complete inversion of the facts than in the
latter statement, since presentation constitutes in fact the
psychological affair. A confusion of logic with physiological physiology
has bred hybrid epistemology, with the amazing result that the technique
of effective inquiry is rendered irrelevant to the theory of knowing,
and those physical events involved in the occurrence of data for knowing
are treated as if they constituted the act of knowing.

V

What are the bearings of our discussion upon the conception of the
present scope and office of philosophy? What do our conclusions indicate
and demand with reference to philosophy itself? For the philosophy which
reaches such conclusions regarding knowledge and mind must apply them,
sincerely and whole-heartedly, to its idea of its own nature. For
philosophy claims to be one form or mode of knowing. If, then, the
conclusion is reached that knowing is a way of employing empirical
occurrences with respect to increasing power to direct the consequences
which flow from things, the application of the conclusion must be made
to philosophy itself. It, too, becomes not a contemplative survey of
existence nor an analysis of what is past and done with, but an outlook
upon future possibilities with reference to attaining the better and
averting the worse. Philosophy must take, with good grace, its own
medicine.

It is easier to state the negative results of the changed idea of
philosophy than the positive ones. The point that occurs to mind most
readily is that philosophy will have to surrender all pretension to be
peculiarly concerned with ultimate reality, or with reality as a
complete (i.e., completed) whole: with _the_ real object. The surrender
is not easy of achievement. The philosophic tradition that comes to us
from classic Greek thought and that was reinforced by Christian
philosophy in the Middle Ages discriminates philosophical knowing from
other modes of knowing by means of an alleged peculiarly intimate
concern with supreme, ultimate, true reality. To deny this trait to
philosophy seems to many to be the suicide of philosophy; to be a
systematic adoption of skepticism or agnostic positivism.

The pervasiveness of the tradition is shown in the fact that so vitally
a contemporary thinker as Bergson, who finds a philosophic revolution
involved in abandonment of the traditional identification of the truly
real with the fixed (an identification inherited from Greek though