Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud

Most controversially of all, James applied his reasoning to intuition, to innate ideas. Whereas Locke had said that all our ideas stem from sensory experience, Kant had insisted that some fundamental notions – the idea of causation being one – could not arise from sensory experience, since we never ‘see’ causation, but only infer it. Therefore, he concluded, such ideas ‘must be innate, wired in from birth’.⁶³ James took Kant’s line (for the most part), that many ideas are innate, but he didn’t think that there was anything mysterious or divine about this.

⁶⁴ In Darwinian terms, it was clear that ‘innate’ ideas are simply variations that have arisen and been naturally selected. ‘Minds that possessed them were preferred over minds that did not.’ But this wasn’t because those ideas were more ‘true’ in an abstract or theological sense; instead, it was because they helped organisms to adapt.⁶⁵

The reason that we believed in God (when we did believe in God) was because experience showed that it paid to believe in God. When people stopped believing in God (as they did in large numbers in the nineteenth century – see next chapter), it was because such belief no longer paid.

America’s third pragmatic philosopher, after Peirce and James, was John Dewey. A professor in Chicago, Dewey boasted a Vermont drawl, rimless eyeglasses and a complete lack of fashion sense. In some ways he was the most successful pragmatist of all. Like James he believed that everyone has his own philosophy, their own set of beliefs, and that such philosophy should help people to lead happier and more productive lives. His own life was particularly productive. Through newspaper articles, popular books, and a number of debates conducted with other philosophers, such as Bertrand Russell or Arthur Lovejoy, author of The Great Chain of Being, Dewey became known to the general public in a way that few philosophers are.

⁶⁶ Like James, Dewey was a convinced Darwinist, someone who believed that science and the scientific approach needed to be incorporated into other areas of life. In particular, he believed that the discoveries of science should be adapted to the education of children. For Dewey, the start of the twentieth century was an age of ‘democracy, science and industrialism’ and this, he argued, had profound consequences for education. At that time, attitudes to children were changing fast. In 1909 the Swedish feminist Ellen Key published her book The Century of the Child

, which reflected the general view that the child had been rediscovered – rediscovered in the sense that there was a new joy in the possibilities of childhood and in the realisation that children were different from adults and from one another.⁶⁷ This seems no more than common sense to us, but in the nineteenth century, before the victory over a heavy rate of child mortality, when families were much larger and many children died, there was not – there could not be – the same investment in children, in time, in education, in emotion, as there was later. Dewey saw that this had significant consequences for teaching. Hitherto, schooling, even in America, which was in general more indulgent to children than in Europe, had been dominated by the rigid authority of the teacher, who had a concept of what an educated person should be and whose main aim was to convey to his or her pupils the idea that knowledge was the ‘contemplation of fixed verities’.⁶⁸ Dewey was one of the leaders of a movement which changed such thinking, and in two directions. The traditional idea of education, he saw, stemmed from a leisured and aristocratic society, the type of society that was disappearing fast in European societies and had never existed in America. Education now had to meet the needs of democracy. Second, and no less important, education had to reflect the fact that children were very different from one another in abilities and interests. In order for children to make the best contribution to society that they were capable of, education should be less about ‘drumming in’ hard facts which the teacher thought necessary, and more about drawing out what the individual child was capable of. In other words, pragmatism applied to education.