266 Selective Thinking 



§ 12. Some Fragmentary Interpretaiio7is 



In the way of showing certain general bearings of the 

 position now taken, — bearings which the Hmits of this 

 address do not enable me to amplify in any detail, — I may 

 go on to indicate the points which follow. They are sug- 

 gestions toward a broader union of points of view. 



I. It will be seen that the position now taken up pre- 

 serves what may be called the * utility ' criterion of survival 

 through the whole progress of knowledge. The acts of 

 selection are never independent of control from experience, 

 however adequate they may be within this control ; for 

 the internal or systematic determination, while always the 

 platform of variation, is yet never the final agent of con- 

 crete selection. To be sure, the individual's judgment, his 

 sense of reality and truth, becomes more independent or 

 self-legislative, as we have seen ; but this, when genetically 

 considered, is both the outcome and the evidence of the 

 control which the environment has all along exercised. 

 Even though we assume certain innate norms of selection 

 which the individual directly applies, still these norms must 

 not only lead to workable systems of knowledge in the 

 world of active experience, but they must also in their 

 origin have been themselves selected from variations, unless, 

 indeed, we go back to a theory of special creation with 

 preestablished harmony. ^ But if we admit that they are 

 themselves selected variations, then we find no way to 

 account for their selection except that by accommodation 

 to the physical and social environments. ^ We thus preserve 



1 Cf. the following chapter for some criticisms of this theory. 



2 Simmel makes the analogous argument {loc. cit., p. 45) that even if we had 

 on a priori stock of knowledge, a selection of movements would still have to be 

 made for practical life, and a system of ' truths ' would still be built up thereby. 



