sible, philosophy must in time become a method of locating and interpreting the more serious of the conflicts that occur in life, and a method of projecting ways for dealing with them: a method of moral and political diagnosis and prognosis" (p. 17). It is this final dismissal of all the general problems, about the world and man's relation to it in order that philosophy may afford guidance and direction in the practical affairs of life, that is the most striking feature of Professor Dewey's program. Several of the papers, indeed, set forth in detail and with much vigor and persuasiveness the pragmatic view of truth; but pragmatism itself seems to be subordinate and in a sense incidental to the tremendous reconstruction that is taking place or has taken place. At any rate, the pragmatic theory of knowledge has already received so much attention that it seems unnecessary to attempt to summarize Professor Dewey's arguments, or to bring up once more the difficulties which so many have found in that theory. Instead of doing so, I should like to raise the question whether the injunction against metaphysics and epistemology is really binding. Have the new methods of inquiry and changed intellectual conditions really rendered it superfluous to search for some consistent conception of reality as a whole?
There can be no question that the progress and vitality of philosophy depend upon its ability to substitute genuine problems for those that have become merely abstract and formal. Nor can anyone doubt that at the present day important reconstructions of traditional philosophical conceptions are taking place and that the movement must go on. The question at issue is only whether it is necessary to abandon as unmeaning the ultimate problems that have always occupied philosophy since its first beginnings, or whether it can be shown that the old formulas are capable of transformation without any such radical breach of continuity. Genuine problems, of course, grow out of life and are not manufactured in the schools. But human life is reflective as well as practical—in fact, if it were merely practical it could have no problems at all. Professor Dewey holds that all genuine problems refer to particular situations in experience because only the analysis of such situations can have any bearing on practice. But in what sense are we to understand the over-worked term 'practice'? Some pragmatists, at least, include under it logical activity, so that the 'practical consequences' necessary to make a problem 'genuine' might well be logical in character. But leaving out of account this ambiguity in the use of the word 'practical' (which really seems to be essential to pragmatism as a distinct theory), is it anything more than dogmatism to assert that theories about the world and the general nature of experience are futile and unmeaning? "Were it a thousand times dialectically demonstrated that life as a whole is regulated by a transcendent principle to a final inclusive goal, none the less truth and error, health and disease, good and evil, hope and fear in the concrete, would remain just what and where they are now" (p. 17). I am not certain what Professor Dewey means by a "transcendent" principle; but I cannot admit that metaphysical theories do not affect our concrete experiences. I should say that if such a demonstration were made,
