Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER 9 ACTIVISM AND THE HISTORIC PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY It is evident that, for the activist, many of the historic philosophic problems will take on a different complexion from their long accustomed hue. Some of them, from his point of view, will be lengthened or foreshortened, and some of them will cease to exist altogether. In so brief an essay, however, intended in great measure to be suggestive merely, there can be no pretense of even an adequate survey, much less an exhaustive analysis, of the many questions which have monopolized the attention of philosophy at different times during its long history. To indicate certain aspects upon which the activistic attitude may have some special bearing is all that can be attempted here. Among the traditional problems the first, and perhaps the most ancient, bequeathed to us moderns already worn and dusty?yet with something of the glamour still about it of the sunlit temples of Egypt, and India, and Greece,?is that of the One and the Many. The problem has taken many different forms. With Plato and Aristotle, it was the problem of universals and particulars. With Spinoza, it wasthe problem of substance and attributes. With Hegel, it was the problem of system?of how a relation relates. It is difficult, however, to fasten fairly either of the catchwords monist or pluralist upon the activist. Since for him every conceivable thing is an activitity of some sort?since activity is the universal in which all entities participate?he may be labeled monist , especially as the attempt is seriously made to discriminate between activities in quantitative terms of activity itself. On the other hand there would seem to be for him certain irreducible differentiae between activities due, paradoxically enough, to the fact of…