[MD] Royce's Evolutionary Insight

[John Carl]

Royce in reconciling the mechanistic view of the 17th century with the
evolutionary view of the 19th:


"Should evolutionary doctrines be true, the real world will not be a place
of mechanical laws and the flux of atoms; it will be a world of struggle and
conflict, of the triumph of the good, or of the abolition of evil, of the
moral importance of the world, of the transition form lower to higher
conditions... it will be a world of ideals."


Why does Royce see these implications in the truth of evolutionary
doctrines?  An evolutionary process is historical, and to appreciate it, he
claims, we must forsake that kind of temporality which confines mechanistic
explanation.  An evolutionary sequence may be a series of events which qua
series is physical -- a set of causally related conditions occurring in
space and time; but to accept this series as an historical explanation is to
emphasize unity, meaning, or significance in a way that a causal explanation
will not.  When a temporal explanation functions this way as an explanation,
when it affirms meaning or significance, our explanation takes on a moral
dimension; it will be evaluative according to Royce.



Evaluative.  Value.


Royce compares the construction of a mental life to the construction of
sound on a phonograph.  Reverse the motion of the phonograph and the same
sounds become unintelligible.  All the same information is there, but the
meaning is lost.


Analogously, imagine a physical description of human consciousness.  If we
should reverse the description, the equation differs only by the
substitution of a minus for a plus.  Nonetheless, as a conscious mind, there
will not merely be "inverted significance":


The significance of mental life is not a function of the law-governed
sequences of its states.  The world of our mental states has a history from
moment to moment, and we cannot reduce this history to sequence.  If this
dimension of mind is real, then the world has meaning; it is a place in
which moral ideals and the goals of conscious striving play a part.


"The doctrine of Evolution is the schoolmaster which teaches us to face at
last the real question of the universe.  This question is the issue between
causation and the ideals... "



This passage in Kuklick's Intellectual Biography of Royce is philosophically
similar to Pirsig's description of a chemistry professor made up of
inorganic compounds.  A mechanistic explanation does not explain the
professor.   Evolution is not thus, a mechanistic explanation.  It's a
biographical explanation.  It's a valuistic explanation.