98 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



make no differences in the detailed course of events. But a philosophy 

 that humbles its pretensions to the work of projecting hypotheses for 

 the education and conduct of mind, individual and social, is thereby 

 subjected to test by the way in which the ideas it propounds work out 

 in practise. In having modesty forced upon it, philosophy also ac- 

 quires responsibility. 



Doubtless I may seem to have violated the implied promise of my 

 earlier remarks and to have turned both prophet and partisan. But 

 in anticipating the direction of the transformations in philosophy to be 

 wrought by the Darwinian genetic and experimental logic, I do not 

 profess to speak for any changes save those wrought in those who yield 

 themselves consciously or unconsciously to this logic. No one can 

 fairly deny that at present there are evident two effects of the Darwin- 

 ian mode of thinking. On the one hand, there are making many sin- 

 cere and vital efforts to revise our traditional philosophic conceptions 

 in accordance with its demands. On the other hand, there is as defi- 

 nitely a recrudescence of absolutistic philosophies ; an assertion of a type 

 of philosophic knowing distinct from that of the sciences, which opens 

 to us another kind of reality from that to which the sciences give ac- 

 cess; an appeal through experience to something that radically trans- 

 cends experiences. This reaction affects popular creeds and religious 

 movements as well as technical philosophies. In other words, the very 

 conquest of the biological sciences by the new ideas has led many to 

 effect a more 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 en- 

 grained attitudes of aversion and preference. Moreover, the convic- 

 tion 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 questions themselves 

 present. But in fact intellectual progress usually occurs through sheer 

 abandonment of such questions, together with both of the alterna- 

 tives they assume — an abandonment that results from decreasing 

 vitality and interest in their point of view. We do not solve them : we 

 get over them. Old questions are solved by disappearing, evaporating, 

 while new questions corresponding to the changed attitude of endeavor 

 and preference take their place. Doubtless the greatest dissolvent of 

 old questions, the greatest precipitant of new methods, new intentions, 

 new problems, is the one effected by the scientific revolution completed 

 in the " Origin of Species." 



