Background
Drake, Durant was born on December 18, 1878 in Hartford, Connecticut, United States.
Drake, Durant was born on December 18, 1878 in Hartford, Connecticut, United States.
University of Illinois, 1911-1912. Wesleyan University, 1912-1915. Vassar College, •915-33.
Given the lead essay in the movement-forming volume Essays in Critical Realism (1920), Drake outlined the contributors’ common approach: character complexes are taken to be characters of existent outer objects, which they are when perception is veridicial. In the case of perceptual error they arc characters of mental states. The ‘monistic realism’ surrounding this conception had been outlined in his first work and was still being developed in the last. There is no legitimate distinction between psychic and material stuff: ‘Whether we call that stuff psychic or material is a mere matter of convenience’. When an organism ‘adjusts itself, however vaguely, to something or other’ conciousness appears, actualized from the potentiality of the psychic-material stuff. With respect to ethics and religion, he believed that they make common cause in support of what matters, ‘to make good prevail and banish evil’, a goal he identifies with bringing in the ‘kingdom of God’. Although beyond proof we have nothing to lose and everything to gain by believing ‘in God, the eternal power that makes for righteousness’. The difference in approach is that where traditional morality was authoritarian, the new morality rests on ‘observation of the results of conduct’, and can direct itself more effectively towards maximizing attainable happiness.