Only a method that takes the world as a changing, historical thing, can deal with the adaptation of morality to new conditions. "Both empiricism and intuitionalism, though in very different ways, deny the continuity of the moralizing process. They set up timeless, and hence absolute and disconnected, ultimates; thereby they sever the problems and movements of the present from the past, rob the past, the sole object of calm, impartial, and genuinely objective study, of all instructing power, and leave our experience to form undirected, at the mercy of circumstance and arbitrariness, whether that of dogmatism or scepticism."[165] In evaluating the article as a whole, it must be said that Dewey's study is not productive of definite results. The history of the past can undoubtedly offer to the student a mass of data that is interesting and instructive. The importance of this or that belief, or its value, can be gauged by the results which it is known to have produced. But when, in this day and age, the moralist sets out to find the principles which shall guide his own conduct, the history of morals is of no more importance than the observations of every day life, which reveal the consequences of conduct in the lives of men about him. But more particularly, it should be added, an estimate of present moral action depends, not upon truth uttered by the past, but upon truth discovered and interpreted by an intelligence which surveys the past and makes it meaningful. The past in itself is nothing; thought alone can create real history.