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<h1> PRAGMATISM </h1>
<h3> A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking </h3>
<p><br/></p>
<h2> By William James </h2>
<p><br/></p>
<h4>
To the Memory of John Stuart Mill <br/> <br/> from whom I first learned
the pragmatic openness of mind <br/> and whom my fancy likes to picture as
our leader were he alive to-day.
</h4>
<p><br/><br/></p>
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<h2> Preface </h2>
<p>The lectures that follow were delivered at the Lowell Institute in Boston
in November and December, 1906, and in January, 1907, at Columbia
University, in New York. They are printed as delivered, without
developments or notes. The pragmatic movement, so-called—I do not
like the name, but apparently it is too late to change it—seems to
have rather suddenly precipitated itself out of the air. A number of
tendencies that have always existed in philosophy have all at once become
conscious of themselves collectively, and of their combined mission; and
this has occurred in so many countries, and from so many different points
of view, that much unconcerted statement has resulted. I have sought to
unify the picture as it presents itself to my own eyes, dealing in broad
strokes, and avoiding minute controversy. Much futile controversy might
have been avoided, I believe, if our critics had been willing to wait
until we got our message fairly out.</p>
<p>If my lectures interest any reader in the general subject, he will
doubtless wish to read farther. I therefore give him a few references.</p>
<p>In America, John Dewey's 'Studies in Logical Theory' are the foundation.
Read also by Dewey the articles in the Philosophical Review, vol. xv, pp.
113 and 465, in Mind, vol. xv, p. 293, and in the Journal of Philosophy,
vol. iv, p. 197.</p>
<p>Probably the best statements to begin with however, are F. C. S.
Schiller's in his 'Studies in Humanism,' especially the essays numbered i,
v, vi, vii, xviii and xix. His previous essays and in general the polemic
literature of the subject are fully referred to in his footnotes.</p>
<p>Furthermore, see G. Milhaud: le Rationnel, 1898, and the fine articles by
Le Roy in the Revue de Metaphysique, vols. 7, 8 and 9. Also articles by
Blondel and de Sailly in the Annales de Philosophie Chretienne, 4me Serie,
vols. 2 and 3. Papini announces a book on Pragmatism, in the French
language, to be published very soon.</p>
<p>To avoid one misunderstanding at least, let me say that there is no
logical connexion between pragmatism, as I understand it, and a doctrine
which I have recently set forth as 'radical empiricism.' The latter stands
on its own feet. One may entirely reject it and still be a pragmatist.</p>
<p>Harvard University, April, 1907.</p>
<p><br/><br/></p>
<hr />
<p><br/><br/></p>
<p><b>CONTENTS</b></p>
<p><SPAN href="#link2H_PREF"> Preface </SPAN></p>
<p><SPAN href="#link2H_TOC"> EXPANDED CONTENTS </SPAN></p>
<p><br/></p>
<p><SPAN href="#link2H_4_0002"> <b>PRAGMATISM</b> </SPAN></p>
<p><SPAN href="#link2H_4_0003"> Lecture I. — The Present Dilemma in
Philosophy </SPAN></p>
<p><SPAN href="#link2H_4_0004"> Lecture II. — What Pragmatism Means </SPAN></p>
<p><SPAN href="#link2H_4_0005"> Lecture III. — Some Metaphysical Problems
Pragmatically Considered </SPAN></p>
<p><SPAN href="#link2H_4_0006"> Lecture IV. — The One and the Many </SPAN></p>
<p><SPAN href="#link2H_4_0007"> Lecture V. — Pragmatism and Common Sense</SPAN></p>
<p><SPAN href="#link2H_4_0008"> Lecture VI. — Pragmatism's Conception of
Truth </SPAN></p>
<p><SPAN href="#link2H_4_0009"> Lecture VII. — Pragmatism and Humanism</SPAN></p>
<p><SPAN href="#link2H_4_0010"> Lecture VIII. — Pragmatism and Religion</SPAN></p>
<p><br/><br/></p>
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<p><SPAN name="link2H_TOC" id="link2H_TOC"> </SPAN></p>
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<div class="middle">
<p>CONTENTS</p>
Lecture I <br/> The Present Dilemma in Philosophy <br/> Chesterton quoted.
Everyone has a philosophy. Temperament is a factor in <br/> all
philosophizing. Rationalists and empiricists. The tender-minded <br/> and
the tough-minded. Most men wish both facts and religion. Empiricism <br/>
gives facts without religion. Rationalism gives religion without facts.
<br/> The layman's dilemma. The unreality in rationalistic systems.
Leibnitz <br/> on the damned, as an example. M. I. Swift on the optimism
of idealists. <br/> Pragmatism as a mediating system. An objection. Reply:
philosophies have <br/> characters like men, and are liable to as summary
judgments. Spencer as <br/> an example. <br/> Lecture II <br/> What
Pragmatism Means <br/> The squirrel. Pragmatism as a method. History of
the method. Its <br/> character and affinities. How it contrasts with
rationalism and <br/> intellectualism. A 'corridor theory.' Pragmatism as
a theory of truth, <br/> equivalent to 'humanism.' Earlier views of
mathematical, logical, and <br/> natural truth. More recent views.
Schiller's and Dewey's 'instrumental' <br/> view. The formation of new
beliefs. Older truth always has to be kept <br/> account of. Older truth
arose similarly. The 'humanistic' doctrine. <br/> Rationalistic criticisms
of it. Pragmatism as mediator between <br/> empiricism and religion.
Barrenness of transcendental idealism. How far <br/> the concept of the
Absolute must be called true. The true is the good <br/> in the way of
belief. The clash of truths. Pragmatism unstiffens <br/> discussion. <br/>
Lecture III <br/> Some Metaphysical Problems Pragmatically Considered
<br/> The problem of substance. The Eucharist. Berkeley's pragmatic
treatment <br/> of material substance. Locke's of personal identity. The
problem of <br/> materialism. Rationalistic treatment of it. Pragmatic
treatment. 'God' <br/> is no better than 'Matter' as a principle, unless
he promise more. <br/> Pragmatic comparison of the two principles. The
problem of design. <br/> 'Design' per se is barren. The question is WHAT
design. The problem of <br/> 'free-will.' Its relations to
'accountability.' Free-will a cosmological <br/> theory. The pragmatic
issue at stake in all these problems is what do <br/> the alternatives
PROMISE. <br/> Lecture IV <br/> The One and the Many <br/> Total
reflection. Philosophy seeks not only unity, but totality. <br/>
Rationalistic feeling about unity. Pragmatically considered, the world
<br/> is one in many ways. One time and space. One subject of discourse.
Its <br/> parts interact. Its oneness and manyness are co-ordinate.
Question of <br/> one origin. Generic oneness. One purpose. One story. One
knower. Value <br/> of pragmatic method. Absolute monism. Vivekananda.
Various types of <br/> union discussed. Conclusion: We must oppose
monistic dogmatism and <br/> follow empirical findings. <br/> Lecture V
<br/> Pragmatism and Common Sense <br/> Noetic pluralism. How our
knowledge grows. Earlier ways of thinking <br/> remain. Prehistoric
ancestors DISCOVERED the common sense concepts. List <br/> of them. They
came gradually into use. Space and time. 'Things.' Kinds. <br/> 'Cause'
and 'law.' Common sense one stage in mental evolution, due <br/> to
geniuses. The 'critical' stages: 1) scientific and 2) philosophic, <br/>
compared with common sense. Impossible to say which is the more 'true.'
<br/> Lecture VI <br/> Pragmatism's Conception of Truth <br/> The polemic
situation. What does agreement with reality mean? It means <br/>
verifiability. Verifiability means ability to guide us prosperously <br/>
through experience. Completed verifications seldom needful. 'Eternal'
<br/> truths. Consistency, with language, with previous truths.
Rationalist <br/> objections. Truth is a good, like health, wealth, etc.
It is expedient <br/> thinking. The past. Truth grows. Rationalist
objections. Reply to them. <br/> Lecture VII <br/> Pragmatism and Humanism
<br/> The notion of THE Truth. Schiller on 'Humanism.' Three sorts of
<br/> reality of which any new truth must take account. To 'take account'
is <br/> ambiguous. Absolutely independent reality is hard to find. The
human <br/> contribution is ubiquitous and builds out the given. Essence
of <br/> pragmatism's contrast with rationalism. Rationalism affirms a
<br/> transempirical world. Motives for this. Tough-mindedness rejects
them. A <br/> genuine alternative. Pragmatism mediates. <br/> Lecture VIII
<br/> Pragmatism and Religion <br/> Utility of the Absolute. Whitman's
poem 'To You.' Two ways of taking <br/> it. My friend's letter.
Necessities versus possibilities. 'Possibility' <br/> defined. Three views
of the world's salvation. Pragmatism is <br/> melioristic. We may create
reality. Why should anything BE? Supposed <br/> choice before creation.
The healthy and the morbid reply. The 'tender' <br/> and the 'tough' types
of religion. Pragmatism mediates. <br/></div>
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<br/>
<h1> PRAGMATISM </h1>
<p><br/><br/></p>
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<br/>
<h2> Lecture I. — The Present Dilemma in Philosophy </h2>
<p>In the preface to that admirable collection of essays of his called
'Heretics,' Mr. Chesterton writes these words: "There are some people—and
I am one of them—who think that the most practical and important
thing about a man is still his view of the universe. We think that for a
landlady considering a lodger, it is important to know his income, but
still more important to know his philosophy. We think that for a general
about to fight an enemy, it is important to know the enemy's numbers, but
still more important to know the enemy's philosophy. We think the question
is not whether the theory of the cosmos affects matters, but whether, in
the long run, anything else affects them."</p>
<p>I think with Mr. Chesterton in this matter. I know that you, ladies and
gentlemen, have a philosophy, each and all of you, and that the most
interesting and important thing about you is the way in which it
determines the perspective in your several worlds. You know the same of
me. And yet I confess to a certain tremor at the audacity of the
enterprise which I am about to begin. For the philosophy which is so
important in each of us is not a technical matter; it is our more or less
dumb sense of what life honestly and deeply means. It is only partly got
from books; it is our individual way of just seeing and feeling the total
push and pressure of the cosmos. I have no right to assume that many of
you are students of the cosmos in the class-room sense, yet here I stand
desirous of interesting you in a philosophy which to no small extent has
to be technically treated. I wish to fill you with sympathy with a
contemporaneous tendency in which I profoundly believe, and yet I have to
talk like a professor to you who are not students. Whatever universe a
professor believes in must at any rate be a universe that lends itself to
lengthy discourse. A universe definable in two sentences is something for
which the professorial intellect has no use. No faith in anything of that
cheap kind! I have heard friends and colleagues try to popularize
philosophy in this very hall, but they soon grew dry, and then technical,
and the results were only partially encouraging. So my enterprise is a
bold one. The founder of pragmatism himself recently gave a course of
lectures at the Lowell Institute with that very word in its title-flashes
of brilliant light relieved against Cimmerian darkness! None of us, I
fancy, understood ALL that he said—yet here I stand, making a very
similar venture.</p>
<p>I risk it because the very lectures I speak of DREW—they brought
good audiences. There is, it must be confessed, a curious fascination in
hearing deep things talked about, even tho neither we nor the disputants
understand them. We get the problematic thrill, we feel the presence of
the vastness. Let a controversy begin in a smoking-room anywhere, about
free-will or God's omniscience, or good and evil, and see how everyone in
the place pricks up his ears. Philosophy's results concern us all most
vitally, and philosophy's queerest arguments tickle agreeably our sense of
subtlety and ingenuity.</p>
<p>Believing in philosophy myself devoutly, and believing also that a kind of
new dawn is breaking upon us philosophers, I feel impelled, per fas aut
nefas, to try to impart to you some news of the situation.</p>
<p>Philosophy is at once the most sublime and the most trivial of human
pursuits. It works in the minutest crannies and it opens out the widest
vistas. It 'bakes no bread,' as has been said, but it can inspire our
souls with courage; and repugnant as its manners, its doubting and
challenging, its quibbling and dialectics, often are to common people, no
one of us can get along without the far-flashing beams of light it sends
over the world's perspectives. These illuminations at least, and the
contrast-effects of darkness and mystery that accompany them, give to what
it says an interest that is much more than professional.</p>
<p>The history of philosophy is to a great extent that of a certain clash of
human temperaments. Undignified as such a treatment may seem to some of my
colleagues, I shall have to take account of this clash and explain a good
many of the divergencies of philosophers by it. Of whatever temperament a
professional philosopher is, he tries when philosophizing to sink the fact
of his temperament. Temperament is no conventionally recognized reason, so
he urges impersonal reasons only for his conclusions. Yet his temperament
really gives him a stronger bias than any of his more strictly objective
premises. It loads the evidence for him one way or the other, making for a
more sentimental or a more hard-hearted view of the universe, just as this
fact or that principle would. He trusts his temperament. Wanting a
universe that suits it, he believes in any representation of the universe
that does suit it. He feels men of opposite temper to be out of key with
the world's character, and in his heart considers them incompetent and
'not in it,' in the philosophic business, even tho they may far excel him
in dialectical ability.</p>
<p>Yet in the forum he can make no claim, on the bare ground of his
temperament, to superior discernment or authority. There arises thus a
certain insincerity in our philosophic discussions: the potentest of all
our premises is never mentioned. I am sure it would contribute to
clearness if in these lectures we should break this rule and mention it,
and I accordingly feel free to do so.</p>
<p>Of course I am talking here of very positively marked men, men of radical
idiosyncracy, who have set their stamp and likeness on philosophy and
figure in its history. Plato, Locke, Hegel, Spencer, are such
temperamental thinkers. Most of us have, of course, no very definite
intellectual temperament, we are a mixture of opposite ingredients, each
one present very moderately. We hardly know our own preferences in
abstract matters; some of us are easily talked out of them, and end by
following the fashion or taking up with the beliefs of the most impressive
philosopher in our neighborhood, whoever he may be. But the one thing that
has COUNTED so far in philosophy is that a man should see things, see them
straight in his own peculiar way, and be dissatisfied with any opposite
way of seeing them. There is no reason to suppose that this strong
temperamental vision is from now onward to count no longer in the history
of man's beliefs.</p>
<p>Now the particular difference of temperament that I have in mind in making
these remarks is one that has counted in literature, art, government and
manners as well as in philosophy. In manners we find formalists and
free-and-easy persons. In government, authoritarians and anarchists. In
literature, purists or academicals, and realists. In art, classics and
romantics. You recognize these contrasts as familiar; well, in philosophy
we have a very similar contrast expressed in the pair of terms
'rationalist' and 'empiricist,' 'empiricist' meaning your lover of facts
in all their crude variety, 'rationalist' meaning your devotee to abstract
and eternal principles. No one can live an hour without both facts and
principles, so it is a difference rather of emphasis; yet it breeds
antipathies of the most pungent character between those who lay the
emphasis differently; and we shall find it extraordinarily convenient to
express a certain contrast in men's ways of taking their universe, by
talking of the 'empiricist' and of the 'rationalist' temper. These terms
make the contrast simple and massive.</p>
<p>More simple and massive than are usually the men of whom the terms are
predicated. For every sort of permutation and combination is possible in
human nature; and if I now proceed to define more fully what I have in
mind when I speak of rationalists and empiricists, by adding to each of
those titles some secondary qualifying characteristics, I beg you to
regard my conduct as to a certain extent arbitrary. I select types of
combination that nature offers very frequently, but by no means uniformly,
and I select them solely for their convenience in helping me to my
ulterior purpose of characterizing pragmatism. Historically we find the
terms 'intellectualism' and 'sensationalism' used as synonyms of
'rationalism' and 'empiricism.' Well, nature seems to combine most
frequently with intellectualism an idealistic and optimistic tendency.
Empiricists on the other hand are not uncommonly materialistic, and their
optimism is apt to be decidedly conditional and tremulous. Rationalism is
always monistic. It starts from wholes and universals, and makes much of
the unity of things. Empiricism starts from the parts, and makes of the
whole a collection-is not averse therefore to calling itself pluralistic.
Rationalism usually considers itself more religious than empiricism, but
there is much to say about this claim, so I merely mention it. It is a
true claim when the individual rationalist is what is called a man of
feeling, and when the individual empiricist prides himself on being
hard-headed. In that case the rationalist will usually also be in favor of
what is called free-will, and the empiricist will be a fatalist—I
use the terms most popularly current. The rationalist finally will be of
dogmatic temper in his affirmations, while the empiricist may be more
sceptical and open to discussion.</p>
<p>I will write these traits down in two columns. I think you will
practically recognize the two types of mental make-up that I mean if I
head the columns by the titles 'tender-minded' and 'tough-minded'
respectively.</p>
<p><br/></p>
<p>THE TENDER-MINDED</p>
<p>Rationalistic (going by 'principles'), Intellectualistic, Idealistic,
Optimistic, Religious, Free-willist, Monistic, Dogmatical.</p>
<p><br/></p>
<p>THE TOUGH-MINDED</p>
<p>Empiricist (going by 'facts'), Sensationalistic, Materialistic,
Pessimistic, Irreligious, Fatalistic, Pluralistic, Sceptical.</p>
<p><br/></p>
<p>Pray postpone for a moment the question whether the two contrasted
mixtures which I have written down are each inwardly coherent and
self-consistent or not—I shall very soon have a good deal to say on
that point. It suffices for our immediate purpose that tender-minded and
tough-minded people, characterized as I have written them down, do both
exist. Each of you probably knows some well-marked example of each type,
and you know what each example thinks of the example on the other side of
the line. They have a low opinion of each other. Their antagonism,
whenever as individuals their temperaments have been intense, has formed
in all ages a part of the philosophic atmosphere of the time. It forms a
part of the philosophic atmosphere to-day. The tough think of the tender
as sentimentalists and soft-heads. The tender feel the tough to be
unrefined, callous, or brutal. Their mutual reaction is very much like
that that takes place when Bostonian tourists mingle with a population
like that of Cripple Creek. Each type believes the other to be inferior to
itself; but disdain in the one case is mingled with amusement, in the
other it has a dash of fear.</p>
<p>Now, as I have already insisted, few of us are tender-foot Bostonians pure
and simple, and few are typical Rocky Mountain toughs, in philosophy. Most
of us have a hankering for the good things on both sides of the line.
Facts are good, of course—give us lots of facts. Principles are good—give
us plenty of principles. The world is indubitably one if you look at it in
one way, but as indubitably is it many, if you look at it in another. It
is both one and many—let us adopt a sort of pluralistic monism.
Everything of course is necessarily determined, and yet of course our
wills are free: a sort of free-will determinism is the true philosophy.
The evil of the parts is undeniable; but the whole can't be evil: so
practical pessimism may be combined with metaphysical optimism. And so
forth—your ordinary philosophic layman never being a radical, never
straightening out his system, but living vaguely in one plausible
compartment of it or another to suit the temptations of successive hours.</p>
<p>But some of us are more than mere laymen in philosophy. We are worthy of
the name of amateur athletes, and are vexed by too much inconsistency and
vacillation in our creed. We cannot preserve a good intellectual
conscience so long as we keep mixing incompatibles from opposite sides of
the line.</p>
<p>And now I come to the first positively important point which I wish to
make. Never were as many men of a decidedly empiricist proclivity in
existence as there are at the present day. Our children, one may say, are
almost born scientific. But our esteem for facts has not neutralized in us
all religiousness. It is itself almost religious. Our scientific temper is
devout. Now take a man of this type, and let him be also a philosophic
amateur, unwilling to mix a hodge-podge system after the fashion of a
common layman, and what does he find his situation to be, in this blessed
year of our Lord 1906? He wants facts; he wants science; but he also wants
a religion. And being an amateur and not an independent originator in
philosophy he naturally looks for guidance to the experts and
professionals whom he finds already in the field. A very large number of
you here present, possibly a majority of you, are amateurs of just this
sort.</p>
<p>Now what kinds of philosophy do you find actually offered to meet your
need? You find an empirical philosophy that is not religious enough, and a
religious philosophy that is not empirical enough for your purpose. If you
look to the quarter where facts are most considered you find the whole
tough-minded program in operation, and the 'conflict between science and
religion' in full blast. Either it is that Rocky Mountain tough of a
Haeckel with his materialistic monism, his ether-god and his jest at your
God as a 'gaseous vertebrate'; or it is Spencer treating the world's
history as a redistribution of matter and motion solely, and bowing
religion politely out at the front door:—she may indeed continue to
exist, but she must never show her face inside the temple. For a hundred
and fifty years past the progress of science has seemed to mean the
enlargement of the material universe and the diminution of man's
importance. The result is what one may call the growth of naturalistic or
positivistic feeling. Man is no law-giver to nature, he is an absorber.
She it is who stands firm; he it is who must accommodate himself. Let him
record truth, inhuman tho it be, and submit to it! The romantic
spontaneity and courage are gone, the vision is materialistic and
depressing. Ideals appear as inert by-products of physiology; what is
higher is explained by what is lower and treated forever as a case of
'nothing but'—nothing but something else of a quite inferior sort.
You get, in short, a materialistic universe, in which only the
tough-minded find themselves congenially at home.</p>
<p>If now, on the other hand, you turn to the religious quarter for
consolation, and take counsel of the tender-minded philosophies, what do
you find?</p>
<p>Religious philosophy in our day and generation is, among us
English-reading people, of two main types. One of these is more radical
and aggressive, the other has more the air of fighting a slow retreat. By
the more radical wing of religious philosophy I mean the so-called
transcendental idealism of the Anglo-Hegelian school, the philosophy of
such men as Green, the Cairds, Bosanquet, and Royce. This philosophy has
greatly influenced the more studious members of our protestant ministry.
It is pantheistic, and undoubtedly it has already blunted the edge of the
traditional theism in protestantism at large.</p>
<p>That theism remains, however. It is the lineal descendant, through one
stage of concession after another, of the dogmatic scholastic theism still
taught rigorously in the seminaries of the catholic church. For a long
time it used to be called among us the philosophy of the Scottish school.
It is what I meant by the philosophy that has the air of fighting a slow
retreat. Between the encroachments of the hegelians and other philosophers
of the 'Absolute,' on the one hand, and those of the scientific
evolutionists and agnostics, on the other, the men that give us this kind
of a philosophy, James Martineau, Professor Bowne, Professor Ladd and
others, must feel themselves rather tightly squeezed. Fair-minded and
candid as you like, this philosophy is not radical in temper. It is
eclectic, a thing of compromises, that seeks a modus vivendi above all
things. It accepts the facts of darwinism, the facts of cerebral
physiology, but it does nothing active or enthusiastic with them. It lacks
the victorious and aggressive note. It lacks prestige in consequence;
whereas absolutism has a certain prestige due to the more radical style of
it.</p>
<p>These two systems are what you have to choose between if you turn to the
tender-minded school. And if you are the lovers of facts I have supposed
you to be, you find the trail of the serpent of rationalism, of
intellectualism, over everything that lies on that side of the line. You
escape indeed the materialism that goes with the reigning empiricism; but
you pay for your escape by losing contact with the concrete parts of life.
The more absolutistic philosophers dwell on so high a level of abstraction
that they never even try to come down. The absolute mind which they offer
us, the mind that makes our universe by thinking it, might, for aught they
show us to the contrary, have made any one of a million other universes
just as well as this. You can deduce no single actual particular from the
notion of it. It is compatible with any state of things whatever being
true here below. And the theistic God is almost as sterile a principle.
You have to go to the world which he has created to get any inkling of his
actual character: he is the kind of god that has once for all made that
kind of a world. The God of the theistic writers lives on as purely
abstract heights as does the Absolute. Absolutism has a certain sweep and
dash about it, while the usual theism is more insipid, but both are
equally remote and vacuous. What you want is a philosophy that will not
only exercise your powers of intellectual abstraction, but that will make
some positive connexion with this actual world of finite human lives.</p>
<p>You want a system that will combine both things, the scientific loyalty to
facts and willingness to take account of them, the spirit of adaptation
and accommodation, in short, but also the old confidence in human values
and the resultant spontaneity, whether of the religious or of the romantic
type. And this is then your dilemma: you find the two parts of your
quaesitum hopelessly separated. You find empiricism with inhumanism and
irreligion; or else you find a rationalistic philosophy that indeed may
call itself religious, but that keeps out of all definite touch with
concrete facts and joys and sorrows.</p>
<p>I am not sure how many of you live close enough to philosophy to realize
fully what I mean by this last reproach, so I will dwell a little longer
on that unreality in all rationalistic systems by which your serious
believer in facts is so apt to feel repelled.</p>
<p>I wish that I had saved the first couple of pages of a thesis which a
student handed me a year or two ago. They illustrated my point so clearly
that I am sorry I cannot read them to you now. This young man, who was a
graduate of some Western college, began by saying that he had always taken
for granted that when you entered a philosophic class-room you had to open
relations with a universe entirely distinct from the one you left behind
you in the street. The two were supposed, he said, to have so little to do
with each other, that you could not possibly occupy your mind with them at
the same time. The world of concrete personal experiences to which the
street belongs is multitudinous beyond imagination, tangled, muddy,
painful and perplexed. The world to which your philosophy-professor
introduces you is simple, clean and noble. The contradictions of real life
are absent from it. Its architecture is classic. Principles of reason
trace its outlines, logical necessities cement its parts. Purity and
dignity are what it most expresses. It is a kind of marble temple shining
on a hill.</p>
<p>In point of fact it is far less an account of this actual world than a
clear addition built upon it, a classic sanctuary in which the rationalist
fancy may take refuge from the intolerably confused and gothic character
which mere facts present. It is no EXPLANATION of our concrete universe,
it is another thing altogether, a substitute for it, a remedy, a way of
escape.</p>
<p>Its temperament, if I may use the word temperament here, is utterly alien
to the temperament of existence in the concrete. REFINEMENT is what
characterizes our intellectualist philosophies. They exquisitely satisfy
that craving for a refined object of contemplation which is so powerful an
appetite of the mind. But I ask you in all seriousness to look abroad on
this colossal universe of concrete facts, on their awful bewilderments,
their surprises and cruelties, on the wildness which they show, and then
to tell me whether 'refined' is the one inevitable descriptive adjective
that springs to your lips.</p>
<p>Refinement has its place in things, true enough. But a philosophy that
breathes out nothing but refinement will never satisfy the empiricist
temper of mind. It will seem rather a monument of artificiality. So we
find men of science preferring to turn their backs on metaphysics as on
something altogether cloistered and spectral, and practical men shaking
philosophy's dust off their feet and following the call of the wild.</p>
<p>Truly there is something a little ghastly in the satisfaction with which a
pure but unreal system will fill a rationalist mind. Leibnitz was a
rationalist mind, with infinitely more interest in facts than most
rationalist minds can show. Yet if you wish for superficiality incarnate,
you have only to read that charmingly written 'Theodicee' of his, in which
he sought to justify the ways of God to man, and to prove that the world
we live in is the best of possible worlds. Let me quote a specimen of what
I mean.</p>
<p>Among other obstacles to his optimistic philosophy, it falls to Leibnitz
to consider the number of the eternally damned. That it is infinitely
greater, in our human case, than that of those saved he assumes as a
premise from the theologians, and then proceeds to argue in this way. Even
then, he says:</p>
<p>"The evil will appear as almost nothing in comparison with the good, if we
once consider the real magnitude of the City of God. Coelius Secundus
Curio has written a little book, 'De Amplitudine Regni Coelestis,' which
was reprinted not long ago. But he failed to compass the extent of the
kingdom of the heavens. The ancients had small ideas of the works of God.
... It seemed to them that only our earth had inhabitants, and even the
notion of our antipodes gave them pause. The rest of the world for them
consisted of some shining globes and a few crystalline spheres. But
to-day, whatever be the limits that we may grant or refuse to the Universe
we must recognize in it a countless number of globes, as big as ours or
bigger, which have just as much right as it has to support rational
inhabitants, tho it does not follow that these need all be men. Our earth
is only one among the six principal satellites of our sun. As all the
fixed stars are suns, one sees how small a place among visible things our
earth takes up, since it is only a satellite of one among them. Now all
these suns MAY be inhabited by none but happy creatures; and nothing
obliges us to believe that the number of damned persons is very great; for
a VERY FEW INSTANCES AND SAMPLES SUFFICE FOR THE UTILITY WHICH GOOD DRAWS
FROM EVIL. Moreover, since there is no reason to suppose that there are
stars everywhere, may there not be a great space beyond the region of the
stars? And this immense space, surrounding all this region, ... may be
replete with happiness and glory. ... What now becomes of the
consideration of our Earth and of its denizens? Does it not dwindle to
something incomparably less than a physical point, since our Earth is but
a point compared with the distance of the fixed stars. Thus the part of
the Universe which we know, being almost lost in nothingness compared with
that which is unknown to us, but which we are yet obliged to admit; and
all the evils that we know lying in this almost-nothing; it follows that
the evils may be almost-nothing in comparison with the goods that the
Universe contains."</p>
<p>Leibnitz continues elsewhere: "There is a kind of justice which aims
neither at the amendment of the criminal, nor at furnishing an example to
others, nor at the reparation of the injury. This justice is founded in
pure fitness, which finds a certain satisfaction in the expiation of a
wicked deed. The Socinians and Hobbes objected to this punitive justice,
which is properly vindictive justice and which God has reserved for
himself at many junctures. ... It is always founded in the fitness of
things, and satisfies not only the offended party, but all wise
lookers-on, even as beautiful music or a fine piece of architecture
satisfies a well-constituted mind. It is thus that the torments of the
damned continue, even tho they serve no longer to turn anyone away from
sin, and that the rewards of the blest continue, even tho they confirm no
one in good ways. The damned draw to themselves ever new penalties by
their continuing sins, and the blest attract ever fresh joys by their
unceasing progress in good. Both facts are founded on the principle of
fitness, ... for God has made all things harmonious in perfection as I
have already said."</p>
<p>Leibnitz's feeble grasp of reality is too obvious to need comment from me.
It is evident that no realistic image of the experience of a damned soul
had ever approached the portals of his mind. Nor had it occurred to him
that the smaller is the number of 'samples' of the genus 'lost-soul' whom
God throws as a sop to the eternal fitness, the more unequitably grounded
is the glory of the blest. What he gives us is a cold literary exercise,
whose cheerful substance even hell-fire does not warm.</p>
<p>And do not tell me that to show the shallowness of rationalist
philosophizing I have had to go back to a shallow wigpated age. The
optimism of present-day rationalism sounds just as shallow to the
fact-loving mind. The actual universe is a thing wide open, but
rationalism makes systems, and systems must be closed. For men in
practical life perfection is something far off and still in process of
achievement. This for rationalism is but the illusion of the finite and
relative: the absolute ground of things is a perfection eternally
complete.</p>
<p>I find a fine example of revolt against the airy and shallow optimism of
current religious philosophy in a publication of that valiant anarchistic
writer Morrison I. Swift. Mr. Swift's anarchism goes a little farther than
mine does, but I confess that I sympathize a good deal, and some of you, I
know, will sympathize heartily with his dissatisfaction with the
idealistic optimisms now in vogue. He begins his pamphlet on 'Human
Submission' with a series of city reporter's items from newspapers
(suicides, deaths from starvation and the like) as specimens of our
civilized regime. For instance:</p>
<p>"'After trudging through the snow from one end of the city to the other in
the vain hope of securing employment, and with his wife and six children
without food and ordered to leave their home in an upper east side
tenement house because of non-payment of rent, John Corcoran, a clerk,
to-day ended his life by drinking carbolic acid. Corcoran lost his
position three weeks ago through illness, and during the period of
idleness his scanty savings disappeared. Yesterday he obtained work with a
gang of city snow shovelers, but he was too weak from illness and was
forced to quit after an hour's trial with the shovel. Then the weary task
of looking for employment was again resumed. Thoroughly discouraged,
Corcoran returned to his home late last night to find his wife and
children without food and the notice of dispossession on the door.' On the
following morning he drank the poison.</p>
<p>"The records of many more such cases lie before me [Mr. Swift goes on]; an
encyclopedia might easily be filled with their kind. These few I cite as
an interpretation of the universe. 'We are aware of the presence of God in
His world,' says a writer in a recent English Review. [The very presence
of ill in the temporal order is the condition of the perfection of the
eternal order, writes Professor Royce ('The World and the Individual,' II,
385).] 'The Absolute is the richer for every discord, and for all
diversity which it embraces,' says F. H. Bradley (Appearance and Reality,
204). He means that these slain men make the universe richer, and that is
Philosophy. But while Professors Royce and Bradley and a whole host of
guileless thoroughfed thinkers are unveiling Reality and the Absolute and
explaining away evil and pain, this is the condition of the only beings
known to us anywhere in the universe with a developed consciousness of
what the universe is. What these people experience IS Reality. It gives us
an absolute phase of the universe. It is the personal experience of those
most qualified in all our circle of knowledge to HAVE experience, to tell
us WHAT is. Now, what does THINKING ABOUT the experience of these persons
come to compared with directly, personally feeling it, as they feel it?
The philosophers are dealing in shades, while those who live and feel know
truth. And the mind of mankind-not yet the mind of philosophers and of the
proprietary class-but of the great mass of the silently thinking and
feeling men, is coming to this view. They are judging the universe as they
have heretofore permitted the hierophants of religion and learning to
judge THEM. ...</p>
<p>"This Cleveland workingman, killing his children and himself [another of
the cited cases], is one of the elemental, stupendous facts of this modern
world and of this universe. It cannot be glozed over or minimized away by
all the treatises on God, and Love, and Being, helplessly existing in
their haughty monumental vacuity. This is one of the simple irreducible
elements of this world's life after millions of years of divine
opportunity and twenty centuries of Christ. It is in the moral world like
atoms or sub-atoms in the physical, primary, indestructible. And what it
blazons to man is the ... imposture of all philosophy which does not see
in such events the consummate factor of conscious experience. These facts
invincibly prove religion a nullity. Man will not give religion two
thousand centuries or twenty centuries more to try itself and waste human
time; its time is up, its probation is ended. Its own record ends it.
Mankind has not sons and eternities to spare for trying out discredited
systems...." [Footnote: Morrison I. Swift, Human Submission, Part Second,
Philadelphia, Liberty Press, 1905, pp. 4-10.]</p>
<p>Such is the reaction of an empiricist mind upon the rationalist bill of
fare. It is an absolute 'No, I thank you.' "Religion," says Mr. Swift, "is
like a sleep-walker to whom actual things are blank." And such, tho
possibly less tensely charged with feeling, is the verdict of every
seriously inquiring amateur in philosophy to-day who turns to the
philosophy-professors for the wherewithal to satisfy the fulness of his
nature's needs. Empiricist writers give him a materialism, rationalists
give him something religious, but to that religion "actual things are
blank." He becomes thus the judge of us philosophers. Tender or tough, he
finds us wanting. None of us may treat his verdicts disdainfully, for
after all, his is the typically perfect mind, the mind the sum of whose
demands is greatest, the mind whose criticisms and dissatisfactions are
fatal in the long run.</p>
<p>It is at this point that my own solution begins to appear. I offer the
oddly-named thing pragmatism as a philosophy that can satisfy both kinds
of demand. It can remain religious like the rationalisms, but at the same
time, like the empiricisms, it can preserve the richest intimacy with
facts. I hope I may be able to leave many of you with as favorable an
opinion of it as I preserve myself. Yet, as I am near the end of my hour,
I will not introduce pragmatism bodily now. I will begin with it on the
stroke of the clock next time. I prefer at the present moment to return a
little on what I have said.</p>
<p>If any of you here are professional philosophers, and some of you I know
to be such, you will doubtless have felt my discourse so far to have been
crude in an unpardonable, nay, in an almost incredible degree.
Tender-minded and tough-minded, what a barbaric disjunction! And, in
general, when philosophy is all compacted of delicate intellectualities
and subtleties and scrupulosities, and when every possible sort of
combination and transition obtains within its bounds, what a brutal
caricature and reduction of highest things to the lowest possible
expression is it to represent its field of conflict as a sort of
rough-and-tumble fight between two hostile temperaments! What a childishly
external view! And again, how stupid it is to treat the abstractness of
rationalist systems as a crime, and to damn them because they offer
themselves as sanctuaries and places of escape, rather than as
prolongations of the world of facts. Are not all our theories just
remedies and places of escape? And, if philosophy is to be religious, how
can she be anything else than a place of escape from the crassness of
reality's surface? What better thing can she do than raise us out of our
animal senses and show us another and a nobler home for our minds in that
great framework of ideal principles subtending all reality, which the
intellect divines? How can principles and general views ever be anything
but abstract outlines? Was Cologne cathedral built without an architect's
plan on paper? Is refinement in itself an abomination? Is concrete
rudeness the only thing that's true?</p>
<p>Believe me, I feel the full force of the indictment. The picture I have
given is indeed monstrously over-simplified and rude. But like all
abstractions, it will prove to have its use. If philosophers can treat the
life of the universe abstractly, they must not complain of an abstract
treatment of the life of philosophy itself. In point of fact the picture I
have given is, however coarse and sketchy, literally true. Temperaments
with their cravings and refusals do determine men in their philosophies,
and always will. The details of systems may be reasoned out piecemeal, and
when the student is working at a system, he may often forget the forest
for the single tree. But when the labor is accomplished, the mind always
performs its big summarizing act, and the system forthwith stands over
against one like a living thing, with that strange simple note of
individuality which haunts our memory, like the wraith of the man, when a
friend or enemy of ours is dead.</p>
<p>Not only Walt Whitman could write "who touches this book touches a man."
The books of all the great philosophers are like so many men. Our sense of
an essential personal flavor in each one of them, typical but
indescribable, is the finest fruit of our own accomplished philosophic
education. What the system pretends to be is a picture of the great
universe of God. What it is—and oh so flagrantly!—is the
revelation of how intensely odd the personal flavor of some fellow
creature is. Once reduced to these terms (and all our philosophies get
reduced to them in minds made critical by learning) our commerce with the
systems reverts to the informal, to the instinctive human reaction of
satisfaction or dislike. We grow as peremptory in our rejection or
admission, as when a person presents himself as a candidate for our favor;
our verdicts are couched in as simple adjectives of praise or dispraise.
We measure the total character of the universe as we feel it, against the
flavor of the philosophy proffered us, and one word is enough.</p>
<p>"Statt der lebendigen Natur," we say, "da Gott die Menschen schuf hinein"—that
nebulous concoction, that wooden, that straight-laced thing, that crabbed
artificiality, that musty schoolroom product, that sick man's dream! Away
with it. Away with all of them! Impossible! Impossible!</p>
<p>Our work over the details of his system is indeed what gives us our
resultant impression of the philosopher, but it is on the resultant
impression itself that we react. Expertness in philosophy is measured by
the definiteness of our summarizing reactions, by the immediate perceptive
epithet with which the expert hits such complex objects off. But great
expertness is not necessary for the epithet to come. Few people have
definitely articulated philosophies of their own. But almost everyone has
his own peculiar sense of a certain total character in the universe, and
of the inadequacy fully to match it of the peculiar systems that he knows.
They don't just cover HIS world. One will be too dapper, another too
pedantic, a third too much of a job-lot of opinions, a fourth too morbid,
and a fifth too artificial, or what not. At any rate he and we know
offhand that such philosophies are out of plumb and out of key and out of
'whack,' and have no business to speak up in the universe's name. Plato,
Locke, Spinoza, Mill, Caird, Hegel—I prudently avoid names nearer
home!—I am sure that to many of you, my hearers, these names are
little more than reminders of as many curious personal ways of falling
short. It would be an obvious absurdity if such ways of taking the
universe were actually true. We philosophers have to reckon with such
feelings on your part. In the last resort, I repeat, it will be by them
that all our philosophies shall ultimately be judged. The finally
victorious way of looking at things will be the most completely IMPRESSIVE
way to the normal run of minds.</p>
<p>One word more—namely about philosophies necessarily being abstract
outlines. There are outlines and outlines, outlines of buildings that are
FAT, conceived in the cube by their planner, and outlines of buildings
invented flat on paper, with the aid of ruler and compass. These remain
skinny and emaciated even when set up in stone and mortar, and the outline
already suggests that result. An outline in itself is meagre, truly, but
it does not necessarily suggest a meagre thing. It is the essential
meagreness of WHAT IS SUGGESTED by the usual rationalistic philosophies
that moves empiricists to their gesture of rejection. The case of Herbert
Spencer's system is much to the point here. Rationalists feel his fearful
array of insufficiencies. His dry schoolmaster temperament, the
hurdy-gurdy monotony of him, his preference for cheap makeshifts in
argument, his lack of education even in mechanical principles, and in
general the vagueness of all his fundamental ideas, his whole system
wooden, as if knocked together out of cracked hemlock boards—and yet
the half of England wants to bury him in Westminster Abbey.</p>
<p>Why? Why does Spencer call out so much reverence in spite of his weakness
in rationalistic eyes? Why should so many educated men who feel that
weakness, you and I perhaps, wish to see him in the Abbey notwithstanding?</p>
<p>Simply because we feel his heart to be IN THE RIGHT PLACE philosophically.
His principles may be all skin and bone, but at any rate his books try to
mould themselves upon the particular shape of this, particular world's
carcase. The noise of facts resounds through all his chapters, the
citations of fact never cease, he emphasizes facts, turns his face towards
their quarter; and that is enough. It means the right kind of thing for
the empiricist mind.</p>
<p>The pragmatistic philosophy of which I hope to begin talking in my next
lecture preserves as cordial a relation with facts, and, unlike Spencer's
philosophy, it neither begins nor ends by turning positive religious
constructions out of doors—it treats them cordially as well.</p>
<p>I hope I may lead you to find it just the mediating way of thinking that
you require.</p>
<p><br/><br/></p>
<hr />
<p><SPAN name="link2H_4_0004" id="link2H_4_0004"> </SPAN></p>
<br/>
<h2> Lecture II. — What Pragmatism Means </h2>
<p>Some years ago, being with a camping party in the mountains, I returned
from a solitary ramble to find everyone engaged in a ferocious
metaphysical dispute. The corpus of the dispute was a squirrel—a
live squirrel supposed to be clinging to one side of a tree-trunk; while
over against the tree's opposite side a human being was imagined to stand.
This human witness tries to get sight of the squirrel by moving rapidly
round the tree, but no matter how fast he goes, the squirrel moves as fast
in the opposite direction, and always keeps the tree between himself and
the man, so that never a glimpse of him is caught. The resultant
metaphysical problem now is this: DOES THE MAN GO ROUND THE SQUIRREL OR
NOT? He goes round the tree, sure enough, and the squirrel is on the tree;
but does he go round the squirrel? In the unlimited leisure of the
wilderness, discussion had been worn threadbare. Everyone had taken sides,
and was obstinate; and the numbers on both sides were even. Each side,
when I appeared, therefore appealed to me to make it a majority. Mindful
of the scholastic adage that whenever you meet a contradiction you must
make a distinction, I immediately sought and found one, as follows: "Which
party is right," I said, "depends on what you PRACTICALLY MEAN by 'going
round' the squirrel. If you mean passing from the north of him to the
east, then to the south, then to the west, and then to the north of him
again, obviously the man does go round him, for he occupies these
successive positions. But if on the contrary you mean being first in front
of him, then on the right of him, then behind him, then on his left, and
finally in front again, it is quite as obvious that the man fails to go
round him, for by the compensating movements the squirrel makes, he keeps
his belly turned towards the man all the time, and his back turned away.
Make the distinction, and there is no occasion for any farther dispute.
You are both right and both wrong according as you conceive the verb 'to
go round' in one practical fashion or the other."</p>
<p>Altho one or two of the hotter disputants called my speech a shuffling
evasion, saying they wanted no quibbling or scholastic hair-splitting, but
meant just plain honest English 'round,' the majority seemed to think that
the distinction had assuaged the dispute.</p>
<p>I tell this trivial anecdote because it is a peculiarly simple example of
what I wish now to speak of as THE PRAGMATIC METHOD. The pragmatic method
is primarily a method of settling metaphysical disputes that otherwise
might be interminable. Is the world one or many?—fated or free?—material
or spiritual?—here are notions either of which may or may not hold
good of the world; and disputes over such notions are unending. The
pragmatic method in such cases is to try to interpret each notion by
tracing its respective practical consequences. What difference would it
practically make to anyone if this notion rather than that notion were
true? If no practical difference whatever can be traced, then the
alternatives mean practically the same thing, and all dispute is idle.
Whenever a dispute is serious, we ought to be able to show some practical
difference that must follow from one side or the other's being right.</p>
<p>A glance at the history of the idea will show you still better what
pragmatism means. The term is derived from the same Greek word [pi rho
alpha gamma mu alpha], meaning action, from which our words 'practice' and
'practical' come. It was first introduced into philosophy by Mr. Charles
Peirce in 1878. In an article entitled 'How to Make Our Ideas Clear,' in
the 'Popular Science Monthly' for January of that year [Footnote:
Translated in the Revue Philosophique for January, 1879 (vol. vii).] Mr.
Peirce, after pointing out that our beliefs are really rules for action,
said that to develope a thought's meaning, we need only determine what
conduct it is fitted to produce: that conduct is for us its sole
significance. And the tangible fact at the root of all our
thought-distinctions, however subtle, is that there is no one of them so
fine as to consist in anything but a possible difference of practice. To
attain perfect clearness in our thoughts of an object, then, we need only
consider what conceivable effects of a practical kind the object may
involve—what sensations we are to expect from it, and what reactions
we must prepare. Our conception of these effects, whether immediate or
remote, is then for us the whole of our conception of the object, so far
as that conception has positive significance at all.</p>
<p>This is the principle of Peirce, the principle of pragmatism. It lay
entirely unnoticed by anyone for twenty years, until I, in an address
before Professor Howison's philosophical union at the university of
California, brought it forward again and made a special application of it
to religion. By that date (1898) the times seemed ripe for its reception.
The word 'pragmatism' spread, and at present it fairly spots the pages of
the philosophic journals. On all hands we find the 'pragmatic movement'
spoken of, sometimes with respect, sometimes with contumely, seldom with
clear understanding. It is evident that the term applies itself
conveniently to a number of tendencies that hitherto have lacked a
collective name, and that it has 'come to stay.'</p>
<p>To take in the importance of Peirce's principle, one must get accustomed
to applying it to concrete cases. I found a few years ago that Ostwald,
the illustrious Leipzig chemist, had been making perfectly distinct use of
the principle of pragmatism in his lectures on the philosophy of science,
tho he had not called it by that name.</p>
<p>"All realities influence our practice," he wrote me, "and that influence
is their meaning for us. I am accustomed to put questions to my classes in
this way: In what respects would the world be different if this
alternative or that were true? If I can find nothing that would become
different, then the alternative has no sense."</p>
<p>That is, the rival views mean practically the same thing, and meaning,
other than practical, there is for us none. Ostwald in a published lecture
gives this example of what he means. Chemists have long wrangled over the
inner constitution of certain bodies called 'tautomerous.' Their
properties seemed equally consistent with the notion that an instable
hydrogen atom oscillates inside of them, or that they are instable
mixtures of two bodies. Controversy raged; but never was decided. "It
would never have begun," says Ostwald, "if the combatants had asked
themselves what particular experimental fact could have been made
different by one or the other view being correct. For it would then have
appeared that no difference of fact could possibly ensue; and the quarrel
was as unreal as if, theorizing in primitive times about the raising of
dough by yeast, one party should have invoked a 'brownie,' while another
insisted on an 'elf' as the true cause of the phenomenon." [Footnote:
'Theorie und Praxis,' Zeitsch. des Oesterreichischen Ingenieur u.
Architecten-Vereines, 1905, Nr. 4 u. 6. I find a still more radical
pragmatism than Ostwald's in an address by Professor W. S. Franklin: "I
think that the sickliest notion of physics, even if a student gets it, is
that it is 'the science of masses, molecules and the ether.' And I think
that the healthiest notion, even if a student does not wholly get it, is
that physics is the science of the ways of taking hold of bodies and
pushing them!" (Science, January 2, 1903.)]</p>
<p>It is astonishing to see how many philosophical disputes collapse into
insignificance the moment you subject them to this simple test of tracing
a concrete consequence. There can BE no difference any-where that doesn't
MAKE a difference elsewhere—no difference in abstract truth that
doesn't express itself in a difference in concrete fact and in conduct
consequent upon that fact, imposed on somebody, somehow, somewhere and
somewhen. The whole function of philosophy ought to be to find out what
definite difference it will make to you and me, at definite instants of
our life, if this world-formula or that world-formula be the true one.</p>
<p>There is absolutely nothing new in the pragmatic method. Socrates was an
adept at it. Aristotle used it methodically. Locke, Berkeley and Hume made
momentous contributions to truth by its means. Shadworth Hodgson keeps
insisting that realities are only what they are 'known-as.' But these
forerunners of pragmatism used it in fragments: they were preluders only.
Not until in our time has it generalized itself, become conscious of a
universal mission, pretended to a conquering destiny. I believe in that
destiny, and I hope I may end by inspiring you with my belief.</p>
<p>Pragmatism represents a perfectly familiar attitude in philosophy, the
empiricist attitude, but it represents it, as it seems to me, both in a
more radical and in a less objectionable form than it has ever yet
assumed. A pragmatist turns his back resolutely and once for all upon a
lot of inveterate habits dear to professional philosophers. He turns away
from abstraction and insufficiency, from verbal solutions, from bad a
priori reasons, from fixed principles, closed systems, and pretended
absolutes and origins. He turns towards concreteness and adequacy, towards
facts, towards action, and towards power. That means the empiricist temper
regnant, and the rationalist temper sincerely given up. It means the open
air and possibilities of nature, as against dogma, artificiality and the
pretence of finality in truth.</p>
<p>At the same time it does not stand for any special results. It is a method
only. But the general triumph of that method would mean an enormous change
in what I called in my last lecture the 'temperament' of philosophy.
Teachers of the ultra-rationalistic type would be frozen out, much as the
courtier type is frozen out in republics, as the ultramontane type of
priest is frozen out in protestant lands. Science and metaphysics would
come much nearer together, would in fact work absolutely hand in hand.</p>
<p>Metaphysics has usually followed a very primitive kind of quest. You know
how men have always hankered after unlawful magic, and you know what a
great part, in magic, WORDS have always played. If you have his name, or
the formula of incantation that binds him, you can control the spirit,
genie, afrite, or whatever the power may be. Solomon knew the names of all
the spirits, and having their names, he held them subject to his will. So
the universe has always appeared to the natural mind as a kind of enigma,
of which the key must be sought in the shape of some illuminating or
power-bringing word or name. That word names the universe's PRINCIPLE, and
to possess it is, after a fashion, to possess the universe itself. 'God,'
'Matter,' 'Reason,' 'the Absolute,' 'Energy,' are so many solving names.
You can rest when you have them. You are at the end of your metaphysical
quest.</p>
<p>But if you follow the pragmatic method, you cannot look on any such word
as closing your quest. You must bring out of each word its practical
cash-value, set it at work within the stream of your experience. It
appears less as a solution, then, than as a program for more work, and
more particularly as an indication of the ways in which existing realities
may be CHANGED.</p>
<p>THEORIES THUS BECOME INSTRUMENTS, NOT ANSWERS TO ENIGMAS, IN WHICH WE CAN
REST. We don't lie back upon them, we move forward, and, on occasion, make
nature over again by their aid. Pragmatism unstiffens all our theories,
limbers them up and sets each one at work. Being nothing essentially new,
it harmonizes with many ancient philosophic tendencies. It agrees with
nominalism for instance, in always appealing to particulars; with
utilitarianism in emphasizing practical aspects; with positivism in its
disdain for verbal solutions, useless questions, and metaphysical
abstractions.</p>
<p>All these, you see, are ANTI-INTELLECTUALIST tendencies. Against
rationalism as a pretension and a method, pragmatism is fully armed and
militant. But, at the outset, at least, it stands for no particular
results. It has no dogmas, and no doctrines save its method. As the young
Italian pragmatist Papini has well said, it lies in the midst of our
theories, like a corridor in a hotel. Innumerable chambers open out of it.
In one you may find a man writing an atheistic volume; in the next someone
on his knees praying for faith and strength; in a third a chemist
investigating a body's properties. In a fourth a system of idealistic
metaphysics is being excogitated; in a fifth the impossibility of
metaphysics is being shown. But they all own the corridor, and all must
pass through it if they want a practicable way of getting into or out of
their respective rooms.</p>
<p>No particular results then, so far, but only an attitude of orientation,
is what the pragmatic method means. THE ATTITUDE OF LOOKING AWAY FROM
FIRST THINGS, PRINCIPLES, 'CATEGORIES,' SUPPOSED NECESSITIES; AND OF
LOOKING TOWARDS LAST THINGS, FRUITS, CONSEQUENCES, FACTS.</p>
<p>So much for the pragmatic method! You may say that I have been praising it
rather than explaining it to you, but I shall presently explain it
abundantly enough by showing how it works on some familiar problems.
Meanwhile the word pragmatism has come to be used in a still wider sense,
as meaning also a certain theory of TRUTH. I mean to give a whole lecture
to the statement of that theory, after first paving the way, so I can be
very brief now. But brevity is hard to follow, so I ask for your redoubled
attention for a quarter of an hour. If much remains obscure, I hope to
make it clearer in the later lectures.</p>
<p>One of the most successfully cultivated branches of philosophy in our time
is what is called inductive logic, the study of the conditions under which
our sciences have evolved. Writers on this subject have begun to show a
singular unanimity as to what the laws of nature and elements of fact
mean, when formulated by mathematicians, physicists and chemists. When the
first mathematical, logical and natural uniformities, the first LAWS, were
discovered, men were so carried away by the clearness, beauty and
simplification that resulted, that they believed themselves to have
deciphered authentically the eternal thoughts of the Almighty. His mind
also thundered and reverberated in syllogisms. He also thought in conic
sections, squares and roots and ratios, and geometrized like Euclid. He
made Kepler's laws for the planets to follow; he made velocity increase
proportionally to the time in falling bodies; he made the law of the sines
for light to obey when refracted; he established the classes, orders,
families and genera of plants and animals, and fixed the distances between
them. He thought the archetypes of all things, and devised their
variations; and when we rediscover any one of these his wondrous
institutions, we seize his mind in its very literal intention.</p>
<p>But as the sciences have developed farther, the notion has gained ground
that most, perhaps all, of our laws are only approximations. The laws
themselves, moreover, have grown so numerous that there is no counting
them; and so many rival formulations are proposed in all the branches of
science that investigators have become accustomed to the notion that no
theory is absolutely a transcript of reality, but that any one of them may
from some point of view be useful. Their great use is to summarize old
facts and to lead to new ones. They are only a man-made language, a
conceptual shorthand, as someone calls them, in which we write our reports
of nature; and languages, as is well known, tolerate much choice of
expression and many dialects.</p>
<p>Thus human arbitrariness has driven divine necessity from scientific
logic. If I mention the names of Sigwart, Mach, Ostwald, Pearson, Milhaud,
Poincare, Duhem, Ruyssen, those of you who are students will easily
identify the tendency I speak of, and will think of additional names.</p>
<p>Riding now on the front of this wave of scientific logic Messrs. Schiller
and Dewey appear with their pragmatistic account of what truth everywhere
signifies. Everywhere, these teachers say, 'truth' in our ideas and
beliefs means the same thing that it means in science. It means, they say,
nothing but this, THAT IDEAS (WHICH THEMSELVES ARE BUT PARTS OF OUR
EXPERIENCE) BECOME TRUE JUST IN SO FAR AS THEY HELP US TO GET INTO
SATISFACTORY RELATION WITH OTHER PARTS OF OUR EXPERIENCE, to summarize
them and get about among them by conceptual short-cuts instead of
following the interminable succession of particular phenomena. Any idea
upon which we can ride, so to speak; any idea that will carry us
prosperously from any one part of our experience to any other part,
linking things satisfactorily, working securely, simplifying, saving
labor; is true for just so much, true in so far forth, true
INSTRUMENTALLY. This is the 'instrumental' view of truth taught so
successfully at Chicago, the view that truth in our ideas means their
power to 'work,' promulgated so brilliantly at Oxford.</p>
<p>Messrs. Dewey, Schiller and their allies, in reaching this general
conception of all truth, have only followed the example of geologists,
biologists and philologists. In the establishment of these other sciences,
the successful stroke was always to take some simple process actually
observable in operation—as denudation by weather, say, or variation
from parental type, or change of dialect by incorporation of new words and
pronunciations—and then to generalize it, making it apply to all
times, and produce great results by summating its effects through the
ages.</p>
<p>The observable process which Schiller and Dewey particularly singled out
for generalization is the familiar one by which any individual settles
into NEW OPINIONS. The process here is always the same. The individual has
a stock of old opinions already, but he meets a new experience that puts
them to a strain. Somebody contradicts them; or in a reflective moment he
discovers that they contradict each other; or he hears of facts with which
they are incompatible; or desires arise in him which they cease to
satisfy. The result is an inward trouble to which his mind till then had
been a stranger, and from which he seeks to escape by modifying his
previous mass of opinions. He saves as much of it as he can, for in this
matter of belief we are all extreme conservatives. So he tries to change
first this opinion, and then that (for they resist change very variously),
until at last some new idea comes up which he can graft upon the ancient
stock with a minimum of disturbance of the latter, some idea that mediates
between the stock and the new experience and runs them into one another
most felicitously and expediently.</p>
<p>This new idea is then adopted as the true one. It preserves the older
stock of truths with a minimum of modification, stretching them just
enough to make them admit the novelty, but conceiving that in ways as
familiar as the case leaves possible. An outree explanation, violating all
our preconceptions, would never pass for a true account of a novelty. We
should scratch round industriously till we found something less excentric.
The most violent revolutions in an individual's beliefs leave most of his
old order standing. Time and space, cause and effect, nature and history,
and one's own biography remain untouched. New truth is always a
go-between, a smoother-over of transitions. It marries old opinion to new
fact so as ever to show a minimum of jolt, a maximum of continuity. We
hold a theory true just in proportion to its success in solving this
'problem of maxima and minima.' But success in solving this problem is
eminently a matter of approximation. We say this theory solves it on the
whole more satisfactorily than that theory; but that means more
satisfactorily to ourselves, and individuals will emphasize their points
of satisfaction differently. To a certain degree, therefore, everything
here is plastic.</p>
<p>The point I now urge you to observe particularly is the part played by the
older truths. Failure to take account of it is the source of much of the
unjust criticism leveled against pragmatism. Their influence is absolutely
controlling. Loyalty to them is the first principle—in most cases it
is the only principle; for by far the most usual way of handling phenomena
so novel that they would make for a serious rearrangement of our
preconceptions is to ignore them altogether, or to abuse those who bear
witness for them.</p>
<p>You doubtless wish examples of this process of truth's growth, and the
only trouble is their superabundance. The simplest case of new truth is of
course the mere numerical addition of new kinds of facts, or of new single
facts of old kinds, to our experience—an addition that involves no
alteration in the old beliefs. Day follows day, and its contents are
simply added. The new contents themselves are not true, they simply COME
and ARE. Truth is what we say about them, and when we say that they have
come, truth is satisfied by the plain additive formula.</p>
<p>But often the day's contents oblige a rearrangement. If I should now utter
piercing shrieks and act like a maniac on this platform, it would make
many of you revise your ideas as to the probable worth of my philosophy.
'Radium' came the other day as part of the day's content, and seemed for a
moment to contradict our ideas of the whole order of nature, that order
having come to be identified with what is called the conservation of
energy. The mere sight of radium paying heat away indefinitely out of its
own pocket seemed to violate that conservation. What to think? If the
radiations from it were nothing but an escape of unsuspected 'potential'
energy, pre-existent inside of the atoms, the principle of conservation
would be saved. The discovery of 'helium' as the radiation's outcome,
opened a way to this belief. So Ramsay's view is generally held to be
true, because, altho it extends our old ideas of energy, it causes a
minimum of alteration in their nature.</p>
<p>I need not multiply instances. A new opinion counts as 'true' just in
proportion as it gratifies the individual's desire to assimilate the novel
in his experience to his beliefs in stock. It must both lean on old truth
and grasp new fact; and its success (as I said a moment ago) in doing
this, is a matter for the individual's appreciation. When old truth grows,
then, by new truth's addition, it is for subjective reasons. We are in the
process and obey the reasons. That new idea is truest which performs most
felicitously its function of satisfying our double urgency. It makes
itself true, gets itself classed as true, by the way it works; grafting
itself then upon the ancient body of truth, which thus grows much as a
tree grows by the activity of a new layer of cambium.</p>
<p>Now Dewey and Schiller proceed to generalize this observation and to apply
it to the most ancient parts of truth. They also once were plastic. They
also were called true for human reasons. They also mediated between still
earlier truths and what in those days were novel observations. Purely
objective truth, truth in whose establishment the function of giving human
satisfaction in marrying previous parts of experience with newer parts
played no role whatever, is nowhere to be found. The reasons why we call
things true is the reason why they ARE true, for 'to be true' MEANS only
to perform this marriage-function.</p>
<p>The trail of the human serpent is thus over everything. Truth independent;
truth that we FIND merely; truth no longer malleable to human need; truth
incorrigible, in a word; such truth exists indeed superabundantly—or
is supposed to exist by rationalistically minded thinkers; but then it
means only the dead heart of the living tree, and its being there means
only that truth also has its paleontology and its 'prescription,' and may
grow stiff with years of veteran service and petrified in men's regard by
sheer antiquity. But how plastic even the oldest truths nevertheless
really are has been vividly shown in our day by the transformation of
logical and mathematical ideas, a transformation which seems even to be
invading physics. The ancient formulas are reinterpreted as special
expressions of much wider principles, principles that our ancestors never
got a glimpse of in their present shape and formulation.</p>
<p>Mr. Schiller still gives to all this view of truth the name of 'Humanism,'
but, for this doctrine too, the name of pragmatism seems fairly to be in
the ascendant, so I will treat it under the name of pragmatism in these
lectures.</p>
<p>Such then would be the scope of pragmatism—first, a method; and
second, a genetic theory of what is meant by truth. And these two things
must be our future topics.</p>
<p>What I have said of the theory of truth will, I am sure, have appeared
obscure and unsatisfactory to most of you by reason of us brevity. I shall
make amends for that hereafter. In a lecture on 'common sense' I shall try
to show what I mean by truths grown petrified by antiquity. In another
lecture I shall expatiate on the idea that our thoughts become true in
proportion as they successfully exert their go-between function. In a
third I shall show how hard it is to discriminate subjective from
objective factors in Truth's development. You may not follow me wholly in
these lectures; and if you do, you may not wholly agree with me. But you
will, I know, regard me at least as serious, and treat my effort with
respectful consideration.</p>
<p>You will probably be surprised to learn, then, that Messrs. Schiller's and
Dewey's theories have suffered a hailstorm of contempt and ridicule. All
rationalism has risen against them. In influential quarters Mr. Schiller,
in particular, has been treated like an impudent schoolboy who deserves a
spanking. I should not mention this, but for the fact that it throws so
much sidelight upon that rationalistic temper to which I have opposed the
temper of pragmatism. Pragmatism is uncomfortable away from facts.
Rationalism is comfortable only in the presence of abstractions. This
pragmatist talk about truths in the plural, about their utility and
satisfactoriness, about the success with which they 'work,' etc., suggests
to the typical intellectualist mind a sort of coarse lame second-rate
makeshift article of truth. Such truths are not real truth. Such tests are
merely subjective. As against this, objective truth must be something
non-utilitarian, haughty, refined, remote, august, exalted. It must be an
absolute correspondence of our thoughts with an equally absolute reality.
It must be what we OUGHT to think, unconditionally. The conditioned ways
in which we DO think are so much irrelevance and matter for psychology.
Down with psychology, up with logic, in all this question!</p>
<p>See the exquisite contrast of the types of mind! The pragmatist clings to
facts and concreteness, observes truth at its work in particular cases,
and generalizes. Truth, for him, becomes a class-name for all sorts of
definite working-values in experience. For the rationalist it remains a
pure abstraction, to the bare name of which we must defer. When the
pragmatist undertakes to show in detail just WHY we must defer, the
rationalist is unable to recognize the concretes from which his own
abstraction is taken. He accuses us of DENYING truth; whereas we have only
sought to trace exactly why people follow it and always ought to follow
it. Your typical ultra-abstractionist fairly shudders at concreteness:
other things equal, he positively prefers the pale and spectral. If the
two universes were offered, he would always choose the skinny outline
rather than the rich thicket of reality. It is so much purer, clearer,
nobler.</p>
<p>I hope that as these lectures go on, the concreteness and closeness to
facts of the pragmatism which they advocate may be what approves itself to
you as its most satisfactory peculiarity. It only follows here the example
of the sister-sciences, interpreting the unobserved by the observed. It
brings old and new harmoniously together. It converts the absolutely empty
notion of a static relation of 'correspondence' (what that may mean we
must ask later) between our minds and reality, into that of a rich and
active commerce (that anyone may follow in detail and understand) between
particular thoughts of ours, and the great universe of other experiences
in which they play their parts and have their uses.</p>
<p>But enough of this at present? The justification of what I say must be
postponed. I wish now to add a word in further explanation of the claim I
made at our last meeting, that pragmatism may be a happy harmonizer of
empiricist ways of thinking, with the more religious demands of human
beings.</p>
<p>Men who are strongly of the fact-loving temperament, you may remember me
to have said, are liable to be kept at a distance by the small sympathy
with facts which that philosophy from the present-day fashion of idealism
offers them. It is far too intellectualistic. Old fashioned theism was bad
enough, with its notion of God as an exalted monarch, made up of a lot of
unintelligible or preposterous 'attributes'; but, so long as it held
strongly by the argument from design, it kept some touch with concrete
realities. Since, however, darwinism has once for all displaced design
from the minds of the 'scientific,' theism has lost that foothold; and
some kind of an immanent or pantheistic deity working IN things rather
than above them is, if any, the kind recommended to our contemporary
imagination. Aspirants to a philosophic religion turn, as a rule, more
hopefully nowadays towards idealistic pantheism than towards the older
dualistic theism, in spite of the fact that the latter still counts able
defenders.</p>
<p>But, as I said in my first lecture, the brand of pantheism offered is hard
for them to assimilate if they are lovers of facts, or empirically minded.
It is the absolutistic brand, spurning the dust and reared upon pure
logic. It keeps no connexion whatever with concreteness. Affirming the
Absolute Mind, which is its substitute for God, to be the rational
presupposition of all particulars of fact, whatever they may be, it
remains supremely indifferent to what the particular facts in our world
actually are. Be they what they may, the Absolute will father them. Like
the sick lion in Esop's fable, all footprints lead into his den, but nulla
vestigia retrorsum. You cannot redescend into the world of particulars by
the Absolute's aid, or deduce any necessary consequences of detail
important for your life from your idea of his nature. He gives you indeed
the assurance that all is well with Him, and for his eternal way of
thinking; but thereupon he leaves you to be finitely saved by your own
temporal devices.</p>
<p>Far be it from me to deny the majesty of this conception, or its capacity
to yield religious comfort to a most respectable class of minds. But from
the human point of view, no one can pretend that it doesn't suffer from
the faults of remoteness and abstractness. It is eminently a product of
what I have ventured to call the rationalistic temper. It disdains
empiricism's needs. It substitutes a pallid outline for the real world's
richness. It is dapper; it is noble in the bad sense, in the sense in
which to be noble is to be inapt for humble service. In this real world of
sweat and dirt, it seems to me that when a view of things is 'noble,' that
ought to count as a presumption against its truth, and as a philosophic
disqualification. The prince of darkness may be a gentleman, as we are
told he is, but whatever the God of earth and heaven is, he can surely be
no gentleman. His menial services are needed in the dust of our human
trials, even more than his dignity is needed in the empyrean.</p>
<p>Now pragmatism, devoted tho she be to facts, has no such materialistic
bias as ordinary empiricism labors under. Moreover, she has no objection
whatever to the realizing of abstractions, so long as you get about among
particulars with their aid and they actually carry you somewhere.
Interested in no conclusions but those which our minds and our experiences
work out together, she has no a priori prejudices against theology. IF
THEOLOGICAL IDEAS PROVE TO HAVE A VALUE FOR CONCRETE LIFE, THEY WILL BE
TRUE, FOR PRAGMATISM, IN THE SENSE OF BEING GOOD FOR SO MUCH. FOR HOW MUCH
MORE THEY ARE TRUE, WILL DEPEND ENTIRELY ON THEIR RELATIONS TO THE OTHER
TRUTHS THAT ALSO HAVE TO BE ACKNOWLEDGED.</p>
<p>What I said just now about the Absolute of transcendental idealism is a
case in point. First, I called it majestic and said it yielded religious
comfort to a class of minds, and then I accused it of remoteness and
sterility. But so far as it affords such comfort, it surely is not
sterile; it has that amount of value; it performs a concrete function. As
a good pragmatist, I myself ought to call the Absolute true 'in so far
forth,' then; and I unhesitatingly now do so.</p>
<p>But what does TRUE IN SO FAR FORTH mean in this case? To answer, we need
only apply the pragmatic method. What do believers in the Absolute mean by
saying that their belief affords them comfort? They mean that since in the
Absolute finite evil is 'overruled' already, we may, therefore, whenever
we wish, treat the temporal as if it were potentially the eternal, be sure
that we can trust its outcome, and, without sin, dismiss our fear and drop
the worry of our finite responsibility. In short, they mean that we have a
right ever and anon to take a moral holiday, to let the world wag in its
own way, feeling that its issues are in better hands than ours and are
none of our business.</p>
<p>The universe is a system of which the individual members may relax their
anxieties occasionally, in which the don't-care mood is also right for
men, and moral holidays in order—that, if I mistake not, is part, at
least, of what the Absolute is 'known-as,' that is the great difference in
our particular experiences which his being true makes for us, that is part
of his cash-value when he is pragmatically interpreted. Farther than that
the ordinary lay-reader in philosophy who thinks favorably of absolute
idealism does not venture to sharpen his conceptions. He can use the
Absolute for so much, and so much is very precious. He is pained at
hearing you speak incredulously of the Absolute, therefore, and disregards
your criticisms because they deal with aspects of the conception that he
fails to follow.</p>
<p>If the Absolute means this, and means no more than this, who can possibly
deny the truth of it? To deny it would be to insist that men should never
relax, and that holidays are never in order. I am well aware how odd it
must seem to some of you to hear me say that an idea is 'true' so long as
to believe it is profitable to our lives. That it is GOOD, for as much as
it profits, you will gladly admit. If what we do by its aid is good, you
will allow the idea itself to be good in so far forth, for we are the
better for possessing it. But is it not a strange misuse of the word
'truth,' you will say, to call ideas also 'true' for this reason?</p>
<p>To answer this difficulty fully is impossible at this stage of my account.
You touch here upon the very central point of Messrs. Schiller's, Dewey's
and my own doctrine of truth, which I cannot discuss with detail until my
sixth lecture. Let me now say only this, that truth is ONE SPECIES OF
GOOD, and not, as is usually supposed, a category distinct from good, and
co-ordinate with it. THE TRUE IS THE NAME OF WHATEVER PROVES ITSELF TO BE
GOOD IN THE WAY OF BELIEF, AND GOOD, TOO, FOR DEFINITE, ASSIGNABLE
REASONS. Surely you must admit this, that if there were NO good for life
in true ideas, or if the knowledge of them were positively disadvantageous
and false ideas the only useful ones, then the current notion that truth
is divine and precious, and its pursuit a duty, could never have grown up
or become a dogma. In a world like that, our duty would be to SHUN truth,
rather. But in this world, just as certain foods are not only agreeable to
our taste, but good for our teeth, our stomach and our tissues; so certain
ideas are not only agreeable to think about, or agreeable as supporting
other ideas that we are fond of, but they are also helpful in life's
practical struggles. If there be any life that it is really better we
should lead, and if there be any idea which, if believed in, would help us
to lead that life, then it would be really BETTER FOR US to believe in
that idea, UNLESS, INDEED, BELIEF IN IT INCIDENTALLY CLASHED WITH OTHER
GREATER VITAL BENEFITS.</p>
<p>'What would be better for us to believe'! This sounds very like a
definition of truth. It comes very near to saying 'what we OUGHT to
believe': and in THAT definition none of you would find any oddity. Ought
we ever not to believe what it is BETTER FOR US to believe? And can we
then keep the notion of what is better for us, and what is true for us,
permanently apart?</p>
<p>Pragmatism says no, and I fully agree with her. Probably you also agree,
so far as the abstract statement goes, but with a suspicion that if we
practically did believe everything that made for good in our own personal
lives, we should be found indulging all kinds of fancies about this
world's affairs, and all kinds of sentimental superstitions about a world
hereafter. Your suspicion here is undoubtedly well founded, and it is
evident that something happens when you pass from the abstract to the
concrete, that complicates the situation.</p>
<p>I said just now that what is better for us to believe is true UNLESS THE
BELIEF INCIDENTALLY CLASHES WITH SOME OTHER VITAL BENEFIT. Now in real
life what vital benefits is any particular belief of ours most liable to
clash with? What indeed except the vital benefits yielded by OTHER BELIEFS
when these prove incompatible with the first ones? In other words, the
greatest enemy of any one of our truths may be the rest of our truths.
Truths have once for all this desperate instinct of self-preservation and
of desire to extinguish whatever contradicts them. My belief in the
Absolute, based on the good it does me, must run the gauntlet of all my
other beliefs. Grant that it may be true in giving me a moral holiday.
Nevertheless, as I conceive it,—and let me speak now confidentially,
as it were, and merely in my own private person,—it clashes with
other truths of mine whose benefits I hate to give up on its account. It
happens to be associated with a kind of logic of which I am the enemy, I
find that it entangles me in metaphysical paradoxes that are inacceptable,
etc., etc.. But as I have enough trouble in life already without adding
the trouble of carrying these intellectual inconsistencies, I personally
just give up the Absolute. I just TAKE my moral holidays; or else as a
professional philosopher, I try to justify them by some other principle.</p>
<p>If I could restrict my notion of the Absolute to its bare holiday-giving
value, it wouldn't clash with my other truths. But we cannot easily thus
restrict our hypotheses. They carry supernumerary features, and these it
is that clash so. My disbelief in the Absolute means then disbelief in
those other supernumerary features, for I fully believe in the legitimacy
of taking moral holidays.</p>
<p>You see by this what I meant when I called pragmatism a mediator and
reconciler and said, borrowing the word from Papini, that he unstiffens
our theories. She has in fact no prejudices whatever, no obstructive
dogmas, no rigid canons of what shall count as proof. She is completely
genial. She will entertain any hypothesis, she will consider any evidence.
It follows that in the religious field she is at a great advantage both
over positivistic empiricism, with its anti-theological bias, and over
religious rationalism, with its exclusive interest in the remote, the
noble, the simple, and the abstract in the way of conception.</p>
<p>In short, she widens the field of search for God. Rationalism sticks to
logic and the empyrean. Empiricism sticks to the external senses.
Pragmatism is willing to take anything, to follow either logic or the
senses, and to count the humblest and most personal experiences. She will
count mystical experiences if they have practical consequences. She will
take a God who lives in the very dirt of private fact-if that should seem
a likely place to find him.</p>
<p>Her only test of probable truth is what works best in the way of leading
us, what fits every part of life best and combines with the collectivity
of experience's demands, nothing being omitted. If theological ideas
should do this, if the notion of God, in particular, should prove to do
it, how could pragmatism possibly deny God's existence? She could see no
meaning in treating as 'not true' a notion that was pragmatically so
successful. What other kind of truth could there be, for her, than all
this agreement with concrete reality?</p>
<p>In my last lecture I shall return again to the relations of pragmatism
with religion. But you see already how democratic she is. Her manners are
as various and flexible, her resources as rich and endless, and her
conclusions as friendly as those of mother nature.</p>
<p><br/><br/></p>
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<br/>
<h2> Lecture III. — Some Metaphysical Problems Pragmatically Considered </h2>
<p>I am now to make the pragmatic method more familiar by giving you some
illustrations of its application to particular problems. I will begin with
what is driest, and the first thing I shall take will be the problem of
Substance. Everyone uses the old distinction between substance and
attribute, enshrined as it is in the very structure of human language, in
the difference between grammatical subject and predicate. Here is a bit of
blackboard crayon. Its modes, attributes, properties, accidents, or
affections,—use which term you will,—are whiteness,
friability, cylindrical shape, insolubility in water, etc., etc. But the
bearer of these attributes is so much chalk, which thereupon is called the
substance in which they inhere. So the attributes of this desk inhere in
the substance 'wood,' those of my coat in the substance 'wool,' and so
forth. Chalk, wood and wool, show again, in spite of their differences,
common properties, and in so far forth they are themselves counted as
modes of a still more primal substance, matter, the attributes of which
are space occupancy and impenetrability. Similarly our thoughts and
feelings are affections or properties of our several souls, which are
substances, but again not wholly in their own right, for they are modes of
the still deeper substance 'spirit.'</p>
<p>Now it was very early seen that all we know of the chalk is the whiteness,
friability, etc., all WE KNOW of the wood is the combustibility and
fibrous structure. A group of attributes is what each substance here is
known-as, they form its sole cash-value for our actual experience. The
substance is in every case revealed through THEM; if we were cut off from
THEM we should never suspect its existence; and if God should keep sending
them to us in an unchanged order, miraculously annihilating at a certain
moment the substance that supported them, we never could detect the
moment, for our experiences themselves would be unaltered. Nominalists
accordingly adopt the opinion that substance is a spurious idea due to our
inveterate human trick of turning names into things. Phenomena come in
groups—the chalk-group, the wood-group, etc.—and each group
gets its name. The name we then treat as in a way supporting the group of
phenomena. The low thermometer to-day, for instance, is supposed to come
from something called the 'climate.' Climate is really only the name for a
certain group of days, but it is treated as if it lay BEHIND the day, and
in general we place the name, as if it were a being, behind the facts it
is the name of. But the phenomenal properties of things, nominalists say,
surely do not really inhere in names, and if not in names then they do not
inhere in anything. They ADhere, or COhere, rather, WITH EACH OTHER, and
the notion of a substance inaccessible to us, which we think accounts for
such cohesion by supporting it, as cement might support pieces of mosaic,
must be abandoned. The fact of the bare cohesion itself is all that the
notion of the substance signifies. Behind that fact is nothing.</p>
<p>Scholasticism has taken the notion of substance from common sense and made
it very technical and articulate. Few things would seem to have fewer
pragmatic consequences for us than substances, cut off as we are from
every contact with them. Yet in one case scholasticism has proved the
importance of the substance-idea by treating it pragmatically. I refer to
certain disputes about the mystery of the Eucharist. Substance here would
appear to have momentous pragmatic value. Since the accidents of the wafer
don't change in the Lord's supper, and yet it has become the very body of
Christ, it must be that the change is in the substance solely. The
bread-substance must have been withdrawn, and the divine substance
substituted miraculously without altering the immediate sensible
properties. But tho these don't alter, a tremendous difference has been
made, no less a one than this, that we who take the sacrament, now feed
upon the very substance of divinity. The substance-notion breaks into
life, then, with tremendous effect, if once you allow that substances can
separate from their accidents, and exchange these latter.</p>
<p>This is the only pragmatic application of the substance-idea with which I
am acquainted; and it is obvious that it will only be treated seriously by
those who already believe in the 'real presence' on independent grounds.</p>
<p>MATERIAL SUBSTANCE was criticized by Berkeley with such telling effect
that his name has reverberated through all subsequent philosophy.
Berkeley's treatment of the notion of matter is so well known as to need
hardly more than a mention. So far from denying the external world which
we know, Berkeley corroborated it. It was the scholastic notion of a
material substance unapproachable by us, BEHIND the external world, deeper
and more real than it, and needed to support it, which Berkeley maintained
to be the most effective of all reducers of the external world to
unreality. Abolish that substance, he said, believe that God, whom you can
understand and approach, sends you the sensible world directly, and you
confirm the latter and back it up by his divine authority. Berkeley's
criticism of 'matter' was consequently absolutely pragmatistic. Matter is
known as our sensations of colour, figure, hardness and the like. They are
the cash-value of the term. The difference matter makes to us by truly
being is that we then get such sensations; by not being, is that we lack
them. These sensations then are its sole meaning. Berkeley doesn't deny
matter, then; he simply tells us what it consists of. It is a true name
for just so much in the way of sensations.</p>
<p>Locke, and later Hume, applied a similar pragmatic criticism to the notion
of SPIRITUAL SUBSTANCE. I will only mention Locke's treatment of our
'personal identity.' He immediately reduces this notion to its pragmatic
value in terms of experience. It means, he says, so much consciousness,'
namely the fact that at one moment of life we remember other moments, and
feel them all as parts of one and the same personal history. Rationalism
had explained this practical continuity in our life by the unity of our
soul-substance. But Locke says: suppose that God should take away the
consciousness, should WE be any the better for having still the
soul-principle? Suppose he annexed the same consciousness to different
souls, | should we, as WE realize OURSELVES, be any the worse for that
fact? In Locke's day the soul was chiefly a thing to be rewarded or
punished. See how Locke, discussing it from this point of view, keeps the
question pragmatic:</p>
<p>Suppose, he says, one to think himself to be the same soul that once was
Nestor or Thersites. Can he think their actions his own any more than the
actions of any other man that ever existed? But | let him once find
himself CONSCIOUS of any of the actions of Nestor, he then finds himself
the same person with Nestor. ... In this personal identity is founded all
the right and justice of reward and punishment. It may be reasonable to
think, no one shall be made to answer for what he knows nothing of, but
shall receive his doom, his consciousness accusing or excusing. Supposing
a man punished now for what he had done in another life, whereof he could
be made to have no consciousness at all, what difference is there between
that punishment and being created miserable?</p>
<p>Our personal identity, then, consists, for Locke, solely in pragmatically
definable particulars. Whether, apart from these verifiable facts, it also
inheres in a spiritual principle, is a merely curious speculation. Locke,
compromiser that he was, passively tolerated the belief in a substantial
soul behind our consciousness. But his successor Hume, and most empirical
psychologists after him, have denied the soul, save as the name for
verifiable cohesions in our inner life. They redescend into the stream of
experience with it, and cash it into so much small-change value in the way
of 'ideas' and their peculiar connexions with each other. As I said of
Berkeley's matter, the soul is good or 'true' for just SO MUCH, but no
more.</p>
<p>The mention of material substance naturally suggests the doctrine of
'materialism,' but philosophical materialism is not necessarily knit up
with belief in 'matter,' as a metaphysical principle. One may deny matter
in that sense, as strongly as Berkeley did, one may be a phenomenalist
like Huxley, and yet one may still be a materialist in the wider sense, of
explaining higher phenomena by lower ones, and leaving the destinies of
the world at the mercy of its blinder parts and forces. It is in this
wider sense of the word that materialism is opposed to spiritualism or
theism. The laws of physical nature are what run things, materialism says.
The highest productions of human genius might be ciphered by one who had
complete acquaintance with the facts, out of their physiological
conditions, regardless whether nature be there only for our minds, as
idealists contend, or not. Our minds in any case would have to record the
kind of nature it is, and write it down as operating through blind laws of
physics. This is the complexion of present day materialism, which may
better be called naturalism. Over against it stands 'theism,' or what in a
wide sense may be termed 'spiritualism.' Spiritualism says that mind not
only witnesses and records things, but also runs and operates them: the
world being thus guided, not by its lower, but by its higher element.</p>
<p>Treated as it often is, this question becomes little more than a conflict
between aesthetic preferences. Matter is gross, coarse, crass, muddy;
spirit is pure, elevated, noble; and since it is more consonant with the
dignity of the universe to give the primacy in it to what appears
superior, spirit must be affirmed as the ruling principle. To treat
abstract principles as finalities, before which our intellects may come to
rest in a state of admiring contemplation, is the great rationalist
failing. Spiritualism, as often held, may be simply a state of admiration
for one kind, and of dislike for another kind, of abstraction. I remember
a worthy spiritualist professor who always referred to materialism as the
'mud-philosophy,' and deemed it thereby refuted.</p>
<p>To such spiritualism as this there is an easy answer, and Mr. Spencer
makes it effectively. In some well-written pages at the end of the first
volume of his Psychology he shows us that a 'matter' so infinitely
subtile, and performing motions as inconceivably quick and fine as those
which modern science postulates in her explanations, has no trace of
grossness left. He shows that the conception of spirit, as we mortals
hitherto have framed it, is itself too gross to cover the exquisite
tenuity of nature's facts. Both terms, he says, are but symbols, pointing
to that one unknowable reality in which their oppositions cease.</p>
<p>To an abstract objection an abstract rejoinder suffices; and so far as
one's opposition to materialism springs from one's disdain of matter as
something 'crass,' Mr. Spencer cuts the ground from under one. Matter is
indeed infinitely and incredibly refined. To anyone who has ever looked on
the face of a dead child or parent the mere fact that matter COULD have
taken for a time that precious form, ought to make matter sacred ever
after. It makes no difference what the PRINCIPLE of life may be, material
or immaterial, matter at any rate co-operates, lends itself to all life's
purposes. That beloved incarnation was among matter's possibilities.</p>
<p>But now, instead of resting in principles after this stagnant
intellectualist fashion, let us apply the pragmatic method to the
question. What do we MEAN by matter? What practical difference can it make
NOW that the world should be run by matter or by spirit? I think we find
that the problem takes with this a rather different character.</p>
<p>And first of all I call your attention to a curious fact. It makes not a
single jot of difference so far as the PAST of the world goes, whether we
deem it to have been the work of matter or whether we think a divine
spirit was its author.</p>
<p>Imagine, in fact, the entire contents of the world to be once for all
irrevocably given. Imagine it to end this very moment, and to have no
future; and then let a theist and a materialist apply their rival
explanations to its history. The theist shows how a God made it; the
materialist shows, and we will suppose with equal success, how it resulted
from blind physical forces. Then let the pragmatist be asked to choose
between their theories. How can he apply his test if the world is already
completed? Concepts for him are things to come back into experience with,
things to make us look for differences. But by hypothesis there is to be
no more experience and no possible differences can now be looked for. Both
theories have shown all their consequences and, by the hypothesis we are
adopting, these are identical. The pragmatist must consequently say that
the two theories, in spite of their different-sounding names, mean exactly
the same thing, and that the dispute is purely verbal. [I am opposing, of
course, that the theories HAVE been equally successful in their
explanations of what is.]</p>
<p>For just consider the case sincerely, and say what would be the WORTH of a
God if he WERE there, with his work accomplished and his world run down.
He would be worth no more than just that world was worth. To that amount
of result, with its mixed merits and defects, his creative power could
attain, but go no farther. And since there is to be no future; since the
whole value and meaning of the world has been already paid in and
actualized in the feelings that went with it in the passing, and now go
with it in the ending; since it draws no supplemental significance (such
as our real world draws) from its function of preparing something yet to
come; why then, by it we take God's measure, as it were. He is the Being
who could once for all do THAT; and for that much we are thankful to him,
but for nothing more. But now, on the contrary hypothesis, namely, that
the bits of matter following their laws could make that world and do no
less, should we not be just as thankful to them? Wherein should we suffer
loss, then, if we dropped God as an hypothesis and made the matter alone
responsible? Where would any special deadness, or crassness, come in? And
how, experience being what is once for all, would God's presence in it
make it any more living or richer?</p>
<p>Candidly, it is impossible to give any answer to this question. The
actually experienced world is supposed to be the same in its details on
either hypothesis, "the same, for our praise or blame," as Browning says.
It stands there indefeasibly: a gift which can't be taken back. Calling
matter the cause of it retracts no single one of the items that have made
it up, nor does calling God the cause augment them. They are the God or
the atoms, respectively, of just that and no other world. The God, if
there, has been doing just what atoms could do—appearing in the
character of atoms, so to speak—and earning such gratitude as is due
to atoms, and no more. If his presence lends no different turn or issue to
the performance, it surely can lend it no increase of dignity. Nor would
indignity come to it were he absent, and did the atoms remain the only
actors on the stage. When a play is once over, and the curtain down, you
really make it no better by claiming an illustrious genius for its author,
just as you make it no worse by calling him a common hack.</p>
<p>Thus if no future detail of experience or conduct is to be deduced from
our hypothesis, the debate between materialism and theism becomes quite
idle and insignificant. Matter and God in that event mean exactly the same
thing—the power, namely, neither more nor less, that could make just
this completed world—and the wise man is he who in such a case would
turn his back on such a supererogatory discussion. Accordingly, most men
instinctively, and positivists and scientists deliberately, do turn their
backs on philosophical disputes from which nothing in the line of definite
future consequences can be seen to follow. The verbal and empty character
of philosophy is surely a reproach with which we are, but too familiar. If
pragmatism be true, it is a perfectly sound reproach unless the theories
under fire can be shown to have alternative practical outcomes, however
delicate and distant these may be. The common man and the scientist say
they discover no such outcomes, and if the metaphysician can discern none
either, the others certainly are in the right of it, as against him. His
science is then but pompous trifling; and the endowment of a professorship
for such a being would be silly.</p>
<p>Accordingly, in every genuine metaphysical debate some practical issue,
however conjectural and remote, is involved. To realize this, revert with
me to our question, and place yourselves this time in the world we live
in, in the world that HAS a future, that is yet uncompleted whilst we
speak. In this unfinished world the alternative of 'materialism or
theism?' is intensely practical; and it is worth while for us to spend
some minutes of our hour in seeing that it is so.</p>
<p>How, indeed, does the program differ for us, according as we consider that
the facts of experience up to date are purposeless configurations of blind
atoms moving according to eternal laws, or that on the other hand they are
due to the providence of God? As far as the past facts go, indeed there is
no difference. Those facts are in, are bagged, are captured; and the good
that's in them is gained, be the atoms or be the God their cause. There
are accordingly many materialists about us to-day who, ignoring altogether
the future and practical aspects of the question, seek to eliminate the
odium attaching to the word materialism, and even to eliminate the word
itself, by showing that, if matter could give birth to all these gains,
why then matter, functionally considered, is just as divine an entity as
God, in fact coalesces with God, is what you mean by God. Cease, these
persons advise us, to use either of these terms, with their outgrown
opposition. Use a term free of the clerical connotations, on the one hand;
of the suggestion of gross-ness, coarseness, ignobility, on the other.
Talk of the primal mystery, of the unknowable energy, of the one and only
power, instead of saying either God or matter. This is the course to which
Mr. Spencer urges us; and if philosophy were purely retrospective, he
would thereby proclaim himself an excellent pragmatist.</p>
<p>But philosophy is prospective also, and, after finding what the world has
been and done and yielded, still asks the further question 'what does the
world PROMISE?' Give us a matter that promises SUCCESS, that is bound by
its laws to lead our world ever nearer to perfection, and any rational man
will worship that matter as readily as Mr. Spencer worships his own
so-called unknowable power. It not only has made for righteousness up to
date, but it will make for righteousness forever; and that is all we need.
Doing practically all that a God can do, it is equivalent to God, its
function is a God's function, and is exerted in a world in which a God
would now be superfluous; from such a world a God could never lawfully be
missed. 'Cosmic emotion' would here be the right name for religion.</p>
<p>But is the matter by which Mr. Spencer's process of cosmic evolution is
carried on any such principle of never-ending perfection as this? Indeed
it is not, for the future end of every cosmically evolved thing or system
of things is foretold by science to be death and tragedy; and Mr. Spencer,
in confining himself to the aesthetic and ignoring the practical side of
the controversy, has really contributed nothing serious to its relief. But
apply now our principle of practical results, and see what a vital
significance the question of materialism or theism immediately acquires.</p>
<p>Theism and materialism, so indifferent when taken retrospectively, point,
when we take them prospectively, to wholly different outlooks of
experience. For, according to the theory of mechanical evolution, the laws
of redistribution of matter and motion, tho they are certainly to thank
for all the good hours which our organisms have ever yielded us and for
all the ideals which our minds now frame, are yet fatally certain to undo
their work again, and to redissolve everything that they have once
evolved. You all know the picture of the last state of the universe which
evolutionary science foresees. I cannot state it better than in Mr.
Balfour's words: "The energies of our system will decay, the glory of the
sun will be dimmed, and the earth, tideless and inert, will no longer
tolerate the race which has for a moment disturbed its solitude. Man will
go down into the pit, and all his thoughts will perish. The uneasy,
consciousness which in this obscure corner has for a brief space broken
the contented silence of the universe, will be at rest. Matter will know
itself no longer. 'Imperishable monuments' and 'immortal deeds,' death
itself, and love stronger than death, will be as though they had never
been. Nor will anything that is, be better or be worse for all that the
labour, genius, devotion, and suffering of man have striven through
countless generations to effect." [Footnote: The Foundations of Belief, p.
30.]</p>
<p>That is the sting of it, that in the vast driftings of the cosmic weather,
tho many a jeweled shore appears, and many an enchanted cloud-bank floats
away, long lingering ere it be dissolved—even as our world now
lingers, for our joy-yet when these transient products are gone, nothing,
absolutely NOTHING remains, of represent those particular qualities, those
elements of preciousness which they may have enshrined. Dead and gone are
they, gone utterly from the very sphere and room of being. Without an
echo; without a memory; without an influence on aught that may come after,
to make it care for similar ideals. This utter final wreck and tragedy is
of the essence of scientific materialism as at present understood. The
lower and not the higher forces are the eternal forces, or the last
surviving forces within the only cycle of evolution which we can
definitely see. Mr. Spencer believes this as much as anyone; so why should
he argue with us as if we were making silly aesthetic objections to the
'grossness' of 'matter and motion,' the principles of his philosophy, when
what really dismays us is the disconsolateness of its ulterior practical
results?</p>
<p>No the true objection to materialism is not positive but negative. It
would be farcical at this day to make complaint of it for what it IS for
'grossness.' Grossness is what grossness DOES—we now know THAT. We
make complaint of it, on the contrary, for what it is NOT—not a
permanent warrant for our more ideal interests, not a fulfiller of our
remotest hopes.</p>
<p>The notion of God, on the other hand, however inferior it may be in
clearness to those mathematical notions so current in mechanical
philosophy, has at least this practical superiority over them, that it
guarantees an ideal order that shall be permanently preserved. A world
with a God in it to say the last word, may indeed burn up or freeze, but
we then think of him as still mindful of the old ideals and sure to bring
them elsewhere to fruition; so that, where he is, tragedy is only
provisional and partial, and shipwreck and dissolution not the absolutely
final things. This need of an eternal moral order is one of the deepest
needs of our breast. And those poets, like Dante and Wordsworth, who live
on the conviction of such an order, owe to that fact the extraordinary
tonic and consoling power of their verse. Here then, in these different
emotional and practical appeals, in these adjustments of our concrete
attitudes of hope and expectation, and all the delicate consequences which
their differences entail, lie the real meanings of materialism and
spiritualism—not in hair-splitting abstractions about matter's inner
essence, or about the metaphysical attributes of God. Materialism means
simply the denial that the moral order is eternal, and the cutting off of
ultimate hopes; spiritualism means the affirmation of an eternal moral
order and the letting loose of hope. Surely here is an issue genuine
enough, for anyone who feels it; and, as long as men are men, it will
yield matter for a serious philosophic debate.</p>
<p>But possibly some of you may still rally to their defence. Even whilst
admitting that spiritualism and materialism make different prophecies of
the world's future, you may yourselves pooh-pooh the difference as
something so infinitely remote as to mean nothing for a sane mind. The
essence of a sane mind, you may say, is to take shorter views, and to feel
no concern about such chimaeras as the latter end of the world. Well, I
can only say that if you say this, you do injustice to human nature.
Religious melancholy is not disposed of by a simple flourish of the word
insanity. The absolute things, the last things, the overlapping things,
are the truly philosophic concerns; all superior minds feel seriously
about them, and the mind with the shortest views is simply the mind of the
more shallow man.</p>
<p>The issues of fact at stake in the debate are of course vaguely enough
conceived by us at present. But spiritualistic faith in all its forms
deals with a world of PROMISE, while materialism's sun sets in a sea of
disappointment. Remember what I said of the Absolute: it grants us moral
holidays. Any religious view does this. It not only incites our more
strenuous moments, but it also takes our joyous, careless, trustful
moments, and it justifies them. It paints the grounds of justification
vaguely enough, to be sure. The exact features of the saving future facts
that our belief in God insures, will have to be ciphered out by the
interminable methods of science: we can STUDY our God only by studying his
Creation. But we can ENJOY our God, if we have one, in advance of all that
labor. I myself believe that the evidence for God lies primarily in inner
personal experiences. When they have once given you your God, his name
means at least the benefit of the holiday. You remember what I said
yesterday about the way in which truths clash and try to 'down' each
other. The truth of 'God' has to run the gauntlet of all our other truths.
It is on trial by them and they on trial by it. Our FINAL opinion about
God can be settled only after all the truths have straightened themselves
out together. Let us hope that they shall find a modus vivendi!</p>
<p>Let me pass to a very cognate philosophic problem, the QUESTION of DESIGN
IN NATURE. God's existence has from time immemorial been held to be proved
by certain natural facts. Many facts appear as if expressly designed in
view of one another. Thus the woodpecker's bill, tongue, feet, tail, etc.,
fit him wondrously for a world of trees with grubs hid in their bark to
feed upon. The parts of our eye fit the laws of light to perfection,
leading its rays to a sharp picture on our retina. Such mutual fitting of
things diverse in origin argued design, it was held; and the designer was
always treated as a man-loving deity.</p>
<p>The first step in these arguments was to prove that the design existed.
Nature was ransacked for results obtained through separate things being
co-adapted. Our eyes, for instance, originate in intra-uterine darkness,
and the light originates in the sun, yet see how they fit each other. They
are evidently made FOR each other. Vision is the end designed, light and
eyes the separate means devised for its attainment.</p>
<p>It is strange, considering how unanimously our ancestors felt the force of
this argument, to see how little it counts for since the triumph of the
darwinian theory. Darwin opened our minds to the power of
chance-happenings to bring forth 'fit' results if only they have time to
add themselves together. He showed the enormous waste of nature in
producing results that get destroyed because of their unfitness. He also
emphasized the number of adaptations which, if designed, would argue an
evil rather than a good designer. Here all depends upon the point of view.
To the grub under the bark the exquisite fitness of the woodpecker's
organism to extract him would certainly argue a diabolical designer.</p>
<p>Theologians have by this time stretched their minds so as to embrace the
darwinian facts, and yet to interpret them as still showing divine
purpose. It used to be a question of purpose AGAINST mechanism, of one OR
the other. It was as if one should say "My shoes are evidently designed to
fit my feet, hence it is impossible that they should have been produced by
machinery." We know that they are both: they are made by a machinery
itself designed to fit the feet with shoes. Theology need only stretch
similarly the designs of God. As the aim of a football-team is not merely
to get the ball to a certain goal (if that were so, they would simply get
up on some dark night and place it there), but to get it there by a fixed
MACHINERY OF CONDITIONS—the game's rules and the opposing players;
so the aim of God is not merely, let us say, to make men and to save them,
but rather to get this done through the sole agency of nature's vast
machinery. Without nature's stupendous laws and counterforces, man's
creation and perfection, we might suppose, would be too insipid
achievements for God to have designed them.</p>
<p>This saves the form of the design-argument at the expense of its old easy
human content. The designer is no longer the old man-like deity. His
designs have grown so vast as to be incomprehensible to us humans. The
WHAT of them so overwhelms us that to establish the mere THAT of a
designer for them becomes of very little consequence in comparison. We can
with difficulty comprehend the character of a cosmic mind whose purposes
are fully revealed by the strange mixture of goods and evils that we find
in this actual world's particulars. Or rather we cannot by any possibility
comprehend it. The mere word 'design' by itself has, we see, no
consequences and explains nothing. It is the barrenest of principles. The
old question of WHETHER there is design is idle. The real question is WHAT
is the world, whether or not it have a designer—and that can be
revealed only by the study of all nature's particulars.</p>
<p>Remember that no matter what nature may have produced or may be producing,
the means must necessarily have been adequate, must have been FITTED TO
THAT PRODUCTION. The argument from fitness to design would consequently
always apply, whatever were the product's character. The recent Mont-Pelee
eruption, for example, required all previous history to produce that exact
combination of ruined houses, human and animal corpses, sunken ships,
volcanic ashes, etc., in just that one hideous configuration of positions.
France had to be a nation and colonize Martinique. Our country had to
exist and send our ships there. IF God aimed at just that result, the
means by which the centuries bent their influences towards it, showed
exquisite intelligence. And so of any state of things whatever, either in
nature or in history, which we find actually realized. For the parts of
things must always make SOME definite resultant, be it chaotic or
harmonious. When we look at what has actually come, the conditions must
always appear perfectly designed to ensure it. We can always say,
therefore, in any conceivable world, of any conceivable character, that
the whole cosmic machinery MAY have been designed to produce it.</p>
<p>Pragmatically, then, the abstract word 'design' is a blank cartridge. It
carries no consequences, it does no execution. What sort of design? and
what sort of a designer? are the only serious questions, and the study of
facts is the only way of getting even approximate answers. Meanwhile,
pending the slow answer from facts, anyone who insists that there is a
designer and who is sure he is a divine one, gets a certain pragmatic
benefit from the term—the same, in fact which we saw that the terms
God, Spirit, or the Absolute, yield us 'Design,' worthless tho it be as a
mere rationalistic principle set above or behind things for our
admiration, becomes, if our faith concretes it into something theistic, a
term of PROMISE. Returning with it into experience, we gain a more
confiding outlook on the future. If not a blind force but a seeing force
runs things, we may reasonably expect better issues. This vague confidence
in the future is the sole pragmatic meaning at present discernible in the
terms design and designer. But if cosmic confidence is right not wrong,
better not worse, that is a most important meaning. That much at least of
possible 'truth' the terms will then have in them.</p>
<p>Let me take up another well-worn controversy, THE FREE-WILL PROBLEM. Most
persons who believe in what is called their free-will do so after the
rationalistic fashion. It is a principle, a positive faculty or virtue
added to man, by which his dignity is enigmatically augmented. He ought to
believe it for this reason. Determinists, who deny it, who say that
individual men originate nothing, but merely transmit to the future the
whole push of the past cosmos of which they are so small an expression,
diminish man. He is less admirable, stripped of this creative principle. I
imagine that more than half of you share our instinctive belief in
free-will, and that admiration of it as a principle of dignity has much to
do with your fidelity.</p>
<p>But free-will has also been discussed pragmatically, and, strangely
enough, the same pragmatic interpretation has been put upon it by both
disputants. You know how large a part questions of ACCOUNTABILITY have
played in ethical controversy. To hear some persons, one would suppose
that all that ethics aims at is a code of merits and demerits. Thus does
the old legal and theological leaven, the interest in crime and sin and
punishment abide with us. 'Who's to blame? whom can we punish? whom will
God punish?'—these preoccupations hang like a bad dream over man's
religious history.</p>
<p>So both free-will and determinism have been inveighed against and called
absurd, because each, in the eyes of its enemies, has seemed to prevent
the 'imputability' of good or bad deeds to their authors. Queer antinomy
this! Free-will means novelty, the grafting on to the past of something
not involved therein. If our acts were predetermined, if we merely
transmitted the push of the whole past, the free-willists say, how could
we be praised or blamed for anything? We should be 'agents' only, not
'principals,' and where then would be our precious imputability and
responsibility?</p>
<p>But where would it be if we HAD free-will? rejoin the determinists. If a
'free' act be a sheer novelty, that comes not FROM me, the previous me,
but ex nihilo, and simply tacks itself on to me, how can <i>I</i>, the
previous I, be responsible? How can I have any permanent CHARACTER that
will stand still long enough for praise or blame to be awarded? The
chaplet of my days tumbles into a cast of disconnected beads as soon as
the thread of inner necessity is drawn out by the preposterous
indeterminist doctrine. Messrs. Fullerton and McTaggart have recently laid
about them doughtily with this argument.</p>
<p>It may be good ad hominem, but otherwise it is pitiful. For I ask you,
quite apart from other reasons, whether any man, woman or child, with a
sense for realities, ought not to be ashamed to plead such principles as
either dignity or imputability. Instinct and utility between them can
safely be trusted to carry on the social business of punishment and
praise. If a man does good acts we shall praise him, if he does bad acts
we shall punish him—anyhow, and quite apart from theories as to
whether the acts result from what was previous in him or are novelties in
a strict sense. To make our human ethics revolve about the question of
'merit' is a piteous unreality—God alone can know our merits, if we
have any. The real ground for supposing free-will is indeed pragmatic, but
it has nothing to do with this contemptible right to punish which had made
such a noise in past discussions of the subject.</p>
<p>Free-will pragmatically means NOVELTIES IN THE WORLD, the right to expect
that in its deepest elements as well as in its surface phenomena, the
future may not identically repeat and imitate the past. That imitation en
masse is there, who can deny? The general 'uniformity of nature' is
presupposed by every lesser law. But nature may be only approximately
uniform; and persons in whom knowledge of the world's past has bred
pessimism (or doubts as to the world's good character, which become
certainties if that character be supposed eternally fixed) may naturally
welcome free-will as a MELIORISTIC doctrine. It holds up improvement as at
least possible; whereas determinism assures us that our whole notion of
possibility is born of human ignorance, and that necessity and
impossibility between them rule the destinies of the world.</p>
<p>Free-will is thus a general cosmological theory of PROMISE, just like the
Absolute, God, Spirit or Design. Taken abstractly, no one of these terms
has any inner content, none of them gives us any picture, and no one of
them would retain the least pragmatic value in a world whose character was
obviously perfect from the start. Elation at mere existence, pure cosmic
emotion and delight, would, it seems to me, quench all interest in those
speculations, if the world were nothing but a lubberland of happiness
already. Our interest in religious metaphysics arises in the fact that our
empirical future feels to us unsafe, and needs some higher guarantee. If
the past and present were purely good, who could wish that the future
might possibly not resemble them? Who could desire free-will? Who would
not say, with Huxley, "let me be wound up every day like a watch, to go
right fatally, and I ask no better freedom." 'Freedom' in a world already
perfect could only mean freedom to BE WORSE, and who could be so insane as
to wish that? To be necessarily what it is, to be impossibly aught else,
would put the last touch of perfection upon optimism's universe. Surely
the only POSSIBILITY that one can rationally claim is the possibility that
things may be BETTER. That possibility, I need hardly say, is one that, as
the actual world goes, we have ample grounds for desiderating.</p>
<p>Free-will thus has no meaning unless it be a doctrine of RELIEF. As such,
it takes its place with other religious doctrines. Between them, they
build up the old wastes and repair the former desolations. Our spirit,
shut within this courtyard of sense-experience, is always saying to the
intellect upon the tower: 'Watchman, tell us of the night, if it aught of
promise bear,' and the intellect gives it then these terms of promise.</p>
<p>Other than this practical significance, the words God, free-will, design,
etc., have none. Yet dark tho they be in themselves, or
intellectualistically taken, when we bear them into life's thicket with us
the darkness THERE grows light about us. If you stop, in dealing with such
words, with their definition, thinking that to be an intellectual
finality, where are you? Stupidly staring at a pretentious sham! "Deus est
Ens, a se, extra et supra omne genus, necessarium, unum, infinite
perfectum, simplex, immutabile, immensum, aeternum, intelligens," etc.,—wherein
is such a definition really instructive? It means less, than nothing, in
its pompous robe of adjectives. Pragmatism alone can read a positive
meaning into it, and for that she turns her back upon the intellectualist
point of view altogether. 'God's in his heaven; all's right with the
world!'—THAT'S the heart of your theology, and for that you need no
rationalist definitions.</p>
<p>Why shouldn't we all of us, rationalists as well as pragmatists, confess
this? Pragmatism, so far from keeping her eyes bent on the immediate
practical foreground, as she is accused of doing, dwells just as much upon
the world's remotest perspectives.</p>
<p>See then how all these ultimate questions turn, as it were, up their
hinges; and from looking backwards upon principles, upon an
erkenntnisstheoretische Ich, a God, a Kausalitaetsprinzip, a Design, a
Free-will, taken in themselves, as something august and exalted above
facts,—see, I say, how pragmatism shifts the emphasis and looks
forward into facts themselves. The really vital question for us all is,
What is this world going to be? What is life eventually to make of itself?
The centre of gravity of philosophy must therefore alter its place. The
earth of things, long thrown into shadow by the glories of the upper
ether, must resume its rights. To shift the emphasis in this way means
that philosophic questions will fall to be treated by minds of a less
abstractionist type than heretofore, minds more scientific and
individualistic in their tone yet not irreligious either. It will be an
alteration in 'the seat of authority' that reminds one almost of the
protestant reformation. And as, to papal minds, protestantism has often
seemed a mere mess of anarchy and confusion, such, no doubt, will
pragmatism often seem to ultra-rationalist minds in philosophy. It will
seem so much sheer trash, philosophically. But life wags on, all the same,
and compasses its ends, in protestant countries. I venture to think that
philosophic protestantism will compass a not dissimilar prosperity.</p>
<p><br/><br/></p>
<hr />
<p><SPAN name="link2H_4_0006" id="link2H_4_0006"> </SPAN></p>
<br/>
<h2> Lecture IV. — The One and the Many </h2>
<p>We saw in the last lecture that the pragmatic method, in its dealings with
certain concepts, instead of ending with admiring contemplation, plunges
forward into the river of experience with them and prolongs the
perspective by their means. Design, free-will, the absolute mind, spirit
instead of matter, have for their sole meaning a better promise as to this
world's outcome. Be they false or be they true, the meaning of them is
this meliorism. I have sometimes thought of the phenomenon called 'total
reflexion' in optics as a good symbol of the relation between abstract
ideas and concrete realities, as pragmatism conceives it. Hold a tumbler
of water a little above your eyes and look up through the water at its
surface—or better still look similarly through the flat wall of an
aquarium. You will then see an extraordinarily brilliant reflected image
say of a candle-flame, or any other clear object, situated on the opposite
side of the vessel. No candle-ray, under these circumstances gets beyond
the water's surface: every ray is totally reflected back into the depths
again. Now let the water represent the world of sensible facts, and let
the air above it represent the world of abstract ideas. Both worlds are
real, of course, and interact; but they interact only at their boundary,
and the locus of everything that lives, and happens to us, so far as full
experience goes, is the water. We are like fishes swimming in the sea of
sense, bounded above by the superior element, but unable to breathe it
pure or penetrate it. We get our oxygen from it, however, we touch it
incessantly, now in this part, now in that, and every time we touch it we
are reflected back into the water with our course re-determined and
re-energized. The abstract ideas of which the air consists, indispensable
for life, but irrespirable by themselves, as it were, and only active in
their re-directing function. All similes are halting but this one rather
takes my fancy. It shows how something, not sufficient for life in itself,
may nevertheless be an effective determinant of life elsewhere.</p>
<p>In this present hour I wish to illustrate the pragmatic method by one more
application. I wish to turn its light upon the ancient problem of 'the one
and the many.' I suspect that in but few of you has this problem
occasioned sleepless nights, and I should not be astonished if some of you
told me it had never vexed you. I myself have come, by long brooding over
it, to consider it the most central of all philosophic problems, central
because so pregnant. I mean by this that if you know whether a man is a
decided monist or a decided pluralist, you perhaps know more about the
rest of his opinions than if you give him any other name ending in IST. To
believe in the one or in the many, that is the classification with the
maximum number of consequences. So bear with me for an hour while I try to
inspire you with my own interest in the problem.</p>
<p>Philosophy has often been defined as the quest or the vision of the
world's unity. We never hear this definition challenged, and it is true as
far as it goes, for philosophy has indeed manifested above all things its
interest in unity. But how about the VARIETY in things? Is that such an
irrelevant matter? If instead of using the term philosophy, we talk in
general of our intellect and its needs we quickly see that unity is only
one of these. Acquaintance with the details of fact is always reckoned,
along with their reduction to system, as an indispensable mark of mental
greatness. Your 'scholarly' mind, of encyclopedic, philological type, your
man essentially of learning, has never lacked for praise along with your
philosopher. What our intellect really aims at is neither variety nor
unity taken singly but totality.[Footnote: Compare A. Bellanger: Les
concepts de Cause, et l'activite intentionelle de l'Esprit. Paris, Alcan,
1905, p. 79 ff.] In this, acquaintance with reality's diversities is as
important as understanding their connexion. The human passion of curiosity
runs on all fours with the systematizing passion.</p>
<p>In spite of this obvious fact the unity of things has always been
considered more illustrious, as it were, than their variety. When a young
man first conceives the notion that the whole world forms one great fact,
with all its parts moving abreast, as it were, and interlocked, he feels
as if he were enjoying a great insight, and looks superciliously on all
who still fall short of this sublime conception. Taken thus abstractly as
it first comes to one, the monistic insight is so vague as hardly to seem
worth defending intellectually. Yet probably everyone in this audience in
some way cherishes it. A certain abstract monism, a certain emotional
response to the character of oneness, as if it were a feature of the world
not coordinate with its manyness, but vastly more excellent and eminent,
is so prevalent in educated circles that we might almost call it a part of
philosophic common sense. Of COURSE the world is one, we say. How else
could it be a world at all? Empiricists as a rule, are as stout monists of
this abstract kind as rationalists are.</p>
<p>The difference is that the empiricists are less dazzled. Unity doesn't
blind them to everything else, doesn't quench their curiosity for special
facts, whereas there is a kind of rationalist who is sure to interpret
abstract unity mystically and to forget everything else, to treat it as a
principle; to admire and worship it; and thereupon to come to a full stop
intellectually.</p>
<p>'The world is One!'—the formula may become a sort of number-worship.
'Three' and 'seven' have, it is true, been reckoned sacred numbers; but,
abstractly taken, why is 'one' more excellent than 'forty-three,' or than
'two million and ten'? In this first vague conviction of the world's
unity, there is so little to take hold of that we hardly know what we mean
by it.</p>
<p>The only way to get forward with our notion is to treat it pragmatically.
Granting the oneness to exist, what facts will be different in
consequence? What will the unity be known-as? The world is one—yes,
but HOW one? What is the practical value of the oneness for US?</p>
<p>Asking such questions, we pass from the vague to the definite, from the
abstract to the concrete. Many distinct ways in which oneness predicated
of the universe might make a difference, come to view. I will note
successively the more obvious of these ways.</p>
<p>1. First, the world is at least ONE SUBJECT OF DISCOURSE. If its manyness
were so irremediable as to permit NO union whatever of it parts, not even
our minds could 'mean' the whole of it at once: the would be like eyes
trying to look in opposite directions. But in point of fact we mean to
cover the whole of it by our abstract term 'world' or 'universe,' which
expressly intends that no part shall be left out. Such unity of discourse
carries obviously no farther monistic specifications. A 'chaos,' once so
named, has as much unity of discourse as a cosmos. It is an odd fact that
many monists consider a great victory scored for their side when
pluralists say 'the universe is many.' "'The universe'!" they chuckle—"his
speech bewrayeth him. He stands confessed of monism out of his own mouth."
Well, let things be one in that sense! You can then fling such a word as
universe at the whole collection of them, but what matters it? It still
remains to be ascertained whether they are one in any other sense that is
more valuable.</p>
<p>2. Are they, for example, CONTINUOUS? Can you pass from one to another,
keeping always in your one universe without any danger of falling out? In
other words, do the parts of our universe HANG together, instead of being
like detached grains of sand?</p>
<p>Even grains of sand hang together through the space in which they are
embedded, and if you can in any way move through such space, you can pass
continuously from number one of them to number two. Space and time are
thus vehicles of continuity, by which the world's parts hang together. The
practical difference to us, resultant from these forms of union, is
immense. Our whole motor life is based upon them.</p>
<p>3. There are innumerable other paths of practical continuity among things.
Lines of INFLUENCE can be traced by which they together. Following any
such line you pass from one thing to another till you may have covered a
good part of the universe's extent. Gravity and heat-conduction are such
all-uniting influences, so far as the physical world goes. Electric,
luminous and chemical influences follow similar lines of influence. But
opaque and inert bodies interrupt the continuity here, so that you have to
step round them, or change your mode of progress if you wish to get
farther on that day. Practically, you have then lost your universe's
unity, SO FAR AS IT WAS CONSTITUTED BY THOSE FIRST LINES OF INFLUENCE.
There are innumerable kinds of connexion that special things have with
other special things; and the ENSEMBLE of any one of these connexions
forms one sort of system by which things are conjoined. Thus men are
conjoined in a vast network of ACQUAINTANCESHIP. Brown knows Jones, Jones
knows Robinson, etc.; and BY CHOOSING YOUR FARTHER INTERMEDIARIES RIGHTLY
you may carry a message from Jones to the Empress of China, or the Chief
of the African Pigmies, or to anyone else in the inhabited world. But you
are stopped short, as by a non-conductor, when you choose one man wrong in
this experiment. What may be called love-systems are grafted on the
acquaintance-system. A loves (or hates) B; B loves (or hates) C, etc. But
these systems are smaller than the great acquaintance-system that they
presuppose.</p>
<p>Human efforts are daily unifying the world more and more in definite
systematic ways. We found colonial, postal, consular, commercial systems,
all the parts of which obey definite influences that propagate themselves
within the system but not to facts outside of it. The result is
innumerable little hangings-together of the world's parts within the
larger hangings-together, little worlds, not only of discourse but of
operation, within the wider universe. Each system exemplifies one type or
grade of union, its parts being strung on that peculiar kind of relation,
and the same part may figure in many different systems, as a man may hold
several offices and belong to various clubs. From this 'systematic' point
of view, therefore, the pragmatic value of the world's unity is that all
these definite networks actually and practically exist. Some are more
enveloping and extensive, some less so; they are superposed upon each
other; and between them all they let no individual elementary part of the
universe escape. Enormous as is the amount of disconnexion among things
(for these systematic influences and conjunctions follow rigidly exclusive
paths), everything that exists is influenced in SOME way by something
else, if you can only pick the way out rightly Loosely speaking, and in
general, it may be said that all things cohere and adhere to each other
SOMEHOW, and that the universe exists practically in reticulated or
concatenated forms which make of it a continuous or 'integrated' affair.
Any kind of influence whatever helps to make the world one, so far as you
can follow it from next to next. You may then say that 'the world IS One'—meaning
in these respects, namely, and just so far as they obtain. But just as
definitely is it NOT one, so far as they do not obtain; and there is no
species of connexion which will not fail, if, instead of choosing
conductors for it, you choose non-conductors. You are then arrested at
your very first step and have to write the world down as a pure MANY from
that particular point of view. If our intellect had been as much
interested in disjunctive as it is in conjunctive relations, philosophy
would have equally successfully celebrated the world's DISUNION.</p>
<p>The great point is to notice that the oneness and the manyness are
absolutely co-ordinate here. Neither is primordial or more essential or
excellent than the other. Just as with space, whose separating of things
seems exactly on a par with its uniting of them, but sometimes one
function and sometimes the other is what come home to us most, so, in our
general dealings with the world of influences, we now need conductors and
now need non-conductors, and wisdom lies in knowing which is which at the
appropriate moment.</p>
<p>4. All these systems of influence or non-influence may be listed under the
general problem of the world's CAUSAL UNITY. If the minor causal
influences among things should converge towards one common causal origin
of them in the past, one great first cause for all that is, one might then
speak of the absolute causal unity of the world. God's fiat on creation's
day has figured in traditional philosophy as such an absolute cause and
origin. Transcendental Idealism, translating 'creation' into 'thinking'
(or 'willing to' think') calls the divine act 'eternal' rather than
'first'; but the union of the many here is absolute, just the same—the
many would not BE, save for the One. Against this notion of the unity of
origin of all there has always stood the pluralistic notion of an eternal
self-existing many in the shape of atoms or even of spiritual units of
some sort. The alternative has doubtless a pragmatic meaning, but perhaps,
as far as these lectures go, we had better leave the question of unity of
origin unsettled.</p>
<p>5. The most important sort of union that obtains among things,
pragmatically speaking, is their GENERIC UNITY. Things exist in kinds,
there are many specimens in each kind, and what the 'kind' implies for one
specimen, it implies also for every other specimen of that kind. We can
easily conceive that every fact in the world might be singular, that is,
unlike any other fact and sole of its kind. In such a world of singulars
our logic would be useless, for logic works by predicating of the single
instance what is true of all its kind. With no two things alike in the
world, we should be unable to reason from our past experiences to our
future ones. The existence of so much generic unity in things is thus
perhaps the most momentous pragmatic specification of what it may mean to
say 'the world is One.' ABSOLUTE generic unity would obtain if there were
one summum genus under which all things without exception could be
eventually subsumed. 'Beings,' 'thinkables,' 'experiences,' would be
candidates for this position. Whether the alternatives expressed by such
words have any pragmatic significance or not, is another question which I
prefer to leave unsettled just now.</p>
<p>6. Another specification of what the phrase 'the world is One' may mean is
UNITY OF PURPOSE. An enormous number of things in the world subserve a
common purpose. All the man-made systems, administrative, industrial,
military, or what not, exist each for its controlling purpose. Every
living being pursues its own peculiar purposes. They co-operate, according
to the degree of their development, in collective or tribal purposes,
larger ends thus enveloping lesser ones, until an absolutely single, final
and climacteric purpose subserved by all things without exception might
conceivably be reached. It is needless to say that the appearances
conflict with such a view. Any resultant, as I said in my third lecture,
MAY have been purposed in advance, but none of the results we actually
know in is world have in point of fact been purposed in advance in all
their details. Men and nations start with a vague notion of being rich, or
great, or good. Each step they make brings unforeseen chances into sight,
and shuts out older vistas, and the specifications of the general purpose
have to be daily changed. What is reached in the end may be better or
worse than what was proposed, but it is always more complex and different.</p>
<p>Our different purposes also are at war with each other. Where one can't
crush the other out, they compromise; and the result is again different
from what anyone distinctly proposed beforehand. Vaguely and generally,
much of what was purposed may be gained; but everything makes strongly for
the view that our world is incompletely unified teleologically and is
still trying to get its unification better organized.</p>
<p>Whoever claims ABSOLUTE teleological unity, saying that there is one
purpose that every detail of the universe subserves, dogmatizes at his own
risk. Theologians who dogmalize thus find it more and more impossible, as
our acquaintance with the warring interests of the world's parts grows
more concrete, to imagine what the one climacteric purpose may possibly be
like. We see indeed that certain evils minister to ulterior goods, that
the bitter makes the cocktail better, and that a bit of danger or hardship
puts us agreeably to our trumps. We can vaguely generalize this into the
doctrine that all the evil in the universe is but instrumental to its
greater perfection. But the scale of the evil actually in sight defies all
human tolerance; and transcendental idealism, in the pages of a Bradley or
a Royce, brings us no farther than the book of Job did—God's ways
are not our ways, so let us put our hands upon our mouth. A God who can
relish such superfluities of horror is no God for human beings to appeal
to. His animal spirits are too high. In other words the 'Absolute' with
his one purpose, is not the man-like God of common people.</p>
<p>7. AESTHETIC UNION among things also obtains, and is very analogous to
ideological union. Things tell a story. Their parts hang together so as to
work out a climax. They play into each other's hands expressively.
Retrospectively, we can see that altho no definite purpose presided over a
chain of events, yet the events fell into a dramatic form, with a start, a
middle, and a finish. In point of fact all stories end; and here again the
point of view of a many is that more natural one to take. The world is
full of partial stories that run parallel to one another, beginning and
ending at odd times. They mutually interlace and interfere at points, but
we cannot unify them completely in our minds. In following your
life-history, I must temporarily turn my attention from my own. Even a
biographer of twins would have to press them alternately upon his reader's
attention.</p>
<p>It follows that whoever says that the whole world tells one story utters
another of those monistic dogmas that a man believes at his risk. It is
easy to see the world's history pluralistically, as a rope of which each
fibre tells a separate tale; but to conceive of each cross-section of the
rope as an absolutely single fact, and to sum the whole longitudinal
series into one being living an undivided life, is harder. We have indeed
the analogy of embryology to help us. The microscopist makes a hundred
flat cross-sections of a given embryo, and mentally unites them into one
solid whole. But the great world's ingredients, so far as they are beings,
seem, like the rope's fibres, to be discontinuous cross-wise, and to
cohere only in the longitudinal direction. Followed in that direction they
are many. Even the embryologist, when he follows the DEVELOPMENT of his
object, has to treat the history of each single organ in turn. ABSOLUTE
aesthetic union is thus another barely abstract ideal. The world appears
as something more epic than dramatic.</p>
<p>So far, then, we see how the world is unified by its many systems, kinds,
purposes, and dramas. That there is more union in all these ways than
openly appears is certainly true. That there MAY be one sovereign purpose,
system, kind, and story, is a legitimate hypothesis. All I say here is
that it is rash to affirm this dogmatically without better evidence than
we possess at present.</p>
<p>8. The GREAT monistic DENKMITTEL for a hundred years past has been the
notion of THE ONE KNOWER. The many exist only as objects for his thought—exist
in his dream, as it were; and AS HE KNOWS them, they have one purpose,
form one system, tell one tale for him. This notion of an ALL-ENVELOPING
NOETIC UNITY in things is the sublimest achievement of intellectualist
philosophy. Those who believe in the Absolute, as the all-knower is
termed, usually say that they do so for coercive reasons, which clear
thinkers cannot evade. The Absolute has far-reaching practical
consequences, some of which I drew attention in my second lecture. Many
kinds of difference important to us would surely follow from its being
true. I cannot here enter into all the logical proofs of such a Being's
existence, farther than to say that none of them seem to me sound. I must
therefore treat the notion of an All-Knower simply as an hypothesis,
exactly on a par logically with the pluralist notion that there is no
point of view, no focus of information extant, from which the entire
content of the universe is visible at once. "God's consciousness," says
Professor Royce,[Footnote: The Conception of God, New York, 1897, p. 292.]
"forms in its wholeness one luminously transparent conscious moment"—this
is the type of noetic unity on which rationalism insists. Empiricism on
the other hand is satisfied with the type of noetic unity that is humanly
familiar. Everything gets known by SOME knower along with something else;
but the knowers may in the end be irreducibly many, and the greatest
knower of them all may yet not know the whole of everything, or even know
what he does know at one single stroke:—he may be liable to forget.
Whichever type obtained, the world would still be a universe noetically.
Its parts would be conjoined by knowledge, but in the one case the
knowledge would be absolutely unified, in the other it would be strung
along and overlapped.</p>
<p>The notion of one instantaneous or eternal Knower—either adjective
here means the same thing—is, as I said, the great intellectualist
achievement of our time. It has practically driven out that conception of
'Substance' which earlier philosophers set such store by, and by which so
much unifying work used to be done—universal substance which alone
has being in and from itself, and of which all the particulars of
experience are but forms to which it gives support. Substance has
succumbed to the pragmatic criticisms of the English school. It appears
now only as another name for the fact that phenomena as they come are
actually grouped and given in coherent forms, the very forms in which we
finite knowers experience or think them together. These forms of
conjunction are as much parts of the tissue of experience as are the terms
which they connect; and it is a great pragmatic achievement for recent
idealism to have made the world hang together in these directly
representable ways instead of drawing its unity from the 'inherence' of
its parts—whatever that may mean—in an unimaginable principle
behind the scenes.</p>
<p>'The world is one,' therefore, just so far as we experience it to be
concatenated, one by as many definite conjunctions as appear. But then
also NOT one by just as many definite DISjunctions as we find. The oneness
and the manyness of it thus obtain in respects which can be separately
named. It is neither a universe pure and simple nor a multiverse pure and
simple. And its various manners of being one suggest, for their accurate
ascertainment, so many distinct programs of scientific work. Thus the
pragmatic question 'What is the oneness known-as? What practical
difference will it make?' saves us from all feverish excitement over it as
a principle of sublimity and carries us forward into the stream of
experience with a cool head. The stream may indeed reveal far more
connexion and union than we now suspect, but we are not entitled on
pragmatic principles to claim absolute oneness in any respect in advance.</p>
<p>It is so difficult to see definitely what absolute oneness can mean, that
probably the majority of you are satisfied with the sober attitude which
we have reached. Nevertheless there are possibly some radically monistic
souls among you who are not content to leave the one and the many on a
par. Union of various grades, union of diverse types, union that stops at
non-conductors, union that merely goes from next to next, and means in
many cases outer nextness only, and not a more internal bond, union of
concatenation, in short; all that sort of thing seems to you a halfway
stage of thought. The oneness of things, superior to their manyness, you
think must also be more deeply true, must be the more real aspect of the
world. The pragmatic view, you are sure, gives us a universe imperfectly
rational. The real universe must form an unconditional unit of being,
something consolidated, with its parts co-implicated through and through.
Only then could we consider our estate completely rational. There is no
doubt whatever that this ultra-monistic way of thinking means a great deal
to many minds. "One Life, One Truth, one Love, one Principle, One Good,
One God"—I quote from a Christian Science leaflet which the day's
mail brings into my hands—beyond doubt such a confession of faith
has pragmatically an emotional value, and beyond doubt the word 'one'
contributes to the value quite as much as the other words. But if we try
to realize INTELLECTUALLY what we can possibly MEAN by such a glut of
oneness we are thrown right back upon our pragmatistic determinations
again. It means either the mere name One, the universe of discourse; or it
means the sum total of all the ascertainable particular conjunctions and
concatenations; or, finally, it means some one vehicle of conjunction
treated as all-inclusive, like one origin, one purpose, or one knower. In
point of fact it always means one KNOWER to those who take it
intellectually to-day. The one knower involves, they think, the other
forms of conjunction. His world must have all its parts co-implicated in
the one logical-aesthetical-teleological unit-picture which is his eternal
dream.</p>
<p>The character of the absolute knower's picture is however so impossible
for us to represent clearly, that we may fairly suppose that the authority
which absolute monism undoubtedly possesses, and probably always will
possess over some persons, draws its strength far less from intellectual
than from mystical grounds. To interpret absolute monism worthily, be a
mystic. Mystical states of mind in every degree are shown by history,
usually tho not always, to make for the monistic view. This is no proper
occasion to enter upon the general subject of mysticism, but I will quote
one mystical pronouncement to show just what I mean. The paragon of all
monistic systems is the Vedanta philosophy of Hindostan, and the paragon
of Vedantist missionaries was the late Swami Vivekananda who visited our
shores some years ago. The method of Vedantism is the mystical method. You
do not reason, but after going through a certain discipline YOU SEE, and
having seen, you can report the truth. Vivekananda thus reports the truth
in one of his lectures here:</p>
<p>"Where is any more misery for him who sees this Oneness in the
Universe...this Oneness of life, Oneness of everything? ...This separation
between man and man, man and woman, man and child, nation from nation,
earth from moon, moon from sun, this separation between atom and atom is
the cause really of all the misery, and the Vedanta says this separation
does not exist, it is not real. It is merely apparent, on the surface. In
the heart of things there is Unity still. If you go inside you find that
Unity between man and man, women and children, races and races, high and
low, rich and poor, the gods and men: all are One, and animals too, if you
go deep enough, and he who has attained to that has no more delusion. ...
Where is any more delusion for him? What can delude him? He knows the
reality of everything, the secret of everything. Where is there any more
misery for him? What does he desire? He has traced the reality of
everything unto the Lord, that centre, that Unity of everything, and that
is Eternal Bliss, Eternal Knowledge, Eternal Existence. Neither death nor
disease, nor sorrow nor misery, nor discontent is there ... in the centre,
the reality, there is no one to be mourned for, no one to be sorry for. He
has penetrated everything, the Pure One, the Formless, the Bodiless, the
Stainless, He the Knower, He the Great Poet, the Self-Existent, He who is
giving to everyone what he deserves."</p>
<p>Observe how radical the character of the monism here is. Separation is not
simply overcome by the One, it is denied to exist. There is no many. We
are not parts of the One; It has no parts; and since in a sense we
undeniably ARE, it must be that each of us is the One, indivisibly and
totally. AN ABSOLUTE ONE, AND I THAT ONE—surely we have here a
religion which, emotionally considered, has a high pragmatic value; it
imparts a perfect sumptuosity of security. As our Swami says in another
place:</p>
<p>"When man has seen himself as one with the infinite Being of the universe,
when all separateness has ceased, when all men, all women, all angels, all
gods, all animals, all plants, the whole universe has been melted into
that oneness, then all fear disappears. Whom to fear? Can I hurt myself?
Can I kill myself? Can I injure myself? Do you fear yourself? Then will
all sorrow disappear. What can cause me sorrow? I am the One Existence of
the universe. Then all jealousies will disappear; of whom to be jealous?
Of myself? Then all bad feelings disappear. Against whom will I have this
bad feeling? Against myself? There is none in the universe but me. ...
Kill out this differentiation; kill out this superstition that there are
many. 'He who, in this world of many, sees that One; he who in this mass
of insentiency sees that One Sentient Being; he who in this world of
shadow catches that Reality, unto him belongs eternal peace, unto none
else, unto none else.'"</p>
<p>We all have some ear for this monistic music: it elevates and reassures.
We all have at least the germ of mysticism in us. And when our idealists
recite their arguments for the Absolute, saying that the slightest union
admitted anywhere carries logically absolute Oneness with it, and that the
slightest separation admitted anywhere logically carries disunion
remediless and complete, I cannot help suspecting that the palpable weak
places in the intellectual reasonings they use are protected from their
own criticism by a mystical feeling that, logic or no logic, absolute
Oneness must somehow at any cost be true. Oneness overcomes MORAL
separateness at any rate. In the passion of love we have the mystic germ
of what might mean a total union of all sentient life. This mystical germ
wakes up in us on hearing the monistic utterances, acknowledges their
authority, and assigns to intellectual considerations a secondary place.</p>
<p>I will dwell no longer on these religious and moral aspects of the
question in this lecture. When I come to my final lecture there will be
something more to say.</p>
<p>Leave then out of consideration for the moment the authority which
mystical insights may be conjectured eventually to possess; treat the
problem of the One and the Many in a purely intellectual way; and we see
clearly enough where pragmatism stands. With her criterion of the
practical differences that theories make, we see that she must equally
abjure absolute monism and absolute pluralism. The world is one just so
far as its parts hang together by any definite connexion. It is many just
so far as any definite connexion fails to obtain. And finally it is
growing more and more unified by those systems of connexion at least which
human energy keeps framing as time goes on.</p>
<p>It is possible to imagine alternative universes to the one we know, in
which the most various grades and types of union should be embodied. Thus
the lowest grade of universe would be a world of mere WITHNESS, of which
the parts were only strung together by the conjunction 'and.' Such a
universe is even now the collection of our several inner lives. The spaces
and times of your imagination, the objects and events of your day-dreams
are not only more or less incoherent inter se, but are wholly out of
definite relation with the similar contents of anyone else's mind. Our
various reveries now as we sit here compenetrate each other idly without
influencing or interfering. They coexist, but in no order and in no
receptacle, being the nearest approach to an absolute 'many' that we can
conceive. We cannot even imagine any reason why they SHOULD be known all
together, and we can imagine even less, if they were known together, how
they could be known as one systematic whole.</p>
<p>But add our sensations and bodily actions, and the union mounts to a much
higher grade. Our audita et visa and our acts fall into those receptacles
of time and space in which each event finds its date and place. They form
'things' and are of 'kinds' too, and can be classed. Yet we can imagine a
world of things and of kinds in which the causal interactions with which
we are so familiar should not exist. Everything there might be inert
towards everything else, and refuse to propagate its influence. Or gross
mechanical influences might pass, but no chemical action. Such worlds
would be far less unified than ours. Again there might be complete
physico-chemical interaction, but no minds; or minds, but altogether
private ones, with no social life; or social life limited to acquaintance,
but no love; or love, but no customs or institutions that should
systematize it. No one of these grades of universe would be absolutely
irrational or disintegrated, inferior tho it might appear when looked at
from the higher grades. For instance, if our minds should ever become
'telepathically' connected, so that we knew immediately, or could under
certain conditions know immediately, each what the other was thinking, the
world we now live in would appear to the thinkers in that world to have
been of an inferior grade.</p>
<p>With the whole of past eternity open for our conjectures to range in, it
may be lawful to wonder whether the various kinds of union now realized in
the universe that we inhabit may not possibly have been successively
evolved after the fashion in which we now see human systems evolving in
consequence of human needs. If such an hypothesis were legitimate, total
oneness would appear at the end of things rather than at their origin. In
other words the notion of the 'Absolute' would have to be replaced by that
of the 'Ultimate.' The two notions would have the same content—the
maximally unified content of fact, namely—but their time-relations
would be positively reversed. [Footnote: Compare on the Ultimate, Mr.
Schiller's essay "Activity and Substance," in his book entitled Humanism,
p. 204.]</p>
<p>After discussing the unity of the universe in this pragmatic way, you
ought to see why I said in my second lecture, borrowing the word from my
friend G. Papini, that pragmatism tends to UNSTIFFEN all our theories. The
world's oneness has generally been affirmed abstractly only, and as if
anyone who questioned it must be an idiot. The temper of monists has been
so vehement, as almost at times to be convulsive; and this way of holding
a doctrine does not easily go with reasonable discussion and the drawing
of distinctions. The theory of the Absolute, in particular, has had to be
an article of faith, affirmed dogmatically and exclusively. The One and
All, first in the order of being and of knowing, logically necessary
itself, and uniting all lesser things in the bonds of mutual necessity,
how could it allow of any mitigation of its inner rigidity? The slightest
suspicion of pluralism, the minutest wiggle of independence of any one of
its parts from the control of the totality, would ruin it. Absolute unity
brooks no degrees—as well might you claim absolute purity for a
glass of water because it contains but a single little cholera-germ. The
independence, however infinitesimal, of a part, however small, would be to
the Absolute as fatal as a cholera-germ.</p>
<p>Pluralism on the other hand has no need of this dogmatic rigoristic
temper. Provided you grant SOME separation among things, some tremor of
independence, some free play of parts on one another, some real novelty or
chance, however minute, she is amply satisfied, and will allow you any
amount, however great, of real union. How much of union there may be is a
question that she thinks can only be decided empirically. The amount may
be enormous, colossal; but absolute monism is shattered if, along with all
the union, there has to be granted the slightest modicum, the most
incipient nascency, or the most residual trace, of a separation that is
not 'overcome.'</p>
<p>Pragmatism, pending the final empirical ascertainment of just what the
balance of union and disunion among things may be, must obviously range
herself upon the pluralistic side. Some day, she admits, even total union,
with one knower, one origin, and a universe consolidated in every
conceivable way, may turn out to be the most acceptable of all hypotheses.
Meanwhile the opposite hypothesis, of a world imperfectly unified still,
and perhaps always to remain so, must be sincerely entertained. This
latter hypothesis is pluralism's doctrine. Since absolute monism forbids
its being even considered seriously, branding it as irrational from the
start, it is clear that pragmatism must turn its back on absolute monism,
and follow pluralism's more empirical path.</p>
<p>This leaves us with the common-sense world, in which we find things partly
joined and partly disjoined. 'Things,' then, and their 'conjunctions'—what
do such words mean, pragmatically handled? In my next lecture, I will
apply the pragmatic method to the stage of philosophizing known as Common
Sense.</p>
<p><br/><br/></p>
<hr />
<p><SPAN name="link2H_4_0007" id="link2H_4_0007"> </SPAN></p>
<br/>
<h2> Lecture V. — Pragmatism and Common Sense </h2>
<p>In the last lecture we turned ourselves from the usual way of talking of
the universe's oneness as a principle, sublime in all its blankness,
towards a study of the special kinds of union which the universe enfolds.
We found many of these to coexist with kinds of separation equally real.
"How far am I verified?" is the question which each kind of union and each
kind of separation asks us here, so as good pragmatists we have to turn
our face towards experience, towards 'facts.'</p>
<p>Absolute oneness remains, but only as an hypothesis, and that hypothesis
is reduced nowadays to that of an omniscient knower who sees all things
without exception as forming one single systematic fact. But the knower in
question may still be conceived either as an Absolute or as an Ultimate;
and over against the hypothesis of him in either form the
counter-hypothesis that the widest field of knowledge that ever was or
will be still contains some ignorance, may be legitimately held. Some bits
of information always may escape.</p>
<p>This is the hypothesis of NOETIC PLURALISM, which monists consider so
absurd. Since we are bound to treat it as respectfully as noetic monism,
until the facts shall have tipped the beam, we find that our pragmatism,
tho originally nothing but a method, has forced us to be friendly to the
pluralistic view. It MAY be that some parts of the world are connected so
loosely with some other parts as to be strung along by nothing but the
copula AND. They might even come and go without those other parts
suffering any internal change. This pluralistic view, of a world of
ADDITIVE constitution, is one that pragmatism is unable to rule out from
serious consideration. But this view leads one to the farther hypothesis
that the actual world, instead of being complete 'eternally,' as the
monists assure us, may be eternally incomplete, and at all times subject
to addition or liable to loss.</p>
<p>It IS at any rate incomplete in one respect, and flagrantly so. The very
fact that we debate this question shows that our KNOWLEDGE is incomplete
at present and subject to addition. In respect of the knowledge it
contains the world does genuinely change and grow. Some general remarks on
the way in which our knowledge completes itself—when it does
complete itself—will lead us very conveniently into our subject for
this lecture, which is 'Common Sense.'</p>
<p>To begin with, our knowledge grows IN SPOTS. The spots may be large or
small, but the knowledge never grows all over: some old knowledge always
remains what it was. Your knowledge of pragmatism, let us suppose, is
growing now. Later, its growth may involve considerable modification of
opinions which you previously held to be true. But such modifications are
apt to be gradual. To take the nearest possible example, consider these
lectures of mine. What you first gain from them is probably a small amount
of new information, a few new definitions, or distinctions, or points of
view. But while these special ideas are being added, the rest of your
knowledge stands still, and only gradually will you 'line up' your
previous opinions with the novelties I am trying to instil, and modify to
some slight degree their mass.</p>
<p>You listen to me now, I suppose, with certain prepossessions as to my
competency, and these affect your reception of what I say, but were I
suddenly to break off lecturing, and to begin to sing 'We won't go home
till morning' in a rich baritone voice, not only would that new fact be
added to your stock, but it would oblige you to define me differently, and
that might alter your opinion of the pragmatic philosophy, and in general
bring about a rearrangement of a number of your ideas. Your mind in such
processes is strained, and sometimes painfully so, between its older
beliefs and the novelties which experience brings along.</p>
<p>Our minds thus grow in spots; and like grease-spots, the spots spread. But
we let them spread as little as possible: we keep unaltered as much of our
old knowledge, as many of our old prejudices and beliefs, as we can. We
patch and tinker more than we renew. The novelty soaks in; it stains the
ancient mass; but it is also tinged by what absorbs it. Our past
apperceives and co-operates; and in the new equilibrium in which each step
forward in the process of learning terminates, it happens relatively
seldom that the new fact is added RAW. More usually it is embedded cooked,
as one might say, or stewed down in the sauce of the old.</p>
<p>New truths thus are resultants of new experiences and of old truths
combined and mutually modifying one another. And since this is the case in
the changes of opinion of to-day, there is no reason to assume that it has
not been so at all times. It follows that very ancient modes of thought
may have survived through all the later changes in men's opinions. The
most primitive ways of thinking may not yet be wholly expunged. Like our
five fingers, our ear-bones, our rudimentary caudal appendage, or our
other 'vestigial' peculiarities, they may remain as indelible tokens of
events in our race-history. Our ancestors may at certain moments have
struck into ways of thinking which they might conceivably not have found.
But once they did so, and after the fact, the inheritance continues. When
you begin a piece of music in a certain key, you must keep the key to the
end. You may alter your house ad libitum, but the ground-plan of the first
architect persists—you can make great changes, but you cannot change
a Gothic church into a Doric temple. You may rinse and rinse the bottle,
but you can't get the taste of the medicine or whiskey that first filled
it wholly out.</p>
<p>My thesis now is this, that OUR FUNDAMENTAL WAYS OF THINKING ABOUT THINGS
ARE DISCOVERIES OF EXCEEDINGLY REMOTE ANCESTORS, WHICH HAVE BEEN ABLE TO
PRESERVE THEMSELVES THROUGHOUT THE EXPERIENCE OF ALL SUBSEQUENT TIME. They
form one great stage of equilibrium in the human mind's development, the
stage of common sense. Other stages have grafted themselves upon this
stage, but have never succeeded in displacing it. Let us consider this
common-sense stage first, as if it might be final.</p>
<p>In practical talk, a man's common sense means his good judgment, his
freedom from excentricity, his GUMPTION, to use the vernacular word. In
philosophy it means something entirely different, it means his use of
certain intellectual forms or categories of thought. Were we lobsters, or
bees, it might be that our organization would have led to our using quite
different modes from these of apprehending our experiences. It MIGHT be
too (we cannot dogmatically deny this) that such categories, unimaginable
by us to-day, would have proved on the whole as serviceable for handling
our experiences mentally as those which we actually use.</p>
<p>If this sounds paradoxical to anyone, let him think of analytical
geometry. The identical figures which Euclid defined by intrinsic
relations were defined by Descartes by the relations of their points to
adventitious co-ordinates, the result being an absolutely different and
vastly more potent way of handling curves. All our conceptions are what
the Germans call denkmittel, means by which we handle facts by thinking
them. Experience merely as such doesn't come ticketed and labeled, we have
first to discover what it is. Kant speaks of it as being in its first
intention a gewuehl der erscheinungen, a rhapsodie der wahrnehmungen, a
mere motley which we have to unify by our wits. What we usually do is
first to frame some system of concepts mentally classified, serialized, or
connected in some intellectual way, and then to use this as a tally by
which we 'keep tab' on the impressions that present themselves. When each
is referred to some possible place in the conceptual system, it is thereby
'understood.' This notion of parallel 'manifolds' with their elements
standing reciprocally in 'one-to-one relations,' is proving so convenient
nowadays in mathematics and logic as to supersede more and more the older
classificatory conceptions. There are many conceptual systems of this
sort; and the sense manifold is also such a system. Find a one-to-one
relation for your sense-impressions ANYWHERE among the concepts, and in so
far forth you rationalize the impressions. But obviously you can
rationalize them by using various conceptual systems.</p>
<p>The old common-sense way of rationalizing them is by a set of concepts of
which the most important are these:</p>
<p>Thing;</p>
<p>The same or different;</p>
<p>Kinds;</p>
<p>Minds;</p>
<p>Bodies;</p>
<p>One Time;</p>
<p>One Space;</p>
<p>Subjects and attributes;</p>
<p>Causal influences;</p>
<p>The fancied;</p>
<p>The real.</p>
<p>We are now so familiar with the order that these notions have woven for us
out of the everlasting weather of our perceptions that we find it hard to
realize how little of a fixed routine the perceptions follow when taken by
themselves. The word weather is a good one to use here. In Boston, for
example, the weather has almost no routine, the only law being that if you
have had any weather for two days, you will probably but not certainly
have another weather on the third. Weather-experience as it thus comes to
Boston, is discontinuous and chaotic. In point of temperature, of wind,
rain or sunshine, it MAY change three times a day. But the Washington
weather-bureau intellectualizes this disorder by making each successive
bit of Boston weather EPISODIC. It refers it to its place and moment in a
continental cyclone, on the history of which the local changes everywhere
are strung as beads are strung upon a cord.</p>
<p>Now it seems almost certain that young children and the inferior animals
take all their experiences very much as uninstructed Bostonians take their
weather. They know no more of time or space as world-receptacles, or of
permanent subjects and changing predicates, or of causes, or kinds, or
thoughts, or things, than our common people know of continental cyclones.
A baby's rattle drops out of his hand, but the baby looks not for it. It
has 'gone out' for him, as a candle-flame goes out; and it comes back,
when you replace it in his hand, as the flame comes back when relit. The
idea of its being a 'thing,' whose permanent existence by itself he might
interpolate between its successive apparitions has evidently not occurred
to him. It is the same with dogs. Out of sight, out of mind, with them. It
is pretty evident that they have no GENERAL tendency to interpolate
'things.' Let me quote here a passage from my colleague G. Santayana's
book.</p>
<p>"If a dog, while sniffing about contentedly, sees afar off his master
arriving after long absence...the poor brute asks for no reason why his
master went, why he has come again, why he should be loved, or why
presently while lying at his feet you forget him and begin to grunt and
dream of the chase—all that is an utter mystery, utterly
unconsidered. Such experience has variety, scenery, and a certain vital
rhythm; its story might be told in dithyrambic verse. It moves wholly by
inspiration; every event is providential, every act unpremeditated.
Absolute freedom and absolute helplessness have met together: you depend
wholly on divine favour, yet that unfathomable agency is not
distinguishable from your own life. ...[But] the figures even of that
disordered drama have their exits and their entrances; and their cues can
be gradually discovered by a being capable of fixing his attention and
retaining the order of events. ...In proportion as such understanding
advances each moment of experience becomes consequential and prophetic of
the rest. The calm places in life are filled with power and its spasms
with resource. No emotion can overwhelm the mind, for of none is the basis
or issue wholly hidden; no event can disconcert it altogether, because it
sees beyond. Means can be looked for to escape from the worst predicament;
and whereas each moment had been formerly filled with nothing but its own
adventure and surprised emotion, each now makes room for the lesson of
what went before and surmises what may be the plot of the
whole."[Footnote: The Life of Reason: Reason in Common Sense, 1905, p.
59.]</p>
<p>Even to-day science and philosophy are still laboriously trying to part
fancies from realities in our experience; and in primitive times they made
only the most incipient distinctions in this line. Men believed whatever
they thought with any liveliness, and they mixed their dreams with their
realities inextricably. The categories of 'thought' and 'things' are
indispensable here—instead of being realities we now call certain
experiences only 'thoughts.' There is not a category, among those
enumerated, of which we may not imagine the use to have thus originated
historically and only gradually spread.</p>
<p>That one Time which we all believe in and in which each event has its
definite date, that one Space in which each thing has its position, these
abstract notions unify the world incomparably; but in their finished shape
as concepts how different they are from the loose unordered time-and-space
experiences of natural men! Everything that happens to us brings its own
duration and extension, and both are vaguely surrounded by a marginal
'more' that runs into the duration and extension of the next thing that
comes. But we soon lose all our definite bearings; and not only do our
children make no distinction between yesterday and the day before
yesterday, the whole past being churned up together, but we adults still
do so whenever the times are large. It is the same with spaces. On a map I
can distinctly see the relation of London, Constantinople, and Pekin to
the place where I am; in reality I utterly fail to FEEL the facts which
the map symbolizes. The directions and distances are vague, confused and
mixed. Cosmic space and cosmic time, so far from being the intuitions that
Kant said they were, are constructions as patently artificial as any that
science can show. The great majority of the human race never use these
notions, but live in plural times and spaces, interpenetrant and
DURCHEINANDER.</p>
<p>Permanent 'things' again; the 'same' thing and its various 'appearances'
and 'alterations'; the different 'kinds' of thing; with the 'kind' used
finally as a 'predicate,' of which the thing remains the 'subject'—what
a straightening of the tangle of our experience's immediate flux and
sensible variety does this list of terms suggest! And it is only the
smallest part of his experience's flux that anyone actually does
straighten out by applying to it these conceptual instruments. Out of them
all our lowest ancestors probably used only, and then most vaguely and
inaccurately, the notion of 'the same again.' But even then if you had
asked them whether the same were a 'thing' that had endured throughout the
unseen interval, they would probably have been at a loss, and would have
said that they had never asked that question, or considered matters in
that light.</p>
<p>Kinds, and sameness of kind—what colossally useful DENKMITTEL for
finding our way among the many! The manyness might conceivably have been
absolute. Experiences might have all been singulars, no one of them
occurring twice. In such a world logic would have had no application; for
kind and sameness of kind are logic's only instruments. Once we know that
whatever is of a kind is also of that kind's kind, we can travel through
the universe as if with seven-league boots. Brutes surely never use these
abstractions, and civilized men use them in most various amounts.</p>
<p>Causal influence, again! This, if anything, seems to have been an
antediluvian conception; for we find primitive men thinking that almost
everything is significant and can exert influence of some sort. The search
for the more definite influences seems to have started in the question:
"Who, or what, is to blame?"—for any illness, namely, or disaster,
or untoward thing. From this centre the search for causal influences has
spread. Hume and 'Science' together have tried to eliminate the whole
notion of influence, substituting the entirely different DENKMITTEL of
'law.' But law is a comparatively recent invention, and influence reigns
supreme in the older realm of common sense.</p>
<p>The 'possible,' as something less than the actual and more than the wholly
unreal, is another of these magisterial notions of common sense. Criticize
them as you may, they persist; and we fly back to them the moment critical
pressure is relaxed. 'Self,' 'body,' in the substantial or metaphysical
sense—no one escapes subjection to THOSE forms of thought. In
practice, the common-sense DENKMITTEL are uniformly victorious. Everyone,
however instructed, still thinks of a 'thing' in the common-sense way, as
a permanent unit-subject that 'supports' its attributes interchangeably.
No one stably or sincerely uses the more critical notion, of a group of
sense-qualities united by a law. With these categories in our hand, we
make our plans and plot together, and connect all the remoter parts of
experience with what lies before our eyes. Our later and more critical
philosophies are mere fads and fancies compared with this natural
mother-tongue of thought.</p>
<p>Common sense appears thus as a perfectly definite stage in our
understanding of things, a stage that satisfies in an extraordinarily
successful way the purposes for which we think. 'Things' do exist, even
when we do not see them. Their 'kinds' also exist. Their 'qualities' are
what they act by, and are what we act on; and these also exist. These
lamps shed their quality of light on every object in this room. We
intercept IT on its way whenever we hold up an opaque screen. It is the
very sound that my lips emit that travels into your ears. It is the
sensible heat of the fire that migrates into the water in which we boil an
egg; and we can change the heat into coolness by dropping in a lump of
ice. At this stage of philosophy all non-European men without exception
have remained. It suffices for all the necessary practical ends of life;
and, among our own race even, it is only the highly sophisticated
specimens, the minds debauched by learning, as Berkeley calls them, who
have ever even suspected common sense of not being absolutely true.</p>
<p>But when we look back, and speculate as to how the common-sense categories
may have achieved their wonderful supremacy, no reason appears why it may
not have been by a process just like that by which the conceptions due to
Democritus, Berkeley, or Darwin, achieved their similar triumphs in more
recent times. In other words, they may have been successfully DISCOVERED
by prehistoric geniuses whose names the night of antiquity has covered up;
they may have been verified by the immediate facts of experience which
they first fitted; and then from fact to fact and from man to man they may
have SPREAD, until all language rested on them and we are now incapable of
thinking naturally in any other terms. Such a view would only follow the
rule that has proved elsewhere so fertile, of assuming the vast and remote
to conform to the laws of formation that we can observe at work in the
small and near.</p>
<p>For all utilitarian practical purposes these conceptions amply suffice;
but that they began at special points of discovery and only gradually
spread from one thing to another, seems proved by the exceedingly dubious
limits of their application to-day. We assume for certain purposes one
'objective' Time that AEQUABILITER FLUIT, but we don't livingly believe in
or realize any such equally-flowing time. 'Space' is a less vague notion;
but 'things,' what are they? Is a constellation properly a thing? or an
army? or is an ENS RATIONIS such as space or justice a thing? Is a knife
whose handle and blade are changed the 'same'? Is the 'changeling,' whom
Locke so seriously discusses, of the human 'kind'? Is 'telepathy' a
'fancy' or a 'fact'? The moment you pass beyond the practical use of these
categories (a use usually suggested sufficiently by the circumstances of
the special case) to a merely curious or speculative way of thinking, you
find it impossible to say within just what limits of fact any one of them
shall apply.</p>
<p>The peripatetic philosophy, obeying rationalist propensities, has tried to
eternalize the common-sense categories by treating them very technically
and articulately. A 'thing' for instance is a being, or ENS. An ENS is a
subject in which qualities 'inhere.' A subject is a substance. Substances
are of kinds, and kinds are definite in number, and discrete. These
distinctions are fundamental and eternal. As terms of DISCOURSE they are
indeed magnificently useful, but what they mean, apart from their use in
steering our discourse to profitable issues, does not appear. If you ask a
scholastic philosopher what a substance may be in itself, apart from its
being the support of attributes, he simply says that your intellect knows
perfectly what the word means.</p>
<p>But what the intellect knows clearly is only the word itself and its
steering function. So it comes about that intellects SIBI PERMISSI,
intellects only curious and idle, have forsaken the common-sense level for
what in general terms may be called the 'critical' level of thought. Not
merely SUCH intellects either—your Humes and Berkeleys and Hegels;
but practical observers of facts, your Galileos, Daltons, Faradays, have
found it impossible to treat the NAIFS sense-termini of common sense as
ultimately real. As common sense interpolates her constant 'things'
between our intermittent sensations, so science EXTRApolates her world of
'primary' qualities, her atoms, her ether, her magnetic fields, and the
like, beyond the common-sense world. The 'things' are now invisible
impalpable things; and the old visible common-sense things are supposed to
result from the mixture of these invisibles. Or else the whole NAIF
conception of thing gets superseded, and a thing's name is interpreted as
denoting only the law or REGEL DER VERBINDUNG by which certain of our
sensations habitually succeed or coexist.</p>
<p>Science and critical philosophy thus burst the bounds of common sense.
With science NAIF realism ceases: 'Secondary' qualities become unreal;
primary ones alone remain. With critical philosophy, havoc is made of
everything. The common-sense categories one and all cease to represent
anything in the way of BEING; they are but sublime tricks of human
thought, our ways of escaping bewilderment in the midst of sensation's
irremediable flow.</p>
<p>But the scientific tendency in critical thought, tho inspired at first by
purely intellectual motives, has opened an entirely unexpected range of
practical utilities to our astonished view. Galileo gave us accurate
clocks and accurate artillery-practice; the chemists flood us with new
medicines and dye-stuffs; Ampere and Faraday have endowed us with the New
York subway and with Marconi telegrams. The hypothetical things that such
men have invented, defined as they have defined them, are showing an
extraordinary fertility in consequences verifiable by sense. Our logic can
deduce from them a consequence due under certain conditions, we can then
bring about the conditions, and presto, the consequence is there before
our eyes. The scope of the practical control of nature newly put into our
hand by scientific ways of thinking vastly exceeds the scope of the old
control grounded on common sense. Its rate of increase accelerates so that
no one can trace the limit; one may even fear that the BEING of man may be
crushed by his own powers, that his fixed nature as an organism may not
prove adequate to stand the strain of the ever increasingly tremendous
functions, almost divine creative functions, which his intellect will more
and more enable him to wield. He may drown in his wealth like a child in a
bath-tub, who has turned on the water and who cannot turn it off.</p>
<p>The philosophic stage of criticism, much more thorough in its negations
than the scientific stage, so far gives us no new range of practical
power. Locke, Hume, Berkeley, Kant, Hegel, have all been utterly sterile,
so far as shedding any light on the details of nature goes, and I can
think of no invention or discovery that can be directly traced to anything
in their peculiar thought, for neither with Berkeley's tar-water nor with
Kant's nebular hypothesis had their respective philosophic tenets anything
to do. The satisfactions they yield to their disciples are intellectual,
not practical; and even then we have to confess that there is a large
minus-side to the account.</p>
<p>There are thus at least three well-characterized levels, stages or types
of thought about the world we live in, and the notions of one stage have
one kind of merit, those of another stage another kind. It is impossible,
however, to say that any stage as yet in sight is absolutely more TRUE
than any other. Common sense is the more CONSOLIDATED stage, because it
got its innings first, and made all language into its ally. Whether it or
science be the more AUGUST stage may be left to private judgment. But
neither consolidation nor augustness are decisive marks of truth. If
common sense were true, why should science have had to brand the secondary
qualities, to which our world owes all its living interest, as false, and
to invent an invisible world of points and curves and mathematical
equations instead? Why should it have needed to transform causes and
activities into laws of 'functional variation'? Vainly did scholasticism,
common sense's college-trained younger sister, seek to stereotype the
forms the human family had always talked with, to make them definite and
fix them for eternity. Substantial forms (in other words our secondary
qualities) hardly outlasted the year of our Lord 1600. People were already
tired of them then; and Galileo, and Descartes, with his 'new philosophy,'
gave them only a little later their coup de grace.</p>
<p>But now if the new kinds of scientific 'thing,' the corpuscular and
etheric world, were essentially more 'true,' why should they have excited
so much criticism within the body of science itself? Scientific logicians
are saying on every hand that these entities and their determinations,
however definitely conceived, should not be held for literally real. It is
AS IF they existed; but in reality they are like co-ordinates or
logarithms, only artificial short-cuts for taking us from one part to
another of experience's flux. We can cipher fruitfully with them; they
serve us wonderfully; but we must not be their dupes.</p>
<p>There is no RINGING conclusion possible when we compare these types of
thinking, with a view to telling which is the more absolutely true. Their
naturalness, their intellectual economy, their fruitfulness for practice,
all start up as distinct tests of their veracity, and as a result we get
confused. Common sense is BETTER for one sphere of life, science for
another, philosophic criticism for a third; but whether either be TRUER
absolutely, Heaven only knows. Just now, if I understand the matter
rightly, we are witnessing a curious reversion to the common-sense way of
looking at physical nature, in the philosophy of science favored by such
men as Mach, Ostwald and Duhem. According to these teachers no hypothesis
is truer than any other in the sense of being a more literal copy of
reality. They are all but ways of talking on our part, to be compared
solely from the point of view of their USE. The only literally true thing
is REALITY; and the only reality we know is, for these logicians, sensible
reality, the flux of our sensations and emotions as they pass. 'Energy' is
the collective name (according to Ostwald) for the sensations just as they
present themselves (the movement, heat, magnetic pull, or light, or
whatever it may be) when they are measured in certain ways. So measuring
them, we are enabled to describe the correlated changes which they show
us, in formulas matchless for their simplicity and fruitfulness for human
use. They are sovereign triumphs of economy in thought.</p>
<p>No one can fail to admire the 'energetic' philosophy. But the
hypersensible entities, the corpuscles and vibrations, hold their own with
most physicists and chemists, in spite of its appeal. It seems too
economical to be all-sufficient. Profusion, not economy, may after all be
reality's key-note.</p>
<p>I am dealing here with highly technical matters, hardly suitable for
popular lecturing, and in which my own competence is small. All the better
for my conclusion, however, which at this point is this. The whole notion
of truth, which naturally and without reflexion we assume to mean the
simple duplication by the mind of a ready-made and given reality, proves
hard to understand clearly. There is no simple test available for
adjudicating offhand between the divers types of thought that claim to
possess it. Common sense, common science or corpuscular philosophy,
ultra-critical science, or energetics, and critical or idealistic
philosophy, all seem insufficiently true in some regard and leave some
dissatisfaction. It is evident that the conflict of these so widely
differing systems obliges us to overhaul the very idea of truth, for at
present we have no definite notion of what the word may mean. I shall face
that task in my next lecture, and will add but a few words, in finishing
the present one.</p>
<p>There are only two points that I wish you to retain from the present
lecture. The first one relates to common sense. We have seen reason to
suspect it, to suspect that in spite of their being so venerable, of their
being so universally used and built into the very structure of language,
its categories may after all be only a collection of extraordinarily
successful hypotheses (historically discovered or invented by single men,
but gradually communicated, and used by everybody) by which our
forefathers have from time immemorial unified and straightened the
discontinuity of their immediate experiences, and put themselves into an
equilibrium with the surface of nature so satisfactory for ordinary
practical purposes that it certainly would have lasted forever, but for
the excessive intellectual vivacity of Democritus, Archimedes, Galileo,
Berkeley, and other excentric geniuses whom the example of such men
inflamed. Retain, I pray you, this suspicion about common sense.</p>
<p>The other point is this. Ought not the existence of the various types of
thinking which we have reviewed, each so splendid for certain purposes,
yet all conflicting still, and neither one of them able to support a claim
of absolute veracity, to awaken a presumption favorable to the
pragmatistic view that all our theories are INSTRUMENTAL, are mental modes
of ADAPTATION to reality, rather than revelations or gnostic answers to
some divinely instituted world-enigma? I expressed this view as clearly as
I could in the second of these lectures. Certainly the restlessness of the
actual theoretic situation, the value for some purposes of each
thought-level, and the inability of either to expel the others decisively,
suggest this pragmatistic view, which I hope that the next lectures may
soon make entirely convincing. May there not after all be a possible
ambiguity in truth?</p>
<p><br/><br/></p>
<hr />
<p><SPAN name="link2H_4_0008" id="link2H_4_0008"> </SPAN></p>
<br/>
<h2> Lecture VI. — Pragmatism's Conception of Truth </h2>
<p>When Clerk Maxwell was a child it is written that he had a mania for
having everything explained to him, and that when people put him off with
vague verbal accounts of any phenomenon he would interrupt them
impatiently by saying, "Yes; but I want you to tell me the PARTICULAR GO
of it!" Had his question been about truth, only a pragmatist could have
told him the particular go of it. I believe that our contemporary
pragmatists, especially Messrs. Schiller and Dewey, have given the only
tenable account of this subject. It is a very ticklish subject, sending
subtle rootlets into all kinds of crannies, and hard to treat in the
sketchy way that alone befits a public lecture. But the Schiller-Dewey
view of truth has been so ferociously attacked by rationalistic
philosophers, and so abominably misunderstood, that here, if anywhere, is
the point where a clear and simple statement should be made.</p>
<p>I fully expect to see the pragmatist view of truth run through the classic
stages of a theory's career. First, you know, a new theory is attacked as
absurd; then it is admitted to be true, but obvious and insignificant;
finally it is seen to be so important that its adversaries claim that they
themselves discovered it. Our doctrine of truth is at present in the first
of these three stages, with symptoms of the second stage having begun in
certain quarters. I wish that this lecture might help it beyond the first
stage in the eyes of many of you.</p>
<p>Truth, as any dictionary will tell you, is a property of certain of our
ideas. It means their 'agreement,' as falsity means their disagreement,
with 'reality.' Pragmatists and intellectualists both accept this
definition as a matter of course. They begin to quarrel only after the
question is raised as to what may precisely be meant by the term
'agreement,' and what by the term 'reality,' when reality is taken as
something for our ideas to agree with.</p>
<p>In answering these questions the pragmatists are more analytic and
painstaking, the intellectualists more offhand and irreflective. The
popular notion is that a true idea must copy its reality. Like other
popular views, this one follows the analogy of the most usual experience.
Our true ideas of sensible things do indeed copy them. Shut your eyes and
think of yonder clock on the wall, and you get just such a true picture or
copy of its dial. But your idea of its 'works' (unless you are a
clock-maker) is much less of a copy, yet it passes muster, for it in no
way clashes with the reality. Even tho it should shrink to the mere word
'works,' that word still serves you truly; and when you speak of the
'time-keeping function' of the clock, or of its spring's 'elasticity,' it
is hard to see exactly what your ideas can copy.</p>
<p>You perceive that there is a problem here. Where our ideas cannot copy
definitely their object, what does agreement with that object mean? Some
idealists seem to say that they are true whenever they are what God means
that we ought to think about that object. Others hold the copy-view all
through, and speak as if our ideas possessed truth just in proportion as
they approach to being copies of the Absolute's eternal way of thinking.</p>
<p>These views, you see, invite pragmatistic discussion. But the great
assumption of the intellectualists is that truth means essentially an
inert static relation. When you've got your true idea of anything, there's
an end of the matter. You're in possession; you KNOW; you have fulfilled
your thinking destiny. You are where you ought to be mentally; you have
obeyed your categorical imperative; and nothing more need follow on that
climax of your rational destiny. Epistemologically you are in stable
equilibrium.</p>
<p>Pragmatism, on the other hand, asks its usual question. "Grant an idea or
belief to be true," it says, "what concrete difference will its being true
make in anyone's actual life? How will the truth be realized? What
experiences will be different from those which would obtain if the belief
were false? What, in short, is the truth's cash-value in experiential
terms?"</p>
<p>The moment pragmatism asks this question, it sees the answer: TRUE IDEAS
ARE THOSE THAT WE CAN ASSIMILATE, VALIDATE, CORROBORATE AND VERIFY. FALSE
IDEAS ARE THOSE THAT WE CANNOT. That is the practical difference it makes
to us to have true ideas; that, therefore, is the meaning of truth, for it
is all that truth is known-as.</p>
<p>This thesis is what I have to defend. The truth of an idea is not a
stagnant property inherent in it. Truth HAPPENS to an idea. It BECOMES
true, is MADE true by events. Its verity is in fact an event, a process:
the process namely of its verifying itself, its veri-FICATION. Its
validity is the process of its valid-ATION.</p>
<p>But what do the words verification and validation themselves pragmatically
mean? They again signify certain practical consequences of the verified
and validated idea. It is hard to find any one phrase that characterizes
these consequences better than the ordinary agreement-formula—just
such consequences being what we have in mind whenever we say that our
ideas 'agree' with reality. They lead us, namely, through the acts and
other ideas which they instigate, into or up to, or towards, other parts
of experience with which we feel all the while-such feeling being among
our potentialities—that the original ideas remain in agreement. The
connexions and transitions come to us from point to point as being
progressive, harmonious, satisfactory. This function of agreeable leading
is what we mean by an idea's verification. Such an account is vague and it
sounds at first quite trivial, but it has results which it will take the
rest of my hour to explain.</p>
<p>Let me begin by reminding you of the fact that the possession of true
thoughts means everywhere the possession of invaluable instruments of
action; and that our duty to gain truth, so far from being a blank command
from out of the blue, or a 'stunt' self-imposed by our intellect, can
account for itself by excellent practical reasons.</p>
<p>The importance to human life of having true beliefs about matters of fact
is a thing too notorious. We live in a world of realities that can be
infinitely useful or infinitely harmful. Ideas that tell us which of them
to expect count as the true ideas in all this primary sphere of
verification, and the pursuit of such ideas is a primary human duty. The
possession of truth, so far from being here an end in itself, is only a
preliminary means towards other vital satisfactions. If I am lost in the
woods and starved, and find what looks like a cow-path, it is of the
utmost importance that I should think of a human habitation at the end of
it, for if I do so and follow it, I save myself. The true thought is
useful here because the house which is its object is useful. The practical
value of true ideas is thus primarily derived from the practical
importance of their objects to us. Their objects are, indeed, not
important at all times. I may on another occasion have no use for the
house; and then my idea of it, however verifiable, will be practically
irrelevant, and had better remain latent. Yet since almost any object may
some day become temporarily important, the advantage of having a general
stock of extra truths, of ideas that shall be true of merely possible
situations, is obvious. We store such extra truths away in our memories,
and with the overflow we fill our books of reference. Whenever such an
extra truth becomes practically relevant to one of our emergencies, it
passes from cold-storage to do work in the world, and our belief in it
grows active. You can say of it then either that 'it is useful because it
is true' or that 'it is true because it is useful.' Both these phrases
mean exactly the same thing, namely that here is an idea that gets
fulfilled and can be verified. True is the name for whatever idea starts
the verification-process, useful is the name for its completed function in
experience. True ideas would never have been singled out as such, would
never have acquired a class-name, least of all a name suggesting value,
unless they had been useful from the outset in this way.</p>
<p>From this simple cue pragmatism gets her general notion of truth as
something essentially bound up with the way in which one moment in our
experience may lead us towards other moments which it will be worth while
to have been led to. Primarily, and on the common-sense level, the truth
of a state of mind means this function of A LEADING THAT IS WORTH WHILE.
When a moment in our experience, of any kind whatever, inspires us with a
thought that is true, that means that sooner or later we dip by that
thought's guidance into the particulars of experience again and make
advantageous connexion with them. This is a vague enough statement, but I
beg you to retain it, for it is essential.</p>
<p>Our experience meanwhile is all shot through with regularities. One bit of
it can warn us to get ready for another bit, can 'intend' or be
'significant of' that remoter object. The object's advent is the
significance's verification. Truth, in these cases, meaning nothing but
eventual verification, is manifestly incompatible with waywardness on our
part. Woe to him whose beliefs play fast and loose with the order which
realities follow in his experience: they will lead him nowhere or else
make false connexions.</p>
<p>By 'realities' or 'objects' here, we mean either things of common sense,
sensibly present, or else common-sense relations, such as dates, places,
distances, kinds, activities. Following our mental image of a house along
the cow-path, we actually come to see the house; we get the image's full
verification. SUCH SIMPLY AND FULLY VERIFIED LEADINGS ARE CERTAINLY THE
ORIGINALS AND PROTOTYPES OF THE TRUTH-PROCESS. Experience offers indeed
other forms of truth-process, but they are all conceivable as being
primary verifications arrested, multiplied or substituted one for another.</p>
<p>Take, for instance, yonder object on the wall. You and I consider it to be
a 'clock,' altho no one of us has seen the hidden works that make it one.
We let our notion pass for true without attempting to verify. If truths
mean verification-process essentially, ought we then to call such
unverified truths as this abortive? No, for they form the overwhelmingly
large number of the truths we live by. Indirect as well as direct
verifications pass muster. Where circumstantial evidence is sufficient, we
can go without eye-witnessing. Just as we here assume Japan to exist
without ever having been there, because it WORKS to do so, everything we
know conspiring with the belief, and nothing interfering, so we assume
that thing to be a clock. We USE it as a clock, regulating the length of
our lecture by it. The verification of the assumption here means its
leading to no frustration or contradiction. VerifiABILITY of wheels and
weights and pendulum is as good as verification. For one truth-process
completed there are a million in our lives that function in this state of
nascency. They turn us TOWARDS direct verification; lead us into the
SURROUNDINGS of the objects they envisage; and then, if everything runs on
harmoniously, we are so sure that verification is possible that we omit
it, and are usually justified by all that happens.</p>
<p>Truth lives, in fact, for the most part on a credit system. Our thoughts
and beliefs 'pass,' so long as nothing challenges them, just as bank-notes
pass so long as nobody refuses them. But this all points to direct
face-to-face verifications somewhere, without which the fabric of truth
collapses like a financial system with no cash-basis whatever. You accept
my verification of one thing, I yours of another. We trade on each other's
truth. But beliefs verified concretely by SOMEBODY are the posts of the
whole superstructure.</p>
<p>Another great reason—beside economy of time—for waiving
complete verification in the usual business of life is that all things
exist in kinds and not singly. Our world is found once for all to have
that peculiarity. So that when we have once directly verified our ideas
about one specimen of a kind, we consider ourselves free to apply them to
other specimens without verification. A mind that habitually discerns the
kind of thing before it, and acts by the law of the kind immediately,
without pausing to verify, will be a 'true' mind in ninety-nine out of a
hundred emergencies, proved so by its conduct fitting everything it meets,
and getting no refutation.</p>
<p>INDIRECTLY OR ONLY POTENTIALLY VERIFYING PROCESSES MAY THUS BE TRUE AS
WELL AS FULL VERIFICATION-PROCESSES. They work as true processes would
work, give us the same advantages, and claim our recognition for the same
reasons. All this on the common-sense level of, matters of fact, which we
are alone considering.</p>
<p>But matters of fact are not our only stock in trade. RELATIONS AMONG
PURELY MENTAL IDEAS form another sphere where true and false beliefs
obtain, and here the beliefs are absolute, or unconditional. When they are
true they bear the name either of definitions or of principles. It is
either a principle or a definition that 1 and 1 make 2, that 2 and 1 make
3, and so on; that white differs less from gray than it does from black;
that when the cause begins to act the effect also commences. Such
propositions hold of all possible 'ones,' of all conceivable 'whites' and
'grays' and 'causes.' The objects here are mental objects. Their relations
are perceptually obvious at a glance, and no sense-verification is
necessary. Moreover, once true, always true, of those same mental objects.
Truth here has an 'eternal' character. If you can find a concrete thing
anywhere that is 'one' or 'white' or 'gray,' or an 'effect,' then your
principles will everlastingly apply to it. It is but a case of
ascertaining the kind, and then applying the law of its kind to the
particular object. You are sure to get truth if you can but name the kind
rightly, for your mental relations hold good of everything of that kind
without exception. If you then, nevertheless, failed to get truth
concretely, you would say that you had classed your real objects wrongly.</p>
<p>In this realm of mental relations, truth again is an affair of leading. We
relate one abstract idea with another, framing in the end great systems of
logical and mathematical truth, under the respective terms of which the
sensible facts of experience eventually arrange themselves, so that our
eternal truths hold good of realities also. This marriage of fact and
theory is endlessly fertile. What we say is here already true in advance
of special verification, IF WE HAVE SUBSUMED OUR OBJECTS RIGHTLY. Our
ready-made ideal framework for all sorts of possible objects follows from
the very structure of our thinking. We can no more play fast and loose
with these abstract relations than we can do so with our
sense-experiences. They coerce us; we must treat them consistently,
whether or not we like the results. The rules of addition apply to our
debts as rigorously as to our assets. The hundredth decimal of pi, the
ratio of the circumference to its diameter, is predetermined ideally now,
tho no one may have computed it. If we should ever need the figure in our
dealings with an actual circle we should need to have it given rightly,
calculated by the usual rules; for it is the same kind of truth that those
rules elsewhere calculate.</p>
<p>Between the coercions of the sensible order and those of the ideal order,
our mind is thus wedged tightly. Our ideas must agree with realities, be
such realities concrete or abstract, be they facts or be they principles,
under penalty of endless inconsistency and frustration. So far,
intellectualists can raise no protest. They can only say that we have
barely touched the skin of the matter.</p>
<p>Realities mean, then, either concrete facts, or abstract kinds of things
and relations perceived intuitively between them. They furthermore and
thirdly mean, as things that new ideas of ours must no less take account
of, the whole body of other truths already in our possession. But what now
does 'agreement' with such three-fold realities mean?—to use again
the definition that is current.</p>
<p>Here it is that pragmatism and intellectualism begin to part company.
Primarily, no doubt, to agree means to copy, but we saw that the mere word
'clock' would do instead of a mental picture of its works, and that of
many realities our ideas can only be symbols and not copies. 'Past time,'
'power,' 'spontaneity'—how can our mind copy such realities?</p>
<p>To 'agree' in the widest sense with a reality, CAN ONLY MEAN TO BE GUIDED
EITHER STRAIGHT UP TO IT OR INTO ITS SURROUNDINGS, OR TO BE PUT INTO SUCH
WORKING TOUCH WITH IT AS TO HANDLE EITHER IT OR SOMETHING CONNECTED WITH
IT BETTER THAN IF WE DISAGREED. Better either intellectually or
practically! And often agreement will only mean the negative fact that
nothing contradictory from the quarter of that reality comes to interfere
with the way in which our ideas guide us elsewhere. To copy a reality is,
indeed, one very important way of agreeing with it, but it is far from
being essential. The essential thing is the process of being guided. Any
idea that helps us to DEAL, whether practically or intellectually, with
either the reality or its belongings, that doesn't entangle our progress
in frustrations, that FITS, in fact, and adapts our life to the reality's
whole setting, will agree sufficiently to meet the requirement. It will
hold true of that reality.</p>
<p>Thus, NAMES are just as 'true' or 'false' as definite mental pictures are.
They set up similar verification-processes, and lead to fully equivalent
practical results.</p>
<p>All human thinking gets discursified; we exchange ideas; we lend and
borrow verifications, get them from one another by means of social
intercourse. All truth thus gets verbally built out, stored up, and made
available for everyone. Hence, we must TALK consistently just as we must
THINK consistently: for both in talk and thought we deal with kinds. Names
are arbitrary, but once understood they must be kept to. We mustn't now
call Abel 'Cain' or Cain 'Abel.' If we do, we ungear ourselves from the
whole book of Genesis, and from all its connexions with the universe of
speech and fact down to the present time. We throw ourselves out of
whatever truth that entire system of speech and fact may embody.</p>
<p>The overwhelming majority of our true ideas admit of no direct or
face-to-face verification-those of past history, for example, as of Cain
and Abel. The stream of time can be remounted only verbally, or verified
indirectly by the present prolongations or effects of what the past
harbored. Yet if they agree with these verbalities and effects, we can
know that our ideas of the past are true. AS TRUE AS PAST TIME ITSELF WAS,
so true was Julius Caesar, so true were antediluvian monsters, all in
their proper dates and settings. That past time itself was, is guaranteed
by its coherence with everything that's present. True as the present is,
the past was also.</p>
<p>Agreement thus turns out to be essentially an affair of leading—leading
that is useful because it is into quarters that contain objects that are
important. True ideas lead us into useful verbal and conceptual quarters
as well as directly up to useful sensible termini. They lead to
consistency, stability and flowing human intercourse. They lead away from
excentricity and isolation, from foiled and barren thinking. The
untrammeled flowing of the leading-process, its general freedom from clash
and contradiction, passes for its indirect verification; but all roads
lead to Rome, and in the end and eventually, all true processes must lead
to the face of directly verifying sensible experiences SOMEWHERE, which
somebody's ideas have copied.</p>
<p>Such is the large loose way in which the pragmatist interprets the word
agreement. He treats it altogether practically. He lets it cover any
process of conduction from a present idea to a future terminus, provided
only it run prosperously. It is only thus that 'scientific' ideas, flying
as they do beyond common sense, can be said to agree with their realities.
It is, as I have already said, as if reality were made of ether, atoms or
electrons, but we mustn't think so literally. The term 'energy' doesn't
even pretend to stand for anything 'objective.' It is only a way of
measuring the surface of phenomena so as to string their changes on a
simple formula.</p>
<p>Yet in the choice of these man-made formulas we cannot be capricious with
impunity any more than we can be capricious on the common-sense practical
level. We must find a theory that will WORK; and that means something
extremely difficult; for our theory must mediate between all previous
truths and certain new experiences. It must derange common sense and
previous belief as little as possible, and it must lead to some sensible
terminus or other that can be verified exactly. To 'work' means both these
things; and the squeeze is so tight that there is little loose play for
any hypothesis. Our theories are wedged and controlled as nothing else is.
Yet sometimes alternative theoretic formulas are equally compatible with
all the truths we know, and then we choose between them for subjective
reasons. We choose the kind of theory to which we are already partial; we
follow 'elegance' or 'economy.' Clerk Maxwell somewhere says it would be
"poor scientific taste" to choose the more complicated of two equally
well-evidenced conceptions; and you will all agree with him. Truth in
science is what gives us the maximum possible sum of satisfactions, taste
included, but consistency both with previous truth and with novel fact is
always the most imperious claimant.</p>
<p>I have led you through a very sandy desert. But now, if I may be allowed
so vulgar an expression, we begin to taste the milk in the cocoanut. Our
rationalist critics here discharge their batteries upon us, and to reply
to them will take us out from all this dryness into full sight of a
momentous philosophical alternative.</p>
<p>Our account of truth is an account of truths in the plural, of processes
of leading, realized in rebus, and having only this quality in common,
that they PAY. They pay by guiding us into or towards some part of a
system that dips at numerous points into sense-percepts, which we may copy
mentally or not, but with which at any rate we are now in the kind of
commerce vaguely designated as verification. Truth for us is simply a
collective name for verification-processes, just as health, wealth,
strength, etc., are names for other processes connected with life, and
also pursued because it pays to pursue them. Truth is MADE, just as
health, wealth and strength are made, in the course of experience.</p>
<p>Here rationalism is instantaneously up in arms against us. I can imagine a
rationalist to talk as follows:</p>
<p>"Truth is not made," he will say; "it absolutely obtains, being a unique
relation that does not wait upon any process, but shoots straight over the
head of experience, and hits its reality every time. Our belief that yon
thing on the wall is a clock is true already, altho no one in the whole
history of the world should verify it. The bare quality of standing in
that transcendent relation is what makes any thought true that possesses
it, whether or not there be verification. You pragmatists put the cart
before the horse in making truth's being reside in verification-processes.
These are merely signs of its being, merely our lame ways of ascertaining
after the fact, which of our ideas already has possessed the wondrous
quality. The quality itself is timeless, like all essences and natures.
Thoughts partake of it directly, as they partake of falsity or of
irrelevancy. It can't be analyzed away into pragmatic consequences."</p>
<p>The whole plausibility of this rationalist tirade is due to the fact to
which we have already paid so much attention. In our world, namely,
abounding as it does in things of similar kinds and similarly associated,
one verification serves for others of its kind, and one great use of
knowing things is to be led not so much to them as to their associates,
especially to human talk about them. The quality of truth, obtaining ante
rem, pragmatically means, then, the fact that in such a world innumerable
ideas work better by their indirect or possible than by their direct and
actual verification. Truth ante rem means only verifiability, then; or
else it is a case of the stock rationalist trick of treating the NAME of a
concrete phenomenal reality as an independent prior entity, and placing it
behind the reality as its explanation. Professor Mach quotes somewhere an
epigram of Lessing's:</p>
<p>Sagt Hanschen Schlau zu Vetter Fritz, "Wie kommt es, Vetter Fritzen, Dass
grad' die Reichsten in der Welt, Das meiste Geld besitzen?"</p>
<p>Hanschen Schlau here treats the principle 'wealth' as something distinct
from the facts denoted by the man's being rich. It antedates them; the
facts become only a sort of secondary coincidence with the rich man's
essential nature.</p>
<p>In the case of 'wealth' we all see the fallacy. We know that wealth is but
a name for concrete processes that certain men's lives play a part in, and
not a natural excellence found in Messrs. Rockefeller and Carnegie, but
not in the rest of us.</p>
<p>Like wealth, health also lives in rebus. It is a name for processes, as
digestion, circulation, sleep, etc., that go on happily, tho in this
instance we are more inclined to think of it as a principle and to say the
man digests and sleeps so well BECAUSE he is so healthy.</p>
<p>With 'strength' we are, I think, more rationalistic still, and decidedly
inclined to treat it as an excellence pre-existing in the man and
explanatory of the herculean performances of his muscles.</p>
<p>With 'truth' most people go over the border entirely, and treat the
rationalistic account as self-evident. But really all these words in TH
are exactly similar. Truth exists ante rem just as much and as little as
the other things do.</p>
<p>The scholastics, following Aristotle, made much of the distinction between
habit and act. Health in actu means, among other things, good sleeping and
digesting. But a healthy man need not always be sleeping, or always
digesting, any more than a wealthy man need be always handling money, or a
strong man always lifting weights. All such qualities sink to the status
of 'habits' between their times of exercise; and similarly truth becomes a
habit of certain of our ideas and beliefs in their intervals of rest from
their verifying activities. But those activities are the root of the whole
matter, and the condition of there being any habit to exist in the
intervals.</p>
<p>'The true,' to put it very briefly, is only the expedient in the way of
our thinking, just as 'the right' is only the expedient in the way of our
behaving. Expedient in almost any fashion; and expedient in the long run
and on the whole of course; for what meets expediently all the experience
in sight won't necessarily meet all farther experiences equally
satisfactorily. Experience, as we know, has ways of BOILING OVER, and
making us correct our present formulas.</p>
<p>The 'absolutely' true, meaning what no farther experience will ever alter,
is that ideal vanishing-point towards which we imagine that all our
temporary truths will some day converge. It runs on all fours with the
perfectly wise man, and with the absolutely complete experience; and, if
these ideals are ever realized, they will all be realized together.
Meanwhile we have to live to-day by what truth we can get to-day, and be
ready to-morrow to call it falsehood. Ptolemaic astronomy, euclidean
space, aristotelian logic, scholastic metaphysics, were expedient for
centuries, but human experience has boiled over those limits, and we now
call these things only relatively true, or true within those borders of
experience. 'Absolutely' they are false; for we know that those limits
were casual, and might have been transcended by past theorists just as
they are by present thinkers.</p>
<p>When new experiences lead to retrospective judgments, using the past
tense, what these judgments utter WAS true, even tho no past thinker had
been led there. We live forwards, a Danish thinker has said, but we
understand backwards. The present sheds a backward light on the world's
previous processes. They may have been truth-processes for the actors in
them. They are not so for one who knows the later revelations of the
story.</p>
<p>This regulative notion of a potential better truth to be established
later, possibly to be established some day absolutely, and having powers
of retroactive legislation, turns its face, like all pragmatist notions,
towards concreteness of fact, and towards the future. Like the
half-truths, the absolute truth will have to be MADE, made as a relation
incidental to the growth of a mass of verification-experience, to which
the half-true ideas are all along contributing their quota.</p>
<p>I have already insisted on the fact that truth is made largely out of
previous truths. Men's beliefs at any time are so much experience funded.
But the beliefs are themselves parts of the sum total of the world's
experience, and become matter, therefore, for the next day's funding
operations. So far as reality means experienceable reality, both it and
the truths men gain about it are everlastingly in process of
mutation-mutation towards a definite goal, it may be—but still
mutation.</p>
<p>Mathematicians can solve problems with two variables. On the Newtonian
theory, for instance, acceleration varies with distance, but distance also
varies with acceleration. In the realm of truth-processes facts come
independently and determine our beliefs provisionally. But these beliefs
make us act, and as fast as they do so, they bring into sight or into
existence new facts which re-determine the beliefs accordingly. So the
whole coil and ball of truth, as it rolls up, is the product of a double
influence. Truths emerge from facts; but they dip forward into facts again
and add to them; which facts again create or reveal new truth (the word is
indifferent) and so on indefinitely. The 'facts' themselves meanwhile are
not TRUE. They simply ARE. Truth is the function of the beliefs that start
and terminate among them.</p>
<p>The case is like a snowball's growth, due as it is to the distribution of
the snow on the one hand, and to the successive pushes of the boys on the
other, with these factors co-determining each other incessantly.</p>
<p>The most fateful point of difference between being a rationalist and being
a pragmatist is now fully in sight. Experience is in mutation, and our
psychological ascertainments of truth are in mutation—so much
rationalism will allow; but never that either reality itself or truth
itself is mutable. Reality stands complete and ready-made from all
eternity, rationalism insists, and the agreement of our ideas with it is
that unique unanalyzable virtue in them of which she has already told us.
As that intrinsic excellence, their truth has nothing to do with our
experiences. It adds nothing to the content of experience. It makes no
difference to reality itself; it is supervenient, inert, static, a
reflexion merely. It doesn't EXIST, it HOLDS or OBTAINS, it belongs to
another dimension from that of either facts or fact-relations, belongs, in
short, to the epistemological dimension—and with that big word
rationalism closes the discussion.</p>
<p>Thus, just as pragmatism faces forward to the future, so does rationalism
here again face backward to a past eternity. True to her inveterate habit,
rationalism reverts to 'principles,' and thinks that when an abstraction
once is named, we own an oracular solution.</p>
<p>The tremendous pregnancy in the way of consequences for life of this
radical difference of outlook will only become apparent in my later
lectures. I wish meanwhile to close this lecture by showing that
rationalism's sublimity does not save it from inanity.</p>
<p>When, namely, you ask rationalists, instead of accusing pragmatism of
desecrating the notion of truth, to define it themselves by saying exactly
what THEY understand by it, the only positive attempts I can think of are
these two:</p>
<p>1. "Truth is just the system of propositions which have an un-conditional
claim to be recognized as valid." [Footnote: A. E. Taylor, Philosophical
Review, vol. xiv, p. 288.]</p>
<p>2. Truth is a name for all those judgments which we find ourselves under
obligation to make by a kind of imperative duty. [Footnote: H. Rickert,
Der Gegenstand der Erkenntniss, chapter on 'Die Urtheilsnothwendigkeit.']</p>
<p>The first thing that strikes one in such definitions is their unutterable
triviality. They are absolutely true, of course, but absolutely
insignificant until you handle them pragmatically. What do you mean by
'claim' here, and what do you mean by 'duty'? As summary names for the
concrete reasons why thinking in true ways is overwhelmingly expedient and
good for mortal men, it is all right to talk of claims on reality's part
to be agreed with, and of obligations on our part to agree. We feel both
the claims and the obligations, and we feel them for just those reasons.</p>
<p>But the rationalists who talk of claim and obligation EXPRESSLY SAY THAT
THEY HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH OUR PRACTICAL INTERESTS OR PERSONAL REASONS.
Our reasons for agreeing are psychological facts, they say, relative to
each thinker, and to the accidents of his life. They are his evidence
merely, they are no part of the life of truth itself. That life transacts
itself in a purely logical or epistemological, as distinguished from a
psychological, dimension, and its claims antedate and exceed all personal
motivations whatsoever. Tho neither man nor God should ever ascertain
truth, the word would still have to be defined as that which OUGHT to be
ascertained and recognized.</p>
<p>There never was a more exquisite example of an idea abstracted from the
concretes of experience and then used to oppose and negate what it was
abstracted from.</p>
<p>Philosophy and common life abound in similar instances. The
'sentimentalist fallacy' is to shed tears over abstract justice and
generosity, beauty, etc., and never to know these qualities when you meet
them in the street, because there the circumstances make them vulgar. Thus
I read in the privately printed biography of an eminently rationalistic
mind: "It was strange that with such admiration for beauty in the
abstract, my brother had no enthusiasm for fine architecture, for
beautiful painting, or for flowers." And in almost the last philosophic
work I have read, I find such passages as the following: "Justice is
ideal, solely ideal. Reason conceives that it ought to exist, but
experience shows that it can-not. ... Truth, which ought to be, cannot be.
... Reason is deformed by experience. As soon as reason enters experience,
it becomes contrary to reason."</p>
<p>The rationalist's fallacy here is exactly like the sentimentalist's. Both
extract a quality from the muddy particulars of experience, and find it so
pure when extracted that they contrast it with each and all its muddy
instances as an opposite and higher nature. All the while it is THEIR
nature. It is the nature of truths to be validated, verified. It pays for
our ideas to be validated. Our obligation to seek truth is part of our
general obligation to do what pays. The payments true ideas bring are the
sole why of our duty to follow them.</p>
<p>Identical whys exist in the case of wealth and health. Truth makes no
other kind of claim and imposes no other kind of ought than health and
wealth do. All these claims are conditional; the concrete benefits we gain
are what we mean by calling the pursuit a duty. In the case of truth,
untrue beliefs work as perniciously in the long run as true beliefs work
beneficially. Talking abstractly, the quality 'true' may thus be said to
grow absolutely precious, and the quality 'untrue' absolutely damnable:
the one may be called good, the other bad, unconditionally. We ought to
think the true, we ought to shun the false, imperatively.</p>
<p>But if we treat all this abstraction literally and oppose it to its mother
soil in experience, see what a preposterous position we work ourselves
into.</p>
<p>We cannot then take a step forward in our actual thinking. When shall I
acknowledge this truth and when that? Shall the acknowledgment be loud?—or
silent? If sometimes loud, sometimes silent, which NOW? When may a truth
go into cold-storage in the encyclopedia? and when shall it come out for
battle? Must I constantly be repeating the truth 'twice two are four'
because of its eternal claim on recognition? or is it sometimes
irrelevant? Must my thoughts dwell night and day on my personal sins and
blemishes, because I truly have them?—or may I sink and ignore them
in order to be a decent social unit, and not a mass of morbid melancholy
and apology?</p>
<p>It is quite evident that our obligation to acknowledge truth, so far from
being unconditional, is tremendously conditioned. Truth with a big T, and
in the singular, claims abstractly to be recognized, of course; but
concrete truths in the plural need be recognized only when their
recognition is expedient. A truth must always be preferred to a falsehood
when both relate to the situation; but when neither does, truth is as
little of a duty as falsehood. If you ask me what o'clock it is and I tell
you that I live at 95 Irving Street, my answer may indeed be true, but you
don't see why it is my duty to give it. A false address would be as much
to the purpose.</p>
<p>With this admission that there are conditions that limit the application
of the abstract imperative, THE PRAGMATISTIC TREATMENT OF TRUTH SWEEPS
BACK UPON US IN ITS FULNESS. Our duty to agree with reality is seen to be
grounded in a perfect jungle of concrete expediencies.</p>
<p>When Berkeley had explained what people meant by matter, people thought
that he denied matter's existence. When Messrs. Schiller and Dewey now
explain what people mean by truth, they are accused of denying ITS
existence. These pragmatists destroy all objective standards, critics say,
and put foolishness and wisdom on one level. A favorite formula for
describing Mr. Schiller's doctrines and mine is that we are persons who
think that by saying whatever you find it pleasant to say and calling it
truth you fulfil every pragmatistic requirement.</p>
<p>I leave it to you to judge whether this be not an impudent slander. Pent
in, as the pragmatist more than anyone else sees himself to be, between
the whole body of funded truths squeezed from the past and the coercions
of the world of sense about him, who so well as he feels the immense
pressure of objective control under which our minds perform their
operations? If anyone imagines that this law is lax, let him keep its
commandment one day, says Emerson. We have heard much of late of the uses
of the imagination in science. It is high time to urge the use of a little
imagination in philosophy. The unwillingness of some of our critics to
read any but the silliest of possible meanings into our statements is as
discreditable to their imaginations as anything I know in recent
philosophic history. Schiller says the true is that which 'works.'
Thereupon he is treated as one who limits verification to the lowest
material utilities. Dewey says truth is what gives 'satisfaction.' He is
treated as one who believes in calling everything true which, if it were
true, would be pleasant.</p>
<p>Our critics certainly need more imagination of realities. I have honestly
tried to stretch my own imagination and to read the best possible meaning
into the rationalist conception, but I have to confess that it still
completely baffles me. The notion of a reality calling on us to 'agree'
with it, and that for no reasons, but simply because its claim is
'unconditional' or 'transcendent,' is one that I can make neither head nor
tail of. I try to imagine myself as the sole reality in the world, and
then to imagine what more I would 'claim' if I were allowed to. If you
suggest the possibility of my claiming that a mind should come into being
from out of the void inane and stand and COPY me, I can indeed imagine
what the copying might mean, but I can conjure up no motive. What good it
would do me to be copied, or what good it would do that mind to copy me,
if farther consequences are expressly and in principle ruled out as
motives for the claim (as they are by our rationalist authorities) I
cannot fathom. When the Irishman's admirers ran him along to the place of
banquet in a sedan chair with no bottom, he said, "Faith, if it wasn't for
the honor of the thing, I might as well have come on foot." So here: but
for the honor of the thing, I might as well have remained uncopied.
Copying is one genuine mode of knowing (which for some strange reason our
contemporary transcendentalists seem to be tumbling over each other to
repudiate); but when we get beyond copying, and fall back on unnamed forms
of agreeing that are expressly denied to be either copyings or leadings or
fittings, or any other processes pragmatically definable, the WHAT of the
'agreement' claimed becomes as unintelligible as the why of it. Neither
content nor motive can be imagined for it. It is an absolutely meaningless
abstraction. [Footnote: I am not forgetting that Professor Rickert long
ago gave up the whole notion of truth being founded on agreement with
reality. Reality, according to him, is whatever agrees with truth, and
truth is founded solely on our primal duty. This fantastic flight,
together with Mr. Joachim's candid confession of failure in his book The
Nature of Truth, seems to me to mark the bankruptcy of rationalism when
dealing with this subject. Rickert deals with part of the pragmatistic
position under the head of what he calls 'Relativismus.' I cannot discuss
his text here. Suffice it to say that his argumentation in that chapter is
so feeble as to seem almost incredible in so generally able a writer.]</p>
<p>Surely in this field of truth it is the pragmatists and not the
rationalists who are the more genuine defenders of the universe's
rationality.</p>
<p><br/><br/></p>
<hr />
<p><SPAN name="link2H_4_0009" id="link2H_4_0009"> </SPAN></p>
<br/>
<h2> Lecture VII. — Pragmatism and Humanism </h2>
<p>What hardens the heart of everyone I approach with the view of truth
sketched in my last lecture is that typical idol of the tribe, the notion
of THE Truth, conceived as the one answer, determinate and complete, to
the one fixed enigma which the world is believed to propound. For popular
tradition, it is all the better if the answer be oracular, so as itself to
awaken wonder as an enigma of the second order, veiling rather than
revealing what its profundities are supposed to contain. All the great
single-word answers to the world's riddle, such as God, the One, Reason,
Law, Spirit, Matter, Nature, Polarity, the Dialectic Process, the Idea,
the Self, the Oversoul, draw the admiration that men have lavished on them
from this oracular role. By amateurs in philosophy and professionals
alike, the universe is represented as a queer sort of petrified sphinx
whose appeal to man consists in a monotonous challenge to his divining
powers. THE Truth: what a perfect idol of the rationalistic mind! I read
in an old letter—from a gifted friend who died too young—these
words: "In everything, in science, art, morals and religion, there MUST be
one system that is right and EVERY other wrong." How characteristic of the
enthusiasm of a certain stage of youth! At twenty-one we rise to such a
challenge and expect to find the system. It never occurs to most of us
even later that the question 'what is THE truth?' is no real question
(being irrelative to all conditions) and that the whole notion of THE
truth is an abstraction from the fact of truths in the plural, a mere
useful summarizing phrase like THE Latin Language or THE Law.</p>
<p>Common-law judges sometimes talk about the law, and school-masters talk
about the latin tongue, in a way to make their hearers think they mean
entities pre-existent to the decisions or to the words and syntax,
determining them unequivocally and requiring them to obey. But the
slightest exercise of reflexion makes us see that, instead of being
principles of this kind, both law and latin are results. Distinctions
between the lawful and the unlawful in conduct, or between the correct and
incorrect in speech, have grown up incidentally among the interactions of
men's experiences in detail; and in no other way do distinctions between
the true and the false in belief ever grow up. Truth grafts itself on
previous truth, modifying it in the process, just as idiom grafts itself
on previous idiom, and law on previous law. Given previous law and a novel
case, and the judge will twist them into fresh law. Previous idiom; new
slang or metaphor or oddity that hits the public taste:—and presto,
a new idiom is made. Previous truth; fresh facts:—and our mind finds
a new truth.</p>
<p>All the while, however, we pretend that the eternal is unrolling, that the
one previous justice, grammar or truth is simply fulgurating, and not
being made. But imagine a youth in the courtroom trying cases with his
abstract notion of 'the' law, or a censor of speech let loose among the
theatres with his idea of 'the' mother-tongue, or a professor setting up
to lecture on the actual universe with his rationalistic notion of 'the
Truth' with a big T, and what progress do they make? Truth, law, and
language fairly boil away from them at the least touch of novel fact.
These things MAKE THEMSELVES as we go. Our rights, wrongs, prohibitions,
penalties, words, forms, idioms, beliefs, are so many new creations that
add themselves as fast as history proceeds. Far from being antecedent
principles that animate the process, law, language, truth are but abstract
names for its results.</p>
<p>Laws and languages at any rate are thus seen to be man-made: things. Mr.
Schiller applies the analogy to beliefs, and proposes the name of
'Humanism' for the doctrine that to an unascertainable extent our truths
are man-made products too. Human motives sharpen all our questions, human
satisfactions lurk in all our answers, all our formulas have a human
twist. This element is so inextricable in the products that Mr. Schiller
sometimes seems almost to leave it an open question whether there be
anything else. "The world," he says, "is essentially [u lambda nu], it is
what we make of it. It is fruitless to define it by what it originally was
or by what it is apart from us; it IS what is made of it. Hence ... the
world is PLASTIC." [Footnote: Personal Idealism, p. 60.] He adds that we
can learn the limits of the plasticity only by trying, and that we ought
to start as if it were wholly plastic, acting methodically on that
assumption, and stopping only when we are decisively rebuked.</p>
<p>This is Mr. Schiller's butt-end-foremost statement of the humanist
position, and it has exposed him to severe attack. I mean to defend the
humanist position in this lecture, so I will insinuate a few remarks at
this point.</p>
<p>Mr. Schiller admits as emphatically as anyone the presence of resisting
factors in every actual experience of truth-making, of which the new-made
special truth must take account, and with which it has perforce to
'agree.' All our truths are beliefs about 'Reality'; and in any particular
belief the reality acts as something independent, as a thing FOUND, not
manufactured. Let me here recall a bit of my last lecture.</p>
<p>'REALITY' IS IN GENERAL WHAT TRUTHS HAVE TO TAKE ACCOUNT OF; [Footnote:
Mr. Taylor in his Elements of Metaphysics uses this excellent pragmatic
definition.] and the FIRST part of reality from this point of view is the
flux of our sensations. Sensations are forced upon us, coming we know not
whence. Over their nature, order, and quantity we have as good as no
control. THEY are neither true nor false; they simply ARE. It is only what
we say about them, only the names we give them, our theories of their
source and nature and remote relations, that may be true or not.</p>
<p>The SECOND part of reality, as something that our beliefs must also
obediently take account of, is the RELATIONS that obtain between our
sensations or between their copies in our minds. This part falls into two
sub-parts: 1) the relations that are mutable and accidental, as those of
date and place; and 2) those that are fixed and essential because they are
grounded on the inner natures of their terms—such as likeness and
unlikeness. Both sorts of relation are matters of immediate perception.
Both are 'facts.' But it is the latter kind of fact that forms the more
important sub-part of reality for our theories of knowledge. Inner
relations namely are 'eternal,' are perceived whenever their sensible
terms are compared; and of them our thought—mathematical and logical
thought, so-called—must eternally take account.</p>
<p>The THIRD part of reality, additional to these perceptions (tho largely
based upon them), is the PREVIOUS TRUTHS of which every new inquiry takes
account. This third part is a much less obdurately resisting factor: it
often ends by giving way. In speaking of these three portions of reality
as at all times controlling our belief's formation, I am only reminding
you of what we heard in our last hour.</p>
<p>Now however fixed these elements of reality may be, we still have a
certain freedom in our dealings with them. Take our sensations. THAT they
are is undoubtedly beyond our control; but WHICH we attend to, note, and
make emphatic in our conclusions depends on our own interests; and,
according as we lay the emphasis here or there, quite different
formulations of truth result. We read the same facts differently.
'Waterloo,' with the same fixed details, spells a 'victory' for an
englishman; for a frenchman it spells a 'defeat.' So, for an optimist
philosopher the universe spells victory, for a pessimist, defeat.</p>
<p>What we say about reality thus depends on the perspective into which we
throw it. The THAT of it is its own; but the WHAT depends on the WHICH;
and the which depends on US. Both the sensational and the relational parts
of reality are dumb: they say absolutely nothing about themselves. We it
is who have to speak for them. This dumbness of sensations has led such
intellectualists as T.H. Green and Edward Caird to shove them almost
beyond the pale of philosophic recognition, but pragmatists refuse to go
so far. A sensation is rather like a client who has given his case to a
lawyer and then has passively to listen in the courtroom to whatever
account of his affairs, pleasant or unpleasant, the lawyer finds it most
expedient to give.</p>
<p>Hence, even in the field of sensation, our minds exert a certain arbitrary
choice. By our inclusions and omissions we trace the field's extent; by
our emphasis we mark its foreground and its background; by our order we
read it in this direction or in that. We receive in short the block of
marble, but we carve the statue ourselves.</p>
<p>This applies to the 'eternal' parts of reality as well: we shuffle our
perceptions of intrinsic relation and arrange them just as freely. We read
them in one serial order or another, class them in this way or in that,
treat one or the other as more fundamental, until our beliefs about them
form those bodies of truth known as logics, geometries, or arithmetics, in
each and all of which the form and order in which the whole is cast is
flagrantly man-made.</p>
<p>Thus, to say nothing of the new FACTS which men add to the matter of
reality by the acts of their own lives, they have already impressed their
mental forms on that whole third of reality which I have called 'previous
truths.' Every hour brings its new percepts, its own facts of sensation
and relation, to be truly taken account of; but the whole of our PAST
dealings with such facts is already funded in the previous truths. It is
therefore only the smallest and recentest fraction of the first two parts
of reality that comes to us without the human touch, and that fraction has
immediately to become humanized in the sense of being squared,
assimilated, or in some way adapted, to the humanized mass already there.
As a matter of fact we can hardly take in an impression at all, in the
absence of a pre-conception of what impressions there may possibly be.</p>
<p>When we talk of reality 'independent' of human thinking, then, it seems a
thing very hard to find. It reduces to the notion of what is just entering
into experience, and yet to be named, or else to some imagined aboriginal
presence in experience, before any belief about the presence had arisen,
before any human conception had been applied. It is what is absolutely
dumb and evanescent, the merely ideal limit of our minds. We may glimpse
it, but we never grasp it; what we grasp is always some substitute for it
which previous human thinking has peptonized and cooked for our
consumption. If so vulgar an expression were allowed us, we might say that
wherever we find it, it has been already FAKED. This is what Mr. Schiller
has in mind when he calls independent reality a mere unresisting [u lambda
nu], which IS only to be made over by us.</p>
<p>That is Mr. Schiller's belief about the sensible core of reality. We
'encounter' it (in Mr. Bradley's words) but don't possess it.
Superficially this sounds like Kant's view; but between categories
fulminated before nature began, and categories gradually forming
themselves in nature's presence, the whole chasm between rationalism and
empiricism yawns. To the genuine 'Kantianer' Schiller will always be to
Kant as a satyr to Hyperion.</p>
<p>Other pragmatists may reach more positive beliefs about the sensible core
of reality. They may think to get at it in its independent nature, by
peeling off the successive man-made wrappings. They may make theories that
tell us where it comes from and all about it; and if these theories work
satisfactorily they will be true. The transcendental idealists say there
is no core, the finally completed wrapping being reality and truth in one.
Scholasticism still teaches that the core is 'matter.' Professor Bergson,
Heymans, Strong, and others, believe in the core and bravely try to define
it. Messrs. Dewey and Schiller treat it as a 'limit.' Which is the truer
of all these diverse accounts, or of others comparable with them, unless
it be the one that finally proves the most satisfactory? On the one hand
there will stand reality, on the other an account of it which proves
impossible to better or to alter. If the impossibility prove permanent,
the truth of the account will be absolute. Other content of truth than
this I can find nowhere. If the anti-pragmatists have any other meaning,
let them for heaven's sake reveal it, let them grant us access to it!</p>
<p>Not BEING reality, but only our belief ABOUT reality, it will contain
human elements, but these will KNOW the non-human element, in the only
sense in which there can be knowledge of anything. Does the river make its
banks, or do the banks make the river? Does a man walk with his right leg
or with his left leg more essentially? Just as impossible may it be to
separate the real from the human factors in the growth of our cognitive
experience.</p>
<p>Let this stand as a first brief indication of the humanistic position.
Does it seem paradoxical? If so, I will try to make it plausible by a few
illustrations, which will lead to a fuller acquaintance with the subject.</p>
<p>In many familiar objects everyone will recognize the human element. We
conceive a given reality in this way or in that, to suit our purpose, and
the reality passively submits to the conception. You can take the number
27 as the cube of 3, or as the product of 3 and 9, or as 26 PLUS 1, or 100
MINUS 73, or in countless other ways, of which one will be just as true as
another. You can take a chessboard as black squares on a white ground, or
as white squares on a black ground, and neither conception is a false one.
You can treat the adjoined figure [Figure of a 'Star of David'] as a star,
as two big triangles crossing each other, as a hexagon with legs set up on
its angles, as six equal triangles hanging together by their tips, etc.
All these treatments are true treatments—the sensible THAT upon the
paper resists no one of them. You can say of a line that it runs east, or
you can say that it runs west, and the line per se accepts both
descriptions without rebelling at the inconsistency.</p>
<p>We carve out groups of stars in the heavens, and call them constellations,
and the stars patiently suffer us to do so—tho if they knew what we
were doing, some of them might feel much surprised at the partners we had
given them. We name the same constellation diversely, as Charles's Wain,
the Great Bear, or the Dipper. None of the names will be false, and one
will be as true as another, for all are applicable.</p>
<p>In all these cases we humanly make an addition to some sensible reality,
and that reality tolerates the addition. All the additions 'agree' with
the reality; they fit it, while they build it out. No one of them is
false. Which may be treated as the more true, depends altogether on the
human use of it. If the 27 is a number of dollars which I find in a drawer
where I had left 28, it is 28 minus 1. If it is the number of inches in a
shelf which I wish to insert into a cupboard 26 inches wide, it is 26 plus
1. If I wish to ennoble the heavens by the constellations I see there,
'Charles's Wain' would be more true than 'Dipper.' My friend Frederick
Myers was humorously indignant that that prodigious star-group should
remind us Americans of nothing but a culinary utensil.</p>
<p>What shall we call a THING anyhow? It seems quite arbitrary, for we carve
out everything, just as we carve out constellations, to suit our human
purposes. For me, this whole 'audience' is one thing, which grows now
restless, now attentive. I have no use at present for its individual
units, so I don't consider them. So of an 'army,' of a 'nation.' But in
your own eyes, ladies and gentlemen, to call you 'audience' is an
accidental way of taking you. The permanently real things for you are your
individual persons. To an anatomist, again, those persons are but
organisms, and the real things are the organs. Not the organs, so much as
their constituent cells, say the histologists; not the cells, but their
molecules, say in turn the chemists.</p>
<p>We break the flux of sensible reality into things, then, at our will. We
create the subjects of our true as well as of our false propositions.</p>
<p>We create the predicates also. Many of the predicates of things express
only the relations of the things to us and to our feelings. Such
predicates of course are human additions. Caesar crossed the Rubicon, and
was a menace to Rome's freedom. He is also an American school-room pest,
made into one by the reaction of our schoolboys on his writings. The added
predicate is as true of him as the earlier ones.</p>
<p>You see how naturally one comes to the humanistic principle: you can't
weed out the human contribution. Our nouns and adjectives are all
humanized heirlooms, and in the theories we build them into, the inner
order and arrangement is wholly dictated by human considerations,
intellectual consistency being one of them. Mathematics and logic
themselves are fermenting with human rearrangements; physics, astronomy
and biology follow massive cues of preference. We plunge forward into the
field of fresh experience with the beliefs our ancestors and we have made
already; these determine what we notice; what we notice determines what we
do; what we do again determines what we experience; so from one thing to
another, altho the stubborn fact remains that there IS a sensible flux,
what is true of it seems from first to last to be largely a matter of our
own creation.</p>
<p>We build the flux out inevitably. The great question is: does it, with our
additions, rise or fall in value? Are the additions WORTHY or UNWORTHY?
Suppose a universe composed of seven stars, and nothing else but three
human witnesses and their critic. One witness names the stars 'Great
Bear'; one calls them 'Charles's Wain'; one calls them the 'Dipper.' Which
human addition has made the best universe of the given stellar material?
If Frederick Myers were the critic, he would have no hesitation in
'turning-down' the American witness.</p>
<p>Lotze has in several places made a deep suggestion. We naively assume, he
says, a relation between reality and our minds which may be just the
opposite of the true one. Reality, we naturally think, stands ready-made
and complete, and our intellects supervene with the one simple duty of
describing it as it is already. But may not our descriptions, Lotze asks,
be themselves important additions to reality? And may not previous reality
itself be there, far less for the purpose of reappearing unaltered in our
knowledge, than for the very purpose of stimulating our minds to such
additions as shall enhance the universe's total value. "Die erhohung des
vorgefundenen daseins" is a phrase used by Professor Eucken somewhere,
which reminds one of this suggestion by the great Lotze.</p>
<p>It is identically our pragmatistic conception. In our cognitive as well as
in our active life we are creative. We ADD, both to the subject and to the
predicate part of reality. The world stands really malleable, waiting to
receive its final touches at our hands. Like the kingdom of heaven, it
suffers human violence willingly. Man ENGENDERS truths upon it.</p>
<p>No one can deny that such a role would add both to our dignity and to our
responsibility as thinkers. To some of us it proves a most inspiring
notion. Signer Papini, the leader of italian pragmatism, grows fairly
dithyrambic over the view that it opens, of man's divinely-creative
functions.</p>
<p>The import of the difference between pragmatism and rationalism is now in
sight throughout its whole extent. The essential contrast is that for
rationalism reality is ready-made and complete from all eternity, while
for pragmatism it is still in the making, and awaits part of its
complexion from the future. On the one side the universe is absolutely
secure, on the other it is still pursuing its adventures.</p>
<p>We have got into rather deep water with this humanistic view, and it is no
wonder that misunderstanding gathers round it. It is accused of being a
doctrine of caprice. Mr. Bradley, for example, says that a humanist, if he
understood his own doctrine, would have to "hold any end however perverted
to be rational if I insist on it personally, and any idea however mad to
be the truth if only some one is resolved that he will have it so." The
humanist view of 'reality,' as something resisting, yet malleable, which
controls our thinking as an energy that must be taken 'account' of
incessantly (tho not necessarily merely COPIED) is evidently a difficult
one to introduce to novices. The situation reminds me of one that I have
personally gone through. I once wrote an essay on our right to believe,
which I unluckily called the WILL to Believe. All the critics, neglecting
the essay, pounced upon the title. Psychologically it was impossible,
morally it was iniquitous. The "will to deceive," the "will to
make-believe," were wittily proposed as substitutes for it.</p>
<p>THE ALTERNATIVE BETWEEN PRAGMATISM AND RATIONALISM, IN THE SHAPE IN WHICH
WE NOW HAVE IT BEFORE US, IS NO LONGER A QUESTION IN THE THEORY OF
KNOWLEDGE, IT CONCERNS THE STRUCTURE OF THE UNIVERSE ITSELF.</p>
<p>On the pragmatist side we have only one edition of the universe,
unfinished, growing in all sorts of places, especially in the places where
thinking beings are at work.</p>
<p>On the rationalist side we have a universe in many editions, one real one,
the infinite folio, or edition de luxe, eternally complete; and then the
various finite editions, full of false readings, distorted and mutilated
each in its own way.</p>
<p>So the rival metaphysical hypotheses of pluralism and monism here come
back upon us. I will develope their differences during the remainder of
our hour.</p>
<p>And first let me say that it is impossible not to see a temperamental
difference at work in the choice of sides. The rationalist mind, radically
taken, is of a doctrinaire and authoritative complexion: the phrase 'must
be' is ever on its lips. The belly-band of its universe must be tight. A
radical pragmatist on the other hand is a happy-go-lucky anarchistic sort
of creature. If he had to live in a tub like Diogenes he wouldn't mind at
all if the hoops were loose and the staves let in the sun.</p>
<p>Now the idea of this loose universe affects your typical rationalists in
much the same way as 'freedom of the press' might affect a veteran
official in the russian bureau of censorship; or as 'simplified spelling'
might affect an elderly schoolmistress. It affects him as the swarm of
protestant sects affects a papist onlooker. It appears as backboneless and
devoid of principle as 'opportunism' in politics appears to an
old-fashioned french legitimist, or to a fanatical believer in the divine
right of the people.</p>
<p>For pluralistic pragmatism, truth grows up inside of all the finite
experiences. They lean on each other, but the whole of them, if such a
whole there be, leans on nothing. All 'homes' are in finite experience;
finite experience as such is homeless. Nothing outside of the flux secures
the issue of it. It can hope salvation only from its own intrinsic
promises and potencies.</p>
<p>To rationalists this describes a tramp and vagrant world, adrift in space,
with neither elephant nor tortoise to plant the sole of its foot upon. It
is a set of stars hurled into heaven without even a centre of gravity to
pull against. In other spheres of life it is true that we have got used to
living in a state of relative insecurity. The authority of 'the State,'
and that of an absolute 'moral law,' have resolved themselves into
expediencies, and holy church has resolved itself into 'meeting-houses.'
Not so as yet within the philosophic class-rooms. A universe with such as
US contributing to create its truth, a world delivered to OUR opportunisms
and OUR private judgments! Home-rule for Ireland would be a millennium in
comparison. We're no more fit for such a part than the Filipinos are 'fit
for self-government.' Such a world would not be RESPECTABLE,
philosophically. It is a trunk without a tag, a dog without a collar, in
the eyes of most professors of philosophy.</p>
<p>What then would tighten this loose universe, according to the professors?</p>
<p>Something to support the finite many, to tie it to, to unify and anchor
it. Something unexposed to accident, something eternal and unalterable.
The mutable in experience must be founded on immutability. Behind our de
facto world, our world in act, there must be a de jure duplicate fixed and
previous, with all that can happen here already there in posse, every drop
of blood, every smallest item, appointed and provided, stamped and
branded, without chance of variation. The negatives that haunt our ideals
here below must be themselves negated in the absolutely Real. This alone
makes the universe solid. This is the resting deep. We live upon the
stormy surface; but with this our anchor holds, for it grapples rocky
bottom. This is Wordsworth's "central peace subsisting at the heart of
endless agitation." This is Vivekananda's mystical One of which I read to
you. This is Reality with the big R, reality that makes the timeless
claim, reality to which defeat can't happen. This is what the men of
principles, and in general all the men whom I called tender-minded in my
first lecture, think themselves obliged to postulate.</p>
<p>And this, exactly this, is what the tough-minded of that lecture find
themselves moved to call a piece of perverse abstraction-worship. The
tough-minded are the men whose alpha and omega are FACTS. Behind the bare
phenomenal facts, as my tough-minded old friend Chauncey Wright, the great
Harvard empiricist of my youth, used to say, there is NOTHING. When a
rationalist insists that behind the facts there is the GROUND of the
facts, the POSSIBILITY of the facts, the tougher empiricists accuse him of
taking the mere name and nature of a fact and clapping it behind the fact
as a duplicate entity to make it possible. That such sham grounds are
often invoked is notorious. At a surgical operation I heard a bystander
ask a doctor why the patient breathed so deeply. "Because ether is a
respiratory stimulant," the doctor answered. "Ah!" said the questioner, as
if relieved by the explanation. But this is like saying that cyanide of
potassium kills because it is a 'poison,' or that it is so cold to-night
because it is 'winter,' or that we have five fingers because we are
'pentadactyls.' These are but names for the facts, taken from the facts,
and then treated as previous and explanatory. The tender-minded notion of
an absolute reality is, according to the radically tough-minded, framed on
just this pattern. It is but our summarizing name for the whole spread-out
and strung-along mass of phenomena, treated as if it were a different
entity, both one and previous.</p>
<p>You see how differently people take things. The world we live in exists
diffused and distributed, in the form of an indefinitely numerous lot of
eaches, coherent in all sorts of ways and degrees; and the tough-minded
are perfectly willing to keep them at that valuation. They can stand that
kind of world, their temper being well adapted to its insecurity. Not so
the tender-minded party. They must back the world we find ourselves born
into by "another and a better" world in which the eaches form an All and
the All a One that logically presupposes, co-implicates, and secures each
EACH without exception.</p>
<p>Must we as pragmatists be radically tough-minded? or can we treat the
absolute edition of the world as a legitimate hypothesis? It is certainly
legitimate, for it is thinkable, whether we take it in its abstract or in
its concrete shape.</p>
<p>By taking it abstractly I mean placing it behind our finite life as we
place the word 'winter' behind to-night's cold weather. 'Winter' is only
the name for a certain number of days which we find generally
characterized by cold weather, but it guarantees nothing in that line, for
our thermometer to-morrow may soar into the 70's. Nevertheless the word is
a useful one to plunge forward with into the stream of our experience. It
cuts off certain probabilities and sets up others: you can put away your
straw-hats; you can unpack your arctics. It is a summary of things to look
for. It names a part of nature's habits, and gets you ready for their
continuation. It is a definite instrument abstracted from experience, a
conceptual reality that you must take account of, and which reflects you
totally back into sensible realities. The pragmatist is the last person to
deny the reality of such abstractions. They are so much past experience
funded.</p>
<p>But taking the absolute edition of the world concretely means a different
hypothesis. Rationalists take it concretely and OPPOSE it to the world's
finite editions. They give it a particular nature. It is perfect,
finished. Everything known there is known along with everything else;
here, where ignorance reigns, far otherwise. If there is want there, there
also is the satisfaction provided. Here all is process; that world is
timeless. Possibilities obtain in our world; in the absolute world, where
all that is NOT is from eternity impossible, and all that IS is necessary,
the category of possibility has no application. In this world crimes and
horrors are regrettable. In that totalized world regret obtains not, for
"the existence of ill in the temporal order is the very condition of the
perfection of the eternal order."</p>
<p>Once more, either hypothesis is legitimate in pragmatist eyes, for either
has its uses. Abstractly, or taken like the word winter, as a memorandum
of past experience that orients us towards the future, the notion of the
absolute world is indispensable. Concretely taken, it is also
indispensable, at least to certain minds, for it determines them
religiously, being often a thing to change their lives by, and by changing
their lives, to change whatever in the outer order depends on them.</p>
<p>We cannot therefore methodically join the tough minds in their rejection
of the whole notion of a world beyond our finite experience. One
misunderstanding of pragmatism is to identify it with positivistic
tough-mindedness, to suppose that it scorns every rationalistic notion as
so much jabber and gesticulation, that it loves intellectual anarchy as
such and prefers a sort of wolf-world absolutely unpent and wild and
without a master or a collar to any philosophic class-room product,
whatsoever. I have said so much in these lectures against the over-tender
forms of rationalism, that I am prepared for some misunderstanding here,
but I confess that the amount of it that I have found in this very
audience surprises me, for I have simultaneously defended rationalistic
hypotheses so far as these re-direct you fruitfully into experience.</p>
<p>For instance I receive this morning this question on a post-card: "Is a
pragmatist necessarily a complete materialist and agnostic?" One of my
oldest friends, who ought to know me better, writes me a letter that
accuses the pragmatism I am recommending, of shutting out all wider
metaphysical views and condemning us to the most terre-a-terre naturalism.
Let me read you some extracts from it.</p>
<p>"It seems to me," my friend writes, "that the pragmatic objection to
pragmatism lies in the fact that it might accentuate the narrowness of
narrow minds.</p>
<p>"Your call to the rejection of the namby-pamby and the wishy-washy is of
course inspiring. But although it is salutary and stimulating to be told
that one should be responsible for the immediate issues and bearings of
his words and thoughts, I decline to be deprived of the pleasure and
profit of dwelling also on remoter bearings and issues, and it is the
TENDENCY of pragmatism to refuse this privilege.</p>
<p>"In short, it seems to me that the limitations, or rather the dangers, of
the pragmatic tendency, are analogous to those which beset the unwary
followers of the 'natural sciences.' Chemistry and physics are eminently
pragmatic and many of their devotees, smugly content with the data that
their weights and measures furnish, feel an infinite pity and disdain for
all students of philosophy and meta-physics, whomsoever. And of course
everything can be expressed—after a fashion, and 'theoretically'—in
terms of chemistry and physics, that is, EVERYTHING EXCEPT THE VITAL
PRINCIPLE OF THE WHOLE, and that, they say, there is no pragmatic use in
trying to express; it has no bearings—FOR THEM. I for my part refuse
to be persuaded that we cannot look beyond the obvious pluralism of the
naturalist and the pragmatist to a logical unity in which they take no
interest."</p>
<p>How is such a conception of the pragmatism I am advocating possible, after
my first and second lectures? I have all along been offering it expressly
as a mediator between tough-mindedness and tender-mindedness. If the
notion of a world ante rem, whether taken abstractly like the word winter,
or concretely as the hypothesis of an Absolute, can be shown to have any
consequences whatever for our life, it has a meaning. If the meaning
works, it will have SOME truth that ought to be held to through all
possible reformulations, for pragmatism.</p>
<p>The absolutistic hypothesis, that perfection is eternal, aboriginal, and
most real, has a perfectly definite meaning, and it works religiously. To
examine how, will be the subject of my next and final lecture.</p>
<p><br/><br/></p>
<hr />
<p><SPAN name="link2H_4_0010" id="link2H_4_0010"> </SPAN></p>
<br/>
<h2> Lecture VIII. — Pragmatism and Religion </h2>
<p>At the close of the last lecture I reminded you of the first one, in which
I had opposed tough-mindedness to tender-mindedness and recommended
pragmatism as their mediator. Tough-mindedness positively rejects
tender-mindedness's hypothesis of an eternal perfect edition of the
universe coexisting with our finite experience.</p>
<p>On pragmatic principles we cannot reject any hypothesis if consequences
useful to life flow from it. Universal conceptions, as things to take
account of, may be as real for pragmatism as particular sensations are.
They have indeed no meaning and no reality if they have no use. But if
they have any use they have that amount of meaning. And the meaning will
be true if the use squares well with life's other uses.</p>
<p>Well, the use of the Absolute is proved by the whole course of men's
religious history. The eternal arms are then beneath. Remember
Vivekananda's use of the Atman: it is indeed not a scientific use, for we
can make no particular deductions from it. It is emotional and spiritual
altogether.</p>
<p>It is always best to discuss things by the help of concrete examples. Let
me read therefore some of those verses entitled "To You" by Walt Whitman—"You"
of course meaning the reader or hearer of the poem whosoever he or she may
be.</p>
<p>Whoever you are, now I place my hand upon you, that you be my poem; I
whisper with my lips close to your ear, I have loved many women and men,
but I love none better than you.</p>
<p>O I have been dilatory and dumb; I should have made my way straight to you
long ago; I should have blabb'd nothing but you, I should have chanted
nothing but you.</p>
<p>I will leave all, and come and make the hymns of you; None have understood
you, but I understand you; None have done justice to you—you have
not done justice to yourself; None but have found you imperfect—I
only find no imperfection in you.</p>
<p>O I could sing such grandeurs and glories about you! You have not known
what you are—you have slumber'd upon yourself all your life; What
you have done returns already in mockeries.</p>
<p>But the mockeries are not you; Underneath them, and within them, I see you
lurk; I pursue you where none else has pursued you; Silence, the desk, the
flippant expression, the night, the accustom'd routine, if these conceal
you from others, or from yourself, they do not conceal you from me; The
shaved face, the unsteady eye, the impure complexion, if these balk
others, they do not balk me, The pert apparel, the deform'd attitude,
drunkenness, greed, premature death, all these I part aside.</p>
<p>There is no endowment in man or woman that is not tallied in you; There is
no virtue, no beauty, in man or woman, but as good is in you; No pluck, no
endurance in others, but as good is in you; No pleasure waiting for
others, but an equal pleasure waits for you.</p>
<p>Whoever you are! claim your own at any hazard! These shows of the east and
west are tame, compared to you; These immense meadows—these
interminable rivers—you are immense and interminable as they; You
are he or she who is master or mistress over them, Master or mistress in
your own right over Nature, elements, pain, passion, dissolution.</p>
<p>The hopples fall from your ankles—you find an unfailing sufficiency;
Old or young, male or female, rude, low, rejected by the rest, whatever
you are promulges itself; Through birth, life, death, burial, the means
are provided, nothing is scanted; Through angers, losses, ambition,
ignorance, ennui, what you are picks its way.</p>
<p>Verily a fine and moving poem, in any case, but there are two ways of
taking it, both useful.</p>
<p>One is the monistic way, the mystical way of pure cosmic emotion. The
glories and grandeurs, they are yours absolutely, even in the midst of
your defacements. Whatever may happen to you, whatever you may appear to
be, inwardly you are safe. Look back, LIE back, on your true principle of
being! This is the famous way of quietism, of indifferentism. Its enemies
compare it to a spiritual opium. Yet pragmatism must respect this way, for
it has massive historic vindication.</p>
<p>But pragmatism sees another way to be respected also, the pluralistic way
of interpreting the poem. The you so glorified, to which the hymn is sung,
may mean your better possibilities phenomenally taken, or the specific
redemptive effects even of your failures, upon yourself or others. It may
mean your loyalty to the possibilities of others whom you admire and love
so, that you are willing to accept your own poor life, for it is that
glory's partner. You can at least appreciate, applaud, furnish the
audience, of so brave a total world. Forget the low in yourself, then,
think only of the high. Identify your life therewith; then, through
angers, losses, ignorance, ennui, whatever you thus make yourself,
whatever you thus most deeply are, picks its way.</p>
<p>In either way of taking the poem, it encourages fidelity to ourselves.
Both ways satisfy; both sanctify the human flux. Both paint the portrait
of the YOU on a gold-background. But the background of the first way is
the static One, while in the second way it means possibles in the plural,
genuine possibles, and it has all the restlessness of that conception.</p>
<p>Noble enough is either way of reading the poem; but plainly the
pluralistic way agrees with the pragmatic temper best, for it immediately
suggests an infinitely larger number of the details of future experience
to our mind. It sets definite activities in us at work. Altho this second
way seems prosaic and earthborn in comparison with the first way, yet no
one can accuse it of tough-mindedness in any brutal sense of the term. Yet
if, as pragmatists, you should positively set up the second way AGAINST
the first way, you would very likely be misunderstood. You would be
accused of denying nobler conceptions, and of being an ally of
tough-mindedness in the worst sense.</p>
<p>You remember the letter from a member of this audience from which I read
some extracts at our previous meeting. Let me read you an additional
extract now. It shows a vagueness in realizing the alternatives before us
which I think is very widespread.</p>
<p>"I believe," writes my friend and correspondent, "in pluralism; I believe
that in our search for truth we leap from one floating cake of ice to
another, on an infinite sea, and that by each of our acts we make new
truths possible and old ones impossible; I believe that each man is
responsible for making the universe better, and that if he does not do
this it will be in so far left undone.</p>
<p>"Yet at the same time I am willing to endure that my children should be
incurably sick and suffering (as they are not) and I myself stupid and yet
with brains enough to see my stupidity, only on one condition, namely,
that through the construction, in imagination and by reasoning, of a
RATIONAL UNITY OF ALL THINGS, I can conceive my acts and my thoughts and
my troubles as SUPPLEMENTED: BY ALL THE OTHER PHENOMENA OF THE WORLD, AND
AS FORMING—WHEN THUS SUPPLEMENTED—A SCHEME WHICH I APPROVE AND
ADOPT AS MY I OWN; and for my part I refuse to be persuaded that we cannot
look beyond the obvious pluralism of the naturalist and pragmatist to a
logical unity in which they take no interest or stock."</p>
<p>Such a fine expression of personal faith warms the heart of the hearer.
But how much does it clear his philosophic head? Does the writer
consistently favor the monistic, or the pluralistic, interpretation of the
world's poem? His troubles become atoned for WHEN THUS SUPPLEMENTED, he
says, supplemented, that is, by all the remedies that THE OTHER PHENOMENA
may supply. Obviously here the writer faces forward into the particulars
of experience, which he interprets in a pluralistic-melioristic way.</p>
<p>But he believes himself to face backward. He speaks of what he calls the
rational UNITY of things, when all the while he really means their
possible empirical UNIFICATION. He supposes at the same time that the
pragmatist, because he criticizes rationalism's abstract One, is cut off
from the consolation of believing in the saving possibilities of the
concrete many. He fails in short to distinguish between taking the world's
perfection as a necessary principle, and taking it only as a possible
terminus ad quem.</p>
<p>I regard the writer of this letter as a genuine pragmatist, but as a
pragmatist sans le savoir. He appears to me as one of that numerous class
of philosophic amateurs whom I spoke of in my first lecture, as wishing to
have all the good things going, without being too careful as to how they
agree or disagree. "Rational unity of all things" is so inspiring a
formula, that he brandishes it offhand, and abstractly accuses pluralism
of conflicting with it (for the bare names do conflict), altho concretely
he means by it just the pragmatistically unified and ameliorated world.
Most of us remain in this essential vagueness, and it is well that we
should; but in the interest of clear-headedness it is well that some of us
should go farther, so I will try now to focus a little more
discriminatingly on this particular religious point.</p>
<p>Is then this you of yous, this absolutely real world, this unity that
yields the moral inspiration and has the religious value, to be taken
monistically or pluralistically? Is it ante rem or in rebus? Is it a
principle or an end, an absolute or an ultimate, a first or a last? Does
it make you look forward or lie back? It is certainly worth while not to
clump the two things together, for if discriminated, they have decidedly
diverse meanings for life.</p>
<p>Please observe that the whole dilemma revolves pragmatically about the
notion of the world's possibilities. Intellectually, rationalism invokes
its absolute principle of unity as a ground of possibility for the many
facts. Emotionally, it sees it as a container and limiter of
possibilities, a guarantee that the upshot shall be good. Taken in this
way, the absolute makes all good things certain, and all bad things
impossible (in the eternal, namely), and may be said to transmute the
entire category of possibility into categories more secure. One sees at
this point that the great religious difference lies between the men who
insist that the world MUST AND SHALL BE, and those who are contented with
believing that the world MAY BE, saved. The whole clash of rationalistic
and empiricist religion is thus over the validity of possibility. It is
necessary therefore to begin by focusing upon that word. What may the word
'possible' definitely mean?</p>
<p>To unreflecting men the possible means a sort of third estate of being,
less real than existence, more real than non-existence, a twilight realm,
a hybrid status, a limbo into which and out of which realities ever and
anon are made to pass. Such a conception is of course too vague and
nondescript to satisfy us. Here, as elsewhere, the only way to extract a
term's meaning is to use the pragmatic method on it. When you say that a
thing is possible, what difference does it make?</p>
<p>It makes at least this difference that if anyone calls it impossible you
can contradict him, if anyone calls it actual you can contradict HIM, and
if anyone calls it necessary you can contradict him too. But these
privileges of contradiction don't amount to much. When you say a thing is
possible, does not that make some farther difference in terms of actual
fact?</p>
<p>It makes at least this negative difference that if the statement be true,
it follows that there is nothing extant capable of preventing the possible
thing. The absence of real grounds of interference may thus be said to
make things not impossible, possible therefore in the bare or abstract
sense.</p>
<p>But most possibles are not bare, they are concretely grounded, or
well-grounded, as we say. What does this mean pragmatically? It means, not
only that there are no preventive conditions present, but that some of the
conditions of production of the possible thing actually are here. Thus a
concretely possible chicken means: (1) that the idea of chicken contains
no essential self-contradiction; (2) that no boys, skunks, or other
enemies are about; and (3) that at least an actual egg exists. Possible
chicken means actual egg—plus actual sitting hen, or incubator, or
what not. As the actual conditions approach completeness the chicken
becomes a better-and-better-grounded possibility. When the conditions are
entirely complete, it ceases to be a possibility, and turns into an actual
fact.</p>
<p>Let us apply this notion to the salvation of the world. What does it
pragmatically mean to say that this is possible? It means that some of the
conditions of the world's deliverance do actually exist. The more of them
there are existent, the fewer preventing conditions you can find, the
better-grounded is the salvation's possibility, the more PROBABLE does the
fact of the deliverance become.</p>
<p>So much for our preliminary look at possibility.</p>
<p>Now it would contradict the very spirit of life to say that our minds must
be indifferent and neutral in questions like that of the world's
salvation. Anyone who pretends to be neutral writes himself down here as a
fool and a sham. We all do wish to minimize the insecurity of the
universe; we are and ought to be unhappy when we regard it as exposed to
every enemy and open to every life-destroying draft. Nevertheless there
are unhappy men who think the salvation of the world impossible. Theirs is
the doctrine known as pessimism.</p>
<p>Optimism in turn would be the doctrine that thinks the world's salvation
inevitable.</p>
<p>Midway between the two there stands what may be called the doctrine of
meliorism, tho it has hitherto figured less as a doctrine than as an
attitude in human affairs. Optimism has always been the regnant DOCTRINE
in european philosophy. Pessimism was only recently introduced by
Schopenhauer and counts few systematic defenders as yet. Meliorism treats
salvation as neither inevitable nor impossible. It treats it as a
possibility, which becomes more and more of a probability the more
numerous the actual conditions of salvation become.</p>
<p>It is clear that pragmatism must incline towards meliorism. Some
conditions of the world's salvation are actually extant, and she cannot
possibly close her eyes to this fact: and should the residual conditions
come, salvation would become an accomplished reality. Naturally the terms
I use here are exceedingly summary. You may interpret the word 'salvation'
in any way you like, and make it as diffuse and distributive, or as
climacteric and integral a phenomenon as you please.</p>
<p>Take, for example, any one of us in this room with the ideals which he
cherishes, and is willing to live and work for. Every such ideal realized
will be one moment in the world's salvation. But these particular ideals
are not bare abstract possibilities. They are grounded, they are LIVE
possibilities, for we are their live champions and pledges, and if the
complementary conditions come and add themselves, our ideals will become
actual things. What now are the complementary conditions? They are first
such a mixture of things as will in the fulness of time give us a chance,
a gap that we can spring into, and, finally, OUR ACT.</p>
<p>Does our act then CREATE the world's salvation so far as it makes room for
itself, so far as it leaps into the gap? Does it create, not the whole
world's salvation of course, but just so much of this as itself covers of
the world's extent?</p>
<p>Here I take the bull by the horns, and in spite of the whole crew of
rationalists and monists, of whatever brand they be, I ask WHY NOT? Our
acts, our turning-places, where we seem to ourselves to make ourselves and
grow, are the parts of the world to which we are closest, the parts of
which our knowledge is the most intimate and complete. Why should we not
take them at their face-value? Why may they not be the actual
turning-places and growing-places which they seem to be, of the world—why
not the workshop of being, where we catch fact in the making, so that
nowhere may the world grow in any other kind of way than this?</p>
<p>Irrational! we are told. How can new being come in local spots and patches
which add themselves or stay away at random, independently of the rest?
There must be a reason for our acts, and where in the last resort can any
reason be looked for save in the material pressure or the logical
compulsion of the total nature of the world? There can be but one real
agent of growth, or seeming growth, anywhere, and that agent is the
integral world itself. It may grow all-over, if growth there be, but that
single parts should grow per se is irrational.</p>
<p>But if one talks of rationality and of reasons for things, and insists
that they can't just come in spots, what KIND of a reason can there
ultimately be why anything should come at all? Talk of logic and necessity
and categories and the absolute and the contents of the whole
philosophical machine-shop as you will, the only REAL reason I can think
of why anything should ever come is that someone wishes it to be here. It
is DEMANDED, demanded, it may be, to give relief to no matter how small a
fraction of the world's mass. This is living reason, and compared with it
material causes and logical necessities are spectral things.</p>
<p>In short the only fully rational world would be the world of wishing-caps,
the world of telepathy, where every desire is fulfilled instanter, without
having to consider or placate surrounding or intermediate powers. This is
the Absolute's own world. He calls upon the phenomenal world to be, and it
IS, exactly as he calls for it, no other condition being required. In our
world, the wishes of the individual are only one condition. Other
individuals are there with other wishes and they must be propitiated
first. So Being grows under all sorts of resistances in this world of the
many, and, from compromise to compromise, only gets organized gradually
into what may be called secondarily rational shape. We approach the
wishing-cap type of organization only in a few departments of life. We
want water and we turn a faucet. We want a kodak-picture and we press a
button. We want information and we telephone. We want to travel and we buy
a ticket. In these and similar cases, we hardly need to do more than the
wishing—the world is rationally organized to do the rest.</p>
<p>But this talk of rationality is a parenthesis and a digression. What we
were discussing was the idea of a world growing not integrally but
piecemeal by the contributions of its several parts. Take the hypothesis
seriously and as a live one. Suppose that the world's author put the case
to you before creation, saying: "I am going to make a world not certain to
be saved, a world the perfection of which shall be conditional merely, the
condition being that each several agent does its own 'level best.' I offer
you the chance of taking part in such a world. Its safety, you see, is
unwarranted. It is a real adventure, with real danger, yet it may win
through. It is a social scheme of co-operative work genuinely to be done.
Will you join the procession? Will you trust yourself and trust the other
agents enough to face the risk?"</p>
<p>Should you in all seriousness, if participation in such a world were
proposed to you, feel bound to reject it as not safe enough? Would you say
that, rather than be part and parcel of so fundamentally pluralistic and
irrational a universe, you preferred to relapse into the slumber of
nonentity from which you had been momentarily aroused by the tempter's
voice?</p>
<p>Of course if you are normally constituted, you would do nothing of the
sort. There is a healthy-minded buoyancy in most of us which such a
universe would exactly fit. We would therefore accept the offer—"Top!
und schlag auf schlag!" It would be just like the world we practically
live in; and loyalty to our old nurse Nature would forbid us to say no.
The world proposed would seem 'rational' to us in the most living way.</p>
<p>Most of us, I say, would therefore welcome the proposition and add our
fiat to the fiat of the creator. Yet perhaps some would not; for there are
morbid minds in every human collection, and to them the prospect of a
universe with only a fighting chance of safety would probably make no
appeal. There are moments of discouragement in us all, when we are sick of
self and tired of vainly striving. Our own life breaks down, and we fall
into the attitude of the prodigal son. We mistrust the chances of things.
We want a universe where we can just give up, fall on our father's neck,
and be absorbed into the absolute life as a drop of water melts into the
river or the sea.</p>
<p>The peace and rest, the security desiderated at such moments is security
against the bewildering accidents of so much finite experience. Nirvana
means safety from this everlasting round of adventures of which the world
of sense consists. The hindoo and the buddhist, for this is essentially
their attitude, are simply afraid, afraid of more experience, afraid of
life.</p>
<p>And to men of this complexion, religious monism comes with its consoling
words: "All is needed and essential—even you with your sick soul and
heart. All are one with God, and with God all is well. The everlasting
arms are beneath, whether in the world of finite appearances you seem to
fail or to succeed." There can be no doubt that when men are reduced to
their last sick extremity absolutism is the only saving scheme.
Pluralistic moralism simply makes their teeth chatter, it refrigerates the
very heart within their breast.</p>
<p>So we see concretely two types of religion in sharp contrast. Using our
old terms of comparison, we may say that the absolutistic scheme appeals
to the tender-minded while the pluralistic scheme appeals to the tough.
Many persons would refuse to call the pluralistic scheme religious at all.
They would call it moralistic, and would apply the word religious to the
monistic scheme alone. Religion in the sense of self-surrender, and
moralism in the sense of self-sufficingness, have been pitted against each
other as incompatibles frequently enough in the history of human thought.</p>
<p>We stand here before the final question of philosophy. I said in my fourth
lecture that I believed the monistic-pluralistic alternative to be the
deepest and most pregnant question that our minds can frame. Can it be
that the disjunction is a final one? that only one side can be true? Are a
pluralism and monism genuine incompatibles? So that, if the world were
really pluralistically constituted, if it really existed distributively
and were made up of a lot of eaches, it could only be saved piecemeal and
de facto as the result of their behavior, and its epic history in no wise
short-circuited by some essential oneness in which the severalness were
already 'taken up' beforehand and eternally 'overcome'? If this were so,
we should have to choose one philosophy or the other. We could not say
'yes, yes' to both alternatives. There would have to be a 'no' in our
relations with the possible. We should confess an ultimate disappointment:
we could not remain healthy-minded and sick-minded in one indivisible act.</p>
<p>Of course as human beings we can be healthy minds on one day and sick
souls on the next; and as amateur dabblers in philosophy we may perhaps be
allowed to call ourselves monistic pluralists, or free-will determinists,
or whatever else may occur to us of a reconciling kind. But as
philosophers aiming at clearness and consistency, and feeling the
pragmatistic need of squaring truth with truth, the question is forced
upon us of frankly adopting either the tender or the robustious type of
thought. In particular THIS query has always come home to me: May not the
claims of tender-mindedness go too far? May not the notion of a world
already saved in toto anyhow, be too saccharine to stand? May not
religious optimism be too idyllic? Must ALL be saved? Is NO price to be
paid in the work of salvation? Is the last word sweet? Is all 'yes, yes'
in the universe? Doesn't the fact of 'no' stand at the very core of life?
Doesn't the very 'seriousness' that we attribute to life mean that
ineluctable noes and losses form a part of it, that there are genuine
sacrifices somewhere, and that something permanently drastic and bitter
always remains at the bottom of its cup?</p>
<p>I can not speak officially as a pragmatist here; all I can say is that my
own pragmatism offers no objection to my taking sides with this more
moralistic view, and giving up the claim of total reconciliation. The
possibility of this is involved in the pragmatistic willingness to treat
pluralism as a serious hypothesis. In the end it is our faith and not our
logic that decides such questions, and I deny the right of any pretended
logic to veto my own faith. I find myself willing to take the universe to
be really dangerous and adventurous, without therefore backing out and
crying 'no play.' I am willing to think that the prodigal-son attitude,
open to us as it is in many vicissitudes, is not the right and final
attitude towards the whole of life. I am willing that there should be real
losses and real losers, and no total preservation of all that is. I can
believe in the ideal as an ultimate, not as an origin, and as an extract,
not the whole. When the cup is poured off, the dregs are left behind
forever, but the possibility of what is poured off is sweet enough to
accept.</p>
<p>As a matter of fact countless human imaginations live in this moralistic
and epic kind of a universe, and find its disseminated and strung-along
successes sufficient for their rational needs. There is a finely
translated epigram in the greek anthology which admirably expresses this
state of mind, this acceptance of loss as unatoned for, even tho the lost
element might be one's self:</p>
<p>"A shipwrecked sailor, buried on this coast, Bids you set sail. Full many
a gallant bark, when we were lost, Weathered the gale."</p>
<p>Those puritans who answered 'yes' to the question: Are you willing to be
damned for God's glory? were in this objective and magnanimous condition
of mind. The way of escape from evil on this system is NOT by getting it
'aufgehoben,' or preserved in the whole as an element essential but
'overcome.' It is by dropping it out altogether, throwing it overboard and
getting beyond it, helping to make a universe that shall forget its very
place and name.</p>
<p>It is then perfectly possible to accept sincerely a drastic kind of a
universe from which the element of 'seriousness' is not to be expelled.
Whoso does so is, it seems to me, a genuine pragmatist. He is willing to
live on a scheme of uncertified possibilities which he trusts; willing to
pay with his own person, if need be, for the realization of the ideals
which he frames.</p>
<p>What now actually ARE the other forces which he trusts to co-operate with
him, in a universe of such a type? They are at least his fellow men, in
the stage of being which our actual universe has reached. But are there
not superhuman forces also, such as religious men of the pluralistic type
we have been considering have always believed in? Their words may have
sounded monistic when they said "there is no God but God"; but the
original polytheism of mankind has only imperfectly and vaguely sublimated
itself into monotheism, and monotheism itself, so far as it was religious
and not a scheme of class-room instruction for the metaphysicians, has
always viewed God as but one helper, primus inter pares, in the midst of
all the shapers of the great world's fate.</p>
<p>I fear that my previous lectures, confined as they have been to human and
humanistic aspects, may have left the impression on many of you that
pragmatism means methodically to leave the superhuman out. I have shown
small respect indeed for the Absolute, and I have until this moment spoken
of no other superhuman hypothesis but that. But I trust that you see
sufficiently that the Absolute has nothing but its superhumanness in
common with the theistic God. On pragmatistic principles, if the
hypothesis of God works satisfactorily in the widest sense of the word, it
is true. Now whatever its residual difficulties may be, experience shows
that it certainly does work, and that the problem is to build it out and
determine it, so that it will combine satisfactorily with all the other
working truths. I cannot start upon a whole theology at the end of this
last lecture; but when I tell you that I have written a book on men's
religious experience, which on the whole has been regarded as making for
the reality of God, you will perhaps exempt my own pragmatism from the
charge of being an atheistic system. I firmly disbelieve, myself, that our
human experience is the highest form of experience extant in the universe.
I believe rather that we stand in much the same relation to the whole of
the universe as our canine and feline pets do to the whole of human life.
They inhabit our drawing-rooms and libraries. They take part in scenes of
whose significance they have no inkling. They are merely tangent to curves
of history the beginnings and ends and forms of which pass wholly beyond
their ken. So we are tangents to the wider life of things. But, just as
many of the dog's and cat's ideals coincide with our ideals, and the dogs
and cats have daily living proof of the fact, so we may well believe, on
the proofs that religious experience affords, that higher powers exist and
are at work to save the world on ideal lines similar to our own.</p>
<p>You see that pragmatism can be called religious, if you allow that
religion can be pluralistic or merely melioristic in type. But whether you
will finally put up with that type of religion or not is a question that
only you yourself can decide. Pragmatism has to postpone dogmatic answer,
for we do not yet know certainly which type of religion is going to work
best in the long run. The various overbeliefs of men, their several
faith-ventures, are in fact what are needed to bring the evidence in. You
will probably make your own ventures severally. If radically tough, the
hurly-burly of the sensible facts of nature will be enough for you, and
you will need no religion at all. If radically tender, you will take up
with the more monistic form of religion: the pluralistic form, with its
reliance on possibilities that are not necessities, will not seem to
afford you security enough.</p>
<p>But if you are neither tough nor tender in an extreme and radical sense,
but mixed as most of us are, it may seem to you that the type of
pluralistic and moralistic religion that I have offered is as good a
religious synthesis as you are likely to find. Between the two extremes of
crude naturalism on the one hand and transcendental absolutism on the
other, you may find that what I take the liberty of calling the
pragmatistic or melioristic type of theism is exactly what you require.</p>
<p>The End</p>
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