

DARWINISM AND PHILOSOPHY 17 



it a thousand times dialectically demonstrated that 

 life as a whole is regulated by a transcendent prin 

 ciple to a final inclusive goal, none the less truth 

 and error, health and disease, good and evil, hope 

 and fear in the concrete, would remain just what 

 and where they now are. To improve our edu- 

 cation, to ameliorate our manners, to advance our- 

 politics, we must have recourse to specific condi-j 

 tions of generation. 



.-. Finally, the new logic introduces responsibility 

 into the intellectual life. To idealize and ration 

 alize the universe at large is after all a confession 

 of inability to master the courses of things that 

 specifically concern us. As long as mankind suf 

 fered from this impotency, it naturally shifted a 

 burden of responsibility that it could not carry 

 over to the more competent shoulders of the trans 

 cendent cause. But if insight into specific con 

 ditions of value and into specific consequences of 

 ideas is possible, philosophy must in time become \ 6 

 a method of locating and interpreting the more 

 serious of the conflicts that occur in life, and a ^ ; 

 method of projecting ways for dealing with them: 

 a method of moral and political diagnosis and 



4. CP w-jw-^-.-wiv..!,} SJ 



prognosis. 



The claim to formulate a priori the legisla 

 tive constitution of the universe is by its nature 

 a claim that may lead to elaborate dialectic de 

 velopments. But it is also one that removes 



