tion
to be an isolation of mind from activity involving physical conditions,
bodily organs, material appliances, and natural objects. Consequently,
there was indicated a philosophy which recognizes the origin, place, and
function of mind in an activity which controls the environment. Thus we
have completed the circuit and returned to the conceptions of the
first portion of this book: such as the biological continuity of human
impulses and instincts with natural energies; the dependence of the
growth of mind upon participation in conjoint activities having a common
purpose; the influence of the physical environment through the uses made
of it in the social medium; the necessity of utilization of individual
variations in desire and thinking for a progressively developing
society; the essential unity of method and subject matter; the intrinsic
continuity of ends and means; the recognition of mind as thinking which
perceives and tests the meanings of behavior. These conceptions are
consistent with the philosophy which sees intelligence to be the
purposive reorganization, through action, of the material of experience;
and they are inconsistent with each of the dualistic philosophies
mentioned.

2. The Nature of Philosophy. Our further task is to extract and make
explicit the idea of philosophy implicit in these considerations. We
have already virtually described, though not defined, philosophy in
terms of the problems with which it deals: and that thing nor even to
the aggregate of known things, but to the considerations which govern
conduct.

Hence philosophy cannot be defined simply from the side of subject
matter. For this reason, the definition of such conceptions as
generality, totality, and ultimateness is most readily reached from
the side of the disposition toward the world which they connote. In any
literal and quantitative sense, these terms do not apply to the subject
matter of knowledge, for completeness and finality are out of the
question. The very nature of experience as an ongoing, changing process
forbids. In a less rigid sense, they apply to science rather than to
philosophy. For obviously it is to mathematics, physics, chemistry,
biology, anthropology, history, etc. that we must go, not to philosophy,
to find out the facts of the world. It is for the sciences to say what
generalizations are tenable about the world and what they specifically
are. But when we ask what sort of permanent disposition of actio