You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
What then is that which is able to conduct a man? One thing and only one, philosophy.
The nineteenth century, intellectually the most picturesque of all the centuries, witnessed the culminating conflict between the philosophies of intellectualism and anti-intellectualism.1 … Parenthetically, it may be worth nothing that the anti-intellectualists, so-called, were as adept in the use of logic and reason and subtle analysis as were the lucid expositors of the intellectual life. Bergson's logic is no less brilliant or acute than Spencer's!
The central factor in the revolutionary transition from intellectualism to anti-intellectualism was the Darwinian conception of evolution with its enormous emphasis on “blind” forces. The stabilizing illusions of special creation, design, rationality, which lent a kind of dignity and superiority to man were rudely shattered by the Darwinian hypothesis which introduced into the calculations of thinkers such unstable realities as chance, cunning, brute force, the sway of instincts, the logic of hit-and-miss, sheer irrationality. Reason, as the divine prerogative of man alone, was dethroned, and impulse, common alike to man and beast, was enthroned as the