PROFESSOR URBAN ADDRESSES PHILOSOPHICAL ASSOCIATION

At" the Twenty-fifth meeting of the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association, held at Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts, during the Christmas recess, Professor W. M. Urban, of the Philosophy Department of Dartmouth, as President of the Association, delivered an address on "Progress in Philosophy in the Last Quarter Century."

Among other phases of progress in philosophic thought, Professor Urban emphasized the advance in our understanding of nature, history and of human values under the aegis of Evolution. But he also called attention to the changes in our philosophy of Evolution during the last decades. The criticism of Bergson and of the newer Emergent Evolution have banished all materialistic evolution, just as the new physics has changed the old conceptions of matter. In the light of the newer ideas of the "limits of evolution," the recent insistence, by the American League of Science, that evolution should be taught as a fact and not a theory, seemed he maintained, like a curious recrudescence of scientific dogmatism. In our amusement at the crudeness of the Fundamentalist-Modernist controversy, we should not forget that the crudeness is sometimes on both sides, and that behind it there are large and difficult questions that are felt as much by scientists as by theologians and philosophers. The reappearance of Theism among so many distinguished scientists is a sign of the times. The speaker ventured the prediction that if evolution remained fundamental in philosophic thought it would become an "idealistic" evolution.