ld, the problems of digestion are specific and plural: What
are the particular correlations which constitute it? How does it proceed
in different situations? What is favorable and what unfavorable to its
best performance?--and so on. Can one deny that if we were to take our
clue from the present empirical situation, including the scientific
notion of evolution (biological continuity) and the existing arts of
control of nature, subject and object would be treated as occupying the
same natural world as unhesitatingly as we assume the natural
conjunction of an animal and its food? Would it not follow that
knowledge is one way in which natural energies cooeperate? Would there be
any problem save discovery of the peculiar structure of this
cooeperation, the conditions under which it occurs to best effect, and
the consequences which issue from its occurrence?

It is a commonplace that the chief divisions of modern philosophy,
idealism in its different kinds, realisms of various brands, so-called
common-sense dualism, agnosticism, relativism, phenomenalism, have grown
up around the epistemological problem of the general relation of subject
and object. Problems not openly epistemological, such as whether the
relation of changes in consciousness to physical changes is one of
interaction, parallelism, or automatism have the same origin. What
becomes of philosophy, consisting largely as it does of different
answers to these questions, in case the assumptions which generate the
questions have no empirical standing? Is it not time that philosophers
turned from the attempt to determine the comparative merits of various
replies to the questions to a consideration of the claims of the
questions?

When dominating religious ideas were built up about the idea that the
self is a stranger and pilgrim in this world; when morals, falling in
line, found true good only in inner states of a self inaccessible to
anything but its own private introspection; when political theory
assumed the finality of disconnected and mutually exclusive
personalities, the notion that the bearer of experience is antithetical
to the world instead of being in and of it was congenial. It at least
had the warrant of other beliefs and aspirations. But the doctrine of
biological continuity or organic evolution has destroyed the scientific
basis of the conception. Morally, men are now concerned with the
amelioration of the conditions of the common lot in this world. Soci