The value of research for social progress; the bearing of psychology
upon educational procedure; the mutual relations of fine and
industrial art; the question of the extent and nature of
specialization in science in comparison with the claims of applied
science; the adjustment of religious aspirations to scientific
statements; the justification of a refined culture for a few in face
of economic insufficiency for the mass; the relation of organization
to individuality--such are a few of the many social questions whose
answer depends upon the possession and use of a general logic of
experience as a method of inquiry and interpretation. I do not say
that headway cannot be made in such questions apart from the method
indicated: a logic of experience. But unless we have a critical and
assured view of the juncture in which and with reference to which a
given attitude or interest arises, unless we know the service it is
thereby called upon to perform, and hence the organs or methods by
which it best functions in that service, our progress is impeded and
irregular. We take a part for a whole, a means for an end; or we
attack wholesale some interest because it interferes with the deified
sway of the one we have selected as ultimate. A clear and
comprehensive consensus of social conviction and a consequent
concentrated and economical direction of effort are assured only as
there is some way of locating the position and rôle of each typical
interest and occupation. The domain of opinion is one of conflict; its
rule is arbitrary and costly. Only intellectual method affords a
substitute for opinion. A general logic of experience alone can do for
social qualities and aims what the natural sciences after centuries of
struggle are doing for activity in the physical realm.
This does not mean that systems of philosophy which have attempted to
state the nature of thought and of reality at large, apart from limits
of particular situations in the movement of experience, have been
worthless--though it does mean that their industry has been somewhat
misapplied. The unfolding of metaphysical theory has made large
contributions to positive evaluations of the typical situations and
relationships of experience--even when its conscious intention has
been quite otherwise. Every system of philosophy is itself a mode of
reflection; consequently (if our main contention be true), it too has
been evoked out of specific social antecedents, and has had its use
as a response to them. It has effected something in modifying the
situation within which it found its origin. It may not have solved the
problem which it consciously put itself; in many cases we may freely
admit that the question put has been found afterward to be so wrongly
put as to be insoluble. Yet exactly the same thing is true, in
precisely the same sense, in the history of science. For this reason,
if for no other, it is impossible for the scientific man to cast the
first stone at the philosopher.
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