THE STORY OF PHILOSOPHY2 The Lives and Opinions

AMERICAN PHILOSOPHERS 395
The experimental attitude . . . substitutes detailed analysis for whole-
sale assertions, specific inquiries for temperamental convictions, small facts
for opinions whose size is in precise ratio to their vagueness. It is within the
social sciences, in morals, politics and education, that thinking still goes on
by large antitheses, by theoretical oppositions of order and freedom, individualism
and socialism, culture and utility, spontaneity and discipline,
actuality and tradition. The field of the physical sciences was once occupied
by similar "total" views, whose emotional appeal was inversely as their
intellectual clarity. But with the advance of the experimental method, the
question has ceased to be which one of two rival claimants has a right to
the field. It has become a question of clearing up a confused subject-matter
by attacking it bit by bit. 1 do not know a case where the final result was
anything like victory for one or another among the pre-experimental notions.
All of them disappeared because they became increasingly irrelevant to the
situation discovered, and with their detected irrelevance they became unmeaning
and uninteresting. 70
It is in this field, in this application of human knowledge to our social
antagonisms, that the work of philosophy should lie. Philosophy clings
like a timid spinster to the old-fashioned problems and ideas; "direct preoccupation
with contemporary difficulties is left to literature and politics." 80
Philosophy is in flight today before the sciences, one after another of
which have run away from her into the productive world, until she is left
chin and alone, like a forsaken mother with the vitals gone from her and
almost all her cupboards empty. Philosophy has withdrawn herself timidly
from her real concerns men and their life in the world into a crum-
bling corner called epistemology, and is in danger every moment of being
ousted by the laws that prohibit habitation in flimsy and rickety struc-
tures. But these old problems have lost their meaning for us: "we do not
solve them, we get over them"; 81 they evaporate in the heat of social
friction and living change. Philosophy, like everything else, must secularize
itself; it must stay on the earth and earn its keep by illuminating life.
What serious-minded men not engaged in the professional business of
philosophy most want to know is what modifications and abandonments of
intellectual inheritance are required by the newer industrial, political, and
scientific movements. . , . The task of future philosophy is to clarify men's
ideas as to the social and moral strifes of their own day. Its aim is to become,
so far as is humanly possible, an organ for dealing with these conflicts.
... A catholic and far-sighted theory of the adjustment of the conflicting
factors of life is philosophy. 82
A philosophy so understood might at last produce philosophers worthy
to be kings.
'"New Republic, Feb. 3, 1917.
^Creative Intelligence, p. 4.
*J. of D. on ?,, p* 19.
m Creative Intelligence* p. *: Reconstruction , p. 26; L of D. on P., p. 45.