tly scientific point of view it might seem
possible to prove that common cognition, as defined above, must in
general be true cognition. I refer here to the now familiar method of
the evolutionist.

According to this doctrine, which is a scientific method in so far as it
investigates the historical developments of mind or the order of mental
phenomena in time, cognition may be viewed as a part of the result of
the interaction of external agencies and the organism, as an incident of
the great process of adaptation, physical and psychical, of organism to
environment. In thus looking at cognition, the evolutionist is making
the assumption which all science makes, namely, that correct views are
correspondences between internal (mental) relations and external
(physical) relations, incorrect views disagreements between these
relations. From this point of view he may proceed to argue that the
intellectual processes must tend to conform to external facts. All
correspondence, he tells us, means fitness to external conditions and
practical efficiency, all want of correspondence practical incompetence.
Consequently, those individuals in whom the correspondence was more
complete and exact would have an advantage in the struggle for existence
and so tend to be preserved. In this way the process of natural
selection, by separately adjusting individual representations to
actualities, would make them converge towards a common meeting-point or
social standard of true cognition. That is to say, by eliminating or at
least greatly circumscribing the region of individual illusion, natural
selection would exclude the possibility of a persistent common illusion.

Not only so, the evolutionist may say that this coincidence between
common beliefs and true beliefs would be furthered by social as well as
individual competition. A community has an advantage in the struggle
with other communities when it is distinguished by the presence of the
conditions of effective co-operation, such as mutual confidence. Among
these conditions a body of true knowledge seems to be of the first
importance, since conjoint action always presupposes common beliefs,
and, to be effective action, implies that these beliefs are correct.
Consequently, it may be argued, the forces at work in the action of man
on man, of society on the individual, in the way of assimilating belief,
must tend, in the long run, to bring about a coincidence between
representations and facts.