Transcriber’s Note
Cover created by Transcriber and placed in the Public Domain.
THE INFLUENCE OF
DARWIN ON PHILOSOPHY
And Other Essays in ContemporaryThought
BY
JOHN DEWEY
Professor of Philosophy in Columbia University
NEW YORK
HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY
Copyright, 1910,
BY
HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY
Published April, 1910
An elaborate preface to a philosophic workusually impresses one as a last desperate effort onthe part of its author to convey what he feelshe has not quite managed to say in the body ofhis book. Nevertheless, a collection of essays onvarious topics written during a series of yearsmay perhaps find room for an independent wordto indicate the kind of unity they seem, to theirwriter, to possess. Probably every one acquaintedwith present philosophic thought—found, withsome notable exceptions, in periodicals ratherthan in books—would term it a philosophy oftransition and reconstruction. Its various representativesagree in what they oppose—the orthodoxBritish empiricism of two generations ago andthe orthodox Neo-Kantian idealism of the lastgeneration—rather than in what they proffer.
The essays of this volume belong, I suppose, towhat has come to be known (since the earlier ofthem were written) as the pragmatic phase of thenewer movement. Now a recent German critic hasdescribed pragmatism as, “Epistemologically,nominalism; psychologically, voluntarism; cosmologically,energism; metaphysically, agnosticism;ethically, meliorism on the basis of the Bentham-ivMillutilitarianism.”1 It may be that pragmatismwill turn out to be all of this formidable array;but even should it, the one who thus defines it hashardly come within earshot of it. For whateverelse pragmatism is or is not, the pragmatic spiritis primarily a revolt against that habit of mindwhich disposes of anything whatever—even sohumble an affair as a new method in Philosophy—bytucking it away, after this fashion, in thepigeon holes of a filing cabinet. There are othervital phases of contemporary transition and revision;there are, for example, a new realism andnaturalistic idealism. When I recall that I findmyself more interested (even though their representativesmight decline to reciprocate) in suchphases than in the systems marked by the labelsof our German critic, I am confirmed in a beliefthat after all it is better to view pragmatism quitevaguely as part and parcel of a general movementof intellectual reconstruction. For otherwisewe seem to have no recourse save to definepragmatism—as does our German author—interms of the very past systems against which it isa reaction; or, in escaping that alternative, to regardit as a fixed rival system making like claim tovcompleteness and finality. And if, as I believe, oneof the marked traits of the pragmatic movement isjust the surrender of every such claim, how havewe furthered our understanding of pragmatism?
Classic philosophies have to be revised becausethey must be squared up with th