118 THE SCIENTIFIC PLAN OF THE CONGRESS 



independent outside world; but that in every judgment real expe- 

 rience is remoulded and reshaped in the service of certain purposes of 

 will. Here lies the true core of that growing popular philosophy 

 of to-day which, under the name of pragmatism, or under other titles, 

 mingles the purposive character of our knowledge and the evolution- 

 ary theories of modern biology in the vague notion that men created 

 knowledge because the biological struggle for existence led to such 

 views of the world; and that we call true that correlation of our 

 experiences which has approved itself through its harmony with 

 the phylogenetic development. Certainly we must reject such circle 

 philosophies. We must see clearly that the whole conception of a 

 biological development and of a struggle of organisms is itself only 

 a part of our construction of causal knowledge. We must have know- 

 ledge to conceive ourselves as products of a phylogenetic history, and 

 thus cannot deduce from it the fact, and, still less, the justification 

 of knowledge. Yet one element of this theory remains valuable: 

 knowledge is indeed a purposive activity, a reconstruction of the 

 world in the service of ideals of the will. We have thus from one side 

 the suggestion that all knowledge is merely theoretical, from the other 

 side the claim that all knowledge is practical activity. It seems as if 

 both sides might agree that it is superfluous and unjustified to make 

 a demarcation line through the field of knowledge and to separate 

 two sorts of knowledge, theoretical and practical. For both theories 

 demand that all knowledge be of one kind , and they disagree only as 

 to whether we ought to call it all theoretical or all practical. 



Yet the true situation is not characterized by such an antithesis. 

 If we say that all knowledge is ultimately practical, we are speaking 

 from an epistemological point of view, inasmuch as we take it then as 

 a reconstruction of the world through the purposive activity of the 

 over-individual subject. On the other hand it is an empirical point of 

 view from which ultimately all knowledge, that of the physician and 

 engineer and lawyer, as well as that of the astronomer, appears theo- 

 retical. But this antithesis can, therefore, not decide the further 

 empirical question, whether or not in the midst of theoretical know- 

 ledge two kinds of sciences may be discriminated, of which the one 

 refers to empirical practical purposes and the other not. Such an 

 inquiry would have nothing to do with the epistemological problem of 

 pragmatism; it would be strictly non-philosophical, just as the separa- 

 tion of chemistry into organic and inorganic chemistry. This empir- 

 ical question is indeed to be answered in the affirmative. If we ask 

 what causes bring about a certain effect, for the sake of a practical 

 purpose of ours, for instance, the curing a patient of a disease, no 

 one can state facts which are not in principle to be included in the 

 complete system of physical causes and effects and thus in the system 

 of physical sciences. And yet it may well be that the physical sciences, 



