DARWINISM AND PHILOSOPHY 19 



that essentially goes beyond experience. This re 

 action affects popular creeds and religious move 

 ments as well as technical philosophies. The very 

 conquest of the biological sciences by the new ideas 

 has led many to proclaim an explicit and rigid 

 separation of philosophy from science. 



Old ideas give way slowly; for they are more 

 than abstract logical forms and categories. They 

 are habits, predispositions, deeply engrained atti 

 tudes of aversion and preference. Moreover, the 

 conviction persists though history shows it to be 

 a hallucination that all the questions that the 

 human mind has asked are questions that can be 

 answered in terms of the alternatives that the ques 

 tions themselves present. But in fact intellectual 

 progress usually occurs through sheer abandonment 

 of questions together with both of the alternatives 

 they assume an abandonment that results from 

 their decreasing vitality and a change of urgent 

 interest. We do not solve them : we get over them. 

 Old questions are solved by disappearing, evapo 

 rating, while new questions corresponding to the 

 changed attitude of endeavor and preference take 

 their place. Doubtless the greatest dissolvent in 

 contemporary thought of old questions, the great 

 est precipitant of new methods, new intentions, new, 

 problems, is- the. one effecte4 f by the scientific revo- 

 lutio^ that found its climax in the &quot; Origin of ; 

 Species.&quot; 



