Page:Philosophical Review Volume 20.djvu/679

665 'ism,' etc., all of which suggest misleading analogies and lead to, as well as result from, false interpretations of social phenomena. That enormous interest in biological evolution which led to the biological invasions of the fields of logic, ethics, religion, æsthetics, and psychology, as well as of sociology, ought itself to have shown the necessity of adjusting categories to subject-matter and the fallacy of interpreting the higher in terms of the lower. The very fact that something has a place within a developmental process, tells us not only that it has grown out of its antecedents but also that it has outgrown them. It follows, as a corollary, that everything must be explained in terms of the specific and unique level of development that it occupies. To interpret society in terms of physics or chemistry or even of biology, must, therefore, inevitably give us an inadqeuate and distorted view of it. It is, I think, Professor Balwdin's genetic point of view and his philosophical insight, rather than the fact that he happens to be a psychologist, that leads him to insist that social science must in all cases allow and demand a psychological interpretation of its data. In insisting, however, as he does, that whatever exists at any given level 'shows' and that we must not transcend in our explanations these actually appearing factors, he seems to be doing violence to the teleological basis of his treatment and to the most essential characteristics of development. Unless we somehow take into account a final cause or end that is operative throughout the entire process, (1) we have no principle by which to determine the selection or the arrangement of the various levels; (2) we have no principle of intelligibility for the process as a whole but merely descriptions of various so-called levels; and (3) we are tempted to regard the later stages as having merely more or additional characteristics instead of as having genuinely and absolutely transformed all that has preceded. And to this temptation Professor Baldwin succumbs when he represents the genetic movement by the diagram of two diverging lines and tells us that the added spaces "show the increased area of facts and principles peculiar to each mode beyond those of the preceding" (p. 51). While it is recognized that the control of intelligence in man over "the play of brute biological forces" "is seldom quite lacking," we are nevertheless told that if we resort to a biological interpretation of collective life at all, we "should restrict its application to those facts of the social life in which instinct operates with least complication from psychological functions, and in which there is present no interference due to intelligent restraint and choice" (p. 53). We should be far safer, I think, in maintaining with Green that man has no mere 'animal' instincts or impulses but that his whole life is genuinely transformed, to a greater or less extent, by the principle of reason or intelligence that differentiates him from the brute creation.