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up to date. He does not misrepresent John Stuart Mill seriously, ob–
jecting not to his politics, but to his secularism. But he speaks casually
of "William James's conviction that particular facts are all." Perhaps
Mr. Kirk is thinking of James's phrase, "radical empiricism," and assum–
ing that it stands for an extreme nominalism; perhaps he is thinking of
James's insistence that we can know only what enters experience. Of
course, it was nominalism that James was opposing. A single statement
of "fact," James wrote, underlies radical empiricism. "The statement of
fact is that the relations between things, conjunctive as well as disjunc–
tive, are just as much matters of direct particular experience, neither
more so nor less so, than the things themselves." Religion itself played
a large role in James's thought because he insisted on the existence of
"religious experience."
The modern villain of the piece, as one would expect,
IS
John
Dewey, and here Mr. Kirk makes, if possible, less sense than Dewey's
other enemies, the Communists. He writes of Dewey,
He commenced with a thoroughgoing naturalism, like Diderot's and Holbach's,
denying the whole realm of spiritual values: nothing exists but physical sensa–
tion and life has no aims but physical satisfaction. He proceeded to a utilitar–
ianism which carried Benthamite ideas to their logical culmination, making
material production the goal and standard of human endeavor; the past is trash,
the future unknowable, and present gratification the only concern of the moralist.
He propounded a theory of education derived from Rousseau, declaring that
the child is born with "a
natural
desire to do, to give out, to serve," and should
be encouraged to follow his own bent, teaching being simply the opening of
paths. He advocated a sentimental equalitarian collectivism with social dead–
level its ideal; and he capped this structure with Marxist economics, looking
forward to proletarian ascendency and a future devoted to efficient material
production for the satisfaction of the masses, a planners' state.
There is much to criticize and much to correct, in the work of
Dewey. It is unfortunate that, for a number of years, no serious and
honest criticism has been forthcoming. As for Mr. Kirk's intellectual
morass: in Dewey's philosophical development, he "commenced" with
Hegel; all his life he was an opponent of the notion that "nothing
exists but physical sensation." Of the doctrine that "life has no aims but
physical satisfaction," he wrote perhaps the most penetrating of criti–
cisms, especially in
Ethics
(written with Tufts); the masterpieces in
the criticism of this doctrine, works which Mr. Kirk neglects, for all
his concern with the idea, are Dewey's analysis and F. H. Bradley's essay,
"Pleasure for Pleasure's Sake."
Dewey's thought is essentially moral. His concern always returns to
