Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 73.djvu/68

64 residual problems which science shoves aside as unimportant or irrelevant are turned over to philosophy, which, as the various sciences successively split off from the parent-stem, has to be satisfied with the vague chaos of general opinions which have not yet come under scientific scrutiny. On such a view philosophy, of course, never can hope to occupy a position of dignity in the intellectual world, for as soon as the human intellect takes up seriously one of these remaining problems and subjects it to careful experimental study, it ceases to be called philosophy and is scored to the credit of science. The result is that the field of philosophy becomes more and more restricted until finally science occupies the whole field and philosophy has only a historical significance.

The name, to be sure, is unimportant—whether it be called philosophy or science—but the fact is that as science gradually encroaches upon the field of the so-called philosophical subject-matter, her method has been becoming more and more philosophic: that is to say, with the progress of science it becomes increasingly necessary to go beyond the confines of any particular science in order to explain any one of its facts. Hence the appearance of the hyphen-sciences and of the comparative method, which have grown up in the interstices between the sciences as formerly classified. Now, in so far as an explanatory law extends beyond the province of the particular science, it is what, in the history of thought, has been called a philosophical principle, and inasmuch as science to-day is increasingly comparative in its method, it follows that it is becoming increasingly philosophic. Instead of philosophy being condemned to the unclassified residuum, it is becoming the very methodology of science. Each scientist is perforce becoming philosophic in order to understand the implications of his own procedure. It behooves the man of science to realize this, and it behooves the old-fashioned metaphysician, who supposes that his method is distinct from that of science, to realize that the only fruitful philosopizing that is going on at the present time is at the hands of the philosophic scientists and the scientific philosophers.

One of the main contributions to this new conception of the relation of philosophy to science is contained in the instrumentalism of Professor Dewey. The main contention of this theory is that ideas are instrumental to action: they are secondary, derived from action, and they are teleological, dynamogenic, point forward to action; or, in so far as they win a permanent place for themselves as ideas, it is because they are more delicate types of action-systems. The reflective or mediating modes of experience are instrumental to the immediate forms of feeling and conduct.

It follows that the formal logic which was elaborated out of relation to the emotional and volitional needs of life, and is consequently correct only in so far as it remains abstract, and valid only in as much