Page:Philosophical Review Volume 24.djvu/484

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
468
THE PHILOSOPHICAL REVIEW.
[Vol. XXIV.

pleasure-pain morality; the word 'egoism' would be misleading; the word 'individualism' is equally objectionable; he is not a friend of anarchy. Nevertheless persons are for him the summit of human evolution—strong, self-directing, final specimens who naturally rule mankind.

Allen J. Thomas.
Humanism and Science. John Frederick Dashiell. J. of Ph., Psy., and Sci. Meth., Vol. XII, 7, pp. 177-189.

Professor Warner Fite holds that pragmatists, in exhibiting instrumentalism, (1) have made absolute the mechanical view of science because of its human uses; (2) have built up an arbitrary and subjective world order and scientific outlook: (3) and have interpreted all the needs of men in terms of bread and butter, overlooking intellectual and social needs. Professor Fite suggests that, combining realism and pragmatism, we regard nature as both objective and personal. But (1) Dewey and Schiller both plainly repudiate the mechanistic conception of the world order, and together with James emphasize the superiority of experience to theory as a teacher. (2) Schiller and Dewey make a clear distinction between reality as found by us, and reality as determined by us. (3) Moore points out that intellectual needs grow out of the "bread-and-butter" needs, which are primary biologically and genetically, but not necessarily in degree of honor. Also both Moore and Dewey insist on the social character of cognition, regarding it as the relation of public attention toward a more or less objectified subject matter. Professor Fite's insistence on a human relationship with nature, in which we shall develop a special regard for its motives, is part of a current anti-formal, anti-intellectualist reaction. But we do not normally feel the world over against us as purposeful, but rather we conceive it dimly as manifesting dynamic activity in relation to us. The scientist wishes to investigate the power back of such activity. He does not claim to be able to work out the interior purposes of things, but rather to find out how things may be controlled. Nature is mysterious and wonderful just because it refuses to be understood in terms of human motives.

Marion D. Crane.
Les sciences morales et sociales et la biologie humaine. Dr. Grasset. Rev. Ph., XL, 2, pp. 97-137.

To regard the moral and social sciences as simply a chapter in General Biology is disastrous to Ethics and Sociology, because it means the negation of such ideas as good, merit, praise, blame, responsibility, obligation, and duty—the very basis of Ethics, and, likewise, of fraternity, social solidarity, love of neighbor, altruism, helping the weak, mutual assistance, and coöperation for continuous, indefinite progress—the very basis of Sociology. General Biology substitutes for these conceptions such notions as strife, natural selection, universal egoism, struggle for existence, 'might makes right,' survival of the strong and elimination of the weak. Obviously, General Biology cannot serve as a foundation for the moral and social sciences, since