past that they would be emancipated and that it is freedom that they seek. It is not a new form of slavery. Into what greater slavery could they fall than into that implied by the squandering of their inheritance or by blaming their ancestors for preceding them? They will be ancestors themselves one day and others will ask what they have bequeathed. These others may not ask for Greece again or for Rome or for Christianity, but they will ask for the like of these, things which can live perennially in the imagination, even if as institutions they are past and dead. He is not freed from the past who has lost it or who regards himself simply as its product. In the one case he would have no experience to guide him and no memories to cherish. In the other he would have no enthusiasm. To be emancipated is to have recovered the past untrammeled in an enlightened pursuit of that enterprise of the mind which first begot it. It is not to renounce imagination, but to exercise it illumined and refreshed.
It would appear, therefore, an error to consider intelligence solely as the instrument of truth or the rule by which propositions are proved and disproved. It is such an instrument and such a rule, but it is more. It is an instrument for the recovery of the past in such wise that the past is doubly effective, effective in view of its own continued nature and effective in view of what intelligence conceives and imagines. To that double effectiveness knowledge is subsidiary. It is a means to an end, not an end in itself. How the whole of philosophy witnesses to that conclusion! We call ourselves by differing party names. We rush to different colors to contend under them for the truth of propositions. It is a battle for the strong, and it is good to engage in it. Let the hosts be drilled and the conflict test our strategy, for truth is worth fighting for. Yet it is worth fighting for because there is one truth which none of us can successfully assail, the truth that intelligence provides "a technique for generating a chosen future out of a given present."[1]
I made my summary at the beginning. I there stated that it was my purpose to express the opinion that evolution is
- ↑ W. T. Bush, "The Emancipation of Intelligence," The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific Methods, Vol. VIII, p. 178.
