s its actual biography shows, did not reach
deep in the soil of events, if its issues had no fruitage in events made
over by its being, it would never have been so closely identified with
intelligence and its systematic hypostasis would never have ensued. The
fact is that philosophy, like all forms of creative intelligence, is a
tool before it is a perfection. Its autonomy supervenes on its
efficaciousness; it does not precede its efficaciousness. Men
philosophize in order to live before they live in order to philosophize.
Aristotle's description of the self-sufficiency of theory is possible
only for a life wherein theory had already earned this self-sufficiency
as practice, in a life, that is, which is itself an art, organized by
the application of value-forms to its existent psycho-physical processes
in such a way that its existence incarnates the values it desiderates
and the values perfect the existence that embodies them.

The biography of philosophy, hence, reveals it to have the same
possibilities and the same fate that all other ideas have. Today ideas
are the patent of our humanity, the stuff and form of intelligence, the
differentiae between us and the beasts. In so far forth, they express the
surplusage of vitality over need, the creative freedom of life at play.
This is the thing we see in the imaginings and fantasies of childhood,
whose environment is by social intent formed to favor and sustain its
being. The capacity for spontaneity of idea appears to decrease with
maturity, and the few favored healthy mortals with whom it remains are
called men of genius. William James was such a man, and there are a few
still among the philosophers. But in the mass and in the long run, ideas
are not a primary confirmation of our humanity; in the mass and long
they are warnings of menace to it, a sign of its disintegration. Even so
radical an intellectualist as Mr. Santayana cherishes this observation
to the degree of almost suggesting it as the dogma that all ideas have
their origin in inner or outer maladjustment.[100] However this may be,
that the dominant philosophic ideas arise out of radical disharmonies
between nature and human nature need not be here reiterated, while the
provocative character of minor maladjustments is to be inferred from the
fertility of ideas in unstable minds, of whatever type, from the
neurasthenic to the mad. Ideas represent in these cases the limits of
vital elasticity, the attempt of the o