Darwin and the humanities / [James Mark Baldwin].

  • Baldwin, James Mark, 1861-1934.
Date:
1910
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Darwin and the humanities / [James Mark Baldwin]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    98/152 (page 78)
    in the spirit of the selection theory. Community of interests is a fundamental fact resting on the conditions of the rise of community life. In the theory of knowledge the same general truth appears, and it is for this reason that I place the two cases together. In the social sciences and in the theory of knowledge alike ‘ community ’ or some equivalent term, used to denote that character which is the opposite of individualism and atomism, is henceforth to be one of the watchwords. In the theory of knowledge it appears in the social reference that all know- ledge implies. For psychologists and logicians the problem now is to find any knowledge that is psychologically private, not to find knowledge that is common and public. Individual judgment and sentiment are everywhere rooted in social life—through education, tradition, convention—and it becomes a problem of knowledge, as of ethics, to show how it is possible for anyone ‘ to be a Daniel,’ ‘ to stand alone.’ The result is that the subjectivist theories of knowledge, like the individual- istic theories of political science, have to be laid away in the attics where old intellectual furniture is stored. The knower does not start out in isolation and then come to some sort of agreement with others by ‘ matching ’ his world of independent sensations and cognitions with theirs. On the contrary, he starts with what his and his neighbour’s experi- ences in common verify ; and only partially and by degrees does he find himself and prove himself to be a relatively com- petent independent thinker. The theory of the ‘ communities ’ or common validities of knowledge, and of the corresponding communities or common interests of members of society, is a new possession, due largely to the genetic researches which the Darwinian spirit and method have inspired.