Page:The Cambridge History of American Literature, v3.djvu/281

The New Realism 263 certain phases of pragmatism as well as of the older idealism, is the tendency known as the new realism. The common element j| in the diverse and often conflicting doctrines which constitute j! this general tendency is the opposition to the Lockian.tradi- tion that the objects of knowledge are always our own ideas. >> Realism maintains that the nature of objects is not determined | by our knowing them. Unlike the older Scotch realism, it does < not view the mind and nature as two distinct entities, but tends j rather, like Santayana and Dewey, to conceive the mind in an Aristotelian fashion as the form or function of a natural or- ganic body responding to its environment. The pioneers of this movement were Professors Woodbridge, Montague, Holt, and Perry. ~ Frederick J. E. Woodbridge is one of the very few Americans interestedrTnTneEapKysics"'6T the philosophy of nature rather than in psychology or epistemology. His sources are in Aris- totle, Hobbes, and Spinoza rather than in Locke and Kant. He rejects the Lockian tradition that we must first examine thel mind as the organ of knowledge before we can study the naturel of existing things. For you cannot begin the epistemologic ^ inquiry, how knowledge is possible, without assuming some- thing already known; and we cannot know any mind entirely apart from nature. When the earth was a fiery mist there was no consciousness on it at all. Besides, the question how in general we come to know is irrelevant to the determination of any specific issue: as, for example, why the flowers bloom in the spring. Studying mind not as a bare subject of knowledge, but as a natural manifestation in nature, we find it to be not an addi- tional thing or term, but a relation between things, namely, the relation of meaning. Whenever through an organic body things come to stand in the relation of meaning to each other we have consciousness. From this distinctive view of mind and meaning, logic ceases to be a study of the laws of thinking and becomes a study of the laws of being. For one reason or another, Professor Woodbridge has never fully elaborated his views, but has barely sketched them in oc- casional essays and papers. His personal influence, however, and the support of The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific Method, of which he is the editor, have undoubtedly