Consequently principles and alleged truths are judged more and more by
criteria of their origin in experience and their consequences of weal
and woe in experience, and less by criteria of sublime origin from
beyond everyday experience and independent of fruits in experience. It
is no longer enough for a principle to be elevated, noble, universal and
hallowed by time. It must present its birth certificate, it must show
under just what conditions of human experience it was generated, and it
must justify itself by its works, present and potential. Such is the
inner meaning of the modern appeal to experience as an ultimate
criterion of value and validity. In the third place, great store is set
upon the idea of progress. The future rather than the past dominates the
imagination. The Golden Age lies ahead of us not behind us. Everywhere
new possibilities beckon and arouse courage and effort. The great
French thinkers of the later eighteenth century borrowed this idea from
Bacon and developed it into the doctrine of the indefinite
perfectibility of mankind on earth. Man is capable, if he will but
exercise the required courage, intelligence and effort, of shaping his
own fate. Physical conditions offer no insurmountable barriers. In the
fourth place, the patient and experimental study of nature, bearing
fruit in inventions which control nature and subdue her forces to social
uses, is the method by which progress is made. Knowledge is power and
knowledge is achieved by sending the mind to school to nature to learn
her processes of change.
In this lecture as in the previous one, I can hardly close better than
by reference to the new responsibilities imposed upon philosophy and the
new opportunities opened to it. Upon the whole, the greatest effect of
these changes up to date has been to substitute an Idealism based on
epistemology, or the theory of knowledge, for the Idealism based on the
metaphysics of classic antiquity.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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