PREFACE v 



completeness and finality. And if, as I believe, one 

 of the marked traits of the pragmatic movement is 

 just the surrender of every such claim, how have 

 we furthered our understanding of pragmatism? 



Classic philosophies have to be revised because 

 they must be squared up with the many social 

 and intellectual tendencies that have revealed 

 themselves since those philosophies matured. The 

 conquest of the sciences by the experimental 

 method of inquiry; the injection of evolutionary 

 ideas into the study of life ItncTsociety ; the ap- 

 plication of the historic methbdTto religions and 

 morals as well as to institutions; the creation of 

 the sciences of &quot; origins &quot; and of the cultural 

 development of mankind how can such intellec 

 tual changes occur and leave philosophy what it 

 was and where it was? Nor can philosophy re 

 main an indifferent spectator of the rise of what 

 may be termed the new individualism in art and 

 letters, with its naturalistic method applied in a 

 religious, almost mystic spirit to what is primi 

 tive, obscure, varied, inchoate, and growing in 

 nature and human character. The age of Darwin, 

 Helmholtz, Pasteur, Ibsen, Maeterlinck, Rodin, and 

 Henry James must feel some uneasiness until it 

 has liquidated its philosophic inheritance in cur 

 rent intellectual coin. And to accuse those who 

 are concerned in this transaction of ignorant con 

 tempt for the classic past of philosophy is to over- 



