to the origin and development of the reasoning process? Yet the validity of the process does not wait upon genetic psychology for its justification. And such must be the case with moral intuitions, if any such exist. Their experienced inner conformity, one with another, throughout the moral life would suffice. In short, there is no disjunction between mere existence and genetic considerations as exhausting the evidences of validity.
The explanation of Professor Dewey's attitude in the matter is not far to seek. For him, present functional value is distinctly and decidedly a genetic consideration; and so the disjunction which we have denied he finds no difficulty in maintaining. No doubt there is a certain force in his contention. The genetic account of function, and the functional account of evolution, have become indispensable to complete knowledge of either function or history. Moreover, a function is itself a process, a change, a development; so that Professor Dewey feels himself amply justified in merging the two conceptions,—in consolidating functional theory with genetic theory as, properly speaking, a single theory. In this spirit, he concludes the paragraph from which I have last quoted (p. 358). Nevertheless the position does not appear to me to be perfectly correct. Evolutionists are apt to arrogate to themselves the view of present life as a process; whereas scarcely anyone has ever looked at it in any other way. If, when Heraclitus said that all things flow, he announced himself an evolutionist, then Professor Dewey's contention is altogether proper. But the essential point, I take it, especially in current controversy, is that the mode of flowing has itself flowed,—that the process itself not only is history but has a history. The grinding of corn, for example, is a process, a change, an evolution, if you please; the grain enters into the mill, and the flour comes out. But the process of changing grain into flour has itself evolved during a period of thousands of years. It is this second evolution,—not the evolution in the process, of which no sane man has ever been ignorant, but the evolution of the process,—that is the relatively new conception, the application of which to the problems of morality constitutes evolutionary ethics.
Moreover, where questions of validity are concerned, the study of present results has at least two decided methodological advantages over the study of origins. First, we must take account of that "heterogony of ends" with which Wundt has made us familiar. A knowledge of the sources of things may be extremely deceptive, if it fails,—as in so many fields it must fail,—of completeness. The second advantage we have already noticed,—the simple fact, that in the process as it now
