D.
Columbia University,
New York City, April, 1915.
I
German Philosophy: The Two Worlds
The nature of the influence of general ideas upon practical affairs is a troubled question. Mind dislikes to find itself a pilgrim in an alien world. A discovery that the belief in the influence of thought upon action is an illusion would leave men profoundly saddened with themselves and with the world. Were it not that the doctrine forbids any discovery influencing affairs—since the discovery would be an idea—we should say that the discovery of the wholly ex post facto and idle character of ideas would profoundly influence subsequent affairs. The strange thing is that when men had least control over nature and their own affairs, they were most sure of the efficacy of thought. The doctrine that nature does nothing in vain, that it is directed by purpose, was not engrafted by scholasticism upon science; it formulates an instinctive tendency. And if the doctrine be fallacious, its pathos has a noble quality. It testifies to the longing of human thought for a world of its own texture. Yet just in the degree in which men, by means of inventions and political arrangements, have found ways of making their thoughts effective, they have come to question whether any thinking is efficacious. Our notions in physical science tend to reduce mind to a bare spectator of a machine-like nature grinding its unrelenting way. The vogue of evolutionary ideas has led many to regard intelligence as a deposit from history, not as a force in its making. We look backward rather than forward; and when we look forward we seem to see but a further unrolling of a panorama long ago rolled up on a cosmic reel. Even Bergson, who, to a casual reader, appears to reveal vast unexplored vistas of genuinely novel possibilities, turns out, upon careful study, to regard intellect (everything which in the past has gone by the name of observation and reflection) as but an evolutionary deposit whose importance is confined to the conservation of a life already achieved, and bids us trust to instinct, or something akin to instinct, for the future:—as if there were hope and consolation in bidding us trust to that which, in any case, we cannot intelligently direct or control.
I do not see that the school of history which finds Bergson mystic and romantic, which prides itself upon its hard-headed and scientific character, comes out at a different place. I refer to the doctrine of the economic interpretation of history in its extreme form—which, so its adherents tell us, is its only logical form. It is easy to follow them when they tell us that past historians have ignored the great part played by economic forces, and that descriptions and explanations have been correspondingly superficial. When one reflects that the great problems of the present day are those attending economic reorganization, one might even take the doctrine as a half-hearted confession that historians are really engaged in construing the past in terms of the problems and interests of an impending future, instead of reporting a past in order to discover some mathematical curve which future events are bound to describe. But no; our strictly scientific economic interpreters will have it that economic forces present an inevitable evolution, of which state and church, art and literature, science and philosophy are by-products. It is useless to suggest that while modern industry has given an immense stimulus to scientific inquiry, yet nevertheless the industrial revolution of the eighteenth century comes after the scientific revolution of the seventeenth. The dogma forbids any connection.
But when we note that Marx gave it away that his materialistic interpretation of history was but the Hegelian idealistic dialectic turned upside down, we may grow wary. Is it, after all, history we are dealing with or another philosophy of history? And when we discover that the great importance of the doctrine is urged upon us, when we find that we are told that the general recognition of its truth helps us out of our present troubles and indicates a path for future effort, we positively take heart. These writers do not seem to mean just what they say. Like the rest of us, they are human, and infected with a belief that ideas, even highly abstract theories, are of efficacy in the conduct of human affairs influencing the history which is yet to be.
I have, however, no intention of entering upon this controversy, much less of trying to settle it. These remarks are but preliminary to a consideration of some of the practical affiliations of portions of the modern history of philosophical thought with practical social affairs. And if I set forth my own position in the controversy in question, the statement is frankly a personal one, intended to make known the prepossessions with which I approach the discussion of the political bearings of one phase of modern philosophy. I do not believe, then, that pure ideas, or pure thought, ever exercised any influence upon human action. I believe that very much of what has been presented as philosophic reflection is in effect simply an idealization, for the sake of emotional satisfaction, of the brutely given state of affairs, and is not a genuine discovery of the practical influence of ideas. In other words, I believe it to be esthetic in type even when sadly lacking in esthetic form. And I believe it is easy to exaggerate the practical influence of even the more vital and genuine ideas of which I am about to speak.
But I also believe that there are no such things as pure ideas or pure reason. Every living thought represents a gesture made toward the world, an attitude taken to some practical situation in which we are implicated. Most of these gestures are ephemeral; they reveal the state of him who makes them rather than effect a significant alteration of conditions. But at some times they are congenial to a situation in which men in masses are acting and suffering. They supply a model for the attitudes of others; they condense into a dramatic type of action. They then form what we call the "great" systems of thought. Not all ideas perish with the momentary response. They are voiced and others hear; they are written and others read. Education, formal and informal, embodies them not so much in other men's minds as in their permanent dispositions of action. They are in the blood, and afford sustenance to conduct; they are in the muscles and men strike or retire. Even emotional and esthetic systems may breed a disposition toward the world and take overt effect. The reactions thus engendered are, indeed, superficial as compared with those in which more primitive instincts are embodied. The business of eating and drinking, buying and selling, marrying and being given in marriage, making war and peace, gets somehow carried on along with any and every system of ideas which the world has known. But how, and when and where and for what men do even these things is tremendously affected by the abstract ideas which get into circulation.
I take it that I may seem to be engaged in an emphatic urging of the obvious. However it may be with a few specialized schools of men, almost everybody takes it as a matter of course that ideas influence action and help determine the subsequent course of events. Yet there is a purpose in this insistence. Most persons draw the line at a certain kind of general ideas. They are especially prone to regard the ideas which constitute philosophic theories as practically innocuous—as more or less amiable speculations significant at the most for moments of leisure, in moments of relief from preoccupation with affairs. Above all, men take the particular general ideas which happen to affect their own conduct of life as normal and inevitable. Pray what other ideas would any sensible man have? They forget the extent to which these ideas originated as parts of a remote and technical theoretical system, which by multitudes of non-reflective channels has infiltrated into their habits of imagination and behavior. An expert intellectual anatomist, my friends, might dissect you and find Platonic and Aristotelian tissues, organs from St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, Locke and Descartes, in the make-up of the ideas by which you are habitually swayed, and find, indeed, that they and other thinkers of whose names you have never heard constitute a larger part of your mental structure than does the Calvin or Kant, Darwin or Spencer, Hegel or Emerson, Bergson or Browning to whom you yield conscious allegiance.
Philosophers themselves are naturally chiefly responsible for the ordinary estimate of their own influence, or lack of influence. They have been taken mostly at their own word as to what they were doing, and what for the most part they have pretended to do is radically
