e into an
exaggerated Brocken-like spectral relief, where exaggeration renders
perceptible features not ordinarily noted. The use of force to secure
narrow because exclusive aims is no novelty in human affairs. The
deploying of all the intelligence at command in order to increase the
effectiveness of the force used is not so common, yet presents nothing
intrinsically remarkable. The identification of force--military,
economic, and administrative--with moral necessity and moral culture is,
however, a phenomenon not likely to exhibit itself on a wide scale
except where intelligence has already been suborned by an idealism which
identifies "the actual with the rational," and thus finds the measure of
reason in the brute event determined by superior force. If we are to
have a philosophy which will intervene between attachment to rule of
thumb muddling and devotion to a systematized subordination of
intelligence to preexistent ends, it can be found only in a philosophy
which finds the ultimate measure of intelligence in consideration of a
desirable future and in search for the means of bringing it
progressively into existence. When professed idealism turns out to be a
narrow pragmatism--narrow because taking for granted the finality of
ends determined by historic conditions--the time has arrived for a
pragmatism which shall be empirically idealistic, proclaiming the
essential connexion of intelligence with the unachieved future--with
possibilities involving a transfiguration.

IV

Why has the description of experience been so remote from the facts of
empirical situations? To answer this question throws light upon the
submergence of recent philosophizing in epistemology--that is, in
discussions of the nature, possibility, and limits of knowledge in
general, and in the attempt to reach conclusions regarding the ultimate
nature of reality from the answers given to such questions.

The reply to the query regarding the currency of a non-empirical
doctrine of experience (even among professed empiricists) is that the
traditional account is derived from a conception once universally
entertained regarding the subject or bearer or center of experience. The
description of experience has been forced into conformity with this
prior conception; it has been primarily a deduction from it, actual
empirical facts being poured into the moulds of the deductions. The
characteristic feature of this prior notion is the assumption that
experi