DARWIN'S INFLUENCE UPON PHILOSOPHY 97 



lies once and for all behind them. The habit of derogating from 

 present meanings and uses prevents our looking the facts of experience 

 in the face; it prevents serious acknowledgment of the evils they pre- 

 sent and serious concern with the goods they promise but do not yet 

 fulfil. It turns thought to the business of finding a wholesale trans- 

 cendent remedy for the one and guarantee for the other. One is re- 

 minded of the way many moralists and theologians greeted Herbert 

 Spencer's recognition of an unknowable energy from which welled up 

 the phenomenal physical processes without and the conscious operations 

 without. Merely because Spencer labeled his unknowable energy 

 " God/' this faded piece of metaphysical goods, was greeted as an 

 important and grateful concession to the reality of the spiritual realm. 

 Were it not for the deep hold of the habit of seeking justification for 

 ideal values in the remote and transcendent, surely this reference of 

 them to an unknowable absolute would be despised in behalf of the daily 

 demonstrations of experience that knowable energies are daily gener- 

 ating about us precious values. 



The displacing of this wholesale type of philosophy will doubtless 

 not arrive by sheer logical disproof, but rather by growing recognition 

 of its futility. Were it a thousand times true that opium produces 

 sleep because of its dormitive energy, the inducing of sleep in the tired 

 and the recovery to waking life of the poisoned, would not be thereby 

 one least step forwarded. And were it a thousand times dialectic- 

 ally demonstrated that life as a whole is regulated by a transcendent 

 principle to a final inclusive goal, truth and error, health and disease, 

 good and evil, hope and fear in the concrete would remain none the 

 less just what and where they now are. To improve our education, to 

 ameliorate our manners, to advance our politics, we must have recourse 

 to specific conditions of generation. 



Finally, the new logic introduces responsibility into the intellectual 

 life. To idealize and rationalize the universe at large is after all a 

 confession of inability to master the courses of things that specifically 

 concern us. As long as mankind suffered from this impotency, nat- 

 urally it shifted a burden of responsibility which it could not carry 

 over to the more competent shoulders of the transcendent cause. But 

 if insight into specific conditions of value and into specific consequences 

 of ideas is possible, philosophy must in time become a method of lo- 

 cating and interpreting the more serious of the conflicts that occur in 

 life, and a method of projecting ways for dealing with them : a method 

 of moral and political diagnosis and prognosis. 



The claim to formulate a priori the legislative constitution of the 

 universe is by its nature a claim that may lead into elaborate dialectic 

 developments. But it is also one which removes these very conclusions 

 from subjection to experimental test, for, by definition, these results 



VOL. I.XXV. — 7. 



