definiteness of their aim-their precise adaptation to their own generation-made them all the more certain in their appeal to all men. An even more remarkable illustration is found in the Bible. Here is a book that we conceive as meant to be the spiritual guide of all men in all ages. And yet every single book in it was written with a very definite purpose to meet the exact spiritual needs of a single generation. It is this very fact that gives it its wonderful suggestion for the spiritual life.

Abstract ideals must have concrete embodiment, and that embodiment will always involve much that we would have otherwise. He who insists on confining his enthusiasm and support to the Good - in - itself and the Beautiful-in-itself to ideal embodiments of ideals—will have no opportunities for either action or enthusiasm in this life.

IV. THE INFLUENCE OF THE IDEA OF THE
ORGANISM IN THE HISTORY OF THOUGHT

The recognition of the concrete, of relatedness everywhere, has expressed itself most definitely in the history of thought, in the idea of the organism, and the attempt has

been made to apply this conception not only to the individual man, but to man's relation to the world, to other men, and to God.

The Idea of the Organism before Hegel.The classical expression of the thought as applied to society is contained in Paul's comparison of the Church to a body, in the twelfth chapter of First Corinthians. Shaftesbury is the first philosophical writer strongly to grasp the conception, and he applies it tellingly in ethics, in his Characteristics; and he is superficially echoed by Pope. The conception emerges anew in Kant's Critique of Judgment, where it is applied especially in the sphere of the beautiful. Of Kant's successors, it was emphasized particularly by Schelling, in his conception of Art and Nature, and by Schleiermacher in his æsthetic conception of religion, in his strong sense of "moral communities," as well as in his perpetual protest against all one-sidedness.

The Idea of the Organism in Hegel.- But the use of this analogy of the organism came to its climax in Hegel, whose whole philosophy it permeates. The system itself aims to be an organism, and claims as its chief justification that it is completely organic; and it strives to conceive everything organically.

Its fundamental thesis- thought and being are identical-is an assertion of so close a relation between thought and being that thought may be said to be the essence of being. His dialectical method is an attempt to formulate the process of growth of an organism, so that thinking itself, as Professor Royce has pointed out, is conceived as "a kind of living," and therefore not merely abstract. His thought that each man must repeat in his thinking the course of thought of the race, as the embryological series repeats the zoological, was only another application of the analogy of the organism; and he applied the conception again with special force in ethics. Even his idea of God is built upon the same analogy.

It was no accident that this philosophy gave such a spur to historical study, not indeed as a mere collecting of facts, but as a rational interpretation of events in their necessary development. Hegel's system is the best illustration of the mediating character of the philosophy of our age. It has inherited the problems of the past, and seeks to mediate between the opposing solutions to show that the faulty solutions have all arisen from conceiving the problem too one-sidedly. That

is, the Hegelian philosophy, abstract and formulizing as it is, was intended to be preëminently a recognition of the whole concrete reality. It aims to do justice to all, to both the real and the ideal, the individual and the whole, the sacred and the secular.

The Idea of the Organism since Hegel.-This growing recognition of the concrete is seen in the reaction from Hegel, in the interests of full reality—as against abstract a priori speculation-with the immensely increased attention to natural science, and, in philosophical lines, to the history of philosophy, psychology, ethics, and sociology. The Hegelians themselves show this reaction in their universal refusal to make any strict use of Hegel's formal dialectic. This tendency, in itself inevitable, has, no doubt, been confirmed and greatly strengthened by the definite setting forth of a scientific evolution theory, with its attempt, in the thought of an organic growth, to draw everything within its sphere. Precisely similar phenomena are the application to well nigh every subject of study of the biological or historical or "genetic," or "functional" method, as well as the present emphasis on sociology, with its assertion of the organic nature of society.

Professor Dewey's statement of a truly genetic method of treatment, perhaps, carries the idea of the organic as far as it is possible to carry it, and is itself, in his notable use of it, a striking example of the relatedness and concreteness of all reality. "The method," he says, "as well as the material, is genetic when the effort is made to see just why and how the fact shows itself, what is the state out of which it naturally proceeds, what the conditions of its manifestation, how it came to be there anyway, and what other changes it arouses or checks after it comes to be there." "For in a truly genetic method, the idea of genesis looks both ways; this fact is itself generated out of certain conditions, and in turn tends to generate something else."1

The whole recent "pragmatic" movement, indeed, with which both Professor Dewey and Professor James have been so closely connected, may be regarded as a kind of final stage in this development of the idea of the organic, and, at the same time, as strongly asserting both of our last two great inferences from modern psychology; as may be seen, perhaps, from Professor Bawden's

1 In Introduction to Irving King's The Psychology of Child Development, pp. xiii, xv