64 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



residual problems which science shoves aside as unimportant or irrele- 

 vant are turned over to philosophy, which, as the various sciences suc- 

 cessively split off from the parent-stem, has to be satisfied with the 

 vague chaos of general opinions which have not yet come under scien- 

 tific scrutiny. On such a view philosophy, of course, never can hope to 

 occupy a position of dignity in the intellectual world, for as soon as 

 the human intellect takes up seriously one of these remaining problems 

 and subjects it to careful experimental study, it ceases to be called 

 philosophy and is scored to the credit of science. The result is that 

 the field of philosophy becomes more and more restricted until finally 

 science occupies the whole field and philosophy has only a historical 

 significance. 



The name, to be sure, is unimportant — whether it be called phi- 

 losophy or science — but the fact is that as science gradually encroaches 

 upon the field of the so-called philosophical subject-matter, her method 

 has been becoming more and more philosophic : that is to say, with the 

 progress of science it becomes increasingly necessary to go beyond the 

 confines of any particular science in order to explain any one of its 

 facts. Hence the appearance of the hyphen-sciences and of the com- 

 parative method, which have grown up in the interstices between the 

 sciences as formerly classified. Now, in so far as an explanatory law 

 extends beyond the province of the particular science, it is what, in 

 the history of thought, has been called a philosophical principle, and 

 inasmuch as science to-day is increasingly comparative in its method, 

 it follows that it is becoming increasingly philosophic. Instead of 

 philosophy being condemned to the unclassified residuum, it is becom- 

 ing the very methodology of science. Each scientist is perforce becom- 

 ing philosophic in order to understand the implications of his own 

 procedure. It behooves the man of science to realize this, and it 

 behooves the old-fashioned metaphysician, who supposes that his method 

 is distinct from that of science, to realize that the only fruitful philoso- 

 jDhizing that is going on at the present time is at the hands of the 

 philosophic scientists and the scientific philosophers. 



One of the main contributions to this new conception of the relation 

 of philosophy to science is contained in the instrumentalism of Pro- 

 fessor Dewey. The main contention of this theory is that ideas are 

 instrumental to action : they are secondary, derived from action, and 

 they are teleological, dynamogenic, point forward to action; or, in so 

 far as they win a permanent place for themselves as ideas, it is because 

 they are more delicate types of action-systems. The reflective or 

 mediating modes of experience are instrumental to the immediate forms 

 of feeling and conduct. 



It follows that the formal logic which was elaborated out of rela- 

 tion to the emotional and volitional needs of life, and is consequently 

 correct only in so far as it remains abstract, and valid only in as much 



