interpenetration of populations. That is not the essential thing. The essential thing is the contact and combination of ideas and cultures. This may easily be secured in this age without the physical intermingling of one group with another. It may result, and does result, from the conquest and subjugation of one group by another. It may take place also peacefully and at a distance. The heart of a civilization is the ideas it embodies. All that is necessary to effect a combination of cultures is to bring the ideas of the groups together. This is done today, more or less unconsciously, through the employment without a definite social purpose of the various means of communication, and evolution is taking place. But this evolution should be controlled. And how? By the determination of the ideas that are to enter into the new synthesis. This does not imply that we may or can select out the particular ideas that we wish to unite. What, then, should be the elements of the new compounding? Well, we are generally agreed that the truth is always salutary. The ideas that should enter into new social combinations, then, should be true ideas. True ideas, we believe, are derived by careful, impartial investigation of the world in which we live, that is, by science. Bring together the true scientific ideas of the world and, though we may not be able to predict the exact result, we may safely rely on the outcome. CONCLUSION In organic and inorganic evolution, then, the basis of progress is the compounding, recompounding and organization of atoms and molecules; in social evolution, the units of combination are ideas. Future society will depend upon the character and number of ideas that unite in future combinations. These are conceivably within human control. To say that man cannot control future evolution is to declare that he has no control of the formation of ideas and their dissemination, and this, I suppose, no one would like to admit. Two things, then, are fundamentally necessary in the successful control of social evolution. In the first place, the process of the formation of new ideas to enter into combination with other ideas must not be interfered with; and, in the second place, there must be free opportunity for these ideas to mingle and combine. The diffusion of knowledge by means of travel, formal instruction, exchange of books, magazines, etc., is by far the most economical means of bringing ideas together. War, I repeat, is wholly unnecessary. The most effective "broadsides" are those of ideas. The origination and diffusion of ideas, then, is the principle and necessary condition of social evolution. But if social progress is to be achieved in any other than a haphazard manner, that is, in the manner of nature, through the compounding of ideas, it is obvious that the combination of truly progressive ideas is the consummation to be wished. Now, progressive ideas are determined by the careful investigation of the phenomena of nature. This is the sole source of truth. Those who declare that action or experience is also a source of truth merely mean that in action and experience ideas and truths are tested or interpreted. It follows, then, plainly enough that there should be throughout the world a perfectly free flow of scientific ideas, and everywhere the most earnest and intelligent encouragement of scientific investigation. The greatest detriment to progress, the real "sin against the Holy Ghost", is opposition to science and to the diffusion of scientific ideas in human society, both horizontally and perpendicularly. Opposition to teaching the young the scientific ideas derived from the painstaking investigation of nature, and to the early use of the mind in exercise upon these truths, is infidelity to the divine purpose of directing the evolution of society to higher and higher levels. This means, of course, a universal education-an education which really involves the diffusion of scientific knowledge and the operation of the fundamental principle of social evolution, namely, the compounding, recompounding and organization of ideas, and the application of this principle in an intelligent effort to direct the future evolution of society. Other principles may and should be applied, but this one is fundamental. "Let knowledge grow from more to more, That mind and soul according well May make one music as before, but vaster." COLORADO STATE TEACHERS COLLEGE. THE NOTION OF INTELLIGIBILITY IN SCIENTIFIC THOUGHT1 I HERE has been a remarkable change of attitude in Interest is no longer centered upon the rôle and nature of particular conceptions in isolation, nor even on the general character of conceptions as such. What is rather being attempted is inquiry into the broad structure of scientific thought as a whole, viewed in relation to the intellectual and emotional background in which it arises in the life of man. It is probable that one underlying cause of this change is the orientation of modern physics in the direction of abstract and comprehensive theories. Such developments direct attention to groups of theories rather than to particular conceptions; and as they usually involve the sacrifice of some assumptions, or their reduction to dependence on others, they tend to throw into relief the relation between bodies of theory and their underlying assumptions. In short, philosophers of science, too, have been encouraged to generalize their results. The familiar critical accounts of the place of hypotheses in the scientific process are giving place to attempts at rendering more explicit the fundamental and often unconsciously held generalizations which lie behind our very "ideals of explanation" themselves, and mould the form of scientific theory. 1A paper read at the Sixth International Congress of Philosophy held in Cambridge, Mass., September, 1926. Many modern writers illustrate this tendency; but I must content myself here with a bare reference to the work of Emile Myerson and A. N. Whitehead. The latter has stated, in his remarkable Lowell Lectures, the general standpoint of those who undertake such studies. He points out that when you are criticising the philosophy of an epoch (and the same is true of its science) you must not chiefly direct your attention to those intellectual positions which its exponents feel it necessary to defend. “There will", he says, "be some fundamental assumptions which adherents of all the variant systems within the epoch unconsciously presuppose. Such assumptions appear so obvious that people do not know what they are assuming because no other way of putting things has ever occurred to them." The importance of this to the student of the philosophy of science has recently been stressed by Prof. Leonard J. Russell, who has traced in detail the influence of those wide preliminary generalizations which guide and condition investigation without being in any formal sense the natural outcome of the facts themselves. It has long been recognized that in narrower fields of scientific work, there is often, in Galileo's apt phrase, "a rape of reason upon the senses." But what Russell has specially in mind is the more pervasive and unobtrusive background of guiding ideas which are "so wide in their scope, so general in their nature, so tenaciously held in the face of contrary evidence, that they seem to express something in man's attitude to the facts rather than to express the mere facts themselves.""" To those anticipatory but challenging generalizations he gives the names of "demands". Some of these demands are logical, as that for consistency; some aesthetic, such as the demand for simplicity. But the one with which we are concerned in this 2A. N. Whitehead, Science and the Modern World, 1926, p. 71. L. J. Russell, "Science and Philosophy", Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, N. S., Vol. XXV, 1924-1925, p. 66. |