PHILOSOPHY
Philosophy is at once a product of civilization and a stimulus to its development. It is the solvent in which the inarticulate and conflicting aspirations of a people become clarified and from which they derive directing force. Since, however, philosophers are likely to clothe their thoughts in highly technical language, there is need of a class of middle-men-interpreters through whom philosophy penetrates the masses. By American tradition, the philosophers have been professors; the interpreters, clergymen. Professors are likely to be deflected by the ideas embodied in the institutions with which they associate themselves. The American college, in its foundations, was designated a protector of orthodoxy and still echoes what Santayana has so aptly called the “genteel tradition,” the tradition that the teacher must defend the faith. Some of the most liberal New England colleges even now demand attendance at daily chapel and Sunday church. Less than a quarter of a century ago, one could still find, among major non-sectarian institutions, the clergyman-president, himself a teacher, crowning the curriculum with a senior requirement, Christian Evidences, in support of the Faith.
The nineteenth century organized a vigorous war against this genteel tradition. Not only were the attacks of rationalism on dogma reinforced by the ever-mounting tide of scientific discovery within our institutions of learning, but also the news of these scientific discoveries began to stir the imagination of the public, and to carry the conflict of science and theology beyond the control of the church-college. The greatest leaven was Darwin’s “Origin of Species,” of which two American editions were announced as early as 1860, one year after its publication in England. The dogma of science came publicly to confront the dogma of theology. Howsoever conservative the college, it had to yield to the new intellectual temper and the capitulation was facilitated by the army of young professors whom cheapened transportation and the rumour of great achievements led to the universities of Germany.
From the point of view of popular interest, the immediate effects of these pilgrimages were not wholly advantageous to philosophy. In losing something of their American provincialism, these pilgrims also lost their hold on American interests. The problems that they brought back were rooted in a foreign soil and tradition. To students they appeared artificial and barren displays of technical skill. Thus an academic philosophy of professordom arose, the more lonely through the loss of the ecclesiastical mediators of the earlier tradition. But here and there American vitality showed through its foreign clothes and gradually an assimilation took place, the more easily, perhaps, since German idealism naturally sustains the genteel tradition and thrives amid the modes of thought that Emerson had developed independently and for which his literary gifts had obtained a following.
Wherever New England has constituted the skeletal muscles of philosophic culture, its temper has remained unchanged. Calvinism was brought to America because it suited this temper, and the history of idealism in America is the history of its preservation by adaptation to a changing environment of ideas. Its marks are a sense of the presence of the Divine in experience and a no less strong sense of inevitable evil. Jonathan Edwards writes, “When we behold the light and brightness of the sun, the golden edges of an evening cloud, or the beauteous bow, we behold the adumbrations of His glory and goodness; and in the blue sky, of his mildness and gentleness. There are also many things wherein we may behold His awful majesty: in the sun in his strength, in comets, in thunder, with the lowering thunder-clouds, in ragged rocks and the brows of mountains.” Emerson’s version is: “Nature is always consistent, though she feigns to contravene her own laws.... She arms and equips an animal to find it place and living in the earth, and at the same time she arms and equips another animal to destroy it. Space exists to divide creatures; but by clothing the sides of a bird with a few feathers she gives him a petty omnipresence.... Nature is the incarnation of a thought, and turns to a thought again, as ice becomes water and gas. Every moment instructs and every object; for wisdom is infused into every form.” And Royce’s: “When they told us in childhood that we could not see God just because he was everywhere, just because his omnipresence gave us no chance to discern him and to fix our eyes upon him, they told us a deep truth in allegorical fashion.... The Self is so little a thing merely guessed at as the unknown source of experience, that already, in the very least of daily experiences, you unconsciously know him as something present.”
In its darker aspect this temper gives us Edwards’s “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” whose choices we may not fathom. But Emerson is not far behind: “Great men, great nations, have not been boasters and buffoons, but perceivers of the terror of life, and have manned themselves to face it.... At Lisbon, an earthquake killed men like flies. At Naples, three years ago, ten thousand persons were crushed in a few minutes. Etc.... Providence has a wild, rough, incalculable road to its end, and it is of no use to try to whitewash its huge, mixed instrumentalities, or to dress up that terrific benefactor in the clean shirt and white neckcloth of a student of divinity.” For Royce, “the worst tragedy of the world is the tragedy of the brute chance to which everything spiritual seems to be subject amongst us—the tragedy of the diabolical irrationality of so many among the foes of whatever is significant.”
Emersonian philosophy fails in two respects to satisfy the demands of the puritanical temperament upon contemporary thought. In building altars to the “Beautiful Necessity,” it neglects to assimilate the discoveries of science, and it detaches itself from the Christian tradition within which alone this spirit feels at home. Both of these defects are met by the greatest of American idealists, Professor Royce.
In character and thought Royce is the great reconciler of contradictions. Irrational in his affections, and at his best in the society of children, he stands for the absolute authority of reason; filled with indignation at wrong and injustice, he explains the presence of evil as an essential condition for the good; keenly critical and not optimistic as to the concrete characters of men, he presents man as the image of God, a part of the self-representative system through which the Divine nature unfolds itself. Never was there a better illustration of Pascal’s dictum that we use our reasons to support what we already believe, not to attain conclusions. And never was there greater self-deception as to the presence of this process.
What man not already convinced of an Absolute could find in error the proof of a deeper self that knows in unity all truth? Who else could accept the dilemma “either ... your real world yonder is through and through a world of ideas, an outer mind that you are more or less comprehending through your experience, or else, in so far as it is real and outer, it is unknowable, an inscrutable X, an absolute mystery”? Without the congeniality of belief, where is the thrill in assimilating self-consciousness as infinite to a greater Infinite, as the infinite systems of even numbers, or of odd numbers, or an infinity of other infinite series can be assimilated to the greater infinity of the whole number series as proper parts? Yet Royce has been able to clothe these doctrines with vast erudition and flashes of quaint humour, helped out by a prolix and somewhat desultory memory, and give them life.
By virtue of the obscurantist logic inherent in this as in other transcendental idealisms, there is a genuine attachment to a certain aspect of Christianity. The identification of the Absolute with the Logos of John in his “Spirit of Modern Philosophy” and the frequent lapses into Scriptural language are not mere tricks to inspire abstractions with the breath of life. By such logic “selves” are never wholly distinct. If we make classifications, they are all secundum quid. Absolute ontological sundering is as mythical as the Snark. The individual is essentially a member of a community of selves that establishes duties for him under the demands of Loyalty. This is the basis of Royce’s ethics. But the fellowship in this community is also a participation in the “beloved community” within which sin, atonement, and the dogma of Pauline Christianity unfold themselves naturally in the guise of social psychology. In such treatment of the “Problem of Christianity” there is at most only a slight shifting of emphasis from the somewhat too self-conscious individualism of his earliest philosophy.
Royce used to tell a story on himself that illustrates a reaction of a part of the public to idealistic philosophy. At the close of a lecture before a certain woman’s organization, one of his auditors approached him with the words: “Oh, my dear Professor Royce, I did enjoy your lectures so much! Of course, I didn’t understand one word of it, but it was so evident you understood it all, that it made it very enjoyable!” The lady, though more frank in her confession, was probably not intellectually inferior to a considerable portion of the idealist’s public. James notes the fascination of hearing high things talked about, even if one cannot understand. But time is, alas, productive of comparative understanding, and it may be with Royce, as with Emerson before him, that growth of understanding contributes to narrowing the circle of his readers. The imported mysteries of Eucken and Bergson offer newer thrills, and a fuller sense of keeping up to date.
If Royce’s philosophy of religion has not the success that might have been anticipated among those seeking a freer religion, it is probably, as Professor Hocking suggests, because “idealism does not do the work of religious truth.” Royce has no interest in churches or sects. Christ is for him little more than a shadow. Prayer and worship find no place in his discussion. The mantle of the genteel tradition must then fall on other shoulders, probably those of Hocking himself. His “Meaning of God in Human Experience” is an effort to unite realism, mysticism, and idealism to establish Christianity as “organically rooted in passion, fact, and institutional life.” Where idealism has destroyed the fear of Hell, this new interpretation “restores the sense of infinite hazard, a wrath to come, a heavenly city to be gained or lost in the process of time and by the use of our freedom”!
In this philosophy, we ask, what has religion done for humanity and how has it operated? Its effects appear in “the basis of such certainties as we have, our self-respect, our belief in human worth, our faith in the soul’s stability through all catastrophes of physical nature, and in the integrity of history.” But if we accept this “mass of actual deed, once and for all accomplished under the assurance of historic religion” and through the medium of religious dogma and practice, does this guarantee the future importance of religion? Much has been accomplished under the conception that the earth was flat, but the conception is nevertheless not valid.
It is too soon to estimate the depth of impression that this philosophy will make on American culture. Professor Hocking warns us against hastening to judge that the world is becoming irreligious. He believes that the current distaste for the language of orthodoxy may spring from the opposite reason, that man is becoming potentially more religious. If so, this fact may conspire with the American tradition of the church-college to verify Professor Cohen’s assertion that “the idealistic tradition still is and perhaps will long continue to be the prevailing basis of philosophic instruction in America.” But there are signs that point to an opposite conclusion and the means of emancipation are at hand both in a change of popular spirit and within philosophy itself.
The economic and social conditions that scattered the more adventurous of the New Englanders through the developing West, and the tides of immigration of the 19th century, have weakened the hold of the Calvinistic spirit. These events, and scientific education, are producing a generation that can look upon the beauties of nature, be moved to enjoyment, admiration, and wonder by them without, on that account, feeling themselves in the presence of a supernatural Divine principle. Success in mastering nature has overcome the feeling of helplessness in the presence of misfortune. It breeds optimists of intelligence. To a cataclysm such as the San Francisco earthquake, it replies with organized relief and reconstruction in reinforced concrete. If pestilence appears, it seeks the germ, an antitoxin, and sanitary measures. There are no longer altars built to the Beautiful Necessity.
Within philosophy, the most radical expression of this attitude appears in the New Realism, and in the instrumentalism of Dewey. In 1910, six of the younger American philosophers issued in the Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Method “The Programme and First Platform of Six Realists,” followed shortly by a co-operative volume of studies to elaborate the doctrine. Their deepest bond of union is a distaste for the romantic spirit and obscurantist logic of Absolute Idealism. Hence their dominant idea is to cut at the very foundations of this system, the theory of relations in general, and the relation of idea and object in particular. Young America is not fond of the subtleties of history, hence these realists take their stand upon the “unimpeachable truth of the accredited results of science” at a time when, by the irony of history, science herself has begun to doubt.
To thwart idealism, psychology must be rewritten. While consciousness exists there is always the chance that our world of facts may fade into subjective presentations. Seizing a fruitful suggestion of James’, they introduce us to a world of objects that exists quite independently of being known. The relations of these objects are external to them and independent of their character. Sometimes, however, there arise relations between our organisms and other objects that can best be described by asserting that these objects have entered into our consciousness. How then can we fall into error? Only as nature makes mistakes, by reacting in a way that brings conflict with unnoted conditions. Perhaps the greatest contribution of Realism as yet to American thought is the contribution of some of its apostles to its implicit psychology, already independently established as behaviourism, the most vital movement in contemporary psychology.
The highly technical form of the Six Realists’ co-operative volume has kept their doctrine from any great reading public. But in its critical echoes, the busy American finds a sympathetic note in the assertion of the independent reality of the objects with which he works and the world in which he has to make his way. His also is practical faith in science, and he is glad to escape an inevitable type of religion and moral theory to be swallowed along with philosophy. Until the New Realists, however, develop further implications of their theory, or at least present congenial religious, moral, and social attitudes, their philosophy has only the negative significance of release. If it is going to take a deep hold on life, it must also be creative, not replacing dogma by dogma, but elaborating some new world vision. As yet it has told us little more than that truth, goodness, and beauty are independent realities, eternal subsistencies that await our discovery.
Professor Perry has outlined a realistic morality. For him a right action is any that conduces to goodness and whatever fulfils an interest is good. But a good action is not necessarily moral. Morality requires the fulfilment of the greatest possible number of interests, under the given circumstances; the highest good, if attainable, would be an action fulfilling all possible interests. This doctrine, though intelligible, is hard to apply in specific instances. In it realism dissolves into pragmatism, and its significance can best be seen in connection with that philosophy, where it has received fuller development and concrete applications.
Pragmatism obtained its initial impulse through a mind in temper between the sturdy common sense of the New Realists and the emotionalistic romanticism of the Idealists, or rather comprehending both within itself. This mind is that of William James, the last heir of the line of pure New England culture, made cosmopolitan by travel and intellectual contacts. Of Swedenborgian family, skilled alike in science and art, James lived the mystical thrills of the unknown but could handle them with the shrewdness of a Yankee trader. With young America, his gaze is directed toward the future, and with it, he is impatient of dogma and restraint. He is free from conventions of thought and action with the freedom of those who have lived them all in their ancestry and dare to face realities without fear of social or intellectual faux pas. With such new-found freedom goes a vast craving for experience. For him, the deepest realities are the personal experiences of individual men.
James’ greatest contribution is his “Psychology.” In it he places himself in the stream of human experience, ruthlessly cutting the gordian knots of psychological dogma and conventions. The mind that he reports is the mind each of us sees in himself. It is not so much a science of psychology as the materials for such a science, a science in its descriptive stage, constantly interrupted by shrewd homilies wherein habit appears as the fly-wheel of society, or our many selves enlarge the scope of sympathetic living. Nor is it congenial to this adventurer in experience that his explorations should constrain human nature within a scientist’s map. Not only must the stream of consciousness flow between the boundaries of our concepts, but also in the human will there is a point, be it ever so small, where a “we,” too real ever to be comprehended by science or philosophy, can dip down into the stream of consciousness and delay some fleeting idea, be it only for the twinkling of an eye, and thereby change the whole course and significance of our overt action. Freedom must not unequivocally surrender to scientific determinism, or chance to necessity.
James is a Parsifal to whom the Grail is never quite revealed. His pragmatism and radical empiricism are but methods of exploration and no adventure is too puny or mean for the quest. We must make our ideas clear and test them by the revelation they produce. Thoughts that make no difference to us in living are not real thoughts, but imaginings. The way is always open and perhaps there is a guiding truth, a working value, in the operations of even the deranged mind. We must entertain the ecstatic visions of saints, the alleged communications of spiritualists, mystical contacts with sources of some higher power, and even the thought-systems of cranks, that nothing be lost or untried. Not that we need share such beliefs, but they are genuine experiences and who can foretell where in experiences some fruitful vision may arise!
As a psychologist, James knew that the significance of a belief lies not so much in its content as in its power to direct the energies it releases. His catholic interests are not equivalent to uncritical credulity. Santayana, the wisest of his critics, is right in his assertion that James never lost his agnosticism: “He did not really believe; he merely believed in the right of believing that you might be right if you believed.” As for Pascal, the wager on immortality might be worth the making for if one won there was the blessedness of Heaven, and if one lost—at least there should have been a sustaining optimism through the trials of this life. Communion with the infinite might open new sources of power. If so, the power was there. If not, no harm had been done by the trial. Yet there is no evidence in James’ philosophy that he himself drew inspiration from any of such sources.
If James has drawn to himself the greatest reading public of all American philosophers, it is because in him each man can find the sanction for himself. Without dogmatism or pedantry, James is the voice of all individual human experiences. In him, each man can find a sympathetic auditor, and words vivid with the language of the street, encouraging his endeavours or at least pointing out the significance of his experiences for the great business of living. Sometimes James listens to human confessions with a suppressed cry of pain and recalls wistfully “A Certain Blindness in Human Beings,” or asks “Is Life Worth Living?” Once with indignation at “the delicate intellectualities and subtleties and scrupulosities” of philosophy he confronts “the host of guileless thoroughfed thinkers” with the radical realities of Morrison I. Swift, only to partially retract a few pages later with the admission, for him grudgingly given, that the Absolute may afford its believers a certain comfort and is “in so far forth” true. We live after all in an open universe, the lid is off and time relentlessly operates for the production of novelties. No empiricist can give a decision until the evidence is all in, and in the nature of the case this can never happen.
Such openness of interest forefends the possibility of James’ founding a school of philosophy. It also renders all his younger contemporaries in some measure his disciples. Popularly he is the refuge of the mystics and heterodox, the spiritualists and the cranks who seek the sanction of academic scholarship and certified dignity. There are more things in the philosophies of these who call him master than are dreamed of in his philosophy. In academic philosophy there is a dual descent of the James tradition. As a principle of negative criticism, it may be turned into its opposite, as with Hocking, who enunciates the extreme form of the pragmatic principle, If a theory is not interesting, it is false—and utilizes it for his realistic, mystic, idealistic absolutism. The philosophy of Henri Bergson, that has been widely read in this country, reinforces this mystical spiritual side, but American mysticism has popularly tended to degenerate into the occultisms of second-rate credulous minds.
On the other hand, for those in whom the conflict of science and religion is settling itself on the side of science, the principle of pragmatism lends itself to the interpretation originally intended by Charles Peirce, the author of the term, as an experimentalism, a search for verifiable hypotheses after the manner of the sciences. But this side of the doctrine is the one that has been developed by John Dewey.
Professor Dewey is without question the leading American philosopher, both from the thoroughness of his analyses and the vigour of his appeal to the American public. In discarding the Hegelian Idealism in which he was trained, he is thoroughly aligned with the New America. In him science has wholly won, and although of New England, Vermont, ancestry, there remains not a trace of the New Englander’s romantic spiritual longings for contact with a vast unknown. His dogmatic faiths, and no man is without such faiths, relate to evolution, democracy, and the all-decisive authority of experience.
For Dewey, as for the Realists, psychology is the study of human behaviour. For him mind is the instrument by which we overcome obstacles and thinking takes place only when action is checked. Hence in the conventional sense there are no abstractions. Our concepts are instruments by which we take hold of reality. If we need instruments to manufacture instruments, or to facilitate their use, these instruments are also concepts. We may call them abstract, but they are not thereby removed from the realm of experienced fact. Since, therefore, our real interest is not in things as they are in themselves, but in what we can do with them, our judgments are judgments of value, and value is determined by practice. Such judgments imply an incomplete physical situation and look toward its completion. But the will to believe is gone. There is no shadow of James’ faith in the practicality of emotional satisfactions, or in his voluntaristic psychology. Our “sensations are not the elements out of which perceptions are composed, constituted, or constructed; they are the finest, most carefully discriminated objects of perception.” Early critics, particularly among the realists, have accused Dewey of subjectivism, but except in the sense that an individual must be recognized as one term in the reaction to a situation, and the realists themselves do this, there is no ground for the charge.
Such a philosophy as Dewey’s is nothing if it is not put to work. And here is his greatest hold on American life. Like most Americans, he has no sympathy for the lazy, and even the over-reflective may suffer from the contamination of sloth; the true American wants to see results, and here is a philosophy in which results are the supreme end. Reform is, for America, a sort of sport and this philosophy involves nothing but reform. Metaphysical subtleties and visions leave the busy man cold; here they are taboo.
Professor Dewey puts his philosophy to work in the fields of ethics and education. Perhaps his ethics is the least satisfactory, howsoever promising its beginnings. Moral codes become the expression of group-approval. But they easily pass into tradition, get out of touch with fact, are superannuated. The highest virtue is intelligence and with intelligence one can recognize the uniqueness of every moral situation and develop from it its own criteria of judgment. Progress in morals consists in raising the general level of intelligence and extending the group whose approvals are significant from a social class to the nation, a notion of highest appeal to Democracy, with its faith in the individual man. But with Dewey the limit of group expansion is humanity, and this may verge on dangerous (unfortunately) radicalism. Dewey’s weapon against conventional ethics is two-edged. For the intelligent man perhaps there is no better actual moral standard than that springing from intelligent specific judgments, but for the uneducated, it is only too easy to identify intelligence with sentimental opinion and to let practice degenerate into legislative repression.
After all, judgments of practice do face incomplete situations and the problem is not only to complete but also to determine the manner in which the completion shall be brought about. What men transform is not merely the world, but themselves, and the ethics is incomplete without some further consideration of such questions as what are human natures, and what do we want them to become. But perhaps such questions are too dangerously near metaphysics to have appealed to Dewey’s powers of analysis. At any rate, the general effectiveness of his ethics is weakened by his neglect of attention to principles in some sense at least ultimate.
In education Dewey’s philosophy has its most complete vitality, for here he is dealing with concrete needs and the means of satisfying them. The problem of education is to integrate knowledge and life. He finds no joy in information for information’s sake. Curiosity may be the gift of the child, but it must be utilized to equip the man to hold his own in a world of industrialism and democracy. Yet Dewey’s sympathies are with spontaneity. He is a Rousseau with a new methodology. Connected with the Laboratory School at Chicago from 1896 to 1903, he has since followed with sympathetic interest all radical experimentation from the methods of Madame Montessori to those of the Gary Schools. The vast erudition amassed in this field, and his careful and unprejudiced study of children, has made him competent above all men to speak critically of methods and results.
In regard to education, he has given a fuller consideration of the ends to be attained than in the case of ethics. The end is seen as continued growth, springing from the existing conditions, freeing activity, and flexible in its adaptation to circumstances. The educational result is social efficiency and culture. This efficiency does not, however, imply accepting existing economic conditions as final, and its cultural aspect, good citizenship, includes with the more specific positive virtues, those characteristics that make a man a good companion. Culture is a complete ripening of the personality. “What is termed spiritual culture has usually been futile, with something rotten about it, just because it has been conceived as a thing which a man might have internally—and therefore exclusively.” The antithesis between sacrificing oneself for others, or others for oneself, is an unreal figment of the imagination, a tragic product of certain spiritual and religious thinking.
Professor Dewey well understands the dangers that lurk behind such terms as social efficiency and good citizenship. To him sympathy is much more than a mere feeling: it is, as he says it should be, “a cultivated imagination for what men have in common and a rebellion at whatever unnecessarily divides them.” But his very gift of clear vision, his penetration of the shams of dogma, economic and social, leads him to treat these things with scant respect. In consequence his fellow-philosophers, the educators over whom his influence is profound, and the public suspect him of radicalism. Only too often, to avoid suspicion of themselves, they turn his doctrine to the very uses that he condemns: industrial efficiency for them becomes identical with business expedience; the school, a trade school; culture, a detached æstheticism to be condemned; and democracy, the privilege of thinking and acting like everybody else.
The greatest weakness of Dewey’s philosophy, and it is serious, for Dewey as no other American philosopher grasps principles through which American civilization might be transformed for the better—lies in its lack of a metaphysics. Not, of course, a transcendentalism or a religious mysticism, but above all an interpretation of human nature. Emotionality represents a phase of the behaviour process too real to deny, yet it has no place in Dewey’s philosophy of man. Human longings and aspirations are facts as real as the materials of industry. Most men remain religious. Must they rest with quack mystics or unintelligent dogmatists? What is religion giving them that they crave? Is it a form of art, an attitude toward the ideal, or some interpretation of the forces of nature that they seek to grasp? Professor Dewey is himself a lover of art, but what place has art in his philosophy? If it is an instrument of education, what end does it serve, and how is it to be utilized? The pragmatic ethics gives no guarantee that the moral criteria developed by specific situations will always be the same even for two men equally intelligent. Perhaps, in spite of the paradox, there may be several best solutions. If so, this fact has some significance rooted in man’s nature and his relations to the world that philosophy should disclose. Such supplementation need not change the character of the results, but it might forefend them from misinterpretation and abuse.
With all its incompleteness, Dewey’s philosophy is undeniably that of the America of to-day. What shall we say of the future? No nation in the world has more abused its philosophies than ours. The inspirational elements of our idealisms have become the panderings of sentimentalists. The vitalizing forces of our pragmatisms threaten to congeal into the dogmata of cash-success. The war has intensified our national self-satisfaction. We tend to condemn all vision as radical, hence unsound, hence evil, hence to be put down. Philosophy thrives in the atmosphere of the Bacchæ:
“What else is Wisdom? What of man’s endeavour
Or God’s high grace, so lovely and so great?
To stand from fear set free, to breathe and wait;
To hold a hand uplifted over Hate;
And shall not loveliness be loved for ever?”
But what have we now of this atmosphere?
At Christmas-time, the American Philosophical Association devoted three sessions to the discussion of the Rôle of the Philosopher in Modern Life. From report, opinion was divided between those who would have him a social reformer, to the exclusion of contemplative background, and those with a greater sense of playing safe, who would have him turn to history, of any sort, or contemplation quite detached from social consequences. Let us hope these opinions are not to be taken seriously. Our social reformers are not all like Dewey, whose neglect of basic reflection is probably not as great as the omission of such reflections from his published works would indicate. Nor is an academic chair generally suited to the specific contacts with life from which successful reforms must be shaped. On the other hand, abstract contemplation with the pedagogic reinforcements advocated, will confirm the popular American sentiment against reflection, if it is true, as Dewey asserts, that education must be an outgrowth of existing conditions. Fortunately genius, if such there be amongst us, will not submit to the opinions of the American Philosophic Association. If philosophy can find freedom, perhaps America can yet find philosophy.
Harold Chapman Brown