The nature of the influence of general ideas upon practical affairs is a troubled question. Mind dislikes to find itself a pilgrim in an alien world. A discovery that the belief in the influence of thought upon action is an illusion would leave men p ... Read more

The nature of the influence of general ideas upon practical affairs is a troubled question. Mind dislikes to find itself a pilgrim in an alien world. A discovery that the belief in the influence of thought upon action is an illusion would leave men profoundly saddened with themselves and with the world. Were it not that the doctrine forbids any discovery influencing affairs—since the discovery would be an idea—we should say that the discovery of the wholly ex post facto and idle character of ideas would profoundly influence subsequent affairs. The strange thing is that when men had least control over nature and their own affairs, they were most sure of the efficacy of thought. The doctrine that nature does nothing in vain, that it is directed by purpose, was not engrafted by scholasticism upon science; it formulates an instinctive tendency. And if the doctrine [4]be fallacious, its pathos has a noble quality. It testifies to the longing of human thought for a world of its own texture. Yet just in the degree in which men, by means of inventions and political arrangements, have found ways of making their thoughts effective, they have come to question whether any thinking is efficacious. Our notions in physical science tend to reduce mind to a bare spectator of a machine-like nature grinding its unrelenting way. The vogue of evolutionary ideas has led many to regard intelligence as a deposit from history, not as a force in its making. We look backward rather than forward; and when we look forward we seem to see but a further unrolling of a panorama long ago rolled up on a cosmic reel. Even Bergson, who, to a casual reader, appears to reveal vast unexplored vistas of genuinely novel possibilities, turns out, upon careful study, to regard intellect (everything which in the past has gone by the name of observation and reflection) as but an evolutionary deposit whose importance is confined to the conservation of a life already achieved, and bids us trust to instinct, or something akin to instinct, for the future:—as if there were hope and consolation in bidding us trust [5]to that which, in any case, we cannot intelligently direct or control. Less