xvi Preface 



the light of the preface to Howlson's book, The Limits of 

 Evolution^ and tlien look reflectively back over my thirty 

 years of contact with him and his teachings, most of it inci- 

 dental and fitful, but some of it rather close, a few influences 

 of his, some positive and some negative, stand out sharply 

 indeed. The positive influences I mention first. No other 

 influence contributed so much to my belief in the power of 

 reason ; that is, in a substratum of truth to the idealistic 

 philosophy. Again no other influence contributed more to 

 my belief in persons — in the power of personality ; that is, 

 in a substratum of truth to the Howisonian philosophy of 

 personal idealism. 



A statement of the negative influence coming from the 

 same source takes us back to Aristotle. In the preface to 

 The Limits of Evolution Howison writes, referring to his 

 own theory of Personal Idealism, "The character of the 

 present theory, relatively to Aristotle, is to be found in its 

 attempt to carry out the individualistic tendencies in Arls- 

 totelianism to a conclusion consistently coherent." This 

 statement I could almost adopt word for word as a charac- 

 terization of the purpose that has animated all my general 

 thinking and writing. Yet how profoundly does the out- 

 come of my efforts differ from that resulting from Profes- 

 sor Howison's efforts ! And here is the kernel of my present 

 remarks : In commending to me the De Anima of Aristotle 

 and generously undertaking to guide me through it, as a 

 response to my appeal for help toward clarifying my mind 

 concerning the deeper, the philosophical meaning of bio- 

 logical evolution, my greatly learned and much esteemed 

 teacher had a purpose, I am now quite sure, that is impos- 

 sible of realization. That purpose was to show that Aris- 

 totle failed in his effort to recognize a "real world" through 

 combining "ideal form" with "real matter," because for him 

 a real world was more fundamentally a sense-experienceable 

 world than is actually the case. As I labored through the 



