Ralph Barton Perry_American Philosophy in the First Decade of the Twentieth Century

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American Philosophy in the First Decade of the Twentieth Century Author(s): Ralph Barton Perry Source: Revue Internationale de Philosophie, Vol. 1, No. 3 (15 AVRIL 1939), pp. 423-443Published by: Revue Internationale de PhilosophieStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/23932398Accessed: 08-10-2015 12:05 UTC

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American Philosophy

in the First Decade of the Twentieth Century

by Ralph Barton Perry

An attempt to summarize the thought of the recent past is beset with many pitfalls. Its recency makes it impossible to

rely on any stabilized perspective. The historian is compelled to formulate for the first time those comparative judgments which, when confirmed and corrected by the judgments of other historians, will eventually define the

" accepted

" view. If the period in question happens to coincide with the youth of the historian, he will invest it with a revolutionary signi ficance that cannot fail to reflect the idealization of his own heroic days.

Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, But to be young was very heaven!

There are always aspects of novelty in any given period of human thought, and if it so happens that the historian

began in that period to think for himself, he will invest its innovations with the marks of destiny. There is a temptation, furthermore, to think by centuries, and to suppose that a dif

ference between 1899 and 1900 is more momentous than a difference between 1898 and 1899. Above all, it is unjust to deal with philosophers as though they belonged to schools and tendencies. No amount of interpellation can adequately pro vide for the individual thinker " unclassifiables," whose ideas may not appear at all in a summary such as this, are

inevitably disparaged. Of all these and other difficulties I am fully aware, and I

cannot hope to overcome them. Nevertheless, any estimate,


424 RALPH BARTON PERRY

however subjective, is better than a tedious recital of names and dates, for it will reveal what the recent past means, at least to one man who has lived through it, survived it, and absorbed something of it into his present thinking. If, as is

inevitable, others disagree, then they can serve history best, not by charging me with bias, but by setting forth in their own behalf what that same past means to them.

In judging the significance of American philosophy during the initial decade of the present century I shall consider first its relation to its own past, what tendencies did it

continue, what novelties did it initiate, and how did these two

aspects of tradition and innovation affect one another? I shall then turn, in the second place, to the even more difficult task of estimating this period by the standards of posterity, how far have its innovations taken root and borne fruit, what that is characteristic of present thought can be traced to their influence?

It is fortunate for my task that during the first decade of the twentieth century America entertained in its midst a visitor from Mars, who remained long enough to become familiar with the scene, but who had his home in another planet and was therefore qualified to view that scene with a shrewd aloof ness. At the close of the decade, having concluded his visit, Santayana wrote his famous bread and butter letter, entitled " The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy ". He

pointed out, graciously but candidly, that it had been char acteristic of America that its philosophy was divided from its life. " The truth is,

" he said, " that one-half of the American

mind, that not occupied intensely in practical affairs, has remained, I will not say high-and-dry, but slightly becalmed; it has floated gently in the back-water, while, alongside, in invention and industry and social organisation, the other half of the mind was leaping down a sort of Niagara Rapids

" ". Our commentator then went on to show that the philoso

phical half of the American mind had been fructified from abroad, had not expressed American life, but had adopted and adapted its ideas from European sources. And the latest of these importations was transcendentalism, from Emerson to Royce. Trancendentalism was made in Germany, but

1 Winds of Doctrine, 1913, p. 188.


AMERICAN PHILOSOPHY 425

partly by reinterpretation and partly by pre-established har

mony, it suited well. It flattered the American sense of creative power, it harmonized with American optimism, and it saved religion in the face of the facts, enabling science and faith to live peacefully together.

Having described the established American piety, San

tayana then testified to a contemporary spirit of innovation, and pointed to its most illustrious exponent.

" William

James, " he said,

" has given some rude shocks to this [gen teel] tradition.

"

Santayana's account of the place of philosophy in Amer ican life, and his characterization of the first decade of the

present century is, I think, substantially correct; and I shall take it as the key to the relations of that decade with its own

past. A broader view of the cultural history of America discloses

the fact that the genteel philosophical tradition was not the

only tradition to be shocked at this time. If we lengthen the

period to embrace the last decade of the nineteenth century together with the pre-war years of the twentieth, it is evident

that the political, economic, and social thinking which had hitherto been habitual, and had acquired a character of ortho

doxy, was rudely challenged. American history was being rewritten after a new model of rigorous fact-finding. The

emphasis shifted from patriotism and hero-worship to a

candid exposure of the sordid and seamy side. There was less

idealism and more economics. Literature depicted the Amer ican scene not as the equal fellowship and abundant oppor tunity of free men, but in terms of poverty, hardship, vul

garity, or boredom. Critics searched beneath the artist's pro fessed creed and exposed his less seemly subterranean con

flicts. Capitalistic laissez-faire had hitherto been identified

with the gospel of liberty, self-improvement, and general

prosperity. Now to the horror of its faithful exponents it was condemned as a system of monopoly and greed. Even demo

cracy, of which America had hitherto deemed itself the unan

swerable proof, the triumphant realization, and, to the rest of the world, the enviable and exemplary embodiment, began to find its critics, even in America. Thus on every hand American piety was challenged, both by sincere reformers, and



by camp followers who obtained publicity and sadistic satis faction from the effect of disillusionment.

The revolt against philosophical piety was thus part of a

general revolt which appears to coincide with the opening of the present century. American philosophical piety had itself

passed through a succession of phases. Colonial piety was identical with Protestant Christian orthodoxy and above all with the Puritanism brought from contemporary old England by the settlers of New England. During the eighteenth century the political beliefs and sentiments were crystallized under the

far-flung influence of the Enlightenment. But it was necessary to find some way of sterilizing this radical ideology, which had led some of its more advanced exponents not only to deism but even to the negations of atheism. This safe and whole some form of the gospel of the Enlightenment was found in the Scottish philosophy of common sense, which both com mended itself to the Presbyterian clergy of the Middle Atlantic

states, and was suited to popular consumption. This philo sophy was combined with a shallow interpretation of Kant, the ready-made assumptions of common sense being identi fied with the a priori forms of intuition, categories, and ideals of reason.

This eclectic philosophy was succeeded after the middle of the nineteenth century by the post-Kantian metaphysics, which, in America as well as in England, arrived in two waves. The first was a blend of philosophical and literary romanticism, sufficiently vague to be readily combined with the Platonic tradition, so that by the anachronisms that arise from a tendency to identify all the sanctions of piety, Knigs berg was confused with Athens and even with Jerusalem.

Carlyle in England and Emerson in America were the great protagonists of this gospel, which was in turn succeeded by the direct and rigorous study of Hegel, represented by J. H. Stir

ling in England and in the United States by William T. Harris.

By the end of the nineteenth century this last movement had

pervaded England and the United States, and under the name of " idealism " constituted the reigning philosophy, taught in the universities, put to apologetic uses by the Protestant

clergy, and relied on generally to provide an answer to science and a secular justification of religious and moral tra dition. German idealism was not transplanted to English and



American soil without modification. Concessions were made both to empiricism and to individualism. But the names of

Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel were the names to conjure with. These thinkers were anointed as the latest members of the legitimate philosophical dynasty which sprang from Soc rates. British empiricism was conceived as a somewhat dis

graceful episode which owed its importance only to the moral which it pointed. Hume was the reductio ad absurdum of

Locke, and Kant, having answered Hume, had short-circuited the whole empirical movement and resumed the great suc cession after Leibnitz.

If one assumes the rle of a graduate student of philoso phy in the year 1905, and stations oneself in any American

university, or imagines oneself to be a serious reader hoping to profit by the deeper wisdom of that day, what is the appear ance of the intellectual heavens? There can be no doubt of their being dominated by the luminaries and galaxies of ideal ism. The Scottish philosophy of common sense with its Kantian graftings is already forgotten or embalmed in the

memories of older men. Noah Porter had died in 1892 and James McCosh in 1894. Alexander T. Ormond had assumed

the mantle of McCosh at Princeton. His Foundation of

Knowledge was published in 1900 and he was elected Pres ident of this Association as late as 1903, but he was already in 1905 recognized as an afterglow of the past. The glory of

Emerson, of New England transcendentalism, and of Carlyle's romantic gospel had likewise departed. The great teachers of

the time were almost without exception men of the new ideal istic group who had nourished their minds at the fountain

head, on the texts of Kant and his successors. George Sylvester Morris, of Michigan and Johns Hopkins, and teacher of Dewey and Boy ce, afforded an example of the evolution from the Scottish philosophy of common sense to a

" belief in the '

demonstrated '

truth of the substance of German idealism 1

He had died in 1899. Although the Journal of Speculative Philosophy had issued its last number in 1893, its author, W. T. Harris, was still active in 1905. The seeds of Hegelian ism which he had helped to plant had yielded an abundant

1 Quoted from John Dewiv, Contemporary American Philosophy,

1930, II, 18.



crop. Charles E. Garman instructed and edified the under

graduates of Amherst from 1881 to 1907. R. M. Wenley was

teaching at Michigan, John Watson at Queens University, Kingston, and Mary Calkins at Wellesley. G. H. Howison had been the most notable intellectual influence on the California coast since 1884, and in 1901 he had set forth his individual istic version of Hegel under the title of The Limits of Evolu tion. A. C. Armstrong's Transitional Eras in Thought had

appeared in 1904. At Cornell, J. G. Schurman had been active since 1886 and had founded the Sage School of Philo

sophy. His successor, James Edwin Creighton, was now

exercising a wide and profound influence not only upon his students at Cornell, but, through his editorship of The Philo

sophical Review, upon younger philosophers who depended on this organ both for the reception and for the transmission of their ideas. Creighton was in many respects a typical figure of the period, in his staunch allegiance to the Kantian

gospel, in his intellectual austerity, and in his manner of

kindly, if somewhat fatherly and sometimes prudish, admon ition to philosophical fledglings. At Harvard George Herbert Palmer was the acknowledged' master in the art of teaching, and if he published little he knew how to spread his influence

through personal contact, and an unparalleled skill in placing his students in strategic positions. He was perhaps the most

perfect epitome of the "genteel tradition, "

being a puritan by inheritance, touched by Scottish realism through the influence of his older colleague, Francis Bowen, converted to

Hegel by William T. Harris and Edward Caird, and trans

muting these elements with delicately modulated eloquence into a polished, edifying and irresistibly plausible idealism.

1

Josiah Royce was at the height of his power, his masterpiece, The World and the Individual, having been completed in 1901. The importance of Royce as the champion of idealism lay in the fact that, while he was at heart and by inheritance an

exponent of Protestant Christianity, he was free from any trace of clericalism; in the fact that although he owed his central doctrines to Kant and the German romantics, and thus

illustrated Santayana's theory of European dependence, he was of pioneer stock and made large concessions to the American

1 Cf. Contemporary American Philosophy, 1930, I, 20.



gospel of individualism; and in the fact that, while he never forsook the central tenets of idealism, he was one of the first heralds of the new logic and scientific methodology, and clothed his essential piety in a dialectic and historical learning so resourceful as to anticipate the awakening critical demands of his students.

Distinguishable from, but allied with, the idealistic

school, is the group variously denominated as spiritualistic personalism, or personal idealism, many of whose adherents were influenced directly or indirectly by Lotze. They repre sented an attempt to unite idealism with an individualistic

empiricism. The chief American disciple of Lotze, and of the Lotze-like Wundt, was George Trumbull Ladd, whose Philo

sophy of Religion, published in 1905, was preceded by a Phi

losophy of Mind, of Knowledge, and of Conduct. Others

belonging to this group were Borden P. Bowne, whose Per sonalism (1908) contributed to the contemporary movement which has adopted this title as its name, and among younger men DeWitt H. Parker, who describes himself as an

" empiri

cal idealist. " Howison, who in 1895 made a vigorous attack on Royce's Absolute,

1 should be remembered in this context. This group formed an intermediate zone between the

" genteel

tradition " and the innovators. It was penetrated from the

right by idealists such as Howison and from the left by James and Schiller. It might, of course, be classed, as a centrist

group, or as the right wing of the innovators. I prefer, however, to describe it as the left wing of idealism, because, if it did not accept either the a priorism or the absolutism of the more orthodox idealists, it was avowedly spiritualistic and formulated a metaphysics which gave to the conscious and moral life of man the central place in the universe.

If in this same year, 1905, we look towards Europe and consider the philosophy which came within the horizon of the American student and reader, the same overwhelming pre

ponderance of idealism is evident. Robert Adamson, William

Wallace, and John Caird had only recently passed from the scene. In England T. H. Green had died in 1882, but his edilion of Hume was generally supposed to have given the

coup de grce to that misguided empiricist, and his Prolego

1 The Conception of God, 1897.



mena, published posthumously, was perhaps the most widely read textbook in ethics. Jowett, who saw antiquity through Kantian spectacles, set the tone at Oxford. James Seth's Ethical Principles appeared in 1894; and J. S. Mackenzie's Outlines of Metaphysics in 1902. J. E. M. McTaggart was pass ing through the Hegelian phase of his development, and his influence at Trinity College, Cambridge, had not yet been

superseded by that of G. E. Moore. Richard B. Haldane had in 1903 published his Pathway to Reality. J. H. Muirhead, A. E Taylor, and Henry Jones were influential teachers at

Birmingham, McGill, and Glasgow. The Scotch universities had gone over wholly and for many years to come to that Kant ianism and Hegelianism for which, as we have seen, the influence of the school of Reid had prepared so favorable a soil. But from the American distance the most commanding figures in the British philosophy of the day were Edward

Caird, who succeeded Jowett at Balliol in 1893, and the two

private scholars, F. H. Bradley and Bernard Bosanquet. Caird's Critical Account of the Philosophy of Kant had appeared in 1877, and his brochure on " Idealism and the Theory of Knowledge

"

in 1903. Bosanquet's Logic had been published in 1888, and his monumental work on Individuality and Value was to appear in 1912. Bradley, whose restrained and impersonal irony was

perhaps the supreme manifestation of idealistic arrogance, was an impressive figure. His Logic had been published in 1883 and his Appearance and Reality, which saw the light in 1893, was regarded as the best existing text by which to cure the student of his vulgar dogmatism and naive empiri cism. John Stuart Mill had died in 1877, and although Huxley had lived to 1895 and Herbert Spencer to 1902, their influence in academic and professional circles was small. They were

neglected and despised as belonging to the unregenerate heathen who had failed to see the light in the East (East Prus

sia) . The influence of Henry Sidgwick lay still in the future. The idealists reigned supreme in England, and their works were read in America with provincial deference as well as

doctrinal assent.

But American philosophers of 1905 looked beyond England to the Germany where many of the elders had spent one or

more years of youthful study. The Germany of 1905 meant not only the exhausting textual study of Kant and his follow



ers, and the adding of commentary to commentary : it meant the rise of a vigorous school of neo-Kantians, neo

Fichteans, and neo-Hegelians. It meant Hermann Cohen and Paul Natorp at Marburg : Hermann Cohen, whose Logik der reinen Erkenntnis had appeared in 1902, followed by his Ethik des reinen Willens in 1904; Natorp, whose Kantianization of Platos Ideenlehre was published in 1903. It meant Windel band and Rickert at Freiburg and Heidelberg : Windelband, the translation of whose Geschichte der Philosophie afforded a favorite route to the American Ph. D., and whose Logik and Immanuel Kant und seine Weltanschauung were fresh from the press. This

" School of Baden " was directly represented in America by Hugo Munsterberg. Two other names should be mentioned here, Rudolf Eucken and Benedetto Croce. The former's Lebensanschauungen was translated into English in 1909 and with his other works exercised a wide popular influence. Croce distinguished What is Living and What is Dead of the Philosophy of Hegel (1912) and transplanted the former to the congenial soil of Italy. His Logic, Aesthetics and other works were translated into English through the

energetic discipleship of Ainslie and were promptly added to the idealistic corpus. Here, too, naturalism, in spite of Ernst Haeckel's popular Weltrathsel, which had been translated into

English in 1900, was despised and rejected in academic circles. Hermann Lotze was another matter. He had been trans

lated into English in 1884. His Microcosmus had an eclectic

character, a strain of empirical realism and of monadistic

individualism, and an emphasis on faith and value, which set its author and his influence apart from the main current of idealistic orthodoxy, and contributed to the vogue in America of that " spiritualistic personalism

" which has been mentioned above.

In order to understand the rle of the innovators one must

understand their temper of mind as well as their doctrine, each

being explicitly opposed to established tradition. The inno vators were obliged to overcome not only the logic of their elder contemporaries, but their prestige and an intellectual inertia derived from habit, academic authority, and alliance with both lay and clerical piety. They felt themselves to be not only rejected but disapproved. They attacked, therefore, with a certain militancy, not altogether free from malice or



impishness, and resorted to polemical tactics which now

appear to reflect a revolutionary mentality rather than a pure temper of judicious philosophizing.

In 1905 the innovators had already made enough stir in the world to arouse the idealists to defensive measures. It is

significant that in 1904 Bradley should have published an article entitled " On Truth and Practice,

" and that in the

previous year Boyce's Presidential Address before the American

Philosophical Association should have discussed the relation between " The Eternal and the Practical. " The Olympians were descending into the plain to repel the gathering threat of pragmatism and instrumentalism. Younger idealists such as C. M. Bakewell and R. F. A. Hoernl rallied to their sup port. The period of the undisputed supremacy of idealism was

definitely closed. Several external events conspired to give the innovators

a hearing. When the religious history of America is finally written it may appear that the first decade of the twentieth

century was marked not only by the decline of political, eco

nomic, social and philosophical orthodoxy, but also by the

weakening of the hold of Protestant Christianity on the minds of thinking men. Be this as it may, the teaching of philo sophy in American colleges and universities was in this decade

being rapidly transferred from the Protestant clergy to a secular-minded and rapidly growing army of young Ph. D.'s, most of whom were trained, not in Germany, but in American centers of infection, such as Harvard, Columbia and Chicago. In 1899 seniors in Williams College were given the option of

taking a course on " Theism " given by the Bev. Franklin

Carter, D. D., aged sixty-two, and a course in the "

History of Philosophy,

" given in the next room by B. B. Perry, Ph. D.,

aged twenty-two. I will, I am sure, be pardoned the suggest ion that, for better of for worse, this was a sign of the times.

The American Philosophical Association was founded in

1901, and held its first meeting in the spring of 1902. From the beginning it created an arena of free discussion, in which more or less irreverent youngsters might dispute or foment

conspiracies against the dignitaries. The year 1904 saw the foundation of the Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and

Scientific Methods, that " whited sepulchre,

" as Santayana called it, in which young philosophers might, as Creighton



expressed it, be "

flippant like James, " and in which they

might write that bad English against which James so energet ically protested.

1

To understand the doctrine of the innovators it is neces

sary to summarize the content of the reigning idealism, and here details must be sacrificed in order to stress the crucial issues. Idealism was a priori and intellectualiste; spiritual istic and moralistic; monistic and absolutistic. Innovators who attacked one of these positions often enfiladed their allies who attacked from a different quarter, but during the first decade of the century, at least, they did more damage to the common enemy than to one another.

The most fundamental issue of this conflict concerned the rle of the intellect in knowledge. Idealism was

" intellectual iste " in the sense of affirming that concepts, categories, ideals and necessities grasped by the pure intellect can be

imputed to existence in advance of experience. Pragmatism or instrumentalism, being the denial of this thesis, was there fore the most profoundly revolutionary of the new doctrines.

It will, I think, be generally admitted that the greatest among the innovators were William James and John Dewey. While James had at the beginning of their relations held an

ascendancy over Royce, their rles were, as regards the fun

damentals of philosophy, later reversed; and it was not until the middle 90's that James felt himself safe from the menace of absolute idealism, and possessed of the necessary weapons, defensive and offensive, with which to set forth his own doc trine. His Essays in Radical Empiricism were published in The Journal of Philosophy in 1904 and 1905, and his Pragma tism in 1907. John Dewey acknowleged the priority of James, and his profound obligations to the latter's Principles of Psy chology, but he was largely independent of James both in his

origins and in his development. He was also more single minded and had a more definite program of research by which to invite collaboration. Thus when with his company of associates Dewey in 1903 published his Studies in Logical Theory, James hailed

" The Chicago School " as a disciplined

and a well-equipped army, marching unexpectedly to his sup port at the crucial moment of the battle. During the first

1 The Letters of William James, 1920, II, 244.



decade of the twentieth century these allies fought side by side in the columns of Mind and The Journal of Philosophy, in the

public press, in the American Philosophical Association, and in the class-rooms of American universities.

I am not unaware of the profound differences between

James and Dewey, but these differences lie below the horizon of this distant retrospect. Both philosophers, and all their

followers, were engaged in undermining the cornerstone of

idealism, namely, the Kantian doctrine of pure reason.

According to this doctrine, knowledge possesses an inherent and universal structure which can be brought to light by transcendental logic, or by a self-examination of the intellect ual faculties; and this structure can be imputed in advance to any knowable world, whether, as with Kant, that world be limited to physical nature, or whether, as with his idealistic

followers, it be extended to metaphysical reality. The older a priori rationalism is thus reinterpreted in terms of a character of knowability which, being the common assumption of all minds that lay claim to truth, can always be imputed, tu quo que, to the critic himself.

The pragmatic innovators did not dispute the formative or constructive role of mind. They did not fall back upon a

pre-Kantian conception, whether empiricist or rationalistic, of the knowing mind as a mere receptivity. They fought the new intellectualism with modern weapons. In a sense they, too, affirmed the a priori character of knowledge. But they substituted a Darwinian for a Kantian a priori. The pragmat istic a priori derived its virtue wholly from the sequel, being conceived as an experimental adaptation of organic and prac tical needs to an environment expressing itself in sensory expe rience. Since sensory experience pronounced the last word,

and might quite unceremoniously dismiss any a priori, how ever elaborate and coherent, which was not to its liking, this doctrine was properly classified as a novel form of empiricism.

The issue concerning intellectualism was complicated by the contemporary appearance of the

" new logic. "

Although Boyce himself was largely responsible for its vogue in America, his attitude was exceptional, and on the whole idealism was

disposed to belittle the new logic or regard it as an enemy. For idealism had its own logic, even to-day generally known as " idealistic logic,

" and set forth authoritatively in the works



of Bradley and Bosanquet. The new logic was an innovation in several particulars. In the first place, in subordinating the

predicative to the relational form of the judgment, it implied a profound breach with the classic Aristotelian logic. In the second place, it developed logic as an independent and highly technical branch of knowledge, which like pure mathematics

might be freed from specific philosophical affiliations. In the third place, such philosophical interpretations as its propo nents did offer were of a sort alien to idealism. There were two such possibilities of interpretation, intuitionism and

pragmatism. If one emphasized its objectivity, as a study of

types of abstract relationship freed altogether from the act of

thinking, one could consider the new logic as the knowledge by direct inspection of a realm of subsistent entities. If, on the other hand, one emphasized its postulational aspect, as the elaboration of a set of assumptions, one could consider the new logic as a refinement of the instruments of thought. This latter alternative was adopted early in the second decade of the century, and has led to the influential and rapidly growing school of logico-experimental positivism. But it so

happened that the first alternative presented itself more con

spicuously to American and Englich philosophers in the first decade of this century, when the new logic was as yet very new. In any case, admitting that the new logic was ambig uous as respects its intuitionist-realistic or pragmatist nominalistic affiliation, it worked against the prevailing philosophical tendency by divorcing logic from idealistic

implications, and multiplying the alternatives by which ideal ism might be escaped. The second issue on which the inno vators dissented from idealism concerned the metaphysical rle of mind, consciousness, or the moral will. The idealistic

theory of knowledge afforded the major contemporary argu ment for a spiritualistic and moralistic metaphysics; and in

disputing the argument the innovators rejected the conclusion,

and substituted some form of realism. Idealism incorporated the non-mental in the mental by the simple device of showing that the non-mental qua known is mental and qua unknown

is meaningless. Bealists, denying that what is known is

thereby rendered mental, extended reality beyond the mind. Naturalistic realism, which would incorporate the mental in

the physical was only one form of realism. The innovators



were, for the most part, metaphysical realists, who incorpo rated both the mental and the physical in a realm which was neither. In any case naturalistic and non-naturalistic realists were agreed that mind, with its attributes of thought and will was a limited domain, having a temporal genesis,

" a local habitation and a name,

" within the existent world at

large. The rise of realism in English speaking countries during

the first and second decades of the present century affords a

striking instance of parallel and independent origins. The so-called " new realists,

" who presented their joint " Pro

gram and First Platform " in 1910, but had already as indi

viduals anticipated its principal doctrines, were influenced by James and irritated by Royce. Under the name of

" episte

mological monism, "

they revived the " naive " realistic view

that the external object of knowledge, without prejudicing its

externality, may, and in some cases does, coincide with im mediate presentation. The so-called

" critical realists " were also in the field in the first decade of the century, long before the appearance in 1921 of their joint publication, Essays in Critical Realism. These realists were avowedly dualistic,

insisting that the external object is always numerically other than the immediate presentation or representation by which it is known; though the difference between the two schools of realists, for reasons that are too detailed to be embraced in this survey, is a graded rather than an absolute difference. In any case, both groups rejected the thesis of the universality of mind, and the idealistic arguments on which it rested. There were other American realists who took the same stand,

and whose realism was not less authentic or influential because

they belonged to no group or because they were known by

some other label. James and Dewey themselves were pro

fessed realists, since the experimental nature of truth involved an intercourse of the mind with some externality not of its own making. F. J. E. Woodbridge, G. S. Fullerton, E. B. Mc

Gilvary, Dickinson S. Miller, J. E. Boodin, Morris R. Cohen and others were all realists, albeit each in his own way. Mean while a similar movement had appeared in England, and had both stimulated and confirmed American realism.

This numerous company of realists came to their common



realism from various sources and diverged from it to different ultimate conclusions, but their contemporaneous appearance in the first decade of the present century, forced a reconsid eration if not an abandonment of the most fundamental, the most direct, and the most widely accepted of the arguments used in behalf of idealism,the argument, namely, which assimilated the object of knowledge to the knowing mind, to its acts, its forms, or its states. Idealism had other weapons in its arsenal to which it now resorted. But it may, I think, be said that since this decade of realistic polemics idealism has largely abandoned its claim of dialectical proof, and assumed the form of a hypothesis which like its rivals must be tested by its power to solve specific problems and provide a comprehensive and self-consistent account of experience.

The third of the doctrines of the reigning idealism which was rejected by the innovators was commonly known as the doctrine of the " Absolute. " This was the latest and most formidable manifestation of the age-long tendency of philo sophy to stress the unity of the world, and to elevate that

unity above the vicissitudes of change as well as above the

diversity of particulars. Monism there has always been, and no doubt always will be, since so many philosophical motives

conspire in its favor. But idealistic monism rested on its own

peculiarly idealistic grounds. When thought is made the

master of things, then things must be conformed to the inher ent tendencies of thought. But thought tends to generalize and relate, to find identity in difference, and to substitute the

timeless connections of logical necessity for the temporal

sequence of causality. If, furthermore, to be is to be thought, then the inter-relations of things, however great their differ

ence, must also be thought; and they must be thought by one all-enveloping Mind whose thinking constitutes that

standard of objective thinking to which all fallible or sub

jective minds must implicitly appeal. Added to these more

strictly theoretical motives, there is also the religious motive

which prompts men to subordinate evil to good, and to identify

reality with the eternal realization of the ideal which man takes

as the goal of his temporal aspirations.

Against this sublime conception of a " concrete univer

sal, "

embracing variety within unity, time within eternity,



evil within good and partiality within perfection the innovators

protested. They had no other noble architecture to erect in its

place. In fact, they rather prided themselves on escaping the illusions of grandeur to which they thought philosophy was

peculiarly susceptible. They felt a certain sympathy with the

self-denying ordinance of science, or even with its asceti cisms. In place of the confident certainties and speculative flights of idealism they had nothing to offer but a verdict of " not proven.

" There was a certain bathos in their meta

physical negations. There were, however, positive impli cations. The Absolute being rejected, appearance resumed the rle of reality. Monism and eternalism are forced upon experience, against its grain, and when that force is removed there is no ground for denying the manifest fact that the existent world contains irrelevance as well as significance, " external " as well as " internal " relations, conflict as well as coherence, and is permeated by change and novelty.

But if realists were thus actuated by a sober regard for the facts, however these might defeat the speculative aspira tions, they felt a powerful moral emotion of their own. They not only rejected, but resented, the idealistic solution of the

problem of evil. For James, "

pluralism " meant essentially a

world in which the good was uncontaminated, and in which evil might be opposed by the moral will without any concil

iatory after-thought. Of the changes which James rang on this theme it is not necessary to speak. Santayana, referring to the early influence of Royce, said :

" The point that partic ularly exercised me was Royce's Theodicy or justification for the existence of evil. It would be hard to exaggerate the ire which his arguments on this subject aroused in my youthful breast.

" 1 This ire was felt in many breasts more youthful and less dispassionate than Santayana's, and the acceptance of moral dualism, together with its religious implications, gave passionate solidarity to the innovators, who tended other wise to be united rather by their negations or dispersed by a preoccupation with special problems.

The religious complement of moral dualism was the finit ist theology. If God was to be identified with the good, and if good was to be freed of complicity with evil, then God's

1 Contemporary American Philosophy, 1930, II, 246.



omnipotence and only-ness must be sacrificed. God, like

men, becomes a partisan within a world which is in some

degree resistant even to his will. The triumph of God, as the head and fount of goodness, can no longer be imputed to the

original constitution of things, but must be an achievement in time, contingent on the moral will.

Pluralism, with its insistence on the irreducible many ness of things, with its shameless avowal of moral dualism, and theological finitism, with its affirmation of the finality of the individual person, with its substitution of inter-relations for corporate entities, with its acceptance of time, change and

novelty as the only inescapable fatality, was more than a party creed. It was the temper of the times. Philosophers who were otherwise in good repute, and who repudiated pragma tism, instrumentalism, empiricism, realism, naturalism, neu tralism and other radical abominations made concessions to this tendency, and testified to its infectiousness by their heroic efforts to insulate themselves from its corrupting effects.

If it is difficult to estimate the philosophy of the first decade of the twentieth century in its relation to the now

relatively-clear currents of antecedent thought, it is insuperably difficult to estimate it in relation to those as-yet-confused cur rents in whose midst we find ourselves today. I shall never theless attempt this impossible, hoping to escape censure by the brevity of my treatment and the modesty of my claims.

If we lift our dripping heads above the stream and look about us, what do we see? In the first place, the current of idealism flows on its uninterrupted course. American idealists have recently taken a leaf from the innovators and published a cooperative volume of their own,

1 as though to protest that

the announcement of their demise was premature. I do not

wish for a moment to question the individual power of these

thinkers, or of their detached idealistic, quasi idealistic and semi-idealistic contemporaries. Nor dare I predict that in the

light of posterity they may not appear as the saving remnant who have during the dark ages of the early twentieth century nourished the seeds of truth that these might spring to renew ed life and bear a more abundant harvest in the years to come. I do, however, go so far as to say that idealism is

1 Contemporary Idealism in America, edited by C. Barrett, 1932.



now only one stream among many, and that the purity of its

waters is contaminated. Even when idealists lay claim to the

inheritance of the Great Tradition, there is a decline from the

old note of authority and self-confidence. I derive confirma

tion from the title of Professor Hoernl's contribution to the

cooperative volume just mentioned. In writing of " The

Revival of Idealism in the United States, " this exceptionally

candid and hospitably-minded idealist presupposes an ante

cedent period of lowered vitality. Nor can such a survey from the midst of the present fail

to disclose the fact that the most powerful philosophical cur

rents about us, powerful in their fruitfulness of ideas, in their

manifestation and promise of vigor, and in their attractiveness

to youthful minds, have sprung from the ferment of inno

vation, rather than from what Professor Bakewell calls " The

Continuity of the Idealist Tradition. " 1

Let me begin with positivism as the latest and most seduc tive of philosophical novelties. No one, least of all an idealist, would claim that it descended from idealism. If, as I think is

true, it springs from seeds which were planted early in the nineteenth century, and in some sense even from Rant himself, it utterly rejects the way of salvation which was proclaimed by Kant's successors. It repudiates not only the idealistic

metaphysics, but metaphysics itself. If we look for its anti

cipations in the American philosophy of the first decade of the century, we find them in the empiricist insistence on verification by the data of sense, in the pragmatist- instrumen

talist conception of the rle of the intellect, in the rise of the new logic, and in the attempt among realists to emulate science

and by collaboration and the definition of terms to substitute methodical agreement for isolated speculative insight.

For those who are dissatisfied with the negations of the new positivism there are two alternatives, both of which pos sess, I think, a greater volume and force in English speaking countries than the continuing stream of idealism; and both of which have sprung from the innovating tendencies by which idealism was challenged at the beginning of the century.

For the first of these I shall use the name of " neutralism." Even dualists are now disposed to maintain that the mental

1 Ibid., p. 25.



and physical worlds are homogeneous; that their common describable character is disclosed in perceptual or affective

experience; and that this character, since it is common, can not be ascribed in any prior and exclusive sense to either world. Neutralism so construed is exemplified by the wide

vogue of such notions as "

experience ", "

sensa ", "

sensi

bilia ", "

perspectives ", " essences ",

" prehensions ",

" phe

nomena ", and "

images. " I submit, furthermore, that these

and kindred notions are now resorted to as a means of avoiding both idealism and the agnostic substantialism which was once

thought to be its only alternative. There are two fields of inquiry in which such notions play

a dominant rle. The first of these is " the problem of per ception.

" This problem has not been definitively solved, but in no field of philosophical inquiry is there so great a display of originality, or so great fertility of hypothesis. These same notions have played a leading part in the revival of metaphy sics by James, Alexander, Whitehead, Santayana and the

posthumous works of Peirce and Mead. Although I freely admit that th vogue of the conception of organism does con firm and continue a strain of idealism, I submit that this vogue finds its strongest contemporary support not in the idealistic

logic of coherence or in the Kantian unity of the transcen

dental subject, but rather in the influence of modern biology and physics, and in the insistence on the continuity of expe rience by James, Peirce and Dewey at the opening of the

century.

In other respects as well, and broadly speaking, the

reigning systems of metaphysics appear to me to justify the innovators rather than the idealists. Alexander's Space, Time, and Deity (1920) was the first protest, by deed and not merely by pious aspiration, against the preoccupation with method

ology, polemics, and special problems at the opening of the

century. But James had already set the example with his

only partially constructed Pluralistic Universe. If Bergson has ceased to be a popular literary sensation, there is a growing respect for his solid philosophical achievement. Whitehead is perhaps to-day the most commanding figure in Anglo American metaphysics. It needed no Last Puritan to prove the prestige and wide influence of Santayana. The remarkable

posthumous reputation of Peirce and Mead completes the pic



ture. Now if we compare these systems, we find amidst their differences an empiricism, temporalism, neutralism, plural ism and affiliation with science, which relate them closely to the innovating tendencies that have since 1900 disputed the claims of idealism.

Those who are dissatisfied with the negations of posi tivism, with its rejection or neglect of metaphysics and with its arbitrary narrowing of the field of experience to the data of the laboratory, may, then, turn to neutralism its applica tion to the problem of perception or its speculative and sys tematic extension to metaphysics. But there is a second non idealistic alternative. It may be argued against positivism that it has failed to render an account of its own fundamental notion. It speaks of

" operationalism,

" but does not go to the roots of operation; its appeals to pragmatic tests, and reduces philosophical ideologies to convenient fictions, but it

possesses no philosophy of practice. Those who condemn

positivism on this score will identify themselves with the con

temporary movement in ethics and theory of value. To this movement belong all of those who, having justified belief by practical reasons, acknowledge an obligation to consider what these reasons are, and what is their reason, until one shall have

created some philosophical foundation solid enough to bear the formidable weight of science, Workers in this field may interest themselves variously in the social or in the physical sciences; or in religion; or in aesthetics; or in the definition of good and evil; or in the relations of will and intellect. The wide vogue of these inquiries in America at the present time is due primarily, I submit, to the rise of pragmatism and instrumentalism, and to the recognition among scientists that their procedures are governed by practical norms.

There are, then, three contemporary tendencies in Ameri can philosophy, all of which have been substantially nourished

by the innovations of the first decade of the twentieth century :

neo-positivism; the neutralistic interpretation of experience, with its application to theory of knowledge and to metaphy sics; and the emergence of a distinct branch of knowledge, known as theory of value, having its bearing on theory of

knowledge and metaphysics, and accompanied by a strong revival of interest in philosophy of religion, ethics, aesthetics and scientific methodology. These tendencies are, I need not



add, combined in the same individuals, and interact signi ficantly upon one another. What future awaits them I do not predict. After taking so many liberties with history and with the contemporary world the least I can do is to allow the future the liberty of developing in its own way, even if, as is

probable, it will take liberties with me.

Harvard University.


Article Contentsp. [423]p. 424p. 425p. 426p. 427p. 428p. 429p. 430p. 431p. 432p. 433p. 434p. 435p. 436p. 437p. 438p. 439p. 440p. 441p. 442p. 443

Issue Table of ContentsRevue Internationale de Philosophie, Vol. 1, No. 3 (15 AVRIL 1939) pp. 423-591Front MatterAmerican Philosophy in the First Decade of the Twentieth Century [pp. 423-443]L'histoire du ralisme amricain [pp. 444-471]A Statement of Critical Realism [pp. 472-498]L'esprit du no-ralisme anglais [pp. 499-541]Complments la bibliographie des fascicules 1 et 2 [pp. 542-544]VARITSLa morale de Carnade [pp. 545-570]

IN MEMORIAMLa psychologie sociologique de Charles Blondel [pp. 571-580]

ANALYSES ET COMPTES RENDUSReview: untitled [pp. 581-582]Review: untitled [pp. 583-583]Review: untitled [pp. 583-584]Review: untitled [pp. 584-585]Review: untitled [pp. 586-587]Review: untitled [pp. 587-587]

REVUE DES REVUES [pp. 588-590]OUVRAGES REUS [pp. 591-591]

Documents

Ralph Barton Perry_American Philosophy in the First Decade of the Twentieth Century