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[263] certain phases of pragmatism as well as of the older idealism, is the tendency known as the new realism. The common element in the diverse and often conflicting doctrines which constitute this general tendency is the opposition to the Lockian tradition 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 rather, like Santayana and Dewey, to conceive the mind in an Aristotelian fashion as the form or function of a natural organic 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 interested in metaphysics or the philosophy of nature rather than in psychology or epistemology. His sources are in Aristotle, Hobbes, and Spinoza rather than in Locke and Kant. He rejects the Lockian tradition that we must first examine the mind as the organ of knowledge before we can study the nature of existing things. For you cannot begin the epistemologic inquiry, how knowledge is possible, without assuming something 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 additional 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 occasional 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
Cambridge University. Press, 1917-1921.
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