Dewey again claims for his theory the support of modern science. "Biology, psychology, and the social sciences proffer an imposing body of concrete facts that also point to the rehabilitation of belief...."[245] Psychology has revised its notions in terms of beliefs. 'Motor' is writ large on the face of sensation, perception, conception, cognition in general. Biology shows that the organic instruments of the intellectual life were evolved for specifically practical purposes. The historical sciences show that knowledge is a social instrument for the purpose of meeting social needs. This testimony is not philosophy, Dewey says, but it has a bearing on philosophy. The new sciences have at least as much importance as mathematics and physics. "Such being the case, the reasons for ruling psychology and sociology and allied sciences out of competency to give philosophic testimony have more significance than the bare denial of jurisdiction."[246] The idealists, apparently, have been the worst offenders in this connection. "One would be almost justified in construing idealism as a Pickwickian scheme, so willing is it to idealize the principle of intelligence at the expense of its specific undertakings, were it not that this reluctance is the necessary outcome of the Stoic basis and tenor of idealism—its preoccupation with logical contents and relations in abstraction from their situs and function in conscious living beings."[247]
In conclusion, Dewey warns against certain possible misunderstandings. The pragmatic philosopher, he says, is not opposed to objective realities, and logical and universal thinking. Again, it is not to be supposed that science is any the less exact by reason of being instrumental to human beliefs. "Because reason is a scheme of working out the meanings of convictions in terms of one another and of the consequences they import in further experience, convictions are the more, not the less, amenable and responsible to the full exercise of reason."[248] And finally, Dewey assures the reader that the outcome of his discussion is not a solution, but a problem. Nobody is apt to dispute that statement.
This very unsatisfactory essay is, nevertheless, a fair specimen of the polemical literature which was produced by Dewey and others during these years. Pragmatism was trying to make converts, and the argumentum ad hominem was freely employed. If the opposition was painted a good deal blacker than was necessary, the end was supposed to justify the evident exaggeration. And so, in this essay, after accusing his contemporaries of adherence to tenets that they would have indignantly repudiated, after a wholesale and indiscriminate condemnation of idealism, Dewey concludes with—a problem. This period of propaganda is now quite definitely a thing of the past. Philosophical discussion, especially since the beginning of the great war, has entered upon a new epoch of sanity, and, perhaps, of constructive effort.
FOOTNOTES:
[212] The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy, p. 227.
[213] Ibid., p. 228. In connection with the discussion which follows see Bradley "On Our Knowledge of Immediate Experience," in Essays on Truth and Reality, Chapter VI.
[214] Ibid., p. 229.
[215] Op. cit., p. 239.
[216] Ibid., p. 240.
[217] The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy, pp. 77-111.