operates we have a well-nigh infinitely richer field for observation than in all the records of the past. When account is taken of these several considerations, we may not readily agree with Professor Dewey that aside from the method of evolution the validity of a supposed intuition could in no wise be established.
One other of Professor Dewey's criticisms upon intuitionalism we may note, though it has little direct bearing upon this discussion. If an intuition fails once, he says, it fails always. "Either everything that appears to the individual as final and authoritative is such, or else such appearance lacks competency in any case" (p. 360). That this is not strictly true, the analogy of sense-perception may again convince us. We may have been occasionally subject to hallucinations of sight and hearing; yet the ordered consistency of our present waking existence leaves us no doubt as to the truth of our present perceptions. And so, though a moral intuition, in which we had had entire confidence, should prove utterly mistaken, that need not rob our life of all further moral guidance. Of course, this is not to say that an intuitionalism is not conceivable, against which Professor Dewey's criticism holds. But surely intuitionalism as a great historical school of thought has more to say for itself than he allows.
"Empiricism," says Professor Dewey, "is no more historic in character than intuitionalism. ... The genetic method determines the worth or significance of the belief by considering the place that it occupied in a developing series; the empirical method by referring it to its components" (p. 364). Here, again, I fail to discover a true disjunction. Empiricism may or may not be genetic in method and spirit. The associations of psychical elements are temporary; they have a history and a function. For the empiricist, as for another man, the idea is a response to a situation and issues in a reconstruction of the situation. So far from dissolving the bonds of the temporal connection of ideas, he distinguishes himself by the elaboration of a distinct as well as comprehensive theory as to the intimate nature and mechanism of that bond. Not content with the general doctrine, "that the idea arises as a response, and that the test of its validity is to be found in its later career as manifested with reference to the needs of the situation that evoked it" (p. 363),—not so easily content, I say, the empiricist has his explicit theory, be it true or false, as to the precise manner in which ideas arise in response to situations, and of the precise mode of their reference to temporary exigencies.
Again, it appears unwarrantable to assert an antithesis between the empirical and genetic methods on the ground that for the one method
