18 DARWINISM AND PHILOSOPHY 



H 



these very conclusions from subjection to experi- I 

 mental test, for, by defmition, these results make no 

 differences in the detailed course of events. But 

 a philosophy that humbles its pretensions to the 

 work of projecting hypotheses for the education 

 and conduct of mind, individual and social, is 

 thereby subjected to test by the way in which the 

 ideas it propounds work out in practice. In hav 

 ing modesty forced upon it, philosophy also ac 

 quires responsibility. 



Doubtless I seem to have violated the implied 

 promise of my earlier remarks and to have turned 

 both prophet and partizan. But in anticipating 

 the direction of the transformations in philosophy 

 to be wrought by the Darwinian genetic and ex 

 perimental logic, I do not profess to speak for 

 any save those who yield themselves consciously 

 or unconsciously to this logic. No one can fairly 

 deny that at present there are twojeffects of the 

 Darwinian mode of thinking. On the one hand, \ 

 there Are &quot;making many sincere and vital 

 to revise our traditional philosophic conceptions 

 in accordance with its demands. On the other 

 hand, there is as definitely a recrudescence of 

 absolutistic philosophies; an assertion of a type 

 of philosophic knowing distinct from that of the 

 sciences, one which opens to us another kind of 

 reality from that to which the sciences give ac 

 cess ; an appeal through experience to something 



