Page:The Cambridge History of American Literature, v3.djvu/275

 J. Mark Baldwin 257 material to be transformed by our intelligence appeals to the pre- "^ vailing light-hearted optimism which sees success as the con- stant reward of intelligent effort and finds no inherent obstacles to the establishment of a heaven on earth. Certainly Dewey || nowhere calls to our attention the existence of incurable evil — ' ! the evil against which our only remedy is some form of wisely 'i cultivated resignation. In his zeal for making philosophy useful and responsible, a good deal of the traditional glory of philosophy is ignored, if not denied. The intellectual activity which we call theoretic j| science is subordinated to its practical application. ^ In elimin- ating the personal consolations of philosophy, he also eliminates the great saving experience which it affords us in making us spectators of a great cosmic drama in which solar systems are born and destroyed, a drama in which our part as actors is of infinitesimal significance. Yet historically the most significant If feature of Dewey's thought is undoubtedly the fact that in an'^^ age of waning faith in human reason — witness the rapid spread '| of the romantic mysticism of Bergson — he has rallied those who! stni believe in the cause of liberalism based on faith in the value) | of intellectual enlightenment. Similar to the view of James and Dewey in accepting the^ evolutionary philosophy as basic, and keeping even closer toij Darwinian ideas, is the philosophy of J. Mark Baldwin. Bald- win began as a psychologist of the orthodox type; but availing himself of the views on social consciousness propounded by Royce in the early nineties, he produced a systern_j3fjevolu- tionary_sqcial psychology with a very elaborate technical ter- minology and analytic scaffolding. This emphasis on technical apparatus makes his great three-volumed treatise on Thoughts and Things (i 906-11) one of the most obscure books written in America, but for all that it seems to have met with appreciation in France and Germany, where it has been translated. An in- telligible summary of his later views is to be found in his Genetic Theory oj Reality (1915), in which he develops this theory of pan- " Dewey insists with some justice that by practical he does not necessarily mean ends of the bread-and-butter type. But his illustrations of the process of knowledge are overwhehningly of the type generally called useful and very sel- dom drawn from the experience of the mathematician or the philosopher himself, even if he is a pragmatist. He glorifies zeal for developing the applications of ; propositions rather than their implications. VOL. Ill — 17