Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 75.djvu/102

98 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 acquires 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 Darwinian mode of thinking. On the one hand, there are making many sincere and vital efforts to revise our traditional philosophic conceptions in accordance with its demands. On the other hand, there is as definitely 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 access; an appeal through experience to something that radically transcends 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 engrained attitudes of aversion and preference. Moreover, the conviction 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 alternatives 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."