264 Later Philosophy helped to make the new realism a strong organized movement. Such it became with the publication of a volume of co-opera- tive studies entitled The New Realism (1912) by Walter Taylor Marvin, Ralph Barton Perry, Edward Gleason Spaulding, I W. P. Montague, Edwin Holt, and Walter B. Pitkin. The I new realism began as an appeal to the naive consciousness of reality ; but relying naively as it does on modem physics, physi- ology, and experimental biology (as opposed to the field and 1 speculative biology of the Darwinians) its doctrine necessarily becomes very technical and complicated. Its insistence on rigorous definitions and definitive intellectual solutions to spe- I cific problems has brought on it the charge of being a new 1 scholasticism. But whatever the merits of scholasticism — the renaissance of logical studies has begun to reveal some of them — the new realism has certainly tried to avoid the tendency of philosophy to become a branch of apologetics or a brief in behalf of supposed valuable interests of humanity. In this a technical vocabulary and the ethically neutral symbols of mathematics are a great aid. The period covered by the greater portion of this chapter is too near us to make a just appreciation of its achievement likely at this time. In the main it has been dominated by two interests, the theologic and the psychologic. ' The development I during this period has been to weaken the former and to deepen I but narrow the latter and make it more and more technical. For this reason the philosophers covered in this chapter have as yet exerted little influence on the general thought of the coun- try. The general current of American economic, political, and legal thought has until very recently been entirely dominated by our traditional eighteenth-century individualism or natural-law philosophy. Neither does our general literature, religious life, or current scientific procedure as yet show any distinctive in- fluence of our professional philosophy. But it must be re- membered that all our universities are comparatively young I " The history of philosophy has occupied a large portion of American philoso- phic instruction and writing. But apart from the books of Albee, Husik, Riley, and Salter (mentioned in the bibliography to this chapter) and articles by Lovejoy on Kant, and on the history of evolution, American philosophy has no noteworthy achievement to its credit — certainly nothing comparable to the historical works of Caird, Bosanquet, Benn, or Whittaker, not to mention the great German and French achievements in this field.
