Page:The Idealistic Reaction Against Science (1914).djvu/38

Rh tion, but also in that of phenomena itself. The theory of evolution, whilst thus calling attention to the new forms and new concrete aspects assumed by reality in the process of development, to the irreversible direction of development in time, and to the hierarchical order of the beings which rise little by little to higher forms of life, reveals a world beyond and above abstract mechanism and indifferent to every temporal and hierarchical order — the world of valuation and history, of which Kant caught a glimpse in his Kritik der Urteilskraft, and which achieves its triumph over intellectualism in the philosophy of Windelband, Bickert, Münsterberg, and Royce. It is, however, specially in another direction that Spencerian evolution prepares the ground for reaction, i.e. in its psychology which maintains that the explanation of all conscious life is to be found in the requirements of biological adaptation. The cognitive function thus becomes but a means for the preservation of the species, consciousness a weapon of defence against natural forces, valuable only for its utility in foreseeing facts, an instrument for the maintenance of organic equilibrium against the influence of perturbing actions in an ever-wider sphere, which is subject, like every other organ, to transformations corresponding to the altered conditions of the environment. Science is not then based on an eternal, universal model, as was asserted by traditional rationalism; scientific theories are born into the world just as are organic species, and like them they perish when they can no longer resist the shock of new experiences. Science, too, has its history, and if we would know the meaning of that history we must seek it, not in the tendency of speculation to grasp the absolute truth of the rational order which is immanent in things, but rather in the needs of life and action. This biological conception of knowledge will pass through the writings of Avenarius and Mach into almost every form of reaction from intellectualism, and will act more especially as the motive power of pragmatism. Spencer’s system with its theory