Excerpt from The Significance of Meaning in Pragmatism and Neo-Realism: A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Arts and Literature in Candidacy for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy, Department of Philosophy

If there be anything that is now a truism it is the fact that we cannot hope to understand any movement until we know something of the circumstances and conditions under which it arose, the historical setting and the social background which gave rise to it. In thus separating ourselves from the social milieu in which we happen to be moving and putting ourselves into the situation we are trying to understand, we become sympathetic or are at least better able to approach our prob lem with a sympathetic attitude. Failure to see the other man's viewpoint together with the divine approval of what happens in a community consciousness, have been a constant source of wars and struggles in the past. Although the think ing world has long been rid of this fallacy, it is rather inter esting to note that in our attitude toward the recent war we have been as absolute and dogmatic in our judgments as peo ple of the days of St. Anselm or St. Thomas Aquinas.

Idealism has long been aware of the necessity of getting things in their proper relation, so much so in fact that it has not been satisfied in stopping with anything short of the uni verse. In attempting to analyze any given situation, in order properly to understand it, the idealist found it necessary to drag in the whole universe, so intricate is the relationship be tween things. But in so doing, he has left us in a position little, if any, better than we were with our tribal consciousness. In the last analysis, idealism has only substituted an Absolute approval for what had hitherto been communal, thus making the causes for struggle and sources for misunderstandings all the more intense.

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