws. You are 
 undertaking to set up another law in place of the one which has 
 been overthrown. The new law is tentatively set up as a hy- 
 pothesis. You test it. When you have tested it, it becomes a 
 working hypothesis. And if others test it and it works, it be- 
 comes an accepted theory. But, although it is an accepted 
 theory, it is still subject to some other chance exception. That 
 is, it still remains hypothetical. What I want to point out is that 
 the necessary conclusions that science draws are always in the 
 form of a hypothetical syllogism. You say this must be true — 
 science has proved it. But if you get back to a statement by a 
 good scientist, you will find that he is careful to say that, if 
 these laws which have been tested by experience continue to 
 hold, if no new exceptions appear, then such and such a result 
 must follow. The necessity in this case is hypothetical. There 
 are no laws of nature which are given in such a fashion that 
 they can be made dogmas. That is, you cannot say that any 
 law is absolute and fixed. The laws of nature, as used by science, 
 are always hypothetical. If some exception appears, then they 
 will have to be remade. That is the form in which all our so- 
 called laws of nature exist in the minds of the most careful sci- 
 entists. They are there as hypotheses; or, to use the expression 
 I have used before, they are postulates. We postulate these 
 
 [285]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 laws; we reach certain results; we act on these results; we get 
 the satisfaction we expected to; and we accompHsh what we set 
 out to accomphsh. But new facts may arise which may make it 
 necessary to reconstruct the postulates. We have always the 
 private faith that any law may have to be reconstructed. In- 
 deed, the law may disappear; but another law will be found to 
 take its place. The law is dead; long live the law! There is al- 
 ways some possible reconstruction that can take the place of it. 
 No statement that science makes is final. 
 
 We have had a striking illustration of this in the last few 
 years in the appearance of the idea of evolution and in the modi- 
 fication of the fundamental laws of the Newtonian world. In 
 both cases laws were found to be incorrectly or inadequately 
 stated. They have had to be restated from the point of view of 
 new experiences. We advance, then, by the use of postulates 
 which have worked. And we continue to use them as long as 
 they work. We can recognize that these postulates may have 
 to be abandoned; but we also recognize that, if they are aban- 
 doned, we shall put up others in the place of them. That is the 
 scientific method which came in and ousted the older technique, 
 the dogmatic attitude toward the world. 
 
 There is one phase of this development to which I wish to re- 
 turn for a moment, that of the idea of energy. By means of it 
 I wish to illustrate the different sources from which science gets 
 its exceptions, or perhaps I should say the different points at 
 which problems arise. As we have seen, in this case the problem 
 arose out of the steam engine, which had become a very im- 
 portant factor in the life of the time and which made it neces- 
 sary to work out a mechanical theory of it so that it could be con- 
 trolled. The steam engine worked by forces which people did not 
 understand. But what they were sure of was that there was a 
 certain amount of accomplishment, of work done. They set up 
 the idea of a something which was there, which could be found 
 in coal, in the revolving wheels of the machine, in the electric 
 current^ — a something there that answered to this work done. 
 And they called it "energy." As I have said, they assumed on 
 
 [2861
 
 MODERN SCIENCE IS RESEARCH SCIENCE 
 
 the analogy of the water wheel that the steam, as it flowed from 
 higher to lower levels of temperature, did this work. Work was 
 proportionate to the fall. The work which could be done was in 
 some fashion proportionate to the amount of heat. So the laws 
 of thermodynamics were worked out. 
 
 This led to the conception of entropy, the assumption that 
 there exists throughout the whole of the universe a certain 
 amount of energy which is in different degrees of excitement. 
 Temperature was recognized as answering to the movement of 
 things, of molecules, the sort of movement which we cannot see, 
 which we cannot feel with our fingers, but which reveals itself 
 to us in terms of temperature. Wherever there is energy, it is 
 assumed that it is an instance of that sort of motion. Now, ac- 
 cording to the laws of energy, this motion is all tending toward 
 a uniform minimum in which it will be evenly distributed all 
 through the physical universe. Where you have a great rate of 
 motion, that motion will impart itself to the other molecules 
 about it, and that to still other molecules, and gradually there 
 will be an evening up. If there is more motion in one place than 
 in another, there will tend to be a situation in which the amount 
 of motion will be the same everywhere. Thus, temperature can 
 be conceived of as streams of water which are all running down 
 toward an entropic ocean, where the motion will be at the low- 
 est degree but the same everywhere. The whole world seems 
 to be running down toward that result. 
 
 While that conception still remains, it has lost a good deal 
 of its interest. We are now approaching the scientific problem 
 from another standpoint; and the conception of entropy, while 
 still retained, has not the import that it had before. W' e are now 
 stating our problems in terms of waves, not of heat. The ques- 
 tion of entropy was one that arose out of the appearance of the 
 machine. And, as we have seen, in a certain sense the machine 
 dictated the conceptions which science itself should utilize. 
 That is, industry wanted a unit that would answer to work 
 done. Industry was interested in work. It divided its work up 
 into single units, steps, such as the foot-pound. That became 
 
 [287]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 the accepted unit of work. Now look to nature, where we are 
 seeking for forces to drive our machines, and see if you can find 
 something to answer to this unit of work done. Society, as I 
 said, came forward with a problem, that of controlling the 
 forces of nature as they appeared in machines. These machines 
 worked. If we can get a simple unit, this work can be expressed 
 in any instance in which we find it. We will look in nature for 
 forces which will do work, and we will state them in terms 
 of units of force. It is very interesting to see how society set 
 up this problem for the scientist. The former had its job on 
 hand— that of introducing machines — and it wanted a scientific 
 statement of nature that it could utilize for that purpose. With 
 its task of getting a certain amount of work done, it looked into 
 nature for something that answered to that work; and this was 
 supposed to be energy. There might be gradation of energy. 
 This particular telephone here at my side represents a certain 
 amount of gradational energy. If I let it drop, it will do a cer- 
 tain amount of work. 
 
 From all this you see that science becomes really quite fluid 
 instead of being a fixed dogmatic structure of the world. It be- 
 comes a method, a way of understanding the world, so that we 
 can act with reference to it. And the problems that arise are 
 those involved in our conduct with reference to the world. 
 That conduct has a great many phases. It is not simply the 
 conduct involved in driving machines. It is also our conduct 
 with reference to other members of society. Religion, for ex- 
 ample, undertakes to interpret the meaning of the world. It 
 calls for a certain type of conduct on the part of those who ac- 
 cept reHgion. Science may come in to determine whether the 
 concepts which religion embodies are in accord with what we 
 call the "facts." It then faces another problem. 
 
 Such a situation arose, as we have seen, in the case of evolu- 
 
 ( tion. The accepted reHgious doctrine stated that all the differ- 
 
 y ent forms of plants and animals and physical things were given 
 
 by fiat of the Creator. They were made just as they were by 
 
 God, and they remained in the form that he gave them from 
 
 [288 1
 
 MODERN SCIENCE IS RESEARCH SCIENCE 
 
 the day of creation. Science examines the origin of species. It 
 shows that there is no strong evidence that the forms of things 
 arose in the creation of a day. God, of course, may have been 
 responsible for their life; but he did not, if this statement of 
 evolution is correct, create the forms as such at a particular 
 moment. Well, science presented evidence to us that the forms 
 themselves arose in the life-process, and then it came into con- 
 flict with the dogma of the church. And it was necessary that 
 the dogma of the latter should be restated if man were going 
 to continue to govern his conduct by science. Inevitably, in 
 the end the dogma will have to be restated, because people are 
 controlling their lives by science. 
 
 If you want to deal with disease and with the various technical 
 problems presented to us — those of transportation, of com- 
 munication with distant people — you must deal with them in a 
 scientific manner. You cannot have two methods of conduct 
 which are separated from one another. In the end your sci- 
 entific conduct will be dominant, so far as dogma is concerned. 
 It is not, you see, so much a question as to whether or not sci- 
 ence can demonstrate a theory of the world. It is a question as 
 to whether people are going to act in accordance with scientific 
 technique. 
 
 I must insist again that scientific interpretation does not set 
 up one dogma in place of another. What it sets up are postu- 
 lates. It sets up hypotheses on the basis of which we act, and 
 we will continue to act on them as long as these hypotheses 
 work. They will be reconstructed when exceptions are found. 
 Back of these postulates, however, Hes the constant assumption 
 that the world is intelligible. That is, if we abandon one hy- 
 pothesis, we at once set about to build up another. From the 
 point of view of dogma, this procedure would be a confession of 
 failure. It is like people continually building cities under vol- 
 canoes: they are repeatedly overthrown, only to be built up 
 again. But science is not stating dogma. It is giving us a meth- 
 od of conduct. The only thing that science accepts without 
 question is that the world itself is intelligible. When a sci- 
 
 [289]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 entific law has been proved to be incorrect, it is reconstructed. 
 The process of inteUigence, then, is one of conduct which is 
 continually adjusting itself to new situations. Therefore, it is 
 continually changing its technique. That is what we mean by 
 "inteUigence": the control over conduct by past experience; 
 the abihty to adjust one's self to a new situation; adjusting 
 one's past experience to meet this new situation. If there were 
 no new situations, our conduct would be entirely habitual. 
 What we term "consciousness" would disappear. We would 
 simply become machines. Conscious beings are those that are 
 continually adjusting themselves, using their past experience, 
 reconstructing their methods of conduct. That is what we are 
 doing all the time. That is what inteUigence consists in, not in 
 finding out once and for all what the order of nature is and then 
 acting in certain prescribed forms, but rather in continual re- 
 adjustment. The theory of evolution, you see, was a statement 
 of this from the point of view of life. 
 
 Science, then, is not simply an advance from one theory to 
 another, is not the erecting of a structure of laws simply to pull 
 them down the next moment. Science is an expression of the 
 highest type of inteUigence, a method of continually adjusting 
 itself to that which is new. You can immediately see that this 
 attitude involves a different view of the universe from that 
 which is presented by dogmatic disciplines. As far as our ex- 
 perience is concerned, if everything novel were abandoned, ex- 
 perience itself would cease. That is, our conduct would become 
 habitual. Just as we pay Httle attention to our food, just as we 
 walk along the street without being aware of the process, or as 
 we carry out so many of our customary tasks without giving 
 attention to them, so in a world without novelty that in the 
 experience of the individual which we call "consciousness" 
 would sink toward zero value. Experience itself would cease. 
 Our experience involves the continual appearance of that which 
 is new. We are always advancing into a future which is differ- 
 ent from the past. In fact, if it were not, the very meaning of 
 the passage would disappear. The conception of the mechanical 
 
 [290]
 
 MODERN SCIENCE IS RESEARCH SCIENCE 
 
 statement of the universe which Newton gave was of a uni- 
 verse made up of physical particles governed by very few and 
 very simple laws. There were movements of these particles; 
 but they were tending, as we have seen from the conception of 
 entropy, toward a condition of stagnation, of very slight move- 
 ments. Changes were tending to balance each other; they were 
 moving toward a situation in which there would be no change 
 at all. That mechanical statement, as everybody felt, took the 
 meaning out of life. If you state the world in purely mechanical 
 terms, then you have a single law for the whole of it, and it is 
 practically the same. The same kind of energy can be some- 
 what differently distributed, but it is uniform. It gives a static 
 sort of picture of the universe. The point of view which comes 
 in with scientific method implies that, so far as our experience 
 is concerned, the world is always different. Each morning we 
 open our eyes upon a different universe. Our intelligence is 
 occupied with continued adjustment to these differences. That 
 is what makes the interest in life. We are advancing constantly 
 into a new universe; and, not only is the universe that we look 
 forward into new, but, as we look back, we reinterpret the old 
 universe. We have continually a different past. Every genera- 
 tion re-writes its history. Novelty reaches out in both directions 
 from each present experience. 
 
 291
 
 CHAPTER XIV 
 
 SCIENCE RAISES PROBLEMS FOR 
 
 PHILOSOPHY— VITALISM ; 
 
 HENRI BERGSON 
 
 THE evolutionary phase of the scientific conception of 
 the world got one of its philosophic expressions in the 
 philosophy of evolution of Henri Bergson. I wish now to 
 turn to an examination of that philosophy. Life is a process of 
 continued reconstruction involved in the world as experienced. 
 The new is always appearing, with the consequent appearance 
 of new forms answering to that reconstruction. Bergson recog- 
 nizes what the office of intelligence is in this immediate adjust- 
 ment, and he saw that it cannot look ahead and see what the 
 order of the world is going to be. But Vv^e have assumed that we 
 can prophesy the future, at least in certain details. For example, 
 the astronomer can figure out all the eclipses of the sun for a 
 number of centuries ahead; and we utilize the same sort of data 
 for determining certain events in the past. We can date past 
 events from certain eclipses which occurred at certain recorded 
 times. And we can go ahead and predict them for the future. 
 But these eclipses are stated in terms of the laws of Newton, 
 and these laws are being continually re-written. While the 
 differences may be minute, the statements of the laws are not 
 exact. There are changes taking place which those laws do 
 not take into account. Even such fundamental facts as that of 
 the relative motion of heavenly bodies with reference to each 
 other cannot be stated once and for all. If the function of intelli- 
 gence is to previse the future of the world, it is a failure. And 
 Bergson took that view. He said, like all the rest of the world, 
 we are en route to something which we cannot foresee. We do 
 not know where we are going, but we are on our way. Intelli- 
 
 [292]
 
 VITALISM; HENRI BERGSON 
 
 gence undertakes to tell us where we are going, and it cannot 
 do it. Intelligence is in that sense a failure. It does enable us 
 to direct our immediate steps; but it cannot tell us the meaning 
 of the world. The onward movement which we discover in 
 it is not one directed by our intelligence. There is some force 
 in nature, which Bergson called the elan vital^ which is pushing 
 us on; and yet we do not know where it is going, what it is 
 going to do.^i^fi^adjust ourselves to it at the moment as best 
 we can. This means that we trust ourselves to that force with- 
 out trying to see into the future. So Bergson decried intelligence. 
 He was an anti-intellectualist. He undertook to show that our 
 reflective view of the world always distorts the world. It does 
 it in the interest of conduct, it is true; it does enable us to ac- 
 complish our daily tasks; but it does not give us the picture 
 of the world as it is. If you ask Bergson how we are to get a 
 picture of the world as it is, he says by means of immediate 
 intuition. "]And there his philosophy becomes quite unsatisfac- 
 tory. '^ 
 
 It is the evolutionary phase of science, as interpreted in 
 Bergson's philosophy, that we will consider first, that part of 
 his philosophy which emphasizes the forward push, the elan 
 vital. It emphasizes a progress which takes place without any 
 given goal. I have spoken of evolution as in one sense having 
 reached the goal of human society. There is always the relation- 
 ship of form to environment. The control may be on the one 
 side or on the other. In human societies forms are reached which 
 do, in a very large degree, control the conditions under which 
 they live. But, while you can say that that is a goal which in 
 some sense has been reached; while there is always an effort on 
 the part of every living form to control its environment, as 
 far as it can; the ways in which that goal can be reached, by the 
 development of sense organs, of means of locomotion and of 
 communication, never stands outside of the process. It is 
 reached in the struggle, in the effort to control. The form it 
 takes is something that can never be prevised. And that is true 
 not only of separate forms but of social development as well. 
 
 [293]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 We can never tell what inventions are going to put us into closer 
 communication with each other, what industrial methods will 
 be worked out for closer economic connection with other people 
 in the world, what means of communication will set us in actual 
 intercourse with people thousands of miles away so as to make 
 of society a universal interrelationship of people. All these are 
 ways in which we get ahead, and not ways of approach to a 
 given, fixed ideal. Bergson interpreted the movement of devel- 
 opment as anti-intellectual. He assumed that reason, in the 
 control of conduct, simply served immediate purposes. And 
 it served them by distorting the world. Forward movement 
 does not come from a rational, reflective element but from an 
 impulse that lies behind, a blind impulse as far as reason was 
 concerned. What Bergson failed to realize is that there is 
 nothing so rational, so self-consciously reflective, as the applica- 
 tion of scientific method to immediate conditions, and that the 
 use of this method is just the means, under these conditions, 
 that the human race is using for advancing. The anti-intellec- 
 tualist attitude of Bergson represents a failure to grasp the 
 import of the scientific method, especially that it puts the en- 
 vironment under the control of the individual. It is always 
 true that we get ahead and keep going without knowing what 
 the goal is toward which we are moving. But we are free to 
 work out the hypotheses that present themselves and test them 
 and so solve the immediate problems that we meet. 
 
 In a certain sense, Bergson's position is one which was an 
 outcome of the theory of evolution, as I have already said. The 
 philosophy of the Renaissance had as its background a view of 
 nature which got its expression in Newtonian mechanics, that 
 is, a physical world which was determined in all its movements 
 by certain simple laws and which gave an account only of the 
 positions of these physical particles. The result of this was the 
 bifurcation of the world, the putting of other characters of 
 the world of our experience into consciousness while it left the 
 world of matter and motion to the statement of a mechanical 
 
 [294]
 
 VITALISM; HENRI BERGSON 
 
 philosophy. The doctrine of Bergson is one which impHes that 
 there is a process of evolution going on in nature, a process in 
 which there is a constant creation of that which is new. There is 
 in the traditional statement of nature, at least of the mechanical 
 theory, practically nothing that is new. While there is a shifting 
 of energies from one field to another, there is the same amount 
 of energy, the same kind of motion and of matter. These always 
 remain the same. And the doctrine of entropy assumes that 
 everything is moving toward a state in which there will be prac- 
 tical stagnation, at least only slight movements taking place 
 among molecular bodies. This was the picture which the me- 
 chanical view of the world gave. It abstracted from everything 
 except matter stated in terms of inertia and the motions of these 
 particles. In consciousness arose the various experiences of the 
 world that we know, different objects with the sensuous char- 
 acters which belong to them in experience. What the me- 
 chanical doctrine was able to do was to state the conditions 
 under which these conscious experiences arose. But the char- 
 acters which belong to objects and their nature as objects be- 
 long only to the conscious experience, if the doctrine is carried 
 out consistently. The world itself, from the point of view of 
 the mechanical philosophy, is simply a congeries of particles 
 all being related to all others. There was no justification for 
 unifying certain groups and saying that these existed by them- 
 selves. There were really only two objects in the universe: 
 one the physical particle, the other the universe as a whole. 
 The lines drawn between separate groups of physical particles 
 were arbitrary, determined by the process of consciousness. 
 The very interest which, for example, an animal would have in 
 certain groupings of them as over against other groupings 
 would, in Bergson's statement, be determined by his percep- 
 tions. That is, he would see those characters of the object, as 
 this appeared in his experience, which were of importance for 
 his own conduct. He would see that which was dangerous and 
 would then run away. He would see food and run toward it. 
 He would regard only those parts and characters of the physical 
 
 [295]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 universe which are of interest to him, so that perception would 
 be responsible for the actual structure of the thing itself. Per- 
 ception would be, in that sense, the determiner of the object. 
 
 But Bergson assumed that the nature of things themselves 
 was to be found not only in perception but also in the world. 
 Our thought or perception — so-called "consciousness" — really 
 belongs to the nature of things. The conceptions that we form 
 of things are, as he indicated, determined by the usage to which 
 we are going to put them. We think things out in terms of plans 
 of action. These are the characters that belong to the things 
 themselves. We want to see the world as it is and as it will be 
 when we are going to act in a certain way. We recognize, as 
 fixed, the ground upon which we walk. The object toward which 
 we are acting is fixed or moving in a certain direction. We see 
 things as conditions of our conduct. We fix the world as much 
 as we can, because that will enable us to act with reference to 
 it. In reality the world is not fixed. We are simply selecting 
 out the characters which are of interest to us for our conduct 
 and holding them in a static condition before our eyes because 
 the changes taking place are unimportant as far as our conduct 
 is concerned. Actually, everything is in motion. Things that 
 seem to be fixed are really in motion, but the motion may be so 
 slight that it is unimportant. Or the motion may belong to a 
 whole group of objects, so that relatively they are at rest with 
 reference to each other. The earth is moving about the sun in 
 this manner, but for our conduct it can be dealt with as at rest. 
 Such a statement of things in certain fixed relations, Bergson 
 said, was a special statement. And this special statement freezes 
 the world, so to speak — catches it at an instant and holds it 
 there. It is not a statement of things as they really are. They 
 are really changing always. And their change is not simply mo- 
 tion from one special point to another. There is change go- 
 ing on within the objects themselves, just as there is change 
 going on within ourselves; there is an inner change, and, as a 
 result of this, there are outer changes. That fundamental proc- 
 ess going on in all things Bergson said appears in what we call 
 
 [296I
 
 VITALISM; HENRI BERGSON 
 
 "time," or duration as distinct from space. And one of tlie 
 fundamental tenets of his philosophy is that this duration, this 
 process which is going on, can never be presented adequately in 
 spatial terms. Any statement of it in purely spatial terms is 
 always bound to be a distortion of reality. 
 
 When he looks for an instance of what he calls pure "dura- 
 tion," as distinct from mere motion in a fixed space, he goes to 
 the inner experience of the individual. If we look inside our- 
 selves, we find a process going on in which there is interpenetra- 
 tion of what takes place at one moment and what takes place 
 at another moment. You cannot cut oflf your ideas, feelings, 
 sensations, and fix them at a certain point and say that one 
 belongs to this point and another to another point. Your feel- 
 ing is something that pervades a whole experience. Such a phe- 
 nomenon, for example, as a melody is illustrative of what Berg- 
 son refers to. You can deal with the melody simply as a set of 
 notes, if you like; and you can hang those notes up on the 
 bars and think of each note as answering to a certain vibration. 
 But there would not be a melody if there was a sound at this mo- 
 ment, another at the next, and so on, each taken by itself. And 
 if your experience was only of that sort, it would not be one of 
 a melody. What is characteristic of the melody is the fact that 
 the note which you are hearing and singing extends on, endures 
 into later notes. It is a relationship between the different notes 
 that makes up the melody. There must be an interpenetration 
 of the different notes in order that there may be a melody, 
 and that is what is characteristic of all our thought. Duration, 
 as such, always involves this interpenetration, not only in the 
 sense that what is taking place extends over into what is 
 coming into existence and anticipates what is coming on, but 
 also that it gives the meaning and value to things. It is the 
 use of the table that makes a table of it. If there is no use 
 for it, it is nothing but a lump of wood. It is our attitudes of 
 conduct that give to even such a thing as a work of art its 
 beauty. It is a sort of response that is aroused in us that calls 
 out the aesthetic feeling. And in our attitude toward more ab- 
 
 [297]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 stract things, such as a concept of a table as a unit that is al- 
 ready there, we find that that constitutes the import of it as an 
 object. When you cut things off and place them in special 
 cubicles, an injustice is really being done to reality. The 
 "knife-edge" point of view assumes that all our experience takes 
 place at instants — instants that are not spread at all. These in- 
 stants have the same relation to time that a point has to space. 
 As a point has no magnitude, so an instant has no duration. It 
 is succeeded by another instant, and so on. The mathema- 
 tician breaks up not only space, but motion, into an infinite 
 number of points; he breaks up the temporal phase of it into an 
 infinite number of instants. 
 
 Now you can see that, if our experience of anything taking 
 place was really confined to an instant, then pushed aside and 
 another experience put into its place; if our experience was 
 simply that which takes place at one instant and then at the 
 next instant, and none of these instants had any spread; then 
 there would not be any experience of change at all. Then the 
 world at one instant would be completely wiped out by the 
 world as it is at the next instant. There would be no connec- 
 tion between the two, no real duration; there would be only 
 substitution of one instant for another. This statement of 
 time in terms of separate instants Bergson calls a "spatial 
 statement of time." And what he insists upon is that this 
 spaHaT Statement of time does not anticipate each duration 
 as we actually experience it. What the mathematician does, 
 you see, is to give an account of time which is spatial. If he 
 draws a line which represents the path of a motion, one of the 
 co-ordinates representing time, another space, he can draw 
 a curve which determines the velocity of the moving body; 
 he can mark off a certain point on one co-ordinate and call 
 it a certain moment, the next point the next moment, and 
 so on. That is a spatial statement. What is of importance 
 from Bergson's point of view is that each moment in time 
 includes any other, just as any point in space includes any 
 other point in space. The exclusion of the parts of duration 
 
 [298]
 
 VITALISM; HENRI BERGSON 
 
 is what Bergson denies. They do not mutually exclude each 
 other. If they did, duration would be nothing but a set of sepa- 
 rate experiences which could have no temporal relationship to 
 each other at all. 
 
 Put in different terms, but with practically the same mean- 
 ing, is the statement that our experience is always a passing 
 experience, and that this passing experience always involves an 
 extension into other experiences. It is what has just hap- 
 pened, what is going on, what is just appearing in the future, 
 that gives to our experience its peculiar character. It is never 
 an experience just at an instant. There is no such thing as the 
 experience of a bare instant as such. The psychologists have 
 termed this the so-called "specious presen t." a term which im- 
 plies that it is not a real present. It is experience dealt with as 
 if the present were instantaneous. Of course, the present is 
 that which is going on; it is a spatial image. To this present 
 psychologists have hitched memory on as a memory image, 
 and the future as another image, something anticipated; 
 and they have dealt with these images as if they existed in 
 an instantaneous present. You can see that your memory of 
 something is something that exists now. You remember now 
 what you did an hour ago. So the psychologist makes up the 
 present out of an instantaneous experience, plus an equally 
 instantaneous memory and an equally instantaneous anticipa- 
 tion, all fused into a present instant. And they say that these 
 images, fused into an instant, give us the impression of a spe- 
 cious present which extends. 
 
 Well, of course, experience does extend. If you could get it 
 into a single instant and then simply replace that by another 
 instant, there would need to be no such thing as duration. You 
 would be living only in the present. And the difference of the 
 presents would be a difference not of duration but of substitu- 
 tion. Actually, our experience is one which includes both past 
 and future. What is going on is something that is slipping 
 away, plus something that is just coming up over the horizon. 
 Part of it has just happened, part is just coming to be; and in 
 
 [ 299 ]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 order that it may have happened and that it may be an experi- 
 ence, it must be past and future. Our present is the fusion with 
 both past and present in the experience itself. The specious 
 present is not the present. The present is something that is 
 happening, going on; and in this going-on what does happen is 
 related really, actually, to what is taking place, and what is 
 taking place is really related to what does happen. Of course, 
 our present is chopped off into very small portions. We can 
 represent only a few seconds perhaps. At times it is so chopped 
 off that we cannot effectively connect the different portions of 
 it. An illustration of this has been given of a person who is rid- 
 ing in a train with telegraph poles flashing by. Suppose he tries 
 to relate these. He is counting them. They go by very rapidly. 
 He finds himself dealing with sets of such short intervals that 
 he cannot connect them, think of them consecutively. One 
 experience is replaced by another so rapidly that he cannot 
 think them separately. But if he can stretch himself out on the 
 grass in the sun, with things moving slowly — the swoop of a 
 bird, the wind in the trees — where there is an extension, he can 
 get a longer present than in the railroad train. One part of 
 experience merges into another, and you have really the inter- 
 penetration of Bergson. 
 
 This is something you do not get in a spatial statement. It is 
 the very essence of space that any position excludes any other. 
 A thing cannot be in two places at once. If you are going to rep- 
 resent time in this spatial fashion, then your experience cannot 
 be at two separate instants. [But our experience, our feelings, 
 our sensations, are extended over our present; and one present 
 extends over another so that there is a flow in which the past is 
 really reflected into the future, and the future back into the 
 past. That, Bergson says, is the nature of reality. It is not that 
 which can be expressed in points and instants; it must be ex- 
 pressed in duration. And what he insists upon is that we should 
 take time seriously. The impression we have of this continuity 
 and of this interpenetration is not something simply to be found 
 in consciousness while the real world is made up of happenings, 
 
 [300]
 
 VITALISM; HENRI BERGSON 
 
 separate instants at separate points, in which the past and the 
 future are not actually present. If the future is in the experience 
 it influences it. That is, of course, the nature of our so-called 
 "intelligent conduct." What we are going to do is determined 
 by what we are doing. Our ends are there, interpenetrating all 
 the world in terms of means. If time is taken seriously, as Berg- 
 son says it must be, then what is going to happen can actually 
 affect what has just happened. You can get final causes into 
 nature. The future can influence the present just as it does in 
 our own condu,ptJ If that is the nature of what takes place, of 
 duration, the future can enter into it. The world is not simply a 
 process of the readjustment of physical particles with reference 
 to each other, a situation that remains always the same; it is a 
 process that is going on, always moving on into a future which 
 lies ahead of it, which is just appearing, and, as it appears, in- 
 fluencing what is taking place. 
 
 For example, a person finds, in crossing a street, that the 
 automobiles are going by at great speed; and he suddenly stops 
 or turns. It is only after he has actually stopped or turned, or 
 means to stop or to turn, that he is aware of what it is that is 
 responsible for his action. That is, his adjustment to what is tak- 
 ing place comes earlier than the impression of the situation it- 
 self. You find that frequently it is the beginning of your own 
 motion that first apprises you of the object itself in regard to 
 which you are moving. It is particularly true of the impressions 
 which have reached the periphery of the retina as over against 
 the most sensitive point of vision. We turn with reference to a 
 moving object, and then see what it is. The motion comes first, 
 with reference to something which is already there. Rut.it is our 
 adjustment to it that is first given in experience. (Tliat is the 
 sort of picture of the world that Bergson presents. It is always 
 moving on toward a future which is just arising. W'hat it is 
 you cannot tell until it does arise. But it is always coming into 
 experience, and we are always adjusting ourselves to it, finding 
 out what it is by the very process of change. That is the sort of 
 evolution which is taking place, a process ceaselessly going on 
 
 ^oi
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 with continued adjustment, with a future actually affecting that 
 which is taking pla(;£^'Well, as I said, what Bergson has in- 
 sisted on is that we should take time seriously, that is, that we 
 should take into account pure duration, and that that involves 
 not simply the past but the future as well. 
 
 The past which physical science gives us is of something that 
 has happened. We are always looking back at something that 
 has happened, in so far as we are observing things scientifically. 
 The event must have taken place, must have left some definite 
 record, must have fixed itself in some definite way; and then, 
 after it has fixed itself, we estimate it. Scientific data are the 
 records left. All that has happened, all that is taking place, is 
 fixed in a spatial framework in which every element excludes 
 every other element. But that is not the nature of reality ac- 
 cording to Bergson's statement. From his standpoint, reality is 
 something that is always going on, and that which is taking 
 place is always reacting on what has taken place and acting 
 ahead upon that which will take place. The novel Is always 
 there affecting us, always affecting what is taking place. 
 
 In a sense, of course. Darwinian evolution expressed this. 
 Something happens and affects the form, selects out that which 
 is adapted to the new situation. It eliminates those forms which 
 are not adapted. This process, going on all the time, is one in 
 which what is taking place has something of the future in it. 
 If you take a geological picture of the world, you get a picture of 
 it looking back over what has taken place, and the continued in- 
 fluence of that which is going on over the future is lost. The 
 view of evolution which Bergson recognized is a view in which 
 there is this interpenetration in which the future can affect the 
 present, in which there is continued adjustment, but an adjust- 
 ment which is due to what is taking place. 
 
 But this view is one which can never be given in spatial 
 terms. What is just taking place is continually belying what 
 we are thinking. Our thinking is just such a process of putting 
 things into a framework as the mathematician's process of 
 dealing with motion. In thinking, we are putting things into 
 
 [302]
 
 VITALISM; HENRI BERGSON 
 
 different cubicles and separating them from each other. It is 
 the very nature of thought to tear things apart, to cut out the 
 things that are important, to pick out only one particular char- 
 acter of the thing and relate it to something else that has the 
 same character and then put these into the same cubbyhole. 
 It is a process of classifying things in which we are continually 
 breaking them up. That, says Bergson, is of service to us in 
 our conduct; but it does not give us the reality of things. 
 
 His philosophy then, while it looks toward the future, looks 
 toward a future that is always novel, toward a future which 
 cannot be conceived, which cannot be presented in terms of per- 
 ception. Any picture which we make of the future, as we know, 
 is always belied by that which really happens. You go to meet 
 somebody and anticipate the meeting. It may be a disappoint- 
 ment or it may be beyond your anticipation, but it is always 
 different. You never can present it to yourself exactly as it is 
 going to happen. You can only say that such things have hap- 
 pened in the past; they have had such and such a fixed char- 
 acter; so I am justified in assuming that the same sort of thing 
 happening in the future v/ill also have this character. But there 
 is always something different. All this fixed conception can 
 do is to direct our conduct; but when we use conceptions to 
 give us the nature of things as such, we are always discard- 
 ing them, according to Bergson. And we know that the fu- 
 ture will always be different from anything we can actually 
 present to ourselves, so that an intellectual view of the world, 
 a conceptual, reflective view, is, apart from its use in conduct, a 
 distortion. Thus, Bergson is an anti-intellectualist. The true 
 view of reality, says Bergson, has to be got by intuition, in 
 which you are able in some way or other to catch the something 
 that is going on and hold on to it as a reality. He is very vague, 
 unsatisfactory, in the picture of reality which is grasped in a 
 sort of metaphysical intuition. 
 
 Of course, so far in this discussion I have done no more than 
 suggest certain phases of the Bergsonian philosophy. What 
 is of importance to us is this taking of time seriously, for in a 
 
 [303]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 certain sense this is an anticipation on the philosophical side of 
 the relativistic doctrines which have set up a space-time in place 
 of an absolute space and an absolute time. And what is also im- 
 portant is that Bergson's philosophy arises out of a point of 
 view of the world which is evolutionary as over against me- 
 chanical. And evolution as such is a process that is continually 
 going on. Bergson's term for this process is an elan vital. Any- 
 thing that is continually going on cannot be stated simply 
 in terms of that which can be put into an instant. What evo- 
 lution has done is to present to us the conditions out of which 
 new forms can arise. It has given us those conditions; and our 
 thought, our interpretation, of them impHes constant appear- 
 ance of new forms. If we turn back to a mechanical state- 
 ment of the world, what we get is simply a distribution of 
 physical particles now at one instant and now at another. In 
 all these situations what we have is practically the same. We 
 have the same amount of energy, the same kind of motion. 
 Everything is interrelated with everything else. The new form 
 that arises means simply the redistribution of physical particles. 
 It is only our interpretation of it that makes the new animal, 
 the new plant, out of this shift of positions. What Bergson does 
 is to insist that this process of change that is going on, with the 
 appearance of that which is novel, is the reality of things, and 
 that our philosophy of nature should be an evolutionary phi- 
 losophy which takes into account a theory of change. This 
 change involves duration. His is an approach to the interpreta- 
 tion of the world from the evolutionary point of view which 
 takes into account the whole of our nature. 
 
 From another point of view we may say that Bergson's ap- 
 proach is the same as that of Kant.^ You will remember that the 
 latter found his problem arising out of the statement of Hume. 
 Hume came back to the reality of states of consciousness but 
 failed to find in them the world which science had been describ- 
 
 ' From this point to the end of the chapter the material has been taken from 
 class notes of Mr. George A. Pappas. They are from a course in "The Philosophy of 
 Bergson," as offered during the summer of 1927. 
 
 [304]
 
 VITALISM; HENRI BERGSON 
 
 ing. The uniformities of the scientific description dissolved into 
 a succession of conscious states held together by laws of associa- 
 tion which, being subjective, tell us nothing of the nature of an 
 objective world. Against this Kant proposed to find the neces- 
 sity for science within consciousness itself. Whereas for Hume 
 knowledge had no other basis than that of habit, for Kant con- 
 cepts were themselves essential, they were the precondition of 
 knowledge. Prior to dealing with the spatial attributes of real- 
 ity you must have a concept of space. The necessity of the 
 great mathematic structure which was the basis of the science 
 of the time was something that came from the nature of the 
 mind Itself. Since the mind had this formal capacity, it was per- 
 fectly possible to develop a rational and universal science on the 
 basis of it. Of course, you will remember that this science ap- 
 plies only to the world of experience, the world of phenomena. 
 There is no bridge from it to the other world, that of noumenal 
 reality. But within the former there was necessity, uniformity, 
 and universality, because the mind required that. The mind be- 
 ing what it is, these characteristics of our science could not be 
 avoided. 
 
 Now Bergson is Kantian in the sense that he too takes his 
 departure from the results of science and builds up his position 
 in terms of what he sees to be the implications of these data. 
 He, like Kant, was convinced that, while science was exact 
 within the field of experience, there was another phase of reality 
 that science itself could not come into contact with; and, in 
 somewhat the same way as his predecessor, he felt that this 
 latter was more important than the former. The fundamental 
 distinction between the two is that the science in which Kant 
 was interested was mathematical while Bergson turns to the 
 implications of biology and psychology. 
 
 Mathematical mechanics, the mechanics of Newton, had 
 broken the world up into ultimate elements. In this statement 
 we have the universe as a whole, on the one hand, and the 
 infinite number of particles that compose it, on the other. This 
 view pays no attention to the particular groupings of these par- 
 
 [305]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 tides into smaller units, objects or organisms. These can be of 
 no special interest to the physicist, because the groupings are 
 not necessary. They are the result of the operation of certain 
 physical tendencies, and any group that may be formed can be 
 broken up until finally the ultimate elements are reached. When 
 these are obtained, it is seen that the temporary groupings of 
 them are wholly incidental from the point of view of their nature 
 and have nothing to do with the character of the physical forces. 
 
 This is not the picture as the biologist presents it to us. It is 
 still less the presentation of the psychologist. In biology the 
 most important factor is the structure of the particles, not in 
 their isolation, but as they appear as structures. Kant himself 
 realized this; and while he was primarily interested in present- 
 ing a philosophical defense of the Newtonian science, he recog- 
 nized, in the Critique of Judgment, that things had to be dealt 
 with in biology which were of no importance from the physicist's 
 point of view. The first of these was that the biologist has to 
 conceive of particles as related in wholes; and second, that to 
 understand these wholes, ends and purposes had to be admitted 
 into the picture. Biology, Hke art, is teleological. 
 
 Kant had accomplished in philosophy what Newton had in 
 science: he had given it complete intelligibility. That is the 
 suggestion that came to Bergson. He found the mechanical ex- 
 planation inadequate. When you turn to the world that had 
 been unfolding under the influence of the growing interest in 
 biological phenomena, particularly after Darwin, you find that 
 the early statement of science is not adequate. You cannot take 
 biological structures and describe them in Newtonian terms. 
 Thus, Kant's intelligible world is faced with a serious difficulty. 
 His problem must be worked out again. It is this that Bergson, 
 in a certain sense, undertakes to do. He proposes to start with 
 the nature not of physical but of biological and psychological 
 phenomena. 
 
 His interest in the data of psychology indicates another roQt 
 in Bergson's thought, one that goes back to Descartes. Psy- 
 chology became important in the nineteenth century. It^oes 
 
 [306]
 
 VITALISM; HENRI BERGSON 
 
 not start with the physical particles of the mechanical state- 
 ment. It starts with the organism which is there as the condi- 
 tion of experience. The organism in some sense is there before 
 consciousness appears. Of course, this is not the Cartesian 
 statement. For Descartes, mind and body were distinct sub- 
 stances neither of which depended upon the other for its being. 
 His fantastic treatment of the pineal body must not be thought 
 of as implying any functional relationship between mind and 
 body. It was simply a device for dealing with an acknowledged 
 situation, the reciprocal influence of mind on body, and vice 
 versa. Not even the English empiricists saw the problem in 
 terms of a functional relationship. Their psychology was a phi- 
 losophy. It undertook to give a statement of the structure of 
 things whic h at t he same time left the things "out there." 
 Hume left the world in the form of impressions and ideas, of 
 states of consciousness. It is to this situation that the words 
 "subjective" and "objective" ordinarily refer. But gradually a 
 new meaning appeared. With the psychology of the nineteenth 
 century these terms apply to a functional relationship within 
 experience. The mind is no longer something here, something 
 inside, which gets impressions from something there, something 
 outside. The inner and the outer, the subjective and the ob- 
 jective, are phases of a single process and point to differences 
 of perspective, not to absolute differences of locus. This new 
 approach is that of what may be called the scientific, the "new," 
 psychology, as over against the philosophical psychology of the 
 earlier period. It develops out of the recognition that the physi- 
 ological organism is the condition of the appearance of states 
 of consciousness. Just as there is a functional relationship be- 
 tween the organism and its environment, so there is one be- 
 tween what is "in the mind" and what is "outside." It is a 
 reconstruction of psychology which starts off with the assump- 
 tion that there is a world "out there" and a world which is the 
 precondition for the states of consciousness. 
 
 According to this functional point of view, the mind itself 
 creates new worlds, not in the Kantian sense of determining the 
 
 [307 ]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 forms, the categories in which experience must be interpreted, 
 but in the sense that each new perspective gives rise to a new 
 creation. The mind is a part of a creative process which is re- 
 sponsible for the world itself. Appearing within this process, the 
 mind is functionally related to all other aspects of it. It is no 
 longer possible to stand by the bifurcation of the world into 
 outer and inner. 
 
 With this new position Bergson is in hearty agreement. In- 
 deed, in it we find one of the clues for the interpretation of his 
 whole position. If the world out there is the condition of what 
 is within, it brings the possibility of the within being created of 
 what is without. Thus Bergson turns his attention to that 
 which lies within experience; and he, like Kant, finds in this 
 certain factors which must be dealt with before the nature of 
 reality can become clear, before the problems of the philosopher 
 can be satisfactorily dealt with. The thing in subjective experi- 
 ence to which he gives his attention particularly is its flow, that 
 is, its temporal aspect. He finds the same thing in consciousness 
 that the biologist finds in dealing with organisms, namely, that 
 it is impossible to reduce either to ultimate elements. By means 
 of this process of reduction physical science had destroyed the 
 significance of particular objects. The world of experience, in 
 so far as it contained wholes, was broken up into an indefinite 
 number of elements. The world in inner experience had been 
 broken up into a series of atomic impressions by the English 
 empirical thinkers. In each case something is left out. In the 
 former, it is the essential unity of certain groupings of par- 
 ticles; in the latter, it is a certain penetration of the experi- 
 ences into one another. It is this which is of especial interest to 
 Bergson. He goes back to his experience and finds that what 
 takes place there is an interpenetration of experiences. Take 
 the notes of a musical scale, for example. A melody is something 
 more than a mere accumulation of separate tones. The E, G, C 
 of the scale have no musical significance in themselves. It is 
 only as they interpenetrate that they form a musical unit; it is 
 only as the tones interpenetrate that the melody is presented. 
 
 [308]
 
 VITALISM; HENRI BERGSON 
 
 The experience of the present moment is what it is because 
 of what took place just before it, and of what is about to take 
 place. That which will be in consciousness in a moment is con- 
 nected with that which is present there now. All our experi- 
 ences share this character of interpenetration. But it is especial- 
 ly true of our indefinite states of consciousness. The subjectiv- 
 ity to which Bergson returns, then, is one which shows us a 
 content rather than a form. In this there is a distinct cleavage 
 be_tween_him and Kant. 
 
 It is in terms of the interpenetration of particles in objects, 
 on the one hand, and of elements of conscious experience, on 
 the other, that Bergson proposes to build up his philosophy. 
 That is, whereas Kant took his problem from mathematical 
 physics, Bergson attacks the philosophical question from the 
 point of view of biology and psychology. The procedure of the 
 scientist of modern times differs from that of the ancient sci- 
 entist in that the former starts from specific problems whereas 
 the latter developed his procedure from the point of view of cer- 
 tain given characters. The practical significance of this is that 
 modern science is hypothetical. It is true that Kant tried to 
 give science a categorical form. But he did not succeed in this. 
 Although he did not realize it, the categories, the universality, 
 the necessity, which he set up are themselves only hypothetical. 
 Even though the form of the laws might be universal, they were 
 still only^ hypothetical in character. Gahleo's statement that 
 velocity varies with time and Darwin's statement that species 
 have arisen under the influence of the process of natural selec- 
 tion and the survival of the fittest are both hypothetical. 
 
 One of the hypotheses of the mathematical point of view was 
 that organic structures could be broken up into their ultimate 
 particles in exactly the same way as could inanimate objects. 
 But the biologist found this could not be done. He had to deal 
 with his objects as individual things. The parts must be con- 
 ceived in their relationship to the whole, for apart from that 
 relationship they have no significance. In dealing with the prob- 
 lems of this science and with tliose of psychology, we cannot 
 
 [ 309 ]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 come to the simplicity of the mechanical statement. If we at- 
 tempt to do so, we destroy the object with which we are deaHng. 
 The organism must be thought of in terms of its processes as a 
 whole and not in terms of its particles, just as states of con- 
 sciousness must be dealt with in terms of their actual inter- 
 penetration and not simply as a flow of atomic sensations each 
 of which is distinct from, and can be dealt with independently 
 of, others. One result of this is, of course, that neither biology 
 nor psychology is as accurate as physical science. The me- 
 chanical science builds up the whole from the parts, and there 
 is no reason why one whole should be built up rather than an- 
 other. Biology, on the other hand, deals with wholes, and the 
 parts have meaning only in so far as they belong to the whole. 
 If you look at them from the point of view of physical science, 
 they cease to be parts; they become atoms and electrons. Thus 
 you have to pay a price for the exactness that you get in the 
 mechanical statement. 
 
 The inadequacy of this statement of reality greatly impressed 
 Bergson, and to offset it he turned to the nature of the process 
 of consciousness for his clue. The terms "extensive" and "in- 
 tensive" have no significance for mechanical physics. All parti- 
 cles are alike. Consciousness does have a definite intensity and 
 a definite extensity. What is its inner reality.'* What is it that 
 one does realize in this field of inner experience, and what is the 
 relation of the judgments that refer to it and those which science 
 uses in referring to the outer world .^ Bergson finds a number of 
 characters which pertain to this inner world which have no sig- 
 nificance for the outer. The most important of these are two 
 that have already been mentioned: the experience of the inter- 
 penetration of our states of consciousness, and the reality of 
 intensity and extensity in inner experience. 
 
 The statement that one experiences a certain brilliance has 
 no meaning for the physicist. He cannot deal with brilliance 
 any more than he can deal with color. Experiences of brilliance 
 are qualitative experiences. You cannot say that your experi- 
 ence of the brightness of a Hght is equal to your experience of 
 
 [310]
 
 VITALISM; HENRI BERGSON 
 
 the combined brilliance of three lights. In regard to certain ex- 
 periences attempts have been made to carry on such analyses. 
 In weights it has been found that the addition of a certain frac- 
 tion of a weight — I think it is one-fourth, according to the law 
 of Weber — is sufficient to give you a qualitatively distinct ex- 
 perience. But even here it is impossible to get any constancy of 
 statement from the point of view of inner experience. It is im- 
 possible to completely control all the conditions outside and 
 then ask what is going on in consciousness. You have to go to 
 consciousness directly. And when you do that, you find the ele- 
 ments of your experience related in ways different from those 
 used in dealing with the outer world. The fundamental differ- 
 ence found between these two types of experience is that the 
 inner experiences interpenetrate. That is, they have a span, 
 they have duration. This sort of consciousness has a peculiar 
 disregard for certain important philosophical problems. It ig- 
 nores the epistemological difficulty. It refuses to take account 
 of a bifurcated world. Bergson approaches the problem of 
 knowledge from the point of view of biology, and what he finds 
 is that knowledge answers to a stream of interpenetrating states 
 of consciousness each of which draws into itself the nature of the 
 past and projects its own nature into the future. Thus they 
 achieve a span, a duree. 
 
 But of what importance is this duration? First of all, it de- 
 termines the nature of time. Tim^ is not simply the sum total 
 of an indefinite number of temporal units. It is a process, and 
 must be conceived as a process or its essential character is lost. 
 In the second place, this being the distinguishing character of 
 our inner experience, the relation of penetration which char- 
 acterizes it passes over into the character of the object. This 
 means, of course, that time has a new significance in the outer 
 world. The basic philosophical question, as Bergson sees it, is 
 this: Shall we take time seriously, shall we recognize the import 
 of duration in experience itself? The answer which he gives to 
 this question is affirmative. The fact of an event in the time 
 series means the recognition of duration as a reality in itself, as
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 something that is going on. A passage which is always taking 
 place is the necessary precondition for the appearance ofparts. 
 You could not single out individual temporal events unless 
 there were a continuous passage, a duration, in which they ap- 
 pear. Here, again, we meet the necessity of recognizing the 
 whole as the condition of the parts. This reality which is going 
 on, says Bergson, has to be taken seriously. It cannot be pre- 
 sented in terms of mathematical analysis. In the latter, all we 
 can do is to break up the series into minute elements and look at 
 these as points. But this is not the process. Thus Bergson tries 
 to seize upon an inner process in reality which will correspond to 
 the process in our inner experience. 
 
 But the mathematician will ask if Bergson has been fair with 
 him. Is it not possible for him to take time seriously in the 
 Bergsonian sense? Is not his description of reality one in which 
 processes are recognized and dealt with as important aspects of 
 the whole? Let us substitute for the older concept of space such 
 a one as Whitehead's. The only thing that you can say about 
 extension is that it extends over. Such a statement obviously 
 is about a continuum. Now, a continuum can be broken up. 
 Take this table, for example. It is a continuum; you can break 
 it up into parts. Now add to this idea of extension, of a con- 
 tinuum, the idea of time as a fourth dimension. What you get 
 then is not merely a spatial spread but a temporal spread. That 
 is, you get duration. In this latter case we now have an actual 
 process in nature. Thus, Bergson's insistence that duration is 
 an attribute of inner experience only, and that since the world 
 outside, at least as presented by science, is a static world it can- 
 not be the source from which this inner duration is obtained, is 
 not wholly adequate. The mathematician has presented us with 
 a picture of a world which has just the type of spread, of dura- 
 tion, that Bergson says is requisite if we are to get at its real 
 nature. The thing that Bergson dislikes in the scientific pro- 
 cedure is essential to it only for purposes of description and 
 analysis. In this aspect, it is true that science, and particularly 
 mathematics, gives us static independent particles. 
 
 [312]
 
 VITALISM; HENRI BERGSON 
 
 For example, one of the most useful of all mathematical con- 
 cepts is that of the limit. The ultimate element to which the 
 mathematician retreats, as Whitehead points out, is the limit. 
 As an object we deal with the table as having extension. It has 
 not only extension in space but extension in time; its extension 
 lasts through this hour. We conceive of the table as a part of a 
 world of passage. It is passing; in its temporal dimension it has 
 an extension that cannot be defined in an instant any more 
 than its spatial extension can be defined in terms of points. 
 But when we undertake to analyze this table in terms of certain 
 scientific problems, we find that it can be broken up into succes- 
 sively smaller and smaller bits of extension. We reduce this ex- 
 tension by getting something that extends over, something 
 which is apart from the table. To take the analogy of boxes, we 
 get boxes which are contained within other boxes until we 
 finally approach a limit. We never get the limit because we 
 can always think of another box being within the smallest that 
 we have thought of up to that time. Thus, if you take a certain 
 portion of extension and consider its quantitative characters, 
 whether this extension be of a table, an electrical charge, a 
 momentum, or what not, you can successively take smaller and 
 smaller portions of it. These can be constructed into a quanti- 
 tative series which approaches a limit. This limit is never 
 reached; it is ever more closely approached. 
 
 Now the mathematician does his best to state his law of the 
 series in terms of such limits. They can never be gotten in our 
 experience, but they can be thought. Here you are dealing with 
 an ideal situation. The mathematician realizes that it is ideal. 
 But he can get a better statement of what is going on in the 
 process through this method of postulating an ideal situation 
 which can never be found in actuality than he can by turning to 
 the immediate process as it is going on. These ultimate, static 
 particles against which Bergson utters so severe an indictment 
 are ideal particles in terms of which we get the laws which we 
 find in nature. There is no such thing as a point or an instant 
 in the static sense. They_a.re_constructs which we use in so far 
 
 [3^3]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 as we are seeking a certain sort of simplicity, a simplicity that 
 makes it possible to get a statement of a law. The law is dis- 
 covered in the ideal situation, but it is then tested in reality 
 to see if it works. It is taken out and put up against the 
 object, against the process it is designed to describe. Thus, 
 when we come back to the table, we see it described as at rest, 
 as an object in which the particles have no velocities added 
 to them. But after the scientist has gotten hold of his law in 
 this way, he comes back to the table and deals with it as an ob- 
 ject whose particles are in motion, as an object which itself re- 
 volves around the sun, for example. It is an object which has a 
 passage. Thus we get the Bergsonian duration in the external 
 world. It is not duration in the Bergsonian sense, because it is 
 not duration from the standpoint of an inner experience. The 
 duration with which the scientist deals is an objective duration. 
 It belongs to the object. The object may be fixed as we look at 
 it; to see it we may have to stop the process. But that reflects 
 a limitation in our method. It does not imply that process, 
 passage, duration, are excluded from the nature of things and 
 made subjective. 
 
 Whitehead comes back to somewhat the same problem that 
 Bergson faces. But, whereas the latter tries to seize upon an 
 inner process, the former tries to present the picture without the 
 distortion which the other emphasis implies. The world of the 
 physical sciences, in so far as they are analytic, is a world of 
 external relations. But that is not the picture of what lies out- 
 side us. Nature is composed of structures: atoms, stellar gal- 
 axies, tables, living beings — all these are organisms, the reality 
 of each abiding within itself. The analysis, the quest for limits 
 carries us back to elements out of which the whole may be 
 thought to be built up. But these are not the whole. It is some- 
 thing that lies within each thing; it is a process. The characters 
 of the object are not present without it. The atoms carry no 
 ions unless there is a process; the living thing does not live un- 
 less there is a process. Natural science deals with a reality of 
 such structures whose essence involves process. The reality of 
 
 [314]
 
 VITALISM; HENRI BERGSON 
 
 the atom abides within itself. It is not affected by any process 
 of dissection, of analysis. Natural science continually brings 
 us back to a reality in which there must be process if reality is to 
 have the characters which belong to it. Physical sciences, even, 
 are dealing with processes which are going on. But they find 
 they can most effectively get hold of them by setting up ideals 
 such as the idea of limit. Whitehead sums the whole question up 
 by saying that any structure which we find in nature is an organ- 
 ism. If this statement is correct, if this is an adequate account 
 of the reality with which the physical scientist is dealing, then 
 Bergson's position that it is only in an inner process that we find 
 processes as such is incorrect. 
 
 The world at an instant is a pure fiction. The natural order is 
 an organization of perspectives. We have to recognize that 
 these perspectives exist in their relationship to organisms. 
 Process must be preserved as an ultimate part of reality. How 
 the process appears depends upon the position of the organism 
 from whose perspective it is reported. These perspectives can be 
 got only in terms of a process in which they have their locus. 
 All these aspects are essential to reality, the latter being nothing 
 more than the sum total of the former. It is my opinion that 
 you have to recognize not only the organism but also the world 
 as having its reality in relation to the organism. The world is 
 organized_in relation to each organism. This is its perspective 
 from that point of view. Reahty is the total of such perspec- 
 tives. Now Bergson is right in insisting that if there is such a 
 thing as Hfe or consciousness, anything to which a rhythm be- 
 longs, we have to think of this as being in the nature of reahty. 
 The point at which he deviates from Whitehead is his inabihty 
 to discover this process elsewhere than in the inner experience. 
 Bergson's point of view is justified when we reahze that there is, 
 in the physical processes, a distortion which is due not to the 
 recognition of qualitative changes but to differences of velocity 
 It is his desire to get inside this process, and he finds his clue 
 in the process of inner experience as distinct from the statement 
 about reality which is presented by the exact sciences. These 
 
 [315]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 sciences distort reality through their quantitative presentation 
 of it. The real is qualitative, and you cannot get quality at an 
 instant. It occurs over a period, whether it be color, melody, or 
 the ionization of an atom. 
 
 For the same reason that he finds the static statements of the 
 exact sciences inadequate, Bergson also turns away from the as- 
 sociational psychology. This describes the conscious life as a 
 series of separate, distinct units. It attempts to account for the 
 fact that a certain book happens to appear in memory through 
 mere association; it seeks to find the causes of an act in terms 
 of similarity, contiguity, and so forth. But this is inaccurate. 
 Thought, as well as conduct, presumes an organization prior to 
 its eventuation. Neither can an act be explained in terms of 
 pleasure and pain. These belong to the end of the act. State- 
 ments of this sort are superficial. They are useful in determin- 
 ing certain relations of things in thought, just as the static pic- 
 ture of the world has its use in the physical sciences. But when 
 you get below this surface account, you find that the mental 
 states interpenetrate each other. You can always separate that 
 which is characterized by this interpenetration, but the rela- 
 tionship of states of consciousness is not that of mere contiguity. 
 So you see, from every point of view the Bergsonian statement 
 is one of interpenetration. All you have is a set of processes. 
 The real is a set of continuities. 
 
 This takes away the element of determination which has been 
 a constant charge of the philosopher against the scientist, as 
 Kant indicated earlier. Here Bergson turns again to an inner 
 experience, this time to the experience of the living organism. 
 It has freedom in the determination of its goal. The question is 
 whether or not this freedom is an expression of an accumulative 
 set of experiences which work from behind, or whether in some 
 sense this freedom is the result of future conditions, that is, is 
 influenced by ends still hidden in the unrevealed future. Ac- 
 cording to the mechanical statement, the past is gone and the 
 future is not yet here. Therefore, the future cannot determine 
 what the change is going to be. The mechanical statement is un- 
 
 [316]
 
 VITALISM; HENRI BERGSON 
 
 able to give us the reflection of the future into what is going on. 
 And yet this is the essence of conduct. It is directed toward 
 goals, ends which, while not yet actual, are operative in the de- 
 termination of the directions which conduct shall take. The 
 organism is free in the selection of its goal. Conscious selection 
 is quite as really influenced by what is yet to be as it is by what 
 has been. This leads Bergson to turn again to experience to see 
 just what it really is like. He finds that in its characteristic in- 
 terpenetration there is no sharp, knife-edge separation between 
 past and future. The interpenetration of experience does go 
 into the future. The essence of reality involves the future as 
 essential to itself. In this way he rescues freedom. The coming 
 of the future into our conduct is the very nature of our free- 
 dom. We may be able to get the reason for everything we do / 
 after the act, according to the mechanical statement; but to see 7 
 conduct as selective, as free, we must take account of that which 
 is not yet in position to be expressed in terms of a mechanical 
 statement of events which follow one another as a series of 
 atomic experiences. 
 
 But, again it seems that Bergson has failed to recognize that 
 this process upon which he lays so much stress must be recog- 
 nized wherever an effort, a process, is essential to the nature of 
 the object. Thus the description he makes must hold for the 
 atom, for which the present is just as much weighted with the 
 future as it is for more specifically "organic" structures. In his 
 Matter and Memory he again deals specifically with the psycho- 
 logical problem of the mind and body. Here we have the ques- 
 tion of the function of the nervous system. Nerve cells may 
 answer to the seat of certain excitations. But there is, as yet, 
 no discovered relationship between a certain sensation of color 
 and the excitement of a certain nerve cell. There is nothing in 
 the path of nerve current from one cell to another, and then to 
 another, and so on, which answers to the appearance of color 
 as such. The functional process is one of action, and here you 
 have nothing which answers to the static character of the sensa- 
 tion itself. Bergson points out in reference to these static con- 
 
 [317]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 tents of sensation, the reporting in consciousness of successive 
 qualities, that the response in each case serves as the selection 
 of the stimulus. In other words, the older statement, which put 
 the stimulus first, made it the condition, the cause of the re- 
 sponse, had, so to speak, put the cart before the horse. You 
 cannot deal with psychological data adequately if you insist 
 on the causal, associational statement in regard to them. We 
 are at any moment surrounded by an indefinite number of 
 possible sensations. Which of these will be picked out is de- 
 decided in terms of the response that is already being made. 
 There you have the future, the conclusion of the act, implied in 
 what is now going on but which is not yet achieved, coming in 
 to set up the conditions in terms of which stimuli shall arise. 
 This mechanism selects certain responses; it selects the stimuli 
 which shall be effective. The inadequacy here, as I indicated a 
 moment ago, is that this is an account not only of living organ- 
 isms but of every object which involves a process. It can be 
 said equally of the atom. Out of the total field in which the ob- 
 ject may respond in terms of processes that are already set up 
 within it, are the conditions for its acting in one way or another. 
 Partly through this limitation, this failure to extend suffi- 
 ciently his doctrine to include all processes in reality, Bergson has 
 to face the alternative of stating his world not in terms of what 
 is going on but in terms of images. We cannot get to reality in 
 any other way, according to him, because, when we try to think 
 our way into it, we stop the process which is requisite to its 
 being. In this, his approach is not unlike that of Locke. Bergson 
 is interested in the organism which as such has this selective 
 character. On the one hand he sees the world of the physical 
 scientist, a world which he describes as a world of physical 
 particles. On the other hand is the experience of the individual 
 through which he reaches the hypotheses which the scientist sets 
 up as a thought structure. This is the idealistic picture. Both of 
 these Bergson tries to avoid by turning to a world of images. 
 Our perceptive world is one which centers about the organism. 
 The more distant the object imaged, the more indifferent its 
 
 [318I
 
 VITALISM; HENRI BERGSON 
 
 characters. Take the illustration of your perception of objects 
 from a moving train. The objects near at hand change with 
 rapidity, while those which are far away are relatively stable. 
 The real process is revealed to us in immediate perceptual ex- 
 perience. But over against this we have a world of objects 
 which is independent of the organism and by which we correct 
 our perceptual experience. This latter world, the world which 
 science analyzes, was there before the organism appeared. How 
 does Bergson set about to fit these two worlds together.'' 
 
 The perceptual world, says Bergson, is a world of knowledge. 
 It appears as a representation in the cognitive sense. The image 
 is a cognitive representation of something. All the conduct of 
 the organism is mapped out in your central nervous system. 
 There are an enormous number of possible reactions. But there 
 is nothing in the central nervous system which answers to the 
 structure of the representation. You cannot find the representa- 
 tions there; you find sensitivities. You find nothing in it which 
 answers to the representation of this table as such, for example. 
 The table is not in our heads. What is there is what we are 
 going to do about it: read on it, sit on it, eat from it. Whenever 
 I change my position, I change my perceptual world. All the 
 stimuli change because of the relation of the organism to them. 
 They are expressed in terms of our reactions. We make the 
 world from the point of view of our reactions to it. If you state 
 the organism in terms of a mechanism, you get the logical rela- 
 tionship between the perceptual world and the scientific world. 
 Your perceptual world is a statement of the scientific world in 
 terms o^fj^our possible reaction to it. This is Bergson's ap- 
 proach. The sensation is a clue; it helps us to pick out the 
 memory image which we will use in action. This memory image 
 had ho place in the scientific world. Yet it plays a great part in 
 the determination of stimuli; and this determines the world to 
 which we shall respond, the world which will be presented in our 
 perceptual representations at the present and which will be- 
 come the memory images of the future. These images will then 
 play the same role in regard to the multitudinous stimuli from 
 
 [319]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 which our conduct will select those which are pertinent to what 
 is then going on. Thus the future image, which has no place in 
 the scientific world, plays a great part in actual experience. 
 Bergson starts off with a freedom which is there for all the 
 world of images. This gives the world the meaning it has for us. 
 By including within this world of images the future as well 
 as the past, Bergson hopes to have established not only the fact, 
 but also the efficacy, of freedom. But we must examine into 
 the nature of these images a little more deeply. How does it 
 happen that we have perceptions and yet only incomplete rep- 
 resentations of reality if, as Bergson contends, these perceptions 
 are really representational? Perception is a restriction of experi- 
 ence, he says. Thus he has to bring in other aspects than those 
 which he has thus far stated. The problem, he says, has been 
 to add to the perceptual experience something that is not there. 
 This is an insoluble problem. It is far easier to diminish the 
 content of what is given than it is to add something to it that 
 is not there. Thus, in undertaking to explain how our percep- 
 tions are called out from reality, he starts out with what he 
 calls "pure perceptions," Perceptions arise only in so far as 
 objects affect the bodily organism. These perceptions repre- 
 sent the interrelations, the interconnections, of the rest of the 
 universe. He accepts the theory that every particle of the uni- 
 verse is interrelated with every other particle. Perception repre- 
 sents the passage of the different forces of the universe. The 
 vital organism is distinguished from all other objects in that it 
 is an indeterminate center which serves as a focal point for the 
 processes in reality. When certain processes, certain activities, 
 reach the nervous system, they are checked. This checking of 
 the processes which are going on in nature seems to Bergson to 
 be the essential character of the living form. This characteristic 
 involves not simply the selection of stimuli but also a stoppage 
 of the process of experience itself until a decision in regard to 
 future activity has been reached. He does not elaborate the 
 ground for this stoppage, but it may be stated in terms of a con- 
 flict of the different sensibilities. The organism has tendencies 
 
 [ 320 ]
 
 VITALISM; HENRI BERGSON 
 
 which would lead it to react in different ways to different 
 stimuli. Out of these different tendencies arise conflicts which 
 require deliberation. This deliberation means that the life- 
 process has got to be held up, so to speak, until the various 
 possible responses have been held passive long enough for a 
 selection to be made among them. This is the difference which 
 will be most immediately noticeable in comparing a living 
 organism to a stone. The part of the response which is held up i 
 in this way, Bergson says, constitutes the representation; in i 
 other words, it is the conscious perception. If it were not for the / 
 checking, we would perceive the whole universe. 
 
 Thus we are really brought to the core of the whole doctrine. 
 The implication clearly is that our conduct, in so far as it is not 
 conscious, in so far as it simply goes on as a part of an inclusive 
 process, is sensitized, so to speak, to the whole of reality. Could 
 we catch it in that condition, we would see the nature of things 
 as they really are. But the way into that vision is not through 
 conscious reflection. That stops the process. Consciousness 
 arises only when our impulses lead us into conflict — conflict that 
 must be solved before conduct can go on effectively. As long as 
 conduct is held up, we get conscious representations of the 
 stimuli which are relevant to the solution of the present diffi- 
 culty. But we have representations only of these. In selecting 
 some, we neglect and ignore others. If we are to catch reality at 
 its core, we must turn to a more instinctive level. We must 
 catch it while the process is going on. Since this is impossible in 
 consciousness, Bergson says that consciousness is inadequate. 
 Through this we are directed to pure perception, that is, to the 
 perceptions which would show us the total interpenetration of 
 things, were we able to become aware of this inner process. Con- ^ 
 scious perception arises only when the process is checked, and ' 
 thus never gives us the "inside" of it, so to speak. We must use 
 "intuition." Only intuition can save us from the distortion 
 which comes with reflection. In other words, Bergson is inter- 
 ested in intuition as opening the door to another type of meta- \ 
 physics than that which can be gotten through reflection, 
 
 [321 ]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 through scientific description. This is why his. system is ulti- 
 mately an irrationalism. 
 
 Paralleling this field of pure perception is another, the field of 
 pure memory. Here again, as in the case of pure perception, if 
 the influence could go through, there would be no image, no con- 
 sciousness. Just as there are many objects about us to which 
 we adjust outselves without perception, situations to which we 
 give only slight attention, so there are memory images which 
 are present, as if there were an undifferentiated field of memory 
 which never rises to the level of reflection. These images are 
 present as a part of the ongoing process, but their efficacy is not 
 required in setting up the process by which stimuli are selected 
 out; they are not required as means to the direction of our con- 
 duct. Therefore, like pure perception, pure memory represents a 
 deeper, more fundamental aspect of the basic process. Our con- 
 scious memories are an expression of the selection that we make 
 among the stimuli presented. Pure memory, on the other hand, 
 answers to the whole of our experience, as pure perception answers 
 to our instinctive contact with the whole of reality. It is not 
 connected with our central nervous system. It must be inde- 
 pendent of this system, for the central nervous system is itself 
 simply one of the images. Pure memory is, of course, as differ- 
 ent from memory as it enters into our experience as pure per- 
 ception is from ordinary perception. The function of the central 
 nervous system is the same in each case — it is a selecting and 
 dissecting organ. 
 
 This brings us to another individual and interesting point of 
 Bergson's position. This dissection of experience that goes on 
 under the influence of the central nervous system and which 
 gives us the world of ordinary perception and which calls up 
 our usual memory images is a materializing process. His doc- 
 trine involves an assumption of a world of images over against 
 the customary psychological doctrine, which assumes that sen- 
 sations and memory images are functions of the central nervous 
 system. This is, of course, true of ordinary perception and mem- 
 ory in so far as each is a result of the process of selection which 
 
 [322]
 
 VITALISM; HENRI BERGSON 
 
 is carried out in the central nervous system. Even here, how- 
 ever, the relation is not the one ordinarily presented. The selec- 
 tion of which Bergson speaks is something very different from 
 the process that is implied in the idea of the functional relation- 
 ship of the central nervous system and the images presented. 
 The images are a part of the process of pure perception and pure 
 memory, which are themselves not the result of any structure 
 within the organism but a part of the world of images in which 
 the representations of the organism and of the central nervous 
 system are included. These particular images are caught at one 
 moment and then another. Having been selected, presenting, 
 as they do, the stoppage of the process, they are mechanized 
 bits. Using Bergson's illustration, they are the dead fragments 
 of an exploded shell through which the process must keep push- 
 ing on, only to reach a new point of conflict in which the same 
 materialization occurs again. The process itself is the complete 
 interrelation of the parts of the universe so that all share in a 
 common reality. According to Bergson, the philosopher has 
 been led astray by the analysis of the scientist into thinking 
 that the conceptual object is a clue to the real nature of things. 
 On the contrary, these are not concepts of anything; they are a 
 part of the process of the materialization which occurs in per- 
 ception. The object is there as a reflection back of the process. 
 I must confess that what this "reflection back" is I am unable 
 to isolate. 
 
 It is interesting in this connection to note that the world of 
 images which Bergson presents is adequate for scientific state- 
 ments. Scientific objects are objects of hypothetical character; 
 and, as such, they have imaginable contents which are essential 
 to the hypothesis to which they belong. At least this is the way 
 I see it. Scientific hypotheses vary constantly. The test of 
 them comes back finally to the test of our own experience. 
 Now the question is whether or not conceptual objects appear 
 in our hypotheses without any imaginable content. I do not see 
 any reason for abandoning the imaginable world with which 
 Bergson deals. Our scientific experience always implies the dis- 
 
 [323]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 tance experience and the contact experience. What the dis- 
 tance experience is, is immaterial to the imagination. The 
 microscope and the telescope extend our powers of contact in 
 two very notable directions. But imagination goes beyond 
 them. The electron, if not the atom, is conceived in the im- 
 agination. These are not, at least as yet, contact experiences. 
 This simply means that some sort of distance experience is es- 
 gential. The problem, then, is of the nature of these concepts. 
 Concepts are not supposed to involve any necessary imagina- 
 ble stuff. The concept is defined in terms of the conditions 
 under which a process of analysis is carried on. Here you get a 
 conceptual account without filling your concepts out with stuff. 
 Does the reality of the object involve the effective occupation 
 of space as revealed by the contact experience.^ You cannot 
 have a concept which is itself an object. It is a concept of 
 something, conceivably of a matter that occupies space. The 
 contact experience would give the material stuff which answers 
 to the distance experience. But at least we are sure that we 
 can give no exact statement of size, for example, of the stuff 
 of the contact experience. It is Poincare who points out that 
 there is no absolute size to which the material universe could be 
 reduced. Then, too, the scientist sets up a noumenal world 
 which Hes beyond contact experience. It is true that some of the 
 relativists, notably Einstein, assume that our spatial time world 
 is entirely relative to the individual. Such a doctrine gives to 
 each individual his own world. But among these worlds we find 
 uniformities which seem to lead us even here to the necessity 
 of setting up a noumenal reality the events and interrelations 
 of which lie beyond our own experience. It is this problem which 
 Bergson proposes to meet through his doctrine of the world as 
 images; and, as I said before, I do not see any reason for aban- 
 doning this imaginable world. 
 
 Where Bergson gets into his greatest difficulty is in failing to 
 see, or at least to state adequately, that the reflective part of 
 consciousness, which is the source of our inadequate representa- 
 tions of reality, is only one part of the whole process which he 
 
 [324]
 
 VITALISM; HENRI BERGSON 
 
 identifies with analysis. Bergson insists that objects are in ex- 
 perience — in pure experience, so to speak — without our being 
 aware of them. Becoming aware of an object is an analytic 
 process. Of course, if your fundamental position is that when 
 we know things we tear them to pieces, then you are going to 
 have distortion. But if you have objects in your experience 
 which you can enjoy as well as analyze, the necessity of the 
 intuitive relation seems, to me, to disappear. In other words, 
 Bergson's immediate intention furnishes the blind spot in his 
 philosophy. He fails to see that the flow, the freedom, the 
 novelty, the interpenetration, the creativity, upon which he 
 sets such store, are not necessarily limited to the interpenetra- 
 tion of experiences in the inner flow of consciousness. They may 
 also be gotten in an objective statement just as soon as we see 
 that the objects of experience have the same type of interpene- 
 tration, the same essential spread, as that which Bergson dis- 
 covers in our inner experience; as soon as we see that the ideas 
 which we get in reflection, the objects which we get in science, 
 and against which Bergson is particularly vehement, are the 
 result of analysis and are not presumed to be reports of the 
 nature of the objects themselves. It is this correction of the 
 Bergsonian philosophy which, it seems to me, Mr. Whitehead 
 has^ mos t efi^ectively made, up to the present at least. 
 
 i^S
 
 CHAPTER XV 
 
 SCIENCE RAISES PROBLEMS FOR PHILOSOPHY- 
 REALISM AND PRAGMATISM 
 
 WE TURN now from the Bergsonlan philosophy to the 
 realistic movement and its reaction on modern sci- 
 ence. This realistic movement is, in a sense, a con- 
 ■^'^ tinuation of the rationalism of the eighteenth century, that 
 which went back to the logical structure of the object of knowl- 
 edge. Over against this rationalism was the empirical doctrine 
 represented by the English school — Locke, Berkeley, and Hume. 
 » The empirical doctrine dealt with the structure of the object 
 as It appears in our qualitative experiences. It was interested 
 in the content of the object rather than in its form. And this 
 school attempted to get the structure, the form of the object, 
 out of the relation of the different elements as they appeared in 
 sensation, in impression, in experience. The rationalistic doc- 
 trine started with a certain structure which belongs to the ob- 
 ject itself; and, of course, the mind was supposed to have im- 
 mediate knowledge. The empirical school started with the expe- 
 riences that came through the senses, and tried to find in the asso- 
 ciation of such experiences the details of the structure of objects. 
 That structure was largely expressed in two conceptions: one 
 of cause and effect, and the other of substance and attribute. 
 The critical doctrine of Kant, you remember, recognized both 
 elements. And still, Kant's leanings were more toward ra- 
 tionalism than toward the empirical side. He assumed that the 
 j mind must give the form to the object, but this structure was 
 i. one which was simply a form of the mind and not a form of 
 things-in-themselves. The mind had the forms of the categories, 
 twelve in number, of which the important ones were substance 
 and attribute, and cause and effect. The empirical school had 
 
 [326]
 
 REALISM AND PRAGMATISM 
 
 attempted to show how mere association of the different ex- 
 periences with each other would lead to the appearance of such 
 conceptions as that of cause and effect and of substance and 
 attribute. Kant recognized that these must be logically ante- 
 cedent to the object. There could be no object except in terms 
 of substance and of cause. 
 
 The recognition that these forms came from the mind led to 
 the idealistic school that undertook to regard the whole of the 
 world as a structure of the mind, applying not simply to cate- 
 gories already fixed in the mind but to the very evolution of 
 the categories themselves. The evolution in this case was that 
 of a^self that thought the universe. 
 
 When we come to the situation after this Romantic idealistic 
 school, we find that people had abandoned this conception of 
 the self that thinks of the world, but that they retained these 
 two phases of experience, the form and the content. The real- 
 istic school undertakes to come back to the formal side of the 
 object, only it approaches it from the standpoint of a new con- 
 ception, that of the more modern mathematics and logic. These 
 conceptions are of the relations which lie between the ultimate 
 elements of things. They were conceived of not as forms of the 
 mind but as relations that exist in the world. Neither are they 
 regarded as the, association of states of consciousness with each 
 other, as the empiricists conceived of them. Until we get to the 
 skeptical statement of Berkeley and Hume, the empiricists as- 
 sumed that there were relations which answered to the relations 
 which arose in the mind, that is, relations in the world, such 
 as cause and effect, that answered to the association of one 
 experience with another. Of course, they could not prove any 
 such connection, and Kant's critical philosophy came in to 
 present another point of view. 
 
 tlhe realists, on the other hand, as distinct from the propo- 
 nents of these two positions, believe that the relations of ele- 
 ments with each other are directly cognized, directly perceived. 
 They are there^ And the relations form some of the elements 
 which are discovered in analysis. If you take an object of knowl- 
 
 [3^-7]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 edge and analyze it, break it up into its content, you will find not 
 only the substantive content, the impression in experience, but 
 also definite relations. And what the realist does is to attempt 
 to present both of these contents, those which appear in sensu- 
 ous experience and those which we think, as relations given in 
 the world. The assumption is that we have direct knowledge of 
 these elements and of their relations in the world itself. The 
 relations are no longer dealt with as acts of thought.^ In the 
 idealistic school the relations were always the impressions of the 
 realizing mind, so that relations were taken back to the thought 
 of the self. Our own selves were parts of the Absolute Self. 
 The realist, on the other hand, assumes the relations as simply 
 there. We think them; and if we think them, they must be 
 there, for we must be thinking something. The something we 
 think is Being. Whether it has existence or not depends on 
 whether it is located in our spatial, temporal experience.) Ex- 
 istence is the relation with reference to which other relations are 
 found actually in spatial, temporal experience. But we can 
 think relations which are not in these forms. We can think of 
 various relations existing between things but which do not 
 exist. They must have being, otherwise we could not think 
 them. We have, then, direct relationship or cognitive relation- 
 ship with the objects of experience and their forms. 
 
 The interest of the realist has been in this process of analysis, 
 of breaking up the object of knowledge into its various elements, 
 with the isolation of the connection as well as of the things 
 themselves, carrying with this the doctrine of the external char- 
 acter of relations. The relations do not exist inside of that 
 which is realized; they exist between relata, between elements 
 that are connected with each other. Realism is indicated by 
 the term which implies that that with which we have cognitive 
 relations is real. It is not phenomenal. It is just what it ap- 
 pears to be in experience. But, to find out just what it is, we 
 must discover it as it appears in the analytic, rather than in the 
 synthetic, phase of experience. The synthetic phase of experi- 
 ence was dealt with by the empiricists under the head of "associ- 
 
 [328]
 
 REALISM AND PRAGMATISM 
 
 atlon." If experience B follows after experience A, it becomes 
 associated with it, so that in the future when we have experi- 
 ence A, or one similar to it, the other experience, B, which had 
 been associated with it, arises also. It is purely a mental affair, 
 a connection of these various states with each other. 
 
 Thus reahsm gathers about the world-old problem of episte- 
 mology. The form which that problem took, you remember, was 
 dictated by the very development of Renaissance science, 
 which, as finally formulated, set up a world of physical particles 
 moving with reference to each other in accordance with fixed 
 laws. The rest of the world had to be put over into conscious- 
 ness. While there was supposed to be a world of these physical 
 particles moving in accordance with natural law, the question at 
 once arose: How does man get outside of the world of con- 
 sciousness.'' How do you know there is anything else but what 
 you have in your own experience? The epistemological prob- 
 lem has been thought out in this way, on this issue. 
 
 As I said, the answer of the realist is to give another state- 
 ment of knowledge. ^Knowledge is finding a relationship be- 
 tween an object that lies in consciousness and an object that 
 hes outside of it.jlf you say, for example, that the table here 
 is nothing but a congeries of your own perceptions and images, 
 you have a table anyway. That is an object. You know it. 
 What you ask is how you can get from such an object which 
 lies simply in your consciousness over to the group of electrons 
 which constitute, as you say, the reahty of that table. And the 
 question is practically unanswerable when stated in this way. 
 There is no way of getting from the inner to the outer. All is 
 inside your experience; all is consciousness. W%at the realist 
 says is that this is an improper statement of what knowledge 
 mean^^JKnowledge is not going from an object already in ex- 
 perience over to something that lies outside of experience which 
 by definition you must reach. It is simply the relationship be- 
 tween the mind and that which it senses, that which it per- 
 ceives. It is thought in a direct relationship, and that is all that 
 you can say about it. Vt is a fundamental, connotative, relation 
 
 [329]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 which exists between the mind and that which is known. We 
 have no problem of getting from the object which is in the mind 
 over to an object which Hes outside of the mind. What knowl- 
 edge consists in is this relation between the mind and its object. 
 It is that shift in the conception of knowledge itself which is 
 characteristic of the realistic doctrine. You see this is not the 
 particular form of the question which I have said was prac- 
 tically unanswerable, namely, "How can one get from con- 
 sciousness over into something that is not consciousness?" That 
 form of the question arises out of Renaissance science. The 
 realist said the relationships between the mind and the object 
 is an immediate, given relationship. 
 
 This was anticipated by the so-called Scottish school, who 
 said knowledge is immediate intuition. But their statement 
 was bound up more or less with the earlier form of the cognitive 
 doctrine. They still kept the object in consciousness as the im- 
 mediate object of knowledge, and they still set off reaHty 
 beyond it. The reahsts said the object is simply the relationship 
 between the mind and the object, a direct cognitive relation- 
 ship. That relationship in a certain sense guarantees the object, 
 and one of the great problems of the realistic philosophers is, 
 therefore, the problem of error. If knowledge is given in the re- 
 lationship of the mind and its object, how can there be error? 
 And, of course, there are errors. 
 
 What has been of still more importance, perhaps, from the 
 standpoint of the realistic doctrine has been its recognition of 
 the objects of thought as they appear in the process of analysis. 
 
 ["The realistic philosophy is one whose method has been analytic. 
 
 I It has sprung from mathematics — mathematics used, however, 
 in the large sense of that term, the sense in which logic and 
 mathematics come together. The earhest of the group, as you 
 might call Leibnitz, goes way back to the Renaissance period. 
 
 ) He at least sketched out the implications of the realistic doc- 
 
 y' trine. He was one of the great mathematicians of the world, one 
 
 / who had an implicit faith in the possibihties of analysis. If, he 
 
 said, you could take objects of knowledge and analyze them
 
 REALISM AND PRAGMATISM 
 
 so that you get back to the ultimate elements, as, for ex- 
 ample, in mathematical problems, those immediately given to 
 you, those which in one sense cannot be defined, which can 
 be set up as indefinable but which can be specified in the sense 
 of having their outlines given so that you can combine them 
 with each other, you would be able to build up all possible com- 
 binations. You could have charge of the ultimate elements, 
 and all the relationships that lie between, if you just pushed > 
 your process of analysis to the limit and got these elements \ 
 spread out before you, as a watchmaker spreads out the parts 
 of his watches. Then you could get all possible combinations y 
 of things. 
 
 It is this method with which the realist operates. He wants 
 to get back to those ultimate elements which are just there, 
 given in immediate cognitive relation, and of which there is no 
 question. If you could get back to those ultimate elements, and 
 particularly to the relationships that lie between them, they 
 would be the basis in terms of which you could make all possible 
 combinations. If you can discover those which are not contra- 
 dictory, those which are tenable, you have the same assurance 
 of your results as in the immediate experience of the ultimate 
 elements themselves. The realists came back, for example, to 
 final definitions of ultimate elements in the world — elements 
 which we make use of in thought itself, the so-called "logical 
 constants." They came back to these ultimate elements and 
 then defined the relationships which could exist between them, 
 and in this way they could build up logical structures which 
 could not be questioned. They found out what the possible rela- 
 tionships could be between all these different elements. This 
 has a very abstract sound, and the achievements of these 
 mathematicians and logicians are abstract in the highest de- 
 gree, but they are very penetrating; and they did, as I said, 
 bring together the fields of mathematics and logic. 
 
 They carried with them a doctrine which for a while belonged 
 to the realistic field but which is not so certain now. This is the 
 doctrine of the so-called "externality of relations." I have said 
 
 [33^^ ]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 /the realist analyzes, takes his object to pieces, comes back to 
 ultimate elements and the relationships which exist between 
 them. He isolates the relations froi^ the elements themselves./ 
 In this activity the relation is something that we will say is Tike 
 a wire that connects two different objects together. You can put 
 up a wire and set up different relations between objects strung 
 on it. The relations as such do not affect the object. The relata 
 are connected by means of the relations, but the relations do 
 not exist by themselves. This emphasis upon the externality of 
 relations was brought out in contests between the realists and 
 the idealists, especially the neo-Hegelians of the latter group. 
 From the standpoint of that latter group, the relation was an 
 internal, not an external, affair. It was not simply a connection 
 set up between different objects, separate relata, but some- 
 thing which affected the very thing related. These relations 
 grew inside of things rather than being connections between 
 independent elements. Take, as an illustration, the Hegelian 
 doctrine of the social individual. We speak of him as having 
 certain relations. He stands in his social group as a citizen, 
 as a member of a family, of this and that group; and all these 
 groups represent various social relations. We might speak of 
 him as a point through which any number of social relations 
 pass. Now, these relations of the man to the people about 
 him are just what constitutes the man. His relations to the 
 members of his family make him what he is. We cannot say 
 that the relationship of father to son is one that lies outside 
 of the character of father and son. We cannot say that here 
 are two different objects connected by means of paternal and 
 filial relations. We cannot substitute something else for this. 
 It lies within the individual, makes him what he is. It is an 
 internal relation so far as the object is concerned. And, not only 
 is it internal, but it makes every individual entering into the 
 relationship different from what he was before that relationship 
 was entered into. You form an acquaintance with someonexjt 
 becomes a friendship. That relationship changes both of you. 
 You are different beings from what you were before. Now the 
 
 [33^]
 
 REALISM AND PRAGMATISM 
 
 Hegelian took this situation over into the whole of social and 
 spiritual reality. For him relations are internal, they are 
 thought of as being the very nature of the Absolute Self. The 
 relation is a process of relating. Relating is a process of think- 
 ing in the Absolute Self in which our minds are simply finite 
 aspects. Thus relations lie in the very nature of things them- 
 selves,,..,-. 
 
 Over against this doctrine, the realists set up one in which 
 relations are external. The process of analysis takes things 
 apart, sets up ultimate relata; and the connections between 
 them, the relations as such, never change the character of the 
 thing related. You can say that new characters arise, but they 
 are simply the expression of the relations existing between 
 the separate elements. The separate elements themselves can 
 never be changed. Connect one number with another number, 
 and perhaps the result gives you a larger bank account, or 
 it may indicate that you have overdrawn your account. Those 
 are very important facts. But they do not change the character 
 of the numbers that are connected with each other by addition 
 and subtraction. These are ultimate elements which fer»ain al- 
 ways what they are. And the relations that exist are what they 
 are. You do not change the relata by their being related. 
 
 Thus the realists accept cognition as a simple relationship be- 
 tween the mind and its object. Nothing can be said about it 
 except that it is an immediate relationship between these two. 
 Therefore, in so far as it exists, it presumably carries with it the 
 import of cognition, that is, it carries knowledge, and so the 
 truth of the experience. 
 
 But this knowledge has as its fundamental principle that of 
 analysis, a principle which, as I have said, it had taken from 
 mathematics. It is a process which leads to the breaking-up of 
 the object of knowledge into its ultimate elements. The diffi- 
 culty which the realist got into on this basis was to account, not 
 for knowledge, but for error. In the older theory the object was 
 given in consciousness as the immediate object of knowledge. 
 That is, the organization of one's percepts, ideas, images, mean- 
 
 [333]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 ings, as they lay in consciousness, into the immediate object of 
 knowledge is where the epistemological problem was found in 
 setting up some sort of a relationship between this immediate 
 object of knowledge and the supposed real object outside. That 
 is what we would consider as answering to our perception of a 
 table, for example. If we state the table in terms of our ideas, 
 or our perceptions, we can say that it constitutes an object of 
 knowledge, but that it is not the real object. The real object is 
 a congeries of physical particles that do not get into experience 
 at all. From the point of view of the realistic philosophy, with 
 its analysis, knowledge is of the ultimate elements in theex- 
 perience itself. And thus the problem becomes one of account- 
 ing for error, for mistakes. The experience of the ultimate ele- 
 rnents themselves is evidence of the object's being there; other- 
 wise it could not be experienced. Knowledge is the relationship 
 between mind and these ultimate elements. Given this rela- 
 tionship, both mind and the ultimate elements are there. Mean- 
 ing and cognitive value, as well as other values, are also objects 
 of knowledge. And they, too, have to be related and organized. 
 Remember, the external character of relations is a funda- 
 mental point in the position of the realist. The relation does not 
 lie inside of the object. It is simply the connection between the 
 ultimate elements. The so-called "meaning" of the object is 
 nothing but an organization of the relations that he between 
 these different elements. For example, we have the relationship 
 of distance which exists between different objects and our con- 
 duct in experience. The groups of distance relations which we 
 find in experience give us the surface of this table, for example. 
 The groups which represent the relation of the individual to 
 each corner, to the different lines, the different spots of color on 
 the surface, taken together, give us our general sense of the dis- 
 tance of the object, as an object, from the organism. It is an 
 organization of the relations which, together, go to make it up. 
 If we want to deal with the meaning of the object, we come back 
 to the various relations which compose it, and get them in 
 their perspective. We may make mistakes in the organization 
 
 [ 334 ]
 
 REALISM AND PRAGMATISM 
 
 of these relations, in the meaning they have. We see an eagle 
 soaring over our heads as we lie in the grass, and after a while 
 we become aware of the fact that it is nothing but a gnat a 
 few inches away. There are mistakes also so far as the im- 
 mediate experience goes, that is true enough. But we may also 
 make mistakes when we organize them into ultimate relation- 
 ships. 
 
 But this leaves yet another group of elements in that experi- 
 ence. The eagle to which I referred is, after all, something more 
 than a set of separate experiences. It is not only something 
 more than that; it is something universal. It is something that 
 is recognized in any eagle that we see. It is the same, the 
 concept of the eagle, the universal eagle; and it is not only a 
 universal, but it is a unity. We may break the unity up into 
 separate parts, but it is something that belongs to the con- 
 cept of the eagle. These ultimate universals have to be recog- 
 nized in their relationship to mind, especially the fundamental 
 universals that appear as logical constants. Not only concepts 
 of this character, but also those of our sensuous experiences — ^ 
 the reds, the blues, the high and low sounds — are all universals; ( 
 and we have to deal with them as such. They have to be recog- ) 
 nized from a realistic standpoint as something that is there be- 
 cause we think about them. If we think about them, there must 
 be something there to think about. 
 
 In the earlier statement which was given, the concept was 
 dealt with as a mental structure of some sort; it was thought of 
 as something in the mind itself. We assume that that which lies 
 in the mind answers to something outside. The realist assumes 
 that our knowledge of the universals is, so to speak, the con- 
 tact between the universals and the mind; we must put them 
 in the mind, but they must also have their existence outside. 
 And yet, many of these universals do not have an existence, in 
 our ordinary use of that term. We imply that a thing is at 
 some point and at some definite time when we say that it 
 exists. If we say a man exists, we locate and date him. If he 
 exists, he does so somewhere and somewhen. But the idea of a 
 
 [33S]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 chimera, for example, does not exist anywhere or any when. It 
 does not exist. That is very characteristic, of course, of the 
 chimera as such or of any other mythical animals, dragons, and 
 what not, that have played such large roles in mythology and in 
 the imaginations of men. They do not exist, and yet we think 
 about them. If we could regard them as just constructs of the 
 imagination and locate them in people's minds, we could ac- 
 count for their being mere mythical objects. You say there are 
 not any such animals; they do not exist; they are just mental 
 pictures which people have had of possible animals which 
 proved to be impossible animals. But if you take the realistic 
 viewpoint, there must be something to think about — some uni- 
 versal, at least — to which our mind turns and about which we 
 are thinking. There are a good many other things we think 
 about which do not exist. We puzzle our heads over them for a 
 long time, over perceptions which prove to have contradictions 
 in them. And yet we have been thinking about them. After all, 
 there must have been something. We talk about such things 
 as "round squares." They could not exist — they are; contradic- 
 tions in terms — and yet we can discuss them. As long as we 
 can think about anything, there must be something that an- 
 swers to the process of thought, and yet many of these things 
 cannot be put into existence. 
 
 What this led to on the part of this realistic approach was the 
 recognition of a real being which generally goes under the name 
 of "subsistence" rather than of "existence." There is a world 
 which subsists, but does not necessarily exist. You can have 
 thought occupied in the recognition of the response to all the 
 elements in experience, and not only to these but to everything 
 we call "idea," that is, any universal. These subsist; some of 
 them exist. Thus, some of them do appear. To apply one of 
 the terms that is used, they have "ingression" into events. This 
 is Whitehead's term for the process. These eternal objects, in 
 the sense that they are outside of time, have ingression into cer- 
 tain events in so far as they constitute things. What you see 
 taking place is the emptying-out of the whole content of the 
 
 [336]
 
 REALISM AND PRAGMATISM 
 
 mind, as the Renaissance philosophers dealt with it, into the 
 world. It is a setting-up of mind as that which has cognitive 
 relationships with all these different elements, allowing the con- 
 struction to take place through the action of the mind. 
 
 But the realist has not been very strong on the constructive 
 or synthetic side. His interest has been in analysis. To under- 
 stand this interest we have to go back, as I have already indi- 
 cated, to a mathematical background. One of the greatest of 
 the realists is Bertrand Russell; another is Alfred Whitehead. 
 What they were interested in at first was the perfection of 
 mathematical theory. They were interested in carrying back 
 the mathematical process behind the immediate objects of the 
 physical world that we follow through their various changes. 
 Back of this lay the development of our modern mathematics. 
 Mathematics, for Kant, stood on a basis of Euclidean geometry 
 on one side and of the traditional arithmetic on the other. 
 KantTyou remember, believed that the forms of mathematics 
 were the forms of the mind. W'cll, not long after the time of 
 Kant two mathematicians undertook to work out geometries 
 which contravened the Euclidean axiom in regard to parallels. 
 It was a question of whether more than one line could be drawn 
 parallel to another line through a point outside that line. They 
 took different points of view, such as that there could be no 
 such line drawn or that there could be a number of them so 
 drawn. The interesting thing was that, starting off with such 
 an axiom, that no lines could be drawn parallel or that there 
 could be an indefinite number of them so drawn, they could 
 build up perfectly consistent systems of geometry. This was 
 not, of course, going back to experience to find a world in which 
 they were true. Neither of these propositions, if true, conforms 
 to the Euclidean axiom. Nor does actual physical experience 
 conform as far as that goes. Of course, this does not go very far. 
 You cannot actually measure the distance between lines so con- 
 structed. One mathematician actually undertook to see whether 
 the experiment of setting up triangles or parallels which could 
 be measured on the surface of the earth would hold, but he did 
 
 [337]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 not measure with sufficient accuracy to get any absolute con- 
 clusions. What these people wanted to do was not to find 
 parallel lines which act like rails as you look at them. It was a 
 question of seeing whether you could assume that there could 
 be an indefinite number of parallel lines drawn to any line from 
 points outside that line, or if you could assume that there could 
 be no parallel lines. Whichever side you took, you had the basis 
 for a possible geometry. Whichever geometry is right in the 
 sense of describing physical nature, you can prove all the propo- 
 sitions in one or the other. If you come back to experience, so- 
 called, it is, after all, that of one geometry only. Why cannot 
 there be others? 
 
 And then, of course, there is always the question as to whether 
 space is curved. We cannot actually follow hnes any great 
 length or distance. Do they actually tend to meet? We could 
 never tell if they did. We have another interesting speculation 
 about people who live in a two-dimensional space. Supposing 
 a person were of no thickness at all and lived on the surface 
 of a sphere. Then, if one started to throw something forward in 
 a straight line with sufficient force, it would hit him in the back 
 of the head. How can we tell whether the space in which we 
 live is of one sort or another? Supposing, for example, to give 
 another illustration, we say space is of indefinite extent. 
 What we mean is that, given (or setting up) any limit in space, 
 we imply something beyond it. It is indefinite. Or, supposing 
 we lived in a world which got cooler as we went away from 
 its center, and that in accordance with these conditions the 
 dimensions of things changed, so that the diameters would 
 shrink as they got farther away from the warm center. And 
 assume that the diameters of all objects shrank proportionally. 
 Then as we walked away toward the periphery of the world, we 
 would get gradually smaller and smaller as we got cooler and 
 cooler, and our steps would get shorter and shorter. In such a 
 system we could never reach the limit of the world. We could 
 have an indefinite world inside of a definite one; we would never 
 arrive at the limit; and yet we would never stop. Everything 
 
 [33^]
 
 REALISM AND PRAGMATISM 
 
 would become proportionately smaller as we went away from 
 that center. 
 
 The value of such an illustration, which is given by Poincare 
 in his Science and Hypothesis^ is simply to show us that our 
 spatial world, which has a right and left, an up and down, is 
 something that is entirely dependent upon our experience. And 
 we have no way of telling whether the world of our spatial ex- 
 perience corresponds to one geometry or another, whether the 
 world is actually Euclidean or non-Euclidean. It is something 
 that is not open to any proof, because our experience will always 
 lie inside our own world. What are these irrefragable difficulties, 
 then? They are proofs for a geometry, provided that the axioms 
 of that geometry are true. We can never tell whether they 
 are true or not. We say a straight Hne is the shortest distance 
 between two points. We have some difficulty in defining a 
 straight line, but we cannot set it up as indefinable, and it comes 
 back to the statement that it is nothing but the shortest dis- 
 tance between two points. You have to assume it to define 
 it. You come back to certain postulates you set up. On one 
 basis you will set up a Euclidean world; and you can prove 
 certain conclusions in that world, prove that there is such a 
 world. All judgments are necessarily hypothetical judgments. 
 Whether or not there is a Euclidean world we cannot tell. We 
 cannot tell whether the world actually has the dimensions that 
 we think it has or the dimensions of a billiard ball. You could 
 just as well set up all the relationships which you have in the 
 world in one the size of a billiard ball, provided you reduce 
 your units. Why not? Your proofs are dependent upon certain 
 given postulates. It is much easier to prove the Pythagorean 
 proposition if you actually have lines drawn in a Euclidean 
 fashion, a number of them, and work them out. But you are 
 not sure that there is such a Euclidean world. Well, now, is 
 there anything in that Pythagorean proposition which would 
 be true if there were no such Euclidean world? Would it be 
 possible to prove propositions of geometry, and of all mathe- 
 
 [339]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 matics, without actually accepting the postulates of our em- 
 pirical world about us? 
 
 That is the problem the mathematicians were working on, 
 and what they did was to set up symbols which would be 
 most general and universal and just as few in number as pos- 
 sible. And by means of these and by using the simplest proc- 
 esses of logic, it was possible to prove a whole mathematical 
 science without introducing the postulates of our empirical ex- 
 perience. You can find this done in the Principia mathematica 
 of Russell and Whitehead. In it mathematics is presented in 
 propositions worked out in so-called "symbolic logic"; and the 
 propositions there are propositions which, if translated into 
 Euclidean geometry, would give all the propositions of that 
 geometry, but give them in such a form that they are free from 
 the fixed postulates of our sensuous experience. We free our- 
 selves from all that to a certain degree. We say that the world 
 which seems to have up and down, right and left, really does 
 not have these characters. What we mean by "up and down" 
 is the relationship between the object on the surface and the 
 center of the earth. In this symbolism you come back to a 
 larger, more effective analysis than that worked out in the past, 
 in which you have symbols that refer to universals and the 
 smallest possible number of indefinables. With these you work 
 out propositions that would be true in any world. You do not 
 know, for example, if they are true in the sense that they actu- 
 ally exist. That is the interesting thing, says Russell, about 
 mathematics. You do not know whether what you are pre- 
 senting is true, and you do not know what you are talking 
 about. You abstract from the content of your postulates. You 
 set up certain indefinable elements and put relationships be- 
 tween them; and then you say that, if such and such a thing 
 exists, a certain result must follow. It was this most general- 
 ized form of mathematics which was worked out by these 
 mathematicians; and in accomplishing it, they went beyond the 
 logic of Aristotle, for example, in introducing the so-called "logic 
 of relations." They produced a symbolic logic which was a more 
 
 [340]
 
 REALISM AND PRAGMATISM 
 
 powerful instrument than the Aristotelian syllogism is. And 
 they reduced the content of our exact scientific knowledge to 
 the simplest form in which it could be expressed and to a form 
 which is valid in any sort of world to which you may wish to 
 refer. 
 
 They were somewhat excited about their success. This was 
 natural enough. If you can take the whole of the object of 
 mathematical science and trace it to a set of formulas which 
 look very much Hke the marks of which a stenographer makes 
 use, condense the whole of that to a relatively small number of 
 pages, and have all the content there, you are justified in getting 
 excited. You get a symbolic logic which is very much more ef- 
 fective than the older logic. If you invited twenty people to 
 dinner and some belonged to one religion and some to another, 
 some to one political faith and some to another, and some of 
 them disliked others, and yet you had to seat them about the 
 table so as to have everyone at peace with his immediate neigh- 
 bors, you would have quite a job on your hands. If you ever 
 have such a job, I advise you to familiarize yourselves with 
 symbolic logic, for that will enable you to state just what the 
 possible combinations are that you can make. It will enable 
 you to arrange your guests in such a way that there will not be 
 any unpleasant experience at the dinner. There are certain situ- 
 ations of that sort which make us aware of the practical value 
 in the use of symbolic mathematics. But I must confess that 
 beyond that, so far as practical things are concerned, its use has 
 been very slight. The achievements which symbolic logic makes 
 in the realm of thought are very impressive, indeed. But we 
 still go on thinking in terms of what has been called the "logic 
 of things," the logic of inference, that is, the logic of Socrates 
 and immortality: all men are mortal; Socrates was a man; 
 therefore Socrates was mortal. That is logic built up on the in- 
 herence of certain qualities in certain substances, \yellj now, 
 the world we live in is a world of things, and the logic we will 
 continue to utilize will be a logic of things. Symbohc logic gives 
 a powerful discipline, an apparatus which enables us to deal 
 
 [ 341 ]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 with relations. But if you continue to work in a world of things, 
 I do not think that symbolic logic will be of any particular value 
 except in such problems as I suggested above. 
 
 What I have been trying to bring out was the background of 
 these realistic philosophers. They try to get rid of the epistemo- 
 logical problem by simply recognizing that knowledge is ji^ cog- 
 nitive relation between mind and the elements. And jthen they 
 try to state the so-called "objects of knowledge" in terms of 
 their ultimate elements and the relationships between them. 
 And in order to do that, they have to assume the externality of 
 relations, that is, that there is a set of ultimate elements which 
 are related to one another as if by wires or strings. If you want 
 to handle such a number of ultimate elements and their rela- 
 tions, you have to have a very powerful sort of technique, such 
 as that which the symbolic logic gives you. So all these go 
 along together. The realists assume that knowledge is just a 
 relationship between the object and the mind. Then by analysis 
 they break up the object into all its elements, set up cognitive 
 relations between mind and these elements and their relations, 
 and then connect them all together. They give you a technique 
 which enables you to handle these factors. 
 
 It is in this field that the realist is occupied. Things are, or 
 at least they have being. Elements, anything we think about, 
 have being; and our problem is, not to determine whether 
 some things have being and others not, but to determine the 
 relationships between these elements of being. And the rela- 
 tionships between these elements also are actually given. They 
 are realized. Things are real. There are different sorts of real- 
 ity. That of existence, for example, of something located at a 
 certain point at a certain time. But things which do not exist 
 have being, that is, they have subsistence; and the problem is to 
 determine what that means. In this philosophy the problem of 
 the universal as out there has to be recognized as present be- 
 cause universals can be thought about. The problem of the uni- 
 versal, as far as our sensuous experience is concerned, presents 
 some difficulties. The forms in which these universals appear 
 
 [ 342 ]
 
 REALISM AND PRAGMATISM 
 
 among different relata are different. For example, Whitehead 
 refers to them as eternal objects. Another group, the so-called 
 "critical realists" — Santayana, Lovejoy, and others — refer to 
 them as "essences." And the question of the appearances of 
 these essences, these universals, in the object and the presence 
 of them in the mind becomes a somewhat difficult question. We 
 say, for example, that there is something which constitutes a 
 table. I know what you mean by this term, otherwise we could 
 not talk about the object in question. We attach a particular 
 word to it. We may call it by any word. But there is something 
 we think about, and it is universal. We also assume that it is in 
 this thing. What evidence have we of this.^ There must be such 
 a thing; otherwise we could not think about it. How do we get 
 it into this relationship.'' That presents problems which we are 
 not undertaking to follow out, but to criticize this philosophy I 
 want to give you the point of view of a group of influential 
 philosophers whose doctrine belongs to this period. If you want 
 a further account, take Santayana's Skepticism and Animal 
 Faith. These realists had something of the same confidence in 
 the mathematical technique that Kant had in the achievements 
 of Newton. 
 
 Philosophy has in this as well as in other centuries occupied 
 itself with the interpretation of what science has accomplished. 
 In modern times science and philosophy are separated from each 
 other. Science reaches certain results. It tests them. We can 
 act upon them. Philosophy has been occupied with the ques- 
 tion of meanings. Some philosophers feel that philosophy goes 
 further and can criticize the propositions, the presuppositions 
 of science. But as a general rule it can be said that what 
 philosophy has been doing, especially since the time of the 
 Renaissance, is to interpret the results of science. Well, now, 
 mathematics has been going ahead at a frightful rate during 
 this last century, and the realists represent an attempt to in- 
 terpret it from the point of view of its own technique. You get 
 very strange results looking at this development of mathe- 
 matics from our empirical point of view. 
 
 [343]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 Alongside of this realistic philosophy we find another — 
 pragmatism — which has developed out of a different aspect of 
 the scientific movements of the period. This doctrine has two 
 outstanding figures: one of them is William James, the other, 
 John Dewey. There are differences in the formulation of prag- 
 matism on the part of these two men. That of James is to be 
 found in his volume entitled Pragmatism; that of Dewey, in 
 his earlier statements in his Essays in Experimental Logic, and 
 in a more elaborate statement in his more recent book, Experi- 
 ence and Nature. Back of the work of both lies the common as- 
 sumption of the testing of the truth of an idea, of a hypothesis, 
 by its actual working. 
 
 Our problem now is to put this statement in relationship to 
 the doctrines which we discussed earlier. In them the test of 
 truth lies in the coherence, the orderliness of ideas, the way in 
 which ideas fit into a general logical structure as it arises in the 
 mind, a mind which is not only a mind but also a creator of the 
 world, all minds being simply phases of a more general, an Abso- 
 lute, mind. From this standpoint the world was the result of 
 the thought process of the Absolute. Our thinking is but one of 
 the finite and imperfect elements of this process — imperfect be- 
 cause a mere phase. It would be impossible for us to think of 
 the world in a true fashion because of our finite character. 
 But in proportion as our thinking is coherent, to that degree we 
 can assume that our mind approaches truth. 
 
 The point that needs particularly to be recognized in an ap- 
 proach to the pragmatic doctrine is the relationship of thinking 
 to conduct. The undertaking of the Romantic ideahsts and the 
 rationalists was to present thought as that which discovered the 
 world. It had the distinct business of finding out what the na- 
 ture of things is. That is, cognition is a process which arose, so 
 to speak, for its own sake. One is curious, one wants to know 
 the world; and knowledge is a simple getting of the nature of 
 the world. Its tests lie, from that standpoint, in the product or 
 in the nature of what is known. This is a copy theory of knowl- 
 edge; one has in his mind the impression of that which exists 
 
 [344]
 
 REALISM AND PRAGMATISM 
 
 outside; or one may have a coherence theory such as that to 
 which I have referred above, that which fits into a structure 
 which lies outside. The function of knowledge in either case is 
 to give as close a resemblance as possible to something which 
 lies outside the mind. 
 
 If we approach the world from the standpoint of the sort of 
 experience with which the psychology we have been presuming 
 deals, we can see that intelligence in its simplest phase, and also 
 in a later phase, really lies inside of a process of conduct. The 
 animal, even the plant, has to seek out what is essential to its 
 life. It has to avoid that which is dangerous for it in its life- 
 process. A plant shows its intelligence by driving down its 
 roots, in its adjustment to the climate. When you get into the 
 animal kingdom, you find much more adjustment and an en- 
 vironment which involves more dangers, in which the getting 
 of food, the avoiding of enemies, the carrying-on of the process 
 of reproduction, take on the form of an adventure. Intelligence 
 consists in the stimulation of those elements which are of im- 
 portance to the form itself, the selection of both positive and 
 negative elements, getting what is desirable, avoiding what is 
 dangerous. These are the ways in which intelligence shows it- 
 self. 
 
 For example, the intelligence of the human form is one which 
 has arisen through its abiHty to analyze this world by discrimi- 
 nation, and, through significant symbols, to indicate to other 
 forms with which it works and to the form itself what the ele- 
 ments are that are of importance to it. It is able to set up such 
 a structure of symbols, images, which stand for the object that 
 it needs. Thinking is an elaborate process of selecting, an elabo- 
 rate process of presenting the world so that it will be favorable 
 for conduct. Whatever is its later function — it has one of knowl- 
 edge, which is for its own sake — in its earlier phases we have 
 intelligence, and then thought, as lying inside of conduct. That 
 is, the test of intelligence is found in action. The test of the ob- 
 ject is found in conduct itself. What the animal needs is its 
 food, freedom from its enemy. If it responds to the right stimuli, 
 
 [345]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 it reaches that food, that safety. The animal has no other test 
 as to whether it has made such a proper selection except in the 
 result attained. You can test your stimulus only by the result 
 of your conduct which is in answer to it. You see, that takes 
 the research method over into life. The animal, for example, 
 faces a problem. It has to adjust itself to a new situation. The 
 way in which it is going brings danger or offers some unexpected 
 possibility of getting food. It acts upon this and thus gets a 
 new object; and if its response to that object is successful, it 
 may be said to be the true object for that stimulus. It is true 
 in the sense that it brings about a result which the conduct of 
 the animal calls for. If we look upon the conduct of the animal 
 form as a continual meeting and solving of problems, we can 
 find in this intelligence, even in its lowest expression, an in- 
 stance of what we call "scientific method" when this has been 
 developed into the technique of the most elaborate science. The 
 animal is doing the same thing the scientist is doing. It is 
 facing a problem, selecting some element in the situation 
 which may enable it to carry its act through to completion. 
 There is inhibition there. It tends to go in one direction, then 
 another direction; it tends to seek this thing and avoid that. 
 These different tendencies are in conflict; and until they can be 
 reconstructed, the action cannot go on. The only test the animal 
 can bring to such a reconstruction of its habits is the ongoing of 
 its activity. This is the experimental test; can it continue in 
 action? And that is exactly the situation found also in science. 
 Take such a problem, for example, as that of the radiation of 
 the sun or of the stars. It is assumed that that radiation is 
 due to the compression which comes with attraction. Then, 
 knowing what the mass of the star is, what the direction of at- 
 traction is, and the compression that follows from it, one can 
 figure out how much heat the star can radiate. On that basis it 
 was figured out some forty years ago that the sun has not been 
 in its present condition for a period of more than twenty million 
 years and that it might be perhaps seventeen million years be- 
 fore it became dark and cold, so far as the earth is concerned. 
 
 [346]
 
 REALISM AND PRAGMATISM 
 
 Geologists, on the other hand, were turning back the pages of the 
 history of the earth and working out its history. In this process 
 they got various tests as to what the time periods had been. 
 And all these tests called for far longer periods than the astro- 
 physicist was willing to grant. The former dealt in terms of a 
 hundred million years. In recent research we have discovered 
 a new test which is perhaps the most accurate of all; that is 
 the radiation of radioactive bodies. We know, for example, that 
 bodies of this type are continually breaking down. We can see 
 them doing it. In the dark we can see the sparkling which 
 represents a continual discharge of energy, the breaking-down 
 of higher atomic structures into lower. At first this process 
 seemed to be indefinite; but when it was worked out, it was 
 found that such a process in radium might last for several 
 hundred years. The rate of disintegration could be figured out. 
 We know something about the elements, the parts of the earth, 
 that are radioactive; and in that way we can determine what 
 the rate is at which certain minerals which result from such 
 a disintegration as this could have formed, how long a time 
 would be necessary to build them up. Taking this and all the 
 other tests, the scientists set up their theory of the history of the 
 world — ^the geologist writing his history on one time schedule, 
 and the physicist writing his on the basis of another. We get a 
 clash here. One calls for a period of several hundred million 
 years; the other denies any period longer than twenty million 
 years. There you get a typical scientific problem. 
 
 What I want to point out is that it stops the scientist in his 
 process of reconstructing the past. You are reconstructing it on 
 one doctrine or the other. You cannot use both of them. And 
 yet there are facts which lie behind each of them. What is the 
 source of the energy of the sun? It is not burning up coal. It 
 undoubtedly produces heat by the very compression that fol- 
 lows from attraction. That is the only source of heat which can 
 be found. On that basis the age of the earth is twenty million 
 years. And yet, here we have a history which the geologist and 
 the archeological zoologist and the botanist have been writing 
 
 [347]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 on the basis of other data. And the two stop each other. The 
 process of writing the history of the earth cannot be continued, 
 because the two theories are in conflict with each other. You 
 have these exceptional situations arising over against each 
 other. What is taking place is the recognition that there is 
 another source of energy which has not been attacked, so to 
 speak, in the doctrine of the scientists themselves. This very 
 energy, which is found in the process of radiation which we 
 make use of in our radium watches and clocks, represents a 
 source of energy which the suns may themselves be drawing 
 upon. In its process of radiation, the sun is actually turning 
 out more than four million tons of energy per square yard 
 every few minutes. It is using itself up. Its mass is passing 
 over into the form of radiation. We know that light has 
 weight. Of course, that weight represents just so much mass. 
 Mass must come from the radiation of the sun. The sun is 
 breaking down its own atoms and getting the energy that is 
 in them. We do not know just what the exact process is by 
 which this takes place, whether it is due simply to the im- 
 mense crushing power of such a great mass as that at the center; 
 but v/e know that there is much energy in an atom. If you 
 could explode an atom, I think it is said that you could carry 
 the S.S. Leviathan across the ocean on the amount of atomic 
 energy found in a drop of oil — ^perhaps it is two or three 
 drops if you like, I have forgotten the figures — but there is an 
 enormous amount of energy shut up in the structure of the 
 atoms themselves. 
 
 Given such a problem as that, what does the scientist do.'* 
 He proceeds to start to write his history of the stars as he finds 
 them, the giant and the dwarf stars, the white and blue and red 
 stars, in their different stages of evolution. He starts to write 
 of them on the basis of the hypothesis that these suns have 
 been continually expending the energy involved in their atomic 
 structure in the form of radiation. And that is brought, of 
 course, into its relationship with the geological and biological 
 history of the earth. Could one go on writing the history of the 
 
 [348]
 
 REALISM AND PRAGMATISM 
 
 stars and of the surface of the earth so that they do not come 
 into conflict with each other? It was found that there is plenty 
 of time provided under the now recognized form of expenditure 
 of the energy of the sun — a hundred miUion years or so, in- 
 stead of twenty million years. So the process of interpreting 
 the world, working out the scientific statement by means of the 
 new hypothesis, could be continued. 
 
 Now, what constitutes the test of the hypothesis? The test 
 of it is that you can continue the sort of conduct that was going 
 on. It is the same sort of test which the animal finds. If it 
 finds itself in a difficult situation and sees escape, it rushes ofl^ 
 in that direction and gets away. That is a fair test, for it, of 
 what we call a hypothesis. It did not present ideas to itself in 
 terms of significant symbols, but it was a good working hypothe- 
 sis. It could continue its action of living that way, where it 
 could not have continued it otherwise. 
 
 Well, in the same fashion, from a logical standpoint, the sci- 
 entist is engaged in stating the past history of the world, and 
 he comes up against this blank wall of insufficient time. Now, 
 when he collates the history of the surface and the history of the 
 radiation of the sun, he gets a clue — a hole, so to speak — which 
 will let him escape from that difficulty. That constitutes the 
 test of the truth of his hypothesis. It means that he can con- 
 tinue the process of stating the history of the world within which 
 he is living. And, of course, the process of stating the world, 
 stating our past, is a process of getting control over that world, 
 getting its meaning for future conduct. 
 
 That is the importance of the pragmatic doctrine. It finds its 
 test of the so-called "true" in hypotheses and in the working of 
 these hypotheses. And when you ask what is meant by the 
 "working of the hypotheses," we mean that a process which 
 has been inhibited by a problem can, from this standpoint, start 
 working again and going on. Just as the animal no longer stands 
 there, dodging this way and that to avoid its enemy, but can 
 shoot away and get out of danger, so the scientist does not 
 simply have to stand before a history which allows him only 
 
 [349]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 twenty million years and a history of two or three hundred 
 million years. He can now continue the process of giving the 
 history of the world, having this conception of the source of 
 energy which had not been recognized before. Putting it into 
 beha.vioristic terms, what we mean by the test of the truth is 
 the ability to continue a process which had been inhibited. 
 
 A certain statement of the pragmatic doctrine implied that a 
 thing was true if it satisfied desire. And the critics of the doc- 
 trine thought that this satisfaction meant the pleasure one 
 could get out of it. That is, if a hypothesis was pleasing to an 
 individual, then it was true. What I have just stated is, how- 
 ever, what is implied in this doctrine — that the test of truth lies 
 in the continued working of the very processes that have been 
 checked in the problem. It is a pleasant thing to get going again 
 after we have been caught and shut in. It is a pleasant thing 
 to have a new planet swim into our ken. But it is not pleasure 
 which constitutes the test, but the ability to keep going, to keep 
 on doing things which we have been trying to do but which we 
 had to stop. That is one phase of the pragmatic doctririe-:;:2the 
 testing of a hypothesis by its working. 
 
 The other phase I have touched on earlier. You see the atti- 
 tude of which I have been speaking brings the process of 
 knowing inside of conduct. Here, again, you have a relation- 
 ship between pragmatic doctrine and the behavioristic type of 
 psychology. Knowing is a process of adjustment; it lies within 
 this process. Cognition is simply a development of the selective 
 attitude of an organism toward its environment and the re- 
 adjustment that follows upon such a selection. This selection 
 we ordinarily connect with what we call "discrimination," the 
 pointing-out of things and the analysis in this pointing. This 
 is a process of labeling the elements so that you can refer to 
 each under its proper tag, whether that tag is a pointing of 
 the finger, a vocal gesture, or a written word. The thinking 
 process is to enable you to reconstruct your environment so 
 that you can act in a different fashion, so that your knowledge 
 lies inside of the process and is not a separate affair. It does
 
 REALISM AND PRAGMATISM 
 
 not belong to a world of spirit by itself. Knowledge is power; 
 it is a part of conduct that brings out the other phase that is 
 connected with pragmatism, especially in Dewey's statement. 
 
 This phase is its instrumentalism. What selection, and its 
 development into reflective thought, gives us is the tools we 
 need, the instruments we need to keep up our process of 
 living in the largest sense. Knowledge is a process of getting 
 the tools, the instruments. Go back to the illustration I have 
 used above of the atoms as a source of energy. This concept 
 becomes a tool by means of which the length of the life of the 
 stars can be estimated. And when you have that, you can re- 
 late it to the age of life on the surface of the earth. 
 
 Perhaps the best statement to bring out the importance of 
 this instrumentahsm is the term "scientific apparatus." We 
 think of that generally as the actual tools of the scientist; but 
 we know that the term "apparatus" is also used for the ideas, 
 the units, the relations, the equations. When we speak of a 
 scientist's apparatus we are thinking of the very ideas of which 
 he can make use, just as he can use the things which he has in 
 his laboratory. An idea of a certain type, such as that of the 
 energy of an atom, becomes a tool by means of which one is able 
 to construct the picture of a star as a source of energy. There, 
 you see, the object as such is a means which enables one to 
 carry on a process of reconstruction such as is given in scientific 
 doctrine. 
 
 Well then, the sources of the pragmatic doctrine are these: 
 one is behavioristic psychology, which enables one to put in- 
 telligence in its proper place within the conduct of the form, 
 and to state that intelligence in terms of the activity of the form 
 itself; the other is the research process, the scientific technique, 
 which comes back to the testing of a hypothesis by its working. 
 Now, if we connect these two by recognizing that the testing in 
 its working-out means the setting-free of inhibited acts and 
 processes, we can see that both of them lead up to such a doc- 
 trine as the one I have just indicated, and that perhaps the 
 most important phase of it is this: that the process of knowing 
 
 [351]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 lies inside of the process of conduct. For this reason pragma- 
 tism has been spoken of as a practical sort of philosophy, a sort 
 of bread-and-butter philosophy. It brings the process of 
 thought, of knowledge, inside of conduct. 
 
 Because pragmatism has these two aspects, it will be well to 
 spend a little more time in their consideration. The first phase 
 is that of the motor psychology. We have referred to its de- 
 velopment into behaviorism. The other phase of the problem is 
 that of the scientific method. The rationahstic philosophies as- 
 sumed a certain structure of the object as being given in the 
 nature of the object itself, a certain structure of knowledge 
 which the object has and which also lies in the mind — as some 
 thought an innate idea, others a something which the mind 
 could directly perceive. The psychological approach of the em- 
 piricists translated this structure of the object over into the re- 
 lations of states of consciousness to each other. Substance and 
 attribute, cause and effect, and the other so-called "categories" 
 were stated in terms of the mere association of different states 
 of consciousness with each other. If they happened to be as- 
 sociated in a certain way, certain structures arose; if associ- 
 ated otherwise, other structures would have arisen. But they 
 were not structures directly, not objects as such. They were 
 mental structures, subject to mental laws. It was generally as- 
 sumed that there were structures of things that answered to 
 these mental structures, that lie behind them, as illustrated in 
 the so-called "causal theory of perception," the theory that our 
 mind is causally affected by things and that these things impress 
 themselves on the mind and that with these impressions come 
 not only the sense quahties but also the relations of these quali- 
 tative elements to each other. That is the structure of the ob- 
 /ject. Both rationahsm and empiricism assumed that there are 
 \ certain structures in the object which the mind gets hold of, and 
 y that it is through these structures that one can know the laws 
 of causation, the laws of the relationship of qualities to sub- 
 / stances, and so on. Particularly, however, it was in the law of 
 V causation that science and philosophy found the reality of
 
 REALISM AND PRAGMATISM 
 
 things. What were the uniform successions of events to each 
 other in a causal series? Everything, as far as possible, was car- 
 ried back to causal laws or uniformities. 
 
 The history of science since the Renaissance is really a his- 
 tory of the research process. At first this research was con- 
 ceived of, and still is largely conceived of, as a simple discovery 
 of something which is out there. Discoveries followed each other 
 closely, so that one statement of the object was rapidly suc- 
 ceeded by another statement. This seemed only natural, be- 
 cause men were finding out more about the world through the 
 scientific method. And this new scientific method carried with 
 it another criterion than that which belonged to the older 
 period, the criterion of experiment, of experimental tests, of ex- 
 perimentation that included observation. Exceptions arose, we 
 have seen, and a problem was formulated, and then a hypothesis 
 for the solution of the problem was presented, and then this 
 solution had to be tested. That is, one had to see whether or not 
 this new hypothesis would work. If it did, then the hypothesis 
 became an accepted theory; if it did not, a new one was substi- 
 tuted for it and subjected to the same test. 
 
 This test or experiment — the research method — in some 
 sense took the place of the mathematical method in which one 
 proceeded seemingly by demonstration, by deduction. xAt least 
 the assumption of the latter was that, if one had all the ultimate 
 elements of things, one could deduce from their mathematical 
 relations what the structure of the world is. This was essentially 
 the position of Descartes. He assumed that he could conceive 
 of the world as made up of ultimate spatial elements which were 
 moving with reference to each other, and, given this motion and 
 the spatial elements, could work out what the structure of 
 things must be. He identified matter with space itself and as- 
 sumed a great whirl of this, with the consequent movement of 
 all the difi-'erent particles in relation to each other; and he 
 undertook to show how the world arose out of such simple mo- 
 tions. He undertook to do this by means of the mathematical 
 laws of physics. Leibnitz also assumed that, if one could only 
 
 [3S3]
 
 "T^ 
 
 V 
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 get hold of these ultimate laws, it was conceivable that one 
 could work out the nature of things from therrfdixfine, the ra- 
 tionalist went on the assumption that there were certain struc- 
 tpre g of things of which the mind got hold.^-^ 
 ( ,Th e practice of research science, which I have described at 
 some length above, was continually to approach, continually to 
 seek for, new problems, and with these new problems to find new 
 hypotheses. And these new hypotheses brought with them new 
 worlds which took the place of the old worlds. The test of them 
 was one which lay in the experience of man. It was to be found 
 in the actual process of cognition as it lay in experience itself. 
 The test became the ultimate test, and from this standpoint the 
 mathematical theory simply presented an apparatus for work- 
 ing out hypotheses, for determining what the situation must be 
 within which the test could take place. But the assurance in re- 
 gard to new hypotheses, with their new structure of the world, 
 rested upon the test of experience itself. It is this scientific 
 ^method, which finds the test of the truth of a hypothesis in its 
 working^at has got its philosophic expression in the pragmatic 
 doctrine/] 
 
 This doctrine is nothing but an expression of the scientific 
 method, which is an experimental method. It has advanced by 
 the positing of hypotheses. It has advanced from problems 
 toward their solution, and these problems have called for 
 analysis. And in the case of changes that we have been describ- 
 ing, this analysis is of the type mentioned above. But, besides 
 these analyses, it is necessary that the scientist should present 
 some hypothesis as a solution to the problem. The hypothesis 
 is not simply a statement of the ultimate elements and the rela- 
 tions between them. If that were the case, one's thinking would 
 be mere deduction, mere demonstration. Given the elements 
 and their relations, we can see that possible combinations can be 
 made and conclusions deduced. That leads to the curious situa- 
 tion that Poincare has pointed out, that in mathematical sci- 
 ence we seem to advance simply by drawing the necessary con- 
 clusions from the premises. In that case there should be nothing 
 
 354
 
 REALISM AND PRAGMATISM 
 
 in the conclusion which was not in the premises; and yet these 
 sciences have advanced from one achievement to another, dis- 
 covering that which is new, reaching results which are foreign 
 to the positions from which thinking started. Mathematical sci- 
 ence has not been simply a recording of the necessary results 
 which can be drawn from a set of given premises. It has been an 
 achievement such as that found in the physical sciences. For 
 example, within mathematics itself we have seen the develop- 
 ment of so-called "transcendental numbers." How shall we 
 explain this: that we get, by a purely deductive process, results 
 not found in the premises? Actually, the conclusion that we 
 have to reach is that we are not using simply a deductive 
 process. For, after stating our problem by means of the most 
 penetrating analysis, we reach a point at which a reconstruc- 
 tion of thought takes place. The scientist, including the mathe- 
 matician, presents a hypothesis and then tests it. In mathe- 
 matics this testing of the hypothesis is generally hidden, cov- 
 ered up. The way in which the mathematician or mathematical 
 scientist justifies himself is by giving a necessary line of reason- 
 ing, and one loses the point at which the hypothesis is made. 
 
 Put it in this way: If you should take any other view of the 
 world than our own — such as that expressed by the Ptolemaic 
 theory, the geocentric theory of the world — on the basis of that 
 account you could state the positions of all the different plane- 
 tary bodies; you could tell where they would all be, could pre- 
 dict eclipses, and other relations. Up to some time in the eight- 
 eenth century you could have covered the whole field of as- 
 tronomy by a Ptolemaic account of the world. But, by work- 
 ing out that doctrine with all its implications, you could not 
 have deduced from it the Copernican, the heliocentric, theory. 
 By the most complete set of deductions possible you could not 
 have reached the latter theory as a necessary result of the 
 former. When one has accepted the statement of the Coper- 
 nican theory that the sun is the center, then you can show why 
 the conclusions that you drew from the Ptolemaic theory were 
 accurate. You can show why it is that, when the sun seems to 
 
 [355] 
 
 /
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 revolve about the earth, you can get the same statement of the 
 relative positions of sun and earth and the other planets whether 
 you regard the earth as revolving on its axis or the sun as re- 
 volving about the earth. You can take the geocentric theory 
 with the heavens revolving about the earth, or the heliocentric 
 with the earth as revolving about the sun, and show that in 
 either case you get the same relative positions of the different 
 bodies. That is, you can deduce the results of the Ptolemaic 
 theory from the results of the Copernican theory. But you 
 could not move in the opposite direction at the time when the 
 Copernican theory took the place of the Ptolemaic. To put it 
 in a more general form, later hypotheses which you present and 
 accept must be able to take up into themselves all the facts 
 gathered before, all the results which have been attained; and 
 they must be able to show how these results were reached. But 
 you cannot advance by a mere process of deduction from an 
 earlier to a later hypothesis. Of course, if your later hypothesis 
 is merely a correcting of errors, you can. If a statement of your 
 bank account is not right, you can go back and find the mistake. 
 But you cannot deduce later theories from earher ones. You 
 cannot deduce the theory of electromagnetism from a theory of 
 solid atoms. But, given the theory as it is being worked out, 
 we can state mass in terms of electromagnetism. From the 
 standpoint of mathematical science, we seem always to have 
 only a process of deduction; and the point at which the new 
 hypothesis comes in is one which is very apt to be completely 
 'hidden. It is not realized that this has taken place in the mind 
 ( of the scientist who has a new idea, for, just as soon as he has 
 ; a new idea, he states the whole in terms of a set of equations 
 where the results follow necessarily from the premises. And in 
 this way he covers up the hypothesis that he has fashioned. 
 !^ .Actually, the hypothetical method is essential to development 
 even inside the field of exact mathematics. 
 
 Mathematical technique has shown itself pecuharly powerful 
 in dealing with problems which science has approached. It suc- 
 ceeded, for example, in dealing with the problem of change.
 
 REALISM AND PRAGMATISM 
 
 That problem was never attacked by the ancient world, that Is, 
 the problem of change while it is occurring. The ancient world 
 considered change in terms of qualitative elaboration, in terms 
 of degeneration and decay, but always from the point of view 
 of the result being attained. Motion, in particular, was studied 
 in terms of spaces which were in the past, in times which had 
 elapsed. The ancient thinkers never undertook to deal with 
 each change while it was going on. 
 
 Now, that is just the problem that presented itself in dealing 
 with what in modern mathematics are called "acceleration" and 
 "deceleration," that is, increase and decrease in velocity. How 
 can you estimate the change that is uniformly taking place 
 within change itself? You have a body moving toward the 
 earth. You can measure the length of the fall and the time of the 
 fall. But this fall is not one in which velocity has been con- 
 stant. On the contrary, its velocity has been uniformly in- 
 creasing. That seemed to mean that the ratio between the dis- 
 tance passed over and the time elapsed is itself continually 
 changing. And yet this ratio always means a certain distance 
 passed over in a certain elapsed time. That is, you have to take 
 a certain distance and a certain time as uniform. We say that a 
 body has fallen so far in a half or in a thousandth of a second, 
 and that its velocity is such and such. That means it has passed 
 over this fixed portion of its path in this fixed time. Then the 
 next portion may represent a ratio which gives a greater time 
 or a greater space. But each portion of it has to be treated as if 
 it were fixed. The problem of the falling body is the problem of 
 a process in which the velocity is uniformly increased. It is that 
 problem that the "infinitesimal calculus," as Leibnitz termed 
 it, or "fluxions," as Newton called it — terms which refer to 
 identical methods at bottom — was invented to solve. These are 
 the methods which mathematics has used for dealing with a 
 seemingly insoluble problem. What Leibnitz and Newton did 
 was to find a way of stating numbers in terms of infinitesi- 
 mals, of distances that are so slight, times so short, that they 
 ca n be n eglected. A more accurate statement was one in which 
 
 [357]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 these distances were stated in terms of the law of change. A 
 still more satisfactory treatment was a statement in terms of 
 limits. That is, it was found out that as one approached a cer- 
 tain limit a certain law was indicated. And it was assumed, 
 then, that this law must be true of the limit itself. What was 
 true of the different situations as you approached this limit, 
 so to speak, must be true of the limit itself. 
 
 There are different ways of stating a mathematical procedure 
 by means of which, as I have said, the scientist was able to 
 deal with the law of change while that change itself was occur- 
 ring — of getting at the law of the change of a change. It is this 
 that has enabled science to get inside of, and to deal with, a 
 process that is going on. The method is one of analysis which 
 goes farther and farther and discovers laws by means of this con- 
 tinued analysis. It was the effectiveness of this analysis which 
 gave prestige to mathematics. It was no longer simply a static 
 science of Euclidean geometry, no longer a mere statement of 
 equations between static quantities; it was a method by means 
 of which one could get inside the processes which were them- 
 selves going on, and get the laws of those changes which were 
 occurring. 
 
 As I have said, the realistic philosophy has been a general- 
 ization, in some sense, of this mathematical method which has 
 been so remarkable in its achievements. It has enabled the sci- 
 entist to enter all sorts of fields— those of the changes of air, of 
 fluids of all sorts; those of the changes with which physics and 
 chemistry have to deal; those of the changes of heat, for ex- 
 ample. It was a method which, by its analysis, was able to get 
 back to ultimate elements — ultimate at least for the time being 
 — and get relations existing between these elements even when 
 the relations were changing. Knowledge, then, seemed to con- 
 sist in getting hold of ultimate elements and the relations be- 
 tween them and also the study, as I have said, of the relations 
 of relations, the changes of changes. It seemed to consist in 
 getting hold of the ultimate elements and relata and the rela- 
 tions between them. That has been the goal of realistic thought.
 
 REALISM AND PRAGMATISM 
 
 This movement and the pragmatic are the two which are 
 peculiarly characteristic of the modern period, for both of 
 them grow out of phases of the scientific process: the one arises 
 out of the mathematical technique which has been greatly gen- 
 eralized, so that it goes into the field of pure logic in which 
 mathematics and philosophy are brought together; the other 
 is a development of the technique of experimental science and 
 the recognition that the test of a hypothesis lies in the success- 
 ful solution of a problem and that human advance consists in 
 the solution of problems, solutions that have to be stated in 
 terms of the processes that have been stopped by the problem. 
 Progress is not toward a known goal. We cannot tell what the 
 goal is toward which we are moving, and we do not test our 
 movements or direct them according to any fixed goal that we 
 can set up. What we do do, in the face of difficulties or prob- 
 lems, is to seek solutions. We seek a hypothesis which will set \ 
 free the processes that have been stopped in the situation that 
 we call problematic. 
 
 There has been a neo-idealism in our modern philosophic / 
 thought too; but it has not played a very important part, and I ' 
 will not complicate the picture by introducing it. 
 
 559
 
 CHAPTER XVI 
 
 THE PROBLEM OF SOCIETY— HOW WE 
 BECOME SELVES 
 
 WHAT I have wanted to make evident in the last few 
 chapters is that science itself has been advancing at 
 a great rate and has become conscious of its experi- 
 mental method, which latter seemingly has been the source of 
 its advance. It has been natural that philosophy should take 
 these phases of the scientific advance as a basis for its interpre- 
 tation of life, for science, as we know, is not a thing which exists 
 by itself, even though it uses abstruse mathematical methods. 
 It is an instrument by means of which mankind, the com- 
 munity, gets control over its environment. It is, in one sense, 
 the successor to the early magic that undertook to control its 
 environment by magical methods. It is a means of control. 
 Science is something that enters into all the minutiae of life. We 
 cannot brush our teeth without it. We cannot eat or drink 
 without science coming in to tell us what should be eaten, what 
 vitamins in the upper part of the alphabet ought to be used, 
 how they can be obtained in the orange juice and the spinach 
 that is on the menu. It tells us how to blow our noses and indi- 
 cates with whom we may shake hands and whom we should 
 avoid. There is hardly a point in life at which science does not 
 tell something about the conduct that is an essential part of our 
 living. It is, in a way, independent of the community, of the 
 community life. It goes on in separate institutions, in universi- 
 ties that cloister themselves from the community, under sepa- 
 rate foundations that demand that this work shall be entirely 
 free so that the scientist may entertain whatever view he cares 
 to hold, use whatever methods he has worked out. The scientist 
 demands a freedom in his operations which is greater than that 
 
 [360I
 
 THE PROBLEM OF SOCIETY 
 
 which anyone else in the community can demand. He seems to 
 stand outside the community; and yet, as I have said, his state- 
 ments, the directions which he gives, enter into the whole 
 minutiae of social life. Society is feeling its dependence upon 
 scientific method more and more, and will continue to do so if 
 it is to go ahead intelligently. The control over community life 
 in the past has been a control of situations. The control, as 
 such, has been almost inevitably conservative. It has preserved 
 orders which have established themselves as social habits that 
 we call "institutions." A conscious social control has taken on 
 this form: The law must be obeyed; the constitution must be 
 honored; the various institutions such as the family, school, 
 courts, must be recognized and obeyed; the order which has 
 come down to us is an order which is to be preserved. And, 
 whenever the community is disturbed, we always find this re- 
 turn to the fixed order which is there, and which we do not want 
 to have shaken. It is entirely natural and, in a certain sense, 
 entirely justifiable. We have to have an order of society; and, 
 if what is taking place shakes that order, we have no evidence 
 that we will get another order to take the place of the present 
 one. We cannot afford to let that order go to pieces. We must 
 have it as a basis for our conduct. 
 
 The first step consciously taken in advance of this position 
 is that which grew out of the French Revolution, that which in 
 a certain sense incorporated the principle of revolution into in- 
 stitutions. That is, when you set up a constitution and one of 
 the articles in it is that the constitution may be changed, then 
 you have, in a certain sense, incorporated the very process of 
 revolution into the order of society. Only now it is to be an or- 
 dered, a constitutional revolution by such and such steps. But, 
 in any case, now you can change the order of things as it is 
 going on. 
 
 That is the problem of society, is it not? How can you present 
 order and structure in society and yet bring about the changes 
 that need to take place, are taking place? How can you bring 
 those changes about in orderly fashion and yet preserve order? 
 
 [361]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 To bring about change is seemingly to destroy the given order, 
 and yet society does and must change. That is the problem, to 
 incorporate the methods of change into the order of society it- 
 self. I do not mean to say that society has not always recognized 
 that change could take place, but it did not undertake to find 
 a process by means of which this should go on. It simply as- 
 sumed that change was going to take place toward some fixed 
 goal. If you are going to have a society in which everyone is 
 going to recognize the interests of everybody else — for example, 
 in which the golden rule is to be the rule of conduct, that is, 
 a society in which everyone is to make the interests of others 
 his own interest, while actually each person seems to be pur- 
 suing his own interest — how can that goal be reached? It was 
 assumed, of course, that this was to be done through a religious 
 current, through a change in the heart of the individual. But 
 in the last analysis that goal was to be reached in the world 
 to come, not in this one. That was the religious solution. The 
 order we find is one given by God for this world and must be 
 preserved. The final perfect society was to be a New Jerusalem 
 that belonged to another world. The religious goal was one of 
 otherworldliness. We have other conceptions, c ouncils of ^er- 
 fection set up, such as that of a society in which you should 
 bring liberty in the sense of everyone's respecting the rights of 
 everyone else, one's liberty being in that sense only circum- 
 scribed by intrenching on others' liberty. That is more or less 
 an abstraction. To take a practical illustration, how are you 
 to determine where the liberty of a man in the control of his 
 property is to be restricted? He needs controlling. We will 
 say that he, or rather a group of men, own shares in a railroad, 
 and that they choose to deal with rates in a fashion which will 
 serve their own interest. Well now, if they are to have com- 
 plete control over their property, and then the community 
 comes in and says that theirs is property of a different sort, that 
 their acts must have the approval of the community, how are 
 we to determine where the restriction in the control over the 
 property is to take place? 
 
 [362I
 
 THE PROBLEM OF SOCIETY 
 
 How is society to find a method for changing its own institu- 
 tions and still preserve the security of those institutions? That 
 is, in general, the problem that presents itself in its most uni- 
 versal form. You want a society that is going ahead, not a fixed 
 order, as the religious solution would have it. You want a 
 society that is progressing. Progress has become essential to in- 
 telligent lif^. Now, how are we to get ahead and change those 
 situations that need changing and yet preserve the security of 
 them? You see this is an advance in which we cannot state the 
 goal toward which we are going. We do not know what the goal 
 is. We are on the way, but we do not know where. And yet we 
 have to get some method of charting our progress. We do not 
 know where jthe^ progress is supposed to terminate, where it is 
 going. This is a seemingly insoluble problem. 
 
 Science does, in a sense, present the method for its solution. 
 That is, it recognizes that progress is of the nature of the solu- 
 tion of a problem. What these problems present are inhibitions, 
 the checking of conduct. And the solution of the problem stops 
 this checking process, sets it free so that we can go on. The 
 scientist is not looking ahead toward a goal and charting his 
 movement toward that goal. That is not the function of the sci- 
 entist. He is finding out why his system does not work, what the 
 difficulty in it is. And the test of his solution of the difficulty is 
 that his system starts working again, goes on. Science is occupied 
 with finding what the problems are that exist in the social proc- 
 ess. It finds what the problems are, what processes have been 
 definitely checked. Then it asks: How can things be so recon- 
 structed that those processes which have been checked can be 
 set going again? The illustration which I have given from the 
 field of hygiene is as good as any, but you can find similar illus- 
 trations elsewhere. 
 
 Take, as another example, the social problem of recreation, ' 
 with all the dangers that gather about its various forms, par- \ 
 ticularly about commercialized recreation. Shall we recognize >,' 
 the legitimacy of the expression of the play instinct, the free- j 
 dom for the play one wants, when at the same time we recognize
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 that dangers go along with it? You do not set up an ideal form 
 of recreation. You find out what the dangers are, just what it 
 is that finds expression in play, what the freedom is that is 
 demanded there; and you see how you can combine the control 
 or avoidance of danger with the freedom of expression. That is 
 the sort of problem we are meeting. We have to let freedom 
 of activity go on, and yet dangers must be avoided. And what 
 science does is to give a method for studying such situations. 
 Again, on the social side, or on the biological side in dealing 
 with questions of disease, we have the question of how we 
 shall deal with these problems. As a further instance, take 
 the question of crime. What are the conditions out of which 
 crime itself springs? How, on the one hand, can you protect 
 society against the criminal and yet, on the other hand, rec- 
 ognize those conditions which are responsible for the criminal 
 himself? What procedure can you set up by means of which you 
 can guard society against the criminal and at the same time 
 protect the individual against unfair conditions under which he 
 has been living? Here we have a series of clashing problems, 
 and what we have to do is to get a way which will recognize 
 that what we feel is essential in each, so that the problems can 
 be adjusted and the essential processes of Hfe can go on. When 
 we get such a method, we have the means for the solution of our 
 problems. Let me illustrate this further in the problem of juve- 
 nile crime, so-called. There we have a situation in which certain 
 definite habits embodied in our institution of the court prove un- 
 satisfactory. The child is brought before the court by the police. 
 The social habit left simply to itself would condemn the child to 
 the penitentiary and thus make a confirmed criminal out of him. 
 But it is possible to modify those habits by what we call the 
 "scientific method." 
 
 What I wish to point out is that the scientific method, as 
 such, is, after all, only the evolutionary process grown self- 
 conscious. We look back over the history of plant and animal 
 life on the face of the globe and see how forms have developed 
 slowly by the trial-and-error method. There are slight varia- 
 
 [364]
 
 THE PROBLEM OF SOCIETY 
 
 tions that take place in the individual forms and occasional 
 more pronounced variations that we call "mutations." Out of 
 these, different forms gradually arise. But the solution of the 
 particular problem of an animal — the food problem, we will 
 say — is one which may take thousands of years to solve in the 
 gradual development of a certain form. A form which passes, 
 let us say, from the eating of meat to the eating of vegetables 
 develops a type of stomach capable of handling this latter kind 
 of food. Here we have a problem which is met gradually by the 
 a:ppearance of some form that does commence to develop an 
 adjustment to the problem, and we can assume that from its 
 progeny those particular forms will be selected which are 
 adapted to such digestion. It is a problem which has to be met 
 if there is to be development, and the development takes place 
 by the seemingly incidental appearance of those forms which 
 happen to be better able than others to meet the peculiar de- 
 mands set up. If we put ourselves in the same place, there is the 
 same problem. The food problem faces us as it does all other 
 animal forms. We have to get our food from both the vegetable 
 and the animal kingdoms. But if it is a question of our being able 
 to get the food that is shut up inside a cellulose covering, we do 
 not wait through long periods until we develop stomachs which 
 will be able to digest this substance. We work out a milling 
 process by means of which we set free that which is digestible. 
 That is, we solve the problem directly by what we call the 
 "scientific method." Here is a certain necessity: the food which 
 we need is shut off from us by a cellulose covering. We work 
 out a mechanism to get rid of this covering. There is an evo- 
 lutionary problem made self-conscious. The problem is stated 
 in a definite form; this, in turn, excites the imagination to 
 the formation of a possible hypothesis which will serve as the 
 solution of it; and then we set out to test the solution. 
 
 The same process is found in social development, in the for- ) 
 mation of great societies among both invertebrates and verte- ' 
 brates, through a principle of organization. Societies develop, 
 just as animal forms develop, by adjusting themselves to the ) 
 
 [365]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 problems that they find before them. They have food problems, 
 problems of climate, just as individual animals do; but they 
 meet them in a social fashion. When we reach the human form 
 with its capacity for indicating what is important in a situation, 
 through the process of analysis; when we get to the position in 
 which a mind can arise in the individual form, that is, where the 
 individual can come back upon himself and stimulate himself 
 just as he stimulates others; where the individual can call out 
 in himself the attitude of the whole group; where he can acquire 
 the knowledge that belongs to the whole community; where he 
 can respond as the whole community responds under certain 
 conditions when they direct this organized intelligence toward 
 particular ends; then we have this process which provides solu- 
 tions for problems working in a self-conscious way. In it we 
 have the evolution of the human mind which makes use directly 
 of the sort of intelligence which has been developed in the whole 
 process of evolution. It makes use of it by the direct method 
 that we call "mental." If one goes back to a primitive society, 
 one finds the beginnings of the evolution of what we call "insti- 
 tutions." Now these institutions are, after all, the habits of 
 individuals in their interrelation with each other, the type of 
 habit that is handed down from one generation to another. 
 And we can study the growth of these habits as we can study 
 the growth and behavior of an animal. 
 
 That is where science comes in to aid society in getting a 
 method of progress. It understands the background of these 
 problems, the processes out of which they have developed; and 
 it has a method of attacking them. It states the problem in 
 terms of checked processes; and then it has a test of the sug- 
 gested solution by seeing whether those processes can continue 
 or not. That is as valuable — in a certain sense more valuable 
 — a contribution of science as any of its immediate results 
 that we can gather together. This sort of method enables us to 
 keep the order of society and yet to change that order within 
 the process itself. It is a recognition that intelligence expresses 
 itself in the solution of problems. That is the way in which evo- 
 
 [366]
 
 THE PROBLEM OF SOCIETY 
 
 lution is taking place in the appearance of problems in life. 
 Living forms have found themselves up against problematic 
 situations: their food gone, the climate changed, new enemies 
 coming in. The method which nature has followed, if we 
 may speak so anthropomorphically, has been the production 
 of variations until finally some one variation has arisen which 
 has survived. Well, what science is doing is making this method 
 of trial and error a conscious method. 
 
 Up to this period the so-called "social sciences" have been 
 gathered about the more or less dogmatic theory of certain 
 institutions. It was assumed that each institution as such 
 stood upon certain rational doctrines, whether those of the 
 family, the state, the church, the school, or the court. The early 
 theory was that these institutions were established directly by 
 God. The divine right of kings was simply the assertion that the 
 state had as divine an origin as the church; and, of course, it 
 was assumed that God was also responsible for the ordering of 
 the family and the other institutions. They all came back to a 
 direct structure which was given to them. If the theories did not 
 place this structure in divine ordinance, they brought it back 
 to certain natures in the institutions themselves. And it was as- 
 sumed that you could work out the theory which would deter- 
 mine what the institutions ought to be. (The development of 
 evolutionary doctrine had as great an effect in this field as any 
 it had in biology. Spencer, and others following immediately in 
 his path, carried over the evolutionary theory into the develop- 
 ment of human institutions. People went back to primitive 
 societies, which at first were regarded as much more primitive 
 than they were, and then undertook to show how, out of the 
 life of these people^ different institutions arose through a 
 process of evolutional 
 
 I pointed out earlier that a certain part of the stimulus which 
 directed this thought came from the Hegelian movement. The 
 Hegelian doctrine was in one sense an evolutionary one. At) 
 least it was particularly interested in the development of what \ 
 we term "self-consciousness," in the process of thinking whereJ 
 
 [ 367 ]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 that arose. And it was the Hegehan thinkers who turned to the 
 study of human institutions, but they did so on the economic 
 and the pohtical side. On the economic side, we have the Marxi- 
 an doctrine of the human institution in the economic process. 
 On the pohtical side, we have the development of the state, es- 
 pecially the city-state. Hegel's son Karl was quite a notable 
 author in the early study of the city-state, particularly of the 
 way in which it developed. The whole study of so complex a 
 dogmatic structure as the Roman law, for example, was brought 
 back to an evolutionary consideration. Later, attention was di- 
 rected toward social forms as social forms, apart from any dog- 
 matic structure that lay behind them. 
 
 Take, again, the attitude of the community toward crime. 
 On the evolutionary side, you go back to a situation, we will 
 say, of blood vengeance. A man from one clan kills a man from 
 another. Immediately there arises within the injured clan a 
 man who is determined to revenge the death by killing someone 
 from the other clan, and the next of kin sets out to kill the 
 slayer. When he accomplishes this, he sets up at once the need 
 of vengeance on the part of the first group. Again, the next of 
 kin goes out to slay in his turn. And this process goes on until, 
 we will say, the clans are nearly exterminated. Well now, when 
 clans were brought together in a tribe in order to defend them- 
 selves against other tribes, such a decimation of fighting 
 members of the group became a serious matter, and the tribe 
 came to consider how this problem could be met. A court was 
 worked out in which vengeance took the form of paying a fine. 
 And some sort of a court had to be constituted which should 
 pass upon obligations. In this way a means was gradually built 
 up of getting rid of blood vengeance. There you have an evo- 
 lutionary process in which the court arises. 
 
 When it is carried through and it becomes necessary to organ- 
 ize society more exactly and fit the penalty more definitely to 
 what is felt to be the character of the crime, there arise all the 
 penalties which belong to a court of law. And we get the insti- 
 tution of criminal law which still carries over some of this sense 
 
 [368]
 
 THE PROBLEM OF SOCIETY 
 
 of vengeance which is to be enacted. There must be some 
 suffering on the part of the man who has gone against the inter- 
 ests of the community, who has trespassed on the rights of others. 
 In the older, medieval state the community was called together 
 to witness the suffering of the individual who was being pun- 
 ished. The community thus got satisfaction out of the venge- 
 ance, particularly any specific individuals who were themselves 
 injured by the so-called criminal. That element of vengeance 
 in a sense demands that where some particularly outrageous 
 crime has been committed, the community feels the need for 
 somebody to suffer. And under such circumstances it is diffi- 
 cult to get impartial justice. It becomes more important to the 
 community that someone should suffer than that the specific 
 individual should suffer. So in our criminal law we have this 
 motive of exacting suffering, and we have a partially worked- 
 out theory which states that where a person has committed a 
 crime he should pay by a certain amount of suffering for the 
 wrong he has done. If the wrong is great, he must suffer more 
 than if it is a lesser wrong. So we inflict punishment by putting 
 him in prison. If the sin is heinous, he is put in for ten or 
 twenty years; if lighter, for perhaps only a few weeks or months. 
 We fit the punishment to the crime. 
 
 But we know that that process does not work at all. We 
 have no such exactly measured sets of sufferings as to be able 
 to put them accurately over against wrongs. When the sense 
 of vengeance has died down, we are not sure whether we want 
 the other person to suffer at all. We want to get rid of crime. 
 And so we change our theory from wanting the person to suffer 
 for a wrong he has done to seeing that we keep him from doing 
 the same wrong again. So we have retribution, not in the sense 
 of vengeance but as repression of crime itself. But you know 
 how difficult it is to work those two motives together, trying ' 
 to find out just how much repression of crime does take place 
 through the action of the law. And when we come to juvenile 
 offenses, we feel the situation should be approached from an 
 entirely different standpoint. So we put aside criminal law, and 
 
 [369]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 we have the judge sitting with the boy or girl; we get members 
 of the family, perhaps some person interested in social service, 
 possibly the school teacher, and they all talk it over, and try to 
 find out just why what happened did happen, and they attempt 
 to discover some sort of situation by means of which the 
 criminal can be got back into a social position and be kept from 
 doing the sort of thing he has done in the past. Thus we try to 
 get rid of crime by a social process. That parole system has been 
 carried over from the juvenile court into the adult court. Very 
 good results have been obtained where politics has not come in 
 to corrupt the process. There we have the development of an 
 institution from both ends, so to speak. You can see how, out of 
 the attitude of vengeance, the court itself has arisen, and then 
 how, out of the operation of an institution of that sort, one 
 having conflicting motives in it, such as repression of crime on 
 the one hand and a demand for vengeance on the other, that 
 institution can be approached from the standpoint of reinstat- 
 ing the individual in society. There is a social problem here, 
 the problem of an individual who has abused the rights of some- 
 body else but whom we want to put back in the social situation 
 so that he will not do it again. There we have the development 
 of a social process by a real scientific method. 
 
 We try to state the problem as carefully as we can. Here is a 
 boy who has allied himself with a gang and has been carried 
 away with the sense of adventure and has committed a burglary 
 which could send him to the penitentiary for years. But that 
 would be absurd. It would make a criminal out of him, and no 
 good would be accomphshed at all. It is very questionable 
 whether it would even keep other boys from doing the same 
 thing, for, of course, the sense of adventure makes the attitude 
 of the criminal something attractive in itself. It is astonishing 
 how, when we are somev/hat relaxed by an attack of grippe 
 or disease, we turn to criminal tales for our relief! If you go 
 through the hospitals of the city, you will find such tales being 
 read in great quantities. The creation of crime taken in itself 
 can be looked at from the point of view of adventure, especially 
 
 [370]
 
 THE PROBLEM OF SOCIETY 
 
 for the adolescent. If you approach things scientifically, you 
 can see what the attitude is. You can see that the boy has ap- 
 proached it from this attitude of adventure, does not realize its 
 import; and if he is made to realize it, you can make a very 
 good citizen indeed out of him. What you want to do, then, is 
 to state your social situation in such a fashion that you can re- 
 constitute the boy as a normal citizen, give him opportunities 
 for play in which he can express his demand for adventure with 
 a recognition of what the rights are that make a possibility of 
 citizenship. That has to be brought home to him. He wants to 
 be a citizen in the community, and he has to see that he must 
 have the same respect for the rights of others that he claims for 
 himself. And at the same time you must have a situation where 
 the boy can lead a normal life. Work out specific hypotheses, and 
 by means of them you may get the boy back into society again. 
 Take any institution as such and look at it from the stand- 
 point of evolution, the way in which that is determined in 
 society, and then you can see the development in society it- 
 self of a technique which we call the "scientific technique," 
 but it is a technique which is simply doing consciously what 
 takes place naturally in the evolution of forms. I have been 
 pointing out that the process of evolution is one that meets 
 such a problem as that of blood vengeance, where members 
 of the tribe are at work killing each other as fast as they 
 can. And the community works out there — in a somewhat 
 bungling fashion, if you like — a court which undertakes to meet 
 this situation. It becomes established, acquires a dogmatic 
 structure, holds on to motives which belonged to the earlier 
 situation. But finally we see the situation as one in which we 
 try to do with self-consciousness what took place by a process 
 of evolution. That is, we try to state the problem with refer- 
 ence to a particular child; we want to see what can be done 
 toward bringing together what was a healthful expression of 
 adventure on the part of the boy with rights which he himself 
 claims. So the juvenile court represents a self-conscious applica- 
 
 [371]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 tion of the very process of evolution out of which the courts 
 themselves arose. 
 
 What I am trying to do is to connect this entire evolution- 
 ary process with social organization in its most complex ex- 
 pression, and as that within which arise the very individuals 
 through whose life-process it works, giving birth to just such 
 elements as are involved in the development of selves. And, as 
 I have said, the life-process itself is brought to consciousness 
 in the conduct of the individual form, in his so-called "self- 
 consciousness." He gets a much more effective control over his 
 environment than the ox can get over its. The process is one 
 in which, in a certain sense, control is within his own grasp. If 
 you think of it, the human being as a social form has actually 
 got relatively complete control over his environment. The ani- 
 mal gets a certain sHght kind of control over its environment; 
 but the human form, in societies, can determine what vegeta- 
 tion shall grow, what animals shall exist besides itself; it can 
 control its own climate, erect its own buildings. It has, in a 
 biological sense, complete control over its own environment. 
 That is, it has attained to a remarkable degree an end which is 
 implied in the whole living process — the control by the form of 
 the environment within which it hves. To a degree human 
 society has reached that goal. 
 
 It has often been pointed out, of course, that evolution does 
 not reach any goal. The concept means simply the adaptation 
 of a form to a certain environment. But adaptation is not 
 simply the fitting of the form into the environment, it carries 
 with it some degree of control over that environment. And in 
 the case of the human form, of human society, we have that 
 adaptation expressing itself in a very high degree of control. 
 Of course, we cannot change the chemical and physical struc- 
 ture o£ things, but we can make them over into those forms that 
 we ourselves need and which are of value to us. That is possible 
 for us; and, as I have said with reference to the question of food 
 and to the question of climatic influences, we can in a very large 
 degree determine that control. So there is, within limits, a de- 
 
 [372]
 
 THE PROBLEM OF SOCIETY 
 
 velopment toward complete adaptation where that adaptation 
 expresses itself in control over the environment. And in that 
 sense I think we can fairly say that human organization, as a 
 social organization, does exercise control and has in that sense 
 reached a certain goal of development. 
 
 Well now, this social process I have been sketching in these 
 broad strokes has become of increasing interest to reflective 
 thought throughout this whole period. Of course, to some ex- 
 tent it has always been of essential interest to man in the social 
 situation in which he lives. What I am referring to specifically 
 is the character of the social organism — its organization, its his- 
 tory, and the conditions under which it can be controlled, ^he 
 statement of the functions of the different parts of the social 
 organism Ts that study which we have in a so-called "social 
 science," and more particularly in sociology. This had its incep- 
 tion in the thought of Comte, and then was enriched by the idea 
 of evolution as brought in by Spencer. From that time on, the 
 attempt to understand human society as an organization has , 
 been of increasing interest to the Western world. Men have 
 been trying to see the habits out of which society has arisen, > 
 to find out under what conditions it operates, and how prob- : 
 lems that arise in it can be definitely controlled. This involves \ 
 looking at human institutions from the standpoint I have sug- \ 
 gested, that is, as social habits. 
 
 While during the century there has been this increased inter- 
 est in the study of the social organization, there has been a cor- 
 responding interest in the experience of the individual. Part of 
 this is due to our scientific attitude. As we have seen, it is the 
 unique experience of the scientist that presents the problem, and 
 it is in the mind of the scientist that the hypothesis arises. It is 
 not only in the scientist as such that this uniqueness of the 
 experience has been recognized as of importance. After all, the 
 scientist is simply making a technique out of human intelli- 
 gence. His method is the same as that of all intelligent beings, 
 even though it involves a simple rendering in self-consciousness 
 of the whole process of evolution. That in the experience of all 
 
 [373]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 individuals which is pecuHar to the individual, that which is 
 unique in his experience, is of importance; and what the last 
 century increasingly recognized was the importance of these 
 unique individual experiences. 
 
 The emotional side of these experiences, as we know, registers 
 itself in the folk poetry, in the lyric expression of the self — a 
 registration of values from the point of view of the individual. 
 There have always been some neat ways of scientific observa- 
 tion, although accurate presentation of it belongs really to the 
 modern world, that world which has grown up since the period 
 of the Renaissance. But what I am particularly caUing atten- 
 tion to is the interest we have in that which is peculiar to the 
 individual as it is revealed in our literature and in our journals, 
 our newspapers. The curious thing about the newspaper is^ that 
 it records happenings to individual persons; and it assumes that 
 it is of interest to us to know that a certain individual at a 
 certain time was run over by an automobile or that a certain 
 person fell down, hurt himself in such and such a way, and 
 that John or Jane has had such and such an experience in such 
 a place. It is curious to note the interest that centers about indi- 
 viduals as such, and the assumption that the world at large 
 will be interested in these happenings. 
 
 Well now, what I want to connect with this journalese 
 interest in happenings to particular individuals is the character 
 of our Hterature, not simply in its lyric poetry, where the emo- 
 tion of the individual is presented so that it can be handed on 
 to others, but particularly in our novels and the drama. In these 
 we have this interest in the experience of the individual as such 
 presented as it has been during the last century, because it does 
 answer to some very profound interest on the part of all the 
 individuals who take up their morning and evening papers, who 
 read all sorts of stories and novels, go to movies, listen to the 
 radio, get those experiences of other individuals which, as I say, 
 have an interest for us which is rather astonishing when one just 
 stands off and looks at the situation. They seem to be so unre- 
 lated. We seem to be interested in just a particular occurrence. 
 
 [374]
 
 THE PROBLEM OF SOCIETY 
 
 We speak of it as sensational and perhaps are apt to regard it 
 as an attitude not entirely helpful on our part when we are 
 interested in this fashion. 
 
 What is the import of this interest? I wanted to bring this up 
 in sharp contrast to what I am going to develop later, that is, 
 that the human self arises through its ability to take the attitude 
 of the group to which he belongs — because he can talk to himself 
 in terms of the community to which he belongs and lay upon 
 himself the responsibilities that belong to the community; be- 
 cause he can recognize his own duties as over against others — 
 that is what constitutes the self as such. And there you see what 
 we have emphasized, as peculiar to others, that which is both 
 individual and which is habitual. The stru cture of society lies in 
 these social habits, and only in so far as we can take these social 
 habits into ourselves can we become selves. 
 
 We speak of this interest on the emotional side as "sympathy" 
 — passing into the attitude of the other, taking the role of the 
 other, feeling the other's joys and sorrows. That is the effective 
 side of it. What we call the "intellectual side," the "rational 
 side," is the recognition of common stimuli, of common emo- 
 tions which call out responses in every member of the group. 
 And in so far as one indicates this common character to others, 
 he indicates it to himself. In this way, of course, by taking the 
 attitude of the others in the group in their co-operative, highly 
 complex activity, the individual is able to enter into their expe- 
 riences. The engineer is able to direct vast groups of individuals 
 in a highly complex process. But in every direction he gives, he 
 takes the attitude of the person whom he is directing. It has the 
 same meaning to him that it has to others. We enter in that 
 way into the attitudes of others, and in that way we make our 
 very complex societies possible. This development of a form 
 that is able so to communicate with others that it takes on atti- 
 tudes of those in the group, that it talks to itself as it talks to 
 others, that imports into its own life this conversation, and sets 
 up an inner forum in which it works out the process that it is 
 going to carry on, and so brings it to public consideration with 
 
 [375]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 the advantage of that previous rehearsing, is all important. 
 Sometimes we find that we can best think out an argument by 
 supposing that we are talking to somebody who takes one par- 
 ticular side. As we say, we have an argument to present, and 
 we think how we will present it to that individual. And as soon 
 as we present it, we know that he would reply in a certain way. 
 Then we reply in a certain fashion to him. Sometimes it is 
 easier to carry out such a conversation by picking out a particu- 
 lar protagonist we know. In that way in the night hours we are 
 apt to go through distressing conversations we have to carry 
 out the next day. That is the process of thought. It is taking 
 the attitude of others, talking to other people, and then replying 
 in their language. That is what constitutes thinking. 
 
 Of course, conditions are different in a human society than in 
 simpler situations. I was pointing out the difference between a 
 human society and a society of invertebrates. The principle of 
 organization is not that of physiological plasticity, not that of 
 holding the form itself physiologically to its particular function; 
 it is rather the principle of organization as found in the form of 
 human intercommunication and participation. It is what the 
 human individual puts into the form of significant symbols 
 through the use of gestures. He is then able to place himselfm 
 the attitude of others, particularly into just such attitudes as those 
 I have spoken of as human institutions. If institutions are sodal 
 habits, they represent certain definite attitudes that people as- 
 sume under certain given social conditions. So that the indi- 
 vidual, in so far as he does take the role of others, can take the 
 habitual attitude of the community over against such social 
 situations as these. 
 
 As I have pointed out, he does this in the process of indicating 
 to others the important elements in a situation, pointing out 
 those elements which are of importance in the social process, in a 
 situation that represents one of these social habits, such as the 
 family situation; one that involves the rights of different indi- 
 viduals in the community, such as a political situation. What 
 the individual does is to indicate what the important characters 
 
 [376]
 
 THE PROBLEM OF SOCIETY 
 
 in a co-operative process are. He indicates this to other mem- 
 bers of the community; but as we shall see, especially in the case 
 of vocal gestures, he indicates it to himself as to others; and just 
 in so far as he does indicate it to himself as to others, he tends to 
 call out in himself the same attitude as in others. There is a 
 common attitude, that is, one which all assume under certain 
 habitual situations. Through the use of language, through the 
 use of the significant symbol, then, the individual does take the 
 attitude of others, especially these common attitudes, so that he 
 finds himself taking the same attitude toward himself that the 
 community takes. This, of course, is what gives the principle of 
 social control, not simply the social control that results from 
 blind habit, but a social control that comes from the individual 
 assuming the same attitude toward himself that the community 
 assumes toward him. In a habitual situation everyone takes a 
 certain attitude in so far as it is habitual, in so far as the habit 
 is one which all have taken, that is, in so far as you have what 
 are called "institutions." If, now, the individual calls out this 
 attitude in others by a gesture, by a word which affects himself 
 just as it affects others, then he will call out the same attitude 
 in himself that he calls out in others. In this way he will be 
 acting toward himself as others act toward him. He will ad- 
 monish himself as others would. That is, he will recognize what 
 are his duties as well as what are his rights. He takes the atti- 
 tude of the community toward himself. This gives the princi- 
 pal method of organization which, as I have said, we can study 
 from the standpoint of a behavioristic psychology, a method • 
 which belongs to human society and distinguishes it from social 
 organizations which one finds among ants and bees and ter- 
 mites. There one finds societies that run up into the millions; 
 and we find these as finely organized as human societies are, and 
 so organized that individuals' lives are largely determined by 
 the life-process of the whole. We get far more complex and intri- 
 cate organization, of course, in human society than among the 
 invertebrates. For this principle to which I have referred — or- 
 ganization through communication and participation — makes 
 
 [377]
 
 THOUGHT IN Tht iNiiMiTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 an almost indefinite organization possible. Now the study of the 
 way in which this organization takes place, the history of it,~t1ie 
 evolution of it, is what has been opened up to the human mind 
 in the last century. We now see the way in which out of a 
 primitive group there can gradually arise the very highly organ- 
 ized societies of the present day. We can study that process in 
 the evolution of institutions, and we can see how that process 
 is modified or may be modified in the presence of probl^^jrnatic 
 situations. 
 
 This evolution also takes place in human society, but here 
 it takes place not through physiological plasticity, not through 
 the development of peculiar physiological functions on the part 
 of the separate individuals. It takes place through the develop- 
 ment of what has been referred to on the logical side as a uni- 
 verse of discourse. That is, it takes place through communica- 
 tion and participation on the part of the different individuals in 
 common activities. It takes place through the development of 
 significant symbols. It is accomplished almost entirely through 
 the development of vocal gestures, through the capacity of the 
 individual to indicate by means of his own gestures to other 
 forms and also to himself, those elements which are of impor- 
 tance in co-operative activity. So far as we can see, the stimuli 
 that keep the invertebrates occupied are those of odor, contact. 
 But we find no evidence of any language among them. It is 
 through physiological development and plasticity that their 
 very complex communities operate. But the human form, sub- 
 ject to no such development as this, can be interwoven into a 
 community activity through its ability to respond to the ges- 
 tures of other forms that indicate to it the stimuli to which it 
 is to respond. We point things out. This pointing-out process 
 may be with the finger, by an attitude of body, by direction of 
 head and eyes; but as a rule it is by means of the vocal gesture, 
 that is, a certain vocal symbol that indicates something to an- 
 other individual and to which he responds. Such indication as 
 this sets up a certain definite process of pointing out to other in- 
 
 [378]
 
 THE PROBLEM OF SOCIETY 
 
 dividuals in the group what is of importance in this co-operative 
 activity. 
 
 The pecuhar importance of the vocal gesture is that it affects 
 the individual who makes it just as much as it affects the indi- 
 vidual to whom it is directed. We hear what we say; if we are 
 talking with our fingers we see what we are saying; if with atti- 
 tudes of the body, we feel what we are saying. The effect of the 
 attitude which we produce in others comes back on ourselves. 
 It is in this way that participation arises out of communication. 
 When we indicate something to another form, we are calling out 
 in that other individual a certain response. The very gesture 
 we make calls out a certain sort of response in him. If that ges- 
 ture affects us as it affects him, it has a tendency to call out 
 some response in ourselves. The gesture that affects another, 
 when it is a vocal gesture, is one which may have the tendency 
 to influence the speaker as it influences others. The common 
 expression of this is that a man knows what he is saying when 
 the meaning of what he is saying comes to him as really as it 
 goes to another. He is affected just as the other is. If the mean- 
 ing of what he says affects the other, it affects himself in the 
 same way. The result of this is that the individual who speaks, 
 in some sense takes the attitude of the other whom he addresses. 
 We are familiar with this in giving directions to another person 
 to do something. We find ourselves affected by the same direc- 
 tion. We are ready to do the thing and perhaps become irritated 
 by the awkwardness of the other and insist on doing it ourselves. 
 We have called out in ourselves the same response we have asked 
 for in another person. We are taking his attitude. It is through 
 this sort of participation, this taking the attitudes of other indi- 
 viduals, that the peculiar character of human intelligence is con-i 
 stituted. We say something that means something to a cer-\ 
 tain group. But it not only means that to the group, it also^ 
 means that to us. It has the same meaning for both. 
 
 There is a certain, what we would call, "unconscious direc- 
 tion" that takes place in lower vertebrate forms. A group of 
 animals is said to set up a sentinel. Some one form is more sensi- 
 
 [379]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 tive than others to stimuli of danger. Now the action on the part 
 of this one which is more sensitive than the rest, the action of 
 running from danger, for example, does cause the other forms 
 to run also. But the first one is not giving a signal in the 
 human sense. It is not aware of giving such directions. Its mere 
 running constitutes a stimulus to the other forms to run in the 
 same direction. It works in the same way as if the form knew 
 what its business was, to catch the first evidence of the enemy 
 and go give the evidence of it to the whole group, thus setting 
 them all going. But in the experience of the animal there is no 
 such procedure, no such content. The animal does not influ- 
 ence himself as he influences others. He does not tell himself of 
 the danger as he tells it to others. He merely runs away^ 
 
 The outstanding characteristic in human communication is 
 that one is making a declaration, pointing out something that is 
 common in meaning to the whole group and to the individual, 
 so that the individual is taking the attitude of the whole group, 
 so far as there is any definite meaning given. When a man calls 
 out "Fire!" he is not only exciting other people but himself in 
 the same fashion. He knows what he is about. That, you see, 
 constitutes biologically what we refer to as a "uniyjsrse .of dis- 
 course." It is a common meaning which is communicated to 
 everyone and at the same time is communicated to the self. The 
 individual is directing other people how to act, and he is taking 
 the attitude of the other people whom he is directing. If in this 
 attitude of the other person he makes an objection, he is doing 
 what the other person would do, and he is also carrying on the 
 process which we call "thought." That is, you indicate to some- 
 body else that he is to do something, and he objects to it. Well 
 now, the person might in his attitude of the other make the same 
 objection himself. You reply to the other person, trying to point 
 out his mistake or admitting your own. In the same way, if you 
 make some objection, you reply to your own objection or admit 
 your mistake to yourself. Thinking is a process of conversation 
 with one's self when the individual takes the attitude of the 
 other, especially when he takes the common attitude of the 
 
 [380]
 
 THE PROBLEM OF SOCIETY 
 
 whole group, when the symbol that he uses is a common symbol, 
 has a meaning common to the entire group, to everyone who is 
 in it and anyone who might be in it. It is a process of com- 
 munication with participation in the experience of other people. 
 
 The mechanism that we use for this process is words, vocal 
 gestures. And we need, of course, only a very few of these as 
 compared with those we need when talking to others. A single 
 symbol is enough to call out necessary responses. But it is just 
 as really a conversation in terms of the significant symbols of 
 language as if the whole process were expressed. We sometimes 
 do our thinking out loud, in fully organized sentences; and one's 
 thought can always presumably be developed into a complete 
 grammatical unit. That is what constitutes thinking. 
 
 Now, it is this inner thought, this inner flow of speech and 
 what it means — that is, words with their meanings — that call 
 out intelligent response; it is this that constitutes the mind, in so 
 far as that lies in the experience of the form. But this is only a 
 part of the whole social process, for the self has arisen in that 
 social process; it has its being there. Of course, you could carry 
 such a self as that over to a Robinson Crusoe island and leave 
 him by himself, and he could carry that social process on by 
 himself and extend it to his pets. He carries that on by himself, 
 but it is only because he has grown up in society, because he can 
 take attitudes and roles of others, that he can accomplish this. 
 
 This mental process, then, is one which has evolved in the 
 social process of which it is a part. And it belongs to the difi^er- 
 ent organisms that lie inside of this larger social process. We 
 can approach it from the standpoint of evolution; and we can 
 approach it more particularly from the standpoint of behavior- 
 istic psychology, where we can get back to what expresses itself 
 in the mind. We also can get somewhat underneath the experi- 
 ence that goes on in the self in what we term "pathological 
 psychology," a psychology that enables us to get hold of the 
 various processes that are not themselves evidenced in this 
 stream of inner conversation to which I have referred. The 
 term "pathological" simply means that this type of psychology 
 
 [381] 
 
 ■^
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 has been pursued largely in dealing with pathological cases. It 
 is a study, for example, of the way in which our special world 
 arises in our experience through our distance senses and our 
 contact experiences, through the collation of the elements which 
 we reach through vision with the elements which we reach 
 through the tactual sense, the process by which we have built 
 up an implemental world by the use of our hands; for a particu- 
 lar instance, the process by which, for purposes of food, we 
 reach with the hand for a distant object. Man comes into that 
 process and gives to the organism a physical thing which is not 
 the food, not the consummation, whatever it may be, but a 
 physical thing. Our world is made up out of physical things. 
 We deal with things as if we could handle them. We think of 
 things as being "pulverized," broken up into parts so we can get 
 hold of them. A physical thing is a unit into which we break up 
 our environment. The process by which we build our world of 
 physical things is a process, too, of which we are not immediate- 
 ly conscious. The child, the infant that is uncertainly groping 
 toward a ball, is gradually building up a world of such physical 
 things; but the process takes place underneath the level of our 
 own consciousness. We cannot get at it in its immediate incep- 
 tion, only indirectly by this type of psychology, a psychology 
 that does enable us to get into the workings of the individual 
 process as it lies inside of the whole social process to which it 
 belongs. 
 
 And this is what constitutes the self as such. A self which is 
 so evidently a social individual that it can exist only in a group 
 of social individuals is as much a result of the process of evolu- 
 tion as other biological forms. A form that can co-operate with 
 others through the use of significant symbols, set up attitudes 
 of others and respond to them, is possible through the develop- 
 ment of great tracts in the central nervous system that are con- 
 nected with our processes of articulation, with the ear, and so 
 with the various movements that can go on in the human form. 
 But they are not circumscribed within the conduct of a single 
 form. They belong to the group. And the process is just as 
 
 [382]
 
 THE PROBLEM OF SOCIETY 
 
 much an evolution as is the queen bee or the fighter among the 
 ants. In those instances we get a certain particular evolution 
 that is taking place, belonging to a certain particular society, 
 one which could exist only in such a society. The same is true of 
 the self. That is, an individual who affects himself as he affects 
 another; who takes the attitude of the other in so far as he af- 
 fects the other, in so far as he is using what we term "intelligible 
 speech;" who knows what he himself is saying, in so far as he is 
 directing his indications by these significant symbols to others 
 with the recognition that they have the same meaning for them 
 as for him; such an individual is, of course, a phase of the devel- 
 opment of the social form. This is a branch of what we term 
 "behavioristic psychology," one in which we can see how the 
 self as such has developed. 
 
 What I want to make evident is that the development, the 
 evolution, of mind as well as of institutions is a social evolution. 
 As I have just stated, society in its organization is a form, a 
 species that has developed; and it has many forms developing 
 within it. You see, for example, at the present time in reference 
 to the question of food that the problem is one which is met by 
 very intricate social organizations. Where the individual him- 
 self responds simply to the odor or sight of food, we recognize 
 it as a biological process. When the whole community responds 
 to the need of food by the organization of its industries, its 
 methods of agriculture, of milling, of transportation, of cooking 
 and preparation, we have the same process, only now not by 
 separate individuals but by a social organization; and that 
 organization is just as really an evolution as the stomach of the 
 ox. That stomach is very complicated. The evolution of a social 
 mechanism by which grain is sowed and reaped in South 
 America and North America, is carried to great milling estab- 
 lishments and there converted into flour, and then carried and 
 distributed by dealers so that the individual groups can get hold 
 of it and prepare it in such fashion that it can be readily assimi- 
 lated — that is just as much evolution as the development of 
 bacteriological laboratories in the digestive tract of an ox. It is
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 a process, however, which takes place much more rapidly than 
 it is taking place in the case of the ox. There we have something 
 that answers to a physiological plasticity in the case of inverte- 
 brates — the adjustment of different organs within the body to 
 accomplish what we accomplish by mechanical means. It is 
 this ability to control our environment that gives us what we 
 term "mind." " """" "~""" " 
 
 What we attach to the term "mind" particularly is its 
 privacy. It belongs to the individual. And what takes place 
 there takes place, we say, in the experience of the individual. 
 He may make it accessible to others by telling about it. He may 
 talk out loud. He may publish. He may indicate even by his 
 uncontrolled gestures what his frame of mind is. But there is 
 that which goes on inside of a man's mind that never gets pub- 
 lished, something that takes place there within the experience 
 of the individual. Part of it, of course, is what answers to what 
 is going on in the physiological mechanism there, the suffering 
 that belongs to one's teeth, the pleasure one gets in the palate. 
 These are experiences which he has for himself because they are 
 taking place within his own organism. But, though they are 
 taking place within his own organism, and so no one else can ex- 
 perience the same thing, the organism does not experience it as 
 its own — that is, it does not realize that the experience is its 
 own — until a self has arisen. We have no reason to assume, for 
 example, that in lower animals there are such entities as selves; 
 and if no such entities, then that which takes place within the 
 organism cannot be identified with such a self. There is pain; 
 there is pleasure; there are feelings which are not exactly painful 
 or pleasurable, such as heat and cold. These various feelings 
 belong to the organism, the tensions of the various muscles, the 
 movements of the joints, so essential in our intelligent social 
 conduct. These belong to the organism in a certain sense. But 
 the individual animal does not associate them with a self be- 
 cause it has no self; it is not a self. 
 
 A self can arise only where there is a social process within 
 which this self has had its initiation. It arises within that proc- 
 
 [384]
 
 THE PROBLEM OF SOCIETY 
 
 ess. For that process the communication and participation to 
 which I have referred is essential. That is the way in which 
 selves as such have arisen. That is where the individual is in a 
 social process in which he is a part, where he does influence him- 
 self as he does others. There the self arises. And there he turns 
 back upon himself, directs himself. He takes over those experi- 
 ences which belong to his own organism. He identifies them with 
 himself. What constitutes the particular structure of his ex- 
 perience is what we call his "thought." It is the conversation 
 which goes on within the self. This is what constitutes his 
 mind. For it is through this so-called "thought," of course, that 
 he interprets his experiences. Now that thought, as I have al- 
 ready indicated, is only the importation of outer conversation, 
 conversation of gestures with others, into the self in which the 
 individual takes the role of others as well as his own role. He 
 talks to himself. This talking is significant. He is indicating 
 what is of importance in the situation. He is indicating those 
 elements that call out the necessary responses. When there are 
 conflicts, the problem gives rise to the hypotheses that form in 
 his mind; and he indicates them to himself and to others. It is 
 this process of talking over a problematic situation with ones' 
 self, just as one might talk with another, that is exactly what 
 we term "mental." And it goes on within the organism. 
 
 385
 
 CHAPTER XVII 
 
 MIND APPROACHED THROUGH BEHAVIOR- 
 CAN ITS STUDY BE MADE SCIENTIFIC? 
 
 WHEN the scientific method we have been describing 
 was brought into the problems of psychology, it was 
 recognized that association could not be maintained 
 as the fundamental principle in terms of which they might be 
 solved. We speak naturally of certain elements as associated 
 with each other. Why are certain experiences associated rather 
 than an indefinite number of others? When we come back to 
 account for their strong association, we find we come back to 
 attention, to interest. We are interested in certain connections, 
 and these get fixed in our minds. We give our attention to cer- 
 tain elements in experience, and that fixes them in the order in 
 which they occur. But association is itself something that needs 
 to be explained. Why is there selection in experience? Con- 
 sciousness is selective; we see what we are looking for. There is 
 a character of conduct about experience that determines what 
 the relations are to be, or at least determines between what ele- 
 ments the relations are going to lie. This recognition of the im- 
 portance of conduct as determining what the connections shall 
 be within experience itself is the characteristic of the latter psy- 
 chology. It has gone under various names. 
 
 The older psychology was structural. That is, it took experi- 
 ence as we find it to pieces and found certain relations between 
 the various elements of it. These it explained through associa- 
 tion. The latter psychology is functional rather than structural. 
 It recognizes certain functions of conduct. We get experiences 
 of distant objects, and their import for us lies in what we are 
 going to do about them. We are hungry, and we set about 
 getting food. We have become stifled with the air in the room, 
 
 [386]
 
 MIND APPROACHED THROUGH BEHAVIOR 
 
 and we get out-of-doors. We are acting, and in our actions we 
 determine what the relations are going to be between the various 
 elements in experience. The structure of the act is the impor- 
 tant character of conduct. This psychology also is called motor 
 psychology, as over against the older psychology of sensation; 
 voluntary psychology, as over against the mere association of 
 ideas with each other. Finally, the development of these differ- 
 ent phases got expression in behavioristic psychology, which 
 gives itself to the study of this conduct to which I have referred. 
 It undertakes to approach the mind from the point of view of 
 the action of the individual. As a psychology, behaviorism has 
 turned away, then, from the category of consciousness as such. 
 Accounts of consciousness had been largely static in character. 
 There were certain states of consciousness, certain impressions 
 — the imagery men had in a spiritual substance that was im- 
 pressed from without by certain experiences. The senses were 
 the organs through which impressions were made on a sub- 
 stantial entity called "consciousness," and they were made in a 
 certain way, in a spatial, temporal order. Consciousness was 
 dealt with as a sort of substance which received impressions. 
 Following upon this came the fruitful statement of Professor 
 James. 
 
 For James, consciousness is not to be regarded as a static 
 substance receiving impressions from without. It is rather a 
 stream that flows on. And this stream has various character- 
 istics, those that we express by its substantive and transitive 
 character. It gathers about a certain experience and then passes 
 on from that to another. ^Another analogy that James used was 
 of the bird that alights on one branch and then flies to another, 
 continually moving from one point to another point. The 
 transitive phases of experience are those answering to relations; 
 the substantives are those that answer to what we call the 
 "things we perceive." If one is speaking, relating something, 
 and says "and" and then stops at that point, we have the feeling 
 of being ready to go on to something else. The feeHng is just as 
 definite an experience as that of yellow or red, of hot or cold; it 
 
 [387]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 is an experience of "and," one that is transitive, that is moving 
 on. And these experiences are quaHtatively different from each 
 other. If, instead of saying "and," the speaker said "but," we 
 should have an entirely different attitude toward what is to 
 follow. In fact, our whole grasp of what we are hearing or read- 
 ing depends upon the feelings we have for these different relat- 
 ing articles. If we come upon a thought with a "though" in it, 
 we have one attitude toward what is to come; if "also," a differ- 
 ent attitude. We are ready for a certain sort of content. We 
 have a definite sort of experience answering to these relations 
 which appear immediately in experience. 
 
 There is also another very important phase of experience 
 which Professor James emphasizes, that which is represented 
 by the spotlight of our attention as over against the fringe of the 
 experience. If one gives his attention to something immediately 
 before him, there hes about this experience a fringe which is very 
 important in the recognition, in the value of that to which one 
 gives attention. For example, when we are reading, we often 
 have the experience of a world which is not immediately be- 
 fore us. The eye in moving over the page has caught a word 
 several lines below. We have to hunt for it to find out what it 
 was. It lies there in the fringe of our immediate experience, and 
 we are ready for it when it appears. But still more, these differ- 
 ent attitudes which are connected with the different particles, 
 the "and," "but," "though," "also," also represent the fringe. 
 We are immediately considering something, but we are already 
 going on to something else. And the beginnings of that some- 
 thing else to which we are going on are already forming in the 
 realization of our experience. They are taking place, and they 
 represent the fringe of experience which comes in to interpret 
 that to which we are giving attention. 
 
 These conceptions of James's which were so fruitful for the 
 psychological consideration of experience do represent definite- 
 ly a process which gets its whole statement in our conduct. We 
 are going on to something besides that which is before us. And 
 the structure of the experience itself depends on what we are 
 
 [388I
 
 MIND APPROACHED THROUGH BEHAVIOR 
 
 going on to do. If we see something, we have at least aroused 
 in the organism a tendency to meet it, or to avoid it. And it is 
 this experience of what the contact will be that comes in to give 
 the meaning to that which we actually see. We are continually 
 interpreting what we see by the something that is represented 
 by possible future conduct. So, to understand what is appearing 
 in experience, we must take into account not only the immedi- 
 ate stimulus as such but also the response. The response is there 
 partly in the actual tendency toward the object and also in our 
 memory images, the experiences that we have had in the past. 
 And this relationship of the response to the stimulus is one of 
 very great importance in the analysis of our perception. 
 
 Professor Dewey brought out that fact in a memorable article 
 on the stimulus-response concept. He pointed out that the very 
 attitude of being acted upon by a stimulus is continually af- 
 fected by the response. We start to do something, and the 
 process of doing it is continually affecting the very stimulus we 
 have received. A familiar illustration is that of the carpenter 
 who is sawing on a Hne. The response of the organism to the 
 stimulation of the line is there to determine what he will look 
 for. He will keep his eye on the line because he is continually 
 sawing. The process of listening is a process in which we turn 
 the head in such a way that we will be able to catch what we are 
 hearing — the listening is essential to the hearing. The process 
 of responding is always present, determining the way in which 
 we shall receive our so-called "impressions." That is, the organ- 
 ism is not simply a something that is receiving impressions and 
 then answering to them. It is not a sensitive protoplasm that is 
 simply receiving these stimuli from without and then responding 
 to them. The organism is doing something. It is primarily seek- 
 ing for certain stimuli. When we are hungry, we are sensitive 
 to the odors of food. When we are looking for a book, we have a 
 memory image of the back of the book. Whatever we are doing 
 determines the sort of a stimulus which will set free certain 
 responses which are there ready for expression, and it is the 
 attitude of action which determines for us what the stimulus 
 
 [389]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 will be. Thorij in the process of acting we are continually select- 
 ing just what elements in the field of stimulation will set the 
 response successfully free. We have to carry out our act so that 
 the response as it goes on is continually acting back upon the 
 organism, selecting for us just those stimuli which will enable 
 us to do what we started to do. 
 
 Out of this stimulus-response concept has developed be- 
 havioristic psychology. Now, there are two ways of elaborating 
 the general point of view belonging to behaviorism. One is to 
 consider the process itself in an external way, or, as the 
 psychologists would say, in an objective fashion; just consider 
 the act itself and forget about consciousness. Watson is the 
 representative of that type of behaviorism. The behaviorist 
 of this type is interested simply in the act. He is particularly 
 interested in the act as it can be observed from the outside. 
 Watson is representative of the so-called "scientific psycholo- 
 gist" who is observing that which can be observed by other 
 scientists. It is a type of psychology which was developed first 
 of all in the study of animals. There you are necessarily shut 
 off from any so-called "field of consciousness." You cannot deal 
 with the consciousness of the animal; you have to study his 
 actions, his conduct. And these psychologists carried over the 
 method of animal psychology into human psychology. They 
 carried over from the study of animal psychology a new and, 
 what seemed to be, a very fruitful conception, that of the reflex 
 which could be, in their terminology, conditioned— the idea of 
 the conditioned reflex. 
 
 This goes back, as most of you know, to Pavlov's dog. Pav- 
 lov was an objective psychologist who was studying the con- 
 duct of animals and endeavoring to make a complete statement 
 of that conduct without bringing in the element of conscious- 
 ness, that is, without having to refer to what was called "intro- 
 spection" to understand the act. He took a dog and, by putting 
 food in its mouth, collected the saliva that was secreted. If a 
 piece of meat was brought within the vision and the sense of 
 odor of the dog, then saliva was secreted. The dog was all 
 
 [390]
 
 MIND APPROACHED THROUGH BEHAVIOR 
 
 ready to eat the meat, and the glands in the mouth were pre- 
 paring for the process of mastication. Now, taking the dog in 
 that way and bringing the meat, he was able to determine just 
 what the effect of this stimulus was in the production of saliva. 
 Then, when he brought the meat to the dog, he also rang a 
 bell. He kept this up long enough so that the two experiences 
 would be associated. He did not speak of it as the consciousness 
 of the dog but in terms of the process of the nervous system ; and 
 then he found that, if he rang the bell without presenting meat, 
 the same effect was produced, that is, the excess of saliva was 
 secreted without actual sight or odor of the meat. This particu- 
 lar reflex, then, the secretion of sahva, was conditioned by the 
 association of the sound of the bell with the smell of meat, so 
 that, when the meat was not presented, the sound of the bell 
 actually acted as a stimulus in place of the smell of the meat 
 itself. 
 
 This conception of conditioned reflex is evidently one that can 
 be carried over into all sorts of fields. I will refer to some of 
 them by way of illustration. First, take the cry of a baby who, 
 for example, is shown a white rat with which he has played 
 before without any fear. If the rat was associated with a 
 loud sound, the sound, especially if not seen, was a natural 
 stimulus of fright. If the white rat was presented to the child 
 when this sound was produced, the child became frightened; 
 and afterward, when the rat was brought to the child and 
 the sound not made, the child was still frightened of the rat. 
 That is, this particular reflex of the fright of the child was con- 
 ditioned by the sight and feel of the white rat. This can be car- 
 ried over to a whole set of situations. Take another example 
 from our conventions. We expect a person to act in a certain 
 sort of way. We expect him to be dressed in a certain sort of 
 w ',y. This conduct goes along with a certain type of manners, 
 and these manners go along with a certain type of individual. 
 If we meet a person whose manners are not those we expect, 
 we have an attitude toward this person as one who lacks those 
 particular characteristics. We have conditioned our reflexes by 
 
 [391 1
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 these particular conventions, many of them entirely external 
 and having nothing to do with the character of the man. We 
 assume that certain manners represent courtesy. A great many 
 of the manners have nothing to do with courtesy; but they have 
 become so related to it that if we find a man who has rough 
 manners, we perhaps do not expect courtesy of him. We caTn 
 carry the conditioned reflex over into other fields, such as tliat 
 of language, where we have a set of arbitrary symbols. Certain 
 experiences call for certain responses. We can associate with 
 each experience a certain arbitrary symbol, a sound, a written 
 word, and we can become so conditioned that when we hear the 
 sound, see the word, we get the attitude which goes with the 
 original experience. 
 
 The conditioned reflex, then, was brought in and used by 
 Watson in his attempt to analyze conduct. You see, this makes 
 possible analysis without bringing in consciousness as such. 
 You do not have to deal with introspection; you do not have to 
 go back and ask the person what he thinks, or feels, what 
 imagery arises before him. One studies simply his conduct and 
 sees what the stimuli are that act upon him under certain con- 
 ditions. And a sort of an analysis can be made of conduct from 
 his standpoint. What is of importance in this method is that 
 this type of analysis goes back to the conduct of the individual, 
 goes back to his behavior, to what he is doing — not to what he 
 is thinking and feeling, but what he is doing. 
 
 The other approach is that of Professor Dewey, also from 
 the standpoint of the conduct itself, which carries with it the 
 various values which we had associated with the term "con- 
 sciousness." There arose at this time the question which James 
 put so bluntly: Does consciousness exist? He wrote an article 
 under that caption. Is there any such entity as consciousness 
 in distinction from the world of our experience? Can we s^y 
 that there is any such thing as consciousness which is a separate 
 entity apart from the character of the world itself? The ques- 
 tion, of course, is difficult to answer directly, because the term 
 "consciousness" is an ambiguous one. We use it particularly for 
 
 [392]
 
 MIND APPROACHED THROUGH BEHAVIOR 
 
 experiences which are represented, we will say, by going to sleep 
 and waking up, going under and coming out of the anesthetic, 
 in losing and regaining "consciousness." We think of it as some- 
 thing which is a sort of entity, which is there, which has been, 
 under these conditions, submerged and then allowed to appear 
 again. That use of consciousness is not essentially different 
 from the shutting-ofF of any field of experience through the 
 senses. If one, for example, turns out the lights in the room, 
 he no longer experiences the sight of objects about him. We 
 say he has lost consciousness of those objects. But you would 
 not speak of him as having lost consciousness. He is simply un- 
 able to see what is there. If he gets farther and farther away 
 from a sound, or the sound becomes fainter and fainter, he loses 
 consciousness of that sound; but he does not lose consciousness 
 in the other sense. If we closed up his eyes, shut off his nostrils, 
 ears, mouth, shut him off from a whole series of different stimuli, 
 even those coming to him from the surface of the body and from 
 the visceral tract, he would probably lose consciousness, go to 
 sleep. There, you see, the losing of consciousness does not mean 
 the loss of a certain entity but merely the cutting-off of one's 
 relations with experiences. Consciousness in that sense means 
 merely a normal relationship between the organism and the out- 
 side objects. And what we refer to as consciousness as such is 
 really the character of the object. That is, the object is a bright 
 object. If now you close the eyes, there is no bright object there 
 any longer. We would say that you have lost consciousness of 
 it, or simply that the bright object is not there. When the eyes 
 are open, you have access to it; when the eyes close, you have 
 access to it no longer. You see, there are two ways of looking at 
 this having consciousness of the object. You may regard con- 
 sciousness as a something that exists inside of the organism 
 somewhere, upon which the influence of certain stimuli come to 
 play. You may think of consciousness in terms of impressions 
 made upon this spiritual substance in some unexplained fashion 
 in the organism. Or you may think of it simply as a relationship 
 between the organism and the object itself. 
 
 [393]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 James in his answer to, or his attempted answer to, the ques- 
 tion, "Does consciousness exist?" lays stress on the relation be- 
 tween the experience which the individual has had, that which 
 has gone before, and that which follows after. He took the illus- 
 tration of a person going to a house and entering the first room. 
 Now that room and its furniture is an experience. You can say 
 that it enters his consciousness, if you like; and still you think 
 of the room as something there with its pictures, furniture, 
 whether he came in or not. If now, the house is burned up by a 
 fire, this particular room with its walls and pictures and furni- 
 ture has disappeared. The experience which the individual has 
 had of the room, however, is not burned up. He remembers it, 
 remembers how the pictures were hung upon the walls. This, 
 says James, is a cross-section of two histories. And the cross- 
 section is identical. The room belongs to the history of the 
 house. It has been there since the house was built. It is in that 
 particular history. When the person comes into the room, that 
 particular room with its furnishings becomes a fact of his his- 
 tory. He had been elsewhere yesterday. He comes into that 
 particular room, and that room is now a part of his experience; 
 he goes out, and it is related to his former experiences. He had 
 been in other houses, seen other furniture. He compares pic- 
 tures. Each is related, you see, to his history. On the other 
 hand, this room also belongs to the history of the house, of the 
 architect, of the carpenter. Thus this question of consciousness, 
 according to Professor James's statement, is a question in what 
 history this particular entity, so-called consciousness, hes. 
 From this point of view the consciousness a man has of the 
 room is a cross-section of his history, while the room in the 
 house regarded as a physical affair is a cross-section of the his- 
 tory of the house. Here we have a single cross-section answering 
 to both of these series. Or there is a coincidence of cross-sec- 
 tions. In that case what we would say is that the consciousness 
 of the man in regard to the room in the house is nothing but a 
 statement of that room as it lies in relationship to the man's 
 own history: taken in its relationship to the history of the 
 
 [394I
 
 MIND APPROACHED THROUGH BEHAVIOR 
 
 house, it is physical; taken in its relationship to the history of 
 the man, it is a conscious event. 
 
 These two are not the only implications or meanings of con- 
 sciousness. That which represents mental activities of one sort 
 or another — of volition, of analytic and synthetic thought, of 
 purpose and intention on the one side, and on the other side cer- 
 tain contents — has been stated in the past in associational psy- 
 chology as states of consciousness. On the one hand, as we have 
 seen, the active side can be stated in terms of conduct, while 
 that which might be referred to as the passive definition of con- 
 sciousness can be regarded as belonging to the object itself. So 
 far as such a division of the spoils takes place, consciousness as a 
 private affair seems largely to disappear. There are other phases 
 of it, as I have said, which we will not refer to now; but these 
 two phases, these two conceptions of consciousness, I wanted to 
 bring out. One is an active, the other a passive, statement. And 
 what I have said is that this active phase, that involved in the 
 motor, volitional side, as well as in the process of analysis and 
 discrimination, can at least be stated in terms of conduct, of 
 the act; and this act can be stated in terms of the organism as 
 such. What we refer to as the passive side, the content side, is 
 found to lie in the object. It can be regarded, of course, in its re- 
 lationship to the individual. It does belong to his history, though 
 not simply to his history but to that of the object as well. When 
 the man is in the room, the room is stated in terms of his experi- 
 ence. It is interpreted in terms of memory, of his own anticipa- 
 tion. But still it is a room. Without attempting to discuss the 
 various philosophic implications of this, I am pointing out that 
 on the one side you may speak of consciousness in its passive 
 sense and at the same time be thinking of the object, the room 
 itself. 
 
 In some fashion, if we turn to the active side we have impulse 
 as perhaps the most fundamental phase of activity; and impulse 
 certainly can be given a statement in terms not only of acts but 
 also of the organism. There are various fundamental physio- 
 logical impulses, that of attack and flight, those which gather 
 
 [ 395 ]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 about hunger and sex. These are lodged in the organism itself. 
 James's celebrated theory of the emotions comes back to the 
 reaction to the motor attitudes of the organism itself in condi- 
 tions such as fear, hunger, love, joy. That is, fear represents our 
 response to our tendency to run away; hatred represents our re- 
 sponse to our tendency to attack. The emotions as such are re- 
 sponses of the organism itself to its own attitudes under certain 
 conditions. These responses are expressed in more or less vio- 
 lent action. 
 
 What is further involved here, that which James did not 
 bring out which Dewey does, is that there is always some inhibi- 
 tion of these actions. If one could actually run away before the 
 terrifying object, if one could keep ahead of it, so to speak, give 
 full expression to the tendency to run, one would not be terri- 
 fied. If one could actually strike the very moment one had the 
 impulse to strike, he would not be angry. It is the checking of 
 the response that is responsible for the emotion, or is essential 
 at least to the emotion. Even in the case of joy, if there were 
 no hesitancy about the way in which one expressed his happi- 
 ness, there would not be that emotion. 
 
 We can approach the emotion, then, from the point of view 
 of our own responses to the attitudes of the organism. Here the 
 James-Lange theory recognizes the visceral, as well as the 
 motor, responses involved in the act. We spoke of the emotion 
 as our effective experience of these attitudes. The impulse is 
 something that can be stated at least in terms of the response 
 of the organism itself. It is, of course, out of the impulse that 
 desires, intentions, arise. What is added to the impulse and 
 desire is the image of what we intend. And here we seem to find 
 ourselves in what might be regarded in an unassailable field of 
 consciousness as such. By its very definition imagery would be 
 not the object, but some copy of the object; not the past event, 
 but some memory of the past event; not future conduct, but a 
 picture of future conduct. If you ask, now, where this image is, 
 you would be at a loss to locate it. The easiest thing is to say 
 that it is in consciousness, whether you put that consciousness in 
 
 [ 396 I
 
 MIND APPROACHED THROUGH BEHAVIOR 
 
 your head or say that you cannot locate it spatially. In any 
 case, it is a relationship to something in your head. At least, the 
 assumption of our physiological psychology is that an image 
 answers to the excitement of certain nerve elements which have 
 been excited in past experience. A cruder form of physiological 
 psychology assumed that pictures of what had happened, were 
 lodged, so to speak, in nerve cells, and, if the organism pressed 
 a button, these pictures would come out. But further study re- 
 vealed the fact that the nerve cells were no more than paths and 
 junctions of paths. They should not be regarded as cubbyholes 
 in which memory images or any other images are stored away. 
 Just where the image is, is, I say, questionable. But you cannot 
 say that the image is not in the objective world, for many of 
 them are. 
 
 Here again I am not discussing the various philosophical im- 
 plications of this analysis, but merely referring to the fact that 
 every book you read has on every page of it your own memory 
 images of words you have read before. Your own eye touches a 
 line of print perhaps only twice. You take in only a relatively 
 small portion of the actual printed line on the page, and the rest 
 of it comes from memory images. I have referred to the atti- 
 tudes represented by particles, adverbs, conjunctions, preposi- 
 tions, the "ands," "buts," and "thoughs," which put us in cer- 
 tain attitudes of anticipation of a certain sort of word that is 
 expected. The context we have gone over gives us a pretty 
 definite anticipation of what is going to be there, so that our 
 mind fills in from past experience. We have not time enough to 
 read each word by itself. There are people, children particular- 
 ly, whose eyes are bound to the page. They have to read word 
 by word; and if they cannot be freed from it, they are slow 
 readers and can accomplish little in this medium. What we have 
 to do is to make most of what we read a contribution of our 
 own. We fill out what we see. That, of course, is evident not 
 only at the time. You suddenly find yourself in a snarl. You 
 see something which is not there. The proofreader has trained 
 himself to notice the words and letters and not the sense. 
 
 [397]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 Well, that is true not only of the printed page. The faces 
 of our acquaintances are largely filled in by our memories of 
 them. We notice very little in the outlines of a face with which 
 we are familiar. The rest of it comes from memory images. If 
 we are seeing a person for the first time, we regard the features 
 in detail, look at the whole face; but even then what we see in 
 each case is in some sense a sort of type. You could not tell what 
 the types of the human face are that you recognize. Yet, there 
 is something about every human face that is in some sense 
 typical, and you fill in there. A considerable part of our per- 
 ceptual world, the world existing "out there," as we say, is made 
 up out of mental images, the same stuff that comes before us 
 in revery, only in that case we are looking at it from the point 
 of view of imagination. These images actually go to make up 
 objects we see and feel. 
 
 The imagery cannot all be put into a consciousness that is 
 distinct from the world about us. It goes back, as I say, to 
 James's question as to whether consciousness as such exists. 
 We have again a type of experience which from one point of 
 view belongs to the external world and from another point of 
 view to the history of the particular individual. Without at- 
 tempting to discuss the question further, I simply want to 
 emphasize the fact that the former is the passive side of our 
 experience, which we ordinarily term "consciousness," but 
 which under various conditions we do not consider as conscious- 
 ness but as the object. If you should take away the so-called 
 "imagery" from what you say you immediately see, from that 
 which answers to what falls on the retina, to the sounds you 
 actually hear, you would find that you have bare skeletal ele- 
 ments; most of the flesh and blood, of the content of the world 
 about you, would have been taken out. What you call the 
 "meaning" of it will go also. The distinction you make between 
 what we call "consciousness" and what we call the "world" is 
 really a functional distinction. It is not a static one. You can- 
 not, then, cut off any particular field of content in our ordinary 
 experience of the world and say, "This is my consciousness as 
 
 [398I
 
 MIND APPROACHED THROUGH BEHAVIOR 
 
 such. This is a certain stuff which belongs inside of my head and 
 not to the world." There are times at which it is inaccessible. 
 But the printed page you see you hand to your friend, who reads 
 it also. A large part of what he reads is his mental image, and 
 what you read is your mental image; and yet you say you are 
 reading the same page. 
 
 If one approaches the problem of psychology simply from the 
 standpoint of trying to find out what takes place in the experi- 
 ence of the individual as an individual, you get a surer clue if 
 you take the man's action than if you take certain static con- 
 tents and say these are the consciousness of the man and that 
 these have to be approached by introspection to be reached. If 
 you want to find out what the man is doing, what he is, you 
 will get it a good deal better if you will get into his conduct, into 
 his action. And you come back there to certain of his impulses, 
 those impulses which become desires, plus his mental images, 
 which from one standpoint are his own but from another stand- 
 point represent certain of his past experiences, or part of his 
 future experience. So-called "objective" or "behavioristic" psy- 
 chology undertakes to examine the acts of the man from outside 
 without trying to get them by introspection as such, although 
 introspection, as I shall show, has a certain definite meaning 
 even for behavioristic psychology. 
 
 I have already referred to accessibility. There are certain 
 very genuine experiences which belong to physical objects and 
 yet which are accessible only to the individual himself, notably, 
 a toothache. There is an aching tooth, no question about it; and 
 yet, though others can see the tooth and the dentist can tap it, 
 it aches only for the individual in whose head it is located, and 
 much as he would like to he cannot transfer that ache to 
 somebody else. There are, of course, a whole series of experi- 
 ences of which that is typical, which are accessible alone to the 
 person having them. What I want to point out is that you have 
 no question about the aching tooth, no question about the 
 members of your body. Your hands have certain definite char- 
 acteristics for you. They can be seen by others, but you have 
 
 [399]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 the only inside approach to them. And that feeling is one which 
 is just as genuinely a feeling of an object as is that of a table. 
 You feel the table, and you feel your hand. Your hand is softer 
 and warmer than the table. Your hand is not as large as the 
 table. All sorts of distinctions can be made. You are feeling 
 your hand as a physical object, but one having a peculiar char- 
 acter, and that character which it has is one which is accessible 
 only to yourself. Nobody else can get that feel of your hand 
 which you have, and yet that does not make you regard it as 
 less genuinely there. You do not put the feel of your hand in 
 your brain. You may assume that that feel is dependent on 
 what is in your brain, but what the hand is involves the actual 
 character that it itself has. Well now, if anybody else comes up 
 and feels the table, he has a sense of the same table; but this ap- 
 proach to the feeling is peculiar to the individual. The mere 
 fact of the accessibility to the experience you have of parts of 
 your own body does not lodge them, so to speak, in a conscious- 
 ness which is located in the brain or somewhere else. It simply 
 means certain objects are accessible to you which are not ac- 
 cessible to anybody else. 
 
 There are various phases of nature which lie betwixt and be- 
 tween. Take the beauty of a landscape as an instance. From 
 one point of view it is the response of the individual himself and 
 seems to be accessible only to him, but the painter and the poet 
 succeed seemingly in making it accessible to those who enjoy 
 the picture and the poem. This is more or less debatable. All I 
 want to insist on is that mere accessibility is not in itself evi- 
 dence of something that belongs to a consciousness. It is much 
 safer, even in such fields as these, to come back to the conduct 
 of the individual if you are going to study him than to come 
 back to something he reports to you by means of introspection. 
 
 Without discussing the various logical and metaphysical 
 snarls involved, we will say that the space about us is public. 
 We are all living in the same spatial world and have experiences 
 of the same world. When it comes to a question of color, the 
 thing seems to be dubious, for one man does not see certain 
 
 [400]
 
 MIND APPROACHED THROUGH BEHAVIOR 
 
 colors which another man does see. We seem to have a case 
 there where the color is private while the space is public. And 
 yet, you cannot,ppssibly separate the space from the color. And, 
 while you may say that the space which one person perceives 
 has a different degree of brightness from another, we would not 
 hesitate to call those spaces public. But there is also something 
 definitely private. Take a man's intentions, for example. We 
 do not know what he is going to do. He has an advantage over 
 us on that account. This is notable in the case of warfare, or in 
 the case of a man who is making a feint when he is boxing. The 
 intent which the person has is not evident to the other person. 
 He may make a guess at it, but it is only the person who is 
 going to strike who knows definitely what he intends to do. 
 This is also true of intent not simply in such a situation but in all 
 our intercourse with other people. We have a pretty genuine 
 idea, as a rule, of what we are going to say when we are talking; 
 but the person to whom we are talking probably does not. He 
 may guess from past experience; but, as a rule, what a person is 
 going to say would in some sense present a problem to the other 
 person while it would be present in the mind of the one who is 
 going to say it. It is not public property. 
 
 That is also true in very large degree of certain types of men- 
 tal imagery. There is a field, a sort of an inner forum, in which 
 we are the only spectators and the only actors. In that field 
 each one of us confers with himself. We carry on something of a 
 drama. If a person retires to a secluded spot and sits down to 
 think, he talks to himself. He asks and answers questions. He 
 develops his ideas and arranges and organizes those ideas as he 
 might do in conversation with somebody else. He may prefer 
 talking to himself to talking to somebody else. He is a more ap- 
 preciative audience, perhaps. The process is not essentially 
 different in these two cases, that is, of thinking and of talking 
 to somebody else. It is essentially the same sort of a process. 
 But the activity, such as it is, is not of the same sort. When you 
 do talk to yourself, you do not ordinarily do it out loud. Some- 
 times you do talk out loud, and somebody else hears you. But, 
 
 [401 ]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 as a rule, when you talk to yourself, you depend on subtle motor 
 and muscular methods of articulation. Supposing that conver- 
 sation which takes place by such imagery as that is only ac- 
 cessible to the man carrying it on. He takes different roles. He 
 asks questions and meets them; presents arguments and refutes 
 them. He does it himself, and it lies inside of the man himself. 
 It has not yet become pubUc. But it is a part of the act which 
 does become public. We will say he is thinking out what he is 
 going to say in an important situation, an argument which he 
 is going to present in court, a speech in the legislature. That 
 process which goes on inside of him is only the beginning of the 
 process which is finally carried on in an assembly. It is just a part 
 of the whole thing, and the fact that he talks to himself rather 
 than to the assembly is simply an indication of the beginning 
 of a process which is carried on outside. 
 
 Well now, that process of talking to one's self — of thinking, 
 as we say — is a process which we speak of as involving discrimi- 
 nation, analysis. Analysis may be a very physical affair. We 
 can smash up an object by means of a hammer and analyze it. 
 We can take it into the laboratory and use more subtle methods 
 of disintegration. But we are analyzing the object either way. 
 We may analyze a thing for somebody else. He wants to find 
 something in it which he cannot see, and we point it out. We 
 point at the particular part of the object he is to take hold of. 
 Now, that pointing is a process of analyzing the object. For 
 him it is the selection of some part of the object to the neglect 
 of other parts, so that he can get hold of it. Indicating by the 
 finger is just as much analysis as breaking up by a hammer 
 or by chemical reagents. There are various ways of pointing at 
 things. There are people among certain native tribes who can 
 point at things by their own features, their lips, eyes, the way 
 in which they turn their head. I have seen people carry on 
 rather elaborate conversations that way. The ordinary way in 
 which we do our pointing is by means of vocal gestures. Point- 
 ing of the finger is a physical gesture. 
 
 Words are gestures by means of which we indicate things; 
 
 [402]
 
 MIND APPROACHED THROUGH BEHAVIOR 
 
 and, just in so far as we indicate things by means of our ges- 
 tures, we are analyzing just as really as if we put them into a 
 test tube of acid or as if we took our hammer and smashed the 
 thing up to find out its different elements. It is a process of 
 analyzing some element by means of our conduct. Thinking, 
 as such, can at least be stated. I am finding all sorts of prob- 
 lems which can be brought up. Even the most recondite intel- 
 lectual processes come back to the things we do; and, of course, 
 for an intelligent human being his thinking is the most im- 
 portant part of what he does and the larger part of that think- 
 ing is a process of the analysis of situations, finding out just 
 what it is that ought to be attacked, what has to be avoided. 
 We have to take the situation to pieces, think it out; and that 
 process may be a process of pointing or of vocal gestures which 
 indicate certain elements in it. Those vocal gestures are the 
 indication of the elements which will lead to certain responses. 
 One of the principal differences between a dog and a man is that, 
 as a rule, we cannot point out to a dog what we want him to 
 give attention to. If you can find out what the dog's interests 
 are, you may be able to point something out to him; but if you 
 want to have the dog tell time, you can never get him to look 
 at a watch and notice where the hands of the watch are. Even 
 if a person does not know what a watch is, you can indicate to 
 a human individual the face of the watch and get him to see the 
 meaning of it. That part of our thinking process, the power of 
 analysis by means of gestures, is the most important part; and 
 we can say, if you hke, that we carry that on inside of our heads. 
 The sense in which we do that is to use these pointers, these 
 vocal gestures, the words which we utilize, to point out certain 
 features in a situation; but we do that inside of ourselves. Oc- 
 casionally, people do hear us. We talk out loud. But as a rule 
 they do not hear us, and we reply to the gestures that we make 
 with other gestures; and in that fashion we get our plan of 
 action made for ourselves. 
 
 Well, that is the way in which behavioristic psychology, if 
 carried out consistently enough, can cover the field of psy- 
 
 [403]
 
 . THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 chology without bringing in the dubious conception of con- 
 sciousness. There are matters which are accessible only to the 
 individual, but even these cannot be identified with conscious- 
 ness as such because we find we are continually utilizing them as 
 making up our world. What you can do is to get at the organ- 
 ism as something that you can study. Now it is true that you 
 cannot tell what a man is thinking about unless he chooses to 
 tell. If he tells, you have access to that as well as he has; and 
 you know what he is going to do, and it can enter into your 
 own conduct. You can get at your own conduct and at the 
 conduct of other people by considering that conduct in an ob- 
 jective sort of fashion. That is what behavioristic psychology 
 is trying to do, trying to avoid the ambiguity of the term "con- 
 sciousness." And what is of importance about this psychology 
 is that it carries us back, as I have said, to the act as such. It 
 considers the organism as active. It is out of the interest in the 
 act itself and the relationship of thought to the act itself that 
 the last phase of more recent philosophy dealt with above, that 
 is, pragmatism, arises. Out of the type of psychology which 
 you may call "behavioristic" came a large part of the stimulus 
 for a pragmatic philosophy. There were several sourceSj. of 
 course; but that is one of the principal ones. 
 
 [404
 
 CHAPTER XVIII 
 
 INDIVIDUALITY IN THE NINETEENTH 
 CENTURY 
 
 I WAS referring in certain preceding sections to the social 
 mechanism through which the individual registers that 
 which is peculiar to his own experience, a mechanism which 
 is most strikingly illustrated in the newspaper, in its giving of 
 news, news being regarded peculiarly as something that hap- 
 pens, something that in itself is novel. Now, that which is novel 
 must appear in the experience of an individual as an individual. 
 The rising of the sun, its going down, the ordinary courses of the 
 seasons — these happen to us all, take place for us all. There is 
 no necessity of bearing testimony to them from the point of 
 view of any particular individual. But when something strange 
 takes place, it can only be validated through its introduction 
 into somebody's biography; it must be said of it that John 
 Smith or A or B had this experience at such a time and such a 
 place. That is, we cannot give universal value to that which is 
 individual. It just happens; it is something that we can state 
 only in terms of the fact that it happened to somebody, at a 
 certain place and at a certain time. 
 
 I have already referred to the import of this in the exceptions 
 to laws which make the basis for the scientific problems and the 
 formation of new hypotheses. It is the observation of the sci- 
 entist that is essential for the establishment of such an excep- 
 tion. I do not mean to say that the statement is confined to a 
 single individual. On the contrary, what the scientist does when 
 he has experienced such a novelty is to state the conditions 
 under which it has occurred, so that others may have the same 
 experience. But it comes to them also as a separate experience. 
 TJie^data of science, especially the exceptions that are noted, 
 
 [405]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 are dated and located with reference to individuals. When we 
 come back to those precious events which are the starting-point 
 for the testing and carrying-out of the scientific problem, we 
 come back to the experience of individuals as such, experiences 
 which are the so-called "hard facts" of science. What is meant 
 by their being "hard" is that they just happen when they are 
 not expected. You stumble over them and scrape your shins 
 against them. They are something there that you are not ad- 
 justed to, and they have no universal value as yet; so you have 
 to state them in terms of your own experience only. 
 
 All this shows again the two sides of the scientific experience: 
 one, its laws, which give meaning to the world; and the other, 
 the experience of individuals just as individuals. Both must be 
 kept clearly in mind. They are the two poles, the foci about 
 which the orbit of science runs. What I want to point out is 
 that even scientific observation of this individual sort is essen- 
 tially news. That is what constitutes news. It is that which 
 gives import to so-called news. What is of interest is not the 
 mere fact, of course, that it has taken place in the experience of 
 a single individual. That is going on everywhere all the time. 
 The important thing is the fact that that which is going on in 
 the experience of the individual in some way runs counter to 
 that to which we are accustomed. For example, the result of 
 the measurements of the positions of the stars about the sun 
 during an ecHpse was news when it started the hypothesis of 
 Einstein. The flourishing of a new star in the heavens is news. 
 And if it is recorded, that record has to be in terms of the experi- 
 ence of individuals. It has to be known just who the people were 
 who made the observations. It could not be any Tom, Dick, 
 or Harry; it has to be a competent person, from our standpoint, 
 in order that his experience may be of importance. It is neces- 
 sary to know when it took place, the exact second and fraction 
 of a second, as well as the location which gave the conditions 
 for the proper observation. The time at which it took place has 
 to be stated. And it has what we may call from the journalese 
 standpoint "sensational value." The data of science, if they can 
 
 [406]
 
 INDIVIDUALITY IN NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 be brought out so that people can realize their merit, are all sen- 
 sational. When murders and divorces are recorded, they are 
 sensational just in so far as these immediate experiences run 
 counter to the customs and habits, to the valuation of the group 
 to which the persons involved belong. They are sensational for 
 the same reason that the records of the positions of the stars 
 about the rim of the sun were sensational. The same data which 
 are presented in the sensational press become scientific data 
 when a competent social scientist studies them, examines them, 
 gets them into such shape that they can be evaluated. There 
 is nothing we may assume that is improper to appear on the 
 front page of a paper which does not have its perfectly legiti- 
 mate place if only it is reported by a competent person who can 
 evaluate it. But what I am insisting on now is that what gives 
 it its importance is that it takes place in the experience of the 
 individual. 
 
 I have perhaps given sufficient emphasis to the reason for this. 
 Just because it is in some sense exceptional, you cannot state 
 it in terms of uniformities. You have to state it, then, in terms 
 of somebody's biography. It just happened to him. Well, what 
 modern experience has succeeded in doing is to get control over 
 these exceptional experiences and make use of them. Look 
 through the literature of the ancient world, through such a 
 really marvelous book as Aristotle's Habits of Animals, which 
 sums up the biological knowledge of the ancient world. You 
 will be struck by the fact that there is not a reference to a proper 
 name, to an individual, as a basis for the accounts which are 
 given of the animals with which Aristotle's treatise deals. He 
 refers to a num.ber of philosophers whose opinions he is com- 
 bating; but when he comes to the statement of the character of 
 animals he is describing, he never once refers to any individuals 
 as having made this observation or that. He does not rest the 
 value of the thought he is presenting on the testimony of any- 
 body. On the other hand, if you are to look, for example, into 
 that natural historian, Pliny, you will find recorded observa- 
 tions, statements of events with seemingly no basis for criticism 
 
 [407]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 of the value of the evidence. He gives you a remarkable ac- 
 count of the overwhelming of Pompeii, of the eruption of 
 Vesuvius; and the facts he cites are such that any school child 
 would discount. There is no basis for the criticism of the value 
 of what we term "observation." The ancient world did not 
 utihze what we call the "scientific method." It organized the 
 experience and works of men such as Aristotle — the experience 
 of the community — and put it in more or less systematic form; 
 but there was no mechanism for its reconstruction, no mecha- 
 nism for the test of the experience of the individual, and for a 
 statement of the scientific problem, for the formation of hy- 
 potheses and the testing of these, which constitutes our sci- 
 entific method. 
 
 It is because we do utilize this method that these experiences 
 of individuals qua individuals have come to have such supreme 
 importance in our lives, and I am calling your attention to the 
 fact that the newspaper is simply the popular expression of just 
 this fact. And that which appears in the newspaper is logically 
 of the same character as that which appears in scientific maga- 
 zines. We can just as well refer to these magazines as constitut- 
 ing newspapers. They record observations, happenings, experi- 
 ments of scientists, which are things that happen to certain 
 individuals; and the importance of these events lies in the fact 
 that they have happened to just these individuals, that they 
 can be put into the experience of this man whom we know to 
 be competent, who can state just what the custom or law or 
 theory is that this particular event has contravened. Conse- 
 quently, we can state the problem and the ideas of the indi- 
 viduals that are brought forward. The hypotheses are brought 
 forward not in the form of the newspaper editorial but as the 
 interpretation of events. The newspaper editorial in some de- 
 gree, of course, does this same thing. It undertakes to give the 
 interpretation of what has happened. It takes the events of 
 the day or of the preceding day and picks out what is pecul- 
 iarly important, and interprets it either in terms of older laws 
 or of some new idea. There is not the scientific control, of 
 
 [408I
 
 INDIVIDUALITY IN NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 course, in the editorial that you have in the scientist's hy- 
 pothesis; but the newspaper editorial does put before us the 
 community problems. And what appears in the editorial is an 
 attempted interpretation of them in some sense, giving the 
 meaning of them so far as they are novel, implying that some 
 change, some reconstruction, ought to take place in order to deal 
 with them. 
 
 Our whole literature from the period of the Renaissance has 
 become increasingly more journalese in its character. We have 
 become distinctly interested in biographies, for example. Go 
 back again to the ancient world, and you have in Plutarch 
 the biography of the ancient world. Read his Lives, and you 
 find that he presents his figures either as typical heroes or 
 typical villains, one class or the other. They embody the atti- 
 tudes and the views, the values, of the community to which they 
 belonged. Or they stand out as striking criminals, people of the 
 type of Alcibiades. But, on the other side, you have the person 
 who is essentially of the hero character. These figures present 
 what is characteristic, that which represents the virtues and 
 the vices of the community. What we fail to find in these bi- 
 ographies as contrasted with modern biographies is just that 
 which commonly goes under the caption of "local color." They 
 do not try to record experiences just as they took place; there 
 is no reference to the form of, say, the food the hero ate, 
 nothing of particular interest in the matter of clothes, or his 
 golf score, the elements which we bring in by way of making a 
 person seem real to us. These elements are all omitted. What 
 the modern biography does is to try to reproduce as far as pos- 
 sible those little things which enable you to put yourself into 
 the situation of the individual so that you get his experiences 
 and experience them. 
 
 To get an analogous contrast, go to the Louvre and see the 
 statues which have come down from the ancient world — 
 "Venus," "Hermes," in their calmness and perfection; and then 
 step across to the Luxembourg to see modern statues. You get 
 a sense of life, of movement. The one with that perfection of the 
 
 [409]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 type which ancient art has given and which has never been 
 given in any such transcendent type since that time. When 
 we undertake to represent that which is typical, we always 
 present what is abstract. Look at the statue we have put on 
 the Chamber of Commerce building, which represents "Com- 
 merce." Compare it with the ancient statue "Hermes"; or the 
 statue on the Courthouse representing "Justice." The ancient 
 world was able to take that which is typical and give it the con- 
 tent and the meaning which belongs to such a philosophy as 
 Plato's. What we present is that which is immediate, living, 
 because we are able to utilize that, because we can take that 
 which occurs to the individual and utilize it for the interpreta- 
 tion of life. 
 
 A great expression of this, of course, is in the novel, which 
 undertakes to present the meaning of life in terms of its occur- 
 rence to the individual. You can see that the novel and the 
 newspaper belong to the same picture. They are taking hap- 
 penings and putting the meaning of life not into a moral theory, 
 not into a social theory as such; they are trying to give life as 
 it actually happens to individuals, to men, women, and children. 
 It takes place there; and when a person is able to see exactly 
 what it is that he gets from the novel he is reading, he feels in 
 some sense enriched when he has read an admirable one. His 
 life has had content added to it. He has been given a new point 
 of view, a new approach, a new way of looking at things; and 
 the novelty involved in it leads to a richer experience, just as 
 novelty in some way makes us feel that the meaning of the 
 social problems which we face has been revealed to us. It 
 makes us realize that our consciousness as such is a continued 
 meeting and solution of problems, or an attempted solution of 
 them. This is not abnormal; it is just the nature of conscious- 
 ness itself. And, as I have insisted, the problem has to appear in 
 the experience of the individual. The problem never appears 
 in a generalized form. The solution we work out and test be- 
 comes universal. The problem itself is always individual. 
 
 The place of the individual as an important, extremely valu- 
 
 [410]
 
 INDIVIDUALITY IN NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 able, thing comes into our thought by way of religion. The 
 preciousness of the human soul was made central in modern 
 experience in religious terms. The soul was that which was to 
 be saved, and saved from an eternity of suffering. That was the 
 yardstick, in some sense, by which one estimated the value of 
 the individual. But we have another sense of the import of the 
 individual as such, namely, that the problems with which our 
 reflective consciousness deals are in the experience of the indi- 
 vidual. They must appear in the experience of the individual; 
 and for the individual they come in some sense as a new view of 
 life, as an aspect of life peculiar to him. If we do not get this, 
 we lose a certain kind of experience, a certain amount of it. 
 There are problems that arise, as we all know, in the lives of 
 every one of us; and in so far as they are not mere mistakes, 
 they, represent an onward movement. Progress, as I have 
 pointed out, even from the point of view of evolution, is the 
 constant meeting of problems and solving them. It may take 
 nature five hundred thousand years to solve a particular prob- 
 lem in digestion. But the problems that appear in the experi- 
 ence of each individual represent the poles of hfe itself. This is 
 what we are doing: we are solving problems, and those prob- 
 lems can appear only in the experience of the individual. It is 
 that which gives the importance to the individual, gives him 
 a value which cannot be stated. He has a certain preciousness 
 which cannot be estimated. You cannot tell what will happen 
 to him, what must happen to him. Take cattle, on the other 
 hand; one is like another. There is nothing represented in the 
 experience of one ox that is peculiar to him. But a human indi- 
 vidual, when he is a self, has this capacity to state and meet 
 problems peculiar to himself. There is something that takes 
 place in his perspective that does not occur for anybody else. 
 Each one of us has an outlook on the universe which belongs 
 to each one of us alone, and it appears in so far as we have in us 
 a reflective consciousness in which life seems to be interpreted. 
 We do not write epics in our day; or, when we do, nobody 
 reads them. We write novels, and we write dramas, which rep- 
 
 [411]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 resent life and its import in terms of that which happens to an 
 individual as such. Of course, this makes the individual invalu- 
 able in the sense that we cannot evaluate him — not in terms 
 of the eternity of suffering, or of more or less abstract blessed- 
 ness, but in terms of what his function is as an individual in the 
 community, that function which belongs to him in his particu- 
 lar perspective. I have brought in the term "perspective" both 
 because it expresses this point of view which I was presenting 
 and also because it brings us into this latest expression both of 
 science and philosophy, "relativity." 
 
 From the point of view of the most abstract of physical sci- 
 ences, it has been recognized that the world, taken from the 
 point of view of any particular physical particle or any particu- 
 lar physical structure, even such as that of an atom of iron, is 
 shifting. If you think of it for a moment, it is really astonish- 
 ing the change that has taken place recently in the mechanical 
 sciences from that in which every physical particle could be 
 given its place in an absolute space and time. By the mere de- 
 velopment of physical science itself, especially through the 
 theory of electromagnetism and the analysis of the spatial and 
 temporal conception, we find abstract physical science taking 
 this most extremely novel point of view: if you give a certain 
 velocity to a certain particle, the world from the point of view 
 of that particle is a different world than it is if the particle has 
 another velocity; the time is a different time; and the space is 
 a different space. That is, you cannot regard the universe except 
 from the point of view of this particular particle in its essential 
 characters. Well now, perhaps that particle does not exist by 
 itself. There is a consentient state, a group of other physical 
 particles which have the same velocities. Take them at rest, 
 and the whole world has a certain value from that standpoint; 
 put them in motion, and it has another value; change the motion 
 again, and again the value changes. What we had assumed was 
 that such a relative statement could always be read over into an 
 absolute statement. We realize that we cannot take the revolu- 
 tion of the heavens as a presentation of the real movement of 
 
 [412]
 
 INDIVIDUALITY IN NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 things. We put ourselves in the position of the sun and see that 
 the earth is moving about its axis; and when we come to the po- 
 sition of the sun with reference to other stars, we see that it is 
 moving; and so we set up so-called "co-ordinates" of the fixed 
 stars. But we know there is no such thing as a fixed star. Thus, 
 in the end we have nothing to which to attach our Cartesian co- 
 ordinates. We cannot take our point of view and the point of 
 view of a man from Mars and that of a man in the sun and re- 
 duce them all to a certain absolute space in which we can tell 
 what the real mass of a body is. All we have is an indefinite 
 number of perspectives. From the point of view of the physical 
 sciences, that shift of perspectives is analogous to what we have 
 been presenting from the point of view of society. That is the 
 reality of the world: it is an organization of the perspectives of 
 all individuals in it. And every individual has something that is 
 peculiar to himself. Our science has grasped that precious pecu- 
 liarity of the scientist that enables him to get hold of the problem 
 whose solution gives a new heaven and a new earth. And we re- 
 alize this in our daily talk and conversation, where we see that 
 eac h o rie..Qf u s h as his own value and own standpoint. 
 
 Now, from an earlier point of view that meant what the 
 philosophers called "solipsism." It meant that the real world 
 had to be translated into the perspective of each one, and that 
 there was no way of getting out of one's perspective into that 
 of somebody else. That is, it means the defeat of any universal 
 philosophy or, seemingly, of science. And, of course, there have 
 been all sorts of philosophical battles waged over this. What I 
 want to point out is simply that science itself has never been 
 disturbed by this sort of so-called "subjective idealism." It has 
 gone on utilizing that which is peculiar to the individual, seeing 
 the world in terms of the individual, getting the problem in- 
 volved there and then obtaining a solution which is one that be- 
 longs to the more inclusive consentient set, which belongs to the 
 community of which the individual is a member. The individual 
 himself is, after all, there only in so far as he arises in the com- 
 munity, as his own particular perspective arises in that com- 
 
 [413]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 munity. In some sense you may say that that represents the 
 form of the philosophical problem which has been presented 
 through relativity. 
 
 Another striking phase that has arisen in modern scientific 
 and philosophic thought is found in the category of emergence. 
 From such a relativistic point of view as we are stating, people 
 will recognize, for example, that there is such a thing as color 
 in the world. It belongs to the perspective of people that have 
 normal retinas. If your retina is not normal, then your color 
 perspective is different. The color does not exist in your "soul"; 
 it exists in the relation of your self to the world. It is a different 
 world in its relation to you than in its relation to me. There are 
 slight differences if you like, and there are other differences which 
 we can interpret as real differences. Well now, if that is true, when 
 retinas appear, in their relation to the central nervous system, 
 color appears. It is presented not in the consciousness of these 
 particular forms, but it appears in the relationship of the world 
 to organisms that are endowed with retinas. When the canals, 
 which developed into an ear, appeared in the side of the head 
 and enabled the form to orient itself to sound, noise and music 
 appeared. It did not come to exist in the consciousness of the 
 individual as such, but in the relationship to the world of the 
 organisms endowed with such apparatus. When individuals 
 with appreciation for beauty appeared, beauty appeared. It did 
 not reside in the consciousness of these individuals but came 
 into existence, emerged, through the relationship of the world 
 to the individual. 
 
 The problem which faces thought, then, is the problem of 
 the relationship of individuals to each other, or the perspec- 
 tives of these individuals to each other. These philosophical 
 problems appear in terms of relativity. It may be that it pre- 
 sents an attempted solution in terms which are thought to be 
 consistent with Einstein's statement, as is the case with Ber- 
 trand Russell's book called Philosophy^ which still leaves each 
 perspective more or less in the consciousness of the individual 
 but does set up some unknowable world outside. This is one 
 
 [414]
 
 INDIVIDUALITY IN NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 philosophical attempt to solve that problem. Or it may be at-^ 
 tempted from the point of view of Whitehead, with his recogni- 
 tion of an organization of these perspectives themselves. 
 
 I will just call your attention again to the fact that the state- 
 ment we have given of the self as it arises in the human com- 
 munity is one which does definitely represent such an organiza- 
 tion of perspectives. That is, the individual comes to realize 
 himself just in so far as he can take the attitude of the group to 
 which he belongs. He can approve or disapprove of himself in 
 those terms. He stands on his own legs just in so far as he as- 
 sumes his own perspective, criticizes it, and reconstructs it. 
 Other people can put themselves in his place, as in the novel and 
 newspaper; and then the same reconstruction can take place. 
 There you seemingly have just this organization of perspectives 
 going on. What society represents is exactly this. The com- 
 munity as such is the organization of the perspectives of all. 
 They all belong to the same consentient set. But it is an organ- 
 ization of the perspectives of real individuals. Each one has his 
 own perspective, and he can assert it against the group. 
 
 And the scientific method is that by means of which the indi- 
 vidual can state his criticism, can bring forward the solution, 
 and bring to it the test of the community. We do have in social 
 consciousness — or, better, in social experience, since "conscious- 
 ness" is an ambiguous term — a real organization of perspectives. 
 That is what takes place. Whether that can be taken over and 
 made the basis for a philosophic solution is another question. 
 But the problem as it lies is whether to take it in terms of rela- 
 tivity and of a space-time world or whether to take it in terms 
 of the lives of individuals in a human community. W^hether in 
 terms of scientific advance in any direction, the problem is 
 definitely one of this organization of individual perspectives and 
 the finding-out of what is universal, but with the recognition 
 that, when we do find that out, the very character of one's 
 self as an individual lies in discovering some exception to the 
 universal and going on to the formation of other universals. It 
 also requires the recognition that this is not simply a series of 
 
 [415]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 revolutions but the very quality, the very nature, of reflective 
 experience. It is that which distinguishes each individual from 
 every other in the whole group to which he belongs. That is the 
 form of the problem, then, which science, philosophy, and reflec- 
 tion approach at the present time. 
 
 There is another phase of it I wanted also to call to your at- 
 tention particularly. As I have said, a subjective idealism takes 
 the content of the world and puts it into the consciousness of 
 the individual. And as you remember, the romantic idealists 
 took the meaning of the universe as a whole and put it into the 
 consciousness of an Absolute Self of which our separate con- 
 sciousnesses were mere aspects or phases. They took the whole 
 of the world and put it into the consciousness of the individual. 
 I have referred again and again to the ambiguity of this term 
 ''consciousness." What the modern movement is doing is tak- 
 ing what has been the consciousness of the individual and carry- 
 ing it out into the world again and realizing that it belongs to 
 the latter, and yet keeping this relationship of the world to the 
 particular individual. The world is a different world to each 
 individual. That does not mean that the consciousness inside 
 of me is different from yours, but that the universe from my 
 point of view is different than it is from your point of view. 
 Those are genuine aspects of the world as such. The relation- 
 ship of the universe to the separate individuals is genuine. One 
 can, from this conception, return the stolen goods to the uni- 
 verse, give it back its color, its form, its meaning and beauty, 
 which had been lodged in the consciousness of separate indi- 
 viduals. They can be returned to the world when we realize 
 that the universe has a different aspect as it exists over against 
 each separate individual. 
 
 What science has always assumed, whether we have been able 
 to give a philosophic statement to it or not, is that the universe 
 has a definite import in its relationship to separate individuals. 
 And in some way we have to get an organization of those differ- 
 ences in the whole, the meaning of which shall be different from 
 that of absolute idealism. Absolute idealism tried to solve the 
 
 I416]
 
 INDIVIDUALITY IN NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 problem by uniting all these different individuals into a single 
 Absolute Self, and the attempt broke down, because it never 
 could state the scientific method as such. But the scientific 
 method goes on. And the continued reconstructions of the world 
 go on — reconstructions not only of the future but of the past. 
 The history which we study is not the history of a few years ago. 
 We cannot say that events remain the same. We are c on- 
 tinually reconstructing the world from our own standpoint. 
 And that reconstruction holds just as really with the so-called 
 "irrevocable" past as with reference to a future. The past is 
 just as uncertain as the future is. We do not know what the 
 Caesar or the Charlemagne of the next century will be. We , 
 look over histories which have dealt with Caesar, but we find 
 a different Caesar portrayed in each one. A dozen different' 
 Caesars have crossed the Rubicon. We are continually recon- ) 
 structing the world, and that is what our consciousness means; it 
 means this reconstruction from the standpoint of the individual. 
 Stating it in as broad a form as I can, this is the philosophical 
 problem that faces the community at the present time: How 
 are we to get the universahty involved, the general statement 
 which must go with any interpretation of the world, and still 
 make use of the differences which belong to the individual as 
 an individual.^ 
 
 ^ 
 
 417]
 
 T 
 
 APPENDIX 
 
 FRENCH PHILOSOPHY IN THE 
 NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 I 
 
 HE background of philosophy in France in the nine- 
 teenth century is, in one sense, the background of all 
 philosophy in the nineteenth century, that of revolution 
 and the varying reactions to it in the different communities of 
 Europe. One reaction was found in Germany in the Romantic 
 idealism of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. In England the reac- 
 tion was determined by the so-called Industrial Revolution. In 
 France the background was that of a defeated Revolution^ — a 
 Revolution that had suffered a double defeat. The undertaking 
 to establish a society or a state on a rational basis, an enterprise 
 for which Rousseau's Contrat social furnished a model, broke 
 down because it was found impossible to build an adequate con- 
 crete political structure on the abstract rights of man. It was 
 defeated in the second sense because the imperialism which 
 sprang out of this failure got its expression in Napoleon's mili- 
 tary genius. This produced a reaction in the whole of Europe 
 in the form of an attempt to turn the clock back. It is this 
 double defeat more than anything else, perhaps, that character- 
 . izes the peculiar atmosphere of France during the last century. 
 L-^^^.-yln one respect the Revolution had been a success from the 
 0>r^^6v!\\. of view of the French. It had put the land into the hands 
 ^^ ?^\i^ °^ ^^ peasantry. The land was and remained the great source 
 of wealth in France. The French peasantry had been fighting to 
 get control of it. They had been carrying on lawsuits with the 
 feudal owners of the land. And it was the peasant who was suc- 
 cessful in the cultivation of the land. There was a marked differ- 
 ence between agriculture in France and in England. In Eng- 
 land, successful agriculture was carried on by landowners who 
 
 [418]
 
 FRENCH PHILOSOPHY 
 
 farmed large tracts. The whole tendency was to break up the 
 small holdings and bring them under the control of a single 
 man who would put through the improved methods of agricul- 
 ture which were characteristic of England in the latter part of 
 the eighteenth century. In France, on the other hand, the 
 owners of the land took no interest in the cultivation of it. They 
 were absentee landlords; they sought only the rents, which they 
 spent in Paris. Agriculture fell back to the peasant, and he was 
 eminently successful in his agricultural processes. He had an in- 
 tense love for the land itself. He wanted to get it for himself. 
 The whole class of yeomen had disappeared in England, and 
 there was no passion on the part of the English peasant to get 
 hold of the land and work it himself. The French peasant had 
 this passion, a love for agriculture; and when he got the land, he 
 worked it successfully. The passage of the land into the hands 
 of the peasantry was one of the most fundamental and im- 
 portant results of the Revolution in France, and it was a result 
 which could not be overthrown or put aside. In many re- 
 spects it was possible to return to the old order, but even the 
 rulers themselves with all their armies could not take the land 
 away from the peasant. He remained in possession. 
 
 This was a result of importance to France in determining the 
 attitude of the French nation, but it did not show itself in the 
 reflective processes of the French nation. Those of the French 
 people who were articulate, who could express themselves in 
 art and literature, in philosophy and science, were not immedi- 
 ately touched by this change. It did not affect them. 
 
 The changes that took place in England were changes that 
 put the control of the land into the hands of the large land- 
 owners, the men who were the controlling poHtical body. The 
 landowners were represented in Parliament. They had been in 
 control of England ever since the Revolution in 1689. This 
 party, with its control over the land, was the controlling power 
 in England and gave the cue, in one way or another, to all the 
 thinking, to all the artistic expression, to science and philoso- 
 phy, during the eighteenth century. It was a minority of the 
 
 [419]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 English people, but it was a minority that was in control and 
 that regarded itself as having got its liberty through a marvel- 
 ous constitution. Its advantages were almost lyrically sung by 
 Burke. It was the constitution of a monarchy, but of a mon- 
 archy which was under the control of Parliament. And this 
 Parliament represented the nation, but secondarily the land- 
 owners, who bore the prestige of the people themselves. Parlia- 
 ment had the possibility of developing in the direction of de- 
 mocracy. Its possibilities worked out later in the extension of 
 the franchise in England. But at the end of the eighteenth cen- 
 tury the power was in the hands of the squirearchy itself, which 
 owned the land and held the power. 
 
 Growing up in England, however, was a new class, a class 
 which had put itself in opposition to this control of the squire- 
 archy, the class of industrial entrepreneurs and financiers. The 
 Industrial Revolution that was going on in England was one 
 which, while it increased the wealth of the nation and brought 
 groups of men into prominence and a sort of power, still left the 
 control in the hands of Parliament and of the men who made 
 efforts to buy holdings in order to become a part of the control- 
 ling squirearchy of England. So the ideas and ideals of the eight- 
 eenth century about the control of the land were maintained 
 during the years of the nineteenth century. The reconstruction 
 that was taking place was not deep; but it was through the class 
 of mill-owners and manufacturers and financiers that this 
 change, such as it was, took place at all. It was brought about 
 through the labor movement which began early in the century 
 and which presented a new social problem to England. 
 
 That is the picture that we have of the development which 
 was taking place in England as over against what was occurring 
 in France. In France the land itself had passed into the hands 
 of the peasantry, out of the hands of the nobility. The nobility 
 were largely deprived of the land they had had in the past. 
 They became a landless aristocracy. Many of them were pro- 
 vided with estates; but as a class the aristocracy was ousted 
 from the land, and the peasantry came into possession of it and 
 
 t42ol
 
 FRENCH PHILOSOPHY 
 
 it was the first source of wealth in France. Land being the pri- 
 mary source of wealth, and being so effectively cultivated by the 
 peasants, the wealth from it increased. The land itself, with 
 the wealth that went with it, represented the inarticulate 
 part of French society, a group that had espoused revolution 
 to get control of the land. It had been swept on by the abstract 
 ideas of Rousseau, but its interests lay not in political recon- 
 struction but in rights that the peasants themselves had got by 
 entering into their new holdings. The peasants having attained 
 that result, their interest in the Revolution largely subsided, 
 after the excitement of Napoleonic imperialism. 
 
 Thus the changes that took place during the early part of the 
 nineteenth century in France were changes that were not moti- 
 vated by the mass of the French people. They were largely 
 revolutions in Paris; they took place in Paris and the other large 
 communities. There was no interest in them that took hold of 
 the French people as a whole. The people had planted them- 
 selves on the soil and were, for the time being, satisfied with the 
 exploitation of their new possessions. This situation did not 
 lead to any profound reconstruction from the point of view of 
 the thought of the world, such as that which took place in Ger- 
 many, in Italy, and in England during the Industrial Revolu- 
 tion. The people themselves had changed the attitude when, 
 from being feudal tenants, they had become the owners of the 
 soil, and their attention was turned back to the political move- 
 ments going on. That is the feeling one has with reference to the 
 changes that took place in France. They were superficial in 
 character, for the great number of the people in France were not ', 
 interested in them. The thought out of which they developed, 
 the expressions that were given to the national life, were expres- \ 
 sions which did not reach down in the great masses of the French / 
 people themselves. 
 
 The changes that had taken place in Germany were more 
 profound, because the Revolution continued to be felt in Ger- 
 many. The small states — the small dynastic states — were too 
 numerous to be reconstituted. Many had to pass over into the 
 
 [421]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 control of the larger states. Here a political change was going 
 on which affected the mass of the community in a profound 
 fashion. Particularly, it brought liberty to the great states in the 
 German part of Europe. First of all to Austria and then to 
 Prussia, those two states which became rivals. That move- 
 ment went on finally to the formation of the German Empire. 
 It was a movement which was profound because for the first 
 time it was bringing German nationaHsm to articulate expres- 
 sion. It is that which lies behind Romantic idealism. France 
 and England and Spain had attained nationalist sentiment 
 and consciousness two centuries earlier. But Germany was 
 divided up into dynastic states. The principle of the organiza- 
 tion of these states was dynastic, not national. It did not turn 
 about the national heritage of the people. They were of the 
 same race, had the same traditions. But they were subjects of 
 different dynasties, and it was about these that the organiza- 
 tion of the communities gathered. For a time an attempt was 
 made to turn the clock back through control of Europe by 
 Metternich, backed by the czar. This control laid emphasis 
 against all these small dynasties and their communities; but 
 the map of Europe could not be reconstituted as it was be- 
 fore the Revolution and before Napoleonic pressure in the 
 Rhine districts. The small dynastic states had been broken 
 down. Their people had been affected by their contact with 
 the French. The ferment of the Revolution had been more ac- 
 tive there than elsewhere in Europe, People in that part of 
 Europe continued to feel tendencies toward that national ex- 
 pression which, during the war of liberation, found its most 
 effective expression through the Prussian state. It was a Prus- 
 sian state which was a means of bringing to successful conscious- 
 ness a sense of nationalism. 
 
 The great exponent of nationalism at that period was Fichte 
 in his addresses to the German people. These were not to the 
 Prussians as such; they were addressed to the German people. 
 Fichte undertook to bring to the German people the awareness 
 that their peculiar nature was a part of their peculiar heritage. 
 
 [422]
 
 FRENCH PHILOSOPHY 
 
 He pointed out what their task in the civilization of a feudal 
 world was and was to be. It was the efficiency of the Prussian 
 administration that gave a certain popular character to this up- 
 lift which took place in the struggle to throw the French out of 
 Germany. The Prussian state could take over the institutions 
 and developments as though they were the expression of the 
 German nation, though they were not such politically. Prussia 
 could give instruction, and the army could be made a national 
 institution. The schools and the army were the two institutions 
 by means of which the Prussian people and the Germans in gen- 
 eral, so far as they were affected by what was going on in Ger- 
 many as a whole, got control of governmental authority. This 
 authority was in direct control. It was in control in so far as it 
 fostered the spread of intelligence, the development of public 
 schools, and the undertaking to make the intelligence of the 
 community in some sense the director of the life of the state it- 
 self. Frederick the Great undertook to develop a state which 
 was eminently intelligent. But a new end was brought into the 
 life of the people with the institution of a national army which 
 should take in all those that were capable of bearing arms. As 
 was the case with the school, the whole of the youth of Germany 
 should be brought into the army, in which they would be trained 
 for their national life. Prussia, therefore, although it was an 
 autocratic state, although all the power belonged to the mon- 
 arch, as such, was a state which was undertaking to train its 
 citizenry not for fighting alone but for intelligent political life. 
 During the period of the war of nationalization there was an 
 intense national life which spread from Prussia throughout / 
 Germany. That was the spirit which got its expression in the \ 
 Romantic philosophy. Thus, while this philosophy was a sys- / 
 tem of great profundity, while it lay beyond the comprehension \ 
 of the masses of the people, it was also an expression of the J 
 spiritual life that came up from the people themselves. 
 
 On the other hand, in England we have a development in 
 which the national movement was brought into the life of the 
 community, of the masses, not through those that owned the ^ 
 
 [423] 
 
 ")
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 land but by the urban laborers, the factory laborers. They had 
 been brought together in organizations, in trade-unions, that 
 gave a sense of understanding which the masses of the people 
 had never had before in England. The labor movement reached 
 all the way down into English society. It was a movement which 
 got its expression in industrial strife, and that industrial strife 
 got its expression in Parliament. As a result, the development 
 of English democracy throughout the nineteenth century had 
 been what it so evidently is today, a national movement. That 
 movement also got its expression in a philosophy, that of the 
 utilitarians, Bentham and the Mills. It was a philosophy which 
 was capable of a simple statement; it was one that could find its 
 place among the trade-unions themselves, one that could get its 
 expression in the movement toward free trade, in the demand 
 for cheap bread, and the demand for internationalism by way 
 of free trade. It was a movement that was connected with the 
 poHtical and philosophical thought of the community itself, 
 reaching out beyond England to other communities. 
 
 It is in contrast with those two countries — England and 
 Germany — that I want to put the French community. The re- 
 sult of the political revolution was of profound importance for 
 the French people. France, like Germany, was affected in some 
 degree by the Industrial Revolution. But France was not as 
 much affected as Germany. In Germany there arose the social- 
 ist theory which took hold of the masses of the people, for in 
 Germany the factory system worked itself out earlier and gave 
 the background for the development of the Marxian doctrine. 
 ButillFrance the wealth lay in the soil. The manufacturing in 
 France was of luxuries. The products did not get into the whole- 
 i sale markets. In England the peasants had been loosened from 
 the soil. They were free to go to the city. When England be- 
 / gan the development of coal and iron, she had a supply of labor 
 that was glad to work at starvation wages. In France the 
 / peasantry were satisfied to remain on the soil. There was little 
 I of the large production which was essential for the development 
 of the national labor movement as such. This movement got its 
 
 [424]
 
 FRENCH PHILOSOPHY 
 
 expression in trade-unionism in England and in socialism in 
 Germany. Both were popular movements; both got into poli- 
 tics. But the labor of the French peasant was not affected by 
 the political situation. It was only in so far as taxation bore on (' 
 him that he was interested in the political situation as such. J 
 
 (As I have said, the attempt during the nineteenth century 
 was to put the clock back. In France men returned to the 
 spiritual order of the church, the Catholic church. Nationalism, 
 so far as it expressed itself, was a chronological expression. 
 France went back to the medieval situation, not exactly as the 
 Germans went back to it or as the English went back to it, in a 
 romantic attitude, but to find an expression of the society of 
 France itself. The Revolution had been a failure politically. 
 From the point of view of its transfer of the land to the peasant 
 it had been a success, but politically it had been a failure. It 
 failed to_reor£anize society on the rational lines that had been 
 its goal. The rehgion of reason, which went with the French 
 Revolution, had a life of only a few duties, and, when the latter 
 failed, men drifted back to the church, which again became the 
 center of the life of the community as such when men turned 
 back in a romantic fashion to the medieval period, but with the 
 sophisticated attitude that belongs to the beginning of the 
 nineteenth century. They went back to rediscover in the medi- 
 eval period something which they felt they had lost, something 
 which was different from the experience of those who lived dur- 
 ing the medieval centuries. That life had been a direct life. The 
 attitude of the romanticist when he returned to it was one of 
 appreciation and enjoyment. It was an aesthetic reaction. All 
 the paraphernalia of the religious service was looked at from 
 the point of view of men who had been estranged from it and 
 returned to it, and who undertook to appreciate it with the new 
 attitude that they had gained. They were playing the roles of ; 
 people in the medieval period. 
 
 Another phase of the Revolution in France must be kept in 
 mind. France exhausted itself emotionally in the Napoleonic 
 period. The enthusiasm in the French armies had arisen out of J 
 
 [425]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 the sentiment of defense against the outsider. Here you have the 
 peasants with the same sentiment as that found later in the 
 Russian peasants, who, without interest in the government as 
 such, were determined to hold on to the land which they had 
 secured. They were ready to fight battles against invaders 
 and protect themselves. They proved themselves the most ef- 
 fective infantry in Europe, and they had a great general. Out 
 of this arose Napoleonism in France. It became identified with 
 Napoleon himself. He was not a dynast; he did not represent 
 the history of France. The justification for his position was that 
 he made possible a larger community that otherwise would not 
 have existed. He brought together people separated socially, 
 geographically, but who still recognized themselves as belonging 
 to the same community because they were subjects of the same 
 monarch. The dynast, the emperor, had been the center of the 
 social organization during the medieval period. He was the 
 symbol of Europe as a single society. While having slight politi 
 cal power, he stood as an impressive symbol of a larger commu- 
 nity^ — a community that was surpassed only by the church, one 
 which might take in the whole human race, which was organized 
 about the church. The dynast in the position of the emperor 
 was the political symbol of that larger community. 
 
 We must go back to France or England in the feudal period to 
 realize what the monarchy meant. Means of communication 
 were slight, customs were different, different dialects were 
 spoken. There was no organization, no France, no England as a 
 whole; but through the monarch it was possible for the feudal 
 tenant, the serf, to recognize himself as having a relation to 
 everyone else inside the national bounds. Running up the line to 
 the monarch was a community made up of parts, of different ele- 
 ments, that were hostile to each other. Thus, only the monarchy 
 made possible national life in Napoleon's opposition to the feudal 
 order. In France the Bourbons, and in England the Plantag- 
 enets, were able to root out the feudal order and make a na- 
 tional life possible. We must remember this in order to recog- 
 nize the importance of the dynasty Napoleon wanted to step 
 
 [426]
 
 FRENCH PHILOSOPHY 
 
 into. This would have identified France with himself. But he 
 could not do it, for his hold on the people was not a historic 
 hold. He represented a revolution; he had overthrown the old 
 state and broken down the principle of authority; and when he 
 undertook to place himself on the historic throne of France and 
 make himself the representative of the line of the oldest dynastic 
 family in Europe and to make his peace with the people which 
 had the longest tradition in Europe, he failed. All the emotional 
 life that he was able to arouse had been spent in the glory which 
 victory produced, in a sense of enlargement that came with the 
 enlarged empire. It was impossible that this should remain. 
 The country broke away; and when France came back to its 
 own boundaries. Napoleon was a stranger. He could not be the 
 symbol of national life. He undertook to carry over the effi- 
 ciency of the Prussian state. He showed a genius comparable 
 to his military genius in the reorganization of the state on the 
 basis of an autocracy which undertook to control everything. 
 The schools were turned into barracks. There was the same 
 training of the child that there was of the soldier in the army. 
 The whole state was organized with great efficiency, and Na- 
 poleon was the center of it all. He undertook to pass over into 
 the field of the arts, to get an expression for the principle of his 
 state in the field of philosophy, to direct the life of the commu- 
 nity itself. He gathered about himself literary men and women. 
 The philosophers, he thought, could be utilized in the organiza- 
 tion of France as the monarchy of Napoleon. But in all this he 
 failed. 
 
 The one hold he had on the community was that of his mili- 
 tary genius and success. The Revolution had done its work. It 
 had overturned the earlier state, and Napoleon could not set up 
 that state again arbitrarily. The emotion of the French people 
 was exhausted. They had been on a long military debauch. 
 Their operations in the field, the glory of their victories, the 
 plunder they had brought back from Europe, were the signs of 
 that debauch, and they were exhausted. The one pre-eminent 
 change which had taken place besides the breakdown of Na-/ 
 
 [427]
 
 ( 
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 poleon's hold was the passage of the land into the hands of the 
 peasant, and the peasant was now indifferent to what went on. 
 The masses of the people were outside of the life that went on 
 among the intellectuals. There was no connection between the 
 literary, philosophical thought of the time and the mass of the 
 French peasantry. Napoleon had almost decimated France by 
 filling his army with those who could bear arms; he had materi- 
 ally weakened her physically; he had decreased the population 
 of France by his continual warfare. But those who were left re- 
 mained on the soil and were satisfied, so that when the Bourbons 
 were put on the throne and undertook to turn the clock back 
 they found that France was exhausted and the mass of the citi- 
 zens were indifferent to what went on. Thus, while there was a 
 rich life in Germany and nationalism expressed itself in vivid 
 ways — a national literature sprang up there and science flour- 
 ished in a remarkable degree — in France there was the deadness 
 of the morning after. There was the interest of the people in the 
 soil itself. They were looking down and not up. They were sat- 
 isfied with what they had and were not looking ahead. They did 
 not wish to carry on the life of the old Napoleonic state. I think 
 it is necessary to appreciate this situation in order that we may 
 realize the comparative poverty of spiritual development in 
 France as compared with that which took place in Germany and 
 in England. 
 
 II 
 
 The enthusiasm of the Romantic period, as it turned back to 
 the medieval period, was expressed in England and in Germany. 
 In France what occurred was the return of an army which was 
 melancholy and defeated. The great expression of the romantic 
 movement in France was religious. In this connection there are 
 two or three figures of importance for the time. De Bonald and 
 De Maistre represented a return to the philosophy of the people 
 — an attempt to restate the medieval philosophy, that which be- 
 longed to the period of the twelfth and thirteenth century. 
 They restated it from the standpoint of France in the nine- 
 
 [428]
 
 FRENCH PHILOSOPHY 
 
 teenth century. They were both men of imagination, men of 
 very great intellectual power and of supreme devotion. They 
 took the fact of the religious organization of the community 
 most seriously. What they undertook to show was that no com- 
 munity could exist except through religion; that the only bond 
 that could hold men together was the church; that the church 
 was the presupposition of society. They found themselves not 
 in touch with the historical development of the church in 
 France itself however. The Gallican movement in France, 
 which answered to the Reformation, left the monarch in power 
 within a national church. That movement was, of course, en- 
 tirely outside of the conception of life represented by De Bonald 
 and De Maistre. They fell back onto the conception of the 
 Holy Roman Empire as representing the single community of 
 Christendom. In its time it was the oldest possible organization 
 of Christendom as such. Europe had been broken into feudal 
 states which were more or less hostile toward each other. Only 
 from the point of view of the church could all the tenants, the 
 serfs, the underlings, conceive of themselves as belonging to a 
 single community. There was, in the medieval period, the pre- 
 supposition that society must have a religious basis. Only the 
 church could make Christendom possible. However, the further 
 the development of this organization went, the more it tended 
 toward the national church, and rulers undertook to get control 
 of it within their own boundary. So far as the church repre- 
 sented the spiritual organization of the community, the state 
 insisted on having its hands on it. So Louis XIV and Henry 
 VIII were acting logically when they undertook to set up na- 
 tional churches inside the Catholic church. That was possible in 
 France; in England it was not possible, and a complete separa- 
 tion took place. The return of De Bonald and De Maistre to the 
 Catholic tradition, their attempt to revive the conception of 
 the thirteenth century, was an inevitable failure. They influ- 
 enced religious schools and convinced those who did not need to 
 be convinced, but the mass of the people was not touched by 
 them. 
 
 [ 429 ]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 Chateaubriand came forward with a work which was super- 
 ficial as compared with the arguments of De Bonald and De 
 Maistre. He presented Christianity as a civiUzing power, a hu- 
 manizing power; he appealed to the aesthetic phase of Chris- 
 tianity and called out the aesthetic response in the process of 
 worship itself; his was essentially a sentimental reaction. For 
 the time being, however, it had very considerable influence in 
 Paris among the intellectuals. It was distinctly a romantic move- 
 ment, but not one which had its roots in the past life of the 
 community. Chateaubriand failed to connect with De Bonald 
 and De Maistre. The latter were undertaking to bring back 
 the church of the thirteenth century; the former, to bring men 
 into the church of the nineteenth century, a church which was 
 Galilean, national, and opportunistic in its relations to Na- 
 poleon; a church which had lost the philosophy of its earlier 
 life; a church which did not have the consciousness of being the 
 organizing principle in the whole of Europe. That proud con- 
 sciousness did belong to the people, and its hierarchy could be 
 aroused again in the nineteenth century. But the only approach 
 Chateaubriand could make to the church was on the sentimen- 
 tal side. De Bonald and De Maistre represented an interest in 
 the development of the church itself. Their doctrine was plant- 
 ed in the dogma of the church; Chateaubriand appealed to the 
 ritual. 
 
 Ill 
 
 The philosophy of the French Revolution was represented in 
 the pre-revolutionary days by Voltaire and Rousseau. The 
 group of men who gathered about them were called Encyclope- 
 dists, after the Encyclopedists who represented the Enlighten- 
 ment in France. The philosophy which lay back of them was 
 imported from England. Voltaire had carried over from Eng- 
 land the philosophy of Locke and put it on French soil. In this 
 period those who were found within this school were called 
 "idealogues." They stood for the ultimacy of a state of con- 
 sciousness, an impression, a sensation. What Locke undertook 
 
 [430]
 
 FRENCH PHILOSOPHY 
 
 to do was to analyze experience into simple elements, and then 
 to find how our experience, especially our collective experience, 
 arose. 
 
 It is interesting to see that it was the philosophy of Locke 
 that was carried over to France rather than that of Berkeley 
 and that of Hume, both of whom represented developments of 
 the Lockian philosophy. But the transplantation of this Eng- 
 lish philosophy by Voltaire and others was taken from Locke. 
 To see this is to see that the hold French thought got of this 
 phijosopliy .was superficial. The development that went on 
 from Locke through Berkeley and Hume was an essential, logi- 
 cal development. The contradictions which were involved in 
 the Lockian statement came out in the subjective idealism of 
 Berkeley and in the criticism of Hume. For Locke, all our 
 knowledge falls into sensations and impressions — those of the 
 outer sense, and those of the inner sense. The outer appears to 
 us in our sensations and contacts — those of color, sound, taste, 
 and odor. The inner impressions are those that come from our 
 processes of thought, from our emotional life, from the action of 
 desire and of will. From Locke's standpoint, the mind is a mo- 
 saic of these impressions. His interest was to take our ideas, or 
 presuppositions of thought, and break them up into ultimate 
 elements, and then to show the connections that lie between 
 these ultimate elements. The first orientation was that of a 
 philosopher who is fighting the doctrine of innate ideas, a sort of 
 superficial neo-Platonism of the time, one which was used by the 
 church and by political philosophers. This philosophy lost the 
 profundity of the Platonism from which it sprang. It located the 
 idea, as such, in the mind and presented the mind as a tablet on 
 which were written certain fundamental ideas. Locke's ideas 
 were oriented by his opposition to the doctrine of innate ideas. 
 His position was that there was nothing in the mind that had 
 not previously been in the senses. Everything was reduced to 
 sensations, to impressions. The memory had impressions of the 
 outer sense and also the inner sense. 
 
 'Ideology and the philosophy which it presented in France 
 
 '^' [431]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 were brought over from England through the translation of the 
 works of Locke, without the recognition of the development 
 which had taken place as represented by Berkeley and Hume. 
 The emphasis lay upon analysis, so-called. The interest behind 
 this was the elimination of the abstract idea. You remember, 
 in one sense, these three were all nominalists. They assumed 
 that the abstract idea, the universal, had no further existence 
 than was found in the association of certain symbols with differ- 
 ent individual things. The problem involved in the similarity 
 Eetween particular things was passed over. They insisted that 
 in the process of thinking the mind was dealing with particulars 
 and with the association of these particulars with each other. 
 
 The interest in the problem which the French of this pe- 
 riod had was in getting rid of the abstractions about which 
 religious, ecclesiastical, and governmental theories gathered. 
 Was there such a thing as absolute divine right. ^ Were there 
 such things as transubstantiation, ideas of which could only be 
 presented in terms of particular objects.^ The theology, the 
 political science, of the period dealt with speculations from 
 these particular objects. Did these abstractions have a unity 
 in themselves, or did one have to come back to particular experi- 
 ence? The Idealogues welcomed a philosophy which analyzed 
 experience into ultimate elements of sensation, which came back 
 simply to particular experiences as such and advanced the ab- 
 stractions which were built into the theories and political doc- 
 trines of the time. The ideological philosophy was regarded, 
 then, as the philosophy of the Revolution. It was used by 
 Voltaire in his attacks on the church; by Rousseau, and those 
 who were influenced by Rousseau, in showing that the state was 
 actually an organization of individuals. As they conceived of it, 
 the state existed only in the contract between individuals. There 
 was no such thing as the unity of the state as such. There were 
 the individuals that made up the state and the relationship that 
 existed between these individuals. You see how this simplified 
 the problem, especially as it involved an attack on the whole in- 
 stitution. From the standpoint of the medieval period there 
 
 [432]
 
 FRENCH PHILOSOPHY 
 
 were universals. These universals existed in the mind of God; on 
 earth, in our own minds. About these universals the whole doc- 
 trine of the church and state was gathered. If one could attack 
 those universals and substitute for them individuals and their 
 experience and the relations that existed between them, one 
 could exorcise those abstract units and come back to what 
 seemed the immediate situation, that is, to men and women as- 
 sociated in various ways. The universals were to be found in 
 the images of these men, in their particular relations. These were 
 to be brought into the mind. Institutional organizations were 
 to be analyzed into the physical relationships of people. The 
 problem of empirical philosophy as it appeared in England and 
 in France was, then, essentially this. 
 
 That this philosophy did not bring about political revolution 
 in England, as in France, was due to the difference in the politi- 
 cal situation. In a certain sense, that revolution had been going 
 on in England ever since the Puritan Revolution. The people 
 were conscious of a change taking place. There had been the 
 institution of Parliament, with its representation in the coun- 
 ties. However inadequate that might be for the absolute 
 power of the crown, the crown was no longer necessary for 
 holding together an English community. Parliament with its 
 powers accomplished what the crown had accomplished. The 
 revolution was taking place. Furthermore, England was, after 
 all, a Protestant community. There was a state church; there 
 were also dissenting bodies; and a large proportion of the popu- 
 lation of England was found in these dissenting churches. They 
 were free to carry out their own process of worship. There 
 was no organization or group of people in an ecclesiastical or- 
 ganization that undertook to determine what their ideas of the 
 world should be. The people were free to formulate their own 
 theology. They were, of course, subject to various political dis- 
 abilities, but still they could carry on their own religious life. 
 That battle had been fought through; and they were left, in that 
 sense, free. The revolution had, in its essentials, taken place in 
 England. 
 
 [433]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 The French thinkers were satisfied with the application of this 
 empiricism. This does not mean that the French mind was less 
 profound in itself. You have only to turn back to the period of 
 the Renaissance to realize how profound a philosophical power 
 the French mind has. This attitude indicates that the interest 
 of the French mind was turned toward the revolution, a revolu- 
 tion which, as I have said, had in its essentials already happened 
 in England. The problem, then, was a different problem. The 
 philosophy was one which could be used by individuals, by the 
 revolutionists, for the disintegration of the institutions which 
 they were trying to pull down. It could be used for the theory 
 of the reconstruction of the institutions that they proposed to 
 put in their place. Philosophy existed in their minds for that 
 purpose; and when they had mastered the idea enough to be able 
 to use it in this analysis, they had no further interest in it. Their 
 interest lay in the revolution they were undertaking; it did not 
 lie immediately in philosophy itself. 
 
 IV 
 
 After the revolution, when the restoration took place, there 
 appeared philosophies of the church, reconstructions of the doc- 
 trine of the institution built on the previous ideas of the church 
 and state. These were formulated by De Bonald and De Maistre, 
 as we have already mentioned; and they were consistent and 
 very able doctrines. They turned on the empirical philosophy 
 of the time and insisted that it was skeptical, that it made 
 knowledge impossible, that it reduced man to a simple congeries 
 of separate sensations. It was known as "sensualism" instead of 
 the philosophy of sensation. Man was reduced to the sensations 
 out of which he was built up, and nature was reduced to the set 
 of experiences that people had. 
 
 For a time, ideology remained the philosophy as far as phi- 
 losophy existed in France. It had sunk to a very low ebb. It 
 almost disappeared from the universities. But where it was 
 taught, it was taught in terms of ideology. There were, how- 
 ever, those that were interested in carrying this philosophy 
 
 [434]
 
 FRENCH PHILOSOPHY 
 
 through to certain skeptical results like those of Hume. But even 
 they were rather interested in the psychological problem and 
 wanted a psychological analysis revealed. Cabanis and De_^ 
 Tracy pointed out that there were elements in experience of 
 which Hume took no account, elements which did not appear 
 in the analysis of substance and of cause. This content was the 
 content of activity. If the analysis had been carried through 
 to that point, it would have gone on to criticize Hume's skepti- 
 cism as reducing experience to a set of instantaneous presents. 
 These men made their statement in terms of factors present 
 in activity itself and in an analysis of conception as involving 
 something besides passivity. They recognized that in per- 
 ception we are passive so far as the qualities of sensation are 
 concerned. But, they said, our knowledge of these involves 
 an act, and this act is something more than mere association. 
 in that respect they were taking a step in advance. They were 
 advancing toward the psychology of education as distinct from 
 the psychology of association. In one sense they were advancing 
 ahead of their time. In England it is not until after the period, 
 or during the later period, of John Stuart Mill that the theory 
 of education is recognized. 
 
 The interest in this type of analysis in France took quite dif- 
 ferent forms. The sensationalism of Condillac was the philoso- 
 phy of the Revolution. It was an attempt to get back to ulti- 
 mate elements so that they might be reconstructed. His interest 
 was in the analysis of the governing ideas in the French commu- 
 nity. What was wished was to get back to more primitive, im- 
 mediate elements so that a plan of reconstruction could be set 
 up. The reconstruction of the Revolution was a failure, of 
 course. The analytic discussion of the older ideas was success- 
 ful. It is this difference in attitude which one must keep in 
 mind in comparing these philosophies. The result, from the phil- 
 osophical standpoint, was that the position of Condillac seems 
 superficial. He was not interested in such problems as Hume 
 was interested in. He was interested in the immediate applica- 
 tion that could be made of this analysis in testing and over- 
 
 [435]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 throwing the structure of church and state. After the revolu- 
 tion, with its failure, came the restoration and the philosophy of 
 the reaction. That philosophy was expressed by men who did 
 not simply accept ideas but who undertook to formulate them 
 with their implications. It had, however, a definite political and 
 practical social interest at that time, just as the philosophy of 
 Condillac had had a political and social interest. The later phi- 
 losophy was naturally the direct opposite of the revolution. It 
 denied the rights of man — there were no such things as rights 
 which inhere in the individual; it denied the independent ex- 
 istence of the individual; it went back to a society which was 
 organized for the church on the authoritarian basis. It was quite 
 powerfully presented. It represented, however, the philosophy 
 of reaction; and, beyond its rather successful attack on the 
 philosophy of sensationalism, it had no political effect in French 
 thought. It was succeeded by a new movement whose chief 
 figure was Guyau, with a connecting link in Royer-Collard. 
 
 V 
 
 Royer-Collard was a lawyer by profession. He became a 
 philosopher late in Hfe. What he brought to French thought 
 was the attitude of the Scottish common-sense school, the 
 school of reason. This school was that of the individualists, and 
 was the dominant philosophy in American colleges fifty years 
 ago. As indicated by the term "common sense," it appealed to 
 the common judgment of the community as carrying with it a 
 conclusion which should be accepted, and accepted as final, as 
 that which is always true. Of course, there must be some sort of 
 philosophical background in so abstract a statement as this; and 
 this was found in what was a different statement of the process 
 of knowledge itself. The doctrine of knowledge as it appeared in 
 the empirical school is found in the relationship of impressions 
 and ideas. In the first place, the empiricists would say that hav- 
 ing an idea or impression and knowing an idea or impression are 
 the same thing. It is there in consciousness; that is all there is to 
 it. It carries its own existence with it. The impressions are 
 
 [436]
 
 FRENCH PHILOSOPHY 
 
 connected with memory images. By the process of association 
 they are connected with other impressions that occur at the 
 same time. If one sees an object with which he is famihar, there 
 arise other impressions with which he is famihar and which are 
 Hke it; there arise impressions of other things that have been as- 
 sociated with it in space and time in the past. When one ob- 
 serves a place, certain memories of persons he has seen there ap- 
 pear. This relation of ideas and impressions to others comes to 
 take the place of knowledge, or what we mean by knowledge. 
 Knowledge is reduced to the relations of the impressions and 
 ideas to each other as they lie in the mind. 
 
 It was assumed by the rationalists that we have, besides that 
 knowledge of things which is present in the mind, knowledge of 
 things to which this refers. Beyond our immediate experience 
 there are things that appear in that experience. For example, 
 there was the assumption that we know there is such a thing as 
 "matter." Our experience of matter is only in our sensations. 
 They lie in the mind. But there is back of these sensations some 
 substance that we call "matter." We experience our own experi- 
 ences. W^e have memory of our own experiences. But we are 
 supposed to know that back of these states of consciousness lies 
 a mind, a conscious mind, a substantial spiritual something in 
 which these experiences inhere. And we are supposed to know 
 that there are causal relations, as well as substantial relations, in 
 the world. We have a set of ideas such as those of unity, mul- 
 tiplicity; we have all the logical concepts as such; and we are 
 supposed to know that they unify our knowledge. And from 
 these ideas and concepts we deduce results that follow or not be- 
 cause of the nature of the laws indicated. That is, it was as- 
 sumed that we have a knowledge of what lies beyond the impres- 
 sions. What the empirical school did was to carry back, step by 
 step, all this inference of something beyond experience to the 
 simple relationship of impressions and ideas that lie inside of 
 experience. 
 
 The most striking result of this analysis was Hume's attempt 
 to show that the causal relation of things was nothing but the 
 
 [437I
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 pictures that arise in our mind — a succession of impressions one 
 after another. If in the past we find one event following another 
 and this has been repeated, then we expect that it will happen 
 again. That is all there is to the law of causality. It does not 
 show that every cause must have a certain effect, every effect 
 a cause; that there must be like causes for like effects; that 
 there must be an adequate cause for every effect. We do not 
 know this as a law of the universe. What we find is this fixed ex- 
 pectation — an expectation that comes so frequently, so uncon- 
 sciously, that we are not aware of it. When the sun rises, there 
 will be day; when it sets, there will be night. If we follow the 
 course of these events, there will be only certain anticipated re- 
 sults. You can see the result of all this was to resolve knowledge 
 as such into the mere relation of impressions and ideas to each 
 other, remembering that I am using the term "idea" in Hume's 
 sense as merely the copy of the impression. Every image must, 
 of course, be of the same character as the impression itself. 
 
 The change that is involved in the position of Reid and the 
 Scottish school is to bring back knowledge as the immediate re- 
 lationship between the mind and an object. Reid recognizes 
 what has been called the "inner sense." According to Reid, we 
 can have knowledge of something that is not given in the state 
 of consciousness itself. The intuitional character of the Scottish 
 school of philosophy lies in this: With experience we have an 
 immediate knowledge of something that is not given in the 
 state of consciousness, in the mind, at the time. In this sense 
 the school seems to hark back to Locke's position. What the in- 
 tuitional school said was that we have an immediate intuition 
 of the table as extended and as solid; that this knowledge as 
 such is an immediate relationship between the mind and the ob- 
 ject. There is no association of common impressions and ideas 
 with other impressions and ideas. There is a cognition of some- 
 thing that is not in a given state of consciousness. If the 
 Scottish school were asked to explain this, they would say you 
 cannot go behind it. We just know. Ask them to explain see- 
 ing, or vision, or color, or sound, or taste, or odor. They are 
 
 [ 438 ]
 
 FRENCH PHILOSOPHY 
 
 there; we know them. That is a position that you cannot over- 
 throw. But this school had to recognize that matter does not 
 have the characters which appear in our vision, in our hearing, 
 in our taste, in our sense of temperature. That which answers to 
 color is motion; that which answers to odor is change; what an- 
 swers to sound are vibrations of the air. Now these physical 
 characters are not what appear in experience. Color, sound, 
 taste, and odor are not motion; they are not chemical structure. 
 So, the Scottish school had to answer the assumption that these 
 lie in the mind and are appHed to physical things that we imme- 
 diately know. In these experiences we are subject to all sorts of 
 possible errors. The extended matter is there; sound, color, 
 taste, depend on surroundings. Put it in one surrounding, and 
 matter has color; in another, it has not. There are possibilities, 
 then, of error; and the Scottish thinkers had no way of account- 
 ing for them. 
 
 Royer-Collard carried over into French philosophy the doc- 
 trine of common sense, but he gave a somewhat different in- 
 terpretation to it. He dealt with common sense in so far as there 
 is uniformity in everyone's judgment. This recalls Kant's as- 
 sumption or implication that minds have universal character. 
 It is not simply that they have common forms but that there 
 is some general consciousness of which all the different minds are 
 different expressions. This is an implication of a good deal of the 
 Kantian doctrine, although Kant himself did not carry it out. 
 He avoided these implications so far as he could. Something of 
 this sort becomes evident in the statement which Royer-Collard 
 made of the common-sense school. He comes back to the state- 
 ment, to the assumption, that we have immediate knowledge of 
 that which is outside of ourselves and that that knowledge is 
 simply given; it is there. We can verify what is immediately 
 given by common sense — that in which everybody else agrees. 
 This French transportation of the doctrine of common sense 
 across the channel carried with it an assumption of a common 
 consciousness in which different minds agree, from which, in 
 some sense, different minds arise. Thecharacteristics which be- 
 
 [439]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 long to this common experience are given, in a certain sense, in 
 advance of that which takes place in the separate experience. 
 Thus we have a statement in France of the Kantian transcen- 
 dentalism^ — the logical priority of certain characters of the 
 mind. That is one striking difference between the doctrine of 
 the Scottish school of Reid and his followers as it appeared in 
 the British Isles and the doctrine as introduced in France. 
 
 There is another character also that belonged to this phi- 
 losophy and which became emphasized later. That is the ele- 
 ment of activity, especially in our normative states. This 
 arises in some sense out of a criticism of the empirical school. 
 As we have seen, for the empiricists having an idea and knowing 
 it or having an impression and knowing it are the same thing. 
 There is no difference. So far as our impressions are concerned, 
 what they insisted on was that we are passive. You open a door 
 to enter a room. If you have never been there before, you do 
 not know what you are going to see, what the furniture will be, 
 what the decorations will be. Furthermore, you have no initia- 
 tive in the matter. You open the door, there is a light in the 
 room, and you see what is in it; but you are quite passive in 
 that experience. The experience which will come to you is some- 
 thing of which you will be aware, but you will have done nothing 
 about it. Having sensation and knowing are the sarne^dijng 
 from the point of view of the empirical school. 
 
 What the French school insisted on with growing emphasis 
 was the distinction between cognition and perception. They 
 admitted that, as far as the sensations are concerned, we are 
 quite passive. No one can, by willing, have a sensation of a cer- 
 tain type any more than he can add a cubit to his stature. If 
 the object is there and the eyes open, one will have a sensation; 
 one is passive in regard to it. The act of cognition, on the 
 other hand, is not passive. It is knowing. If my relationship to 
 this table is not simply the presence in my mind of a set of im- 
 pressions but is a knowledge that the table is there, then that 
 knowledge is the result of an active process. It is not a simple 
 report of a set of sensations. What that means is that the mere 
 
 [440]
 
 FRENCH PHILOSOPHY 
 
 having of a set of perceptions is different from knowing the ta- 
 ble. In the latter the analysis must be carried on farther if one 
 is to say that the case is correct. Getting a glimpse of a face, one 
 sees an acquaintance. When he meets the person he finds it is 
 someone else whom he has never met. He has made a mistake. 
 Our perceptual process and conceptional processes are passive 
 in regard to the elements over which we have no control. But 
 we are continually building things up. If we are taking certain 
 experiences from the past, we have at the time relatively few 
 impressions that are immediate. We are experiencing what the 
 last impressions meant and what they imply for the future. We 
 start off with an image, a sensation; and we expect something. 
 We bind the whole thing in our perception. We set up the ob- 
 jects we look for next. 
 
 There were, then, these two elements in this French school; 
 the taking-over of the Scottish school with its immediate knowl- 
 edge of something, the acceptance of common sense, as, in a cer- 
 tain sense, the criterion of that which we are sure we know; and, 
 in the second place, the emphasis on the presence of activity. It 
 is these factors that distinguish the sensationalists of the period 
 and represent the difference between them and the Ideologues 
 on the one hand and the eclecticism of Cousin on the other. 
 
 VI 
 
 One point I want to impress on you is that all French phi- 
 losophy of the period had a pohtical bias. It is only natural that 
 that should be the case. France had been overthrown by politi- 
 cal speculation in a certain sense. The French Revolution was 
 called the revolution of the philosophers — Rousseau, Vol- 
 taire. They were the philosophers of revolution. When the 
 Revolution had been carried out, the reaction came, and with it 
 a philosophy that undertook to put back the old world. Then 
 there grew up a liberal school that tried to establish something 
 on the political side like that already achieved in England. In 
 England you find a philosophical detachment. The constitution 
 seem§jtxi-reflect_a permanent political order. T here were r elative 
 
 [441 ]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 freedom and development. People were at liberty to speculate 
 without asking for the political implications of their specula- 
 tions, but that was not the situation in France. 
 
 I want to call your attention again to the fact that the stream 
 of French life was flowing not through Paris but through the ex- 
 perience of the peasants. They represented the mass of the 
 French people, and through the revolution they had got the soil 
 and were occupied in the cultivation of it with a passion that be- 
 longed to the life of the French peasants. In this they are differ- 
 ent from the English peasants. They were satisfied. They were 
 not interested in what was going on in Paris. Thus, much of the 
 thought of the period was superficial, as far as the consciousness 
 of the French as a whole is concerned. This is characteristic of 
 the whole period in France. The changes taking place in Eng- 
 land went all the way through; and although there the expres- 
 sions are the expressions of the upper class, they were felt by 
 the whole country. A minority was in control, but their control 
 aflfected the life of the whole group. They carried the communi- 
 ty with them, and they had a sense of the racial life that they 
 were directing. The profoundest experience in the French public 
 lay below the surface; and what took place on the surface, while 
 it was picturesque and had back of it men of talent and ability, 
 did not represent the deeper currents. It has been only very 
 slowly that the French people have passed over into political 
 life, passed over by means of institutions which were brought 
 in from the outside, which were not their own. 
 
 The movement from this earlier position to which I have just 
 referred took place by way of Royer-Collard. He made a com- 
 mon consciousness, rather than a common assent, the character- 
 istic of the process of knowledge. It was a movement, as I 
 pointed out, that lies within the Kantian movement. It goes 
 back to something that is transcendent. It. impHes a common 
 character which belongs to all consciousness, to all intelli- 
 gence — something which is logically there in advance of cog- 
 nitive experiences themselves. This was not worked out in any 
 such metaphysical theory as it finally received in the German 
 
 [442]
 
 FRENCH PHILOSOPHY 
 
 idealists, but it is definitely implied; and what Royer-Collard 
 came back to in his lectures is something that is common in the 
 attitude of everyone, something that is common in conscious- 
 ness itself. It was a test of what is true. 
 
 The other feature of his philosophy to which I have referred 
 and which was emphasized by other writers was that of activ- 
 ity, and here he was in advance of the English movement. His 
 emphasis was placed upon the ego, upon the self. For him ego 
 has substance, which is soul. If you deal with it in terms of sub- 
 stance, it is that in which states of consciousness exist. But the 
 soul is more especially that which organizes experience or that 
 which is a statement of a process of organization. The soul, you 
 may say, is an ego; but it is a substantial ego in which inhere 
 the different states of consciousness whose faculties express 
 themselves in the conduct of the individual. But the soul lies 
 back of the states of consciousness as a substance which is un- 
 knowable and as a function whose faculties express the soul 
 lying behind the idea. The act of volition takes place; the man 
 is responsible for what he does; but the process of volition itself 
 is the self. The self has wanted; has felt; has been affected. That 
 is the ego of the older metaphysics, especially with its teleologi- 
 cal implications. This principle of the activity of the soul comes 
 into the process of consciousness as something that is going on, 
 not as something that is simply an expression of a substantial 
 entity that lies back behind the sensation. It is something that 
 is^oing on. 
 
 Here Royer-Collard simply gives an emphasis to a phase of 
 experience; he does not work out his doctrine. We have only a 
 report on his so-called "second year" in philosophy, and his in- 
 fluence was one that came to those who listened to his lectures 
 rather than those who read his book. But he makes a connect- 
 ing link between the philosophy of the revolution, which was de- 
 structive in character, and the latter thought. The point at 
 which he may be said definitely to depart in his emphasis, at 
 least from the philosophy which he had taken over, was in this 
 conception of a common consciousness and common will, and 
 
 [443]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 not in the concept of an activity going on in experience itself 
 which, therefore, is not stated in terms of associations which are 
 already there, and which is not to be stated in terms of a sub- 
 stance. For the psychology of association the process as such 
 has already taken place; the association is simply an inference 
 of organization which is already there. You bring up things by 
 association. You are allowing a relationship which is already in 
 existence to apply itself. You have met a person at a certain 
 place; you pass the place, and the memory of the previous event 
 comes back to you. You are allowing the structure which is al- 
 ready there simply to express itself. It is not a process; it is not 
 an activity in itself. The psychology of Royer-CoUard, as it ex- 
 pressed itself later, comes back to what is going on. It is the 
 impulse that is taking place expressing itself. That is found in 
 attention as such. It creates relationships, sets up relationships, 
 or, in finding relations, organizes them. It is active in a manner 
 in which activity cannot be found in the associational statement. 
 But it is this activity which is emphasized at this period. 
 
 It is the activity which gathers about the ego, the self, as it 
 represents an interest in the study of the self in its psychological 
 experiences^, which has been characteristic of French thought 
 from that time on. We find also, an interest in memoirs, an 
 interest of the sort which gets expression in Montaigne; but that 
 is a characteristic of the French of an earlier period. They, too, 
 were looking for an activity which goes on in the inner life of 
 the individual. They make use of introspection, but as a differ- 
 ent process from that used by John Stuart Mill. The difference 
 has to do with emphasis again, with the sort of problem for 
 which introspection is used. Introspection is still used by the 
 English school in the interest of the solution of the epistemo- 
 logical problem. It comes back to an analysis of sensation and 
 perception. The interest in the French school comes back to the 
 life of the individual himself, at this period to the salvation, the 
 glorification, the affirmation, of himself. It took account of the 
 record of the experience of philosophy as it goes back into the 
 past. That interest in history is also characteristic of the Ro- 
 
 [444]
 
 FRENCH PHILOSOPHY 
 
 mantic movement. Introspection as we connect it with this 
 earlier psychology is a distinct affair. It has to do with experi- 
 mentation that starts off with extreme abstractions and quaH- 
 tatively susceptible differences. It is a different affair from the 
 introspection of the English thinkers and writers of this period. 
 Those who were working under the general idea of introspection 
 were endeavoring to get back to their own selves, to find out 
 what they were, and to try to evaluate themselves. It represents 
 a process of evaluation of spiritual experiences rather than the 
 process of locating certain cognitive experiences. 
 
 VII 
 
 Every philosophy and every philosopher appearing in France 
 during this period has a political status. This is notable in the fig- 
 ure Cousin, He had a career in which there was difficulty. He ex- 
 pressed the attitude of the monarchy of Louis Philippe and the 
 school of the bourgeoisie, of those who were seeking security and 
 still were attempting to hold on to that which was valuable 
 from the standpoint of the Revolution. They did not break with 
 the Revolution, as the reactionary school had. They insisted 
 that what it undertook to achieve — liberty — was essential to 
 the life of the individual, to the life of the soul. But it was a 
 liberty which had to be stated in terms of conditions under 
 which it could be expressed. It was a school which was en- 
 deavoring to gather together what was valuable in the thought 
 of the period that had gone before it and also another French 
 school that was moving outside of its own border to get what 
 was valuable in the thought of other nations. It took over not 
 only the empiricism which the philosophy of the revolution 
 had brought in from the English empirical school but also 
 the interpretation of the Scottish school's doctrine to which 
 I have referred. Then Cousin went farther afield into Ger- 
 many and studied the new Continental philosophical doc- 
 trine that was arising, and undertook to get the outline of the 
 philosophy of Kant and also to realize what was going on in the 
 German Romantic school. This school set up what, in the sense 
 
 [445]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 that I have already indicated, you may call a "transcendental- 
 ism." This was presented in the philosophy of Royer-Collard. 
 There is a certain structure of things belonging to a common 
 consciousness which is a presupposition of the act of knowledge. 
 It is something given in advance in the mind that determines 
 the character of the object itself. The French thinkers did not 
 take this doctrine in the skeptical sense in which it is presented 
 in Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. It was taken as the test of 
 that which could be verified; in the sense in which it was pre- 
 sented in the Scottish school — what is common is true. 
 
 The figures in Germany that most attracted Cousin and other 
 writers of the time were ScheUing and Hegel. It is interesting to 
 see the different reactions to the Romantic philosophers. In 
 England a class movement fastened on Fichte, rather than 
 Schelling, although Schelling had a reverberation in Coleridge. 
 Carlyle responded to Kant and Fichte; Cousin, to Kant and 
 Schelling. There is perhaps an outlet of the French aesthetic 
 nature in the philosophy which gathered about the aesthetic 
 response as presented by Schelling. It was, however, also a 
 presentation of nature as having the objectivity of the mind 
 itself. This made the philosophy of Schelling attractive to 
 Cousin and other thinkers of the time. 
 
 The other expression to which I have referred, that of activ- 
 ity, found its statement in a psychological method which was 
 affirmed as the method of this philosophy. It is the expres- 
 sion, of course, of Romantic idealism. This was developed in 
 Germany in the affirmation of the absolute philosophy, in the 
 statement that our own selves are simply aspects of the Abso- 
 lute Self. This carrying-back of experience, objective experi- 
 ence, to the self found its expression in French philosophy in the 
 assumption that the philosophical method is essentially a psy- 
 chological method. If one did make a consistent philosophical 
 system on this basis, he would find himself in the position 
 of the German Romantic idealists, as that appears in Hegel's 
 phenomenology. This metaphysical statement, however, was 
 not taken over and made use of by the French philosophers. They 
 
 [446]
 
 FRENCH PHILOSOPHY 
 
 insisted that the study of the self as it appears in introspection is 
 the method of which philosophy makes use. This philosophy 
 had, in some sense, fortified itself with the Kantian position. 
 The structure of the mind determines the structure of the 
 world. The problem of getting from the mind over into the 
 world it knows is a problem which must first be faced; but it 
 presumably has built its bridges by means of the Kantian as- 
 sumption, connected, of course, in a certain sense with the as- 
 sumptions of the Scottish school. It has already made its es- 
 tablished contact with the world. The structure of the world 
 and of the mind are in some sense the same. The former will be 
 studied, then, in the mind, as it can be got at most readily there. 
 The method given is psychological. That is the French interpre- 
 tation of Romantic idealism as it was seen in Germany. That 
 idealism, of course, had a late after-birth in England in the neo- 
 Hegelian movement. But the influence of Hegel, as it appeared 
 in Carlyle and Coleridge and men of that sort, was literary. In 
 France the definite inference from this idealism came especially 
 by way of the Kantian philosophy of Cousin, but it had none of 
 the air of abandon of the Romantic idealistic philosophy in Ger- 
 many. It was carefully regimented. It dealt with a mind which 
 has definite faculties. It takes over the problems which Kant 
 had thrown up in the doctrine of a common consciousness in 
 which are given the forms of mind which are also the forms of 
 matter. By this method men could turn back to study them- 
 selves with a feeling that the study of the self was also a study 
 of the world; that the same drama was present in the mind as in 
 nature; that nature was free, an odyssey of spirit. One could 
 study nature, its reality, its structure, in some sense, in our own 
 minds. 
 
 Another characteristic which was present in this school, one 
 which led to greater fruitfulness, was the interest in history. 
 The Romantic school affected all Europe in this same fashion. 
 It was the essence of the Romantic movement to return to the 
 past from the point of view of the self-consciousness of the Ro- 
 
 [447]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 mantic period, to become aware of itself in terms of the past. 
 We have a Romantic interest expressed in Voltaire in the re- 
 newed interest in the more primitive conditions of society. We 
 have it in the reaction of a national consciousness, a national 
 soul, which definitely has that which is comparable to the his- 
 tory of the individual. The work of Hegel in going back to the 
 expression of racial and national community consciousness ex- 
 pressed itself early in philosophy. The interest of the school 
 of Royer-Collard in the history of philosophy also reflected 
 the same spirit. But it is not a history of philosophy which 
 is the statement of the other side of a theory of metaphysical 
 logic, as was the case with Hegel. Hegel presented the develop- 
 ment of the categories as they take place in our thought and 
 the development of these categories as they take place in his- 
 tory as two sides of a single process. The study we find in 
 France has more feudal interest behind it. It is interested in 
 men, and it led to very important advances. It is an acute criti- 
 cal study of Greek philosophy, particularly of Plato, It was in- 
 terested in the building-up of a school of philosophical thought 
 that was not committed to a metaphysical interpretation. Its 
 statement was not the reflection of a single philosophical doc- 
 trine. 
 
 The philosophical doctrine of Cousin, on the other hand, 
 was tenuous and superficial. It never seriously had a real inter- 
 est in the study of earlier philosophy and in the presentation 
 of it on the basis of actual documents and their interpretation 
 in terms of historical criticism. You find that sort of systematic 
 interest existing in German philosophy that has gotten beyond 
 the period of Romantic idealism. Something of the spirit of 
 that idealism is still found in such a work as Zeller's History of 
 Greek Philosophy. It also passed over into the interpretation of 
 history in the Marxian movement. It has its reflection in the 
 interpretation of history in the formulation of the Flegelian 
 doctrine of the state. It has less detachment than French his- 
 tory of philosophy, as reflected in the uncertainty of the philo- 
 sophical presuppositions of the French thinkers. 
 
 [448]
 
 FRENCH PHILOSOPHY 
 
 vni 
 
 There is another figure of more importance to us than Cousin, 
 though he made relatively little stir at the time. This is Comte, 
 I have presented Royer-Collard and the philosophy of the revo- 
 lution. Comte has his connection with the philosophy of re- 
 action, that of the church in the reactionary period. He has 
 his revolutionary aspects, but it is the other that is the taproot 
 of his philosophy. If we are going to understand the man, we 
 must realize that. 
 
 The philosophy of the early period, the philosophy of the 
 revolution, that of De Maistre and DeBonald — the philosophy 
 of the Restoration, that of Royer-Collard — which was the phi- 
 losophy of the bourgeois monarchy, were all practical in some 
 sense. Another element, however, was forcing its way in and 
 was setting the temper for the later philosophical thought. This_ 
 element was science, a science which was not political. The con- 
 "ftection between philosophy and science is a connection which 
 may be made either through a cosmology (a theory of the physi- 
 cal universe) or through methodology (the attempt to present 
 the world as a whole, to organize all the different sciences into 
 a single science, to criticize the concepts of the different sciences 
 from the standpoint of others). This attempt is one which 
 we find in all philosophy. The scientist is occupied with his own 
 particular field. This is especially true of modern, specialized 
 science. And the very restriction of the fields of the different 
 sciences set up what may be called "organic relationships" be- 
 tween them. You cannot consider a biological field by itself 
 without putting it into relationship with the physical environ- 
 ment in which the organism is found. You cannot concentrate 
 your attention on the digestive tract of an animal without tak- 
 ing into account the whole life of that animal. You must relate 
 the one in its organic functioning with the other. You cannot, 
 in a physical sense, take up the consideration of physics as over 
 against chemistry without setting up relationships between the 
 different fields. Thus the scientists themselves feel the necessity 
 of this interrelationship. It gets its fullest expression on the 
 
 [449]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 philosophical side, and in every generation there have been 
 philosophical scientists or philosophers who are familiar with 
 the science of the period. There have always been those who 
 endeavor to present a concept of the world as a whole, with the 
 interrelationship of the different sciences. 
 
 It is possible, however, for philosophy to approach science 
 not through a conception of the different scientific fields but 
 from the point of view of the scientific method. The scientific 
 method in the Greek period was not different from the method 
 of philosophy. Plato was educating his young men, so that they 
 would become guardians or philosopher-kings, by giving them 
 work on geometry. The method of geometry was the method of 
 the philosopher. It was a process of deduction from the very 
 nature of the ideas with which the geometrician or philosopher 
 dealt. Aristotle, entering the field of biology, carried into the 
 philosophical field a new method, the development of a teleo- 
 logical concept of matter as potentiality and substance, as the 
 reahzation of matter in form. This concept he brought over 
 from science. It was a conception which he used both in his 
 studies of animals and plants and in his consideration of meta- 
 physics. He dre\^^no_iine,between..p.hjlosaphy^ 
 far as method was concerned. Both Plato and Aristotle regard 
 themselves as philosophers in so far as they are astronomers and 
 biologists. There was but a single field with a single method. 
 
 The Renaissance introduced a new method which was dis- 
 tinct from the philosophy of its time. Bacon presented it as an 
 inductive method which was not one of Aristotelian induction. 
 It appeared sharply in the work of the great scientists of the 
 period as the experimental method. What was peculiarly scien- 
 tific in it, as distinct from the philosophical method of the time, 
 was that it dealt with that which was taking place not in terms 
 of the substance of things but in terms of events as they took 
 place. Galileo registered this in his statement of it as a new sci- 
 ence. He called it "dynamics." Aristotle's treatment of falling 
 bodies was that the nature of heavy bodies was to move toward 
 the earth. He deduced their velocity from their weight: the 
 
 [450]
 
 FRENCH PHILOSOPHY 
 
 more they weighed, the greater their velocity. He start ed with 
 the object and deduced from that what the nature of the process^ 
 "must l)c. What GalTTeoundertook to do was to find out what the 
 velocity of the object wasTtTmct. If you take that method over 
 Into biology, you come to a statement of the physiological or- 
 ganism in terms of its functions. You ask what a digestive tract 
 is. Instead of starting off with the form of the stomach, you 
 start off with the digestive tract and state its nature in terms of 
 the function it has to carry out. Then you can see why it has a 
 certain form, why it has a different function. You state your 
 problem in such terms that you can define it in terms of the 
 process going on. This is just the opposite of what you find in 
 the Aristotelian science and philosophy, where you get the na- 
 ture of the object first and define its processes in terms of the 
 nature of the object itself. 
 
 What I want to point out in this connection is that our mod- 
 ern scientific method abstracts from the things which had been 
 philosophically, metaphysically defined, and occupies itself with 
 what is happening. It has brought on what we now call the 
 "event" as the object of observation. We do not observe, as 
 Aristotle observed, to see through the process to what the na- 
 ture of the object itself is. We observe to see what changes take 
 place, what motions are going on, and at what velocities. That 
 is the character of the observation; and that is also true, of 
 course, in the biological world as far as it has its modern expres- 
 sion in evolution. O bserv ation can be ^directed toward that 
 which is taking place and can, to that extent,^be abstracted from 
 tITe nature of the thing itself. That is, it can ignore metaphysics. 
 Aj;istotelian science was bound up with its metaphysics. Our 
 biology, until evolution set it free, was bound up with meta- 
 physics. It could explain species only in terms of creation. But 
 an evolution which explains the development of form is free 
 from such a metaphysical statement-^ Well_th^n^.tJie_point^hat 
 I am rnal5ingJs.that]modern sciencejCateresLtfid-m 
 "pens'asdistinct from the thin^ which was supposed to be re- 
 sp^nsibFe^lor the nature of the happening. And when it comes
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 to the statement of the thing, it defines itjn terms of the proc- 
 ess going on. It is free from metaph}^^ics<^ / 
 £Now, the reflection of dim. ill- philosophy .appears in positiv- 
 ism. Positivism is the statement of reahty in terms of so- 
 called "phenomena."-^These are the things that happen, that 
 which is going on. Positivism abstracts the process, the event, 
 from the nature of the things that are involved in what is going 
 on. That such a process of knowledge should be possible is, of 
 (^ course, due to the experimental method. This method presents 
 a test by means of which you can consider by themselves what 
 the philosopher calls "phenomena" and still standardize your 
 knowledge. These are the two characters of scientific method 
 which put it in such an independent place as over against 
 philosophy: it can abstract from the nature of what is in- 
 volved in the process of the world; it can in that way free 
 jtself from metaphysics in so far as it studies phenomena. The 
 philosopher has no method by means of which he can contest its 
 claims. The experimental method set the scientist free from the 
 philosophur>) 
 
 The attempt to carry this method into philosophy is found in 
 positivism, Vv'hich undertakes to deal with phenomena. They 
 are called "phenomena" in the philosophic sense; "facts" in the 
 scientific sense. A fact is something that happens, takes place. 
 There is no problem of a certain "nature" in what is taking 
 place. Put it in philosophical terms, and it is something hap- 
 pening that has a relation to a noumenon that lies back of it. 
 Positivism deals with what is there, what is positive and directly 
 experienced, whose processes the mind can follow. It was Comte 
 who undertook to carry over this method into philosophy. He 
 was by no means free from metaphysical taint, but he is the one 
 who gave the first definite philosophical statement to the more 
 descriptive aspect of science. He was the first one to make the 
 attempt to build up philosophy along the lines_of the scientific 
 method. 
 
 It follows, of course, that such a method is hypothetical. 
 What one does is to follow a curve, so to speak. On the basis of 
 
 [45^-]
 
 FRENCH PHILOSOPHY 
 
 observation, one assumes or makes the hypothesis that the 
 curve is of a certain character. If it is of that character, then 
 a body moving in such a path would have to be at such and 
 such a point at such and such a time, and one could observe and 
 make sure that the body was at that point in its process. The 
 hypothesis is justified, in so far as that movement of the body is 
 concerned; but there may be something in it that the scientist 
 has not been able to determine. In that case it may later be 
 necessary to reconstruct the hypothesis. That is, the scientific 
 method is essentially hypothetical. It is a method of extrapola- 
 tion, a way of determining what the result may be and justify- 
 ing one's theory by means of that result. Of course, one can 
 never make a complete statement of all that is involved in any- 
 thing that happens. In some sense everything is involved in 
 everything that happens. Consequently, the theory must be 
 hypothetical. The experimental method, as applied by science, 
 always implies that a theory is hypothetical. 
 
 What positivism undertook to do was to deal with that which 
 fallswithin the fi^eld^fphilosophic thought as we deal with sci- 
 enfi'fic^'data, in terms of scientific method. There we deal with 
 the event as it appears. The event as it appears for the scien- 
 tist, the observer, is the sensation in consciousness. The scien- 
 tist takes the event as something by itself. Then he finds out 
 what other events are connected with it, finds what uniformity 
 may be discovered, and forms a hypothesis of the way in 
 which these events will be associated with each other. He 
 tests this hypothesis by future events and establishes a theory, 
 but a theory which still remains hypothetical in character. 
 The assumption here is that knowledge is to be obtained only 
 through the observation of events and the testing of hypotheses 
 as tfiey appear in experience, and that the immediate object of 
 knowledge is the event and the thing. Here we have a philoso- 
 phy which is positivistic in character. If we cannot treat en- 
 tities in terms of metaphysical things, we can deal with them 
 at least as far as our experience is concerned. The matter that 
 lies back of the qualities of the chair is something that does not 
 
 [453]
 
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 enter into experience. It is not positive knowledge. This is a 
 statement which is of the same general character as that of 
 Hume. As far as his account of what we have in our cognitive 
 experience is concerned, Hume comes back to impressions and 
 ideas and the analysis of them. In thinking of the substance of 
 things, he says we have uniformities which reveal themselves in 
 our experience in terms of habit; and that is what Hume was 
 interested in — the relation of events in experience to the so- 
 called "laws of nature." 
 
 \Xd the case of positivism, of the form in which it was espoused 
 
 by Comte, the interest does not lie primarily in reducing na- 
 
 t ajv ture and its uniformities to associated ideas. What Comte ^yas 
 
 *|V /^ interested in was the relation between the events as they take 
 
 , j place. He did not bring up the questicm as to where those events 
 
 Intake place, whether in the mind or in the world, whether "there 
 is something that answers to them as they take place in the 
 
 *^ mirid. He said here are the events; we call some subjective, 
 'some objective. Let us find the uniformity of their happening, 
 not only for an observational science but also for philosopK^Oi, 
 Comte was particularly interested in the appearance oFthis 
 method and its relationship to the formal metaphysical con- 
 tent which should lie behind it. He went back into the history 
 of thought to the Greek period, with its metaphysical method, 
 and asked what lies behind it. He showed the interpretation 
 of the world in terms of gods, of magic influences of spirits, 
 and then showed how Greek philosophy, becoming ration- 
 alistic, advanced beyond this concept of gods to the concept 
 of certain natures which belong to things. Such a statement as 
 that which Aristotle gives is partly theological and partly meta- 
 physical. He assumed, for example, that the nature of the heav- 
 enly bodies is divine. He assumed that there must be some sort 
 of a divine being that directs the motion of all planetary bodies. 
 They are gods, such gods as the Greeks had conceived, but de- 
 prived of the anthropomorphic aspects we find in mythology. 
 Aristotle conceived of them as responsible for the motions of the 
 heavenly bodies, although he assumed that these bodies, by na- 
 
 [ 454 ]
 
 FRENCH PHILOSOPHY 
 
 ture, move in circular orbits and with uniform velocities. On the 
 face of the earth this teleological element largely disappears, and 
 you have heavy bodies whose tendency is to move toward the 
 center of the earth, Aristotle did not conceive of these as direct- 
 ed by divine beings. From the standpoint of nature, there is no 
 very great difference between assuming that the growth of a 
 tree is due to a dryad or to a certain metaphysical substance 
 which belongs by nature to the tree. The growth of trees is such 
 as it is. You can think of it in pictorial form, show it as it is, a 
 living tree. You can think of the force of the tree as that which 
 comes-from a living being or from an inherent force of nature 
 that tends to develop itself in a certain way. There is a certain 
 nature in the acorn which, given an opportunity, will develop 
 Jnto a sapling and then into an oak. 
 
 A scientific statement is a natural development of the theo- 
 logical statement. The intermediate, metaphysical statement 
 is, of course, free from all the anthropomorphic characters of 
 the theological statement. It does not have to be brought inside 
 of the sphere of magic. The mind is free in that respect. But 
 still it is bound to the definition which it gives of the nature of 
 the object itself. Having given that definition, it can deduce 
 certain necessary qualities from it. So we find that the Aristote- 
 lian metaphysics regards not a growing science but a completed 
 science. Aristotle was the Encyclopedist of his period. He gath- 
 ored into his statements all'that could be known, and put it in 
 ^terms of the nature of the things that make up the world, 
 things that we find in the world when put in their necessary > 
 ^gic;il relations to each other. Such a statement has a certain 
 finality about it, provided it is carried out by a genius, like, 
 Aristotle, who is able to gather together and organize a great 
 ~I)ody of diverse material. If the summation has been a very com- 
 plete one, there is no invitation to anyone to carry it further. 
 That is what is striking, but with such a complete science inter- 
 est lapses,.^ 
 
 The type of problem which comes with the work of Galileo, 
 as expressing the experimental method, is essentially one which 
 
 [455]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 comes from the method of research science, not from the science 
 of the Encyclopedists, not from the type that we sometimes call 
 "systematic." There are certain fields into which this new 
 method has entered comparatively late. Biology, to go back for 
 a generation or a little more perhaps, took into itself everything 
 that men knew; and anything that they did not know, at the 
 time, could be added to it. There were certain groupings of 
 plants — the genera, the famiHes, and their species and sub- 
 species. There was a principle of organization, a principle which 
 was worked out in the eighteenth century by Linnaeus. Into 
 this system could be introduced any new species that might be 
 found, but the system itself did not carry with it any proof. 
 
 That is not a research science. Research science has come into 
 biology only with evolution, for the conception of evolution 
 / deals with species not as ultimate metaphysical entities but as 
 / something that arises out of conditions. Experience, instead of 
 ''— - being of such and such a metaphysical entity, becomes a prob- 
 lem. That is, of course, presented to us in Darwin's great work. 
 What is the origin of species? This question indicates a new 
 line of approach. The earlier concept was that characters and 
 species were given in the creation of the plant or animal. God 
 gave to the plants and animals a certain nature for their preser- 
 vation. The whole life-history of plants and animals shows the 
 development of this nature. The cataloguing system enables 
 us to give them their characters and place them in a complete 
 science. A scientific problem is itself not a statement that here 
 is the oak, the ox, the tiger. It is rather the question: "Why 
 is the oak there; why is it oak instead of another tree; what is 
 the meaning of this species?" 
 
 In what I have been saying, you have a very vivid. illustra- 
 tion of the passage from the metaphysical over to what Comte 
 would call the "positivistic state." There are, said Comte, these 
 three stages of development, the theological, the metaphysical, 
 the positivistic. And he said this is true not only of com- 
 munities but of individuals. A child lives in a world of magical- 
 things arid persons. He loves things that meet hi s wishes, an^ 
 
 [456]
 
 FRENCH PHILOSOPHY 
 
 he hates things. tJigt hurt him. And then comes the later period 
 when he gives up these magical implications and takes to hard 
 
 %,and fixed definitions of things. The objects about him have cer- 
 tain natures. They are not to be looked at from the point of 
 view of a fairyj:al g. It is a common-sense attitude if you like, 
 
 ^ BuTarTa ttitude which in itself is metaphysical in that each thing 
 has a scertain nature that distinguishes it from other things. Be- 
 cause of its nature, it has certain qualities; and the child utilizes 
 these qualities. It is the common-sense attitude which all per- 
 sons^oTadult years reflect in regard to the objects about them. 
 The natural definition of a chair is that it is something having 
 certain necessary qualities — it has hardness, a certain form, and 
 other qualities — inhering in a certain nature. That metaphysi- 
 cal statement is nothing but the abstract formulation of our atti- 
 tude toward all things as they exist about us. Then we advance 
 to the positivistic, the scientific, stage as Comte stated it. Such 
 a statement as that which had been given of the nature of the 
 chair is recognized as utterly incomplete. What is there that 
 gives to wood its particular strength? For example, how does 
 it compare with iron or steel? We depart from the metaphysi- 
 cal attitude when we ask: "What happens when we do this, 
 that, and the other thing to the object?" We try to find cer- 
 tain' uniformities by means of which we can determine what 
 will happen. We have passed out of a world of fixed things as 
 such and come back to data which we can get in experience. 
 We have to distinguish between what the scientist refers to as 
 "hard facts" and the objects about us. Persons are said to 
 "come up against hard facts." Their theory comes in conflict 
 with a fact. But the fact against which the theory comes in 
 conflict is a happening of some sort; it is a happening which is 
 not the happening that we anticipated from a certain theory. 
 Give "I a certain theory, \\ e expect certain happenings; and then 
 somethi g else happens. It is the contr .diction i ex^ erie .ce 
 that is the hard fact of science. 
 
 That is the phase that we need to keep in mind in getting the? 
 scientific method as it appears in such a system as that of 
 
 [457]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 Comte. What one is dealing with is a set of events that take place 
 in experience. In those events you find uniformities; they never 
 get a final statement, however. Given the statement, we have a 
 theory; we are then able to determine vv^hat the results will be on 
 the basis of that theory. If something else happens, then the 
 theory must be reconstructed. The world is a world of events, of 
 things that are going on. The scientist's attitude is the expres- 
 sion of the positivistic statement that succeeds the medieval 
 statement. This exemplifies the three-stage theory of Comte. 
 As communities and as individuals we pass through three stages 
 — the theological, the metaphysical, and the scientific. From 
 the point of view of philosophy, the importance of the view lies, 
 you see, in the statement of the object of knowledge. Is one con- 
 sidering substance or is one considering events that are taking 
 
 I /- \place, what philosophers would call "phenomena"? Is knowl- 
 
 ''k/ i^ edge occupied with these or with something that these reveal? 
 Stv n -^ ■'^^ °"^ observation a finding, an isolation, of a certain nature or 
 
 lf^. « ., form that lies back of it all? Or is it occupied with the phe- 
 *vj^/, nomena themselves? It is a question as to what the function of 
 
 ^f» ■ ^ knowledge is. 
 
 IX 
 
 r The important characteristic of Comte's doctrine was its 
 ^,' recognition of what we may term the "philosophical import" of 
 ' scientific methods As I have indicated, the scientific method 
 recognized the object of knowledge in the experience of the in- 
 dividual, in that which is ordinarily termed the "fact." If one is 
 to identify the fact, he must do it in terms of his experience. It 
 is, of course, true that the observer states his observation in 
 such terms that it can also be made an object by others and so 
 be tested by them. He tries to give it a universal form, but still 
 he comes back eventually to the account which he gives of his 
 observation as such. 
 
 What is not recognized in the positivistic doctrine is that the 
 observation is always one that has an element of novelty in it. 
 That is, it is in some sense unusual. It is observed because it is 
 distinct in some way from the expected experience. One does 
 
 [458]
 
 FRENCH PHILOSOPHY 
 
 not observe that which is to be expected. One notes it; one 
 recognizes it. We recognize what we expect, and give attention 
 only to that which differs from that which is expected. If one 
 reaches for a tool that he is after and it is in its expected place, or 
 for a book in its place on the shelf, all he gives attention to is 
 that the object is of the type that he expects to find. He gives as 
 little attention as is necessary in order to identify it. More than i 
 this would mean loss of effort and time. One does not stop to / 
 examine the expression of his friend unless there is something ! 
 unusual about it. He sees only enough to identify him. Ordi- \ 
 narily, then, we would not speak of an observer as one who \ 
 merely recognizes. Observation implies careful noting of all the \ 
 details of the object. It is true that you do not observe every- j 
 thing about anything. What one does is to observe all that en- j 
 ables one to assure himself that the object is not exactly what / 
 one expects. One reaches for a tool, thinking he is going to 
 pick up a hammer, and finds it is a chisel; and he pays atten- 
 tion to find why it was that he made the mistake. He observes 
 the character of a plant that misled him. His observation is 
 given to that which distinguishes it from the expected thing. 
 These are the facts of science — those observations that enable 
 us to determine characters that would not have been antici- 
 pated. One may also, of course, give attention to objects that 
 seem quite familiar. That is what is implied. You are looking 
 for something that will strike your attention as in some sense 
 
 unusual. L, 
 
 — z:; , . . . . -\ . ,A<*r' 
 
 The positiyistic doctrine assumes that our objects are given in ( - ,4, 
 
 0^ 
 
 such observation, and that is the logical weakness of positivism. } ^o\»V»'*' 
 It assumes that the world is made up, so to speak, out of facts, --^ ^ 1 
 is made up out of those objects that appear in the experience of f ^"^ 
 the scientific observer. Most objects we regard simply as they 
 identify themselves. The objects of scientific observation answer 
 to a detailed analysis, which implies an interest of some sort. We 
 can explain this position in terms of the method to which I 
 refer, by saying that the objects of science do not always have 
 behind them implicit or explicit problems. In other words, sci- 
 
 [459]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 ence is really research science. Research always implies a prob- 
 lem. Where there is nothing of this sort, we are not engaged 
 in research. There is a type of thinking which is not problemati- 
 cal — that of carrying out a habitual act, of attending a machine 
 with which you are familiar, for example. That sort of concen- 
 trated attention is given simply to those stimuli that will enable 
 us to carry out a well-formed habit. There we have concentrat- 
 ed attention, but it is not occupied with the proceedings of our 
 research science. It is occupied in a world where one is awake 
 only to the next stimulus that is necessary to carry on an activ- 
 ity that more or less runs itself. 
 
 A further step which Comte did not recognize, because it be- 
 longs to a later period, is the evolutionary one which under- 
 takes to see how these forms, these experiences, arise. Evolu- 
 tionary doctrine started off with the life-process, and undertook 
 to account for the appearance of species themselves. It carries 
 us back to a world in which the nature of the object, the experi- 
 ence as such, arises. Neither Comte nor John Stuart Mill, who 
 would be the corresponding figure in England, was influenced by 
 ^ J evolutionary doctrine to any great degree. Mill was also, to all 
 7^ intents and purposejj^ a positivist. He, too, assumed tKat the 
 analysis"^aftbg, scientist makes of an object reveals_tEe^tht«:r- 
 acters of things, reveals the elements of things, the .p.grts of 
 diings; and if we want to know the world, we must discover 
 these elements which the scientist finds. Mill, as you know, 
 embodied this doctrine in his logic in which he undertook to state 
 the logic of science. It is by no means an adequate account of 
 scientific procedure; but his theory of induction and of the in- 
 ductive process in science, his method of agreement and differ- 
 ence, are definitely attempts to state the scientist's procedure. 
 They are really methods of distinguishing rather than of forming 
 hypotheses. 
 
 What I am attempting to make clear is that the positivistic 
 doctrine was one which undertook to give the philosophic im- 
 plications the form of scientific method. But neither Comte nor 
 Mill gave a competent account of the scientist's procedure. 
 
 [460] 
 
 S
 
 ^u 
 
 FRENCH PHILOSOPHY 
 
 They did assume that science — what we would call "research 
 science"— was the most efficient method of knowing. They did 
 recognize that this type of science was one which was an ad- 
 vance over metaphysical science, while the metaphysical was a 
 natural successor to theology. We have, then, in the French^ 
 thought of this period, the reconstruction of science as pres£nt- 
 ingtheiormof the philosophic problem. 
 
 The step which positivism represents is that of stating a prob- 
 lem so that it is put in the form of a method rather than of a re- 
 sult. Is the method of science jhejoieihod of philosophy? Can 
 one rtta^e tliejnethpdpTscience the method of philosophy ? One 
 "great, somewhat grandiose efiPort to solve this problem was made 
 by the Romantic idealists. Hegel, who was most complete in his 
 statement, undertook to show that the method of science and 
 the method of human thought in all its endeavor and the \ \ 
 
 method of the universe were all the same, the method which he 
 represented by his dialectic process. His philosophy was in one 
 sense~a philosophy of evolution; but the same process, the same 
 method, the same logic, lay back of physical nature, back of 
 moral effort, back of human history, back of all that science pre- 
 sents. It was, as I said in other connections, a grandiose under- 
 taking which was a failure. Particularly, it was unable to pre- / 
 sent the scientific procedure within each field. It could not sue- \ 
 cessfully state the method of research science. This is the prob- \ 
 lem, then, that is presented in positivism. For positivism meta- J iXT 
 physics is past; it is gone. Just as metaphysics was supposed to Y ^ ^' 
 have wiped out theology, so the positivists were presenting a ) jjlr\ 
 method which could be immediately applied, and through which/' 
 we could get rid of metaphysics. 
 
 X 
 
 Comte had as vivid an interest in the relation of his philoso- 
 phy to society and its values as any others of the period. He 
 looked for the forms of a society of the human race whose values 
 should determine the conduct of the individual. But, as far as 
 the process of knowing social values was concerned, it would be 
 
 [461]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 the same as in the physical and the biological sciences. He as- 
 sumed that there could be a study of society which could be un- 
 dertaken in the same way as the study of the physical sciences. 
 That was the most striking character of his doctrine in its im- 
 mediate impact. The church had a metaphysical doctrine be- 
 hind it. And this is no less true in this period of what we may 
 call "political science," the theory of law, of ethics, of education. 
 That is, each of them had essential doctrines. The sovereignty 
 of the state, in the attitude of an English community, is to be 
 found in the individuals that form the repubhc. Sovereignty 
 was a dogma. It was that in the state which exercised absolute 
 power. And the state had to be conceived of in terms of such 
 metaphysical entity as that. Similarly, the family was a certain 
 definite entity, and the school was a certain definite entity. One 
 argued from the nature of the sovereign, of the family, of the 
 school, what the position of the individual under it must be. In 
 each case the attitude was essentially metaphysical. ^^0i2t Comte 
 presented was the demand for the use of positivistic method Jtl 
 the study of society. He presented sociology as a new fieldr-* 
 What I want to emphasize is that we do not think of it as an- 
 other science. We have economics, education, political science; 
 and here comes sociology, another science covering the same 
 field and yet claiming to be different. J^ has been ^ in veryjC::: 
 cent times, a great question as to whether there was any such 
 thing as sociology. And I have seen theses presented in this uni- 
 versity for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the field of 
 sociology upon the prob lem of whether or not there is any such 
 thing as sociology. \^^JLis characteristic of Comte's position is 
 his demand that society and social events should be approached 
 in the same fashion that the study of plants and animals and 
 moving bodies are approached. He was breaking away from the 
 metaphysical attitude and presenting another science, that of 
 society. As he conceived of society, it inevitably includes the 
 whole human race; and he thought there could be one science of 
 ^it. Sociology, then, was the attempt to apply the method of 
 positivism, the method of science, to the ifield of spcrefy^an at- 
 
 [462]
 
 !f'^ 
 
 FRENCH PHILOSOPHY 
 
 __tem£tJjQ_^isplace--wlmtJ&:aSv aj_.t h ^^ Hnie, an essent[aJh^jTTera- 
 
 thg^tate, with a study oi-the pwocesse^ of socialxhan§es_gQing-iiiU' 
 ift-^YanouS-in^sti tiitionp Comte undertook to approach human 
 affairs in the way of the scientist who simply analyzes things 
 into their ultimate elements in a positivistic fashion and then I 
 
 from that finds the laws of their behavior. JBut there lay in^thc^^H^ 
 b ack o f Comte's mind pictures of a medieval period, ontjrTTe C J^ 
 would have substituted society for the pope. He was nut freed \ 
 JixmL^that^TKis other side of Conitels-doxitrinejs one thatjiarks ^ 
 back to the medieval period. 
 
 I pointed out that early in the century, during the period of 
 De Bonald and De Maistre, reactionary philosophers sought to 
 go back to the church as the source of all authority, as that 
 which must give an interpretation of life. Their statement, how- 
 ever, was different from the medieval statement. They were par- 
 ticularly impressed with the society of Europe in the twelfth and 
 thirteenth centuries, the period which is best represented by 
 Dante. It was a period in which the world realized itself as a 
 single community, in which everything could be explained by 
 the doctrine of the church. There was no difficulty in the ex- 
 planation, because this world was so created that man can be 
 moral; and, if he can be moral, it must also be possible for him 
 to be immoral. It is a world in which sin has a legitimate place; 
 and if man sins, the punishment of sin follows. The world at 
 that period was entirely comprehensible from the point of view 
 of the church theology. It included everyone. Anything that 
 happened that w^ as undesirable could be explained by the fact 
 that God was using it to bring about the great good, including 
 the good of man. The Western world was conceived of as a 
 single society. It took in nearly the whole of the human race. It 
 was organized through the church. The church took over the 
 statement that St. Paul gives, you remember, of the church as 
 the body of which Christ was the head. In his concept of a uni- 
 fied society everyone has his place and everything can be ex- 
 plained from the point of view of the theory of the church. 
 
 [463]
 
 f X ^i THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 !< 
 
 it was to that conception of a society which was a world soci- 
 ety, an organic society, and a society which answered to the im- 
 mediate impulse of the individual that these philosophers, De 
 Bonald and De Maistre, went back. 
 
 Coixite.,was never influenced by this account. His positions 
 freed him from the dogma of the church, but he still looked to 
 such a picture of the whole society of man as representing the 
 idea that should be realized. The curious thing from our stand- 
 point is that he should have copied to such an extent the char- 
 acters of the church. His ideay_too,-j5fas~th.at.^o.ciety should be 
 an organic whole. It must then have some organized value. 
 What Comte presents, instead of welfare by the church, is the 
 welfare of the community as a whole. This community as a 
 whole comes to take the place of the glory of God, which, as 
 spoken of by the church, is the end of all existence. For the 
 positivist it is not the glory of God but the good of mankind 
 that is the supreme value. That is the supreme value in terms 
 /of which everything should be stated. This point of view is 
 stated in less emotional form in the utilitarianism in England 
 during the same period. Bentham and the Mills are, in a sense, 
 cornp^anipjijigures^^to Comte. Their idea of the ideal society is 
 bne which achieves the greatest good of the greatest number. 
 This welfare of the community transcends the good of any par- 
 ticular individual. This is something all should see, and man's 
 attitude toward it should be a religious attitude. This should 
 be recognized as the supreme value that determines all others. 
 And Comte recognized that an emotional attitude was essential. 
 
 John Stuart Mill said that everyone finds himself and his con- 
 duct constantly influenced by others. Each can retain his own 
 pleasure by recognizing others in the pursuit of their pleasure. 
 The individual feels continually the presence of the community 
 about him forcing him to recognize the interest of others. It 
 seems a skeptical account which Mill gives of the origin of vir- 
 tue. Comte would put up the good of the community itself 
 through an emotional expression which should be essentially 
 religious in its character. That is, men should actually worship 
 
 [464]
 
 FRENCH PHILOSOPHY 
 
 the Supreme Being in the form of society. Society as an organ- 
 ized whole, as that which is responsible for the individual, should 
 be worshiped; and on this basis Comte undertook to set up 
 a positivistic religion. Now, this religion of positivism had some 
 vogue among the followers of Comte. There was a devoted 
 group of this sort to be found in England. It never attained any 
 size. A wag, referring to a dissension among them, said of the 
 sessions, "They came to church in one cab and left in two." It 
 never became a widespread religious movement, but the under- 
 taking to set up such a religion which should find the highest 
 value in society and fuse that into a unity which could be wor- 
 shiped was characteristic of Comte. He thought and looked for 
 a society that could be organized in the same fashion as medi- 
 eval society had been by the church. And he attempted to work 
 out in some detail how this sort of ordering of society would take 
 place. Fie did not try to substitute the value of society itself 
 for the Deity, but tried to take over the religious attitude to- 
 ward the Deity into the religious attitude of members of the 
 community toward society itself. 
 
 This phase of Comte's sociology was not a lasting one. What 
 was of importance was his emphasis on the dependence of the 
 individual on society, his sense of the organic character of soci- 
 ety as responsible for the nature of the individual. This is what 
 Comte put into a scientific form. It had already found its theo- 
 logical statement, as I have said, in Paul's account of the rela- 
 tion of men in the church to parts of the body and to the church 
 as the whole. That is, he conceived of the individual as determined 
 by society as an organism, just as there are different organs 
 which must be conceived of as dependent on the organism as a 
 whole. You cannot take the eye as a separate reality by itself. 
 It has meaning only in its relationship to the whole organism of 
 which it is a part. So you must understand an individual in a 
 society. In^t^jd..QXthmking of society made up of different en- 
 tities, Cpj3rt«. thought of it in terms of a union of all which was 
 .ascertain social nature which ji^t crmioedTt Ke" 
 lere are two characteristics of
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 Comte:Jirst,. his recognition that society as such is a subject for 
 study; and second, his conviction that we must advance from 
 the study of society to the individual rather than from the indi- 
 vidual to societyTy 
 
 XI 
 
 The next point I want to emphasize is that in France the 
 philosophic mind was dominantly psychological. It was psy- 
 chological in a different sense from that in which English em- 
 pirical thought was psychological. It was also different from 
 the psychological position of Reid and the so-called Scottish 
 school. For example, it recognizes activity as a fundamental 
 characteristic of the experience which science was studying, 
 and not simply the content of experience, not simply states of 
 consciousness. It recognizes that the process of knowledge is 
 not simply the passive reception of impressions, but that it is 
 an organized process in knowledge. In sensation one can say 
 that the mind just has impressions. But in perception you have 
 a reaction of the mind upon its own sensations, and perhaps on 
 the objects which were supposed to be responsible for these 
 sensations. Activity, then, forms part of the content with 
 which the French psychologists were occupied. They were also 
 much more interested in the affective side of life, the emotional 
 side. They were not, however, any more interested in the per- 
 sonality, the ego, the self, from the psychological side than were 
 the English empiricists. The Germans, of course, in their phi- 
 losophy came back to the self as basic. It is central to their 
 whole doctrine. But their interest was metaphysical rather than 
 psychological. 
 
 The interest of the French psychologists was in the actual 
 stream of life of the self rather than in the psychology of the 
 other groups. These others regarded psychology as the method 
 of philosophy. This gave to their philosophy that character 
 expressed in the term "spiritualism." That is, it assumed 
 that what is revealed in our study of ourselves is in accord with 
 nature itself. In one sense, Comte agreed with this position; 
 in another sense, he did not. In his adherence to science and 
 
 [ 466 ]
 
 FRENCH PHILOSOPHY 
 
 the conception of the Individual as a product of social forces 
 he did not. The emphasis of French philosophy was upon 
 the experience of the individual. In this it went back to its psy- 
 chological method. Royer-CoUard, for example, in taking over 
 the Scottish form, comes back to our immediate intuition. He 
 relied upon those experiences with which psychology deals. 
 That is, he, like Reid, did not come back to immediate experi- 
 ences in the sense that Descartes did. Descartes came back to 
 the immediate experience of his own existence as a self, as a 
 substantial being. Reid came back to that experience in its im- 
 mediate psychological character. In our immediate experience 
 we are in contact with objects that we know. This is the aspect 
 of experience to which Reid came back. And French philosophy 
 laid particular emphasis on this same aspect of the individual. 
 Its method was that of psychology. Comte turned away from 
 that and tried to reduce psychology to biology. He denied the 
 possibiUty of a science of psychology. 
 
 If we are to relate the French philosophy to that of its neigh- 
 bors in England and Germany, it is essential to recognize this 
 essentially psychological interest. The whole interest of the 
 English analysts was in carrying the division of experience 
 back to that which was common to everyone — back to common 
 sensations, common impressions, common memory images — 
 back to that which was psychical in the sense of being private 
 not only in that it lies within the experience of an individual but 
 in the sense of having that particular character which belongs to 
 one's own inner life as distinct from that of anyone else. What 
 the French felt and expressed on the philosophical and the liter- 
 ary side was the need of an active self to which these experiences 
 came back. Among the Germans we have seen thinkers coming 
 back to a logical process which is identical with experience, for 
 both are expressions of the single ego. But in that single ego it is 
 difficult to get to the common character which belongs to the 
 individual life, that in which sensations are identified with the 
 life of the individual. This disappears in so far as it is known to 
 the experience of others and the infinite movement of minds 
 
 [467]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 that are common to it. From the logical standpoint, that which 
 is pecuhar to the individual lacks reality. What is universal and 
 necessary is real. John Stuart Mill definitely presented his phi- 
 
 ^losophy in a psychological form. So did his father. But they 
 were interested in the analysis of the object of knowledge. They 
 proceeded on the principle that if they could get back to the ele- 
 ments of knowledge they could determine the character of 
 
 / objects. They find these in what were called "impressions" and 
 "ideas," which are located by the individual in his own experi- 
 ence. Their method, then, was that of introspection. What the 
 school was interested in, and what it placed emphasis on, was 
 
 ' the object of knowledge as such. Thus their problem was essen- 
 
 >, tially the epistemological problem. 
 
 /■ The interest of the French philosopher was not in the episte- 
 mological problem. It lay, rather, in the attack on certain in- 
 stitutions. They were interested in puUing down the theories of 
 the church and state. This problem was first attacked by the 
 "sensationalists," as their opponents called them. This was es- 
 sentially a revolutionary school. It was recognized as having 
 that political bias. When philosophy was being established on 
 more definite philosophical bases, when France was endeavoring 
 to get itself out of the situation which had been left by the Revo- 
 lution, a turn was made to the philosophy ofJReid, taking over 
 his position that one has immediate knowledge of that which 
 lies outside, and particularly emphasizing the test of that 
 knowledge which Reid had insisted on, the test of common 
 sense, a sense which is common to all. This left the experience 
 of the individual as a field which was of deep interest in itself. 
 It was no longer simply the field within which the object of 
 knowledge was found. It was that in which the experience of 
 the individual was found. The object of knowledge is common. 
 It is only in so far as it is public that it has validity. On the 
 other hand, it lies in the experience of the individual. The em- 
 phasis of the empirical school had been on that object as it was 
 supposed to exist in the experience of all; and, while they recog- 
 nized that it appeared in the experience of the individual, their 
 
 I468I
 
 FRENCH PHILOSOPHY 
 
 interest centered in finding out what was the import of its being 
 common property. If one sets this doctrine up as the theory of 
 knowledge, it implies that the mind itself has direct acquaint- 
 ance with its object. It has, in some sense, cut the Gordian knot. 
 You cannot ask how you know; the fact is that you do know! 
 That leaves the field of the experience of the individual as a field 
 which may have interest in itself. And it was this interest which 
 the French took up. 
 
 As I have said, they were following out what was charac- 
 teristic of the French mind and its genius — its memoirs, its 
 study of the experience of the individual, as found, for example, 
 in Montaigne. That interest belonged peculiarly to the French. 
 They were interested in the experience of the individual just as 
 an individual, and in the recounting of that experience. As I 
 said, they took the position of Reid; but they took it in a some- 
 what different form. Their position approached that of Kant. 
 They assumed a general experience which was common in some 
 sense to all, something answering to the transcendental ego. The 
 f orms of the mind, which were common to all individuals, are 
 the Kantian reply to the position of the English empirical school 
 and their skepticism; and French philosophy took ov^r this an- 
 swer. It is this interest that characterized French thought and 
 its psychology. And this interest gives a certain definite turn to 
 French psychology and to the philosophy that depended on it. 
 
 To get that angle one must realize the development taking 
 place in Germany. After the development of the Romantic 
 school the Germans also turned to psychological investigation. 
 We have, first of all, the philosophy of Herbart, which may be 
 said to answer to the tendency among the French. Herbart un- 
 dertook to establish his philosophy on the basis of ideas as they 
 appear in the minds of the individual. The principal application 
 of this Herbartian psychology was in the field of education. 
 Herbart was himself a theorist in the field of education. He 
 looked on the mind from the point of view of the increase of 
 knowledge. The organization of ideas in the mind answers to 
 the Lockian idea, a state of consciousness which has a reference 
 
 [469]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 to something else, that out of which the intellectual life, as over 
 against the affective and volitional life, is built up. What Her- 
 bart was interested in pointing out was that it was the organiza- 
 tion of these elements in the mind that made the mind able to 
 isolate others. Taking over the Kantian term, he called this or- 
 ganization "apperception," and not simply "perception" in the 
 sense of immediate experience — not simply the organization of 
 that experience in terms of association but a perception which 
 is a unified grasp of the sense in experience. Now this Herbart 
 referred to as an "apperceptive mass of ideas." The gist of the 
 doctrine was that grasping anything, taking it over into the 
 mind, is dependent on there being given such a mass. There 
 must be a group of ideas to which one might look for connective 
 factors which give ideas their essential relations. The value of 
 this theory was to be found not only in the application of it to 
 education but also in the beginnings of the science of language. 
 In those two fields the Herbartian psychology remained signifi- 
 cant long after its influence had been lost elsewhere. 
 
 There is a certain community between the French and Ger- 
 mans in connection with their interest in psychological content. 
 But another distinction must be made. German psychologists, 
 especially Herbart's successors, were laying stress on the organ- 
 ism and its structure. This resulted in a significant physiologi- 
 cal psychology. If youstudy what takes place in experience in 
 terms of the central nervous system and the nervous mechanism 
 in general, you will find that which is common, universal. The 
 technique of your study will be to isolate what your experience 
 has in common with the experience of others. But suppose 
 you get a curious experience like color blindness, where one 
 person fails to distinguish red from green. Even this may be 
 isolated, at least hypothetically, in terms of certain color spots 
 which should be present in the eye but are not. In this way you 
 get a more or less universal statement of the unusual experience. 
 Just because this psychology was so interested in the organism 
 as such, it was stated in terms that belong to all organisms. The 
 study of the experience of the individual was put into the same 
 
 [470]
 
 FRENCH PHILOSOPHY 
 
 terms. Such an approach would select out of the experience of 
 the individual that which is common in the experience of all. 
 French psychology lays emphasis on that which is individual 
 and peculiar, on that which introspection reveals. The German 
 school passes over this, perhaps. Its interest is in the prob- 
 lem as it appears in the organic responses and mechanisms of 
 experience in the individual. 
 
 XII 
 
 The psychological problem that came to have the largest 
 meaning for the French philosophy, that about which other 
 problems were gathered, was that of mechanism and determin- 
 ism as over against voluntary acts and free will. We have seen 
 that French philosophy had oriented itself with reference to 
 fact. Comt e had given expression to this in terms of scientific 
 method, as over against simply scientific results. He brought 
 over_a scientific method into philosophy and undertook to ap- 
 proach the problem of common reforms from the standpoint of 
 the method of science. Is there any place for common choice in 
 the world which science discusses? Can the worlds of will and of 
 law be brought together? That is the problem that fixed itself 
 in the mind of the French thinkers. 
 
 TTiey accepted a scientific statement that did not open the 
 door to the sort of miracle which you find in the statement of 
 Descartes, which assumes that God in some fashion enables 
 consciousness to react on the organism. They did not take that 
 course. They tried to find a place for consciousness in the world 
 as science presents it. There was no criticism of the scientist's 
 statement in his own terms; but they tried to find a way by 
 which choice could be brought into a mechanistic universe, a 
 world in which causal relations are dominant, in which one can 
 state, from the point of view of the causes, if he had them all, 
 what the effects must be. It was the sort of a picture suggested 
 by Laplace in his world-equation in which one would have only 
 to iritroduce the variable of time and solve it in order to find just 
 where every particle must be at any given instant. If that is 
 
 [471]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 your conception of physical science, is there any place, any 
 meaning, for human spontaneity, human freedom? That was 
 the problem which interested the French thinkers because of 
 their concern with their own inner experience. You do not find 
 this sort of problem dominating thought in England or Ger- 
 many. It was peculiarly a French approach. 
 
 In the case of the English, we have the analysis of the object 
 of knowledge in terms of impressions and ideas, or sensations 
 and images, the interest lying in the treatment of the episte- 
 mological problem in reference to the content of the object of 
 knowledge as related to the states of consciousness of the indi- 
 vidual. On the German side we have, first of all, the approach 
 from the standpoint of the personality, the self, and the meta- 
 physical conception of the Absolute Self, of which the individual 
 self was regarded as a phase. The interest there lay in the meta- 
 physical identification of the personaHty of the individual with 
 the Absolute Self of the whole universe. The later development 
 from this period of German Romantic idealism was found in the 
 physiological approach, in which the attempt was made to find 
 what answers to the stimulus in what takes place in the or- 
 ganism, especially in the central nervous system. An attempt 
 was made to set up a relationship between the stimulus and the 
 response of the organism to it. It was inevitable that the inter- 
 est should be guided by that which could be actually isolated in 
 the study of the physiological process. A central nervous system 
 is a complex structure whose elements are so mixed that they 
 can be reached only by microscopic study, and the complexities 
 of the structure are so great that it was with very great difficulty 
 that any entrance at all was made into this field. It was inevita- 
 ble that investigators should fasten on that which could be got 
 hold of. Beyond that, they were left largely in the field of specu- 
 lation and were thrown back on what introspection indicated 
 plus the hypothesis of nervous processes and structures that 
 would answer to what introspection revealed. The sense organs 
 themselves were, of course, there for study, analysis, and anato- 
 mization. These could be identified as having definite relation- 
 
 [472]
 
 FRENCH PHILOSOPHY 
 
 ships to stimuli from without. It was possible to approach the 
 theory of color, for example, from this standpoint. The photo- 
 chemical substances in the eye could be regarded as answering 
 to particular vibrations without. 
 
 When it came to following the nerve tracts back into the cen- 
 tral nervous system, the field was so intricate that it was diffi- 
 cult to follow out the paths. Simple reflex automatisms or paths 
 could be found or were supposed to exist running through the 
 sense organs back to the muscles and glands, and it was possible 
 then to approach the central nervous system from the point of 
 view of these reflexes. The earlier assumption had regarded 
 these elements in the central nervous system as in some sense 
 answering to certain characteristics of the object. They even 
 pictured the nerve cells as that which would answer to a group 
 of ideas. The study of the central nervous system showed that 
 it consisted of a set of paths among the nerve cells. But you got 
 nothing but a set of paths. There is nothing static in the central 
 nervous system. You could not find anything there that an- 
 swered to an idea of a static entity. One simply finds connections 
 between the end-organs and the muscles and glands in which the 
 nerve processes finally terminate — a field of fibrils and nerve 
 centers which are intricate but remain in the paths. You had, 
 then, an approach from the point of view not of statics but of 
 dynamics, x^^physiological psychology inevitably emphasizes 
 wha t we call jtlie "active side" of psychology, and this leads 
 back to the study of what goes on in the experience of the indi- 
 vidual. 
 
 Now, there was no place within this process into which one 
 could insert a conscious process; the most that one could do was 
 to define a certain correlation. It was this interrelationship be- 
 tween what was going on in different nervous mechanisms and 
 what belonged to the experience of the individual that interested 
 the German psychologists particularly. 
 
 The interest on the French side was one which belongs to the 
 field of introspection first of all. Physiological psychology was 
 not neglected there. Some very valuable work was done in 
 
 [473]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 France in the study of the phenomena of light. Many of the sub- 
 jects which were dealt with by the psychology of the period were 
 examined in the laboratory by the French psychologists. But 
 their approach was from the standpoint of the individual rather 
 than from the standpoint of the physiological system. I have 
 already pointed out the positions of Royer-Collard and Cousin. 
 j They came back to the immediate experience of knowledge as 
 / that in the experience of the individual which is ultimate. I 
 j have indicated the difficulties connected with that, but the posi- 
 [ tion is characteristic of the French school. They held on to the 
 experience of the individual. 
 
 When we advance to the philosophical problem involved in 
 such an approach, we find it centers in the problem of the free- 
 dom of the will. Science assumes that everything that happens 
 can be explained because it must necessarily follow from previ- 
 ous events as an expression of natural law. The intelligibility 
 of nature is dependent on our assumption that there are uni- 
 form laws that can be depended on. If nature were a chaos 
 of events that had no necessary connection with each other, it 
 would be impossible for science to unravel any of its mysteries. 
 Our knowledge would be confined to particular experiences, 
 sensations. Unless we can find connections between these, 
 knowledge is utterly impossible. The intelligibility of nature 
 presupposes natural laws. Science, in its faith in the intelligi- 
 bility of the world, is committed to the necessity of its happen- 
 ings. It is natural, therefore, that science should emphasize 
 this necessity and that it should sweep everything within this 
 field of necessity, at least in so far as it knows it. And that, of 
 course, took in the human body; everything that happens there 
 must be in accordance with natural law. There are laws for the 
 circulation of blood as for the movement of planets. Each can 
 be known. It seems that what takes place is necessary. In 
 terms of this, the succession of our states of consciousness as 
 they succeed each other seems to be necessary. The behavior 
 of human consciousness is as necessary as the movements of the 
 heavenly bodies. 
 
 [474]
 
 FRENCH PHILOSOPHY 
 
 xni 
 
 Cousin's reaction against this assumption was a superficial 
 one. He undertook to check the statement of the necessity of 
 physical science against the active nature of the self and thus 
 tried to find a place in which you could insert the freedom of the 
 individual. The approach of Renouvier is somewhat different in 
 character. He emphasized the hypothesis as it appears in sci- 
 ence. Science approaches its field with postulates which, we 
 say, are based on a certain phase of experience. One of these as- 
 sumptions is that the world is knowable; another is that the 
 world is in some sense necessary, that is, that we can predicate 
 events. Now, if we can predicate events, we must know the 
 reason why things are going to happen. But the hypotheses with 
 which we approach these problems are hypotheses which arise 
 in our own minds. The hypotheses are themselves in nature. We 
 must find that which answers to nature by the form in which it 
 appears in human thought, and what Renouvier insists on is 
 that in the alternatives which we have between hypotheses it is 
 possible for the human mind to enter as a determining factor. 
 There are alternative hypotheses, especially when we recognize 
 how small a part of the whole field of knowledge is really brought 
 within the range of our scientific study. We know very little — 
 so little that we feel like a child on the seashore gathering peb- 
 bles while the ocean of truth lies beyond. Renouvier insisted 
 that in the selecting of hypotheses the human will plays its part; 
 the mind plays a part in the structure of knowledge. 
 
 This comes out in another form when we get to Boutroux. 
 Still a third answer was suggested by some who came back to 
 parallelism in a somewhat different expression than that of the 
 physiological psychologists. The physical and the mental side 
 of the world are parallel. That implies some common content. 
 The attempt was made to approach something that was both 
 physical and mental; and it laid that which was more fundamen- 
 tal in the mind. It was an attempt to go back from parallelism 
 to something that lies beyond it. This parallels Boutroux's 
 
 [475]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 statement, and indicates that we have here a reflection of the 
 positivism to which I have called your attention in Comte. 
 /'You remember Comte undertook to get away from meta- 
 physical presuppositions. That which we know is what appears 
 in experience — it is phenomenal. Our knowledge of that is posi- 
 tive and direct. When we go back to a substance that lies back 
 of this, we are making metaphysical assumptions that cannot be 
 established. Knowledge should confine itself to the recording 
 of experiences and the relationships which we find lying between 
 them. We cannot say that there are certain physical bodies, en- 
 'Yities, substances; the most that we can say is that there are cer- 
 tain experiences which we have interpreted in this metaphysical 
 fashion. W^e cannot say that there is a force which acts with 
 necessity in the world; the most we can say is that there are cer- 
 tain uniformities in motion and change. We can determine this 
 but we cannot get back to any forces. When we speak of a force 
 as operating from an object, when we allow ourselves to use our 
 imaginations and think of the sun as pulling the earth, then we 
 get a sense of a necessity which impels the earth to move toward 
 the sun. If, on the other hand, we observe the movements of the 
 earth and sun with reference to each other and we find that these 
 movements agree with Newton's law that velocities are propor- 
 tionate to masses and indirectly to the square of the distances, 
 we are noting certain uniformities in certain changes; and these 
 uniformities present a different experience from that which was 
 implied in the idea of a force. 
 
 It is Boutroux who undertakes to analyze what is involved in 
 this conception of knowing. You must remember the sort of 
 problem with which we are working: Does the necessity which 
 science implies as found in the world include also the action of 
 the human mind? You set up the mechanical universe and posit 
 the human body as a part of it. If you establish a strict paral- 
 lelism between an organism and what takes place in the mind, 
 you seem to reduce the mental process to a mechanism. What 
 Boutroux undertakes to do is to analyze what this neces- 
 sity means. He speaks of a metaphysical necessity in the first 
 
 [ 476 ]
 
 FRENCH PHILOSOPHY 
 
 place, a necessity which expresses itself in the formula of iden- 
 tity: A is A, or, in order to put it in a form which we feel to be 
 the most general, A is not-nothing. That is, given any certain 
 reality, in so far as we can identify anything with it we can af- ; 
 firm the same thing of that which is identified with it that we 
 can of the thing itself. If we can say anything about the nature 
 of substance, because of a given effect, then anything that we 
 can identify with substance can have the same thing attributed 
 to it. That is the nature of substance. If you say anything of it 
 in its relationship to an effect, then you can identify anything 
 which occurs with that which makes possible the same affirma- 
 tion in regard to the relation between cause and effect. In so far 
 as you can get back to A as A, you can get back to cause as a 
 metaphysical necessity. But the necessity that is indicated here / 
 does not go over to the characters of things. 
 
 We keep talking about the mechanical universe as a whole. 
 But we have no knowledge of a whole. We have knowledge of 
 various elements and speak of them in a metaphysical sense. 
 We say the table has a certain nature which was there before 
 and will be there after we are gone. It is substance that we iden- 
 tify in certain of our experiences. We can make the same affir- 
 mation about the universe that we make of the table. But we 
 never reach the universe as a whole. Our metaphysics necessari- 
 ly is confined to those situations in which we identify the nature 
 of one thing with the nature of something else. If we could get 
 hold of the whole universe, we could get a statement which 
 would identify everything with the universe and give to it the 
 characters that belong in the universe. But we cannot do that. 
 Necessity from the metaphysical point of view is a necessity 
 that is affected by contingency in regard to the object about 
 which we make our affirmation. For one man a substance, an 
 organism, is certain states of consciousness. For another it is a 
 form of a phenomenal mind and does not apply to the noumenal 
 reality. For a third it is a phase in the logical process of develop- 
 ment. It is a fact that there is a certain matter out there in the 
 world that is immediately given to us by knowledge and has a 
 
 [477]
 
 c 
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 certain range of contingency; but if we go beyond our field of ex- 
 perience, we find the contingency which the positivists empha- 
 sized. 
 
 We see that the laws of nature are necessary. They are the 
 record of happenings that have come within the experience of 
 ourselves and of others who have recorded their experiences. 
 They state simply the fact that B follows A in our own lives and 
 in theirs. That is all the necessity that there is: A itself is con- 
 tingent and B is contingent. When A has occurred and B has 
 then occurred, we form, if you like, a habit of expecting B when 
 we find A. We strike a match and expect a hght, but the rela- 
 tionship between the striking of the match, as science distin- 
 guishes it, and the light is certainly a contingent relation. Sup- 
 pose you can follow out in detail the process that goes on in the 
 explosion of the match: the waves of radiation that reach the 
 retina of the eye; the disintegration of the photochemical sub- 
 stances there; the effect in the central nervous organism follow- 
 ing that; the movement from the nerve centers to the muscles 
 and back to the eye; and the resultant winking of the eye. There 
 we have a necessary succession of events. What about the light? 
 The light is not a chemical explosion; it is not the waves of radia- 
 tion; it is not the disintegration of photochemical substances in 
 the eye; nor is it the excitement in the central nervous system. 
 The events that take place in nature are events which, as events, 
 are contingent. They happen. No scientist can sit down and 
 evolve nature, from any ideas, any metaphysical entity. He can 
 experience objective nature and accurately record it and know 
 certain relationships which are there, but that which happens is 
 contingent. The uniformities which we discover are in them- 
 selves contingent. That is, the law of nature does not exclude 
 contingency any more than metaphysical laws or laws of logic 
 exclude it. In order that we may observe anything, something 
 must be happening. The whole point of the position in question 
 is that it is the unexpected that happens, and there is much truth 
 in it. If a thing happens at all, it is in some way unexpected. 
 It is not entirely the sort of thing that we could prophesy. There 
 
 [478]
 
 FRENCH PHILOSOPHY 
 
 N 
 
 is always some element in that which takes place which is differ- 
 ent from anything that we could anticipate — a bit of novelty 
 attends the recurrence of even ordinary events. That is true as 
 far as our observation of it is concerned. It^has got to be some- . , 
 
 thing different from anything we could hold in the mind of ^^.^^^^j^^ 
 w"ould~t3e unable to identify it. Our discovery of uniformity im-' /\ • 
 plies that which is not uniform. What Boutroux was interested 
 in_was_in reducing an event which is different from another y 
 
 event to a certain identity with it. —^ 
 
 To have uniformity you must have it in that which is not 
 uniform; that which the genius of research is able to get out of 
 the world are uniformities in the midst of that which is not uni- 
 form. You cannot have the one without the other. We come 
 into a world which is pluralistic, as far as our knowledge is con- 
 cerned. We are overwhelmed with a multiplicity of things that 
 cannot be identified with each other, and then we set out on a 
 scientific approach and select something which we think may be 
 a clue to identities. In order to select that element, we must ig- 
 nore other characters. If we are going to consider a given pecu- 
 liarity, we must not give attention to others; and if we have 
 good fortune when we follow the peculiarity out, we may dis- 
 cover it elsewhere. W^e might have had some other clue. A 
 later scientist with better luck or greater penetration does find 
 some other clue that is more important and builds up his theory 
 on the basis of that clue. But a still greater genius may displace 
 him. The undertaking is to bring order into something which 
 is, in our immediate experience, wholly disordered. We must 
 get a method for doing this: following out clues which are in- 
 volved and ignoring what we do not know. It has been pointed 
 out that ignoring is an essential part of knowledge. You can only 
 know a thing in so far as you can ignore something else. We 
 generally think of this in terms of getting rid of that which is 
 not essential to the thing. It was Boutroux who insisted that 
 scientific procedure is directed by the interest which we have in 
 the^process of knowledge and is dependent on the choices that 
 we make of the hypotheses that we form out of contingent 
 
 [479]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 interests. I want to leave that in your minds particularly, be- 
 cause it appears in somewhat different form in the later state- 
 ment of Poincare in regard to the conventional character in 
 which mathematics is presented. Boutroux also turned particu- 
 larly to mathematics to show in what sense his statement was 
 correct. A man in mathematics gets the highest degree of ab- 
 straction. In that subject you can consider things only in terms 
 of the content of their certain, definite relationships. You must 
 abstract everything else. But the knowledge you get is at the 
 expense of everything else. 
 
 Boutroux, and the point of view which he represents in the 
 development of French philosophy, indicates the reaction to the 
 method and psychology of science. As I pointed out, science had 
 given a control over the world which went beyond that which 
 could be obtained by philosophy. The striking result of scien- 
 tific work, its research, and the establishment of its results by 
 observation and experiment lay, among other things, in its 
 presenting that which is recognized by all who are competent 
 to recognize what the scientist is doing. That is the difference 
 between science and philosophy. One belongs to one philo- 
 sophical school or another; he is an ideahst, a pragmatist, a 
 realist. One does not, on the other hand, belong to one scientific 
 school or another as far as the results of science are concerned, 
 if these results are established by observation. If the hypotheses 
 are consistent and logical, they are accepted even where there 
 is a difference of opinion in regard to the value of any certain 
 one of them. They are taken as working hypotheses; and, in 
 so far as they work, they are accepted. There is, on the whole, 
 unanimity among the scientists in so far as results are con- 
 cerned. Of course, in regard to the questions of accuracy of 
 observation, of the adequacy of absolute tests, and of the 
 interpretation of these results there are wide differences of 
 opinion. But in so far as one gets a hypothesis that is recog- 
 nized as consistent in its structure, one that answers to the 
 problem which has given rise to it, and the hypothesis is sup- 
 ported by tests, it is accepted. It must be accepted to get that 
 
 [480]
 
 FRENCH PHILOSOPHY 
 
 sort of unanimity which science presents but which is in con- 
 trast with the attitude of philosophers. The temperament of 
 the man himself, his background, may determine the phi- 
 losophy that he adopts. There is, of course, rational develop- 
 ment of it from his mere opinion. It is criticized by himself 
 and by others. One must accept certain types of criticism, but 
 in the end one does take the point of view which answers to the 
 personality, the interest, the background, of the man himself in 
 his philosophic creed. Thus, science has stood out in contrast 
 with philosophy in certain respects. It has an authority which 
 philosophy does not have. During the medieval period philos- 
 ophy expressed the attitude of the authoritative church, with its 
 affirmation of divine inspiration; and hence it was able to speak 
 for science. But with the appearance of experimental science you 
 have an authority which is different from that of philosophy. 
 
 I wish to call that to your attention in order to indicate the 
 attitude which philosophy took. It felt that it had to recognize 
 science; and the relationship of science to philosophic doctrine 
 became, in one way or another, the really important problem 
 of all nineteenth-century thought. The Romantic idealists un- 
 dertook to bring science within philosophy itself. They did not 
 succeed, but they stated the scientific method in terms of the 
 dialectic. Ifjhey had succeeded, then there would have been 
 a philosophy of science which should have been more or less 
 'in harmony with both science and philosophy. The point of 
 conflict between science and philosophy in England was the 
 epistemological question. Science tells us what we know. And 
 what the epistemological school did was to criticize knowing as 
 such — not the result of science, but the process knowing. What 
 does knowing amount to; what does it tell us? The Germans, of 
 course, recognized this problem; but their interest lay in the 
 carrying-out of science, particularly along the lines of physiol- 
 ogy and the relationships between the organism and states of 
 consciousness. There was an interest in finding that interrela- 
 tionship through the development of psychophysics. 
 
 Fechner thought that he had found a mathematical relation- 
 
 [481]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 ship which could be set up between the intensity of the stimuli 
 and that of the responses. He found out that you had to in- 
 crease a stimulus by a certain percentage of itself in order to 
 produce a difference in the response or in the sensation itself. 
 If you were to take up a weight, for example, you would have to 
 add a certain percentage, a third, of the weight to itself before 
 you would recognize that you had a heavier weight in your hand. 
 Similarly, a light would have to be increased by a tenth of itself. 
 Fechner went on the assumption that these just-perceptible dif- 
 ferences were elements in sensation which were equal to each 
 other. The assumption then would be that sensation is made up 
 out of elements which appear in just-perceptible differences. It 
 is a composite. You can break it up so that you have elements 
 which are just perceptibly different. If that is true, you can say 
 that you can set up a mathematical relationship between the 
 stimulus and the sensation. You add a certain percentage of the 
 stimulus to itself in order to get a just-perceptible difference. If 
 you work that out, what you get is a logarithmic equation. 
 This seemed to be an open door for the mathematical analy- 
 sis of so-called "consciousness." It seems possible, by means 
 of mathematical analysis, to get back to ultimate elements 
 in sensation itself. Fechner designated this as the field of psy- 
 chophysics. 
 
 You can see at once that there are all sorts of assumptions 
 here. For example, in the instances to which I have referred, it 
 is assumed that the sensation can be broken up into just-per- 
 ceptible differences, and that a difference in one case is equal to 
 that in another. These assumptions are without support. Par- 
 ticularly, the theory runs frankly against the data of experi- 
 ence. One's sensation of weight is a unit; it is not made up of a 
 number. You can Hft a series of weights and, after that, can see, 
 we think, that some of them would feel equal. Suppose we have 
 a pound weight. That would be a guess which does not mean 
 that the sensation you have when you lift the pound weight is 
 equal to, can be divided into, twelve or sixteen different parts. 
 The experience, the unitary experience, cannot be divided as the 
 
 [482]
 
 FRENCH PHILOSOPHY 
 
 object itself can be divided. And then, of course, there is the 
 question of just where the equation which is made use of is to be 
 applied. What you get is the response of the individual which 
 indicates that he feels that this weight is heavier than another. 
 Now, what has happened? A stimulus has come in, has traveled 
 around through the central nervous system, and has come out 
 in the process of feeling. That represents a very intricate path- 
 way in the central nervous system. Does the equation represent 
 a relationship between the increase in the stimulus and the re- 
 sponse of the nervous system.'' Have you a relationship there 
 between the stimuli and consciousness, between the stimuli and 
 the response in the central nervous system? This is a question 
 which you see^ — when you once get over the sense of triumph at 
 having gotten mathematics into the field of consciousness — in- 
 volves assumptions that run counter to the actual data of 
 experience. And, on the other hand, you have got the rela- 
 tionship which may apply to the organism in its response in- 
 stead of the relationship between consciousness and the stimu- 
 lus. So, the field of psychophysics lost its interest rather short- 
 ly. There has been a revival of it at the present time from an- 
 other standpoint, however. I brought it up as an illustration of 
 the type of interest that was dominant in Germany — the inter- 
 est in the study of our consciousness and experience through the 
 study of the organism as science deals with it. That is where the 
 interest fastened in Germany, 
 
 XIV 
 
 Now, in France you have the interest in the relationship of 
 the individual as an individual, as a personality, to science. 
 What is the bearing of the scientific doctrine on the experience 
 of the individual as a personality? What science gives is a world 
 that is seemingly independent of ourselves — at least as far as sci- 
 ence presents it. And, as I have indicated, Boutroux says it has 
 necessity— the necessity which science predicates in its state- 
 ments, if not one of a metaphysical character. The scientist qua 
 scientist does not state that the changes must take place in the 
 
 [483]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 order in which he thinks they will. He has not got back to a nec- 
 essary structure of the universe which can be dealt with. I have 
 already said several times that the necessity which science 
 postulates is practically synonymous with the intelligibility of 
 the world. The only way in which you can know the world is in 
 terms of uniformity. It is only in so far as you can get a law 
 that you can get that which is uniform, that you can get that 
 which can be known. Science does not state that it has dis- 
 covered laws which are themselves fixed and certain. Its state- 
 ments are always hypothetical. If the relationship between the 
 mass, distances, and velocities of bodies is such as stated in 
 Newton's law, then such and such results must be true. If the 
 law of the pressure of gases is as it has been worked out, then 
 such and such results must follow. That is where the necessity 
 lies. It is a necessity of a hypothetical presupposition. A hy- 
 pothetical proposition is a solution of certain problems which 
 has met the test of observation. That is why we can go ahead 
 on the basis of it. But science does not maintain that those hy- 
 potheses are necessary. It maintains, as I have said, that they 
 are legitimate solutions for the problems which people have met 
 and that they have been tested in the sense that action can con- 
 tinue on the basis of them. We can work out such things as 
 stresses and strains, can determine when motions will occur. 
 We do not hesitate to make these statements with the recogni- 
 tion that there may be some more satisfactory statement. But, 
 as far as the situation is given, we are justified in accepting this 
 hypothesis. Now, if we do use a certain hypothesis, it necessari- 
 ly follows that such and such results will be found. If the hy- 
 pothesis is correct, the eclipse will take place at such and such a 
 time. That is the scientific necessity. 
 
 Boutroux approached the question from the point of view of 
 a metaphysical necessity and asked what the justification for 
 this metaphysical necessity is. He pointed out that there are 
 always contingencies even in the metaphysical state. I think 
 we can see that the contingent to which Boutroux referred is 
 just that which I have pointed out in the hypothetical nature 
 
 [484]
 
 FRENCH PHILOSOPHY 
 
 of the scientist's judgment. After A, B must follow. This is 
 contingent, never dogmatic. On the contrary, the scientist is 
 looking for events which will lead him to another problem. We 
 can regard Newton's statement as an approximation and Ein- 
 stein's as more accurate. Newton was the last person to main- 
 tain that there was absolute assurance in regard to the law of 
 gravitation. He used the unfortunate expression that he had not 
 used hypotheses. What he was referring to were the rather 
 fantastic assumptions which the scientists of the time were mak- 
 ing. They went beyond a possibility of testing. But his state- 
 ment of the law was definitely a hypothesis. His hypothesis ap- 
 peared in this form: he knew what the velocity of a falling body 
 is near the surface of the earth; he had a rough estimate on the 
 basis of which he could determine the distance of the moon, and 
 he could figure out how much the moon falls toward the earth 
 during a second; if it were not for the attraction of the earth, the 
 moon would go off on a tangent; he could figure out how much 
 the moon was drawn toward the earth during a second; if you 
 take this relation in terms of the inverse square, then the dis- 
 tance the moon falls in a second, its velocity, would have a defi- 
 nite value; the moon should fall only 1/3,600 as rapidly as a 
 body on the surface of the earth. That was the hypothesis which 
 Newton set up, and he figured out on that basis what the veloc- 
 ity of the moon was and then saw that it was a certain fraction 
 of the velocity of a body falling near the surface of the earth. 
 That is thinking in a circle, and the first calculation was not 
 entirely satisfactory; but he got a more accurate measure- 
 ment of the attraction of the earth and found that it agreed 
 exactly. 
 
 There you get the test of a hypothesis. You can continue to 
 act on the assumption that the body is continually falling 
 toward the earth with a velocity which is determined by this 
 law. There is nothing that we now know that interferes with 
 that assumption. All the facts are in harmony with it. If that 
 is the law, then we can go on and state what must follow. That 
 is the necessity that science can appeal to. If this law holds, 
 
 [485]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 there there must be such and such a result. If this law holds, 
 there is a necessity which carries with it contingency. When 
 Boutroux was criticizing the necessity of the law from the meta- 
 physical standpoint, he was implying that the scientist was 
 making a metaphysical assumption. Science, of course, always 
 works with errors of observation; and science also works with 
 reference to a method of limits. It does not get back to exact 
 agreements, exact positions, exact congruence. What it does do, 
 however, is to get a position which approximates these. The 
 limit is never reached. But we get a series of which one can 
 say: If the limit were reached, then such and such a thing 
 would be true; and if that is true, such and such things must be 
 true if we approximate it. We have, then, a method of approxi- 
 mation which enables us to state what the situation will be 
 when you get there. But there is an "if" there, and the whole 
 scientific method has this postulate behind it. Boutroux's as- 
 sumption does not negate that. We cannot get back to the nou- 
 menal reality of the universe. Our knowledge is all relative 
 knowledge. The space and time which are the basis for geom- 
 etry and mechanics are relative to our own observations. All 
 our observations have that sort of relativity behind them. What 
 we find is a correlation between that which is given in experi- 
 ence and what we assume there as outside. 
 
 The possibility of getting such correlation is found, of course, 
 in a field of thought in which mathematics and logic are domi- 
 nant. Mathematics is a field of exact thought and analysis 
 which has proved powerful. It has back of it certain definitions, 
 certain presuppositions, certain postulates. Given these, its re- 
 sults are necessary results. Geometry has a postulate of par- 
 allel lines^ — that through a point outside of a line only one line 
 can be drawn that will be parallel to it. Now you can set up 
 another postulate, that through a point an indefinite number of 
 lines can be drawn that are parallel to it, and you can construct 
 a geometry on this basis. And as a piece of logic, the latter is 
 just as sound a system as Euclidean geometry. You can make 
 still other suppositions: that more than one line or a certain 
 
 [486]
 
 FRENCH PHILOSOPHY 
 
 number of lines can be drawn through such a point, or that no 
 lines can be drawn through it. You are at liberty to make any 
 assumption on the basis of which you can build up a consistent 
 geometry. If we say Euclidean geometry fits the experience we 
 have of things, there is a great question as to how far it can be 
 applied. Our measurements indicate that our local world is Eu- 
 clidean. But we have never made any exact measurements 
 which we tried to carry out to sufficient length to determine 
 whether it is true that space is Euclidean. It is possible that our 
 world is non-Euclidean. The assumption of Einstein is that it is 
 non-Euclidean. We cannot prove that it is or that it is not. If 
 we set up the assumption of its being Euclidean, then necessary 
 results follow. Suppose you have a geometry which is non-Eu- 
 clidean and one that is Euclidean. Which one is to be adopted? 
 You will adopt the one that is most convenient! 
 
 Here you get the position of Poincare, which is a development 
 of Boutroux's statement, that our scientific theory and our 
 mathematical theory are the most convenient that we can get. 
 In the first place, we must abandon the space of immediate ob- 
 servation, the space in which we move up and down and right 
 and left. What is real space? No one can tell. You can work 
 out a geometry of one sort, or an infinite number of others, 
 which could be applied to our experience, each having various 
 of these different assumptions as to what the structure of the 
 world is. Poincare says we should adopt that which is most 
 convenient. It is like getting persons of different races together 
 and saying that the proceedings shall be in a certain language. 
 You can find out the number of persons who speak the language 
 that is most generally known, and you take that language as the 
 medium of the gathering. In what language shall we express our 
 observation of the world, Euclidean or non-Euclidean, or some 
 other? That which is the most convenient! That is Poincare's 
 position. He said that our scientific theories are, after all, com- 
 promises. We never get back to the exact elements that science 
 presupposes. There is always considerable leeway in the hy- 
 pothesis, but the scientist proceeds anyway. We have never had 
 
 [487I
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 knowledge of reality. We have a compromise, a working com- 
 promise. 
 
 But Boutroux did not go to the point of saying that state- 
 ments which science makes are simply conventionalisms. That 
 is the statement that Poincare makes later. The former con- 
 sidered himself a rationalist. He said we can find out about the 
 world so that we can get an agreement between the world as it 
 is and the scientific statement we make. We can make a scien- 
 tific statement that comes pretty close to the statement of the 
 nature of things. Thus we can feel that we know something 
 about reality. That was the position which Boutroux retained: 
 we should believe that knowledge reveals something of the 
 world. But he refused to recognize what he considered the da- 
 tum of science in regard to the necessity of a scientific state- 
 ment. As I have tried to point out, he was implying a necessity 
 in the scientist's statement which the scientist does not claim. 
 He was failing to recognize that all scientific judgments are, 
 from the point of view of the scientist, hypotheses and that the 
 necessity is only the necessity that you get in a hypothetical syl- 
 logism. If A is B, then C is D. However, A is B; so C is D. The 
 scientist's laws are always of that form. If the square of the dis- 
 tances gives such and such a result, then a certain movement of 
 the moon will be necessary if its motion conforms to the hy- 
 pothesis of universal gravitation. 
 
 Boutroux represents a movement which comes to be more 
 prominent in French philosophy, a movement toward the irra- 
 tionality of our experience. He turned it in this direction, 
 gave it an anti-intellectuahst current. What he reached was the 
 statement that science in its rational statement seems to get a 
 necessary, ordered result which it does not really get. He criti- 
 cizes what he considered to be the finding of science from the 
 point of view of its own place. His interest in it was in showing 
 that science is not justified — supposing it makes that claim — in 
 saying that the unity of the individual is determined, that he 
 has no free will, no spontaneity. The freedom of the vv^ill is a 
 question. We do not know that the world is such a necessary tex- 
 
 [488]
 
 FRENCH PHILOSOPHY 
 
 ture of events that everything that takes place is determined 
 by what has occurred before. He is interested in showing that 
 the world is not such a necessary texture of events that every- 
 thing that takes place is caused by what preceded it. He under- 
 takes to show this by the analysis of the process of science itself, 
 and by his assumption that what science presents is a sort of 
 compromise. Boutroux comes to a definite conclusion that the 
 realistic statement of science, as he interprets it, claims far 
 more than it can establish. 
 
 That is a step in the direction of anti-intellectualism, and it is 
 carried on by Bergson. Both Poincare and Bergson represent 
 a movement which developed along that line. In this, Poin- 
 care was the scientist and Bergson the philosopher. 
 
 As I have already said, the principal figure in the movement 
 in the tendency which introduced the element of irrationality in 
 French thought is Boutroux, who criticized the conception of 
 necessity as this appears in scientific doctrine and in scientific 
 method. His theme was the presence of contingency in both the 
 doctrine and the method of science. From the metaphysical 
 standpoint he insisted that each postulate of science left the 
 door open to contingencies. The axioms and postulates of 
 mathematics and the sciences could not be reduced to identity; 
 they could not be developed from the proposition that A is A. 
 The universe could not be presented as necessary. Therefore, 
 the findings of science are contingent. 
 
 From the standpoint of method, science proceeds inductively, 
 discovering the laws which in their formulation are presented 
 as necessary. But there formulations never exactly accord with 
 the findings of observation and experiment. The point that Bou- 
 troux laid emphasis on was that the form of the law is one which 
 is made by the mind. But this universal and necessary form 
 does not exactly state what is presented in experience. Further- 
 more, the mind selects that form which seems to be the most 
 satisfactory for the given situation. From Boutroux's stand- 
 point, a compromise is made between the demand of the 
 mind for necessary laws and the actual data as they come 
 
 [489]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 within the field of observation in science. This term "compro- 
 mise" was the one that he used. There is an element of con- 
 tingency here not only from the standpoint of the sort of data 
 that comes within the range of science but also from the point 
 of view of the mind itself in the selection that it makes of 
 the hypothesis it uses. In the end, however, Boutroux con- 
 ceived the universe as rational. He was not himself anti-intel- 
 lectualistic; he did not come back to an irrational element. But, 
 on the other hand, he did not believe that science was able to 
 demonstrate a necessary rational order, that room was always 
 open for the expression of spontaneity on the part of the indi- 
 vidual. These were the principal points in Boutroux's state- 
 ment. As you see, this study of science is made from the stand- 
 point of contingency, with a view to leaving the door open to the 
 freedom of the will, to the expression of the individual as an in- 
 dividual. That was the problem that more or less obsessed the 
 French philosophic mind during the period under consideration. 
 It has before it the seeming mechanical order of the universe 
 which mathematical science presented and within which, at 
 least in its formulation, everything that takes place is necessari- 
 ly determined by that which has gone before. In such a uni- 
 verse there seems to be no room for the spontaneous individual, 
 for the spontaneous mind, for our freedom or ability to deter- 
 mine our own conduct. This seems to be an illusion. 
 
 XV 
 
 The next figure of importance in this movement is Poincare, 
 the author of Science and Hypothesis and other significant works, 
 and a cousin, by the way, of the one-time premier of France. 
 He was an eminent mathematician and physicist. He was par- 
 ticularly important in the development of Maxwell's theory of 
 electricity. He also gave a very acute and profound study of 
 the meaning of scientific method. Born in the year of Comte's 
 death, he parallels Russell and Whitehead in England. He 
 belonged not only to the group of men we have considered but 
 to these men who are our contemporaries. He is a connect- 
 
 [490]
 
 FRENCH PHILOSOPHY 
 
 ing link between them. He took up the mathematical method as 
 such and showed that that method is not one of deduction. So 
 far as one has simply the principle of identity — that A is equal 
 to A — as the principle of reasoning, no advance can be made. 
 Nothing more can be found in the world than is presented in the 
 premises. He sees, however, that advances have appeared in 
 mathematical theory and asks what their source is. So far as 
 arithmetic and algebra are concerned, he brings them back to a 
 principle of mathematics which finds its expression in the num- 
 ber series, namely, the proof that anything true of n will also be 
 true of w— I, and one goes on back until one reaches the position 
 of unity itself. In such a situation the mind, by immediate in- 
 tuition, realizes what the law of the number series is. That im- 
 mediate intuition is not a mere reduction to identity. It does 
 not come back to the principle that A is equal to A. It is a grasp- 
 ing by the mind of a process which, in its recurrence, exhibits 
 certain necessary laws. In the field of geometry we have the 
 fundamental assumptions of Euclidean geometry in the axioms, 
 postulates, definitions. These Poincare considers from the point 
 of view of non-Euclidean geometry. The former geometry de- 
 velops on the Euclidean axiom that only one line can be drawn 
 through a point outside a hne parallel to that line. What Poin- 
 care points out is that we have here certain more or less arbi- 
 trary definitions. He discusses the space of our perception with 
 its dimensions, its structure, and its position in relation to the 
 space of mathematics and geometry; and he finds that the lat- 
 ter space is, in some sense, created by the geometrist. 
 
 I pointed out that it is perfectly possible to create other geom- 
 etries which are non-Euclidean, geometries of what we may call 
 "curved spaces." For example, we speak of a solid as the form 
 of an infinite number of planes. We start from a line and reach 
 the plane as an infinite number of lines; start with the plane and 
 reach solids by an infinite number of planes. Now, suppose 
 those planes, instead of being level, were bent, were slightly 
 curved. Suppose the universe were made out of space that had 
 a coefficient of curvature. The point can be made perhaps a 
 
 [491I
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 little more concrete by the change which came about in naviga- 
 tion when it was recognized that the surface of the earth was 
 curved. It came to be realized that the shortest distance be- 
 t\^en two points is not a direct line. Now, suppose that is true 
 not only of the surface of the earth but that the whole of space 
 has a slight curvature. Then the axiom of Euclid about the 
 parallel lines would not be true. Such a space as that would re- 
 quire a geometry built on a principle different from that of 
 Euclid. Such a geometry might be developed, and for every 
 proposition in that geometry you could find a proposition in the 
 Euclidean geometry, and vice versa. You could go on the as- 
 sumption that you had a curved space with a certain coefficient 
 of curvature, and build your geometry on that basis, and still 
 you could utilize the Euclidean position as a particular in- 
 stance. In other words, it is a matter of convenience whether 
 we adopt one geometry or another. The reason for adopting the 
 Euclidean geometry is that it has been found more convenient. 
 And Poincare said, suppose we should find that our space had 
 some such curvature, that lines which are parallel tend to meet 
 at a distant point. We would then probably find it more con- 
 venient to go on the assumption that there was an error in our 
 calculation than to change our system of geometry. It would 
 likely be that we would retain EucHdean geometry even in a 
 non-Euclidean world because it would be the most convenient. 
 In other words, our mathematical systems are conventional. 
 
 It is possible that people should live in a world not of solids 
 but of fluids. Suppose one did live in a world of fluids. Then 
 the form of this desk, as we conceive of it, when it had passed 
 out through the fluid would be distorted. Or, take another il- 
 lustration that Poincare used. Let us assume that, as we 
 move from a center in any direction, all dimensions and posi- 
 tions are proportionately decreased. This table, for example, 
 would have a certain definite volume, a certain definite length. 
 Now, if it moves away from this point, its dimensions would 
 be altered proportionately. But not only would the dimen- 
 sions of the table change, but those of the measuring-rods would 
 
 [492]
 
 FRENCH PHILOSOPHY 
 
 also change. Not only that, but persons would also become 
 smaller while retaining the same symmetry. The retina of the 
 eye would be just so much smaller. Just as a body shrinks 
 in the cold, every object would become proportionately less 
 in all its dimensions. You can see that in such a world as that 
 there would be no way of discovering this change, because 
 the individuals and the units of measurement would change pro- 
 portionately. What we have in science is a satisfactory language 
 for stating the events and structure of things as they take place 
 about us. Now, we could have another language; and if we did, 
 we could express the relationship which exists in this world in 
 one language or another. The system that is used is a conven- 
 tional one. It comes back to the process of the mind of the in- 
 dividual. The whole mathematical system, then, is a conven- 
 tional system. It does not give us a picture of the world as it is, 
 but it does pick out certain relationships in it. And it states 
 these relationships in terms of such convenient systems as that 
 to which I have referred. Thus, the mechanical system of the 
 universe, instead of being a structure lying outside of us in which 
 we are helpless elements, is really a creation which serves to 
 enable us to pick out those aspects that seem to be the impor- 
 tant or essential features of the world and their relationships. 
 
 Here we have, as you see, a development of the conception of 
 a compromise between the mind and the world which Boutroux 
 had brought forward. Poincare was not skeptical. He did not 
 believe that it was impossible to know. What he was doing was 
 reconstructing what he considered to be the hmits, the actual 
 content, of our knowledge. We have this same conception car- 
 ried further among the neo-realists, like Russell, who assumes 
 that the only knowledge that we have of a world outside of 
 ourselves is of its logical pattern, and he thinks that there is a 
 relationship between that pattern and the pattern of our 
 thought. You have a certain pattern present in Euclidean ge- 
 ometry. You have another picture arising out of our immediate 
 sense perception. You have still another pattern in the non- 
 Euclidean geometry. Suppose there were creatures that lived in 
 
 [493] 
 
 r
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 two dimensions only, and suppose they developed a geometry in 
 that dimension. They have only those dimensions and move in 
 that plane. Now, suppose there is a hump in that plane. These 
 beings will be unable to state it in terms of dimensions of things. 
 What they would find is that, as they approached the hump, in 
 order to move around it in the shortest time they would have to 
 make a curve. They might express that in different ways. They 
 might assume that there was some sort of a force in the back of 
 what we could call the center of this hump which drove them 
 away. You would get the same sort of a picture if you were in a 
 balloon and, looking down, saw people moving with lanterns 
 where you could not see the contour of the earth. It would all 
 be a plane. But you would see forms with lanterns going over 
 the side of a mountain and notice that, when they got to a cer- 
 tain point, they went off in a curve instead of a straight line. 
 You would have two different ways of stating that. If you could 
 get the third dimension, you could state it in terms of this di- 
 mension or you could state it in terms of a force. How would 
 you express it if you were sailing over the ocean and did not 
 know that the surface was curved and found that you got to a 
 certain point by taking a longer path? You could conceive of 
 some repulsive power drawing you away when you take one 
 way rather than another. You would have different ways of 
 explaining your course. 
 
 So you can have different geometries. One geometry, the Eu- 
 clidean, has proved to be the simpler way of stating our experi- 
 ence of spatial relations. You could state it in other terms. In 
 the Einsteinian doctrine you get a particular statement which 
 works out in a non-Euclidean geometry. That may be the sim- 
 pler way of stating it. That may come to be accepted. It is the 
 position in which one sees certain relationships which exist be- 
 tween certain events, something that is happening out there; 
 and you presume the relationship between that and the patterns 
 that you have in your own mind. You cannot get hold of those 
 events out there, but you find a certain structure in them. The 
 most striking illustration of that is found in the relativity doc- 
 
 [494]
 
 FRENCH PHILOSOPHY 
 
 trine. You can get a statement in terms of which you get what 
 takes place in one space, then in terms of that which takes 
 place in another. Now there is a certain interpenetration be- 
 tween events in your theory which can be given a definite state- 
 ment, and that statement can be translated into any space. 
 From such a standpoint you can recognize that your mathemati- 
 cal theory is only a link for bringing out relationships where you 
 do not have the things which have these interrelationships. And 
 you can get the correlation between that pattern and the pat- 
 tern that you have in your mind. From the biological point of 
 view, these patterns were all convenient. That is, they are defi- 
 nitely selected with reference to the uses to which one is to put 
 them. They are selected for the sake of their convenience. That 
 is what we mean by "convenience." But there are certain neces- 
 sary relations. Thus, Poincare was not skeptical. He was, as it 
 were, simply loosening the mathematical theory of the world 
 from the world itself, as it was presented by the physical scien- 
 tist. 
 
 The latter had thought that the world was a mechanical struc- 
 ture of masses, of bits of energy, in motion. He thought of it 
 as a great machine that ran in accordance with necessary law. 
 Poincare and the others were loosening this necessary structure 
 from the world itself and lodging it in the mind. We can get a 
 connection, a correlation, of the relations between the charac- 
 ters out there and those in your mind; but we have no such 
 universe actually present in experience. We have only a way of 
 getting hold of certain characters which are there. Do these 
 characters reveal the actual structure of reality? In the matter 
 of movement Poincare came back to a certain intuition of the 
 movement in dealing with the recurrence of the number series. 
 Does that intuition reveal the actual relationship of events to 
 each other? He believed it did. 
 
 The tendency here is to assimilate the nature of things to the 
 mind. This is a tendency toward a certain type of idealism. 
 But we have a fundamental break between the mind, on the one 
 side, and what we call "matter," on the other. It involves the 
 
 [495]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 distinction between quantity and quality. Our experience tends 
 to pick out that which is quaUtative. Our mathematical tech- 
 nique, our scientific technique, picks out that which is quantita- 
 tive. So, we speak of color in nature as a certain motion, of 
 something with definite vibrations. We measure the world and 
 deal with it as a measurable quantity, but no measurement gives 
 us a control over it. The color, sound, taste, odor — the quan- 
 tities of the world — tend to be put in the mind. That bifur- 
 cation of the world has been the most convenient to use. As 
 Poincare pointed out, it is a great convenience to have these 
 statements; but the only thing we get hold of is certain defi- 
 nite relations in the world, and those relations from Poincare's 
 standpoint, as stated in terms of geometry, are, in a certain 
 sense, a creation. What is the relationship of those statements to 
 reality itself? Poincare denied that the logic and metaphysics of 
 identity could reveal to us the world as it existed, but he did 
 speak of an intuition which could see through to certain essential 
 relations. We want a world made up of events — one in which 
 things have definite lengths, can be definitely measured — one in 
 which objects can be put into geometric relations with each 
 other, have perfectly definite successions, certain velocities, cer- 
 tain accelerations. That is the sort of world we want so that we 
 can control it. In order to get such a world, we must abstract 
 from our experience as it takes place immediately. This table is 
 colored; it has a feel; it is warm; it is smooth. We cannot state 
 its characters in these terms; but we can state them in terms of a 
 geometry, in terms of a dynamics. We can utilize the materials 
 of nature for this or that or the other thing, and by giving a sci- 
 entific statement we can get control of reahty. But to do that 
 we must put this conventional framework of ours into the world. 
 
 XVI 
 
 We have in these conceptions, which follow from Comte up to 
 Poincare, the setting for the philosophy of Bergson. There is one 
 important addition. The thought of Boutroux and Poincare was 
 occupied with mathematical physics. The problems of biology 
 
 [496]
 
 FRENCH PHILOSOPHY 
 
 were only incidental to their discussions. It was assumed that 
 life-processes could be stated in terms of the inanimate world; 
 life could be dealt with in terms of chemistry and physics. This 
 position could not be proved, but it was a legitimate assumption 
 that the whole world could be included in such a mechanical 
 statement. The justification for that is what Boutroux and 
 Poincare were discussing. 
 
 Bergson starts with the science of biology, particularly the 
 theory of evolution. He is a true French philosopher in that his 
 method is a psychological one. In his book Time and Free Will 
 he starts off with the assumption that the universe and the field 
 of our experience are fields of what he calls "imagination." 
 They are the impressions that belong to a self, to a mind, an 
 organized mind. You can see this is an idealistic statement; yet, 
 it is not romantic, spiritual idealism, nor yet the subjective 
 idealism of Berkeley. Bergson comes back to experience as he 
 finds it; he recognizes the table as an experience that can be 
 stated in terms either of physics or of psychology. And he 
 chooses the psychological statement of it. He does not lodge ob- 
 jects in the mind. They can be in the mind or out of the mind 
 but are the same in both cases. There is an identity of structure, 
 or nature, as you like. The question whether they are in the 
 mind or not is a question that does not necessarily arise. Sup- 
 pose one takes the illustration I have given before of the face of a 
 person that one sees and mistakes for an acquaintance. When 
 one approaches the individual, he sees that he has made a mis- 
 take. In a certain sense he takes off the face that he sees and 
 considers that it is a different individual. He has put something 
 — the face, form, image, of his friend — on this person; and when 
 he approaches, he sees that it does not fit. Where was that image 
 that he saw? Was it out there, or was it in the mind? W^hat is 
 the meaning of any such question as that? We may say the 
 image could not be there, for, when we come to study it, it is 
 different and what was seen was only a mental image, and a 
 mental image must be in a mind. But, for the purpose of ex- 
 
 [497]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 perience the image is out there. That is a phase of experience 
 of which French philosophy never lost hold. 
 
 Bergson presents himself at this point. His is a different ap- 
 proach from that which we have indicated was being made in 
 Germany. The approach in Germany was to take the physiolog- 
 ical organism over into the field of psychology. It states what 
 corresponds to states of consciousness in terms of what goes on 
 in the organism. And this psychology which wants to be scien- 
 tific simply gets a parallelism between these two. As far as it 
 can, it subordinates the mental to the physical, or rather the 
 psychical to the physiological. If it can only get hold of what 
 goes on in the central nervous system, the self, then it will have 
 data of a scientific sort and will be able to interpret this much 
 more uncertain field of the inner life. It goes from the ground of 
 natural science into the psychical self. Bergson reversed this 
 procedure. His approach was from the psychical side, and he at- 
 tempted to deal with the physical and physiological from that 
 standpoint. He does not, however, use the distinction as Berke- 
 ley did. Berkeley wiped out the distinction between the men- 
 tal and physical and tried to state the problem in terms of 
 association of ideas. The German, or physiological-psychologi- 
 cal, school does not, of course, wipe out the psychical; but it 
 looks at it from the point of view of the physiological. That is, 
 the psychical tends to become phenomenal, merely a psychical 
 shadow which accompanies certain physiological happenings. 
 That which is given, the whole process, is found in the organ- 
 ism. Only a part of this reveals itself in consciousness which 
 flares up here and there. If we want to understand states of 
 consciousness, we must go over into the field of physiological 
 psychology. That is the attitude which the scientific psycholo- 
 gists took, although a philosopher could interpret that attitude 
 in different fashions. But the psychologists as such were de- 
 manding an attitude in which they interpreted the psychical in 
 terms of the physical. They did not, however, say that con- 
 sciousness is a secretion of the brain as the bile is a secretion of 
 
 [498]
 
 FRENCH PHILOSOPHY 
 
 the liver. They had got beyond that form of crude materialism 
 which belonged to the 1840's. 
 
 The position of Bergson is that the fundamental reality is 
 given in mental experience, and that the statement of what we 
 call physical and physiological must be interpreted in terms of 
 the psychical, of the mental. He undertakes to treat the physi- 
 cal world, as science deals with it, as a phenomenal statement of 
 what goes on in the psychological world. There is a distinction 
 between knowledge and the real. It is a distinction which is 
 legitimate. It is one which is undertaken in the interest of con- 
 duct, for the sake of utihty. If one does not undertake to set up 
 the experienced world as the ultimate metaphysical reality, there 
 is no criticism to be made of our statement of it in such terms. 
 But the content of reality is that which is revealed within, in 
 that which is in some sense psychical. We have taken the reali- 
 ties that go on in our inner experience and have fixed them so 
 that we can control them, but we must not assume that the 
 petrification of these experiences is a living, pulsing reality. 
 
 The first question, of course, that would be put up to such a 
 philosophy is: How do you know that this is the approach to 
 ultimate reality? Science knows a world in so far as it can meas- 
 ure it, in so far as it can find laws of uniformity that are stated 
 in terms of the relationship of things in space and time — and 
 its statement in terms of time is, after all, spatial. If you ask 
 the length of time that it takes to walk through the park, the 
 answer is so many minutes. What is that? It is the representa- 
 tion of a certain distance on the face of your watch. If you are 
 going to put the time that science deals with in measurable 
 terms, you must put it in spatial terms. How can you get the 
 different inner realities if what your science deals with is stated 
 in terms of an outer physical world? It is in the former that 
 you get to exact measurements, to ultimate realities. But how 
 do you approach that inner world in which you say the outer is 
 a distinct phenomena? What Bergson does is to set up a meta- 
 physical method. He has rejected the scientific formula. He re- 
 gards it as academic. He calls for an immediate return to inner 
 
 [499]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 experience, a return to that inner experience which does not take 
 place in terms of what he calls "concepts." The field of distinc- 
 tions and of reality are for Bergson special fields. And he places 
 in the former not only what the measuring-rod deals with but 
 also the whole of scientific technique. The only thing he can 
 measure is something that he can put a measuring-rod on. You 
 have the falling grains of sand in the hourglass, the drops of 
 water in a water clock, the slow melting-away of the candle, the 
 swinging of the pendulum of a clock. All these are spatial 
 events, and the only time that science deals with is a time that 
 can be petrified in such spatial form, that is, where one can ap- 
 ply measurement. Motion, to be measured, must be stopped. 
 You measure a motion, and what you get is a simultaneity at 
 one end of the hne and a simultaneity at the other. You get the 
 point on your watch at which the hand of your watch stands 
 when the runner starts; and when he stops, you may reduce 
 that and get back to an infinitesimal bit. If you are measuring 
 in terms of space, your motion must be put in a spatial con- 
 tainer. You have to stop your motion in order to measure it. 
 As far as science deals with processes, then, it must petrify 
 them in spatial forms. 
 
 Our concepts, says Bergson, have the same characteristic. 
 What they do is to divide things off into discontinuities. Con- 
 ceptualization breaks up processes and simply relates concept A 
 to concept B. It analyzes the living object into certain quan- 
 tities, and puts all these together; but it carefully distinguishes 
 one from the other. It is this, that, and the other thing; and 
 they must all be held separately. You take a reality to pieces 
 and can get your conceptual view of what its nature is. It 
 is made up of a set of situations which you describe in terms 
 of movement, but a whole set of separate concepts would be 
 required to define the thing. It is not as simple for Bergson to 
 make his conceptual world spatial as it is for him to make his 
 temporal world spatial. But he undertakes to show that our 
 conceptual analysis inevitably stops the living process. It does 
 not give the reality of something that is going on. If you are to 
 
 [500]
 
 FRENCH PHILOSOPHY 
 
 know all this, know reality in terms of concepts, you must get 
 it by the approach of intuition, by a sudden turning-back to the 
 inner life, grasping it in its reality. Bergson distinguishes sharp- 
 ly between that reality and the spatial, conceptual statement 
 which one finds of it. In that world of change, of process, of 
 spontaneity, Bergson is able to preserve freedom. The other 
 statement is that which science makes in concepts, in measure- 
 ment. The former is the statement which you get in Bergson's 
 volume translated under the title of Time and Free Will. 
 
 The ideal of a scientific statement is that you get in an equa- 
 tion the assurance of a reality of such sort that it makes no dif- 
 ference what happens — there is no accident in it. Everything 
 must happen according to that which has taken place. That is 
 the scientific ideal of accuracy. That is the picture that science 
 undertakes to obtain. But, Bergson says, that does not carry 
 with it the nature of duration, of what is happening. Under such 
 circumstances, happening would cease. You would have abso- 
 lute monotony, no way of distinguishing one moment from 
 another. The scientist tries to wipe out all such distinctions. 
 Bergson turns to the inner life for the expression of this other 
 type of succession — a type of succession in which it is always 
 the unexpected that happens, in which it is that which is uni- 
 versal that makes us aware of succession, of duration. You can- 
 not recognize duration, happening, experience, except in that 
 which is changing. There must be change in order that there 
 may be awareness of what is going on. Duration, then, is 
 something that lies in our immediate experience. But duration 
 is not found in the world as science presents it, that is, not as 
 mechanical science has presented it. Here you do not find that 
 which is characteristic of this inner experience. It is the state- 
 ment of this situation that Bergson faces, and it is more or less 
 original with him. To Bergson there is for the scientist nothing 
 but a succession of separate, instantaneous moments, one of 
 which replaces another. Now that is not duration. What does 
 characterize duration is a passage from the past into the present, 
 and on into the future. Something is always taking place in
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 which there is some past and some future. This is true of every 
 experience. Whether that is to be called "interpenetration" 
 may be a question, but that is the way in which Bergson pre- 
 sents it. The past is actually crowding into the future. The 
 only way in which we can get that duration is by a sort of intui- 
 tion, a sudden turning on one's self, grasping experience as it is 
 going on. But, if you try to state it by means of analysis, espe- 
 cially in terms of the external world, you kill it. In such a state- 
 ment you have to anatomize it. You can dissect it, but then you 
 no longer have a living process there. 
 
 It is this attitude of Bergson which makes him an anti- 
 intellectualist. Of course, Bergson is not an anti-intellectualist 
 in the sense that he denied intelligence of a sort, but he says it 
 has a particular function. From that standpoint Bergson may 
 be called pragmatic. The function of conceptional thinking 
 is action. It presents a world in terms of mechanisms. It is a 
 mechanical thing and gives the mechanism by means of which 
 we can control the content of experience. Man is a tool-making 
 animal. He works by tools; and his concepts are tools, just as 
 his machines are. They are legitimate for their purpose. But 
 the purpose is not that of revealing ultimate reahty. If you 
 want to get ultimate reality, turn within, where you have ex- 
 perience itself. Bergson has the same difficulty in terms of phi- 
 losophy and metaphysics as do the mystics. You get intuitions 
 only in a glimpse that can be recognized now and then, and you 
 cannot determine whether or not you are going to get them. 
 In the very nature of the case there can be no conceptual theory 
 of intuition. That is perhaps the most fundamental obstacle to 
 the development of the Bergsonian philosophy. But the escape 
 from this difficulty which Bergson presents is his identification 
 of life with this reality which we have within us. I pointed out 
 to you that in scientific development there is evolution, and the 
 theory of life which appears in science is revealed in the Berg- 
 sonian philosophy. In other words, Bergson finds in life all the 
 characters which he has identified in this inner experience. But 
 what is life? As it is presented to us in the modern physiological 
 
 [502]
 
 FRENCH PHILOSOPHY 
 
 statement, it is an interaction of process going on all over the 
 body. The different elements must be there affecting each other 
 in order that there may be life. You can kill a living form and 
 get all the elements and get them into test tubes, but you can 
 never get life. Life then is, from the point of view of Bergson, 
 another illustration of that which we find in our own inner life, 
 another illustration of reahty. 
 
 We have seen that the center of Bergson's position is found 
 in what he terms "intuition," the recognition of duration as it 
 appears in the inner experience. This involves interpenetration 
 of characters — intensity, rather than extensity, of qualities. 
 This is a method which is given immediately, obtained through 
 a conceptual analysis and construction. From Bergson's stand- 
 point the reahty of the world is that which is revealed in the 
 inner experience. This inner experience belongs to the individu- 
 al. It is not essential to the nature of reality. It indicates, 
 rather, the path by which the individual gets this intuition. But 
 that of which he gets an intuition is not a state of consciousness; 
 it is of the nature of reality itself. 
 
 XVII 
 
 In discussing the relationship of mind and body in Bergson's 
 doctrine we have seen that the center of reality is to be found in 
 the psychical experience, as he indicates in the use of the term 
 "image." These images answer in one sense to the impressions 
 and ideas of the empirical school. For Bergson the center of 
 reality is the psychical experience which is revealed in intuition, 
 as distinct from conceptual knowledge and also as distinct from 
 the organism of the spatial world. For Bergson the category of 
 time, as he conceives time, is closer to reality than that of space. 
 The time to which he refers is duration, duree^ that which ap- 
 pears in the inner experience, that within which there can be 
 different types of interpenetration. This he puts in sharp con- 
 trast with the spatial world, which is external, which is the state 
 of quantity, while the inner experience is the state of quality;
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 which is a matter of extensive magnitude over against intensive 
 magnitude. He refuses to recognize that this intensive magni- 
 tude can be dealt with from the point of view of the extensive 
 magnitude. In Bergson's mind, concepts involve the same sort 
 of externahty which he criticized in the attempts to state our 
 inner experience in terms of external stimulation. When we 
 think of things in terms of concepts with the sharp differences of 
 which they are capable, separating one from another, we are 
 doing the same sort of injustice to reahty as that to which I just 
 referred in the relation of an extensive stimulation or an exten- 
 sive physiological response in its relationship to the inner ex- 
 perience. Bergson does not say that a concept is a spatial event, 
 but he says that it has just the same character of externality. 
 Concepts are exclusive of each other, and that exclusiveness is 
 almost externality. What Bergson finds in the world, especially 
 in the biological world, is a creative process which grows out of 
 that which has taken place but which is not itself given in that 
 which has come before. Duration is always the happening of that 
 which is novel. If you get a spatial statement of time, you get 
 that which has no succession in it, at least no duration in it. 
 Duration involves the appearance of something that was not 
 present before. 
 
 The account which Bergson gives of this world, as against 
 what he speaks of as a "distortion of reality," is in terms of the 
 characters in which the organism, the mind, puts its experience. 
 He assumes that the nature of the individual fixes the world, and 
 fixes it in terms of the uniformities of an individual's past ex- 
 perience in order that he may utilize it. The mind selects out 
 certain characters of experience on which it can depend, on 
 which its past experience indicates it can depend, and states a 
 world in these fixed forms. It is a pragmatic sort of procedure, a 
 selection of characters which are relatively permanent and a 
 statement of these in the interest of the solution of problems. 
 The externalized world is, therefore, a fixing, a freezing, of 
 reality in terms of certain uniformities that are applied to the 
 world as if they dominated and expressed that reality. The 
 
 [504]
 
 FRENCH PHILOSOPHY 
 
 mind, then, is that which within itself is psychical, and which 
 fixes its own universe and its own organism for the purposes of 
 conduct. The great instrument for this purpose is the central 
 nervous system. 
 
 Bergson passes on from this sort of a statement which is in 
 psychical terms over to a statement in biological terms in the 
 notion of a creative evolution. Reality, in so far as it is living, is 
 that which advances, that which changes in its own nature, that 
 whose nature it is to change. In Bergson's sense, motion is some- 
 thing that goes on in the nature of the thing that is moving. It 
 is not a mere change of position. It does not change that which is 
 itself moving. Life is a change in the very nature of that which 
 lives. In so far as we are living beings, we are not at any second 
 what we were the second before. If we undertake to state life in 
 terms of a permanent content, we have taken the whole meaning 
 out of life as life. There is a physical, chemical statement avail- 
 able, but it is applied to inanimate things. It cannot be made 
 into a statement of life, for our conduct is from one reality to 
 another in which that reality is always changing. That, Berg- 
 son says, identifies life with this inner nature which our intui- 
 tion reveals to us. Life is in that sense a sort of mind. It has 
 the same relationship to its environment as mind has to its 
 world and physical organism. It is selecting, it is petrifying its 
 world in spatial terms in the same fashion that mind does. In an 
 account of the process of evolution he gives this statement of 
 an onward move that is creation, that is constantly changing, 
 producing that which was not there before, changing itself but 
 doing it by means of the physical world. This picture we must 
 get from the outside, from what biology presents. But we inter- 
 pret the form from within, for reality lies in our own experi- 
 ence. In our own experience we are cutting things up into ho- 
 mogeneous elements. That is, we want to have the same science 
 for tomorrow that we have today. We do not wish to have to re- 
 member in detail. Therefore, we fix our world and become fa- 
 miliar with it. 
 
 Evolution is a process of constructing a world that is exactly 
 
 [505]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 parallel, in Bergson's sense, to our perception of it. Selection is 
 going on. Processes are continued; and in this selection that 
 which is novel is happening, making duration possible. That 
 takes place in our conduct, too. Now, Bergson brings this over 
 into a grand evolution in the development of life-processes. Life- 
 forms in this fashion do just what we do in sense perception. 
 They mobilize themselves. They maintain themselves by means 
 of skeletons they develop, by sense organs which are produced 
 by their environment, which bound it and analyze it into ele- 
 ments which can be regarded as relatively permanent. The or- 
 ganism does this sort of thing just as our perception builds up 
 its field of perception and its objects. But this very world 
 impresses life in just the way that habit impresses our own 
 action. Man becomes the slave of his habits, of the exoskele- 
 tons which cover us. We can only see what we have habitu- 
 ated ourselves to see. We live in the world which is cut out by 
 our past habits. This situation is presented from the Bergson- 
 ian standpoint on the side of evolution in its relation to an en- 
 vironment of organisms which have picked out that which they 
 can eat, that which they can reach by their method of procrea- 
 tion, that by means of which they can avoid this danger and 
 that. The organism has fixed itself, and it cannot go ahead. 
 The man who is getting on in years loses the vital spark. Health 
 is gone; he has nothing left but the fixed habits of life; he can 
 see nothing but that which he has selected in his conduct; he 
 has impressed himself, and there is no further advance for him; 
 he can no longer be in a field of creation. 
 
 What I want to leave with you is a clue for the comprehension 
 of Bergson's conception of the world — the parallelism of the per- 
 ceptual process and the living process with this metaphysical 
 assumption of process which he never fully worked out. He does 
 not show us in any detail how the method does actually get 
 stereotyped, nor does he show how life stereotypes its world. 
 He appeals to the process of perception and refers us to that 
 sort of intuition which is so difficult to get, and assumes that the 
 same thing is taking place in the external world that is taking 
 
 [506]
 
 FRENCH PHILOSOPHY 
 
 place from the standpoint of our inner perception. It is that to 
 which he refers, as I have said. 
 
 Here, then, we have Bergson's solution of the problem he 
 took over from Boutroux and Renouvier — the problem of free- 
 dom. If one accepts his statement, he has more than solved 
 it. The only reality is this duration in which that which is 
 novel Is continually coming into being. Bergson's problem can 
 be presented in this way. It is true that you can never previse 
 what is going to happen. There is always a difference in what 
 takes place and what has existed in the past. You cannot deter- 
 mine what you are going to be later. But the question is now: 
 What is the relationship of means to ends? We are constantly 
 stating the means. Bergson is correct in his position that, if we 
 state an end in the form in which it is going to be realized, or 
 if we state it in such form that we must stick to the account 
 that we give of it, then we distort the thing. There is a story of 
 James and Royce, who were out sight-seeing in a city. Royce 
 had information of where they were going and told James what 
 car they would take so that in the end they would get to such 
 and such a place. They got to a junction where they had to 
 change cars. James got on the wrong car. Royce corrected him, 
 telling him he was on the wrong car, that the car he was on went 
 to another point. "Yes," said James, "that is where I wanted to 
 go." There he puts in acute form the present problem. Can we 
 state the end of our own conduct and the end of creation; can it 
 be stated in exact, definite form if the world is something that is 
 moving on from that which is to that which is not ? If that is the 
 nature of reality, can the end toward which movement is to take 
 place be stated in a conceptual form? Certainly we can say 
 that it cannot be stated at any given time. 
 
 What Bergson overlooks in his treatment of science is that 
 science does not undertake to make such a statement. It is 
 continually presenting hypotheses of the world as it is, but sci- 
 ence is a research affair and goes forward on the basis of the fact 
 not only that the world will be intelligent but that it will always 
 be different from any statement that science can give of it. That
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 is, we are looking for an opportunity to restate any statement 
 which we can give of the world. That is the implication of 
 our research science. But that does not mean that we cannot 
 think in conceptual terms. It means that we are always re- 
 stating our restatement of the world. The same is true of 
 our own ends and process in life. If a person could state to 
 himself everything that is going to happen, his life would 
 be unbearable. Life is a happening; things take place; the 
 novel arises; and our intelligence shows itself in solving prob- 
 lems. But the solution of problems is by means of a definite 
 conceptual procedure. The collapse of absolute idealism lies 
 in the fact that everything is all accomplished in the Abso- 
 lute. All that is to take place has already taken place in the 
 Absolute. But our life is an adventure. And we can be in- 
 teUigent in stating at every point the form which our conduct 
 should take. We show our intelligence by giving as elaborate a 
 statement of the world as we can. The realization of emergence 
 in philosophy, the large acceptance of pluralism which you see, 
 is involved in the assumption that the novel can appear by say- 
 ing it is an enlarging of our finite imperfect experience. But 
 there can be nothing novel in an Absolute. You can have a proc- 
 ess of an infinite type, but it is one in which all the movements 
 are determined. You can have contradictions, but they are al- 
 ways overcome. You have that which goes on; but it is going on 
 in eternity, in an infinity in which the result is obtained already, 
 but in which it does not appear. 
 
 It is this element that Bergson insists is involved in passage. 
 That other statement is of a conception of the reality of the 
 world in which everything is fixed in advance. It is its accept- 
 ance which Bergson is fighting. When you state reality in terms 
 of a mechanism, it is an academic statement of nature. When 
 you undertake to state your ends and problems, you fix and 
 stereotype it. You stop advancing. Does that mean you cannot 
 use the intelligence that enables you to get hold of means of 
 stating the ends toward which you are moving? If this is true, 
 Bergson's doctrine is correct, and we must draw away our in- 
 
 [508]
 
 FRENCH PHILOSOPHY 
 
 tellectual control of life and give ourselves up to our impulses. 
 But if you can state your end in terms of your means, with a 
 definite recognition that that statement is one which you are 
 going to change, that your life is a process of adaptation, you 
 can have the full reign of intellectual life and the control that it 
 gives and still not stereotype your experience. 
 
 That brings out the problem which Bergson presented in 
 his philosophy. The problem is that involved in the opposi- 
 tion, if you like, the antimony, between a conceptualized state- 
 ment of that which is going to take place, of that which we 
 are going to do, and of that which does arise, that which we do 
 do, that which takes place in nature. Is there any real duration ? 
 If there is, there is that in which the novel is appearing. We are 
 passing on constantly to that which is new, and our concep- 
 tual statement is in terms of the situation in which we find 
 ourselves. How can we state that which is not.'' That is the 
 Bergsonian problem in its simplest form. I have tried to present 
 it as it appears in perception, as it appears in mechanical science, 
 in evolution, and in terms of social progress. We are moving on, 
 in the very nature of the case, in a process in which the past is 
 moving into the present and into the future. Can we use our 
 intellects to get hold of and direct this movement? Bergson 
 says that we cannot, because in the nature of the case that to- 
 ward which we are going is not here yet and, if you do not have 
 knowledge of the end to which you are going, you cannot travel 
 toward it intellectually. You must depend on the wind blowing 
 behind you. You cannot reach it by conceptual means. But 
 there is another statement which can be made over against this: 
 that the man who is finding his way toward a goal which he can- 
 not state can make a tentative plan as he goes along; and then 
 he can make that better, more accurate, more complete. But he 
 has got to be in the attitude of continually reconstructing it and 
 restating it. We do not know what the end of society should be, 
 but we are sure that disease and misery in its various forms 
 should be gotten rid of. How we are going to get rid of disease 
 we do not know. How the values that have rested in it in the
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 past, the care for the sick, and so on, fit in with the conception of 
 a place where there will be no suffering we do not know. But we 
 are stating in our conceptual way what the end is to be, and then 
 we test our steps and restate it. What Bergson denies is the 
 possibility of advancing by a set of hypotheses which are being 
 continually reconstructed if they do not hold — hypotheses 
 which are confessedly hypothetical. We have only the state- 
 ment which we can give at the time, hypotheses which are open 
 to unexpected happenings and which are ready for reconstruc- 
 tion, hypotheses that belong to a world in which things are going 
 on, in which there is duration. What Bergson says is that this 
 sort of intelligent control of our conduct and intelligent control 
 over our comprehension of and appreciation of nature in the di- 
 rection of the movements in society is impossible. He refuses 
 that because any statement that is made at this time would be 
 an absurd statement of what is going to be later. If we had to 
 conduct the world by the hypotheses of the seventeenth cen- 
 tury, we would not get along. They undertook to state the 
 world as they gave it in conceptual terms. But that did not in- 
 terfere with a continued restatement of them. The scientist is 
 always ready to reconstruct, and it is by means of such refined 
 statement that he gets ahead. If, of course, science had under- 
 taken to give infaUibihty to any statement that it had and re- 
 fused to reconstruct that statement, it would have been in a 
 prison. But a restatement at every point possible is what science 
 wants. Thus, Bergson's attack upon science represents a mis- 
 conception of its method and ideal. His flight to irrationahsm 
 is unnecessary. 
 
 510I
 
 INDEX 
 
 Abelard, Peter 9 
 
 Absolute, 124, 139, 143-44, 221, 233, 334, 
 416-17, 508 
 
 laws, 253 
 
 and relative, 141 
 
 state, 1 44-46 
 
 See also Self 
 Activity, as content, 435, 440, 443-44, 466 
 Aesthetics, 425 
 
 for Kant, 68 
 
 for Romanticism, ']'^-~l3 
 
 for Schiller, 66, 69 
 
 and self, 90 
 
 See also Schelling 
 Analysis, 328, 330-32, 333, 337, 358, 366, 
 402-3, 502 
 
 Aristarchus, 137 
 
 Aristotle, 4, 9, 10, 88, 137, 159, 249, 266- 
 67, 268, 272, 275, 340-41, 407, 450- 
 
 51, 454-55 
 Art, 409-10 
 
 Asquith, Herbert Henry, 228 
 Association, 327, 328-29, 352, 386-87, 
 
 391. 395. 435. 436-37. 443-44- See 
 also Hume 
 
 Atoms, 244, 246, 255-56, 260, 347-48 
 
 Attention, 386, 388, 444 
 
 Attributes. See Relation 
 
 Bacon, Francis, 261, 450 
 Bebel, Ferdinand A., 233-34 
 Behaviorism, 386-404. See also Psy- 
 chology 
 Being, 328, 342 
 Bennett, Arnold, 208 
 Bentham, Jeremy, 201-5, 208, 210-11, 
 
 4-4. 464 
 Bergson, Henri, 168, 292-325, 489, 496- 
 
 510 
 Berkeley, George, 32-34, 79, 326, 327, 
 
 431-32, 498 
 Bifurcation, 496 
 
 Biography, 409 
 
 Biology, 159, 249, 252-53, 263, 264-66, 
 305-6, 309, 364, 407, 450-51, 456, 
 496-97, 505. See also Process, life 
 
 Bismarck, Otto von, 234 
 
 Bonald. See De Bonald 
 
 Boutroux, Emile, 475-80, 483, 484-90, 
 493. 496-97. 5°7 
 
 Bright, John, 192 
 
 Brownian movement, 156 
 
 Bureaucracy, 231 
 
 Burke, Edmund, 55, 57, 209, 420 
 
 Butler, Joseph, 202 
 
 Byron, George Gordon, Lord, 62 
 
 Cabanis, Pierre J. G., 435 
 
 Calvin, John, 181 
 
 Capital, 220, 232-33. See also Wealth 
 
 Capitalism, development of, 179-98, 233. 
 See also Industrial Revolution, So- 
 cialism 
 
 Carlyle, Thomas, 6t„ 152, 205-9, 211-12^ 
 446, 447 
 
 Carnot, Sadi, 156, 278-79 
 
 Categorical imperative, 27-30, 107 
 statement of, 118 
 
 Categories. See Mind 
 Cause: 
 
 in biology, 252 
 
 and conduct, 114 
 
 and effect, 269, 326 
 
 efficient, 249 
 
 final, 268-72 
 
 first, 1 1 2-1 3 
 
 for Hume, 437-38 
 
 laws, 352-53 
 
 for science, 276-80 
 
 and self, 124 
 Change, 296-98, 304, 356-58, 362-63, 501 
 
 505 
 Chateaubriand, Francois, 430 
 
 [^11]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 Church. See Religion 
 
 Coleridge, Samuel T., 58, 63, 1 52, 446, 447 
 
 "Common-sense" philosophy, 436, 438- 
 
 41, 442-43, 446, 468 
 Communism, 231, 24I 
 Community: 
 
 and economic process, 238-39 
 
 and the individual, 248, 281, 369, 375- 
 77, 413-14, 415 
 
 Napoleon as symbol of, 425-26 
 
 and religion, 428-30, 463 
 
 and science, 360-61 
 
 as supreme value, 464 
 
 See also Society, Socialism 
 Comte, August, 373, 449, 45^-^6, 466-67, 
 
 47 1 > 476, 490 
 Concepts, 278-79, 324, 335, 500-501, 504, 
 
 507-10 
 Condillac, Stephen Bonnot de, 435-36 
 Conditioned reflex, 390-92 
 Conduct: 
 
 and behavioristic psychology, 404 
 
 and experience, 386-89 
 
 explanation for, 249-50, 316-21 
 
 freed by science, 261, 288-90 
 
 moral, 1 14 
 
 for pragmatism, 344-59 
 
 and reality, 505-7 
 
 as "self-consciousness," 372 
 
 society as basis for, 361-63, 510 
 
 Consciousness: 
 
 as brain secretion, 273 
 and conduct, 372 
 defined, 392-93, 395, 417 
 and intelligence, 290 
 and knowledge, 329-30, 22,3-^ 
 non-existent for behavioristic psycholo- 
 gy, 386-404, 473, 498-99 
 and problem-solving, 410 
 and relation, 414, 416, 482-83 
 states of, 327, 437-38, 443, 469, 498, 503 
 Conservation of energy, 280 
 Corpernicus, 6, 117, 137, 355-56 
 Cousin, Victor, 441, 445-49. 474-75 
 Crime, 364, 368-75 
 
 Damien de Veuster, Father, 108-9 
 
 Dante, 3, 463 
 
 Darwin, Charles, 91, 117, 128, 145, 154, 
 
 157-61, 166, 196-97, 244-45, 252-53, 
 
 262, 262,, 270, 273, 302, 306, 309, 456 
 De Bonald, Louis Gabriel, 428-30, 434, 
 
 449, 463-64 
 De Maistre, Joseph Marie, 428-30, 434, 
 
 449, 463-64 
 Democritus, 272 
 De Quincy, Thomas, 63 
 Descartes, Rene, i, 8, 252, 306, 307, 353, 
 
 467, 471 
 and Romanticism, 78-79, 82-83 
 De Tracy, Antoine Louis, 435 
 
 Dewey, John, 151, 344, 350-51, 389-9°, 
 392-93, 396. See also Pragmatism 
 
 Dialectic: 
 
 defined, 121-22 
 
 Hegel's, 128-29, 131-32, 231, 461 
 
 influences of, 149-52 
 
 and Marx, 21 5, 220-22, 232-33 
 
 and science, 132-38, 143-44 
 Dickens, Charles, 57 
 Distribution, 219, 235, 237, 258 
 Drake, Sir Francis, 179 
 Duration, 297-302, 304, 31 1-14, 316, 501- 
 
 2, 503-4, 507. 509 
 Duty: 
 
 Calvinistic, 182 
 
 defined, 108 
 
 for Fichte, 102-4, 106-10, 120-24 
 
 Economic process, 183, 223, 233. See also 
 
 History 
 Economic structure of society, 192-98 
 Economics: 
 
 and the community, 188, 206-7 
 
 and the French Revolution, 418-19 
 
 and science, 243-58 
 
 and socialism, 236-39 
 
 and society, 171, 178-79 
 
 See also History, Socialism, Industrial 
 Revolution 
 Eddington, Sir Arthur, 142 
 Education: 
 
 and Mill, 214 
 
 psychology of, 435, 469-7° 
 Ego. See Self 
 
 Einstein, Albert, 38, 117, 137, 258, 324, 
 406, 487, 494. See also Relativity 
 
 512]
 
 INDEX 
 
 Elan vital, 293, 304 
 Electricity, 243-44, 255-56 
 Electromagnetism, 1SS~S1 
 Electrons, 256, 260, 329 
 Embryology, 159 
 Emergence, 414 
 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 1 52 
 Emotion, 396 
 
 See also James-Lange theory 
 Empiricism: 
 
 and association, 326-27 
 
 and Kant, 45-50, 66-67, 76, 153 
 
 and knowledge, 436-38, 440 
 
 and mathematics, 340 
 
 and objects, 352 
 
 and self, 35, 77, 78 
 
 and universals, 433-34 
 
 Encyclopedists, 430, 456 
 Energy, 154-56, 243-46, 268, 279-80, 
 286-88,291,347-48 
 
 conservation of, 280 
 Entropy, 155-56, 287 
 Environment, 140, 161, 168, 253, 261-62, 
 
 270, 281, 350, 372-73 
 Epicurus, 8 
 Epistemology: 
 
 for empiricism, 436-38, 440 
 
 for Fichte, 88-93, 123-24 
 
 for Kant, 76-78 
 
 for pragmatism, 344-45 
 
 problem of, 75-76, 468-69, 472 
 
 for realism, 327-43 
 
 for Romanticism, 79-81 
 
 of science and philosophy, 276-77, 481 
 
 See also Knowledge, Skepticism 
 
 Ether, 254-5S, 257 
 
 Evolution, 91, 129, 142-43, 145, 147, 153- 
 68, 270, 271, 273, 288-89, 290, 294- 
 
 95, 301-4, 364, 456, 5°5-6 
 and forms, 154, 157-59, 451 
 organic, 140 
 
 social, 148-49, 365-73, 378, 381-85 
 of thought, 139 
 See also Species 
 Experience: 
 
 aesthetic, 410-11 
 and antinomies, 115 
 for Bergson, 497-505 
 
 and consciousness, 290 
 
 form and content of, 327-29 
 
 French interest in, 469-71 
 
 interpenetration of, 300, 308-11, 316 
 
 moral, 107 
 
 of the novel, 405-8 
 
 organization of, 443 
 
 as a problem for science, 456 
 
 and psychology, 386-93, 467 
 
 for realism, 2,23-^2, 
 
 and skepticism, 434-35, 437-38 
 
 social, 415 
 
 subjective and objective aspects of, 
 
 1 53-54, 439-41 
 of universals, 432-33 
 value of, 204-5 
 See also Novelty 
 
 Fabian socialism, 229-30, 235, 239-40 
 Factory system, 173, 175, 191-95, 206- 
 
 7,217,218,424 
 Fechner, Emil, 481-82 
 Feudalism: 
 
 and Carlyle, 205-9, 211-12 
 
 and Christianity, 429 
 
 and French Revolution, 418-21 
 
 and Napoleon, 426-27 
 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 63, 71, 84, 85- 
 iio, 122, 418, 446 
 
 and Kant, 88-89, 91-107 
 
 and nationalism, 96-110, 422-23 
 
 See also Self 
 Fitzgerald contraction, 257 
 Force, 279, 288, 494 
 Forms. See Mind, Species 
 Frederick the Great, 96, 144, 423 
 Free Trade, 200, 424 
 French Revolution, 13, 14, 21, 51-61, 65, 
 71, 147, 169, 361, 421 
 
 effects of, 418-22, 425 
 
 philosophy of, 430-34, 435-36, 44^ 
 
 See also Hobbes, Kant, Locke, Na- 
 poleon, Renaissance, Rousseau, Vol- 
 taire 
 
 Galileo, 5, 6, 8, 243, 248-49, 259, 266-67 
 
 309,450-51,455 
 Galilean movement, 429-30 
 Geometry. See Mathematics 
 
 sn
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 George, Lloyd, 228 
 Goethe, 4, 61, 63, 65, 81, 187 
 Green, Thomas Hill, 156 
 Guilds, 178, 231, 232 
 Guyau, Jean Marie, 436 
 
 Heat, 243, 278, 287 
 Hedonism, 205 
 
 Hegel, Georg W. F., 84, 86-87, 106, 122, 
 127-52, 168, 221-24, 239,332-33,418 
 influence of, 150-51, 367-68, 447-48 
 and science, 461 
 See also Dialectic 
 
 Hegel, Karl, 368 
 
 Henry VIII, 429 
 
 Herbart, Johann Friedrick, 469-71 
 
 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 69 
 
 Hertz, Heinrich, 255 
 
 History, I45-52, 447~48 
 
 economic, 150, 221-24, 233 
 Hobbes, Thomas, 14-15, 17, 18, 25 
 Holy Roman Empire, 176, 178, 186-87, 
 
 429 
 Homer, 274-75 
 
 Hume, David, 5, 79, 80, 188, 202, 304, 
 305, 307, 326, 327, 431-32, 435 
 
 and causation, 33-34, 437-38 
 
 and Kant, 31-50 
 
 and laws of nature, 37-39, 454 
 
 and Napoleon, 427 
 
 and self, 34-35 
 
 "I." See Self 
 Idea, 146 
 Idealism: 
 
 absolute, 95, 139, 416-17 
 
 Berkeley, 32 
 
 criticism of, 508 
 
 Kant, 35 
 
 philosophy of, 327, 332 
 
 and realism 327-28 
 
 romantic, 95, 344, 416, 418, 422-23, 
 
 446-47.481 
 See also Absolute, Mind 
 
 Idealistic movements, 228, 497 
 
 Idealogues, 431, 432 
 
 Ideology, 43 ' -3-, 434-35 
 
 Identity: 
 
 in mathematics, 491 
 philosophy of, 126, 127, 496 
 of subject and object, 131, 477 
 
 Images, 397-99, 401-2, 497-9^, 5°3 
 
 Immorality, 107 
 
 Imperative, categorical. See Categorical 
 
 imperative 
 ImperiaHsm, 109, 418, 421 
 Individuality, 405-17 
 Industrial Revolution, 149, 169-98, 212, 
 239,418,421 
 
 results of, 419-20 
 
 See also Utilitarianism 
 Inertia, 154, 249 
 Ingression, 336 
 Institutions: 
 
 and change, 2^2 
 
 and the community, 361, 366-76 
 
 defined, 361, 366 
 
 French philosophy hostile to, 468 
 Instrumentalism, 351 
 Intelligence, 345-46 
 International, 216, 225-26 
 Internationalism, 228-30, 424. See also 
 
 International, Labor, Nationalism 
 Interpenetration, 300, 308-11, 316, 502, 
 
 503 
 Introspection, 444-45, 447, 471 
 
 Intuition, 124, 126-27, 303, 321, 330, 438, 
 467, 491, 495, 501-3 
 
 James, William, 344, 387-89, 392, 394, 
 
 395, 398. See also Pragmatism 
 James-Lange theory of emotions, 396-97 
 
 Kant, Immanuel, 25-50, 59, 67, 76, 157, 
 304-7, 316, 326-27, 337, 343, 439, 
 446, 469 
 
 and antinomies, 86, 95, 112-22, 129 
 
 and a priori elements, 31-50 
 
 and Bergson, 305, 306, 309 
 
 categorical imperative, 27-30, 107, 1 1 8 
 
 and conduct, 48-50, 89-90, 102, 1 1 5 
 
 and experience, 112 
 
 faculty of judgment, 42-48, 92-93, 112 
 
 and Fichte, 88-89, 91-107 
 
 and Hume, 31-50 
 
 laws of nature, 39-42, 49, 76-77 
 
 [S'4
 
 IN»EX 
 
 Kant, Immanuel — Continued 
 
 and political revolution, 25-50, 51 
 and Romanticism, 66-84, 85-86 
 and Rousseau, 25-27, 42 
 and science, 37-42, 46-47, 50, 67-68, 
 
 and subject-object relationship, 35, 73- 
 
 See also Mind, Self 
 Kepler, Johannes, 137, 243 
 Knowledge: 
 
 is active, 466 
 
 and conduct, 350-51 
 
 for Locke, 431 
 
 for Poincar^, 493 
 
 positive, 453-54 
 
 as relation, 438 
 
 is relative, 486 
 
 for Royer-Collard, 442-43, 446 
 
 See also Epistemology 
 
 Labor, 150-51, 194-97, 199, 206-7, ^'7" 
 20, 223-42, 245, 424-25. See also In- 
 ternational, Internationalism 
 
 Labor party, 229-30, 234-35, 238, 239 
 
 Laissez faire, 199. See also Economic 
 Structure, Adam Smith 
 
 Lamarck, Jean Baptiste, 91, 127, 154, 
 159, 161, 166 
 
 Land, struggle for, 418-21, 425-28 
 Language: 
 
 and apperceptive mass, 470 
 
 as basis for society, 375-81 
 
 as symbols, 392 
 LaPIace, Pierre Simon, 157, 159, 251, 252, 
 
 471 
 Lassalle, Ferdinand J. G., 216, 217 
 
 Leibnitz, Gottfried Wilhelm, i, 8, 139, 
 
 251. 330-31. 3 53-54> 357 
 Liberty, 362, 445 
 Life. See Process 
 Light, 253-57, 348 
 Linnaeus, Carl von, 456 
 Locke, John, 14, 15-16, 17, 32, 34, 36, 
 79. 318, 326, 469-70 
 
 influence on French, 430-32 
 Logic: 
 
 of Aristotle and Bacon, 450-51 
 
 Hegelian, 132, 146-47 
 
 Kant's, 153 
 
 and mathematics, 340-42, 359, 491 
 
 Mill's, 460 
 
 Romantic, 154 
 Louis XIV, 429 
 Lovejoy, A. O., 343 
 Luther, Martin, 181 
 
 Machine, 170, 173-74, 193. 206-7, 245, 
 287 
 
 Maistre. See De Maistre 
 
 Malory, Sir Thomas, 62 
 
 Malthus, David, 161, 193, 194-98, 215, 
 221, 232, 236, 237, 244-45, 252 
 
 Malthusian law. See Malthus 
 
 Man, as organism, 251 
 
 Manchester school, 215, 218, 220, 224, 
 
 229, 232, 245, 253 
 Markets, 171-81, 189, 191-92, 220, 229 
 
 Marx, Karl, 149-50, 215-40, 253, 368, 
 424, 448. See also Socialism 
 
 Mass, 154-55. 243. 249. 251, 348 
 Materialism, 220-28, 233, 273 
 
 Mathematics: 
 
 and logic, 330^31 
 
 and Plato's philosophy, 450 
 
 and relation, 481-83, 493 
 
 theory of, 486-88, 490-96 
 
 and world-view, 337-42, 353, 354-59, 
 480 
 Matter, 113, 138, 154, 248-49, 258, 437, 
 
 439 
 Maxwell, James Clerk, 255, 256, 490 
 
 "Me." Seesdi 
 
 Mechanical science, 250-63, 267-81, 493, 
 
 495. 501 
 Mechanics, 249, 279 
 Mechanism, 155-57, 243, 250-53, 255 
 
 259, 260-64, 273, 281, 290-91 
 versus free will, 471-90, 496-510 
 Mercantilism, 188-90, 216 
 Meredith, George, 211 
 Merz, John Theodore, 251 
 Metaphysics. See Reality 
 Metternich, Prince Klemens von, 422 
 Michelson-Morley experiment, 257 
 
 [s^s\
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 Mill, James, 193, 208, 210, 214, 424, 464, 
 
 468 
 Mill, John Stuart, 22, 193, 208, 212-14, 
 217-18, 224, 424, 435, 460-61, 464, 
 468. See also Utilitarianism 
 Milton, John, 2, 3, 247 
 Mind. 
 
 as Absolute, 344 
 
 and activity, 466 
 
 and behavior, 386-404 
 
 and body, 306-8 
 
 forms of, 99, 102, 112, 147, 153, 326, 
 
 337. 469 
 for Hume, 437-38 
 and intelligence, 366 
 for Locke, 431 
 and matter, 497-98 
 relation to environment, 384 
 relation to world, 138-39, 326-27, 329- 
 
 30. 335-37. 352-54, 439-40, 447, 
 
 requires universality, 305 
 
 and society, 381 
 
 See also Kant, Idealism, Locke 
 Money. See Wealth 
 Montaigne, Michel de, 444, 469 
 Montesquieu, Charles de, 16 
 Moral purpose, 247 
 Moralist, Romantic, 107 
 Morality: 
 
 and Fichte, 93-94, 98-110, 120 
 
 and Kant, 48-50, 89-90, 118 
 
 and man, 91-92 
 Motion, 138, 154, 248, 251, 279-80, 357, 
 500, 505 
 
 Napoleon, 51-57, 60, 85, 95-97, 418, 421, 
 
 425-28 
 Nationalism: 
 
 in England, 423-24 
 
 in France, 55-56, 418 
 
 in Germany, 96-97, 422-23, 428 
 
 and internationalism, 226 
 
 and Napoleon, 425-28 
 Natural law: 
 
 contingency of, 477-90 
 
 necessity of, 477-90 
 
 See also Nature 
 Natural rights, 418, 436. See also Rous- 
 seau 
 
 Nature: 
 
 control of, 261 
 
 laws of, 249-52, 253, 258, 260, 264-91, 
 
 329,353-54.406,474.478 
 as objective expression, 124-26 
 for skepticism, 434 
 See also Mechanism 
 
 Neo-Platonists, 139 
 
 Nervous system, 472-73 
 
 News, 405-9. See also Individuality, Novel 
 
 Newton, Isaac, 38, 117, 137, 154-55, 157, 
 243-44, 251, 254, 256, 260, 279, 286, 
 290, 292, 294, 305, 306, 343, 357, 476, 
 484-85 
 
 Novel, 410, 411-12. See also Individual- 
 ity, News 
 
 Novelty, elements of, 1 16-17, 405-9, 
 458-59, 478-79. 507, 509 
 
 Opportunism, 230, 235-36 
 Organism, 251 
 Ostwald, Wilhelm, 246 
 
 Pavlov, Ivan Petrovich, 390-91 
 Perception: 
 
 causal theory of, 352 
 
 and cognition, 158, 282, 440-41 
 
 as determining world, 142 
 
 and knowledge, 333-3^, 435. 506-7 
 Philosophy: 
 
 French and English contrasted, 418-41 
 
 and science, 281-91, 326-59, 449-52, 
 480-81 
 Physical science. See Science 
 Physical world. See World 
 Physiocrats, 188-90, 215 
 Plato, 121, 139,448,450 
 Pleasure-pain theory, 202, 204-5, 209-10, 
 
 213 
 Pliny, 407-8 
 Plutarch, 409 
 Poincare, Henri, 324, 339, 354, 480, 487- 
 
 88, 489, 490-96, 497 
 Positivism: 
 
 defined, 452 
 
 and J. S. Mill, 460-61 
 
 philosophy of, 452-66 
 
 and society, 461-66 
 
 weakness of, 459-61 
 
 See also Comte 
 
 [5^6]
 
 INBEX 
 
 Postulates: 
 
 Kant's, 119 
 
 of science, 258-59, 265-91 
 Pragmatism: 
 
 and Bergson, 502 
 
 philosophy of, 344-59 
 
 See also Dewey 
 Process: 
 
 of entropy, 155 
 
 life, 127-28, 161-68, 252-53, 260, 263, 
 271. 289, 372, 377, 502-3, 505-6, 508 
 
 natural, 158, 451-52, 500 
 
 social, 148, 363, 370-73, 376, 381-85 
 
 thinking, 129-30 
 Production, 218-20, 223-24, 231, 232-33, 
 
 237. 245, 258 
 Profit, 218, 220, 223, 231 
 Progress, 411, 509. See also Evo'.ution 
 Proletariat, 24I 
 Psychology: 
 
 behaviorism, 387-404 
 
 heha- "orism in pragmatism, 350-52 
 
 behaviorism and society, 381-83 
 
 in Bergson's philosophy, 305-10, 316- 
 18, 322-23 
 
 conditioned reflex, 391-92 
 
 and consciousness, 387-88, 392-404 
 
 and experience, 388-404, 435 
 
 functional, 386-87 
 
 .1 philosophy, 444-45, 446-47> 466-83, 
 496-506 
 
 stimulus response, 389 
 
 structural, 386 
 Psycho-physical parallelism, 475-70 
 Psychophysics, 481-82 
 Ptolemy, 117, 137,355-56 
 Pythagoras, 137, 339 
 
 Quantum theory, 117, 254, 256 
 Queen Elizabeth, 179 
 
 Radiation, 346-48 
 
 Rationalism, 326, 344, 352, 437 
 
 and Aristotle, 4-5 
 
 and Christianity, i 
 
 of Christianity and science, 5-8 
 
 and mathematics, 7-8 
 
 in modern science, 9 
 
 theory of the state, 12-24 
 
 and St. Augustine, 2 
 
 Realism, 326-44, 358 
 Realistic movement, 151 
 Reality, 146, 269, 327-43, 352, 413, 467, 
 476-90, 495-96. 499-510 
 
 Abelard, 9 
 
 Bergson, 300, 302-4, 308, 310-11, 3I5- 
 I9, 3^3^25 
 
 Christianity, 10 
 
 Descartes, 8 
 
 Epicurus, 8, 9 
 
 Kant, 35, 42-48 
 
 quantum theory, 117 
 
 Renaissance, 9-10 
 
 romanticism, 82-83 
 
 science, q 
 
 of C{e!f, 131,' 
 
 substancc-attributt^82, 477 
 
 See also Self 
 Reform. See Socialism, Utilityiianism 
 Reformation, 181, 182 
 Reid, Thomas, 438, 440, 466-68 
 Relation, 327, 343, 352, 386-87, 394-95, 
 41 4-1 6 
 
 cause and effect, 326-28, 437-38 
 
 as knowledge, 437, 444, 454-55 
 
 for science, 1 58, 243-44, 260, 449-50 
 
 self- not-self, iii 
 
 subject-object, 35, 73-75, 81-82, 87, 
 97-98, 105, 130-31, 139, 163, 166-67, 
 339-30, 393, 438, 481-82, 593-96 
 
 subject-object relation and moral ex- 
 perience, 98 
 
 subject-object relation as process, 105, 
 128 
 
 subject-object versus substance-attri- 
 bute, 109 
 
 substance-attribute, 105, 326 
 
 Relativity, 140-41, 256-58, 303-4, 412- 
 
 17, 487, 494-95 
 Religion, 176-78, 186-87 
 
 and banking, 180-81 
 
 and economic change, 181-83 
 
 positivistic, 464-65 
 
 and romanticism, 428-30 
 
 and science, 247-49, 288-89 
 
 and society, 362-63, 41 1, 425, 463-64 
 Renaissance, 1-24, 222, 248, 259, 275, 294, 
 450-51 _ 
 
 as revolution, 12-24, 80, 137, 154 
 
 social, 215-40 
 
 [517]
 
 THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 Renouvier, Charles Bernard, 475, 507 
 Research, 264-91. See also Science 
 
 Revolution: 
 
 against authority, 12-13, 418, 427 
 breakdown of, 51-65 
 in England, 433 
 socialist, 220-24 
 
 See also French Revolution, Industrial 
 Revolution 
 Ricardo, David, 193, 197, 215, 221, 244- 
 
 45 
 Romantic Idealism, 66-152, 154, 163, 
 167. See also Fichte, Hegel, Kant, 
 SchelHng 
 Romanticism: 
 
 background of, 5^--^y 
 
 characteristics of, 57-65, 69-73, 75> 
 
 147, 21 ;. 423, 425, 428 
 and evolution, 127, 142 
 and Fichte, 85-110 
 and Hegel, 127-52 
 and Kant, 66-84 
 and Schelling, 11 1-26 
 and Spinoza, 105 
 summary of, 85-86 
 Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 12, 13, 14, 16-24, 
 85,421,432 
 criticism of, 21-24, 25 
 and Hobbes, 17 
 influence on Kant, 25-27 
 and poHtical revolution, 51, 54, 60, 
 418,430, 441 
 Royce, Josiah, 151 
 Royer-Collard, Peter Paul, 436, 439-40, 
 
 442-44, 446, 449, 467, 474 
 Russell, Bertrand, 337, 340, 414, 490, 493 
 
 St. Augustine, 2 
 
 Santayana, George, 343 
 
 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm, 63, 71, 84, 
 
 86-87, 106, 1 1 1-26, 418, 446 
 Schiller, Friedrich, 61, 63, 65, 66, 69 
 
 Science: 
 
 for Bergson, 501, 507-10 
 
 and determinism, 471-90 
 
 and dogma, 258-59, 265-78, 288-91 
 
 and duty, 108-9 
 
 is evolutionary, 168 
 
 and the individual, 405-9 
 
 and industry, 243-63 
 
 for Kant, 99 
 
 as news, 405-9 
 
 and origin of man, 91 
 
 and philosophy, 281-91, 326-59, 449- 
 
 52,480-81,499 
 Renaissance, 1 54, 324 
 as research, 264-91 
 and society, 360-85 
 Scientific method, 143-44, 168, 264-66, 
 
 275, 281, 284-85, 294, 346, 352-56, 
 
 361, 364-65, 370, 386, 405-8, 4i5-i7> 
 
 450-51,490 
 Scott, Sir Walter, 62, 73 
 
 Self: 
 
 and empiricism, 125 
 ^;i'Dression of, 374-75 
 and yichte, 85-110 
 and Frencu philosophy, 466-71 
 and Hume, 34-35 
 individuality of, 41 1 
 and Kant, 45-46, 5°, 66, T2o 
 and not-self, 88, 93-1 10 
 reality of, 139 
 
 and romanticism, 58-65, 66-84, 85- 
 iio, 120-21, 125, 147, 167-68, 215, 
 327,328,416 
 and Royer-Collard, 443-44 
 and Schelling, 11 1-26 
 and social process, 381-85, 415 
 See also Absolute 
 Skepticism, 31, 35-36, 76, 77-78, 80, 327, 
 
 434-35 
 Smith, Adam, 188-91, 193, 197, 215, 217, 
 
 220, 221, 224-25, 240 
 Social philosophy, 147-50 
 Social-Democratic party, 225, 230, 233, 
 
 242 
 Social evolution, 168 
 Social reform, 363-67. See also Socialism, 
 
 Utilitarianism 
 Socialism, 199, 215-42, 253, 424-25 
 
 Society: 
 
 and change, 202-3 
 dynastic, 426-28 
 economic, 195-97 
 
 feudal and industrial contrasted, 169-98 
 French Revolution fails to reorganize, 
 418,425 
 
 [5^8]
 
 INDEX 
 
 Society:— ^Continued 
 
 and the individual, 23'^y 4°5> 4'3> 4' 5 
 
 and positivism, 461-66 
 
 and religion, 248, 428-30 
 
 and science, 248, 250-51, 253, 261, 280- 
 81,360-85 
 
 See also Community 
 Sociology, 373-85 
 
 and Comte, 461-66 
 Socrates, 121-22 
 Solar system, 243 
 Solipsism, 413 
 Sophists, 121-22 
 Space, 256-58, 338-39, 400-401, 412, 487, 
 
 491-95, 503 
 Species, 157-68, 252-C3, 262-63, ^64, 274, 
 
 288-89, 365, 383, 451, 456 
 Spencer, Herbert, 368, 373 
 Spinoza, Baruch, i, 8, 74, 80-82, 105 
 Sta 'A, 144-46, 221, 239-40, 432. See also 
 
 oScialism 
 Stimulus-response, 389-90 
 Subsistence, 23(> 
 Synthesis, 328, 337 
 
 Tariffs, 200-201, 229 
 
 Teleology, 450 
 
 and mechanism, 267-72 
 See also Mechanical science 
 
 Thinking, 376, 380-81, 401-3, 432. See 
 also Process, thinking 
 
 Time, 250, 251, 256-58, 31 1, 412, 471, 503. 
 See also Duration 
 
 Transcendentalism, 115, 118, 153, 440, 
 445, 469. See also Kant, Romanti- 
 cism 
 
 TroUope, Anthony, 211 
 
 Truth, 344-50, 442-43 
 
 Twain, Mark, 63 
 
 Unions, 207-8, 236, 424-25 
 
 Universal, 267, 275-76, 335-36, 340, 342- 
 
 43,415 
 versus particular, 135, 432-33 
 
 Universality, 135, 405-6 
 and morality, 119 
 
 Usher, James, 274 
 
 Utilitarianism, 193, 199-214, 424, 464 
 
 Value: 
 
 and action, 103 
 
 of experience, 388 
 
 human, 202-3, 412 
 
 and positivism, 464-65 
 Vitalism, 292-325 
 Voltaire, 59, 430, 431, 432, 441, 448 
 
 Wages, 175, 196, 199-200, 218-20, 223, 
 
 229, 232-34, 236-37 
 Watson, Jc'.-n, yc, 392 
 W-alth, i88-q2, 1135, 216, 218-23, 232, 
 
 235, 420-21 
 Webb, Beatrice, 235 
 Wetb, Sidney, 235 
 Webi.r's law, 31 1 
 
 Whitehead, Alfred N., 7, 142, 312, 313, 
 314, 3' 5, 325, 33(>, 337, 340, 343. 415. 
 49° 
 Will: 
 
 and Boutroux, 475-79 
 
 Cousin, 475 
 
 and determinism, 471-90 
 
 and Renouvier, 475 
 
 and science, 250-52 
 Wolff, Christian, i 
 Wordsworth, William, 58 
 World: 
 
 as art, 111-12 
 
 and dialectic, 137 
 
 elements of novelty in, 1 16-17, 4°S~9> 
 
 458-59, 507 
 and form, 128 
 identical with self, 124-25 
 and perception, 142, 416 
 physicist's, 154-57,412-13,487,495-96 
 as rational, 114, 118 
 and relation, 4I4-17, 493 
 for romanticism, 141 
 structure of, 491-96, 503-10 
 See also Fichte, Kant, Mechanism, 
 
 Relativity, Schelling, Science 
 
 Zeller, Eduard, 448 
 
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