John Dewey

“ But the doctrine, held in our own day, that knowledge of the plant that yields the poppy consists in referring the peculiarities of an individual to a type, to a universal form, a doctrine so firmly established that any other method of knowing was conceived to be unphilosophical and unscientific, was a survival of precisely the same logic. ”

“ To improve our education, to ameliorate our manners, to advance our politics, we must have recourse to specific conditions of generation.
Finally, the new logic introduces responsibility into the intellectual life. To idealize and rationalize the universe at large is after all a confession of inability to master the courses of things that specifically concern us. As long as mankind suffered from this impotency, naturally it shifted a burden of responsibility which it could not carry over to the more competent shoulders of the transcendent cause. ”

“ In the second place, the classic type of logic inevitably set philosoophy upon proving that life must really have certain qualities and values—no matter how experience presents the matter—because of some remote cause and eventual goal, while the logic of the new science frees philosophy from this apologetic habit and temper. The duty of wholesale justification inevitably accompanies all thinking that makes the meaning of special occurrences depend upon something that lies once and for all behind them. ”

“ The Darwinian principle of natural selection cut straight under this philosophy. If all organic adaptations are due simply to constant variation and the elimination of those variations that are harmful in the struggle for existence which is brought about by excessive reproduction, there is no call for a prior intelligent causal force to plan and preordain them. Hostile critics charged Darwin with materialism and with making chance the cause of the universe. ”

“ This formal activity which operates throughout a series of changes and holds them to a single course; that subordinates their aimless flux to its own perfect manifestation; which, leaping the boundaries of space and time, keeps individuals in spite of their being distant in space and remote in time to a uniform type of structure and function: this principle seemed to give insight into the very nature of reality itself. ”

“ On the other hand, there is as definitely a recrudescence of absolutistic philosophies; an assertion of a type of philosophic knowing distinct from that of the sciences, which opens to us another kind of reality from that to which the sciences give access; an appeal through experience to something that radically transcends experiences. This reaction affects popular creeds and religious movements as well as technical philosophies. In other words, the very conquest of the biological sciences by the new ideas has led many to effect a more explicit and rigid separation of philosophy from science. ”

“ When Descartes said: "The nature of physical things is much more easily conceived when they are beheld coming gradually into existence, than when they are only considered as produced at once in a finished and perfect state," the modern world became self-conscious of the logic that was henceforth to control it, the logic of which Darwin's "Origin of Species" is the latest scientific achievement. Without the methods of Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo and their successors in astronomy, physics and chemistry, Darwin would have been helpless in the organic sciences. ”

“ Since, however, the scene of nature which directly confronts us is in change, nature as directly and practically experienced can not satisfy the conditions of knowledge. Human experience is also in flux, and hence the instrumentalities of sense-perception and of inference based upon observation are condemned in advance. Science is compelled to aim at realities lying behind and beyond the processes of nature, and to carry on its search for these realities by means of rational forms transcending ordinary modes of perception and inference. ”

“ Doubtless the greatest dissolvent of old questions, the greatest precipitant of new methods, new intentions, new problems, is the one effected by the scientific revolution completed in the "Origin of Species." ”

“ The gates of the garden of life were barred to the new ideas while only through this garden was there access to mind and politics. The influence of Darwin upon philosophy resides in his having freed the new logic for application to mind and morals by conquering the phenomena of life. When he said of species what Galileo had said of the earth, e pur se muove, he emancipated once for all genetic and experimental ideas as an organon of asking questions and looking for explanations in philosophy. ”

“ But in anticipating the direction of the transformations in philosophy to be wrought by the Darwinian genetic and experimental logic, I do not profess to speak for any changes save those wrought in those who yield themselves consciously or unconsciously to this logic. No one can fairly deny that at present there are evident two effects of the Darwinian mode of thinking. On the one hand, there are making many sincere and vital efforts to revise our traditional philosophic conceptions in accordance with its demands. ”

“ The latter alternative is unerringly pointed to in the celebrated case of design versus chance. Once admit that the sole verifiable or fruitful object of knowledge is the particular set of changes that generate the object of study, together with the consequences that further flow from it, and no intelligible question can be asked about what, by assumption, lies outside. To assert—as is often asserted—that specific values of particular truths, social bonds and forms of beauty, if they can be shown to be generated by concretely knowable conditions, are meaningless and in vain ”

“ The same drama is enacted to the same destiny in countless myriads of individuals so sundered in time, so severed in space, that they have no opportunity for mutual consultation and no means of interaction. ”

“ When Henry Sidgwick casually remarked in a letter that as he grew older his interest in what or who made the world was altered into interest in what kind of a world it is anyway, his voicing of a common experience of our own day illustrates also the nature of that intellectual transformation effected by the Darwinian logic. Interest shifts from the wholesale essence back of special changes to the question of how these special changes serve and defeat concrete purposes; shifts from an intelligence that shaped things once for all to the particular intelligences which things are even now shaping ”

“ In laying hands upon the sacred ark of absolute permanency, in treating the forms that had been regarded as types of fixity and perfection as originating and passing away, the "Origin of Species" introduced a mode of thinking that in the end was bound to transform the logic of knowledge, and hence the treatment of morals, politics and religion. ”

“ But in fact intellectual progress usually occurs through sheer abandonment of such questions, together with both of the alternatives they assume—an abandonment that results from decreasing vitality and interest in their point of view. We do not solve them: we get over them. Old questions are solved by disappearing, evaporating, while new questions corresponding to the changed attitude of endeavor and preference take their place. ”

“ In the first place, the new logic outlaws, flanks, dismisses—what you will—one type of problems and substitutes for it another type. Philosophy forswears inquiry after absolute origins and absolute finalities in order to explore specific values and the specific conditions that generate them.
Darwin concluded that the impossibility of assigning the world to chance as a whole and to design in its parts indicated the insolubility of the question. Two radically different reasons, however, may be given as to why a problem is insoluble. One reason is that the problem is too high for intelligence ”

“ The habit of derogating from present meanings and uses prevents our looking the facts of experience in the face; it prevents serious acknowledgment of the evils they present and serious concern with the goods they promise but do not yet fulfil. It turns thought to the business of finding a wholesale transcendent remedy for the one and guarantee for the other. ”

“ And were it a thousand times dialectically demonstrated that life as a whole is regulated by a transcendent principle to a final inclusive goal, truth and error, health and disease, good and evil, hope and fear in the concrete would remain none the less just what and where they now are. ”

“ Moreover, the conviction persists—though history shows it to be a hallucination—that all the questions that the human mind has asked are questions that can be answered in terms of the alternatives that the questions themselves present. ”

“ That the combination of the very words origin and species embodied an intellectual revolt and introduced a new intellectual temper is easily overlooked by the expert. The conceptions that had reigned in the philosophy of nature and knowledge for two thousand years, the conceptions that had become the familiar furniture of the mind, rested on the assumption of the superiority of the fixed and final ”

“ The exact bearings upon philosophy of the new logical outlook are, of course, as yet, uncertain and inchoate. We live in the twilight of intellectual transition. One must add the rashness of the prophet to the stubbornness of the partisan to venture a systematic exposition of the influence upon philosophy of the Darwinian method. ”

“ Old ideas give way slowly; for they are more than abstract logical forms and categories. They are habits, predispositions, deeply engrained attitudes of aversion and preference. ”

“ Darwin was not, of course, the first to question the classic philosophy of nature and of knowledge. The beginnings of the revolution are in the physical science of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. ”

“ But it is also one which removes these very conclusions from subjection to experimental test, for, by definition, these results make no differences in the detailed course of events. But a philosophy that humbles its pretensions to the work of projecting hypotheses for the education and conduct of mind, individual and social, is thereby subjected to test by the way in which the ideas it propounds work out in practise. In having modesty forced upon it, philosophy also acquires responsibility. ”

“ The manifestation of this principle brings about a subordination of matter and sense to its own realization, and this ultimate fulfilment is the goal of nature and of man. The design argument thus operated in two directions. Purposefulness accounted for the intelligibility of nature and the possibility of science, while the absolute or cosmic character of this purposefulness gave sanction and worth to the moral and religious endeavors of man. Science was underpinned and morals authorized by one and the same principle, and their mutual agreement was eternally guaranteed. ”

“ The displacing of this wholesale type of philosophy will doubtless not arrive by sheer logical disproof, but rather by growing recognition of its futility. Were it a thousand times true that opium produces sleep because of its dormitive energy, the inducing of sleep in the tired and the recovery to waking life of the poisoned, would not be thereby one least step forwarded. ”

“ Intellectually, religious emotions are not creative but conservative. They attach themselves readily to the current view of the world and consecrate it. ”

“ But prior to Darwin the impact of the new scientific method upon life, mind and politics, had been arrested for the most part, because between these ideal or moral interests and the inorganic world there intervened the kingdom of plants and animals. ”

“ Darwin could not accept this mediating proposal. He admits or rather he asserts that it is "impossible to conceive this immense and wonderful universe including man with his capacity of looking far backwards and far into futurity as the result of blind chance or necessity." [1] But nevertheless he holds that since variations are in useless as well as useful directions, and since the latter are sifted out simply by the stress of the conditions of struggle for existence, the design argument as applied to living beings is unjustifiable ”

“ But the changes in the living thing are orderly; they are cumulative; they tend constantly in one direction; they do not, like other changes, destroy or consume, or pass fruitless into wandering flux; they realize and fulfil. Each successive stage, no matter how unlike its predecessor, preserves its net effect and also prepares the way for a fuller activity on the part of its successor. In living beings changes do not happen as they seem to elsewhere, any which way ”

“ Together they added such prestige to the design argument that by the late eighteenth century it was, as proved by the sciences of organic life, the central point of theistic and idealistic philosophy. ”

“ We must either find the appropriate objects and organs of knowledge in the mutual interactions of changing things; or else, to escape the infection of change, we must seek them in some transcendent and supernal region. ”

“ Were it not for the deep hold of the habit of seeking justification for ideal values in the remote and transcendent, surely this reference of them to an unknowable absolute would be despised in behalf of the daily demonstrations of experience that knowable energies are daily generating about us precious values. ”

“ Since, however, the perfect form is gradually approximated through the sensible changes, it also follows that in and through a sensible realm a rational ideal force is working out its own ultimate manifestation. ”

“ There is not, I think, an instance of any large idea about the world being independently generated by religion. However much the ideas that rose np like armed men against Darwinism owed their intensity to religious associations, their origin and meaning are to be sought elsewhere. ”