nsequences as well as character, is obvious enough. It
is, however, to be noted that these consequences have issued out of the
fact that the systems have been specific items of existence among other
equally and even more specific items, thought by particular men, at
particular times and in particular places. As such they have been
programs for meeting events and incarnating values; operative ideals
aiming to recreate the world according to determined standards. They
have looked forward rather than backward, have tacitly acknowledged the
reality of change, the irreducible pluralism of nature, and the
genuineness of the activities, oppugnant or harmonizing, between the
items of the Cosmic. Many they ostensibly negate. The truth, in a word,
has been experimental and prospective; the desiderates they uttered
operated actually as such and not as already existing. Historians of
philosophy, treating it as if it had no context, have denied or ignored
this role of philosophy in human events, but historians of the events
themselves could not avoid observing and enregistering it.

Only within very recent years, as an effect of the concept of evolution
in the field of the sciences, have philosophers as such envisaged this
non-aesthetic aspect of philosophy's ground and function in the making of
civilization and have made it the basis for a sober vision which may or
may not have beauty, but which cannot have finality. Such a vision is
again nothing more than traditional philosophy become conscious of its
character and limitations and shorn of its pretense. It is a program to
execute rather than a metaphysic to rest in. Its procedure is the
procedure of all the arts and sciences. It frankly acknowledges the
realities of immediate experience, the turbulence and complexity of the
flux, the interpenetrative confusion of orders, the inward
self-diversification of even the simplest thing, which "change" means,
and the continual emergence of novel entities, unforeseen and
unprevisible, from the reciprocal action of the older aggregate. This
perceptual reality it aims to remould according to the heart's desire.
Accordingly it drops the pretense of envisaging the universe and devotes
itself to its more modest task of applying its standards to a particular
item that needs to be remade. It is believed in, but no longer without
risk, for, without becoming a dogma, it still subjects itself to the
tests of action. So it acknowledges that it must a