Because science becomes more and more a fragmentated thing, with ever less coördination, ever less sense of the whole. Our industrial system has forced division of labor here, as in the manual trades, almost to the point of idiocy: let a man seek to know everything about something, and he will soon know nothing about anything else; efficiency will swallow up the man. Because of this shredded science we have great zoölogists talking infantile patriotism about the war, and great electricians who fill sensational sheets with details of their trips to heaven. We live in a world where thought breaks into pieces, and coördination ebbs; we flounder into a chaos of hatred and destruction because synthetic thinking is not in fashion.
Consider, for example, the problem of monopoly: we ask science what we are to do here; why is it that after we have listened to the economist, and the historian, and the lawyer, and the psychologist, we are hardly better off than before? Because each of these men speaks in ignorance of what the others have discovered. We must find some way of making these men acquainted with one another before they can become really useful to large social purposes; we must knock their heads together. We want more uniters and coördinators, less analyzers and accumulators. Specialization is making the philosopher a social necessity of the very first importance.
This does not mean that we must put the state into the hands of the epistemologists. Hardly. The type of philosopher who must be produced will be a man too close to life to spend much time on merely analytical problems. He will feel the call of action, and will automatically reject all knowledge that does not point to deeds. The essential feature of him will be grasp: he will have his net fixed for the findings of those sciences which have to do, not with material reconstructions, but with the discovery of the secrets of human nature. He will know the essentials of biology and psychology, of sociology and history, of economics and politics; in him these long-divorced sciences will meet again and make one another fertile once more. He will busy himself with Mendel and Freud, Sumner and Veblen, and will scandalously neglect the Absolute. He will study the needs and exigencies of his time, he will consider the Utopias men make, he will see in them the suggestive pseudopodia of political theory, and will learn from them what men at last desire. He will sober the vision with fact, and find a focus for immediate striving. With this focus he will be able to coördinate his own thinking, to point the nose of science to a goal; science becoming thereby no longer inventive and instructive merely, but preventive and constructive. And so fortified and unified he will preach his gospel, talking not to students about God, but to statesmen about men.
For we come again—ever and ever again—to Plato: unless wisdom and practical ability, philosophy and statesmanship, can be more closely bound together than they are, there will be no lessening of human misery. Think of the learning of scientists and the ignorance of politicians! You see all these agitated, pompous men, making laws at the rate of some ten thousand a year; you see those quiet, unheard of, underpaid seekers in the laboratories of the world; unless you can bring these two groups together through coördination and direction, your society will stand still forever, however much it moves. Philosophy must take hold; it must become the social direction of science, it must become, strange to say, applied science.
We stand to-day in social science where Bacon stood in natural science: we seek a method first for the elucidation of causes, and second for the transformation, in the light of this knowledge, of man’s environment and man. “We live in the stone age of political science,” says Lester Ward; “in politics we are still savages.”[300] Our political movements are conceived in impulse and developed in emotion; they end in fission and fragmentation because there is no thought behind them. Who will supply thinking to these instincts, direction to this energy, light to this wasted heat? Our young men talk only of ideals, our politicians only of fact; who will interpret to the one the language of the other? What is it, too, that statesmen need if not that saving sense of the whole which makes philosophy, and which philosophy makes? Just as philosophy without statesmanship is—let us say—epistemology, so statesmanship without philosophy is—American politics. The function of the philosopher, then, is to do the listening to to-day’s science, and then to do the thinking for to-morrow’s statesmanship. The philosophy of an age should be the organized foresight of that age, the interpreter of the future to the present. “Selection adapts man to yesterday’s conditions, not to to-day’s”;[301] the organized foresight of conscious evolution will adapt man to the conditions of to-morrow. And an ounce of foresight is worth a ton of morals.
CHAPTER III
ORGANIZED INTELLIGENCE
I
The Need
INTELLIGENCE is organized experience; but intelligence itself must be organized. Consider the resources of the unused intelligence of the world; intelligence potential but undeveloped; intelligence developed but isolated; intelligence allowed to waste itself in purely personal pursuits, unasked to enter into coöperation for larger ends. Consider the Platos fretting in exile while petty politicians rule the world; consider Montaigne, and Hobbes, and Hume, and Carlyle, and the thousand other men whose genius was left to grow—or die—in solitude or starvation; consider the vast number of university-trained minds who are permitted, for lack of invitation and organized facilities, to slip into the world of profit and loss and destructively narrow intent; consider the expert ability in all lines which can be found in the faculties of the world, and which goes to training an infinitesimal fraction of the community. The thought of university graduates, of university faculties, of university-trained investigators, has had a rapidly growing influence in the last ten years in America; and because it is an influence due to enlightenment it is fundamentally an influence for “good.” It was this influence that showed when President Wilson said that the eight-hour day was demanded by the informed opinion of the time. The sources of such influence have merely been touched; they are deep; we must find a way to make informed opinion more articulate and powerful. “The most valuable knowledge consists of methods,” said Nietzsche;[302] and the most valuable methods are methods of organization, whether of data or of men. Organization’s the thing. Economic forces are organized; the forces of intelligence are not. To organize intelligence; that is surely one method of approach to the social problem; and what if, indeed, it be the very heart and substance of the social problem?
Now a very easy way of making the propounder of such an organization feel unusually modest is to ask him that little trouble-making question, How? To answer that would be to answer almost everything that can be answered. Here are opera basilica again!—for what are we doing, after all, but trying to take Francis Bacon seriously? Of course the difficulty in organizing intelligence is how to know who are intelligent, and how to get enough people to agree with you that you know. If each man’s self-valuation were accepted, our organization would be rather bulky. Are there any men very widely recognized as intelligent, who could be used as the nucleus of an organization? There are individual men so recognized,—Edison, for example, and, strange to say, one or two men who by accident are holding political office. But these are stray individuals; are there any groups whose average of intelligence is highly rated by a large portion of the community? There are. Physicians are so rated; so much so that by popular usage they have won almost a monopoly on the once more widely used term doctor. University professors are highly rated. Let us take the physicians and the professors; here is a nucleus of recognized intelligence.
There are objections, here, of course; some one urges that many physicians are quacks, another that professors are rated as intelligent, but only in an unpractical sort of way. Perhaps we shall find some scheme for eliminating the quacks; but the professors present a difficult problem. It is true that they suffer from intellectualism, academitis, overfondness for theories, and other occupational diseases; it is true that the same people who stand in awe of the very word professor would picture the article indicated by the word as a thin, round-shouldered, be-spectacled ninny, incapable of finding his way alone through city streets, and so immersed in the stars that he is sooner or later submerged in a well. But what if this quality of detachment, of professorial calm, be just one of the qualities needed for the illumination of our social problem? Perhaps we have too much emotion in these questions, and need the colder light of the man who is trained to use his “head” and not his “heart.” Perhaps the most useful thing in the world for our purpose is this terribly dispassionate, coldly scrutinizing professor. We need men as impartial and clear-eyed as men come; and whatever a professor may say, yet he sees his field more clearly and impartially than any other group of men whatever. Let the professors stay.