Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 66.djvu/461

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HE history of philosophical thought itself participates in the scheme of evolutionary progress which it expounds and records. The sequence of culture changes and the soil of motives in which these find root remain the permanently vital sources by which to illustrate and to comprehend the nature of human endowment, striving and achievement. For only half a century have we had access to an adequate point of view that brings into the vista of the progress of the ages the nature and the scope of evolutionary forces. This added insight has come, more than any single factor, to stamp the pattern of modern thought. We look backward not only with a different equipment in the way of telescopic aids to such retrospective vision, but with very different anticipation of what is thus to be discovered, and of its significance.

Though the application of evolutionary principles to mental endowment has kept pace with its advance within the more strictly biological field; and though the factors which psychological processes have themselves contributed to the trend of evolution have been of late prominently recognized, yet the sum-total of these recognitions has gone rather toward adding some chapters and an appendix or two to the volume of philosophy, than towards the rewriting of the whole. Yet the latter type of reconstruction of philosophy and psychology is by no means unrepresented. The manner of such representation naturally varies with author and subject, with scope and purpose; but it is possible to set down a score or more of titles indicative of the absorption into the ripest psychological thought of the tissue of evolutionary doctrine. In some aspects this tendency appears in a still more intensive and comprehensive form than has yet been accorded it, in the psychological work of large dimensions which President G. Stanley Hall has recently brought to an issue. The dominant message of his pages is the notable one that psychology must ever remain close to biology; that considerations of origin and of the potent past must ever illuminate the road to the future.