The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy, and other essays in contemporary thought

Transcriber’s Note Cover created by Transcriber and placed in the Public Domain.
And Other Essays in Contemporary Thought
BY JOHN DEWEY Professor of Philosophy in Columbia University
NEW YORK HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY
Copyright, 1910, BY HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY Published April, 1910

An elaborate preface to a philosophic work usually impresses one as a last desperate effort on the part of its author to convey what he feels he has not quite managed to say in the body of his book. Nevertheless, a collection of essays on various topics written during a series of years may perhaps find room for an independent word to indicate the kind of unity they seem, to their writer, to possess. Probably every one acquainted with present philosophic thought—found, with some notable exceptions, in periodicals rather than in books—would term it a philosophy of transition and reconstruction. Its various representatives agree in what they oppose—the orthodox British empiricism of two generations ago and the orthodox Neo-Kantian idealism of the last generation—rather than in what they proffer.
Classic philosophies have to be revised because they must be squared up with the many social and intellectual tendencies that have revealed themselves since those philosophies matured. The conquest of the sciences by the experimental method of inquiry; the injection of evolutionary ideas into the study of life and society; the application of the historic method to religions and morals as well as to institutions; the creation of the sciences of “origins” and of the cultural development of mankind—how can such intellectual changes occur and leave philosophy what it was and where it was? Nor can philosophy remain an indifferent spectator of the rise of what may be termed the new individualism in art and letters, with its naturalistic method applied in a religious, almost mystic spirit to what is primitive, obscure, varied, inchoate, and growing in nature and human character. The age of Darwin, Helmholtz, Pasteur, Ibsen, Maeterlinck, Rodin, and Henry James must feel some uneasiness until it has liquidated its philosophic inheritance in current intellectual coin. And to accuse those who are concerned in this transaction of ignorant contempt for the classic past of philosophy is to overlook the inspiration the movement of translation draws from the fact that the history of philosophy has become only too well understood.