Long after “pragmatism” in any sense save as an application of his Weltanschauung shall have passed into a not unhappy oblivion, the fundamental idea of an open universe in which uncertainty, choice, hypotheses, novelties and possibilities are naturalized will remain associated with the name of James; the more he is studied in his historic setting the more original and daring will the idea appear. . . . Such an idea is removed as far as pole from pole from the temper of an age whose occupation is acquisition, whose concern is with security, and whose creed is that the established economic regime is peculiarly “natural” and hence immutable in principle.
JOHN DEWEY
No one yet has succeeded, it seems to me, in jumping into the centre of your vision. . . . That it is the philosophy of the future, I’ll bet my life.
WILLIAM JAMES to JOHN DEWEY
As the philosophy of Spencer had reigned supreme in the heroic age of enterprise, so pragmatism, which, in the two decades after 1900, rapidly became the dominant American philosophy, breathed the spirit of the Progressive era. Spencer’s outlook had been the congenial expression of a period that looked to automatic progress and laissez faire for its salvation; pragmatism was absorbed into the national culture when men were thinking of manipulation and control. Spencerianism had been the philosophy of inevitability; pragmatism became the philosophy of possibility.
The focus of the logical and historical opposition between pragmatism and Spencerian evolutionism was in their approach to the relationship between organism and environment. Spencer had been content to assume the environment as a fixed norm—a suitable enough position for one who had no basic grievance against the existing order. Pragmatism, entertaining a more positive view of the activities of the organism, looked upon the environment as something that could be manipulated. It was by way of the pragmatists’ theory of mind in relation to environment that the old outlook was controverted.
Pragmatism resulted from criticism not only of Spencerian evolutionism but of many other intellectual tendencies. It was, certainly in its inception, by no means an essentially social philosophy. At the risk, then, of considerable oversimplification, and with this caution, it will be of use to the main purpose of this study to look briefly into the relation of the two leading pragmatists to Spencerianism and to the general social outlook that was being so roughly challenged in the days of pragmatism’s ascendancy.
Spencerian philosophical doctrines were just making their way in the United States when other currents began to stir. Before the Synthetic Philosophy was completed, a Hegelian movement was under way and pragmatism was well advanced in its formative stages. In 1867 William T. Harris, unable to persuade the editors of the North American Review to publish a critical piece on Spencer, launched his own Journal of Speculative Philosophy. The Hegelian idealism of Harris and the St. Louis School gained with surprising rapidity and soon acquired the stature of an active competitor of Spencerianism and the old Scottish philosophy. In spite of the gulf that separated them in philosophic doctrine, Hegelianism and Spencerianism, as they were usually interpreted in America, shared a common social conservatism.1 The same cannot be said categorically of pragmatism, which displayed much greater flexibility in its potentialities for social thought.
Although profoundly influenced by Darwinism, the pragmatists soon departed sharply from prevailing evolutionary thought. Hitherto evolutionism, because of its identification with Spencer, had been blown up into a cosmology. The pragmatists turned philosophy from the construction of finished metaphysical systems to an experimental study of the uses of knowledge. Pragmatism was an application of evolutionary biology to human ideas, in the sense that it emphasized the study of ideas as instruments of the organism. Working primarily with the basic Darwinian concepts—organism, environment, adaptation—and speaking the language of naturalism, the pragmatic tradition had a very different intellectual and practical issue from Spencerianism. Spencer had apotheosized evolution as an impersonal process, the omnipotence of circumstances and the environment, the helplessness of man to hasten or deflect the course of events, the predetermined development of society in accordance with a cosmic process toward a remote but comfortable Elysium. By defining life and mind as the correspondence of inner to outer relations, he had portrayed them as essentially passive agencies. The social counterpart of this approach was his gradualistic fatalism.2 The pragmatists, beginning without any special interest in ulterior social consequences, at first approached the uses of ideas in an individualistic vein, but in time drifted toward a socialized philosophical theory in the form of Dewey’s instrumentalism. The development and spread of pragmatism broke Spencer’s monopoly on evolution, and showed that the intellectual uses of Darwinism were more complex than Spencer’s followers had thought. The pragmatists’ most vital contribution to the general background of social thought was to encourage a belief in the effectiveness of ideas and the possibility of novelties—a position necessary to any philosophically consistent theory of social reform. As Spencer had stood for determinism and the control of man by the environment, the pragmatists stood for freedom and control of the environment by man.
To find the beginnings of pragmatism and its critique of the older evolutionism, one must look beyond James and Dewey to Chauncey Wright and Charles Peirce. Although Wright and Peirce were essentially technical philosophers, they were also critics of established social thinking, including the Spencerian apparatus. It was their experimental criticism that James broadened into a humanistic philosophy, and it was a related philosophical outlook that in the hands of Dewey became both a social theory and a social influence.
Chauncey Wright (1830–75) was the intellectual leader of the Metaphysical Club, founded by Peirce in the 1860’s and attended by James, Fiske, the younger Holmes, and a few other Cambridge intellectuals. The best of Wright’s philosophical work evidently emerged in conversation at such gatherings, but he also had access to the public as a critic for the North American Review and the Nation. Both James and Peirce were stimulated by his hard-headed, empirical way of thinking.3
Wright was probably the first American thinker to publish a thoroughgoing critique of Spencer from a naturalistic point of view. Steeped in the writings of John Stuart Mill, Wright objected to the popular tendency to classify Spencer as a positivist. He condemned him as a second-rate metaphysician presuming to deal in ultimate truths, and charged him with a misleading devotion to useless abstractions. In this essay he declared:
Nothing justifies the development of abstract principles but their utility in enlarging our concrete knowledge of nature. The ideas on which mathematical Mechanics and the Calculus are founded, the morphological ideas of Natural History, and the theories of Chemistry are such working ideas,—finders, not merely summaries of truth.4
As an alternative to the finality of Spencer’s view of scientific knowledge, Wright believed in the probability of novelties in the universe, a conviction based upon a strict interpretation of the inductive character of scientific laws.5 It is possible for “accidents” or novelties to arise which are not predictable from our knowledge of their antecedents—for example, the evolution of self-consciousness, or the application of the voice to social communication.
Charles Peirce (1839–1914) was more inclined to system-building than either James or Wright, but his orientation was also scientific. The son of Benjamin Peirce, the eminent Harvard mathematician, Charles Peirce attained distinction in his own right as a mathematician, astronomer, and geodesist. Primarily interested in logical theory, and particularly in the problem of induction, Peirce viewed scientific laws as statements of probabilities rather than invariable relationships; in particular instances the facts are certain “to show irregular departures from the law.”6 A thoroughly consistent evolutionist, Peirce argued, must regard the laws of nature themselves as the results of evolution, and hence as limited rather than absolute. There exists, he concluded, “an element of indeterminacy, spontaneity, or absolute chance in nature.”7 Consequently he had no sympathy for Spencer’s attempt to deduce evolution from a mechanical principle (persistence of force) instead of explaining the emergence of mechanical principles from evolution. Also he pointed out that, since the law of conservation of energy is equivalent to the proposition that all operations governed by mechanical laws can be reversed, continued growth cannot be explained by these laws.8 Peirce’s stringent criticisms of Spencer first turned James from the Synthetic Philosophy to a more experimental approach, and Peirce’s epoch-making essay, “How to Make Our Ideas Clear,” published in the Popular Science Monthly in 1878, first formulated the practical criterion of the meaning of ideas which James later expanded into the pragmatic theory of truth.9
William James was the first great beneficiary of the scientific education emerging in the United States during the 1860’s and 1870’s. Trained at Harvard’s Lawrence Scientific School by Eliot, Wyman, and Agassiz, James was distinguished from most of his contemporaries by an understanding of scientific method coupled with a broad streak of mysticism, an acute moral and aesthetic sensitivity. This may be traced in part to the influence of his father, the elder Henry James who was a Swedenborgian.10 Personal factors, emotion, and temperament, loom unusually large in the formation of James’s thought. In 1869–70 he underwent a severe emotional depression in which he almost lost his will to live; from it he emerged with a highly intellectualized solution, a passionate belief in freedom of the will.11 The revolt against “the monistic superstition under which I had grown up”12—a dominant motif in his thought—led him into rebellion against all “block-universe” philosophies, all systems which were finished and executed, impervious to chance or choice. Primarily, his revolt against the prevailing philosophies, Spencerianism and Hegelianism, was a revolt against the moral and aesthetic bleakness of hidebound philosophical systems.13 This was the source of the pluralism he preached. “It surely is a merit in a philosophy to make the very life we lead real and earnest,” he wrote. “Pluralism, in exorcising the absolute, exorcises the great de-realizer of the only life we are at home in, and thus redeems the nature of reality from essential foreignness.”14
James’s thought is usually looked upon as a reaction from the absolute idealism expounded by his Harvard colleague, Josiah Royce, and in the writings of his later years this reaction is particularly clear; but the basic trend of his thinking, which was well established before he became acquainted with Royce, was visible in his work at the same time that the St. Louis Hegelians were beginning to spread their creed. James’s original impulse was in a large measure also a reaction from Herbert Spencer. The years when Spencer’s philosophy was winning attention were the formative years of James’s intellectual life. He read First Principles in the early 1860’s and soon enrolled in the ranks of Spencerian converts. So infatuated was he with the intellectual revolution which Spencer had apparently accomplished that he felt “spiritually wounded” when Charles Peirce attacked the master in his presence.15 Yet Peirce’s arguments prevailed; James soon began to criticize Spencer himself, and by the middle 1870’s he was roundly contemptuous of Spencer’s ponderous system. Although he was using the Principles of Psychology in his teaching at Harvard, he urged his students to criticize Spencer’s reasoning, and for almost three decades he offered courses in which the Englishman served as a whipping-boy.16 While he considered First Principles a museum of logical confusions, the emotional core of his reaction to Spencer is suggested by James’s complaint that Spencer’s mind was “so fatally lacking in geniality, humor, picturesqueness, and poetry; and so explicit, so mechanical, so flat in the panorama which it gives to life.”17 James was overcome by the “awfully monotonous quality” in Spencer, remarking that “one finds no twilight region in his mind, and no capacity for dreaminess and passivity. All parts of it are filled with the same noonday glare, like a dry desert where every grain of sand shows singly, and there are no mysteries or shadows.”18 In his Pragmatism he paused to object to Spencer’s “dry school-master temperament . . . his preference for cheap makeshifts in argument, his lack of education even in mechanical principles, and in general the vagueness of all his fundamental ideas, his whole system wooden, as if knocked together out of cracked hemlock boards.”19 The margins of James’s copy of First Principles he decorated with such remarks as “absurd,” “trebly asinine,” “curse his metaphysics,” and “damned scholastic quibble.” He made fun of the vacuity of Spencer’s fundamental principles, declaring Spencer’s use of the persistence of force to be “vagueness incarnate,” and suggesting ridiculous examples for his principle of the rhythm of motion, such as people going upstairs and downstairs, intermittent fevers, and cradles and rocking chairs. Spencer’s definition of evolution he parodied in his lectures in these terms: “Evolution is a change from a no-howish untalkaboutable all-alikeness to a somehowish and in general talkaboutable not-all-alikeness by continuous stick-togetherations and somethingelseifications.”20
It seems clear that James’s objection to Spencer arose partly because James was in search of a philosophy that would acknowledge active human effort in the bettering of life. In Pragmatism James objected to Spencer’s finished deterministic philosophy because of the “disconsolateness of its ulterior pratical results.”21 “When the whole training of life is to make us fighters for the higher,” he wrote on the last page of his well-annotated copy of First Principles, “why should it be extraordinary or wrong to protest against a philosophy the acceptance of which is acceptance of the defeat of the higher?”22 Symptomatic of James’s approach to philosophy was his recurrent interest in the problem of evil, so evident in his answers to Royce His desire to reject all philosophies that denied the existence of evil or minimized its practical significance can be seen in his attacks upon absolutism. He cited with approval an indictment of philosophers drawn up by Morrison I. Swift, an anarchist writer, for their cool neglect of the ills of society.23 His essay on “The Dilemma of Determinism” hinged upon the necessity of validating moral judgments. The idea of chance, which interested Peirce as a logician, was significant to James as a moralist. Determinism, James declared, insists that possibilities which fail to get realized are no possibilities at all, but illusions; it affirms that nothing in the future can be ambiguous, not even human volitions. But if there is no such thing as chance, moral judgments are pragmatically meaningless.
Calling a thing bad means, if it means anything at all, that the thing ought not to be, that something else ought to be in its stead. Determinism, in denying that anything else can be in its stead, virtually defines the universe as a place in which what ought to be is impossible,.—in other words, as an organism whose constitution is afflicted with an incurable taint, an irremediable flaw.24
Determinism is consistent only with the direst pessimism or a romantic mood of resignation. But if moral judgments are to be effective there must be some minimum of uncertainty in the universe; this does not necessitate a completely haphazard world, but only one in which there are occasional choices. The necessity of retaining choices remains, even though one’s dream of universal fatalism be as optimistic as that of Spencer, who believes in the ultimate advent of a peaceful millennium. Even if it is true, as Spencer says, that no preference can succeed unless it is in harmony with the ultimate triumph of peace, justice, and sympathy, “we are still free to decide when to settle down on the equitable and peaceful basis.” Until it is finally revealed with certainty what shall succeed, we are all free to try for our own preferences.25
In 1878 the Journal of Speculative Philosophy published an article by James entitled “Remarks on Spencer’s Definition of Mind as Correspondence,” in which the lines of his later thought are clearly foreshadowed. The article shows also how much more dynamic than Spencer’s was James’s understanding of the implications of Darwinism for psychology. Spencer, in defining the mind in terms of adjustment, leaves out the greater part of what is usually considered the mental life. Spencer defines life as the adjustment of inner to outer relations and looks upon mind and cognition as aspects of that adjustment. He forgets, according to James, all noncognitive elements in mind, all sentiment and emotion. He plays down or ignores entirely the element of interest in the organism which is essential to the whole process of cognition. He defines intelligent mental reactions as those that minister to survival by arranging internal relations to suit the environment, but the critical factor in the cognitive situation, the desire for survival or welfare, is a subjective element which he leaves out. The idea of correspondence between inner and outer relations, to be made meaningful as the criterion of mental acts, must be qualified by some subjective or teleologic reference. Furthermore, the idea that mind ministers to survival alone cannot explain the full range of higher cultural activities which have no survival value. The knower, James concluded,
. . . is not simply a mirror floating with no foothold anywhere, and passively reflecting an order that he comes upon and finds simply existing. The knower is an actor, and coefficient of the truth on one side, whilst on the other he registers the truth which he helps to create. Mental interests, hypotheses, postulates, so far as they are bases for human action—action which to a great extent transforms the world—help to make the truth which they declare. In other words, there belongs to mind, from its birth upward, a spontaneity, a vote. It is in the game, and not a mere looker-on; and its judgments of the should-be, its ideals, cannot be peeled off from the body of the cogitandum as if they were excrescences, or meant, at most, survival.26
In his Principles of Psychology, which appeared in 1890, James continued this line of thought. There he made a sharp break with the traditional view of mind as a quiet cognitive organ, and criticized post-Darwinian psychology for its neglect of the active role of the mind.27 It had become habitual, he complained, to speak as if the mere body that owns the brain has interests, to treat the body’s survival as an absolute end without reference to any commanding intelligence. In this bare physical view, the reactions of an organism cannot be considered useful or harmful; it can only be said of them that if they occur in certain ways survival will incidentally be their consequence:
But the moment you bring a consciousness into the midst, survival ceases to be a mere hypothesis. No longer is it “if survival is to occur, then so and so must brain and other organs work.” It has now become an imperative decree: “Survival shall occur, and therefore organs must so work!” Real ends appear for the first time upon the world’s stage. . . . Every actually existing consciousness seems to itself at any rate to be a fighter for ends, of which many, but for its presence, would not be ends at all. Its powers of cognition are mainly subservient to these ends, discerning which facts further them and which do not.28
The doctrine—or method—of pragmatism, taken with acknowledgment from Peirce, was a projection of this approach to the test of knowledge. A world in which theories are experimental instruments rather than answers, and in which truth “happens to an idea.”29 and can be made by the knower, was alone coherent with the unfinished universe James chose to believe in.
In 1880 James made one of his rare ventures into social theory when he published in the Atlantic Monthly an article on “Great Men, Great Thoughts, and the Environment.”30 Using Spencer and his disciples as a foil, James raised the question: What causes communities to change from generation to generation? With Walter Bagehot, whose Physics and Politics he greatly admired, James believed the changes were the result of innovations by unusual or outstanding individuals, playing the same role in social change as variations in Darwin’s theory of evolution; such persons are selected by society and elevated into positions of influence because of their adaptability to the social situation into which they happen to be born. The Spencerians had attributed social changes to geography, environment, external circumstances—in brief, to everything except human control. They had assumed the existence of a universal web of causation, in which the finite human intellect becomes hopelessly entangled. Spencer, in his Study of Sociology, attributed everything to prior conditions, a process which, when pushed further and further back, becomes circular and yields nothing of value in social analysis. It offers nothing but the omnipotence of circumstances, in much the same way as the Oriental answers every question with “God is great.” This evolutionary philosophy has no explanation for the patent fact that great men change the course of social development. The significant details of their careers cannot be predicted by or attributed to the vague complex of factors which in the Spencerian philosophy is invoked by the term “environment.” There was no convergence of sociological pressures which demanded that William Shakespeare be born at Stratford-on-Avon in 1564. The most that sociology can predict is that if a great man of such nature appears under certain circumstances he will affect society in such and such a way; but that he does affect it should not be denied. The great man is himself part of the environment of everybody else.
Spencer’s impersonal view of history is a brand of oriental fatalism, “a metaphysical creed and nothing else. It is a mood of contemplation, an emotional attitude rather than a system of thought”; and in its neglect of spontaneous variations in human thinking and their effect upon society, it is “an absolute anachronism reverting to a pre-Darwinian type of thought.”31 In this essay James seems to be out-individualizing the individualists, but in the larger context of his thought it appears that his main concern was to redeem spontaneity and indeterminacy from the oppressive causal network of Spencerian social evolution. Without spontaneity, without some possibility that the individual may in a measure alter the course of history, there is no chance for betterment of any kind, and the whole romance of struggle with its attendant alternatives of triumph or failure is banished. As James declared in a subsequent article, “there is a zone of insecurity in human affairs in which all the dramatic interest lies. The rest belongs to the dead machinery of the stage.” That life should be deprived of its dramatic interest by a scheme of universal causality was an intolerable thought, “the most pernicious and immoral of fatalisms.”32
Unlike Dewey, his successor in the pragmatic tradition, James was guilty of only the remotest interest in systematic or collective social reform. One expression of his fundamental individualism33 is the fact that while he was from time to time interested in current events—as an anti-imperialist, a Dreyfusard, a Mugwump—he had no sustained interest in social theory as such. He always dealt with philosophical problems in individual terms. When he wished to illustrate the problem of evil he chose a spectacularly brutal murder rather than wars or slums.34 Although he was casually interested in moderate reform, he had been brought up in the brand of liberalism displayed by the Nation, to which he declared he owed his “whole political education.”35 He considered Godkin a fount of political wisdom36 and Spencer’s political and ethical theory, in spite of its “hardness and inflexibility of tone,” infinitely superior to his abstract philosophy.37 He thought Spencer inconsistent in attempting to be faithful at once to the old English tradition of individual liberty as embodied in Social Statics and to the theory of universal evolution, in the workings of which the individual’s interests are often harshly overridden.38 He was never capable of the sternness of spirit that marked more consistent old-school liberals of Godkin’s stripe. He could not take alarm at the activities of labor, even in the heated days of 1886, when he wrote to his brother that labor troubles “are a most healthy phase of evolution, a little costly, but normal, and sure to do lots of good to all hands in the end”—excepting, of course, the anarchist riots in Chicago, which were “the work of a lot of pathological Germans and Poles.”39
In his later years, after the winds of social criticism had been blowing in America for some time, James viewed the rise of collectivism with satisfaction and found a means of reconciling it with his characteristic emphasis on individual activity. “Stroke upon stroke, from pens of genius,” he wrote to Henry James in 1908, after reading G. Lowes Dickinson’s Justice and Liberty, “the competitive regime so idolized seventy-five years ago seems to be getting wounded to death. What will follow will be something better, but I never saw so clearly the slow effect of [the] accumulation of the influence of successive individuals in changing prevalent ideals.”40 In 1910 he openly expressed his belief “in the reign of peace and the gradual advent of some sort of socialistic equilibrium.”41 Yet in one of his lectures over a decade before, he had, in a more characteristic Jamesean vein, advised a very modest appraisal of the meaning of collectivism for the inner quality of human life:
Society has . . . undoubtedly got to pass toward some newer and better equilibrium, and the distribution of wealth has doubtless slowly got to change; such changes have always happened, and will happen to the end of time. But if, after all that I have said, any of you expect that they will make any genuine vital difference, on a large scale, to the lives of our descendants, you will have missed the significance of my entire lecture. The solid meaning of life is always the same eternal thing,—the marriage, namely, of some unhabitual ideal, however special, with some fidelity, courage, and endurance; with some man’s or woman’s pains.—And, whatever or wherever life may be, there will always be the chance for that marriage to take place.42
“A real school, and real Thought. Important thought, too!”43 This was the reaction of William James to the group of philosophers and educators gathered around John Dewey at the University of Chicago in the early 1900’s. Dewey’s indebtedness to James and James’s approval of Dewey indicate the essential continuity of the pragmatic school. When Dewey first read James’s Principles of Psychology he was still under the sway of the Hegelianism of George Sylvester Morris, with whom he did his graduate work at Johns Hopkins and his earliest teaching at Michigan. But James’s psychology altered the whole trend of his thinking, and James’s approach to mental life became a vital strain in his philosophy.44 With James, Dewey preached the effectiveness of intelligence as an instrument in modifying the world; but to the philosophical argument he brought an unusually strong consciousness of its social import and an urgent sense of the social responsibility of the philosopher. The instrumentalist view of the creative character of intelligence he associated with experimentalism in social theory—a sharp contrast to the conservatism everywhere prevalent in 1882 when Dewey came to Baltimore to begin his graduate study.45
Dewey’s interpretation of the act of thought is more than a simple extension of Darwinism, but it is biological in its orientation.46 Thinking is not a series of transcendent states or acts interjected into a natural scene. Knowledge is a part of nature, and its end is not mere passive adjustment but the manipulation of the environment to provide “consummatory” satisfactions. An idea is a plan of action rooted in the natural impulses and responses of the organism. The “spectator theory of knowledge” is pre-Darwinian.47 “The biological point of view commits us to the conviction that mind, whatever else it may be, is at least an organ of service for the control of environment in relation to the ends of the life process.” 48 Dewey joined this view of mental activity to a general criticism of the conservative outlook. As he remarked in 1917:
The ultimate refuge of the standpatter in every field, education, religion, politics, industrial and domestic life, has been the notion of an alleged fixed structure of mind. As long as mind is conceived as an antecedent and ready-made thing, institutions and customs may be regarded as its offspring.49
Associated with Dewey’s belief in the potentialities of intelligence was his insistence that it operates within a series of objectively “indeterminate” situations. It is from the indeterminateness of the situations, from the element of contingency in nature, that the discriminating intellect derives its special significance. The significance of morals and politics, of religion and science, have “their source and meaning in the union in Nature of the settled and the unsettled, the stable and the hazardous.” Without this union there can be no such things as “ends,” either in the form of human consummations or as purposes. “There is only a block universe, either something ended and admitting of no change, or else a predestined march of events. There is no such thing as fulfillment where there is no risk of failure, and no defeat where there is no promise of possible achievement.”50 Although suggestive of James, this conception is probably closer to the earlier views of Peirce and Wright, for Dewey shied clear of James’s assertion of freedom of the will.51
In 1920, in his Reconstruction in Philosophy, Dewey made a powerful argument for a practical emphasis in philosophy and urged that philosophers shift their attention from the sterile aspects of epistemology and metaphysics to politics, education, and morals. Appended as it was to an acute historical analysis of the division between thought and action, the volume stood as his most noteworthy statement on the theme. The social emphasis, however, was deeply rooted in Dewey’s career. A decade before, he had predicted that philosophy would become, among other things, “a moral and political diagnosis and prognosis,” and as early as 1897 he had stated his social view of the problem of knowledge.52
From his early years, when he became acquainted with Comte’s writings, social philosophy had occupied a prominent place among Dewey’s concerns.53 In 1894 he published a review of Ward’s Psychic Factors of Civilization and Kidd’s Social Evolution which enables the reader to place Dewey’s thinking in relation to the problem of biological sociology. Dewey approved of Ward’s effort to overthrow mechanical Darwinism in sociology by means of a theory of psychic activity. Spurred by James’s psychology, however, Dewey was critical of Ward’s old-fashioned allegiances in this field, and he pointed out that Ward’s psychology was an inadequate instrument for his social theory. In his version of psychic activity, the critical point in his whole sociology, Ward worked with an outmoded pleasure-pain psychology, not far advanced from the sensationalism of Locke. From such passive states of feeling as pleasure and pain sensations, Ward attempted to derive action. His psychology would be better founded if it rested upon the primary fact of impulse, the positive motivation of the organism, “just the fact needed to give firm support to his main contentions.” In his criticism of Ward’s psychology, Dewey was rearguing in a general way the case that James had made against Spencer sixteen years before. With Ward’s criticism of laissez faire Dewey agreed, and he also agreed that “the biological theory of society needs reconstruction from the standpoint of the significance of intellect, emotion, and impulse.” His differences with Ward were over means, not ends.
Dewey’s criticisms of Kidd were more fundamental. While he admitted that the elimination of conflict from society is “a hopeless and self-contradictory ideal,” he still believed it possible to direct the struggle to eliminate waste. He argued that Kidd’s belief in the continual sacrifice of the individual to the conditions of progress showed a hopeless confusion about the relation of ends and means. In Kidd’s scheme the individual forever sacrifices himself to the welfare of future generations, but since the individuals of future generations do the same, the process never reaches any consummation in human satisfactions. Man always sacrifices toward an end which is by definition never attained.54 It was the reductio ad absurdum of the philosophy of progress.
Dewey’s skepticism about laissez faire was a logical consequence of his experimentalism. Far from agreeing with Spencer’s contention that meddling in social affairs is a barrier to knowing them, he insisted that direct participation in events is necessary to genuine understanding.55 No universal proposition can be laid down to determine the functions of a state. Their scope is something for experimental determination.56 The general reaction from laissez faire in practical policy commanded his sympathy, but Dewey deplored the absence of a coherent alternative theory and the general penchant for working on a vague belief that something must be done.57 His emphasis upon the function of education in social change, reminiscent of the earlier proposals of Lester Ward, derives in part from a sense of need for guidance.58
Dewey’s ethical speculation was an attempt to bring order out of the moral confusion caused by the apparently conflicting aims of morality and science, and it is especially significant that he attributed the development of instrumentalism largely to the stimulation afforded by this problem.59 In an early article in The Monist (1898) which showed marks of his Hegelian background, Dewey rejected Huxley’s distinction between the cosmic process and the ethical process. While disputing Huxley’s dualistic approach to the problem, Dewey did not doubt the validity of Huxley’s analogy between the ethical and the horticultural process. “The ethical process, like the activity of the gardener, is one of constant struggle. We can never allow things simply to go on of themselves. If we do, the result is retrogression.” But what is the significance of this apparent opposition between the ethical process and the cosmic process, in the light of our idea of the evolutionary process as a whole? At this point Dewey argued that Huxley failed to realize that the conflict is not one in which man is pitted against his entire natural environment, but one in which man modifies one part of the environment with relation to another. He does not work with anything that is totally alien to his entire environment. The gardener may introduce foreign fruits or vegetables into a particular locale, and he may assist their growth by conditions of sunlight and moisture unusual on his particular plot of ground; “but these conditions fall within the wont and use of nature as a whole.”
Huxley recognized that the survival of the fittest in respect to the existing conditions is different from the survival of the ethically best. Yet must not the conditions be interpreted as a whole complex, including “the existing social structure with all the habits, demands, and ideals which are found in it?” Under such an interpretation the fittest would in truth be the best. The unfit would be practically equivalent to the antisocial, but not to the physically weak or the economically dependent. The dependent classes in society may be quite “fit” when measured by the whole of the environment. The prolongation of the period of dependency in man (Fiske’s infancy theory) has developed foresight and planning and the bonds of social unity; the care of the sick has taught us how to protect the healthy. What was fit among the carnivora is not fit among men. Man lives in such a changing and progressive environment that in his case it is flexibility, readiness to adjust to the conditions of the morrow as well as the present, that constitutes fitness. As the meaning of environment changes, the meaning of the struggle for existence changes also. The biological promptings of self-assertion have potentialities for good as well as evil. The essence of the human problem is controlled foresight—ability to maintain the institutions of the past while remaking them to suit new conditions; in short, to maintain a balance between habits and aims. The term “selection” can mean not only that one form of life, one organism, is selected at the expense of another, but also that various modes of action and reaction are selected by an organism or a society because of their superiority over other modes. Society has its own mechanisms, public opinion and education, to select the modes it finds most suitable. There is, then, no bifurcation between the ethical process and the cosmic process. The difficulty has been created by static interpretations of biological functions and their application out of context to the unique and dynamic conditions of human environment. It is not necessary to go outside of Nature to find warrant for the ethical process; one need only recognize the natural situation in its totality.60
In 1908 Dewey and his former colleague James H. Tufts brought out a textbook in ethics whose contents were radically different from the abstract homilies characteristic of the past. The treatment of ethical principles was made ancillary to social issues of the day; such problems as individualism and socialism, business and its regulation, labor relations and the family, were given prominent place. Dewey’s contribution included a short section sharply criticizing the crude assimilation of Darwinism to ethical theory, and took a position on the “natural” aspect of competition not unlike Kropotkin’s.61
Indeed, it is as part of a maturing social criticism that the historical position of pragmatism can best be understood. This is in accord with Dewey’s own conception of the place of the pragmatic tradition in American culture. Dewey repeatedly denied that pragmatism, with its interest in what James called the “cash-value” of ideas, was an intellectual equivalent of American commercialism or an abject apology for the acquisitive spirit of a business culture. He reminded its critics that it was James who protested against the excessive American worship of “the bitch-goddess SUCCESS.”62 Hostile to all absolutist social rationalizations, conservative or radical, instrumentalism has varied in social content from the Progressive era to the days of the New Deal; but what is most important in its history is its association with social consciousness and its susceptibility to change.
The social orientation which was always present in Dewey’s thought, in bold relief against the individualism of William James, illustrates the changing potentialities of a somewhat similar philosophical standpoint in different eras. It was partly a difference in personal history. James came from a family with a comfortable inherited fortune that provided him with a Harvard education, travel, social status, and the advantage of a long period of maturation free of financial problems. Dewey, the son of a small business proprietor in Burlington, Vermont, was thrown largely upon his own resources. The social emphasis acquired by instrumentalism has, however, a larger significance. Dewey, who was born in the year when The Origin of Species appeared, survived James for a period in which two generations came to maturity, and social criticism among men of academic standing became respectable. The beginnings of the Progressive era, moreover, coincided with the growth and spread of Dewey’s ideas—the same period in which James himself thought he saw the competitive regime “getting wounded to death”; and it is easy to see Dewey’s faith in knowledge, experimentation, activity, and control as the counterpart in abstract philosophy of the Progressive faith in democracy and political action. It is not far from Croly’s appeal to his countrymen to think in terms of purpose rather than inevitable destiny, or from Lippmann’s assertion that “we can no longer treat life as something that has trickled down to us,” to Dewey’s appeal for an experimental approach to social theory. If Dewey’s belief in the efficacy of intelligence and education in social change was justified, his own philosophy was more than a passive reflection of the transformation in American thought. The sight of a distinguished philosopher occupied with the activities of third parties, reform organizations, and labor unions provided a measure of some of the changes that have taken place on the American intellectual stage since the days when Fiske and Youmans were dramatizing Spencer for an enchanted audience.