THE STORY OF PHILOSOPHY2 The Lives and Opinions

AMERICAN PHILOSOPHERS 393
powerful instincts, such as sex and pugnacity, have been considerably
modified and controlled by social training; and there is no reason why
other instincts, like those of acquisition and mastery, should not be
similarly modified by social influence and education. We must unlearn
our ideas about an unchangeable human nature and an omnipotent
environment. There is no knowable limit to change or growth; and perhaps
there is nothing impossible but thinking makes it so.
3. SCIENCE AND POLITICS
What Dcwey sees and reverences as the finest of all things, is growth;
so much so, that he makes this relative but specific notion, and no
absolute "good," his ethical criterion.
Not perfection as a final goal, but the ever-enduring process of perfecting,
maturing, refining, is the aim in . . . living The bad man is the man
who, no matter how good he has been, is beginning to deteriorate, to grow
less good. The good man is the man who, no matter how morally unworthy
he has been, is moving to become better. Such a conception makes one severe
in judging himself and humane in judging others. 7*
And to be good does not merely mean to be obedient and harmless;
goodness without ability is lame; and all the virtue in the world will not
save us if we lack intelligence. Ignorance is not bliss, it is unconsciousness
and slavery; only intelligence can make us sharers in the shaping of our
fates. Freedom of the will is no violation of causal sequences, it is the
illumination of conduct by knowledge. "A physician or engineer is free
in his thoughts or his actions in the degree in which he knows what he
deals with. Perhaps we find here the key to any freedom." 75 Our trust
must after all be in thought, and not in. instinct; how could instinct
adjust us to the increasingly artificial environment which industry has
built around us, and the maze of intricate problems in which we are
enmeshed?
Physical science has for the time being far outrun psychical. We have mastered
the physical mechanism sufficiently to turn out possible goods; we have
not gained a knowledge of the conditions through which possible values become
actual in life, and so are still at the mercy of habit, of haphazard, and
Hence of force. , , . With tremendous increase in our control of nature,
in our ability to utilize nature for human use and satisfaction, we find the
actual realization of ends, the enjoyment of values, growing unassured and
precarious. At times it seems as though we were caught in a contradiction;
the more we multiply means the less certain and general is the use we
are able to make of them. No wonder a Carlyle or a Ruskin puts our whole
industrial civilization under a ban, while a Tolstoi proclaims a return to the
^Reconstruction in Philosophy, pp. 177, 176.
n Human Naturt and Conduct* p. 303.