ught but a distant eye, registering in a remote
and alien medium the spectacle of nature and life. To enforce the fact
that the emergence of imagination and thought is relative to the
connexion of the sufferings of men with their doings is of itself to
illuminate those sufferings and to instruct those doings. To catch mind
in its connexion with the entrance of the novel into the course of the
world is to be on the road to see that intelligence is itself the most
promising of all novelties, the revelation of the meaning of that
transformation of past into future which is the reality of every
present. To reveal intelligence as the organ for the guidance of this
transformation, the sole director of its quality, is to make a
declaration of present untold significance for action. To elaborate
these convictions of the connexion of intelligence with what men undergo
because of their doings and with the emergence and direction of the
creative, the novel, in the world is of itself a program which will keep
philosophers busy until something more worth while is forced upon them.
For the elaboration has to be made through application to all the
disciplines which have an intimate connexion with human conduct:--to
logic, ethics, esthetics, economics, and the procedure of the sciences
formal and natural.

I also believe that there is a genuine sense in which the enforcement of
the pivotal position of intelligence in the world and thereby in control
of human fortunes (so far as they are manageable) is the peculiar
problem in the problems of life which come home most closely to
ourselves--to ourselves living not merely in the early twentieth century
but in the United States. It is easy to be foolish about the connexion
of thought with national life. But I do not see how any one can question
the distinctively national color of English, or French, or German
philosophies. And if of late the history of thought has come under the
domination of the German dogma of an inner evolution of ideas, it
requires but a little inquiry to convince oneself that that dogma itself
testifies to a particularly nationalistic need and origin. I believe
that philosophy in America will be lost between chewing a historic cud
long since reduced to woody fiber, or an apologetics for lost causes
(lost to natural science), or a scholastic, schematic formalism, unless
it can somehow bring to consciousness America's own needs and its own
implicit principle of successfu