Common factor in traditional theories. Every moral situation unique. Supremacy of the specific or individualized case. Fallacy of general ends. Worth of generalization of ends and rules is intellectual. Harmfulness of division of goods into intrinsic and instrumental. Into natural and moral. Moral worth of natural science. Importance of discovery in morals. Abolishing Phariseeism.... Growth as the end. Optimism and pessimism. Conception of happiness. Criticism of utilitarianism. All life moral in so far as educative. VIII RECONSTRUCTION AS AFFECTING SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY 187 Defects of current logic of social thought. Neglect of specific situations. Defects of organic concept of society. Evils of notion of fixed self or individual. Doctrine of interests. Moral and institutional reform. Moral test of social institutions. Social pluralism. Political monism, dogma of National State. Primacy of associations. International humanism. Organization a subordinate conception. Freedom and democracy. Intellectual reconstruction when habitual will affect imagination and hence poetry and religion. INDEX 217 RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY CHAPTER I CHANGING CONCEPTIONS OF PHILOSOPHY Man differs from the lower animals because he preserves his past experiences. What happened in the past is lived again in memory. About what goes on today hangs a cloud of thoughts concerning similar things undergone in bygone days. With the animals, an experience perishes as it happens, and each new doing or suffering stands alone. But man lives in a world where each occurrence is charged with echoes and reminiscences of what has gone before, where each event is a reminder of other things. Hence he lives not, like the beasts of the field, in a world of merely physical things but in a world of signs and symbols. A stone is not merely hard, a thing into which one bumps; but it is a monument of a deceased ancestor. A flame is not merely something which warms or burns, but is a symbol of the enduring life of the household, of the abiding source of cheer, nourishment and shelter to which man returns from his casual wanderings. Instead of being a quick fork of fire which may sting and hurt, it is the hearth at which one worships and for which one fights. And all this which marks the difference between bestiality and humanity, between culture and merely physical nature, is because man remembers, preserving and recording his experiences.