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philosophy is religion rationalized, and those (a smaller but perhaps growing number) to whom philosophy is a scientific method of dealing with certain general ideas. To the former a combination of atheistic catholicism and anti-puritanic, nondemocratic, æsthetic morality, lacking withal in missionary enthusiasm, typifies almost all that is abhorrent. To the scientific group Santayana is just a speculative poet who may value science very highly but does so as a well-groomed gentleman who knows it at a polite distance, afraid to soil his hands with its grimy details. These judgments illustrate the great tragedy of modern philosophy. In view of the enormous expansion of modern knowledge and the increased rigour of scientific accuracy, the philosopher can no longer pretend to universal knowledge and yet he cannot abandon the universe as his province. Genuinely devoted to philosophy's ancient and humanly indispensable task of drawing a picture or unified plan of the world in which we live, Santayana is willing to abandon the pretension to scientific accuracy and to face the problem as a poet or moralist. But whether because interest in a unified world view is weak and the possession of poetic faculty such as Santayana's uncommon, or whether because philosophy has been too long wedded to logical argumentation and scientific pretensions, the marked tendency is to make philosophy like one of the special sciences, dealing with a limited field and definitely solving problems. As philosophy is thus abandoning its old pretensions to be the sovereign and legislative science—it is no longer taught by the college president himself-all the fields of concrete information, physics, economics, politics, psychology, and even logic, are parcelled out among the special sciences and there is nothing left to the philosopher except the problem as to the nature of knowledge itself. On this problem Santayana has some suggestive hints, but no completely elaborated solution. Hence his essential loneliness. But perhaps every true philosopher, like the true poet, is essentially lonely.

The latest movement in American philosophy, opposing

'Santayana himself speaks of that virtual knowledge of physics which is enough for moral and poetic purposes (Reason in Science, pp. 303-304). Such virtual knowledge does not save him from absurd statements such as that Plato had no physics.

The New Realism

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certain phases of pragmatism as well as of the older idealism, is the tendency known as the new realism. The common element in the diverse and often conflicting doctrines which constitute this general tendency is the opposition to the Lockian tradition that the objects of knowledge are always our own ideas. Realism maintains that the nature of objects is not determined by our knowing them. Unlike the older Scotch realism, it does not view the mind and nature as two distinct entities, but tends rather, like Santayana and Dewey, to conceive the mind in an Aristotelian fashion as the form or function of a natural organic body responding to its environment. The pioneers of this movement were Professors Woodbridge, Montague, Holt, and Perry.

Frederick J. E. Woodbridge is one of the very few Americans interested in metaphysics or the philosophy of nature rather than in psychology or epistemology. His sources are in Aristotle, Hobbes, and Spinoza rather than in Locke and Kant. He rejects the Lockian tradition that we must first examine the mind as the organ of knowledge before we can study the nature of existing things. For you cannot begin the epistemologic inquiry, how knowledge is possible, without assuming something already known; and we cannot know any mind entirely apart from nature. When the earth was a fiery mist there was no consciousness on it at all. Besides, the question how in general we come to know is irrelevant to the determination of any specific issue: as, for example, why the flowers bloom in the spring.

Studying mind not as a bare subject of knowledge, but as a natural manifestation in nature, we find it to be not an additional thing or term, but a relation between things, namely, the relation of meaning. Whenever through an organic body things come to stand in the relation of meaning to each other we have consciousness. From this distinctive view of mind and meaning, logic ceases to be a study of the laws of thinking and becomes a study of the laws of being.

For one reason or another, Professor Woodbridge has never fully elaborated his views, but has barely sketched them in occasional essays and papers. His personal influence, however, and the support of The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific Method, of which he is the editor, have undoubtedly

helped to make the new realism a strong organized movement. Such it became with the publication of a volume of co-operative studies entitled The New Realism (1912) by Walter Taylor Marvin, Ralph Barton Perry, Edward Gleason Spaulding, W. P. Montague, Edwin Holt, and Walter B. Pitkin. The new realism began as an appeal to the naïve consciousness of reality; but relying naïvely as it does on modern physics, physiology, and experimental biology (as opposed to the field and speculative biology of the Darwinians) its doctrine necessarily becomes very technical and complicated. Its insistence on rigorous definitions and definitive intellectual solutions to specific problems has brought on it the charge of being a new scholasticism. But whatever the merits of scholasticism-the renaissance of logical studies has begun to reveal some of them -the new realism has certainly tried to avoid the tendency of philosophy to become a branch of apologetics or a brief in behalf of supposed valuable interests of humanity. In this a technical vocabulary and the ethically neutral symbols of mathematics are a great aid.

The period covered by the greater portion of this chapter is too near us to make a just appreciation of its achievement likely at this time. In the main it has been dominated by two interests, the theologic and the psychologic. The development during this period has been to weaken the former and to deepen but narrow the latter and make it more and more technical. For this reason the philosophers covered in this chapter have as yet exerted little influence on the general thought of the country. The general current of American economic, political, and legal thought has until very recently been entirely dominated by our traditional eighteenth-century individualism or natural-law philosophy. Neither does our general literature, religious life, or current scientific procedure as yet show any distinctive influence of our professional philosophy. But it must be remembered that all our universities are comparatively young

'The history of philosophy has occupied a large portion of American philosophic instruction and writing. But apart from the books of Albee, Husik, Riley, and Salter (mentioned in the bibliography to this chapter) and articles by Lovejoy on Kant, and on the history of evolution, American philosophy has no noteworthy achievement to its credit-certainly nothing comparable to the historical works of Caird, Bosanquet, Benn, or Whittaker, not to mention the great German and French achievements in this field.

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institutions and our university-trained men numerically an almost insignificant portion of our total population. In the field of education William T. Harris and after him Dewey have undoubtedly exerted potent influences, and it looks as if American legal thought is certain to be profoundly impressed by Roscoe Pound, who draws some of his inspiration from philosophic pragmatism as well as from Ward's social theories.

From the point of view of European culture, America has certainly not produced a philosopher as influential as was Willard Gibbs in the realm of physics or Lester Ward in the realms of sociology. Though Ward and even Gibbs may with some justice be claimed as philosophers, this can be done only by disregarding the unmistakable tendency to divorce technical philosophy entirely from physical and social theory. James, however, is undoubtedly a European force, and, in a lesser degree, Baldwin, Royce, and Dewey. Serious and competent students in Germany, Italy, and Great Britain have also recognized the permanent importance of C. S. Peirce's contribution to the field of logic. History frequently shows philosophers who receive no adequate recognition except from later generations, but it is hazardous to anticipate the judgment of posterity.

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CHAPTER XVIII

The Drama, 1860-1918

OR the ten years preceding the advent of Bronson Howard, the American drama settled upon staid and not very

vigorous times. The Civil War was not conducive to original production at the time; and its influence was not great upon the character of the amusement in the American theatre. Only after many years had passed, and after local and national feeling had been allowed to cool, did the Civil War become a topic for the stage,-in such dramas as William Gillette's Held by the Enemy (Madison Square Theatre, 16 August, 1886),1 Shenandoah (Star Theatre, 9 September, 1889) by Bronson Howard, The Girl I Left Behind Me (Empire Theatre, 25 January, 1893) by David Belasco and Franklyn Fyles, The Heart of Maryland (Herald Square Theatre, 22 October, 1895) by David Belasco, William Gillette's Secret Service (Garrick Theatre, 5 October, 1896), James A. Herne's Griffith Davenport (Washington, Lafayette Square Theatre, 16 January, 1899), Barbara Frietchie (Criterion Theatre, 24 October, 1899) by Clyde Fitch. No one dared to take the moral issue of the war and treat it seriously, Mrs. Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (first played 24 August, 1852) having ante-dated the internecine struggle. Even today, the subject of the Negro and his relation with the white is one warily handled by the American dramatist. Dion Boucicault's The Octoroon (Winter Garden, 5 December, 1859), was typical of the way that dramatist had of making hay out of the popular sunshine of others. William DeMille wanted to treat of the Negro's social isolation, but compromised when he came to write Strongheart (Hudson Theatre, 30 January,

Unless it is otherwise stated, the theatres and dates given with the titles of plays apply to initial New York productions.

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