The Mind in the Making The Relation of Intelligence to Social Reform

thers availed themselves of his metaphysics to rear a system of arrogant mystical dogmatism. He put his speculations in the form of dialogues -ostensible discussions in the market place or the hou

s. The dialogue is indecisive in its outcome. It does not lend itself to dogmatic conclusions and systematic presentation, but exposes the intricacy of all important questions and the inevitable conflict of views, which may seem altogether irreconcil

like a sentimental idealist and act like a brute. The same person will devote anxious years to the invention of high explosives and then give his fortune to the promotion of peace. We devise the most exquisite machinery for blowing our neighbors to pieces and then display our highest skill and organization in trying to patch together such as offer hope of being mended. Our nature for

which was like a leaky pot or a man running at the nose. In short, he ascribed the highest form of existence to ideals and abstractions. This was a new and sophisticated republication of savage animism. It invited lesser minds

ich we may, according to our standards, pronounce honorable or dishonorable? If you believe in beauty, truth, and love as such you are a Platonist. If you believe that there are only individual instance

an, science, reason, error-or, on the other hand, casts some light on actual human complications. I do not mean, of course, that we can get along without the use of abstract and general terms in our thinking and speaking, but we should be on our constant guard against

supplied manuals of Ethics, Politics, Logic, Psychology, Physics, Metaphysics, Economics, Poetics, Zo?logy, Meteorology, Constitutional Law, and God only knows what not, for we do not have by any means all the things he wrote. And he was equally interested, and perhaps equally capable, in all the widely scattered fields in which he labored. And some of his manuals were so overwhelming in the conclusiveness of their re

which became the curse of later docile generations, no other thinker of whom we have record can really compare with him in the distinction and variety of his achievements

uld by any possibility occur to those who had little inclination to fare forth and extend their knowledge of the so-called realities of nature by painful and specialized research and examination. This is to me the chief reason why, except for some advances in mathematics, astronomy, geogr

ions is possible. The mechanical inventiveness of the Greeks was slight, and hence they never came upon the lens; they had no microscope to reveal the minute, no telescope to attract the remote; they never devised a mechanical timepiece, a thermometer, nor a barometer, to say nothing of cameras and spectroscopes. Archimedes, it is reported, disdained to make any record of his ingenious devic

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fragments of highly abstruse speculation which he did not know what to do with. So he called them "addenda to the Physics"-Ta meta ta physica. These frag

tionalizing current habits and standards. Reconstruction in Philosophy, lectures i-ii. It is certainly surprising how fe

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and the lesser light to rule the night; he made the stars also. And

reature after its kind, cattle and creeping thing, a

nion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and

abimus. Ecce quod erit in fine sine fine. Nam quis alius noster est