III Philosophy as Mediator between Science and Statesmanship
BUT why philosophy?—some one asks. Why will not science do? Philosophy dreams, while one by one the sciences which she nursed steal away from her and go down into the world of fact and achievement. Why should not science be called upon to guide us into a better world?
Because science becomes more and more a fragmentated thing, with ever less coördination, ever less sense of the whole. Our industrial system has forced division of labor here, as in the manual trades, almost to the point of idiocy: let a man seek to know everything about something, and he will soon know nothing about anything else; efficiency will swallow up the man. Because of this shredded science we have great zoölogists talking infantile patriotism about the war, and great electricians who fill sensational sheets with details of their trips to heaven. We live in a world where thought breaks into pieces, and coördination ebbs; we flounder into a chaos of hatred and destruction because synthetic thinking is not in fashion.
Consider, for example, the problem of monopoly: we ask science what we are to do here; why is it that after we have listened to the economist, and the historian, and the lawyer, and the psychologist, we are hardly better off than before? Because each of these men speaks in ignorance of what the others have discovered. We must find some way of making these men acquainted with one another before they can become really useful to large social purposes; we must knock their heads together. We want more uniters and coördinators, less analyzers and accumulators. Specialization is making the philosopher a social necessity of the very first importance.
This does not mean that we must put the state into the hands of the epistemologists. Hardly. The type of philosopher who must be produced will be a man too close to life to spend much time on merely analytical problems. He will feel the call of action, and will automatically reject all knowledge that does not point to deeds. The essential feature of him will be grasp: he will have his net fixed for the findings of those sciences which have to do, not with material reconstructions, but with the discovery of the secrets of human nature. He will know the essentials of biology and psychology, of sociology and history, of economics and politics; in him these long-divorced sciences will meet again and make one another fertile once more. He will busy himself with Mendel and Freud, Sumner and Veblen, and will scandalously neglect the Absolute. He will study the needs and exigencies of his time, he will consider the Utopias men make, he will see in them the suggestive pseudopodia of political theory, and will learn from them what men at last desire. He will sober the vision with fact, and find a focus for immediate striving. With this focus he will be able to coördinate his own thinking, to point the nose of science to a goal; science becoming thereby no longer inventive and instructive merely, but preventive and constructive. And so fortified and unified he will preach his gospel, talking not to students about God, but to statesmen about men.
For we come again—ever and ever again—to Plato: unless wisdom and practical ability, philosophy and statesmanship, can be more closely bound together than they are, there will be no lessening of human misery. Think of the learning of scientists and the ignorance of politicians! You see all these agitated, pompous men, making laws at the rate of some ten thousand a year; you see those quiet, unheard of, underpaid seekers in the laboratories of the world; unless you can bring these two groups together through coördination and direction, your society will stand still forever, however much it moves. Philosophy must take hold; it must become the social direction of science, it must become, strange to say, applied science.
We stand to-day in social science where Bacon stood in natural science: we seek a method first for the elucidation of causes, and second for the transformation, in the light of this knowledge, of man’s environment and man. “We live in the stone age of political science,” says Lester Ward; “in politics we are still savages.”1 Our political movements are conceived in impulse and developed in emotion; they end in fission and fragmentation because there is no thought behind them. Who will supply thinking to these instincts, direction to this energy, light to this wasted heat? Our young men talk only of ideals, our politicians only of fact; who will interpret to the one the language of the other? What is it, too, that statesmen need if not that saving sense of the whole which makes philosophy, and which philosophy makes? Just as philosophy without statesmanship is—let us say—epistemology, so statesmanship without philosophy is—American politics. The function of the philosopher, then, is to do the listening to to-day’s science, and then to do the thinking for to-morrow’s statesmanship. The philosophy of an age should be the organized foresight of that age, the interpreter of the future to the present. “Selection adapts man to yesterday’s conditions, not to to-day’s”;2 the organized foresight of conscious evolution will adapt man to the conditions of to-morrow. And an ounce of foresight is worth a ton of morals.