The Essays which follow represent an attempt at intellectual coöperation. No effort has been made, however, to attain unanimity of belief nor to proffer a platform of "planks" on which there is agreement. The consensus represented lies primarily in outlook, in conviction of what is most likely to be fruitful in method of approach. As the title page suggests, the volume presents a unity in attitude rather than a uniformity in results. Consequently each writer is definitively responsible only for

Intellectual advance occurs in two ways. At times increase of knowledge is organized about old conceptions, while these are expanded, elaborated and refined, but not seriously revised, much less abandoned. At other times, the increase of knowledge demands qualitative rather than quantitative change; alteration, not addition. Men's minds grow cold to their former intellectual concerns; ideas that were burning fade; interests that were urgent seem remote. Men face in another direction; their older

In a general survey of the development of logical theory one is struck by the similarity, not to say identity, of the indictments which reformers, since the days of Aristotle, have brought against it. The most fundamental of these charges are: first, that the theory of logic has left it formal and with little significance for the advancement of science and the conduct of society; second, that it has great difficulty in avoiding the predicament of logical operations that are merely labored reprod

Herbart is said to have given the deathblow to faculty psychology. Man no longer appears endowed with volition, passion, desire, and reason; and logic, deprived of its hereditary right to elucidate the operations of inherent intelligence, has the new problem of investigating forms of intelligence in the making. This is no inconsequential task. "If man originally possesses only capacities which after a given amount of education will produce ideas and judgments" (Thorndike, Educational Psychology

The most primitive mathematical activity of man is counting, but here his first efforts are lost in the obscurity of the past. The lower races, however, yield us evidence that is not without value. Although the savage mind is not identical with the mind of primitive man, there is much in the activities of undeveloped races that can throw light upon the behavior of peoples more advanced. We must be careful in our inferences, however. Among the Australians and South Americans there are peoples who

A characteristic of Greek social life is responsible both for the next phase of the development of mathematical thought and for the misapprehension of its nature by so many moderns. "When Archytas and Menaechmus employed mechanical instruments for solving certain geometrical problems, 'Plato,' says Plutarch, 'inveighed against them with great indignation and persistence as destroying and perverting all the good that there is in geometry; for the method absconds from incorporeal and intellectual

To develop the complete history of arithmetic and geometry would be a task quite beyond the limits of this paper, and of the writer's knowledge. In arithmetic we were able to observe a stage in which spontaneous behavior led to the invention of number names and methods of counting. Then, by certain speculative and "play" impulses, there arose elementary arithmetical problems which began to be of interest in themselves. Geometry here also comes into consideration, and, in connection with position

As I write, the way is paved for me by Professor Cohen ( Journ. of Phil., Psy., and Sci. Meth. , Vol. XI, No. 23, Nov. 5, 1914, pp. 623-24), who outlines a theory of relations closely allied to that which I have in mind. Professor Cohen writes: "Like the distinction between primary and secondary qualities, the distinction between qualities and relations seems to me a shifting one because the 'nature' of a thing changes as the thing shifts from one context to another.... To Professors Montague an

The controlling factors for the progress of scientific thought are inventions that lead the scientist into closer contact with his data, and direct attention to complexities which would otherwise have escaped observation. This end is best fulfilled by conceiving entities that under some point of view are practically isolable from the context in which they occur. Only too often philosophic thought has confused this practical segregation with ontological separation, and so been obliged to introduc

The real nature of intelligence as it appears in the development of mathematics is something quite other than that of sensory analysis. Intelligence is fundamentally skill, and although skill may be acquired in connection with some sort of sensory contact of an organism and environment, it is only determined by that contact in the sense that if the sensory conditions were different the needs of the organism might be different, and the kind and degree of skill it could attain would be other than

The scientist in the ancient world found his test of reality in the evidence of the presence of the essence of the object. This evidence came by way of observation, even to the Platonist. Plato could treat this evidence as the awaking of memories of the ideal essence of the object seen in a world beyond the heavens during a former stage of the existence of the soul. In the language of Theatetus it was the agreement of fluctuating sensual content with the thought-content imprinted in or viewed by

If it is true that misery loves company, those persons who feel despondent over the present situation in philosophy may console themselves with the reflection that things are not so bad as they might be. Our friends, the psychologists, are afflicted even as we are. The disagreements of experts as to both the subject-matter and the method of psychology are as fundamental as anything that philosophy can show. A spirit of revolt is abroad in the land, and psychology is once more on trial. The compa

§ 1. In the logic of Instrumentalism, truth has been identified with usefulness and the good with the satisfactory. Classifying critics have seen in this the damaging mark of Utilitarianism, certain of them deeming "Amerikanismus" an even shrewder and more specific diagnosis. The association of these terms together and the aptness of either to express what the critics have in mind are matters of small interest. It is of more importance to discover, behind the reproach implied, the assumptions wh

§ 19. The argument may now be summarily reviewed. I. How are we to understand the acquisition, by an individual, of what are called new economic needs and interests? Except by a fairly obvious fallacy of retrospection we cannot regard this phenomenon as a mere arousal of so-called latent or implicit desires. New products and new means of production afford "satisfactions" and bring about objective results which are unimaginable and therefore unpredictable, in any descriptive fashion, in advance.

Writing about ethics has tended to take one of two directions. On the one hand we have description of conduct in terms of psychology, or anthropology. On the other a study of the concepts right and wrong, good and bad, duty and freedom. If we follow the first line we may attempt to explain conduct psychologically by showing the simple ideas or feelings and the causal connections or laws of habit and association out of which actions arise. Or anthropologically we may show the successive stages of

He who assiduously compares the profound and the commonplace will find their difference to turn merely on the manner of their expression; a profundity is a commonplace formulated in strange or otherwise obscure and unintelligible terms. This must be my excuse for beginning with the trite remark that the world we live in is not one which was made for us, but one in which we happened and grew. I am much aware that there exists a large and influential class of persons who do not think so; and I off