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Title: Pragmatism and idealism
Author: Caldwell, William
Language: English
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PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM
AGENTS
AMERICA THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
64 & 66 FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK
AUSTRALASIA THE OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
205 FLINDERS LANE, MELBOURNE
CANADA THE MACMILLAN COMPANY OF CANADA, LTD.
ST MARTIN’S HOUSE, 70 BOND STREET, TORONTO
INDIA MACMILLAN & COMPANY, LTD.
MACMILLAN BUILDING, BOMBAY
309 BOW BAZAAR STREET, CALCUTTA
PRAGMATISM
AND
IDEALISM
BY
WILLIAM CALDWELL, M.A., D.SC.[EDINR.]
SIR WILLIAM MACDONALD PROFESSOR OF MORAL PHILOSOPHY,
McGILL UNIVERSITY, MONTREAL
LONDON
ADAM AND CHARLES BLACK
1913
PREFACE
What is attempted in this book is an examination of the Pragmatist
philosophy in its relations to older and newer tendencies in the
thought and practice of mankind.
While a good deal has been written within the last ten years upon
Pragmatism, the issue that it represents is still an open one--to
judge at least from recent books and reviews, and from recent official
discussions. And there seems to be a favourable opportunity for a
general account of the whole subject and for an estimate of its
significance.
In the opening chapter and elsewhere, both in the text and in the
footnotes, I have put together some things about the development and
the affiliations of Pragmatism, and of pragmatist tendencies, that may
not be altogether new to the professional student. Such a presentation,
or general conspectus, I have found to be a necessity in the way of a
basis both for discussion and for rational comprehension. Taken along
with the original pronouncements of James and his _confrères_ it
affords an indication of the philosophy to which the pragmatists would
fain attain, and of the modification of rationalistic philosophy they
would fain effect.
The chapter upon Pragmatism as Americanism is put forth in the
most tentative spirit possible, and I have thought more than once
of withholding it. Something in this connexion, however, is, in my
opinion, needed to cause us to regard the pragmatist philosophy as
resting upon a very real tendency of the civilized world of to-day--a
tendency that is affecting us all whether we like it or not.
The chapter upon Pragmatism and Anglo-Hegelian Rationalism is also
offered with some degree of reservation and misgiving, for, like
many of my contemporaries, I owe nearly everything in the way of my
introduction to philosophy to the great Neo-Kantian and Neo-Hegelian
movement. In its place, I had some months ago a more general
chapter upon Pragmatism and Rationalism, containing the results of
material that I had been elaborating upon the development of English
Neo-Hegelianism. At the last moment I substituted what is here offered
upon the significant high-water output of Hegelianism represented in
Dr. Bosanquet’s Edinburgh Gifford Lectures.
In regard to the note upon the Pragmatist elements in the philosophy of
Bergson I ought, perhaps, to say that I kept away from Bergson’s last
two books until I had written out what had been growing up in my own
mind about the activism of Pragmatism and its relations to Idealism.
I have found confirmation for much of my own thought in the teaching
of this remarkable and significant thinker, and I regret the partial
representation of it that is here submitted.
Having crossed the ocean for the printing of my book, I have in some
cases lost or misplaced references that I intended to use or to verify.
For this I crave the indulgence of readers and critics.
I am indebted to the following gentlemen for much kind help and
criticism in the revision of my manuscript and proof-sheets for the
press: my brother, the Rev. Victor Caldwell, M.A., of Patna, Ayrshire;
Professor John Laird of Queen’s University, Belfast; Professor James
Seth of the University of Edinburgh; Professor P. T. Lafleur of
M’Gill University. I also owe much in this same connexion to recent
conversations with Professors A. Lalande and D. Parodi of Paris, upon
Pragmatism and contemporary philosophy generally.
LONDON, _September 1913_.
CONTENTS
CHAP. PAGE
I. INTRODUCTORY 1
NOTE ON THE MEANING OF “PRAGMATISM” 21
II. PRAGMATISM AND THE PRAGMATIST MOVEMENT 23
III. SOME FUNDAMENTAL CHARACTERISTICS 58
IV. PRAGMATISM AND HUMAN ACTIVITY 93
APPENDIX TO CHAPTER IV.--PHILOSOPHY AND THE
ACTIVITY-EXPERIENCE 109
V. CRITICAL 116
VI. PRAGMATISM AS HUMANISM 141
VII. PRAGMATISM AS AMERICANISM 168
VIII. PRAGMATISM AND ANGLO-HEGELIAN RATIONALISM 196
IX. PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF BERGSON 234
CONCLUDING REMARKS 262
INDEX 267
PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM
CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTORY
Pragmatism has by this time received so much attention in the
reflective literature of the day that any writer upon the subject may
now fairly presume upon a general acquaintance with its main principles
and contentions. Indeed, it is probable that most thinking people may
be credited with the ability to have formed some sort of judgment of
their own about a philosophy whose main contention is that true ideas
are working ideas, and that truth itself, like a creed or a belief, is
simply a working valuation of reality. There are still, however, some
things to be said, at least in English, upon the place and the meaning
of Pragmatism in the philosophical reconstruction that is generally
felt to be so necessary to-day.
As far as the external signs of any such vital relation between
Pragmatism and our recent academic philosophy are concerned, the reader
may be aware, to begin with, that there have been many important
concessions[1] made to pragmatists by such representative rationalists
as Mr. Bradley and Professor Taylor, not to speak of others,[2]
and Pragmatism has certainly had a very powerful effect upon the
professional philosophy of both England and Germany, judging at least
from the extent to which many of the more prominent representatives of
philosophy in these countries have apparently been compelled to accord
to it at least an official recognition.[3]
Pragmatism, again, in consequence of the different receptions that it
has met with at the hands of its friends and its foes, has undergone
various phases of exposition and of modification, although it has
not yet, nor is it on the whole likely to have, a philosophical
output comparable to that of Idealism. It has become more and more
conscious of its own affiliations and relations to older, and to
broader doctrines, declaring itself, in the hands of Professor James
and his friends, to be but a new name for older ways of thinking. And
it has succeeded, in a measure, in clearing itself from liability to
the superficial interpretation that it met with a few years ago, when
it was scoffed at for teaching that you may believe “what you like,”
for speaking, for example, as if the “theoretical” consequences of
truth were not to be considered as well as the “practical.” Although
still resting in the main upon an outspoken declaration of war against
Rationalism, it is no longer blind to the place and the value of
thought or the “concept,” in the matter of the interpretation of our
experience.
Pragmatism, as the theory is generally understood, rests in the main
upon the work of three men, Professors James and Dewey of America,
and Dr. Schiller of Oxford. The fact, along doubtless with other
things, that these men have ere now been spoken of as occupying a
right, a left, and a centre in the new movement, is presumably an
indication that it has already received its highest theoretical
expression--presumably in the California pamphlet of Professor James,
or in the famous _Popular Science Monthly_ article of Peirce, canonized
as the patron saint of the movement by James.
Whether this be so or not, it has been in the main the work of James to
set forth the meaning of Pragmatism as a philosophy of everyday life,
as the theory of the attitude of man as man to the world in which he
finds himself. Dr. Schiller, again, it is claimed, has done much to set
forth Pragmatism to the world as an essentially humanistic philosophy,
recognizing and providing for the rights of faith and of feeling in
determining our beliefs and our theories about things. This philosophy
has “much in common with what in other quarters is called Personalism.”
It cannot, however, be differentiated so sharply as Dr. Schiller
apparently would have us believe from the many manifestations of this
philosophy that abound in modern times, from Fichte, and from Lotze,
down to men who are still living--Eucken and others. The ingenious
Professor Dewey, moreover, is the champion of the scientific, or the
empirical, or the “instrumental” method in philosophy, and has worked
hard and successfully at the reform which he thinks must take place in
logical and philosophical conceptions when interpreted as simply tools
or devices for the economy of our thought.
When, in pragmatist fashion, we seek to judge of Pragmatism by this
last-mentioned matter of its results, by the things it has enabled its
advocates to accomplish, we find that we may, to begin with, speak in
the following terms of the work of Professor James. He has certainly
indicated how the pragmatist method may be applied to the solution of
some of the ordinary difficulties of reflective thought; about, for
example, the nature of matter or the nature of the soul, or about the
old opposition between the “one” and the “many,” about such concepts
as “thing,” “kinds,” “time,” “space,” the “fancied,” the “real,” and
so on. In all such cases an answer, he holds, is obtained by putting,
say, the initial difficulty in the following form: “What practical
difference can it make now that the world should be run by matter or by
spirit?”
A fair illustration of his meaning here would be his own characteristic
attitude, so far as the philosophy of religion is concerned, to the
so-called “theistic” proofs that have been part of the stock in trade
of rational theology. A “necessary being” and a “whole of truth”
and the “Absolute”[4] are not, he would hold, what the average man
understands by God; they have hardly any perceptible effect upon
life and conduct--the all-important matter in the thought of God as
he conceives it. Only those notions, he would have it, which can
be interpreted by the thought of the “difference” they make to our
practical conduct are real notions at all--“Providence,” say, or “God”
as the guarantor of the reality and the permanence of the moral order,
and so on. The “soul,” again, he would hold, “is good for just so much
and no more.” And a similar thing, too, would be true about Berkeley’s
“matter,” or about the “matter” of the materialists.[5] This latter,
for instance, cannot possibly do all it is claimed to be able to do in
the way of an explanation of the order of the world and the phenomena
of life.
Then again, James has written a great many pages upon the so-called
deeper view of human nature (as inclusive of will and “emotion” in
addition to mere thought) taken by Pragmatism in comparison with that
entertained by Rationalism. We shall have occasion to return to this
point.
He has made it clear, too, that it was an unfair interpretation of
Pragmatism to take it as a plea for believing what you like, as was
said above. Our experience, he puts it, must be consistent, the “parts
with the parts,” and the “parts with the whole.” Beliefs must not clash
with other beliefs, the mind being wedged tightly between the coercion
of the sensible order and that of the ideal order. By “consequences,”
too, he contends we may mean intellectual or theoretical consequences
as well as practical consequences.
He has also, along with his brother-pragmatists, raised the question
of the nature of Truth, attaining to such important results as the
following: (1) there is no such thing as pure truth, or ready-made
truth; (2) the “copy-theory” of truth is unintelligible.[6] We shall
later be obliged to examine the more controversial positions that (3)
truth is not an end in itself, but a means towards vital satisfaction;
(4) truth is the “expedient” in the way of thinking, as the right is
the expedient[7] in the way of acting, and so on.
Further, Professor James finds that Pragmatism leaves us with the
main body of our common-sense beliefs [Peirce holds practically the
same thing], such as the belief in “freedom”--as a “promise and a
relief,” he adds; and the belief in the religious outlook upon life,
in so far as it “works.” This is the attitude and the tenor of the
well-known books on The _Will to Believe_ and _The Varieties of
Religious Experience_.[8] “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?” And yet, as against this attitude, Professor James
elsewhere finds himself unable to believe “that our human experience
is the highest form of experience extant in the universe.” It is the
emergence of many such incoherences in his writings that gives to
his pragmatist philosophy of religion a subjective and temperamental
character, and makes it seem to be lacking in any objective basis. “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--that is, reliance on possibilities that are
not necessities--will not seem to offer you security enough.”[9] He
“inclines,” on the whole, to “Meliorism,” treating satisfaction as
neither necessary nor impossible; the pragmatist lives in “the world of
possibilities.”
These words show clearly how difficult it is to pin down Professor
James to any single intelligible philosophy of belief, if belief be
interpreted as in any sense a “commerce” of the soul with objective
realities, as something more than a merely generous faith in the
gradual perfection or betterment of human society.
“Religious experience,” as he puts it in his _Pluralistic Universe_,
“peculiarly so called, needs, in my opinion, to be carefully considered
and interpreted by every one who aspires to reason out a more complete
philosophy.” In this same book, it is declared, however, on the one
hand, that “we have outgrown the old theistic orthodoxy, the God of
our popular Christianity being simply one member of a pluralistic
system”; and yet, on the other hand, and with equal emphasis, that
“we finite minds may simultaneously be conscious with one another in a
supernatural intelligence.”[10]
The book on _The Meaning of Truth_ seems to return, in the main, to the
American doctrine of the strenuous life as the only courageous, and
therefore true, attitude to beliefs, as the life that contains, in the
plenitude of its energizing, the answer to all questions. “Pluralism
affords us,” it openly confesses, “no moral holidays, and it is unable
to let loose quietistic raptures, and this is a serious deficiency in
the pluralistic philosophy which we have professed.” Professor James
here again attacks Absolutism in the old familiar manner, as somehow
unequal to the complexity of things, or the pulsating process of the
world, casting himself upon the philosophy of experience, and upon
the evident reality of the “many” and of the endless variety of the
relations of things, in opposition to the abstract simplicity of the
“one,” and the limited range of a merely logical, or mathematical,
manner of conceiving of reality. “The essential service of Humanism,
as I conceive the situation, is to have seen that, though one part of
experience may lean upon another part to make it what it is in any
one of several aspects in which it may be considered, experience as
a whole is self-sustaining and leans on nothing.... “It gets rid of
the standing problems of Monism and of other metaphysical systems and
paradoxes.”[11]
Professor James exhibits, however, at the same time a very imperfect
conception of philosophy, holding that it gives us, in general, “no new
range of practical power,” ignoring, as it were, the difference between
philosophy and poetry and religion and mere personal enthusiasm.
And he leaves the whole question of the first principles of both
knowledge and conduct practically unsettled. These things are to him
but conceptual tools,[12] and “working” points of departure for our
efforts, and there seems in his books to be no way of reducing them to
any kind of system. And he makes, lastly, a most unsuccessful attempt
at a theory of reality. Reality is to him sometimes simply a moving
equilibrium of experience, the “flux” we have already referred to;
sometimes the fleeting generations of men who have thought out for us
all our philosophies and sciences and cults and varied experiences,
and sometimes the “common-sense world in which we find things partly
joined and partly disjoined.” It is sometimes, too, other things
even than these. In a chapter of the book upon _Pragmatism_[13] it
is stated in italics that “reality is, in general, what truths have
to take account of,” and that it has three parts: (1) “the flux of
our sensations,” and (2) the “relations that obtain between our
sensations, or between their copies in our minds,” and (3) “the
previous truths of which every new inquiry takes account.” Then again,
in _A Pluralistic Universe_,[14] it is declared that “there may
ultimately never be an All-form at all, that the substance of reality
may never get totally collected ... and that a distributive form of
reality, the Each-form, is logically as acceptable and empirical
and probable as the All-form.” This is the theory of the outspoken
“radical empiricism”[15] which is the contention of the volume upon
_The Meaning of Truth_, the main effort of which seems to be to show
again that the world is still in the process of making. It has the
additional drawback of bringing Pragmatism down not only to the level
of radical empiricism, but to that of common-sense realism or dualism
[the belief in the two independent realities of matter and mind], and
to that of the “copy-theory”[16] of truth, from which both Pragmatism
and Radical Empiricism are especially supposed to deliver us. “I will
say here again, for the sake of emphasis, that the existence of the
object ... is the only reason, in innumerable cases, why the idea does
work successfully.... Both Dewey and I hold firmly ... to objects
independent of our own judgments.”[17] Much of all this is, no doubt,
like surrendering philosophy altogether.
In the case of Dr. Schiller, we may notice first his frequent and
successful exhibition of the extent to which human activity enters into
the constitution not only of “truth,” but of “reality,” of what we mean
by reality. This is interwoven in his books with his whole philosophy
of truth as something merely human, as “dependent upon human purposes,”
as a “valuation” expressive of the satisfactory, or the unsatisfactory,
nature of the contents of “primary reality.” It is interwoven, too,
with his doctrine that reality is essentially a ὕλη, something that is
still in the making, something that human beings can somehow re-make
and make perfect. Then this position about truth and reality is used
by him, as by James, as a ground of attack against Absolutism, with
its notion of a “pre-existing ideal” of knowledge and reality, as
already existing in a super-sensible world, that descends magically
into the passively recipient soul of man. There is no such thing, he
claims, as absolute truth, and the conception of an “absolute reality”
is both futile and pernicious. Absolutism, too, has an affinity
to Solipsism,[18] the difficulties of which it can escape only by
self-elimination.
Then Absolutism is, Schiller continues, “essentially irreligious,”[19]
although it was fostered at first in England for essentially religious
purposes.[20] It has developed there now at last, he reminds us, a
powerful left[21] wing which, as formerly in Germany, has opened a
quarrel with theology. In Absolutism, the two phases of Deity--God
as moral principle, and God as an intellectual principle--“fall
apart,” and absolutist metaphysic has really no connexion with genuine
religion. Humanism can “renew Hegelianism” by treating the making
of truth as also the making of reality. Freedom is real, and may
possibly “pervade the universe.”[22] All truth implies belief, and
it is obviously one of the merits of Pragmatism to bring truth and
reason together. Beliefs and ideas and wishes are really essential and
integral features in real knowing, and if knowing, as above, really
transforms our experience, they must be treated as “real forces,” which
cannot be ignored by philosophy.[23]
Against all this would-be positive, or constructive, philosophy we
must, however, record the fact that the pragmatism of Dr. Schiller
breaks down altogether in the matter of the recognition of a
distinction between the “discovering” of reality and the “making” of
reality. And despite the ingenuity of his essay in the first edition
of _Humanism_ upon “Activity and Substance,”[24] there is not in his
writings, any more than in those of James, any coherent or adequate
theory of reality. And this is the case whether we think of the
“primary reality” upon which we human beings are said to “react,” in
our knowledge and in our action, or of the supreme reality of God’s
existence, of which such an interesting speculative account is given
in the essay referred to. Nor is there in Dr. Schiller, any more than
in James, any adequate conception, either of philosophy as a whole,
or of the theory of knowledge, or of the relation of Pragmatism as a
“method” (it is modestly claimed to be only such, but the position is
not adhered to) to philosophy as such.[25] “For the pragmatic theory of
knowledge initial principles are literally ἀρχαί, mere starting-points
variously, arbitrarily, casually selected, from which we hope to try
to advance to something better. Little we care what their credentials
may be.... And as far as the future is concerned, systems of philosophy
will abound as before, and will be as various as ever, but they will
probably be more brilliant in colouring and more attractive in their
form, for they will certainly have to be put forward and acknowledged
as works of art that bear the impress of a unique and individual
soul.”[26]
The main result of pragmatist considerations in the case of Professor
Dewey is perhaps that reconsideration of the problems of logic
and knowledge in the light of the facts of genetic and functional
psychology which has now become fairly general on the part of English
and American students of philosophy. It is through his influence
generally that pragmatists seem always to be talking about the way in
which we “arrive at” our beliefs, about ideas as “instruments” for the
interpretation and arrangement of our experience, about the “passage”
from cognitive expectation to “fulfilment,” about ideas as “plans of
action” and mental habits, about the growth and the utility of the
truth, about the “instrumental” character of all our thinking, about
beliefs as more fundamental than knowledge, and so on.
Professor Dewey has also written many more or less popular, but none
the less highly valuable, short studies upon the application of an
instrumentalist conception of philosophy to education and to social
questions. One of his last pieces of service in this connection is a
volume in which he associates Pragmatism with the general revolution
effected in the entire range of the mental and moral sciences by
Darwinism, with the present tendency in philosophy to turn away from
ultimate questions to specific problems, and with the reform which, in
his opinion, is necessary in our educational ideals[27] generally.
These three leading exponents of Pragmatism may be regarded as
meeting the objections to philosophy urged respectively by the “man
of affairs,” by the “mystical, religious” man, and by the “man of
science.”[28] By this it is meant that the man of affairs will find
in James an exposition of philosophy as the study of different ways
of looking at the world; the mystical, religious man will find
in Schiller a treatment of philosophy as the justification of an
essentially spiritual philosophy of life; and that the scientific man
will find in the writings of Dewey and his associates a treatment of
philosophy as nothing else than an extension into the higher regions of
thought of the same experimental and hypothetical method with which he
is already familiar in the physical sciences.
In this version of the work of the three leading pragmatists it
is assumed, of course, that the pragmatist philosophy is the only
philosophy that can show to the average man that philosophy can really
do something useful--can “bake bread,” if you will, can give to a man
the food of a man. It is assumed, too, that it is the only philosophy
which proceeds scientifically, that is to say, by means of observation
and of hypotheses that “work,” and by subsequent deduction and by
“verification.” And again, that it is the only philosophy that gives
to man the realities upon which he can base his aspirations or his
faith in distinction, that is to say, from the mere abstractions of
Rationalism in any form.
By way of a few quotations illustrative of the fundamental contentions
of the pragmatists, we may select the following: “Ideas become true
just in so far as they help us to get into satisfactory relation with
other parts of our experience, to summarise them and get about among
them by conceptional 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 labour--is true for just so much,
true in so far forth, true instrumentally.”[29] “The true is the name
of whatever proves itself to be good in the way of belief, and good for
definite and assignable reasons.”[30] From Professor Dewey: “Thinking
is a kind of activity which we perform at specific need, just as at
other times we engage in other sorts of activity, as converse with a
friend, draw a plan for a house, take a walk, eat a dinner, purchase
a suit of clothes, etc. etc. The measure of its success, the standard
of its validity is precisely the degree in which thinking disposes of
the difficulty and allows us to proceed with the more direct modes
of experiencing, that are henceforth possessed of more assured and
deepened value.”[31] From Dr. Schiller’s book, _Studies in Humanism_:
“Pragmatism is the doctrine that when an assertion claims truth, its
consequences are always used to test its claims; that (2) the truth
of an assertion depends on its application; that (3) the meaning
of a rule lies in its application; that (4) all meaning depends on
purpose; that (5) all mental life is purposive. It [Pragmatism] must
constitute itself into (6) a systematic protest against all ignoring
of the purposiveness of actual knowing, alike whether it is abstracted
from for the sake of the imaginary, pure, or absolute reason of the
rationalists, or eliminated for the sake of an equally imaginary or
pure mechanism of the naturalists. So conceived, we may describe it as
(7) a conscious application to logic of a teleological psychology which
implies ultimately a voluntaristic metaphysics.”
From these citations, and from the descriptive remarks of the
preceding two paragraphs, we may perhaps be enabled to infer that our
Anglo-American Pragmatism has progressed from the stage of (1) a mere
method of discussing truth and thinking in relation to the problem
of philosophy as a whole, (2) that of a more or less definite and
detailed criticism of the rationalism that overlooks the practical,
or purposive, character of most of our knowledge, to that of (3) a
humanistic or “voluntaristic” or “personalistic” philosophy, with
its many different associations and affiliations.[32] One of the
last developments, for example, of this pragmatist humanism is Dr.
Schiller’s association of philosophy with the metaphysics of evolution,
with the attempt to find the goal of the world-process and of human
history in a changeless society of perfected individuals.
We shall immediately see, however, that this summary description of the
growth of Pragmatism has to be supplemented by a recognition of (1)
some of the different phases Pragmatism has assumed on the continent of
Europe, (2) the different phases that may be detected in the reception
or criticism accorded to it in different countries, and (3) some of the
results of the pragmatist movement upon contemporary philosophy. All
these things have to do with the making of the complex thing that we
think of as Pragmatism and the pragmatist movement.
A NOTE ON THE MEANING OF “PRAGMATISM”
(1) “The opinion that metaphysics is to be largely cleared up by
the application of the following maxim for obtaining clearness of
apprehension: ‘Consider what effects that might conceivably have
practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have.
Then, our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of
the object’” (Baldwin’s _Philosophical Dictionary_, vol. ii. p. 321).
[We can see from this citation that the application of its formulæ
about “consequences” to metaphysics, or philosophy generally, must be
considered as a part, or aspect, of the pragmatist philosophy.]
(2) “The doctrine that the whole meaning of a conception expresses
itself in practical consequences; consequences either in the shape of
conduct to be recommended, or in that of experiences to be expected,
if the conception be true; which consequences would be different, if
it were untrue, and must be different from the consequences by which
the meaning of other conceptions is in turn expressed. If a second
conception should not appear to have other consequence, then it
must be really only the first conception under a different name. In
methodology, it is certain that to trace and compare their respective
consequences is an admirable way of establishing the different meanings
of different conceptions” (_ibid._, from Professor James).
(3) “A widely current opinion during the last quarter of a century has
been that _‘reasonableness’ is not a good in itself, but only for the
sake of something_. Whether it be so or not seems to be a synthetical
question [_i.e._ a question that is not merely a verbal question, a
question of words], not to be settled by an appeal to the Principle of
Contradiction [the principle hitherto relied upon by Rationalism or
Intellectualism].... Almost everybody will now agree that the ultimate
good lies in the evolutionary process in some way. If so, it is not in
individual reactions in their segregation, but in something general or
continuous. Synechism is founded on the notion that the coalescence,
the becoming continuous, the becoming governed by laws, the becoming
instinct with general ideas, are but phases of one and the same process
of the growth of reasonableness” (_ibid._ p. 322. From Dr. Peirce, the
bracket clauses being the author’s).
(4) “It is the belief that ideas invariably strive after practical
expression, and that our whole life is teleological. Putting the
matter logically, logic formulates theoretically what is of regulative
importance for life--for our ‘experience’ in view of practical ends.
Its philosophical meaning is the conviction that all facts of nature,
physically and spiritually, find their expressions in ‘_will_’; will
and energy are identical. This tendency is in agreement with the
practical tendencies of American thought and American life in so far
as they both set a definite end before Idealism” (Ueberweg-Heinze,
_Geschichte der Philosophie_, vol. iv., written and contributed by
Professor Matoon Monroe Curtis, Professor of Philosophy in Western
Reserve University, Cleveland, U.S.A.).
(5) See also an article in _Mind_ for October 1900, vol. ix. N.S., upon
“Pragmatism” by the author of this book on _Pragmatism and Idealism_,
referred to as one of the early sources in Baldwin’s _Philosophical
Dictionary_ (New York and London) and in Ueberweg-Heinze’s
_Geschichte_, Vierter Teil (Berlin, 1906).
The conclusion that I am inclined to draw from the foregoing official
statements (and also, say, from another official article like that
of M. Lalande in the _Revue Philosophique_, 1906, on “Pragmatisme
et Pragmaticisme”) is that the _term_ “Pragmatism” is not of itself
a matter of great importance, and that there is no separate,
intelligible, independent, self-consistent system of philosophy that
may be called Pragmatism. It is a general name for the Practicalism or
Voluntarism or Humanism or the Philosophy of the Practical Reason, or
the Activism, or the Instrumentalism, or the Philosophy of Hypotheses,
or the Dynamic Philosophy of life and things that is discussed in
different ways in this book upon Pragmatism and Idealism. And it is
not and cannot be independent of the traditional body of philosophical
truth in relation to which it can alone be defined.
CHAPTER II
PRAGMATISM AND THE PRAGMATIST MOVEMENT
In considering some of the results of pragmatist and voluntarist
doctrines in the case of European writers, to whom the American-English
triumvirate used to look somewhat sympathetically, we may begin with
Italy, which boasted, according to Dr. Schiller (writing in 1907),
of a youthful band of avowed pragmatists with a militant organ, the
_Leonardo_. “Fundamentally,” declares Papini,[33] the leader of this
movement, “Pragmatism means an unstiffening of all our theories and
beliefs, by attending to their instrumental value. It incorporates and
harmonizes various ancient tendencies, such as Nominalism, with its
protest against the use of general terms, Utilitarianism, with its
emphasis upon particular aspects and problems, Positivism, with its
disdain of verbal and useless questions, Kantism, with its doctrine of
the primacy of practical reason, Voluntarism, with its treatment of
the intellect as the tool of the will, and Freedom, and a positive
attitude towards religious questions. It is the tendency of taking all
these, and other theories, for what they are worth, being chiefly a
corridor-theory, with doors and avenues into various theories, and a
central rallying-ground for them all.” These words are valuable as one
of the many confessions of the affiliations of Pragmatism to several
other more or less experiential, or practical, views of philosophy.
It is perfectly obvious from them that Pragmatism stands, in the
main, for the apprehension of all truth as subservient to practice,
as but a device for the “economy” of thought, for the grasping of the
multiplicity and the complexity of phenomena. It looks upon man as
made, in the main, for action, and not for speculation--a doctrine
which even Mr. Peirce, by the way, now speaks of as “a stoical maxim
which to me, at the age of sixty, does not recommend itself so forcibly
as it did at thirty.”[34]
“The various ideal worlds are here,” continues Papini, according to
the version of James,[35] “because the real world fails to satisfy us.
All our ideal instruments are certainly imperfect. But philosophy can
be regenerated ... it can become pragmatic in the general sense of the
word, a general theory of human action ... so that philosophic thought
will resolve itself into a comparative discussion of all the possible
programmes for man’s life, when man is once for all regarded as a
_creative_ being.... As such, man becomes a kind of god, and where are
we to draw the limits?” In an article called “From Man to God,” Papini,
in the _Leonardo_, lets his imagination work in stretching the limits
of this way of thinking.
These prophetic, or Promethean, utterances--and we must never forget
that even to the Greeks philosophy was always something of a religion
or a life--may be paralleled by some of the more enthusiastic and
unguarded, early utterances of Dr. Schiller about “voluntarism”
or “metaphysical personalism” as the one “courageous,” and the
only potent, philosophy; or about the “storming of the Jericho of
rationalism” by the “jeers” and the “trumpetings” of the confident
humanists and their pragmatic _confrères_. The underlying element
of truth in them, and, for that part of it, in many of the similar
utterances of many of our modern humanists, from Rabelais to Voltaire
and from Shelley to Marx and Nietzsche, is, as we may see, that a true
metaphysic must serve, not only as a rational system for the intellect,
but as a “dynamic”[36] or motive for action and achievement, for the
conscious activity of rational, self-conscious beings.
As for the matter of any further developments[37] of the free,
creative religion hinted by Papini, we had, in 1903, the solemn
declaration of Professor James that “the programme of the man-god is
one of the great type programmes of philosophy,” and that he himself
had been “slow” in coming to a perception of the full inwardness of
the idea. Then it led evidently in Italy itself to a new doctrine
which was trumpeted there a year or two ago in the public press as
“Futurism,”[38] in which “courage, audacity and rebellion” were the
essential elements, and which could not “abide” the mere mention
of such things as “priests” and “ideals” and “professors” and
“moralism.” The extravagances of Prezzolini, who thinks of man as a
“sentimental gorilla,” were apparently the latest outcome of this
anarchical individualism and practicalism. Pragmatism was converted
by him into a sophisticated opportunism and a modern Machiavellism, a
method of attaining contentment in one’s life and of dominating one’s
fellow-creatures by playing upon their fancies and prejudices as does
the religious charlatan or the quack doctor or the rhetorician.
The reader who may care to contemplate all this radical, pragmatist
enthusiasm for the New Reformation in a more accessible, and a less
exaggerated, form had better perhaps consult the recent work of Mr.
Sturt of Oxford on the _Idea of a Free Church_. In this work the
principles of Pragmatism are applied, first, critically and in the
main negatively, to the moral dogmas of traditional Christianity, and
then positively to the new conception of religion he would substitute
for all this--the development of personality in accordance with the
claims of family and of national life. A fair-minded criticism of
this book would, I think, lead to the conclusion that the changes
contemplated by Mr. Sturt are already part and parcel of the programme
of liberal Christianity, whether we study this in the form of the many
more or less philosophical presentations of the same in modern German
theology, or in the form of the free, moral and social efforts of the
voluntary religion of America and England. In America many of the
younger thinkers in theology and philosophy are already writing in a
more or less popular manner upon Pragmatism as a philosophy that bids
fair to harmonize “traditional” and “radical” conceptions of religion.
One of these writers, for example, in a recent important commemorative
volume,[39] tries to show how this may be done by interpreting the
“supernatural,” not as the “trans-experimental,” but as the “ethical”
in experience, and by turning “dogmatic” into “historical theology.”
And it would not be difficult to find many books and addresses in
which the same idea is expressed. The more practical wing of this same
party endeavours to connect Pragmatism with the whole philosophy and
psychology of religious conversion, as this has been worked over by
recent investigators like Stanley Hall,[40] Starbuck,[41] and others,
and, above all, by James in his striking volume _The Varieties of
Religious Experience_.[42]
The fact, of course--and I shall immediately refer to it--that
Pragmatism has been hailed in France as a salutary doctrine, not
merely by Liberals and Evangelicals, but by devout Catholics and
Anti-modernists, is perhaps enough to give us some pause in the matter
of its application in the sphere of theoretical and practical religion.
It is useful, it would seem, sometimes to “liberate” the spirit of
man, and useful, too, at other times to connect the strivings of the
individual with the more or less organized experiences of past ages.
Turning, then, to France, it is, judging from the claims of the
pragmatists, and from some of the literature bearing upon this entire
subject,[43] fairly evident that there has been a kind of association
or relationship between Pragmatism and the following tendencies in
recent French philosophy: (1) the “freedom” and “indeterminism”
philosophy of Renouvier[44] and other members of the Neo-Critical
school, and of Boutroux and Bergson, who, “although differing from each
other in many important respects,” all “belong to the same movement of
thought, the reaction against Hegelianism and the cult of science which
has dominated France since the decline of the metaphysics of the school
of Cousin”;[45] (2) the philosophy of science and scientific hypotheses
represented by writers like Poincaré,[46] Brunschvicg, Le Roy,[47]
Milhaud, Abel Rey,[48] and others; (3) the religious philosophy and the
fideism of the followers of the spiritualistic metaphysic of Bergson,
many of whom go further than he does, and “make every effort to bring
him to the confessional faith”;[49] and (4) the French philosophy
of to-day that definitely bears the name of Pragmatism, that of M.
Blondel,[50] who in 1893 wrote a suggestive work entitled _L’Action_,
and who claims to have coined the word Pragmatism, after much careful
consideration and discrimination, as early as 1888--many years before
the California pamphlet of James.
The first of these points of correspondence or relationship we can pass
over with the remark that we shall have a good deal to say about the
advantage enjoyed by Pragmatism over Rationalism in the treatment of
“freedom” and the “volitional” side of human nature, and also about the
general pragmatist reaction against Rationalism.
And as for the philosophy of science, it has been shown that our
English-speaking pragmatists cannot exactly pride themselves in the
somewhat indiscriminate manner of James and Schiller upon the supposed
support for their “hypothetical” conception of science and philosophy
to be found in the work of their French associates upon the logic of
science. “The men of great learning who were named as sponsors of this
new philosophy have more and more testified what reservations they
make, and how greatly their conclusions differ from those which are
currently attributed to them.”[51] Both Brunschvicg and Poincaré, in
fact, take the greatest pains in their books to dissociate themselves
from anything like the appearance of an acceptance of the doctrine of
the relativity of knowledge, from the signs of any lack of faith in the
idea that science, as far as it goes, gives us a true revelation of the
nature of reality.
Then in regard to (3) the French pragmatist philosophy or religion
we have only to read the reports and the quotations of M. Lalande
to see in this philosophy the operation of an uncritical dogmatism
or a blind “fideism” to which very few other philosophers, either
in France or in any other country, would care to subscribe. “_La
Revue de Philosophie_, which is directed by ecclesiastics, recently
extolled pragmatism as a means of proving orthodox beliefs.” ... “This
system solves a great many difficulties in philosophy; it explains
the necessity of principles marvellously.” ... “The existence of God,
Providence and Immortality are demonstrated by their happy effects upon
our terrestrial life.” ... “If we can consider the matter carefully,
it will be seen that the Good is the useful; for not to be good in
anything is synonymous with being bad, and everywhere the true is the
useful. It is in this assertion that Pragmatism consists.”[52]
And as to the fourth tendency, there is, at its outset, according
to M. Lalande, a more rational or ethical basis for the fideism of
M. Blondel’s book upon action, which starts off with a criticism
of philosophic dilettantism quite analogous with that which Mr.
Peirce follows in _How to Make Our Ideas Clear_. But M. Blondel
“does not continue in the same manner, and his conclusion is very
different. Rejecting all philosophical formalism, _he puts his trust
in moral experience, and consults it directly_. He thinks that moral
experience shows that action is not wholly self-contained, but that
it _presupposes a reality which transcends the world in which we
participate_.”[53]
Finally, maintains M. Blondel, “we are _unable_, as Pascal already
said, _either to live, or to understand ourselves, by ourselves alone_.
So that, unless we mutilate our nature by renouncing all earnestness of
life, we are necessarily led to recognize in ourselves the presence of
God. Our problem, therefore, can only be solved by an act of absolute
faith in a positive religion [Catholicism in his case]. This completes
the series of acts of faith, without which no action, not even our
daily acts, could be accomplished, and without which we should fall
into absolute barrenness, both practical and intellectual.”[54]
Now again these words about our being unable to understand ourselves
“by ourselves alone” contain an element of truth which we may
associate with the pragmatist tendency to believe in a socialized
(as distinguished from an individualistic) interpretation[55] of
our common moral life, to believe, that is to say, in a society of
persons as the truth (or the reality) of the universe, rather than
in an interpretation of the universe as the thinking experience of a
single absolute intelligence. This, however, is also a point which we
are obliged to defer[56] until we take up the general subject of the
relations between Pragmatism and Rationalism. The other words of the
paragraph, in respect of our absolute need of faith in some positive
religion, are, of course, expressive again of the uncritical fideism
to which reference has already been made. As an offset or alternative
to the “free” religion of Papini and James and to the experimental or
practical religion of different Protestant bodies, it is enough of
itself to give us pause in estimating the real drift[57] of Pragmatism
in regard to religious faith and the philosophy of religion.[58]
We shall meantime take leave of French Pragmatism[59] with the
reflection that it is thus obviously as complex and as confusing
and confused a thing as is the Pragmatism of other countries. It is
now almost a generation since we began to hear of a renascence of
spiritualism[60] and idealism in France in connexion not merely with
the work of philosophers like Renouvier and Lachelier and Fouillée[61]
and Boutroux, but with men of letters like De Vogué, Lavisse, Faguet,
Desjardins[62] and the rest, and some of the French Pragmatism of
to-day is but one of the more specialized phases of the broader
movement.
And as for the special question of the influence of James and his
philosophy upon Bergson, and of that of the possible return influence
of Bergson upon James,[63] the evidence produced by Lalande from
Bergson himself is certainly all to the effect that both men have
worked very largely independently of each other, although perfectly
cognisant now and then of each other’s publications. Both men, along
with their followers (and this is all that needs interest us), have
obviously been under the influence of ideas that have long been in the
air about the need of a philosophy that is “more truly empirical”[64]
than the traditional philosophy, and more truly inclined to “discover
what is involved in our actions in the ultimate recess, when,
unconsciously and in spite of ourselves, we _support existence and
cling to it whether we completely understand it or not_.”[65]
As for Pragmatism and pragmatist achievements in Germany, there is,
as might well be supposed, little need of saying much. The genius
of the country is against both; and if there is any Pragmatism in
Germany, it must have contrived somehow to have been “born again” of
the “spirit” before obtaining official recognition.[66] So much even
might be inferred from the otherwise generous recognition accorded to
the work of James by scholars and thinkers like Eucken and Stein[67]
and the rest. Those men cannot see Pragmatism save in the broad light
of the “humanism” that has always characterised philosophy, when
properly appreciated, and understood in the light of its true genesis.
Pragmatism has in fact been long known in Germany under the older
names of “Voluntarism” and “Humanism,” although it may doubtless be
associated there with some of the more pronounced tendencies of the
hour, such as the recent insistence of the “Göttingen Fries School”
upon the importance of the “genetic” and the “descriptive” point of
view in regard even to the matter of the supposed first principles of
knowledge, the hypothetical and methodological conception of philosophy
taken by philosophical scientists like Mach and Ostwald[68] and their
followers, the “empiricism” and “realism” of thinkers like the late
Dr. Avenarius[69] of Zurich.
Then the so-called “teleological,” or “practical,” character of our
human thinking has also been recognized in modern German thought long
before the days of Peirce and Dewey, even by such strictly academic
thinkers as Lotze and Sigwart. The work of the latter thinker upon
Logic, by the way, was translated into English under distinctly
Neo-Hegelian influences. In the second portion of this work the
universal presuppositions of knowledge are considered, not merely as
_a priori_ truths, but as akin in some important respects “to the
ethical principles by which we are wont to determine and guide our free
conscious activity.”[70] But even apart from this matter of the natural
association of Pragmatism with the Voluntarism that has long existed in
German philosophy,[71] we may undoubtedly pass to the following things
in contemporary and recent German thought as sympathetic, in the main,
to the pragmatist tendencies of James and Dewey and Schiller: (1) the
practical conception of science and philosophy, as both of them a kind
of “economy of the attention,” a sort of “conceptual shorthand”[72]
(for the purposes of the “description” of our environment) that
we have referred to in the case of Mach and Ostwald; (2) the close
association between the “metaphysical” and the “cultural” in books like
those of Jerusalem[73] and Eleutheropulos;[74] (3) the sharp criticism
of the Rationalism of the Critical Idealism by the two last-mentioned
thinkers, and by some of the members of the new Fichte[75] School
like Schellwien; and last but not least, (4) the tendency to take a
psychological[76] and a sociological[77] (instead of a merely logical)
view of the functions of thought and philosophy, that is just as
accentuated in Germany at the present time as it is elsewhere.
James and Schiller have both been fond of referring to the work of many
of these last-mentioned men as favourable to a conception of philosophy
less as a “theory of knowledge” (or a “theory of being”) in the old
sense than as a _Weltanschauungslehre_ (a view of the world as whole),
a “discussion of the various possible programmes for man’s life” to
which reference has already been made in the case of Papini and others.
And we might associate with their predilections and persuasions in
this regard the apparent Pragmatism also of a great scholar like
Harnack[78] in reference to the subordination of religious dogma to
the realities of the religious life, or the Pragmatism of Ritschl[79]
himself, in regard to the subordinate place in living religion of mere
intellectual theory, or even some of the tendencies of the celebrated
value-philosophy of Rickert and Windelband[80] and Münsterberg[81]
and the rest. But again the main trouble about all this quasi-German
support for the pragmatists is that most of these contemporary thinkers
have taken pains to trace the roots of their teaching back into the
great systems of the past. The pragmatists, on the other hand, have
been notoriously careless about the matter of the various affiliations
of their “corridor-like” and eclectic theory.
There are many reasons, however, against regarding even the
philosophical expression of many of the practical and scientific
tendencies of Germany as at all favourable to the acceptance of
Pragmatism as a satisfactory philosophy from the German point of view.
Among these reasons are: (1) The fact that it is naturally impossible
to find any real support in past or present German philosophy for the
impossible breach that exists in Pragmatism between the “theoretical”
and the “practical,” and (2) the fact that Germany has only recently
passed through a period of sharp conflict between the psychological
(or the “genetic”) and the logical point of view regarding knowledge,
resulting in a confessed victory for the latter. And then again (3)
even if there is a partial correspondence between Pragmatism and the
_quasi_ economic (or “practical”) conception taken of philosophy by
some of the younger men in Germany who have not altogether outlived
their reaction against Rationalism, there are other tendencies there
that are far more characteristic of the spirit and of the traditions
of the country. Among these are the New Idealism generally, the strong
Neo-Kantian movement of the Marburg school[82] and their followers in
different places, the revived interest in Hegel[83] and in Schelling,
the Neo-Romanticism of Jena, with its booklets upon such topics as
_The Culture of the Soul_, _Life with Nature_, _German Idealism_, and
so on.[84] And then (4) there are just as many difficulties in the
way of regarding the psychological and sociological philosophy of men
like Jerusalem and Eleutheropulos as anything like a final philosophy
of knowledge, as there is in attempting to do the same thing with
the merely preliminary and tentative philosophy of James and his
associates.
Returning now to America and England, although Pragmatism is eminently
an American[85] doctrine, it would, of course, be absurd to imagine
that Pragmatism has carried the entire thought of the United States
with it.[86] It encountered there, even at the outset, at least
something of the contempt and the incredulity and the hostility
that it met with elsewhere, and also much of the American shrewd
indifference to a much-advertised new article. The message of James
as a philosopher, too, was doubtless discounted (at least by the
well-informed) in the light of his previous brilliant work as a
descriptive psychologist, and also, perhaps, in the light of his
wonderfully suggestive personality.[87]
What actually happened in America in respect of the pragmatist movement
was, first of all, the sudden emergence of a magazine literature[88]
in connexion with the Will-to-Believe philosophy of James and the
California address, and in connexion (according to the generous
testimony of James) with Deweyism or “Instrumentalism.” Much of
this tiresome and hair-splitting magazine discussion of “ideas as
instruments of thought,” and of the “consequences” (“theoretical”
or “practical” or what not) by which ideas were to be “tested,” was
pronounced by James, in 1906, to be largely crude and superficial.
It had the indirect merit, however, of yielding one or two valuable
estimates of the many inconsistencies in Pragmatism, and of the many
different kinds of Pragmatism or instrumentalism that there seemed to
be, and of the value of Pragmatism as a “theory of knowledge,” and as
a “philosophical generalization.” The upshot of the whole preliminary
discussion was (1) the discovery that, Pragmatism having arisen (as
Dewey himself put it) out of a multitude of conflicting tendencies
in regard to what we might call the “approach” to philosophy, would
probably soon “dissolve itself” back again into some of the streams out
of which it had arisen,[89] and (2) the discovery that all that this
early “methodological” pragmatism amounted to was the harmless doctrine
that the meaning of any conception expressed itself in the past or
future conduct or experience of actual, or possible, sentient creatures.
We shall again take occasion[90] to refer to this comparative failure
of Pragmatism to give any systematic or unified account of the
consequences by which it would seek to test the truth of propositions.
Its failure, however, in this connexion is a matter of secondary
importance in comparison with the great lesson[91] to be drawn from
its idea that there can be for man no objective truth about the
universe, apart from the idea of its meaning[92] or significance to his
experience and to his conscious activity.
What is now taking place in America in this second decade [_i.e._ in
the years after 1908] of the pragmatist movement is apparently (1)
the sharpest kind of official rationalist condemnation of Pragmatism
as an imperfectly proved and a merely “subjective” and a highly
unsystematic philosophy; (2) the appearance of a number of instructive
booklets[93] upon Pragmatism and the pragmatist movement, some of them
expository and critical, some of them in the main sympathetic, some of
them condemnatory and even contemptuous, and some of them attempts at
further constructive work along pragmatist lines; (3) indications here
and there of the acceptance and the promulgation of older and newer
doctrines antithetic and hostile to Pragmatism--some of them possibly
as typically American as Pragmatism itself.
As a single illustration of the partly constructive work that is
being attempted in the name and the spirit of pragmatism, we may
instance the line of reflection entered upon by Professor Moore[94]
in consequence of his claim that to Pragmatism the fundamental thing
in any judgment or proposition is not so much its consequences, but
its “value.” This claim may, no doubt, be supported by the many
declarations of James and Schiller that the “true,” like the “good”
and the “beautiful,” is simply a “valuation,” and not the fetish that
the rationalists make it out to be. It is doubtful, however, as we may
try to indicate, whether this “value” interpretation of Pragmatism
can be carried out independently of the more systematic attempts at a
general philosophy of value that are being made to-day in Germany and
America and elsewhere. And then it would be a matter of no ordinary
difficulty to clear up the inconsistency that doubtless exists between
Pragmatism as a value philosophy and Pragmatism as a mere philosophy of
“consequences.” It is “immediate,” and “verifiable,” and “definitely
appreciated” consequences, rather than the higher values of our
experience that (up to the present time) seem to have bulked largely in
the argumentations of the pragmatists.
And as an illustration of a doctrine that is both American and hostile
to pragmatism, we may instance the New Realism[95] that was recently
launched in a collective manifesto in _The Journal of Philosophy and
Scientific Methods_. This realism is, to be sure, hostile to every
form of “subjectivism” or personalism, and may in a certain sense be
regarded as the emergence into full daylight of the realism or dualism
that we found to be lurking[96] in James’s “radical empiricism.” It
is, therefore, as it were, one of the signs that Pragmatism is perhaps
breaking up in America into some of the more elemental tendencies out
of which it developed--in this case the American desire for operative
(or effective) realism and for a “direct”[97] contact with reality
instead of the indirect contact of so many metaphysical systems.
It is only necessary to add here that it is to the credit of American
rationalism of the Neo-Hegelian type that it has shown itself,
notably in the writings of Professor Royce,[98] capable, not only
of criticising Pragmatism, but of seeking to incorporate, in a
constructive philosophy of the present, some of the features of the
pragmatist emphasis upon “will” and “achievement” and “purpose.” It
is, therefore, in this respect at least in line with some of the best
tendencies in contemporary European philosophy.
Lastly, there are certain tendencies of recent English philosophy with
which Pragmatism has special affinities. Among these may be mentioned:
(1) the various general and specific criticisms[99] that have been
made there for at least two generations on the more or less formal
and abstract character of the metaphysic of our Neo-Kantians and our
Neo-Hegelians; (2) the concessions that have recently been made by
prominent rationalists to the undoubtedly purposive, or “teleological,”
character of our human thinking, and to the connexion of our mental
life with our entire practical and spiritual activity. Many of these
concessions are now regarded as the merest commonplaces of speculation,
and we shall probably refer to them in our next chapter. Then there is
(3) the well-known insistence of some of our foremost psychologists,
like Ward and Stout,[100] upon the reality of activity and “purpose”
in mental process, and upon the part played by them in the evolution
of our intellectual life, and of our adjustment to the world in which
we find ourselves. And (4) the ethical and social idealism of such
well-known members of our Neo-Hegelian school as Professors Jones,
Mackenzie, and Muirhead. These scholars and thinkers are just as
insistent as the pragmatists upon the idea that philosophy and thought
are, and should be, a practical social “dynamic”--that is to say,
“forces” and “motives” making for the perfection of the common life.
(5) A great deal of the philosophy of science and of the philosophy of
axioms and postulates to be found in British writers, from Mill and
Jevons to Karl Pearson and Mr. A. Sidgwick[101] and many others.
Apart from all this, however, or rather, in addition to it, it may
be truly said that one of the striking things about recent British
philosophical literature[102] is the stir and the activity that have
been excited in the rationalist camp by the writings of the pragmatists
and the “personal idealists,” and by the critics of these newer modes
of thought. All this has led to many such re-statements of the problems
of philosophy as are to be found in the books of men like Joachim,[103]
Henry Jones,[104] A. E. Taylor,[105] Boyce-Gibson,[106] Henry H.
Sturt,[107] S. H. Mellone,[108] J. H. B. Joseph,[109] and others, and
even, say, in such a representative book as that of Professor Stewart
upon the classical theme of Plato’s _Theory of Ideas_. In this work an
attempt is made to interpret Plato’s “Ideas” in the light of pragmatist
considerations as but “categories” or “points of view” which we find it
convenient to use in dealing with our sense experience.
CHAPTER III
SOME FUNDAMENTAL CHARACTERISTICS
We shall now attempt a somewhat detailed treatment of a few of the more
characteristic tendencies of Pragmatism. The following have already
been mentioned in our general sketch of its development and of the
appearance of the pragmatist philosophy in Europe and America: (1) the
attempted modification by Pragmatism of the extremes of Rationalism,
and its dissatisfaction with the rationalism of both science and
philosophy; (2) its progress from the stage of a mere practical and
experimental theory of truth to a broad humanism in which philosophy
itself becomes (like art, say) merely an important “dynamic” element
in human culture; (3) its preference in the matter of first principles
for “faith” and “experience” and a trust in our instinctive “beliefs”;
(4) its readiness to affiliate itself with the various liberal and
humanistic tendencies in human thought, such as the philosophy of
“freedom,” and the “hypothetical method” of science, modern ethical
and social idealism, the religious reaction of recent years, the
voluntaristic trend in German post-Kantian philosophy, and so on. Our
subject in this chapter, however, is rather that of the three or four
more or less characteristic assumptions and contentions upon which all
these and the many other pragmatist tendencies may be said to rest.
The first and foremost of these assumptions is the position that all
truth is “made” truth, “human” truth, truth related to human attitudes
and purposes, and that there is no “objective” or “independent”
truth, no truth “in whose establishment the function of giving human
satisfaction, in marrying previous parts of experience with newer
parts, has played no rôle.” Truths were “nothing,” as it were,
before they were “discovered,” and the most ancient truths were once
“plastic,” or merely susceptible of proof or disproof. Truth is “made”
just like “health,” or “wealth,” or “value,” and so on. Insistence, we
might say, upon this one note, along with the entire line of reflection
that it awakens in him, is really, as Dewey reminds us, the main
burden of James’s book upon _Pragmatism_. Equally characteristic is
it too of Dewey himself who is for ever reverting to his doctrine of
the factitious character of truth. There is no “fixed distinction,”
he tells us, “between the empirical values of the unreflective life
and the most abstract process of rational thought.” And to Schiller,
again, this same thought is the beginning of everything in philosophy,
for with an outspoken acceptance of this doctrine of the “formation”
of all truth, Pragmatism, he thinks, can do at least two things that
Rationalism is for ever debarred from doing: (1) distinguish adequately
“truth” from “fact,” and (2) distinguish adequately truth from error.
Whether these two things be, or be not, the consequences of the
doctrine in question [and we shall return[110] to the point] we may
perhaps accept it as, on the whole, harmonious with the teaching of
psychology about the nature of our ideas as mental habits, or about
thinking as a restrained, or a guided, activity. It is in harmony,
too, with the palpable truism that all “truth” must be truth that
some beings or other who have once “sought” truth (for some reasons
or other) have at last come to regard as satisfying their search and
their purposes. And this truism, it would seem, must remain such in
spite of, or even along with, any meaning that there may be in the idea
of what we call “God’s truth.” By this expression men understand, it
would seem, merely God’s knowledge of truths or facts of which we as
men may happen to be ignorant. But then there can have been no time in
which God can be imagined to have been ignorant of these or any other
matters. It is therefore not for Him truth as opposed to falsehood.
And then, again, this pragmatist position about all truth being “made”
truth would seem to be valid in view of the difficulty (Plato[111]
spoke of it) of reconciling God’s supposed absolute knowledge of
reality with our finite and limited apprehension of the same.[112]
The main interest, however, of pragmatists in their somewhat tiresome
insistence upon the truism that all truth is made truth is their
hostility (Locke had it in his day) to the supposed rationalist
position that there is an “_a priori_” and “objective” truth
independent altogether of human activities and human purposes.[113]
The particular object of their aversion is what Dewey[114] talks of
as “that dishonesty, that insincerity, characteristic of philosophical
discussion, that is manifested in speaking and writing as if certain
ultimate abstractions or concepts could be more real than human
purposes and human beings, and as if there could be any contradiction
between truth and purpose.” As we shall reflect at a later stage[115]
upon the rationalist theory of truth, we may, meantime, pass over this
hostility with the remark that it is, after all, only owing to certain
peculiar circumstances (those, say, of its conflict with religion and
science and custom) in the development of philosophy that its first
principles have been regarded by its votaries as the most real of
all realities. These devotees tend to forget in their zeal that the
pragmatist way of looking upon all supposed first principles--that of
the consideration of their utility in and necessity as explanations of
our common experience and its realities--is the only way of explaining
their reality, even as conceptions.
It requires to be added--so much may, indeed, have already been
inferred from the preceding chapter--that, apart from their hint about
the highest truth being necessarily inclusive of the highest human
purposes, it is by no means easy to find out from the pragmatists
what they mean by truth, or how they would define it. When the matter
is pressed home, they generally confess that their attitude is in
the main “psychological” rather than philosophical, that it is the
“making” of truth rather than its “nature” or its “contents” or its
systematic character that interests them. It is the “dynamical” point
of view, as they put it, that is essential to them. And out of the
sphere and the associations of this contention they do not really
travel. They will tell you what it means to hit upon this particular
way of looking upon truth, and how stimulating it is to attempt to do
so. And they will give you many more or less artificial and tentative,
external, descriptions of their philosophy by saying that ideas are
“made for man,” and “not man for ideas,” and so on. But, although they
deny both the common-sense view that truth is a “correspondence” with
external reality, and the rationalist view that truth is a “coherent
system” on its own account, they never define truth any more than
do their opponents the rationalists. It is a “commerce” and not a
“correspondence,” they contend, a commerce[116] between certain parts
of our experience and certain other parts, or a commerce between our
ideas and our purposes, but not a commerce with reality, for the
making of truth is itself, in their eyes, the making of reality.
Secondly, it is another familiar characteristic of Pragmatism that,
although it fails to give a satisfying account either of truth
or reality, the one thing of which it is for ever talking of, as
fundamental to our entire life as men, is _belief_.[117] This is the
one thing upon which it makes everything else to hang--all knowledge
and all action and all theory. And it is, of course, its manifest
acceptance of belief as a fundamental principle of our human life,
and as a true measure of reality, that has given to Pragmatism its
religious atmosphere.[118] It is this that has made it such a welcome
and such a credible creed to so many disillusioned and free-thinking
people to-day, as well as to so many of the faithful and the orthodox.
“For, in principle, Pragmatism overcomes the old antithesis of Faith
and Reason. It shows, on the one hand, that faith must underlie all
reason and pervade it, nay, that at bottom rationality itself is the
supremest postulate of Faith.”[119] “Truth,” again, as James reminds
us, “lives in fact for the most part on a credit system. Our thoughts
and beliefs [how literally true this is!] pass so long as nobody
challenges them, just as bank-notes pass so long as nobody refuses
them.”[120]
Now it requires but the reflection of a moment to see that the various
facts and considerations upon which the two last quotations, and the
general devotion of Pragmatism to “belief,” both repose, are all
distinctly in favour of the acceptability of Pragmatism at the present
time. There is nothing in which people in general are more interested
at the beginning of this twentieth century than in belief. It is
this, for example, that explains such a thing as the great success
to-day in our English-speaking world of such an enterprise as the
_Hibbert Journal of Philosophy and Religion_, or the still greater
phenomenon of the world-wide interest of the hour in the subject of
comparative religion. Most modern men, the writer is inclined to think,
believe[121] a great deal more than they know, the chief difficulty
about this fact being that there is no recognized way of expressing
it in our science or in our philosophy, or of acting upon it in our
behaviour in society. It is, however, only the undue prominence of
mathematical and physical science since the time of Descartes[122]
that has made evidence and demonstration the main consideration of
philosophy instead of belief, man’s true and fundamental estimate of
reality.
We have already[123] pointed out that one of the main results of
Pragmatism is the acceptance on the part of its leading upholders
of our fundamental beliefs about the ultimately real and about the
realization of our most deeply cherished purposes. In fact, reality in
general is for them, we may say--in the absence from their writings of
any better description,--simply that which we can “will,” or “believe
in,” as the basis for action and for conscious “creative” effort, or
constructive effort. As James himself puts it in his book on _The
Meaning of Truth_: “Since the only realities we can talk about are
objects believed in, the pragmatist, whenever he says ‘reality,’
means in the first instance what may count for the man himself as
a reality, what he believes at the moment to be such. Sometimes
the reality is a concrete sensible presence.... Or his idea may be
that of an abstract relation, say of that between the sides and the
hypotenuse of a triangle.... Each reality verifies and validates its
own idea exclusively; and in each case the verification consists in the
satisfactorily-ending consequences, mental or physical, which the idea
was to set up.”
We shall later have to refer to the absence from Pragmatism of
a criterion for achievement and for “consequences.” And, as far
as philosophical theories are concerned, these are all, to the
pragmatists, true or false simply in so far as they are practically
credible or not. James is quite explicit, for example, about Pragmatism
itself in this regard. “No pragmatist,” he holds, “can warrant the
objective truth of what he says about the universe; he can only
believe it.”[124] There is faith, in short, for the pragmatist, in
every act, in every phase of thought, the faith that is implied in
the realization of the purposes that underlie our attempted acts and
thoughts. They eagerly accept, for example, the important doctrine of
the modern logician, and the modern psychologist, as to the presence of
volition in all “affirmation” and “judgment,” seeing that in every case
of affirmation there is a more or less active readjustment of our minds
(or our bodies) to what either stimulates or impedes our activity.
A third outstanding characteristic of Pragmatism is the “deeper” view
of human nature upon which, in contrast to Rationalism, it supposes
itself to rest, and which it seeks to vindicate. It is this supposedly
deeper view of human nature for which it is confessedly pleading when
it insists, as it is fond of doing, upon the connexion of philosophy
with the various theoretical and practical pursuits of mankind, with
sciences like biology and psychology, and with social reform,[125]
and so on. We have, it may be remembered, already intimated that even
in practical America men have had their doubts about the depth of a
philosophy that looks upon man as made in the main for action and
achievement instead of, let us say, the realization of his higher
nature. Still, few of the readers of James can have altogether
failed to appreciate the significance of some of the many eloquent
and suggestive paragraphs he has written upon the limitations of the
rationalistic “temperament” and of its unblushing sacrifice of the
entire wealth of human nature and of the various pulsating interests of
men to the imaginary exigencies of abstract logic and “system.”[126]
To him and to his colleagues (as to Socrates, for that part of it)
man is firstly a being who has habits and purposes, and who can,
to some extent, control the various forces of his nature through
_true knowledge_, and in this very discrepancy between the real and
the ideal does there lie for the pragmatists the entire problem of
philosophy--the problem of Plato, that of the attainment of true virtue
through true knowledge.
Deferring, however, the question of the success of the pragmatists in
this matter of the unfolding of the true relation between philosophy
and human nature, let us think of a few of the teachings of experience
upon this truly important and inevitable relation, which no philosophy
indeed can for one moment afford to neglect. Insistence upon these
facts or teachings and upon the reflections and criticisms to which
they naturally give rise is certainly a deeply marked characteristic of
Pragmatism.
Man, as has often been pointed out, is endowed with the power of
reflection, not so much to enable him to understand the world either
as a whole or in its detailed workings as to assist him in the further
evolution of his life. His beliefs and choices and his spiritual
culture are all, as it were, forces and influences in this direction.
Indeed, it is always the soul or the life principle that is the
important thing in any individual or any people, so far as a place in
the world (or in “history”) is concerned.
Philosophers, as well as other men, often exchange (in the words of
Lecky) the “love of truth” as such for the love of “_the_ truth,” that
is to say, for the love of the system and the social arrangements that
best suit their interests as thinkers. And they too are just as eager
as other men for discipleship and influence and honour. Knowledge with
them, in other words, means, as Bacon put it, “control”; and even with
them it does not, and cannot, remain at the stage of mere cognition. It
becomes in the end a conviction or a belief. And thus the philosopher
with his system (even a Plato, or a Hegel) is after all but a part of
the universe, to be judged as such, along with other lives and other
systems--a circumstance hit off early in the nineteenth century by
German students when they used to talk of one’s being able (in Berlin)
to see the _Welt-Geist_ (Hegel) “taking a walk” in the _Thiergarten_.
Reality again, so far as either life or science is concerned, means for
every man that in which he is most fundamentally interested--ions and
radium to the physicist of the hour, life to the biologist, God to the
theologian, progress to the philanthropist, and so on.
Further, mankind in general is not likely to abandon its habit of
estimating all systems of thought and philosophy from the point of view
of their value as keys, or aids, to the problem of the meaning and the
development of life as a whole. There is no abstract “truth” or “good”
or “beauty” apart from the lives of beings who contemplate, and who
seek to create, such things as truth and goodness and beauty.
To understand knowledge and intellect, again, we must indeed look at
them in their actual development in connexion with the total vital or
personal activity either of the average or even of the exceptional
individual. And instead of regarding the affections and the emotions as
inimical to knowledge, or as secondary and inferior to it, we ought to
remember that they rest in general upon a broader and deeper attitude
to reality than does either the perception of the senses[127] or the
critical analysis of the understanding. In both of these cases is the
knowledge that we attain to limited in the main either to what is
before us under the conditions of time and space, or to particular
aspects of things that we mark off, or separate, from the totality of
things. As Bergson reminds us, we “desire” and “will” with the “whole”
of our past, but “think” only with “part” of it. Small wonder then that
James seeks to connect such a broad phenomenon as religion with many of
the unconscious factors (they are not all merely “biological”) in the
depth of our personality. Some of the instincts and the phenomena that
we encounter there are things that transcend altogether the world that
is within the scope of our senses or the reasoning faculties.
Truth, too, grows from age to age, and is simply the formulated
knowledge humanity has of itself and its environment. And errors
disappear, not so much in consequence of their logical refutation, as
in consequence of their inutility and of their inability to control the
life and thought of the free man. Readers of Schopenhauer will remember
his frequent insistence upon this point of the gradual dissidence and
disappearance of error, in place of its summary refutation.
Our “reactions” upon reality are certainly part of what we mean by
“reality,” and our philosophy is only too truly “the history of our
heart and life” as well as that of our intellectual activity. The
historian of philosophy invariably acts upon a recognition of the
personal and the national and the epochal influence in the evolution of
every philosophical system. And even the new, or the fuller conception
of life to which a given genius may attain at some stage or other of
human civilization will still inevitably, in its turn, give place to a
newer or a more perfect system.
Now Pragmatism is doubtless at fault in seeking to create the
impression that Rationalism would seek to deny any, or all, of those
characteristic facts of human nature. Still, it is to some extent
justified in insisting upon their importance in view of the sharp
conflict (we shall later refer to it) that is often supposed to exist
between the theoretical and the practical interests of mankind,
and that Rationalism sometimes seems to accept with comparative
equanimity.[128] What Pragmatism is itself most of all seeking after is
a view of human nature, and of things generally, in which the fullest
justice is done to the facts upon which this very real conflict[129] of
modern times may be said to rest.
A fourth characteristic of Pragmatism is its notorious
“anti-intellectualism,”[130] its hostility to the merely dialectical
use of terms and concepts and categories,[131] to argumentation that
is unduly detached from the facts and the needs of our concrete human
experience. This anti-intellectualism we prefer meantime to consider
not so much in itself and on its own account (if this be possible
with a negative creed) as in the light of the results it has had upon
philosophy. There is, for example, the general clearing of the ground
that has undoubtedly taken place as to the actual or the possible
meaning of many terms or conceptions that have long been current
with the transcendentalists, such as “pure thought,” the “Absolute,”
“truth” in and for itself, philosophy as the “completely rational”
interpretation of experience, and so on. And along with this clearing
of the ground there are (and also in consequence of the pragmatist
movement) a great many recent, striking concessions of Rationalism
to practical, and to common-sense, ways of looking at things, the
very existence of which cannot but have an important effect upon the
philosophy of the near future. Among some of the more typical of these
are the following:
From Mr. F. H. Bradley we have the emphatic declarations that
the principle of dialectical opposition or the principle of
“Non-Contradiction” (formerly, to himself and his followers, the “rule
of the game” in philosophy) “does not settle anything about the nature
of reality”; that “truth” is an “hypothesis,” and that “except as a
means to a foreign end it is useless and impossible”; and “when we
judge truth by its own standard it is defective because it fails to
include all the facts,”[132] and because its contents “cannot be made
intelligible throughout and entirely”; that “no truth is idle,” and
that “all truth” has “practical” and æsthetic “consequences”; that
there is “no such existing thing as pure thought”;[133] that we cannot
separate truth and practice; that “absolute certainty is not requisite
for working purposes”; that it is a “superstition[134] to think that
the intellect is the highest part of us,” and that it is well to
attack a one-sided “intellectualism”; that both “intellectualism”
and “voluntarism” are “one-sided,” and that he has no “objection to
identifying reality with goodness or satisfaction, so long as this
does not mean merely practical satisfaction.”[135] Then from this same
author comes the following familiar statement about philosophy as a
whole: “Philosophy always will be hard, and what it promises in the
end is no clear vision nor any complete understanding or vision, but
its certain reward is a continual and a heightened appreciation [this
is the result of science as well as of philosophy] of the ineffable
mystery of life, of life in all its complexities and all its unity and
all its worth.”[136]
Equally typical and equally important is the following concession from
Professor Taylor, although, of course, to many people it would seem no
concession at all, but rather the mere statement of a fact, which our
Neo-Hegelians have only made themselves ridiculous by seeming to have
so long overlooked: “Mere truth for the intellect can never be quite
the same as ultimate reality. For in mere truth we get reality only in
its intellectual aspect, as that which affords a higher satisfaction to
thought’s demand for consistency and systematic unity in its object.
And as we have seen, this demand can never be quite satisfied by
thought itself.[137] For thought, to remain thought, must always be
something less than the whole reality which it knows.”[138]
And we may add also from Professor Taylor the following declaration
in respect of the notorious inability of Neo-Hegelian Rationalism
to furnish the average man with a theory of reality in the
contemplation of which he can find at least an adequate motive to
conscious effort and achievement: “Quite apart from the facts, due
to personal shortcomings and confusions, it is inherent in the
nature of metaphysical study that it can make no positive addition
to our information, and can itself supply no motive for practical
endeavour.”[139]
Many of those findings are obviously so harmonious with some of the
more familiar formulas of the pragmatists that there would seem
to be ample warrant for associating them with the results of the
pragmatist movement. This is particularly the case, it would seem,
with the concession of Mr. Bradley with respect of the “practical”
or “hypothetical” conception that we ought to entertain of “truth”
and “thinking,” and also with the strictures passed by him upon “mere
truth” and “mere intellectualism,” and with Professor Taylor’s position
in respect of the inadequacy of the rationalist theory of reality, as
in no sense a “dynamic” or an “incentive” for action. And we might well
regard Professor Taylor’s finding in respect of mere systematic truth
or the “Absolute” (for they are the same thing to him) as confirmatory
of Dr. Schiller’s important contention that “in Absolutism” the two
“poles” of the “moral” and the “intellectual” character of the Deity
“fall apart.” This means, we will remember, that the truth of abstract
intellectualism is not the truth for action,[140] that absolutism
is not able to effect or harmonize between the truth of systematic
knowledge and moral truth--if, indeed, there be any such thing as moral
truth on the basis of a pure Rationalism.
To be sure, both the extent and even the reality of all this supposed
cession of ground in philosophy to the pragmatists has been doubted
and denied by the representatives of Rationalism. They would be
questioned, too, by many sober thinkers and scholars who have long
regarded Hegelian intellectualism and pragmatist “voluntarism” as
extremes in philosophy, as inimical, both of them, to the interests
of a true and catholic conception of philosophy. The latter, as we
know from Aristotle, should be inclusive of the realities both of the
intellectual and the practical life.
Pragmatist criticisms of Rationalism, again, may fairly be claimed to
have been to a large extent anticipated by the independent findings
of living idealist thinkers like Professors Pringle-Pattison,
Baillie, Jones, and others, in respect of the supposed extreme claims
of Hegelianism, as well as by similar findings and independent
constructive efforts on the part of the recent group of the Oxford
Personal Idealists.[141] That there is still a place for pragmatist
anti-intellectualism is evidently the conclusion to be drawn from such
things as the present wide acceptance of the philosophy of Bergson, or
the recent declarations of Mr. Bradley that we are justified “in the
intelligent refusal to accept as final an theoretical criterion which
actually so far exists,” and that the “action of narrow consistency
must be definitely given up.”
The reflection ought, moreover, to be inserted here that even if
Pragmatism has been of some possible service in bringing forth from
rationalists some of their many recent confessions of the limitations
of an abstract intellectualism, it is not at all unlikely that
Rationalism in its turn may succeed in convicting Pragmatism of an
undue emphasis[142] upon volition and action and upon merely practical
truth.
We shall now terminate the foregoing characterization of Pragmatism
by a reference to two or three other specific things for which it
may, with more or less justice, be supposed to stand in philosophy.
These are (1) the repudiation of the “correspondence view”[143] of
the relation of truth to reality, (2) the rejection of the idea of
there being any ultimate or rigid distinction between “appearance” and
“reality,” and (3) the reaffirmation of the “teleological” point of
view as characteristic of philosophy in distinction from science.
As for (1) it has already been pointed out that this idea of the
misleading character of the ordinary “correspondence notion” of truth
is claimed by pragmatists as an important result of their proposal
to test truth by the standard of the consequences involved in its
acceptance.[144] The ordinary reader may not, to be sure, be aware
of the many difficulties that are apt to arise in philosophy from an
apparent acceptance of the common-sense notion of truth as somehow
simply a duplicate or a “copy” of external reality. There is the
difficulty, say, of our ever being able to prove such a correspondence
without being (or “going”) somehow beyond both the truth and the
reality in question, so as to be able to detect either coincidence or
discrepancy. Or, we might again require some bridge between the ideas
in our minds and the supposed reality outside them--“sensations” say,
or “experiences,” something, in other words, that would be accepted
as “given” and indubitable both by idealists and realists. And there
would be the difficulty, too, of saying whether we have to begin for
the purposes of all reflective study with what is within consciousness
or with what is outside it--in matter say, or in things. And if the
former, how we can ever get to the latter, and _vice versa_. And
so on with the many kindred subtleties that have divided thinkers
into idealists and realists and conceptualists, monists, dualists,
parallelists, and so on.
Now Pragmatism certainly does well in proposing to steer clear of all
such difficulties and pitfalls of the ordinary “correspondence notion.”
And as we shall immediately refer to its own working philosophy in the
matter, we shall meantime pass over this mere point of its rejection
of the “correspondence notion” with one or two remarks of a critical
nature, (1) Unfortunately for the pragmatists the rejection of the
correspondence notion is just as important a feature of Idealism[145]
as it is of Pragmatism. The latter system therefore can lay no claim
to any uniqueness or superiority in this connexion. (2) Pragmatism, as
we may perhaps see, cannot maintain its position that the distinction
between “idea” and “object” is one “within experience itself” (rather
than a distinction between experience and something supposedly outside
it) without travelling further in the direction of Idealism[146] than
it has hitherto been prepared to do. By such a travelling in the
direction of Idealism we mean a far more thorough-going recognition
of the part played in the making of reality by the “personal” factor,
than it has as yet contemplated either in its “instrumentalism” or in
its “radical empiricism.” (3) There is, after all, an element of truth
in the correspondence notion to which Pragmatism fails to do justice.
We shall refer to this failure in a subsequent chapter[147] when again
looking into its theory of truth and reality.
Despite these objections there is, however, at least one particular
respect in regard to which Pragmatism may legitimately claim some
credit for its rejection of the correspondence notion. This is its
insistence that the truth is not (as it must be on the correspondence
theory) a “datum” or a “presentation,” not something given to us by
the various objects and things without us, or by their supposed effects
upon our senses and our memory and our understanding. It rather, on the
contrary, maintains Pragmatism, a “construction” on the part of the
mind, an attitude of our “expectant” (or “believing”) consciousness,
into which our own reactions upon things enter at least as much as do
their supposed effects and impressions upon us. Of course the many
difficulties of this thorny subject are by no means cleared up by this
mere indication of the attitude of Pragmatism, and we shall return in
a later chapter[148] to this idea of truth as a construction of the
mind instead of a datum, taking care at the same time, however, to
refer to the failure of which we have spoken on the part of Pragmatism
to recognize the element of truth that is still contained in the
correspondence notion.
(2) The rejection of the idea of any rigid, or ultimate distinction
between “appearance” and “reality.” This is a still broader rejection
than the one to which we have just referred, and may, therefore, be
thought of as another more or less fundamental reason for the rejection
either of the copy or of the correspondence theory of truth. The
reality of things, as Pragmatism conceives it, is not something already
“fixed” and “determined,” but rather, something that is “plastic” and
“modifiable,” something that is, in fact, undergoing a continuous
process of modification, or development, of one kind or another. It
must always, therefore, the pragmatist would hold, be defined in terms
of the experiences and the activities through which it is known and
revealed and through which it is, to some extent, even modified.[149]
Pragmatism, as we may remember, has been called by James “immediate”
or “radical” empiricism, although in one of his last books he seeks to
give an independent development to these two doctrines. The cardinal
principle of this philosophy is that “things are what they are
experienced as being, or that to give a just account of anything is
to tell what that thing is experienced to be.”[150] And it is perhaps
this aspect of the new philosophy of Pragmatism that is most amply and
most attractively exhibited in the books of James. It is presented,
too, with much freshness and skill in Professor Bawden’s[151] book upon
Pragmatism, which is an attempt, he says, “to set forth the necessary
assumptions of a philosophy in which experience becomes self-conscious
as a method.”[152]
“The new philosophy,” proceeds Bawden,[153] “is a pragmatic idealism.
Its method is at once intrinsic and immanent and organic or functional.
By saying that its method is functional, we mean that its experience
must be interpreted from within. We cannot jump out of our skins ...
we cannot pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps. We find ourselves
in mid-stream of the Niagara of experience, and may define what it
is by working back and forth within the current.” “We do not know
where we are going, but we are on the way” [the contradiction is
surely apparent]. Then, like James, Bawden goes on to interpret
Pragmatism by showing what things like self-consciousness, experience,
science, social consciousness, space, time, and causation _are_ by
showing how they “appear,” and how they “function”--“experience”
itself being simply, to him and to his friends, a “dynamic system,”
“self-sustaining,” a “whole leaning on nothing.”
The extremes of this “immediate” or “radical” philosophy appear to
non-pragmatists to be reached when we read words like those just quoted
about the Niagara stream of our experience, and about our life as
simply movement and acceleration, or about the celebrated “I think” of
Descartes as equally well [!] set forth under the form “It thinks,”
or “thinking is going on,” or about the “being” of the individual
person as consisting simply in a “doing.” “All this we hold,” says
Bawden, “_to be not materialism but simply energism_.” “There is no
‘truth,’ only ‘truths’--this is another way of putting it--and the only
criterion of truth is the changing one of the image or the idea which
comes out of our impulses or of the conflict of our habits.” The end of
all this modern flowing philosophy is, of course, the “Pluralism” of
James, the universe as a society of functioning selves in which reality
“may exist in a distributive form, or in the shape, not of an All, but
of a set of eaches.” “The essence of life,” as he puts it in his famous
essay on Bergson,[154] “is its continually changing character,” and we
only call it a “confusion” sometimes because we have grown accustomed
in our sciences and philosophies to isolate “elements” and “differents”
which in reality are “all dissolved in one another.”[155] “Relations of
every sort, of time, space, difference, likeness, change, rate, cause,
or what not, are just as integral members of the sensational flux as
terms are.” “Pluralism lets things really exist in the each form, or
distributively. Its type of union ... is different from the monistic
type of all-_einheit_. It is what I call the strung-along type, the
type of continuity, contiguity, or concatenation.” And so on.
(3) The reaffirmation of the teleological point of view. After the
many illustrations and references that have already been given in
respect of the tendencies of Pragmatism, it is perhaps hardly necessary
to point out that an insistence upon the necessity to philosophy of the
“teleological” point of view, of the consideration of both thoughts
and things from the point of view of their purpose or utility, is a
deeply-marked characteristic of Pragmatism. In itself this demand can
hardly be thought of as altogether new, for the idea of considering
the nature of anything in the light of its final purpose or end is
really as old in our European thought as the philosophy of Aristotle
or Anaxagoras. Almost equally familiar is the kindred idea upon which
Pragmatism is inclined to felicitate itself, of finding the roots
of metaphysic “in ethics,” in the facts of conduct, in the facts
of the “ideal” or the “personal” order which we tend[156] in human
civilization to impose upon what is otherwise thought of by science
as the natural order. The form, however, of the teleological argument
to which Pragmatism may legitimately be thought to have directed our
attention is that of the possible place in the world of reality, and
in the world of thought, of the effort and the free initiative of the
individual. This place, unfortunately (the case is quite different with
Bergson[157]), Pragmatism has been able, up to the present time, to
define, in the main, only negatively--by means of its polemic against
the completed and the self-completing “Absolute” of the Neo-Hegelian
Rationalists. What this polemic is we can best indicate by quoting from
Hegel himself a passage or a line of the reflection against which it
is seeking to enter an emphatic and a reasoned protest, and then after
this a passage or two from some of our Anglo-Hegelians in the same
connexion.
“The consummation,” says Hegel, in a familiar and often-quoted passage,
“of the Infinite aim (_i.e._ of the purpose of God as omniscient and
almighty) consists merely in removing the illusion which makes it seem
unaccomplished.”[158] Now although there is a sense in which this great
saying must for ever be maintained to contain an element of profound
truth,[159] the attitude of Pragmatism in regard to it would be,
firstly, that of a rooted objection to its outspoken intellectualism.
How can the chief work of the Almighty be conceived to be merely that
of getting rid somehow from our minds, or from his, of _our_ mental
confusions? And then, secondly, an equally rooted objection is taken
to the implication that the individual human being should allow
himself to entertain, as possibly true, a view of the general trend
of things that renders any notion of his playing an appreciable part
therein a theoretical and a practical absurdity.[160] This notion
(or “conceit,” if you will) he can surrender only by ceasing to
think of his own consciousness of “effort” and of the part played by
“effort”[161] and “invention” in the entire animal and human world, and
also of his consciousness of duty and of the ideal in general. This
latter consciousness of itself bids him to realize certain “norms”
or regulative prescripts simply because they are consonant with that
higher will which is to him the very truth of his own nature. He
cannot, in other words, believe that he is consciously obliged to work
and to realize his higher nature for nothing. The accomplishment of
ends and of the right must, in other words, be rationally believed
by him to be part of the nature of things. It is this conviction, we
feel sure, that animates Pragmatism in the opposition it shares both
with common sense and with the radical thought of our time against the
meaninglessness to Hegelianism, or to Absolutism,[162] many of the
hopes and many of the convictions that we feel to be so necessary and
so real in the life of mankind generally.
And there are other lines of reflection among Neo-Hegelians against
which Pragmatism is equally determined to make a more or less definite
protest, in the interest, as before, of our practical and of our moral
activity. We may recall, to begin with, the memorable words of Mr.
Bradley, in his would-be refutation of the charge that the ideals of
Absolutism “to some people” fail to “satisfy our nature’s demands.”
“Am I,” he indignantly asks, “to understand that we are to have all we
want, and have it just as we want it?” adding (almost in the next line)
that he “understands,” of course, that the “views” of Absolutism, or
those of any other philosophy, are to be compared “only with views”
that aim at “theoretical consistency” and not with mere practical
beliefs.[163] Now, speaking for the moment for Pragmatism, can it be
truly philosophical to contemplate with equanimity the idea of any
such ultimate conflict as is implied in these words between the demands
of the intellect[164] and the demands of emotion--to use the term
most definitely expressive of a personal, as distinct from a merely
intellectual satisfaction?
Then again there is, for example, the dictum of Dr. McTaggart, that
there is “no reason to trust God’s goodness without a demonstration
which removes the matter from the sphere of faith.”[165] May there not,
we would ask, be a view of things according to the truth of which the
confidence of the dying Socrates in the reasonableness and the goodness
of God are at least as reasonable as his confession, at the same time,
of his ignorance of the precise, or the particular, fate both of the
just and of the unjust? And is not, too, such a position as that
expressed in these words of Dr. McTaggart’s about a logically complete
reason for believing in the essential righteousness of things now ruled
out of court by some of the concessions of his brother rationalists to
Pragmatism, to which reference has already been made? It is so ruled
out, for example, even by Mr. Bradley’s condemnation as a “pernicious
prejudice” of the idea that “what is wanted for working purpose is the
last theoretical certainty about things.”[166]
CHAPTER IV
PRAGMATISM AND HUMAN ACTIVITY
It requires now but a slight degree of penetration to see that beneath
this entire matter of an apparent opposition between our “theoretical”
and our “practical” satisfaction, and beneath much of the pragmatist
insistence upon the “consequences” of ideas and of systems of thought,
there is the great question of the simple fact of human action and of
its significance for philosophy. And it might truly be said that the
raising of this question is not merely another of the more or less
definitely marked features of Pragmatism, but in some respects it is
one outstanding characteristic.
For some reason or other, or for some strange combination of reasons,
the phenomenon that we call “action”[167] (the activity of man as
an agent) and the apparently simple facts of the reality and the
intelligibility of action have long been regarded as matters of
altogether secondary or subordinate importance by the rationalism
of philosophy and by the mechanical philosophy of science. This
Rationalism and this ostensibly certain and demonstrable mechanical
philosophy of science suppose that the one problem of human thought is
simply that of the nature of truth or of the nature of reality (the
reality of the “physical” world) as if either (or each) of these things
were an entity on its own account, an absolutely final finding or
consideration. That this has really been the case so far as philosophy
is concerned is proved by the fact even of the existence of the many
characteristic deliverances and concessions of Rationalism in respect
of Pragmatism to which reference has already been made in the preceding
chapter. And that it has also been the case so far as science is
concerned is proved by the existence of the many dogmatic attempts of
many natural philosophers from Holbach to Haeckel to apply the “iron
laws” of matter and motion to the reality of everything else under
heaven,[168] and of everything in the heavens in spite of the frequent
confessions of their own colleagues with regard to the actual and the
necessary limits and limitations of science and of the scientific
outlook.
Only slowly and gradually, as it were, has the consideration come into
the very forefront of our speculative horizon that there is for man as
a thinking being _no_ rigid _separation_ between theory and practice,
between intellect and volition, between action and thought, between
fact and act, between truth and reality.[169] There is clearly volition
or aim, for example, in the search after truth. And there is certainly
purpose in the attention[170] that is involved even in the simplest
piece of perception, the selection of what interests and affects us
out of the total field of vision or experience. And it is equally
certain that there is thought in action--so long, that is to say, as
action is regarded as action and not as impulse. Again, the man who
wills the truth submits himself to an imperative just as surely as does
the man who explicitly obeys the law of duty. It is thus impossible,
as it were, even in the so-called intellectual life, to distinguish
absolutely between theoretical and practical considerations--“truth”
meaning invariably the relations obtaining in some “sphere,” or order,
of fact which we separate off for some purpose or other from the
infinite whole of reality. Equally impossible is it to distinguish
absolutely between the theoretical and the practical in the case of the
highest theoretical activity, in the case, say, of the “contemplation”
that Aristotle talks of as the most “godlike” activity of man. This
very contemplation, as our Neo-Hegelian[171] friends are always
reminding us, is an activity that is just as much a characteristic of
man, as is his power of setting his limbs in motion.
We have referred to the desire of the pragmatists to represent, and
to discover, a supposedly deeper or more comprehensive view of human
nature than that implicitly acted upon by Intellectualism--a view that
should provide, as they think, for the organic unity of our active and
our so-called reflective tendencies. This desire is surely eminently
typical of what we would like to think of as the rediscovery by
Pragmatism for philosophy, of the active, or the volitional, aspects of
the conscious life of man, and along with this important side of our
human nature, the reality also of the activities and the purposes that
are revealed in what we sometimes speak of as unconscious nature. The
world we know, it would hold, in the spirit and almost in the letter
of Bergson, lives and grows by experiment,[172] and by activities and
processes and adjustments. Pragmatism has doubtless, as we pointed out,
been prone to think of itself as the only philosophy that can bake
bread, that can speak to man in terms of the actual life of effort
and struggle that he seems called upon to live in the environment in
which he finds himself. And, as we have just been insisting, the main
ground of its hostility to Rationalism is the apparent tendency of the
latter to treat the various concepts and hypotheses that have been
devised to explain the world, and to render it intelligible, as if they
were themselves of more importance than the real persons and the real
happenings that constitute the world of our experience.[173]
If it were at all desirable to recapitulate to any extent those
phenomena connected with Pragmatism that seem to indicate its
rediscovery of the fact of action, and of the fact of its meaning
for philosophy, as its one outstanding characteristic, we may point
to such considerations as the following: (1) The fact of its having
sought to advance from the stage of a mere “instrumentalist” view
of human thought to that of an outspoken “humanism” or a socialized
utilitarianism. (2) The fact of its seeking to leave us (as the outcome
of philosophy) with all our more important “beliefs,” with a general
“working” view of the world in which such things as religion and
ideals and enthusiasm are adequately recognized. Pragmatism is really,
as we have put it, more interested in belief than in knowledge, the
former being to it the characteristic, the conquering attitude of man
to the world in which he finds himself. (3) Its main object is to
establish a dynamical view of reality, as that which is “everywhere
in the making,” as that which signifies to every person firstly that
aspect of the life of things in which he is for the time being
most vitally interested.[174] (4) In the spirit of the empirical
philosophy generally its main anxiety is to do the fullest justice
to all the aspects of our so-called human experience, looking upon
theories and systems as but points of view for the interpretation of
this experience, and of the great universal life that transcends it.
And proceeding upon the theory that a true metaphysic must become
a true “dynamic” or a true incentive to human motive, it seeks the
relationships and affiliations that have been pointed out with all the
different liberating and progressive tendencies in the history of human
thought. (5) It would “consult moral experience directly,” finding
in the world of our ordinary moral and social effort a spiritual
reality[175] that raises the individual out of and above and beyond
himself. And it bears testimony in its own more or less imperfect
manner to the autonomous element[176] in our human personality that,
in the moral life, and in such things as religious aspiration and
creative effort and social service, transcends the merely theoretical
descriptions of the world with which we are familiar in the
generalizations of science and of history.
Without attempting meanwhile to probe at all deeply into this
pragmatist glorification of “action” and its importance to philosophy,
let us think of a few of the considerations that may be urged in
support of this idea from sources outside those of the mere practical
tendencies and the affiliations of Pragmatism itself.
There is first of all the consideration that it is the fact of action
that unites or brings together what we call “desire” and what we
call “thought,” the world of our desires and emotions and the world
of our thoughts and our knowledge. This is really a consideration of
the utmost importance to us when we think of what we have allowed
ourselves to call the characteristic dualism[177] of modern times, the
discrepancy that seems to exist between the world of our desires and
the impersonal world of science--which latter world educated people
are apt to think of as the world before which everything else must
bend and break, or at least bow. Our point here is not merely that
of the humiliating truth of the wisdom of the wiseacres who used to
tell us in our youth that we will anyhow have to act in spite of all
our unanswered questions about things, but the plain statement of the
fact that (say or think what we will) it is in _conscious action_
that our desires and our thoughts _do_ come together, and that it is
there that they are both seen to be but partial expressions of the
one reality--the life that is in things and in ourselves, and that
engenders in us both emotions and thoughts, even if the latter do
sometimes seem to lie “too deep for tears.” It is with this life and
with the objects and aims and ends and realities that develop and
sustain it that all our thoughts, as well as all our desires, are
concerned. If action, therefore, could only be properly understood, if
it can somehow be seen in its universal or its cosmic significance,
there would be no discrepancy and no gap between the world of our
ideals and the world of our thoughts. We would know what we want,[178]
and we would want and desire what we know we can get--the complete
development of our personality.
Again there is the evidence that exists in the sciences of biology and
anthropology in support of the important role played in both animal and
human evolution by effort and choice and volition and experimentation.
“Already in the contractibility of protoplasm and in the activities of
typical protozoons do we find ‘activities’ that imply[179] volition
of some sort or degree, for there appears to be some selection of
food and some spontaneity of movement: changes of direction, the
taking of a circuitous course in avoidance of an obstruction, etc.,
indicate this.” Then again, “there are such things as the diversities
in secondary sexual characters (the ‘after-thoughts of reproduction’
as they are called), the endless shift of parasites, the power of
animals to alter their coloration to suit environment, and the complex
‘internal stimuli’ of the higher animals in their breeding periods
and activities, which make us see only too clearly what the so-called
struggle for life has been in the animal world.”...
Coming up to man let us think of what scientists point out as the
effects of man’s disturbing influence in nature, and then pass from
these on to the facts of anthropology in respect of the conquest
of environment by what we call invention and inheritance and free
initiative. “In placing _invention_,” says a writer of to-day in a
recent brilliant book, “at the bottom of the scale of conditions
[_i.e._ of the conditions of social development], I definitely break
with the opinion that human evolution is throughout a purely natural
process.... It is pre-eminently an _artificial construction_.”[180] Now
it requires but the reflection of a moment or two upon considerations
such as the foregoing, and upon the attested facts of history as to
the breaking up of the tyranny of habit and custom by the force of
reflection and free action and free initiative, to grasp how really
great should be the significance to philosophy of the active and the
volitional nature of man that is thus demonstrably at the root not only
of our progress, but of civilization itself.
If it be objected that while there cannot, indeed, from the point
of view of the general culture and civilization of mankind, be any
question of the importance to philosophy of the active effort and
of the _active thought_ that underlie this stupendous achievement,
the case is perhaps somewhat different when we try to think of the
pragmatist glorification of our human action from the point of view
of the (physical?) universe as a whole.[181] To this reflection it
is possible here to say but one or two things. Firstly, there is
apparently at present no warrant in science for seeking to separate
off this human life of ours from the evolution of animal life in
general.[182] Equally little is there any warrant for separating
the evolution of living matter from the evolution of what we call
inanimate matter, not to speak of the initial difficulty of accounting
for things like energy and radio-active matter, and the evolution and
the devolution that are calmly claimed by science to be involved in
the various “systems” within the universe--apart from an ordering and
intelligent mind and will. There is therefore, so far, no necessary
presumption against the idea of regarding human evolution as at least
in some sense a continuation or development of the life that seems to
pervade the universe in general. And then, secondly, there is the
familiar reflection that nearly all that we think we know about the
universe as a whole is but an interpretation of it in terms of the life
and the energy that we experience in ourselves and in terms of some of
the apparent conditions of this life and this energy. For as Bergson
reminds us, “As thinking beings we may apply the laws of our physics to
our world, and extend them to each of the worlds taken separately, but
nothing tells us that they apply to the entire universe nor even that
such affirmation has any meaning; for the universe is _not made_ but
is _being made continually_. It is growing perhaps indefinitely by the
addition of new worlds.”[183]
On the ground, then, both of science and of philosophy[184] may it
be definitely said that this human action of ours, as apparently
the highest outcome of the forces of nature, becomes only too
naturally and only too inevitably the highest object of our reflective
consideration. As Schopenhauer put it long ago, the human body is the
only object in nature that we know “on the inside.” And do or think
what we will, it is this human life of ours and this mind of ours that
have peopled the world of science and the world of philosophy with
all the categories and all the distinctions that obtain there, with
concepts like the “(Platonic) Ideas,” “form,” “matter,” “energy,”
“ether,” “atom,” “substance,” “the individual,” “the universal,” “empty
space,” “eternity,” “the Absolute,” “value,” “final end,” and so on.
There is much doubtless in this action philosophy, and much too in the
matter of the reasons that may be brought forward in its support, that
can become credible and intelligible only as we proceed. But it must
all count, it would seem, in support of the idea of the pragmatist
rediscovery, for philosophy, of the importance of our creative action
and of our creative thought. And then there are one or two additional
general considerations of which we may well think in the same connexion.
Pragmatism boasts, as we know, of being a highly democratic[185]
doctrine, of contending for the emancipation of the individual and his
interests from the tyranny of all kinds of absolutism, and all kinds
of dogmatism (whether philosophical, or scientific, or social). No
system either of thought or of practice, no supposed “world-view” of
things, no body of scientific laws or abstract truths shall, as long as
it holds the field of our attention, entirely crush out of existence
the concrete interests and the free self-development of the individual
human being.
A tendency in this direction exists, it must be admitted, in the
“determinism” both of natural science and of Hegelianism, and of
the social philosophy that has emanated from the one or from the
other. Pragmatism, on the contrary, in all matters of the supposed
determination, or the attempted limitation, of the individual by what
has been accomplished either in Nature or in human history, would
incline to what we generally speak of to-day as a “modernistic,”
or a “liberalistic,” or even a “revolutionary,” attitude. It would
reinterpret and reconstruct, in the light of the present and its needs,
not only the concepts and the methods of science and philosophy, but
also the various institutions and the various social practices of
mankind.[186]
Similarily Pragmatism would protest, as does the newer education
and the newer sociology, against any merely _doctrinaire_ (or
“intellectualistic”) conception of education and culture, substituting
in its place the “efficiency” or the “social service”[187] conception.
And even if we must admit that this more or less practical ideal of
education has been over-emphasized in our time, it is still true, as
with Goethe, that it is only the “actively-free” man, the man who can
work out in service and true accomplishment the ideal of human life,
whose production should be regarded as the aim of a sound educational
or social policy.
We shall later attempt to assign some definite reasons for the failure
of Pragmatism to make the most of all this apparently justifiable
insistence upon action and upon the creative activity of the
individual, along with all this sympathy that it seems to evince for a
progressive and a liberationist view of human policy.
Meantime, in view of all these considerations, we cannot avoid making
the reflection that it is surely something of an anomaly in philosophy
that a thinker’s “study” doubts about his actions and about some of
the main instinctive beliefs of mankind (in which he himself shares)
should have come to be regarded--as they have been by Rationalism--as
considerations of a greater importance than the actions, and the
beliefs, and the realities, of which they are the expression. Far be
it from the writer to suggest that the suspension of judgment and the
refraining from activity,[188] in the absence of adequate reason and
motive, are not, and have not been of the greatest value to mankind
in the matter of the development of the higher faculties and the
higher ideals of the mind. There may well be, however, for Pragmatism,
or for any philosophy that can work it out satisfactorily, in the
free, creative, activity of man, in the duty that lies upon us all of
carrying on our lives to the highest expression, a reason and a truth
that must be estimated at their logical worth along with the many other
reasons and truths of which we are pleased to think as the truth of
things.
Short, however, of a more genuine attempt on the part of Pragmatism
than anything it has as yet given us in this connexion to justify this
higher reason and truth that are embodied in our consciousness of
ourselves as persons, as _rational agents_, all its mere “practicalism”
and all its “instrumentalism” are but the workaday and the utilitarian
philosophy of which we have already complained in its earlier and
cruder professions.[189]
After some attention, then, to the matter of the outstanding critical
defects of Pragmatism, in its preliminary and cruder forms, we shall
again return to our topic of the relatively new subject-matter it has
been endeavouring to place before philosophy in its insistence upon the
importance of action, and upon the need of a “dynamic,” instead of an
intellectualistic and “spectator-like” theory of human personality.
APPENDIX TO CHAPTER IV
PHILOSOPHY AND THE ACTIVITY-EXPERIENCE
[In an article upon the above title in the _International Journal of
Ethics_, p. 1898, I attempted to deal with some aspects of the problem
that I have just raised in the preceding chapter. I venture to append
here some of the statements that I made then upon the importance of
action and the “activity-experience” to the philosophy of to-day. I
am inclined to regard them (although I have not looked at them until
the present moment of passing this book through the press) as a kind
of anticipation and confirmation of many of my present pages. Part
of my excuse, however, for inserting them here is a hope that these
references and suggestions may possibly be of service to the general
reader. The extracts follow as they were printed.]
I. It requires no very profound acquaintance with the trend of
the literature of general and specialized philosophy of the last
twenty-five years to detect a decidedly practical turn in the recent
speculative tendencies of philosophy and philosophers. The older
conception of philosophy or metaphysics as an attempt to state (more
or less systematically) the value of the world for thought is being
slowly modified, if not altogether disappearing, into the attempt to
explain or to grasp the significance of the world from the stand-point
of the moral and social activity of man. The philosophical student must
be to some extent conscious of the difference in respect of both tone
and subject-matter between such books as Stirling’s _Secret of Hegel_,
E. Caird’s _Critical Philosophy of Kant_ (the first editions of both
works), Green’s _Prolegomena to Ethics_, and the most recent essays
and books of Professors A. Seth[190] and James[191] and Ward[192]
and Sidgwick[193] and Baldwin,[194] and of Mr. Bosanquet[195] and
the late Mr. Nettleship,[196] and between--to turn to Germany--the
writings of Erdmann and Kuno Fischer and Zeller and F. A. Lange, and
those of Gizycki, Paulsen, Windelband, Eucken, Hartmann, Deussen,
Simmel, and--in France--between the writings of Renouvier and Pillon
and Ravaisson, the “Neo-Kantianism” of the _Critique Philosophique_
(1872–1877), and those of Fouillée, Weber (of Strassburg), Séailles,
Dunan, and others, and of general writers like de Vogüé, Desjardins,
and Brunetière, and of social philosophers like Bouglé, Tarde, Izoulet,
and so on. The change of _venue_ in these writers alone, not to speak
of the change of the interest of the educated world from such books
as Huxley’s _Hume_ and Renan’s _L’Avenir de la Science_ and Du Bois
Reymond’s _Die Sieben Welträthsel_, and Tyndall’s _Belfast Address_,
to the writings of Herbert Spencer (the Sociology and the general
essays on social evolution), Kidd, Nordau, Nietzsche, Mr. Crozier
(his important _History of Civilization_), and Demolins,[197] and the
predominance of investigations into general biology and comparative
psychology and sociology over merely logical and conceptual philosophy
seem to afford us some warrant for trying to think of what might
be called a newer or ethical idealism, an idealism of the will, an
idealism of life, in contradistinction to the older or intellectual
(epistemological, Neo-Kantian) idealism, the idealism of the intellect.
Professor A. Seth,[198] in his recent volume on _Man’s Place in the
Cosmos_, suggests that Mr. Bradley’s treatise on _Appearance and
Reality_ has closed the period of the absorption or assimilation of
Kanto-Hegelian principles by the English mind. And there is ample
evidence in contemporary philosophical literature to show that even
the very men who have, with the help of Stirling and Green and Caird
and Bradley and Wallace, “absorbed and assimilated” the principles
of critical idealism are now bent upon applying these principles to
the solution of concrete problems of art and life and conduct. Two
things alone would constitute a difference between the philosophy of
the last few years and that of the preceding generation: An attempt
(strongly[199] accentuated at the present moment) to include elements
of _feeling_ and _will_ in our final consciousness of reality, and a
tendency (inevitable since Comte and Hegel’s _Philosophy of History_)
to extend the philosophical synthesis of the merely “external,” or
physical, universe so as to make it include the world of man’s action
and the world that is now glibly called the “social organism.”[200] A
good deal of the epistemological and metaphysical philosophy of this
century has been merely cosmological, and at best psychological and
individualistic. The philosophy of the present is, necessarily, to a
large extent, sociological and collectivistic and historical. Renan
once prophesied that this would be so. And many other men perceived the
same fact and acted upon their perception of it--Goethe and Victor Hugo
and Carlyle, for example.
To be sure, any attempt to draw lines of novel and absolute separation
between writers of to-day and their immediate predecessors would be
absurd and impossible, just as would be the attempt to force men who
are still living and thinking and developing, into Procrustean beds
of system and nomenclature. The history of the philosophy of the
last half of this century constitutes a development as continuous
and as logical as the philosophy of any similar period of years
wherein men have thought persistently and truly upon the problems of
life and mind. There were in the ’sixties men like Ulrici and Lotze
(Renouvier, too, to some extent) who divined the limitations of a
merely intellectual philosophy, and who saw clearly that the only way
to effect a reconciliation between philosophy and science would be
to apply philosophy itself to the problems of the life and thought
of the time, just as we find, in 1893, Dr. Edward Caird writing, in
his _Essays on Literature and Philosophy_, that “philosophy, in face
of the increasing complexity of modern life, has a harder task laid
upon it than ever was laid upon it before. It must emerge from the
region of abstract principles and show itself able to deal with the
manifold results of empirical science, giving to each of them its
proper place and value.” Professor Campbell Fraser, while welcoming and
sympathetically referring to (in his books upon Berkeley and Locke)
the elements of positive value in English and German idealism, has
throughout his life contended for the idea (expressed with greatest
definiteness in his Gifford Lectures on _The Philosophy of Theism_)
that “in man, as a self-conscious and self-determining _agent_,” is
to be found the “best key we possess to the solution of the ultimate
problem of the universe”; while Professor Sidgwick, by virtue of his
captivating and ingenious pertinacity in confining philosophical
speculation to the lines of the traditional English empiricism,
and in keeping it free from the ensnaring subtleties of system and
methodology, has exercised a healthful and corrective influence
against the extremes alike of transcendentalism and naturalism. And
it would be rash to maintain that all the younger men in philosophy
show an intention to act upon the idea (expressed by Wundt, for
instance, in his _Ethik_) that a metaphysic should build upon the
facts of the moral life of man; although we find a “Neo-Hegelian” like
Professor Mackenzie[201] saying that “even the wealth of our inner
life depends rather on the width of our objective interests than on
the intensity of our self-contemplation”; and an expounder of the
ethics of dialectic evolution like Professor Muirhead quoting[202] with
approval the thought expressed by George Eliot in the words, “The great
world-struggle of developing thought is continually foreshadowed in the
struggle of the affections seeking a justification for love and hope”;
and a careful psychologist like Mr. Stout[203] deliberately penning
the words,[204] “Our existence as conscious beings is essentially an
activity, and activity is a process which, by its very nature, is
directed towards an end, and can neither exist nor be conceived apart
from this end.” There are, doubtless, many philosophers of to-day who
are convinced that philosophy is purely an intellectual matter, and
can never be anything else than an attempt to analyze the world for
_thought_--an attempt to state its value in the terms of thought.
Against all these and many similar considerations it would be idle to
set up a hard and fast codification or characterization of the work of
the philosophy or philosophers of to-day. Still, the world will accord
the name of philosopher to any man--Renan, for example, or Spencer or
Huxley or Nordau or Nietzsche--who comes before it with views upon the
universe and humanity that may, for any conceivable reason, be regarded
as fundamental. And on this showing of things, as well as from many
indications in the work of those who are philosophers by profession,
it may be said that the predominating note of the newer philosophy is
its openness to the facts of the volitional and emotional and moral
and social aspects of man’s life, as things that take us further
along the path of truth than the mere categories of thought and their
manipulation by metaphysic and epistemology.
II. The Newer Idealism does not dream of questioning the positive
work of the Kantian and Neo-Kantian and Neo-Hegelian idealists. It
knows only too well that even scientific men like Helmholtz and
Du Bois Reymond, that “positive” philosophers like Riehl and Laas
and Feuerbach and others have, through the influence of the Kantian
philosophy, learned and accepted the fact of there being “ideal” or
psychical or “mind-supplied” factors in so-called external reality.
There are among the educated men of to-day very few Dr. Johnsons who
ridicule the psycho-physical, or the metaphysical, analysis of external
reality, who believe in a crass and crude and self-sufficient “matter”
utterly devoid of psychical attributes or characteristics. True,
Herbert Spencer has written words to the effect that “If the Idealist
(Berkeley) is right, then the doctrine of Evolution is a dream”; but
then everything in Spencer’s philosophy about an “actuality lying
behind appearances” and about our being compelled “to regard every
phenomenon as a manifestation of some Power by which we are acted
upon,” is against the possibility of our believing that, according to
that philosophy, an unconscious and non-spiritual “matter” could evolve
itself into conscious life and moral experience. The philosophers
of to-day have indeed rejoiced to see Kant’s lesson popularized by
such various phases and movements of human thought as psychophysical
research, art and æsthetic theory, the interest in Buddhism (with its
idealistic theory of the knowledge of the senses), and the speculative
biology of Weismann and others. That people generally should see that
matter is, for many reasons, something more than mere matter, is to
the student of Kant a piece of fulfilled prophecy. And by a plea for
a return to reality and life and sociability from conceptualism and
criticism and speculative individualism no philosophical scholar for
one moment contemplates, as even conceivable, an overlooking of the
idealistic interpretation of the data of the senses supplied by Locke
and Berkeley and Hume, or of the idealistic interpretation of the data
of science and understanding supplied by Kant’s “Copernican” discovery.
Any real view of the universe must now presuppose the melting down
of crass external reality into the phenomena of sense and experience
and the transformation of inorganic and organic nature into so many
_planes_ or _grades_ of being expressive of the different forms
(gravitation, cohesion, vital force, psychic force) in which cosmic
energy manifests itself.
Equally little does the Newer Idealism question the legitimacy or the
actual positive service of the “dialectic” of Hegel (as Archimedean
a leverage to humanity as was the “concept” of Socrates or the
“apperception” of Kant) that has shown the world to be a _system_
in which everything is related to everything else, and shown, too,
that all ways of looking at reality that stop short of the truths
of personality and moral relationship are untrue and inadequate. To
use the words of Professor Howison, of California, in the preface to
the first edition of Professor Watson’s[205] latest volume (a book
that connects the idealism of Glasgow and Oxford with the convictions
of the youth of the “Pacific Coast”), the “_dominant tone_” of the
militant and representative philosophy of to-day, is “affirmative and
idealistic. The decided majority ... are animated by the conviction
that human thought is able to solve the riddle of life positively; to
solve it in accord with the ideal hopes and interests of human nature.”
CHAPTER V
CRITICAL
Enough has perhaps now been said by way of an indication of some of the
main characteristics of Pragmatism, and of the matter of its relations
to ordinary and to philosophical thinking. Its complexity and some of
its confusions and some of its difficulties have also been referred to.
As for the affiliations and the associations of Pragmatism, it would
seem that it rests not so much upon its own mere instrumentalism and
practicalism as upon some of the many broader and deeper tendencies in
ancient and modern thought that have aimed at a dynamic, instead of a
static, interpretation of reality.
We have suggested, too, that there are evidently things in traditional
philosophy and in Rationalism of which it fails to take cognizance,
although it has evidently many things to give to Rationalism in the way
of a constructive philosophy of human life.
Now it would be easily possible to continue our study of Pragmatism
along some or all of those different lines and points of view. In
the matter, for example, of the affiliations and associations
of Pragmatism, we could show that, in addition to such things
as the “nominalism” and the utilitarianism, and the positivism,
and the “voluntarism” and the philosophy of hypotheses, and the
“anti-intellectualism” already referred to, Pragmatism has an affinity
with things as far apart and as different as the Scottish Philosophy
of Common-sense, the sociological philosophy of Comte and his
followers, the philosophy of Fichte with its great idea of the world
as the “sensualized sphere” of our duty, the “experience” philosophy
of Bacon and of the entire modern era, and so on. There is even a
“romantic” element in Pragmatism, and it has, in fact, been called
“romantic utilitarianism.”[206] We can understand this if we think of
M. Berthelot’s[207] association of it not only with Poincaré, but with
Nietzsche, or of Dr. Schiller’s famous declaration that the genius of a
man’s logical method should be loved and reverenced by him as is “his
bride.”
And there is always in it, to be sure, the important element of
sympathy with the religious instincts of mankind. And this is the case,
too, whether these instincts are contemplated in some of the forms to
which reference has already been made, or in the form, say, expressed
by such a typical modern thinker as the late Henry Sidgwick, in his
conviction that “Humanity will not, and cannot, acquiesce in a Godless
world.”[208]
Then again we might take up the point of the relations of Pragmatism
to doctrines new and old in the history of philosophy, to the main
points of departure of different schools of thought, or to fundamental
and important positions in many of the great philosophers. The writer
finds that he has noticed in this connexion the doctrines of Stoicism
and Epicureanism,[209] the “probability” philosophy of Locke[210] and
Butler, and Pascal, the ethics and the natural theology of Cicero,
the “voluntarism” of Schopenhauer,[211] Aristotle’s philosophy of the
Practical Reason,[212] Kant’s philosophy of the same, the religious
philosophy of theologians like Tertullian, Augustine, Duns Scotus, and
so on--to take only a few instances.[213] The view of man and his
nature represented by all these names is, in the main, an essentially
practical, a concrete, and a moral view as opposed to an abstract and
a rationalistic view. And of course even to Plato knowledge was only
an element in the total spiritual philosophy of man, while his master,
Socrates, never really seemed to make any separation between moral and
intellectual inquiries.
And as for positions in the great philosophers between which and
some of the tendencies of Pragmatism there is more than a merely
superficial agreement, we might instance, for example, the tendency of
Hume[214] to reduce many of the leading categories of our thought to
mere habits of mind, to be explained on an instinctive rather than a
rationalistic basis; or Comte’s idea of the error of separating reason
from instinct;[215] or the idea of de Maistre and Bain, and many others
that “will” is implied in the notion of “exteriority”; or the idea of
Descartes[216] that the senses teach us not so much “what is in reality
in things,” as “what is beneficial[217] or hurtful to the composite
whole of mind and body”; or the declaration of Kant that the chief end
of metaphysic is God and immortality; or the idea of Spencer[218] that
the belief in the unqualified supremacy of reason is a superstition of
philosophers; or the idea of Plato in the Sophist[219] that reality is
the capacity for acting or of being acted upon; and so on.
As for such further confirmation of pragmatist teaching as is to be
found in typical modern thinking and scholars, thought of almost at
random, it would be easy to quote in this connexion from writers as
diverse as Höffding, Fouillée, Simmel, Wundt, Mach, Huxley, Hobhouse,
and many others. It might be called a typically pragmatist idea,
for example, on the part of Mr. L. T. Hobhouse to hold that “The
higher conceptions by which idealism has so firmly held are not to be
‘scientifically’ treated in the sense of being explained away. What
is genuinely higher we have ... good reason to think must also be
truest,” and we “cannot permanently acquiesce in a way of thinking what
would resolve it into what is lowest.”[220] These last words represent
almost a commonplace of the thought of the day. It is held, for
example, by men as different and as far apart in their work, and yet as
typical of phases of our modern life, as Robert Browning and Sir Oliver
Lodge. The close dependence again of the doctrines of any science upon
the social life and the prevalent thought of the generation is also
essentially a pragmatist idea. Its truth is recognized and insisted
upon in the most explicit manner in the recent serviceable manifesto of
Professors Geddes and Thomson upon “Evolution,”[221] and it obviously
affects their whole philosophy of life and mind. It figures too
quite prominently in the valuable short _Introduction to Science_ by
Professor Thomson in the same series of manuals.
Another typical book of to-day, again (that of Professor Duncan on the
_New Knowledge_ of the new physical science), definitely gives up, for
example, the “correspondence”[222] notion of truth, holding that it is
meaningless to think of reality as something outside our thought and
our experience of which our ideas might be a possible duplicate. This
again we readily recognize as an essentially pragmatist contention.
So also is the same writer’s rejection of the notion of “absolute
truth,”[223] and his confession of the “faith” that is always involved
in the thought of completeness or system in our scientific knowledge.
“We believe purely as an act of faith and not at all of logic,” he
says, “that the universe is essentially determinable thousands of years
hence, into some one system which will account for everything and which
will be the truth.”[224]
Nor would it be at all difficult to find confirmation for the
pragmatist philosophy of ideas and thoughts in what we may well think
of as the general reflective literature of our time, outside the
sphere, as it were, of strictly rational or academic philosophy--in
writers like F. D. Maurice, W. Pater, A. W. Benn (who otherwise
depreciates what he calls “_ophelism_”), J. H. Newman, Karl Pearson,
Carlyle, and others.[225] Take the following, for example, quoted with
approval from Herschel by Karl Pearson: “The grand and indeed the only
character of truth is its capability of enduring the test of universal
experience, and coming unchanged out of every possible form of fair
discussion.”[226] The idea again, for example, recently expressed in
a public article by such a widely read and cleverly perverse writer
as Mr. Bernard Shaw,[227] that “the will that moves us is dogmatic:
our brain is only the very imperfect instrument by which we devise
practical means for satisfying the will,” might only too naturally
be associated with the pragmatist-like anti-intellectualism[228] of
Bergson, or, for that part of it, with the deeper “voluntarism” of
Schopenhauer. The following quotation taken from Mr. Pater reveals
how great may be correspondence between the independent findings of
a finely sensitive mind like his, and the positions to which the
pragmatists are inclined in respect of the psychology of religious
belief. “The supposed facts on which Christianity rests, utterly
incapable as they have become of any ordinary test, seem to me matter
of very much the same sort of assent as we give to any assumption in
the strict and ultimate sense, moral. The question whether these facts
were real will, I think, always continue to be what I should call one
of those _natural_ questions of the human mind.”[229] Readers of
Carlyle will easily recognize what we might call a more generalized
statement of this same truth of Pater’s in the often-quoted words from
_Heroes and Hero-Worship_:[230] “By religion I do not mean the church
creed which a man professes, the articles of faith which.... But the
thing a man does practically believe (and this often enough _without_
asserting it even to himself, much less to others); the thing a man
does practically lay to heart and know for certain concerning his
vital relations to the mysterious universe, and his duty and destiny
there.” It has long seemed to the writer that a similar thing to this
might be written (and James has certainly written it) about a man’s
“philosophy” as necessarily inclusive of his working beliefs as well
as of his mere reasoned opinions, although it is the latter that are
generally (by what right?) taken to be properly the subject-matter of
philosophy.[231] And it is this phase of the pragmatist philosophy that
could, I am inclined to think, be most readily illustrated from the
opinions of various living and dead writers upon the general working
philosophy of human nature as we find this revealed in human history.
We are told, for example, by Mr. Hobhouse, in his monumental work upon
_Morals in Evolution_, that in “Taoism the supreme principle of things
may be left undefined as something that we experience in ourselves
if we throw ourselves upon it, but which we know rather by following
or living it than by any process of ratiocination.”[232] And “this
mystical interpretation,” he adds, “is not confined to Taoism, but in
one form or another lies near to hand to all spiritual religions, and
expresses one mode of religious consciousness, its aspiration to reach
the heart of things and the confidence that it has done so, and found
rest there.”
We are reminded, of course, by all such considerations of the
philosophy of Bergson, and of its brilliant attempt to make a synthesis
of intuition or instinct with reflection or thought, and indeed it may
well be that the past difficulties of philosophy with intuition and
instinct are due to the fact of its error in unduly separating the
intellect from the “will to live,” and from the “creative” evolution
that have been such integral factors in the evolution of the life of
humanity.
This entire matter, however, of the comparison of pragmatist doctrines
to typical tendencies in the thought of the past and the present must
be treated by us as subordinate to our main purpose, that of the
estimation of the place of Pragmatism in the constructive thought of
the present time. With a view to this it will be necessary to revert to
the criticism of Pragmatism.
The criticism that has already been made is that in the main
Pragmatism is unsystematic and complex and confusing, that it has no
adequate theory of “reality,” and no unified theory of philosophy, that
it has no satisfactory criterion of the “consequences” by which it
proposes to test truth, and that it has not worked out its philosophy
of the contribution of the individual with his “activity” and his
“purposes” to “reality” generally, and that it is in danger of being a
failure in the realm of ethics.[233]
To all this we shall now seek to add a few words more upon (1)
the pragmatist criterion of truth, (2) the weakness of Pragmatism
in the realms of logic and theory of knowledge, (3) its failure
to give consistent account of the nature of reality, and (4) its
unsatisfactoriness in the realm of ethics.
(1) We have already expressed our agreement with the finding of
Professor Pratt[234] that the pragmatist theory of truth amounts to
no more than the harmless doctrine that the meaning of any conception
expresses itself in the past, present, or future conduct or experiences
of actual, or possible, sentient creatures. Taken literally, however,
the doctrine that truth should be tested by consequences is not only
harmless but also useless, seeing that Omniscience alone could bring
together in thought or in imagination all the consequences of an
assertion. Again, it is literally _false_ for the reason that the
proof of truth is not in the first instance any kind of “consequences,”
not even the “verification” of which pragmatists are so fond. If
the truth of which we may happen to be thinking is truth of “fact,”
its proof lies in its correspondence (despite the difficulties[235]
of the idea) with the results of observation or perception.[236]
And if it be inferential truth, its proof is that of its deduction
from previously established truths, or facts, upon a certain plane
of knowledge or experience. In short, Pragmatists forget altogether
the logical doctrine of the existence (in the world of our human
experience, of course) of different established planes of reality, or
planes of ascertained knowledge in which all propositions that are
not nonsensical or trivial, are, from their very inception, regarded
as necessarily true or false. The existence of these various planes
of experience or of thought is in fact implied in the pragmatist
doctrine of the fundamental character of belief.[237] According to
this perfectly correct doctrine, the objectivity of truth (_i.e._
its reality or non-reality in the world of fact or in the world of
rational discourse) is the essential thing about it, while the idea of
its “consequences” is not. A truth is a proposition whose validity has
already been established by evidence or by demonstration. It has then
afterwards the immediate “utility” of expressing in an intelligible
and convenient manner the fact of certain connexions among things or
events. And its ultimate utility to mankind is also at the same time
assured, humanity being by its very nature a society of persons who
must act, and who act, upon what they believe to be the truth or the
reality of things. But a proposition is by no means true because it
is useful. Constantine believed eminently in the concord-producing
utility of certain confessions enunciated at the Council of Nice, but
his belief in this does not prove their truth or reality outside the
convictions of the faithful. Nor does the pragmatist or utilitarian
character of certain portions of the writings of the Old Testament or
of the Koran prove the matter of their literal and factual truth in the
ordinary sense of these terms. As Hume said, “When any opinion leads
us into absurdities ’tis certainly false, but ’tis not certain that an
opinion is false because it has dangerous consequences.”
And then, apart from this conspicuous absence of logic in the views
of pragmatists upon “truth,” the expression of their doctrine is so
confusing that it is almost impossible to extract any consistent
meaning out of it. They are continually confounding conceptions and
ideas and propositions, forgetful of the fact that truth resides not
in concepts and ideas but only in propositions. While it may be indeed
true, as against Rationalism, that all human conceptions whatsoever
[and it is only in connexion with “conceptions” that Pragmatism is
defined even in such an official place as Baldwin’s _Dictionary of
Philosophy_[238]] have, and must have, reference to actual or possible
human experience or consequences, it is by no means true that the test
of a proposition is anything other than the evidence of which we have
already spoken.
Then the pragmatists have never adequately defined terms that are so
essential to their purposes as “practical,” “truth,” “fact,” “reality,”
“consequences,” and they confound, too, “theories” with “truths” and
“concepts” just as they confound concepts and propositions.
(2) That logic and the theory of proof is thus one of the weak spots of
Pragmatism has perhaps then been sufficiently indicated. We have seen,
in fact, the readiness of Pragmatism to confess its inability[239] to
prove its own philosophy--that is, to prove it in the ordinary sense of
the term.[240] That it should have made this confession is, of course,
only in keeping with the fact that its interest in logic is confined to
such subordinate topics as the framing and verification of hypotheses,
the development of concepts and judgments in the “thought-process,” and
so on. Of complete proof, as involving both deduction and induction,
it takes but the scantiest recognition. And it has made almost no
effort to connect its discoveries in “genetic logic” and in the theory
of hypotheses with the traditional body of logical doctrine.[241] Nor,
as may perhaps be inferred from the preceding paragraph, has it made
any serious attempt to consider the question of the discovery of new
truth in relation to the more or less perfectly formulated systems and
schemes of truth already in the possession of mankind.
The case is similar in regard to the “theory of knowledge” of the
pragmatists. While they have made many important suggestions regarding
the relation of all the main categories and principles of our human
thought to the theoretical and practical needs of mankind, there is in
their teachings little that is satisfactory and explicit in the matter
of the systematization of first principles,[242] and little too that is
satisfactory in respect of the relation of knowledge to reality. They
sometimes admit (with James) the importance of general points of view
like the “causal,” the “temporal,” “end,” and “purpose,” and so on. At
other times they confess with Schiller that questions about ultimate
truth and ultimate reality cannot be allowed to weigh upon our
spirits, seeing that “actual knowing” always starts from the “existing
situation.”
Now of course actual knowing certainly does start from the particular
case of the existing situation, but, as all thinkers from Aristotle to
Hume have seen, it is by no means explained by this existing situation.
In real knowledge this is always made intelligible by references to
points of view and to experiences that altogether transcend it. The
true theory of knowledge, in short, involves the familiar Kantian
distinction between the “origin” and the “validity” of knowledge--a
thing that the pragmatists seem continually and deliberately to ignore.
Schiller, to be sure, reminds us with justice that we must endeavour
to “connect,” rather than invariably “contrast,” the two terms of
this distinction. But this again is by no means what the pragmatists
themselves have done. They fail, in fact, to connect their hints about
the practical or experimental origin of most of our points of view
about reality with the problem of the validity of first principles
generally.
There is a suggestion here and there in their writings that, as
Schiller[243] puts it, there can be no coherent system of postulates
except as rooted in personality, and that there are postulates at every
stage of our development. What this statement means is that there are
“points of view” about reality that are incidental to the stage of our
natural life (as beings among other beings), others to the stage of
conscious sensations and feelings, still others to that of our desires
and thoughts, to our aesthetic appreciation, to our moral life, and so
on. But, as I have already said, there is little attempt on the part
of the pragmatists to distinguish these different stages or planes of
experience adequately from one another.
(3) References have already been made to the failures of our
Anglo-American pragmatists to attain to any intelligible and consistent
kind of reality, whether they conceive of this latter as the sum-total
of the efforts of aspiring and achieving human beings, or with Schiller
as an “original, plastic sub-stratum,” or as the reality (whatever it
is) that is gradually being brought into being by the creative efforts
of ourselves and of beings higher or lower than ourselves in the scale
of existence. Their deepest thought in the matter seems to be that
the universe (our universe?) is essentially “incomplete,” and that
the truth of God, as James puts it, “has to run the gauntlet of other
truths.” One student of this topic, Professor Leighton, has arrived
at the conclusion that pragmatism is essentially “acosmistic,”[244]
meaning, no doubt, and with good reason, that Pragmatism has no place
of any kind for objective order or system. Now it is just this palpable
lack of an “objective,” or rational, order that renders the whole
pragmatist philosophy liable to the charges of (1) “subjectivism,”
and (2) irrationality. There are in it, as we have tried to point
out, abundant hints of what reality must be construed to be on the
principles of any workable or credible philosophy, namely something
that stimulates both our thought and our endeavour. And there is in
it the great truth that in action we are not only in contact with
reality as such, but with a reality, moreover, that transcends the
imperfect reality of our lives as finite individuals and the imperfect
character of our limited effort and struggle. But beyond the vague
hints that our efforts must somehow count in the final tale of reality,
and that what the world of experience seems to be, it must somehow be
conceived ultimately to be, there is no standing-ground in the entire
pragmatist philosophy for want of what, in plain English, must be
termed an intelligible theory of reality. “You see,” says James, “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 take them at that valuation. They can stand the
world, their temper being well adapted to its insecurity.”[245]
The present writer, some years ago, in an article in _Mind_,[246]
ventured to point out the absurdity of expecting the public to believe
in a philosophy which sometimes speaks as if we could now, to-day, by
our efforts begin to make the world something different from what it
is or what it has been. “As far as the past facts go,” so James put it
in 1899, “there is indeed _no difference_. These facts are _bagged_
(is not the phraseology too recklessly sporting?), are captured, and
the good that’s in them is gained, be the atoms, be the God their
cause.” And again, “Theism and materialism, so indifferent when taken
retrospectively [?], point, when we take them prospectively, to wholly
different, practical consequences, to opposite outlooks of experience.”
And again, “But I say that such an alternation of feelings, reasonable
enough in a consciousness that is _prospective_, as ours now is, and
whose world is partly yet to come, _would be absolutely senseless_
(!) and irrational in a purely retrospective consciousness summing up
a world _already past_.” Now on what theory of things is it that the
future of the world and our future may be affected by ideal elements
and factors (God, Freedom, Recompense, Justice) without having been so
affected or determined in the past?[247]
(4) The unsatisfactoriness of Pragmatism in the realm of ethics.
Crucial and hopeless as is the failure of Pragmatism in the realm of
ethics, a word or two had better be said of the right of the critic to
judge of it in this connexion. In the first place, the thinking public
has already expressed its distrust of a doctrine that scruples not to
avow its affinity with utilitarianism, with the idea of testing truth
and value by mere consequences and by the idea of the useful. “The word
‘expedient,’” wrote a correspondent to Professor James, “has no other
meaning than that of self-interest. The pursuit of this has ended by
landing a number of officers of national banks in penitentiaries. A
philosophy that leads to such results must be unsound.”
Then again, Professor Dewey (now doubtless the foremost living
pragmatist) is the joint author of a book upon ethics, the most
prominent feature of which is the application of pragmatist-like
methods and principles to moral philosophy. This book sums up, too, a
great many previous illuminating discussions of his own upon ethical
and educational problems, for all of which, and for its general
application of the principles of Humanism to the realm of morals he has
deservedly won the praise of Professor James himself. So we have thus
the warrant both of the public and of Dewey and James for seeking to
judge Pragmatism from the point of view of moral philosophy.
Another justification for seeking to judge of Pragmatism from the point
of view of moral philosophy is that the whole weight of its “humanism”
and of its “valuation” philosophy must inevitably fall upon its view
of the moral judgment. Dr. Schiller, we have seen, is quite explicit
in his opinion that for Humanism the roots of metaphysics “lie, and
must lie,” in ethics. And this is all the more the case, as it were,
on account of the proclamation[248] by Pragmatism of the inability of
Intellectualism to understand morality, and also on account of its
recurring contention in respect of the merely hypothetical character of
all intellectual truth.
Now, unfortunately for Pragmatism, the one thing that the otherwise
illuminating book of Dewey and Tufts almost completely fails to do, as
the writer has already sought to indicate, is to _provide a theory of
the ordinary distinction between right and wrong_.[249] The only theme
that is really successfully pursued in this typically American book is
the “constant discovery, formation, and re-formation of the ‘self’ in
the ‘ends’ which an individual is called upon to sustain and develop in
virtue of his membership of a ‘social whole.’” But this is obviously a
study in “genetic psychology,” or in the psychology of ethics, but by
no means a study in the theory of ethics. “The controlling principle,”
it characteristically tells us, “of the deliberation which renders
possible the formation of a voluntary or socialized self out of our
original instinctive impulses is the love of the objects which make
this transformation possible.” But what is it, we wish to know, that
distinguished the objects that make this transformation possible from
the objects that do not do so? The only answer that we can see in the
book is that anything is “moral” which makes possible a “transition
from individualism to efficient social personality”---obviously again
a purely sociological point of view, leaving the question of the
standard of efficiency quite open. The whole tendency, in short, of
the pragmatist treatment of ethical principles is to the effect that
standards and theories of conduct are valuable only in so far as they
are, to a certain extent, “fruitful” in giving us a certain “surveying
power” in the perplexities and uncertainties of “direct personal
behaviour.” They are all, in other words, merely relative or useful,
and none of them is absolute and authoritative. It is this last thing,
however, that is the real desideratum of ethical theory. And so far
as practice is concerned, all that this Pragmatism or “Relativism” in
morals inevitably leads to is the conclusion that whatever brings about
a change, or a result, or a “new formation,” or a new “development”
of the moral situation, is necessarily moral, that “growth” and
“liberation” and “fruitfulness,” and “experimentation” are everything,
and moral scruples and conscience simply nothing. In the celebrated
phrase of Nietzsche, “Everything is permissible and nothing is true or
binding.”
Is not, then, this would-be ethical phase of Pragmatism just too
modernistic, too merely practical, too merely illuminative and
enlightening? And would it not be better for the youth of America (for
Dewey’s book is in the _American Science Series_) and other countries
to learn that _not_ everything “practical” and “formative” and
“liberative” and “socializing” is _moral_ in the strict sense of the
term?[250] In saying this I am, of course, giving but a very imperfect
idea of the contents of a book which is, in many respects, both
epoch-marking and epoch-making. It is, however, unfortunately, in some
respects, only too much in touch with “present facts and tendencies,”
with the regrettable tendency of the hour, for example, to justify as
right any conduct that momentarily “improves the situation,” or that
“liberates the activities” of the parties concerned in it. It is not
enough, in other words (and this is all, I am inclined to think, that
Pragmatism can do in morals), to set up a somewhat suggestive picture
of the “life of the moral man in our present transitional” and would-be
“constructive” age. A moral man does not merely, in common parlance,
“keep up with the procession,” going in for its endless “formations”
and “re-formations.” He seeks to “lead” it, and this _leading_ of men,
this setting up of a standard of the legitimacy or of the illegitimacy
of certain social experiments is just what Pragmatism cannot do in
morals.
It is otherwise, doubtless, with a true humanism, or with the humanism
that Pragmatism is endeavouring to become.
CHAPTER VI
PRAGMATISM AS HUMANISM
In spite of the objections that have been brought in the preceding
chapters against Pragmatism as Instrumentalism and Practicalism, the
great thing about Pragmatism as the Humanism that it is tending to
become is the position that it virtually occupies in respect of the
ethical and the personal factors that enter into all our notions about
final truth. To Pragmatism the importance of these factors in this
connexion is apparent from the outset, it being to it the merest truism
that by final truth we cannot mean “truth” existing on its own account,
but rather the truth of the world as inclusive of man and his purposes.
For so much it stands by its very letter as well as by its spirit.
And if we can find any confirmation for this attitude in some of the
concessions of the rationalists that have been previously mentioned, so
much the better, as it were, for Pragmatism.
Now it might well seem as if Pragmatism by the denial of an absolute
or impersonal truth is so far simply another version of modern
agnosticism, or of the older doctrine of the “relativity” of human
knowledge. There is a great difference, however, between these two
things and Pragmatism. A mere agnostical, or relativity, philosophy
generally carries with it the belief that the inmost reality of things
is both unknowable and out of all relation alike to human purpose
and to human knowledge. Pragmatism, on the contrary, would like to
maintain---if it could do so logically---that in human volition,
we do know something about the inward meaning of things, that the
“developmental” view of things is, when properly interpreted, the real
view, that reality is at least what it comes to be in our “purposes”
and in our ideals, and not something different from this.
The main reason, however, of the inability of Pragmatism to do what it
would like to do in this connexion is what we have already complained
of as its failure either to recognize, or to use, the help that could
be afforded to it by (1) Idealism, and by (2) the “normative”[251] view
of ethical science.
In respect of the first point, we have already suggested, for example,
that Pragmatism is inclined in various ways to make much of its
“radical empiricism,” its contention that reality must, to begin with,
be construed to be what it seems to be in our actual dealings with
it and in our actual experience of it.[252] To the biologist, as we
put it in our fourth chapter, reality is life; to the physicist it
is energy; to the theologian it is the unfolding of the dealings of
God with His creatures; to the sociologist it is the sphere of the
evolution of the social life of humanity; to the lover of truth it
is a “partly intelligible system.” The only rational basis, however,
for all this constructive interpretation of reality is the familiar
idealist position of the necessary implication of the “subject” in the
“object,” the fact that “things” or “existences” are invariably thought
of as the elements or component parts in some working system or sphere
of reality that is contemplated by some being or beings in reference
to some purpose or end. On its so-called lowest plane, indeed, reality
is conceived as the play of all the particles of matter, or of all the
elemental forces of nature, upon each other. And on this construction
of things the susceptibility of everything to the influence of
everything else is no less certainly assumed than in the case of the
world of life itself. But, as the idealist realizes in a moment, there
is no possibility of separating, either in thought or experimentally,
this supposed physical world from the so-called experiences and
relations and laws through which it is interpreted and described,
even as a world of objects or of forces. This is what Parmenides saw
ages ago when he said that “thought” and “being” are the same thing,
that “being” belongs to “thought,” that “being” is the true object of
thought, and that being is the “rational” and the “thinkable” and not
something outside thought. It is what a scientist, an expounder of
science, like Professor J. A. Thompson means and partly states when he
says, speaking of the work of many of his fellow-scientists of the day,
“The matter of physical science is an abstraction, whereas the matter
of our direct experience is in certain conditions the physical basis of
life and the home of the soul.”[253]
To the objector who again retorts that this line of reflection seems to
rest upon a very large assumption as to the nature of the apparently
illimitable physical universe, the idealist can but reply, firstly,
that we know nothing of the so-called natural world save through the
so-called spiritual or psychical world,[254] and secondly, that even
the most complete description of the world from the point of view
of science would, of course, still leave the world of our mental
experiences entirely unexplained. It is surely, therefore, so far, much
more logical to use this last world as at least the partial explanation
of the former rather than _vice versa_.
And as for the “normative” view of ethics and the help it affords to
Pragmatism in its contention in respect of final truth, it may be said,
to begin with, that it is in the ethical life that what we call the
truth of things becomes the basis of an ideal of personal achievement.
It is not merely of man’s well-known transformation and utilization of
the forces of nature that we are at present thinking, but of the fact
that in the moral life man “superposes,” as has been said, an order
of his own upon the so-called natural order of things, transforming
it into a spiritual order. This superposition, if we will, this
transformation, is revealed unmistakably in the history of the facts of
conduct.
In the recent elaborate researches in sociological ethics of Hobhouse
and Westermarck[255] we read, for example, of facts like the gradual
“blunting of the edges of barbarian ideas,” and the recognition of the
“principal moral obligations” in the early oriental civilizations,
the existence of the “doctrine of forgiveness,” and of “disinterested
retributive kindly emotion,” the acceptance and redistribution
by Confucius of the traditional standards of Chinese ethics, the
“transformation” by the Hebrew prophets of the “law of a barbarous
people into the spiritual worship of one God,” of a God of “social
justice,” of “mercy,” and finally of “love.” Both these writers, in
view of such facts and of other facts of a kindred nature, arrive at
the conclusion that the supreme authority assigned to the moral law
is not altogether an illusion, that there is after all the “_great
permanent fact of the moral consciousness persisting through all stages
of development_, that whether we believe or disbelieve in God, or
religion, or nature, or what not, there remain for all of us certain
things to do which affect us with a greater or less degree of mental
discomfort.”
Now as we think of it, there is something that Pragmatism fails to see
in respect of this undoubted transformation of the merely physical
basis of our life that takes place, or that has taken place, in the
moral life of humanity. While firmly holding in its moral philosophy
(we can see this in the typical work of Dewey and Tufts[256]) to its
far-reaching principle that our entire intellectual life has been
worked out in the closest kind of relation to our practical needs,
Pragmatism has nevertheless failed to see that in the highest reaches
of our active life the controlling ideas (“justice,” “humanity,”
“courage,” and so on) have a value independently of any consequences
other than those of their realization in the purposes and in the
dispositions of men. Or, more definitely, it is just because moral
ideas, like any ideas, cannot fail to work themselves out into our
actions and into our very dispositions and character, that it becomes
of the utmost importance to conceive of the truth they embody as having
a value above all consequences and above all ordinary utility. If
sought ever and always for its own sake, the highest kind of truth and
insight, the truth that we apprehend in our highest intuitions and in
our highest efforts, will inevitably tend to the creation of a realm
of “value,” a realm of personal worth and activity that we cannot but
regard as the highest reality,[257] or the highest plane of experience
of which we are conscious. In this thought, then, in the thought of the
reality of the life and work of human beings who have given all for
truth and goodness and love, there is surely at least a partial clue to
the value of the great idea after which Pragmatism is blindly groping
in its contention of the importance even to metaphysics of the notion
of our human, “purposive” activity.
Indeed, when we think of the matter carefully it is doubtful whether
the human mind would ever even have attained to the notion of ideal
truth, with the correlative thought of the shortcomings or the limits
of our ordinary knowledge, if it had not been for the moral life and
the serious problem it sets before us as men--that of the complete
satisfaction or the complete assertion of our human personality. We
seek truth in the first instance because we wish to act upon certainty
or upon adequate certainty, and because we feel that we must be
determined by what appeals to our own convictions and motives, by
what has become part of our own life and consciousness. It is only
in fact because we will it, and because we want it, that the “ideal”
exists--the ideal of anything, more certain knowledge about something,
for example, or gratified curiosity, or satisfied desire, and so on.
In every case, say, of the pursuit of an ideal we desire something or
some state of things that does not yet exist. The actual, if indeed
(which is doubtful) we can think of the actual merely as such, does
not engender the notion of the ideal, although there is possibly a
suggestion of the “ideal” in the “meaning” that we cannot, even in
sense perception,[258] attach to the actual.
Even science, as we call it, is very far from being a mere description
of the actual, it is an ideal “construction” or “interpretation” of
the same in the interest, not of mere utility, but of the wonder
and the curiosity and the intellectual and aesthetical satisfaction
of our entire personality, of our disinterested love of the highest
truth.[259]
A striking example of the part played by moral and personal factors
in the evolution of truth may easily be found, as has already been
suggested, in some of the circumstances connected with the evolution of
the Platonic philosophy in the mind of its creator. Plato’s constant
use of the dialogue form of exposition is of itself an expression of
the fact that philosophy was always to him a living and a personal
thing, the outcome of an intellectual emotion of the soul in its
efforts after true knowledge and spiritual perfection. It speaks also
of Plato’s essentially social conception of philosophy, as a creation
arising out of the contact of mind with mind, in the search after
wisdom and virtue and justice. And there is little doubt that his own
discontent with the social conditions of his time and with the false
wisdom of the sophists was a powerful impulse in his mind in the
development of that body of intellectual and ethical truth for all time
that is to be found in his works. The determining consideration, again,
in the arguments for immortality in the _Phaedo_ is not so much the
imperfect physical and theoretical philosophy on which they are partly
made to repose as the tremendous conviction of Plato of the supreme
importance of right conduct, of his belief in the principle of the
“best.”
Plato has a way, too, of talking of truth as a kind of “addition”[260]
to being and science, as a “being” that “shares” somehow in the “idea
of the Good”--a tendency that, despite the imperfect hold of the Greek
mind upon the fact and the conception of personality, we may also look
upon as a confirmation of the pragmatist notion of the necessity of
ethical and personal factors in a complete theory of truth.
A still more important instance of the importance of moral and
practical factors to a final philosophy of things is to be found in the
lasting influence of the great Hebrew teachers upon both the ancient
and the modern world, although the mere mention of this topic is apt
to give offence to some of our Neo-Hellenists[261] and to thinkers
like Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. The remarkable thing about the Hebrew
seers is their intuition of God as “the living source of their life
and strength and joy,” not as a mere first principle of thought, not
as the substance of things, not as the mere “end of patient search and
striving,” but as the “_first principle of life and feeling_.”[262]
And their work for the world lay in the bringing to an end of the
entire mythology and cosmology of the age of fable and fancy, and the
substitution for all this of the worship of one God, as something
distinct and different from all the cults of polytheism, as a great
social and ethical achievement, as a true religion that loved justice
and social order because it loved God. “In Hebrew poetry,”[263] says
a recent authority upon this subject, “all things appear in action.
The verb is the predominating element in the sentence. And though the
shades of time distinctions are blurred, the richness of the language
throws the precise complexion of the act into clear, strong light.” If
this be so, there is, of course, no wonder that this people elaborated
for mankind a living and practical, a “pragmatist” (if we will) view
of the world, which is so rich by way of its very contrast both to
Greek and to modern scientific conceptions. With the enumeration of
two specific instances from this same writer of the Hebrew perception
of the importance of practical and personal factors to a true grasp
of certain fundamental ideas, we may safely leave this great source
of some of the leading ideas of our western world to take care of
itself. “The Hebrew counterpart to the Greek ideal of ὁ καλὸς κἀγαθός,
‘the finely-polished gentleman,’ is _hāsîd_, the adjective derived
from _hesed_, that is ‘the man of love.’ As God is love, the good man
is likewise a lover both of God and of his fellow-men. His love is
indeed the pure reflection of God’s--tender and true and active as
His is. For in no other ancient religion are the fear and love of God
so indissolubly wedded to moral conduct.”[264] And secondly, speaking
of immortality, Professor Gordon says, “The glad hope of immortality
rests, not on speculative arguments from the nature of the soul, but
on the sure ground of religious experience. Immortality is, in fact, a
necessary implicate of personal religion. The man that lives with God
is immortal as He is.”[265]
If the reader be inclined to interject here that all that this
pragmatist talk about the importance of action obviously amounts
to is simply the position that the highest truth must somehow take
recognition of our beliefs as well as of our knowledge, we can but
reply that he is literally so far in the right. Our point, however,
for Pragmatism would here be that belief rests not merely upon the
intellect, but upon the intellect in conjunction with the active and
the ethical nature of man. It is mainly because we feel ourselves to
be active and legislative and creative, mainly because we partly are
and partly hope to be, as the phrase has it, that we believe as well
as seek continually to know. Hence the rightness and the soundness
of Pragmatism in its contention; the truth is not so much a datum
(something given) as a construction,[266] or a thing that is made and
invented by way of an approximation to an ideal.
That it is this almost in the literal sense of these words is evident
from the fact of the slow and gradual accumulation of truth and
knowledge about themselves and their environment by the fleeting
generations of men. And even to-day the truth is not something that
exists in nature or in history or in some privileged institution, or in
the teaching of some guild of masters, but rather only in the attitude
of mind and heart of the human beings who continue to seek it and to
will it and to live it when and where they may. Truth includes, too,
the truth of the social order, of civilization[267]--this last costly
work being just as much the creation of the mind and the behaviour of
men as is knowledge itself. And there can, it would seem, be but slight
objection to an admission of the fact that it is only in so far as
the truth has been conceived as inclusive of the truth of human life
as well as of that of the world of things that humanity as a whole
seems to have any abiding interest in its existence, even where, as
in _Omar Khayyàm_ and in other writings, the idea of its discovery is
given up as impossible. Only, in other words, as the working out of the
implications of desire does thought live, and the completest thought is
at bottom but the working out of the deepest desire.[268]
These two elements of our life, thought and desire, have had indeed a
parallel development in the life of mankind. What we call the predicate
of thought bespeaks invariably an underlying (or personal) reaction
or attitude towards the so-called object of thought.[269] When desire
ceases, as it does sometimes in the case of a disappointed man, or the
pessimist, or the agnostic, or the mystic, thought too ceases. Even
the philosophical mood, as likewise the expression of a desire, is as
such comparable to other motives or desires, such as the scientific or
the practical or the emotional, and subject, too, like them, to the
various “conflicts” of personality.[270] The free speculative thought
or activity that, with the Greeks, we sometimes think of as the highest
attribute of our human nature, is itself but the highest phase of that
free creative[271] activity which we have found to underlie the moral
life and all the various constructions of mankind, inclusive of the
work of civilization itself.
Lastly, there is, as we know, ample warrant in the past and the
present reflections of men of science upon the apparent limits[272]
and limitations of our knowledge of our environment to justify the
correctness of the pragmatist insistence upon the ethical and the
personal factors that enter into truth. Reference having already been
made to these limits, there is perhaps little need of pursuing this
topic any further, either so far as the facts themselves are concerned
or so far as their admission by scientists and others is concerned.
How any supposed mere physical order can ever come _to know itself as
such_, either in the minds of men or in the minds of beings other than
men, is of course the crowning difficulty of what we call a physical
philosophy--a difficulty that transcends altogether the many familiar
and universally admitted difficulties in respect of topics like the
origin of motion and the origin of life, and the infinite number of
adjustments and adaptations involved in the development of the world
of things and men with which we are acquainted. Obviously, to say the
very least, only when some explanation of consciousness and feeling
and thought is added on to our knowledge of Nature (fragmentary as
is the latter at best) will the demands of thought and of desire for
unity in our knowledge be satisfied or set at rest. Now, of course,
to religious thought all this costly explanation, all this completion
and systematization of our knowledge are revealed, in the main, only
to a faith in God and to a consequent faith in the final “perfection”
of our human life as the gradual evolution of a divine kingdom. And
while Pragmatism cannot, especially in its cruder or more popular
form, be credited with anything like a rational justification of the
religious point of view about reality and of the vision it opens up,
it may, nevertheless, in virtue of its insistence upon such things as
(1) the rationality of the belief that accompanies all knowledge, (2)
the supposedly deeper phenomena of the science of human nature to which
reference has already been made, and (3) the great spiritual reality
that is present to the individual in the moral life, and that lifts him
“out of himself,” and that makes it impossible for him to “understand
himself by himself alone,”[273] justifiably lay claim to the possession
of a thorough working sympathy with the religious view of the world.
With the direction of the attention of the reader to two important
corollaries or consequences of the “pluralism” and the “dynamic
idealism” of Pragmatism this chapter may well be brought to a
termination.
One of the most obvious corollaries of nearly everything that has been
put forward by us in the foregoing chapters as pragmatist doctrine
or pragmatist tendency, is the marked distance at which[274] it all
seems to stand from the various entanglements of the false philosophy
of “subjective,” or “solipsistic” idealism. In other words, while we
have ventured to censure Pragmatism for its inability to recognize
the elemental truth[275] in Idealism, we must now record it as a merit
of Pragmatism that it does not, like so much modern philosophy, take
its start with the “contents” of the consciousness of the individual
as the one indubitable beginning, the one _inconcussum quid_ for all
speculation. This starting-point has often, as we know, been taken
(even by students of philosophy) to be the very essence of Idealism,
but it is not so. Although there is indeed no “object” without a
“subject,” no “matter” without “mind,” neither mind nor matter is
limited to _my_ experience of the same.[276] It is impossible for me to
interpret, or even to express, to myself the contents of my experience
without using the terms and the conceptions that have been invented
by minds and by personalities other than my own without whom I could
not, and do not, grow up into what I call my “self-consciousness.”[277]
We have all talked of ourselves (as we know from experience and
from psychology) in the third person as objects for a common social
experience long before we learn to use the first personal pronoun. And
as for the adult, his “ego” or self has a meaning and a reality only
in relation to, and in comparison with, the other selves of whom he
thinks as his associates. An “ego” implies invariably also an “alter”
an “other,” and thus our deepest thought about the universe is always,
actually and necessarily, both personal and social. Even in art, and in
religion, and in philosophy, it is the communion of mind with mind, of
soul with soul, that is at once our deepest experience and our deepest
desire.
I do not suggest for one moment that Pragmatism is the only philosophy
(if indeed we may call it a philosophy at all) that is necessarily
committed to Pluralism,[278] nor am I, of course, blind to the
difficulties that Pluralism, as over against Monism, presents to many
thinking minds. But I do here say that if Pragmatism be true, as it
is in the main (at least as an “approach” to philosophy), it follows
that the reality with which we are in contact in all our thoughts
and in all our theorizing is not any or all of the “contents” of
the consciousness of the individual thinker, but rather the common,
personal life of activity and experience and knowledge and emotion that
we as individuals share with other individuals. This life is that of
an entire “world of intersubjective intercourse,”[279] of a communion
of thought, and feeling, and effort in which, as persons, we share the
common life of persons, and are members one of another.[280]
Truth itself, in fact, as may be seen, of course, from the very
connexion of the word truth with other words like “try”[281] and
“utter” (and in its root with words like “ware” and “verihood”), is
a social possession, implying both seekers and finders, listeners and
verifiers as well as speakers and thinkers. Its existence implies a
universe of discourse, as the logicians put it, in which thoughts
and conceptions are elaborated and corrected, not merely by a kind
of self-analysis[282] and internal development, but by the test of
the action to which they lead and of the “responses” they awaken
in the lives and thoughts of other persons. And it is this very
sociological[283] and “pluralistic” character of Pragmatism that, along
with its tendency to “affirmation” in the matter of the reality of the
religious life, has helped to render it (as far as it goes) such a
living and such a credible philosophy to-day.
Another consequence of the dynamic idealism and the “radical
empiricism” of Pragmatism is the “immediacy” of our contact with
reality, for which it is naturally inclined to stand in the matter
of what we may call the philosophy of perception. What this new
“immediacy” and this new directness of our contact with reality
would mean to philosophical and scientific thought can be fully
appreciated only by those who have made the effort of years to live in
a “thought world,” in which the first reality is what the logicians
term “mediation”[284] or inference, a world of thoughts without the
reality of a really effective thinker, or the reality of a world of
real action--a world from which it is somehow impossible to escape
either honestly or logically. It would be a return, of course, on
the part of the thinker to the direct sense of life with which we
are familiar in instinct and in all true living and in all real
thought,[285] in all honest effort and accomplishment, and yet not a
“return” in any of the impossible senses in which men have often (and
with a tragic earnestness) sought to return to Nature[286] and to the
uncorrupted reality of things. And we have not indeed done justice to
the “instrumentalism” and the “hypothetical” treatment of ideas and of
systems of thought for which Pragmatism and Humanism both stand until
we see that so far from its being (almost in any sense) the duty of the
thinker to justify, to his philosophy, this _direct contact_ with the
_infinite life_ of the world, that has been the common possession of
countless mortals who have lived their life, it is, on the contrary,
his duty to justify (to himself and to his public) the various
thought-systems of metaphysic, by setting forth the various points of
departure and the various points of contact they have in the reality of
the life of things.[287]
We spoke at the close of our fourth chapter of the strange irony that
may be discovered in the fate of philosophers who have come to attach
a greater importance to their own speculations and theories than
to the great reality (whatever it may be, or whatever it may prove
itself to be) of which all philosophy is but an imperfect (although a
necessary) explanation. And the reader has doubtless come across the
cynical French definition of metaphysics as the “art of losing one’s
way systematically”[288] (_l’art de s’égarer avec méthode_). In view
of all this, and in view of all the inevitable pain and difficulty of
the solitary thinkers of all time, it is indeed not the least part of
the service of Pragmatism and Humanism, and of the “vitalistic” and
“voluntaristic” philosophy with which it may be naturally associated
to-day, to have compelled even metaphysicians to _feel_ that it is the
living reality of the world that we _know_ and that we _experience_,
that is first, last, and foremost the real subject-matter of philosophy.
With the real sceptic, then, with David Hume, we may indeed be
“diffident” of our “doubts” and at the same time absolutely “free” and
unprejudiced in our hold upon, and in our treatment of, metaphysical
systems as, all of them, but so many more or less successful attempts
to state and explain, in terms appreciable by the understanding and
the reason, the character and the reality of the infinite life with
which we are in contact in our acts and in our thoughts and in our
aspirations. Of the _reality_ of that life we can never be sceptical,
for it is the life that we know in that “world of inter-subjective”
intercourse that, according to Pragmatism and Humanism, is implied even
in sense-perception and in our daily experience.
CHAPTER VII
PRAGMATISM AS AMERICANISM
In adopting the title he has chosen for the heading of this chapter the
writer feels that he has laid himself open to criticism from several
different points of view. What has philosophy as the universal science
to do with nationalism or with any form of national characteristics?
Then even if Pragmatism be discovered to be to some extent
“Americanism” in the realm of thought, is this finding, or criticism,
a piece of appreciation or a piece of depreciation? And again, is
it possible for any individual to grasp, and to understand, and to
describe such a living and such a far-reaching force as the Americanism
of to-day?
The following things may be said by way of a partial answer to these
reflections: (1) There are American characteristics in Pragmatism, and
some of them may profitably be studied by way of an attempt to get all
the light we can upon its essential nature. Their presence therein has
been detected and recognized by critics, both American and foreign,
and reference has already been made to some of them in this book. (2)
There is no universal reason in philosophy apart from its manifestation
in the thoughts and the activities of peoples who have made or who
are making their mark upon human history. It may well be that the
common reason of mankind has as much to learn from Americanism in the
department of theory as it has already been obliged to learn from this
same quarter in the realm of practice. (3) One of the most important
phases of our entire subject is precisely this very matter of the
application of philosophy to “practice,” of the inseparability, to put
it directly, of “theory” and “practice.” It would surely, therefore, be
the strangest kind of conceit (although signs of it still exist here
and there)[289] to debar philosophy from the study of such a practical
thing as the Americanism of to-day. To connect the two with any degree
of success would certainly not be to depreciate Pragmatism, but to
strengthen it by relating it to a spirit that is affecting the entire
life and thought of mankind.
One or two other important considerations should also be borne in
mind. It goes without saying that there are in the United States and
elsewhere any number of Americans who see beyond both contemporary
Pragmatism and contemporary Americanism, and to whom it would be,
therefore, but a partial estimate of Pragmatism to characterize it
as “Americanism.” So much, to be sure, might be inferred from some
things that have already been said in respect of the reception and the
fate of Pragmatism in its own country. Again, it is one of the errors
of the day to think of Americanism as in the main merely a belief in
“practicality” and “efficiency.” To those who know it, Americanism is
practical idealism, and its aims, instead of being merely materialistic
and mechanical, are idealistic to the point of being Utopian. The
American belief in work is not really a belief in work for its
own sake, but rather a faith in the endless possibilities open to
intelligent energy with resources at its command. Lastly, it will here
certainly not be necessary either to think or to speak (even if it were
possible to do so) of _all_ American characteristics.[290]
Among the American-like characteristics in Pragmatism that have already
made themselves apparent in the foregoing chapters are its insistence
upon “action” and upon the free creative effort of the individual,
its insistence upon the man-made (or the merely human) character of
most of our vaunted truths, its instrumentalism, its radicalism,[291]
its empiricism (that is to say, its endless faith in experience),
its democratic character, and its insistence upon the necessity to
philosophy of a broad, tolerant, all-inclusive view of human nature.
So, too, are its insistence upon the basal character of belief,[292]
and upon the importance of a creed or a philosophy that really “works”
in the lives of intelligent men, its feeling of the inadequacy of a
merely scholastic or dialectical philosophy, and even its _quasi_
“practical” interpretation of itself in the realms of philosophy and
religion and ethics--its confession of itself as a “corridor-theory,”
as a point of approach to all the different systems in the history
of thought. In addition to these characteristics we shall attempt
now to speak, in the most tentative spirit, firstly, of some of the
characteristics of American university life of which Pragmatism may
perhaps be regarded as a partial expression or reflex, and then
after this, of such broadly-marked and such well-known American
characteristics as the love of the concrete (in preference to the
abstract), the love of experiment and experimentation, an intolerance
of doctrinairism and of mere book-learning, the general democratic
outlook on life and thought, the composite or amalgam-like character
of the present culture of the United States, the sociological interest
that characterizes its people, and so on. All these things are clearly
to be seen in Pragmatism as a would-be philosophical system, or as a
preliminary step in the evolution of such a system.
Owing very largely to the “elective” system that still prevails in the
universities of the United States, Philosophy is there (to an extent
somewhat inconceivable to the student of the European continent) in
the most active competition with other studies, and the success of a
professor of philosophy is dependent on the success of his method of
presenting his subject to students who all elect studies believed by
them to be useful or interesting or practically important. It has long
seemed to the writer that there is abundant evidence in the writings of
the pragmatists of this inevitable attempt to make philosophy a “live”
subject in competition, say, with the other two most popular subjects
in American colleges, viz. economics and biology. The importance to the
thought of to-day of biological and economic considerations is one of
the things most emphatically insisted upon by Professor Dewey in nearly
all his recent writings.[293] And both he and James--the fact is only
too evident--have always written under the pressure of the economic and
sociological interest of the American continent. And even Schiller’s
Humanism has become, as we have seen, very largely the metaphysics of
the “evolutionary process,” a characterization which we make below[294]
as a kind of criticism of the philosophy of Bergson. Our present point,
however, is merely that, owing to the generally competitive character
of the intellectual life there, this biological influence is felt more
acutely in America than elsewhere.
The one outstanding characteristic again of every approved academic
teacher in the United States is his method of handling his subject,
just as the one thing that is claimed for Pragmatism by its upholders
is that it is particularly a “methodology” of thought rather than a
complete philosophy. To the university constituency of the United
States a professor without an approved and successful method is as good
as dead, for no one would listen to him. The most manifest sign, to be
sure, of the possession of such an effective method on the part of the
university lecturer is the demonstration of skill in the treatment of
his subject, in the “approach” that he makes to it for the beginner,
in his power of setting the advanced student to work upon fruitful
problems, and of giving him a complete “orientation” in the entire
field under consideration. And then in addition to this he must be
able to indicate the practical and the educational value of what he is
teaching.
In his review of James’s classical work upon Pragmatism, Dewey, while
indicating a number of debatable points in the pragmatist philosophy,
declares emphatically his belief in that philosophy as a method of
“orientation.” The title again of Peirce’s famous pamphlet was _How
to make Ideas Clear_--a phrase of itself suggestive enough of the
inquiring mind of the young student when oppressed by apparently
conflicting and competing points of view. “We are acquainted with a
thing,” says James, “as soon as we have learned how to behave towards
it, or how to meet the behaviour we accept from it.” In one of his
books he talks about physics, for example, as giving us not so much
a theory about things as a “practical acquaintance” with bodies;
“the power to take hold of them and handle them,” indicating at the
same time his opinion that this way of regarding knowledge should
be extended to philosophy itself. All of this will serve as a proof
or illustration of the essentially “practical” and “methodological”
conception of philosophy taken by the pragmatists. Papini refers, we
remember, to the pragmatist philosophy as a power of “commanding our
material,” of “manipulating” for practical purposes the different
“thought-constructions” of the history of philosophy. And those who
have any familiarity with the early pragmatist magazine literature
know that the pragmatists used to be fond of asking themselves such
preliminary and “laboratory-like” inquiries as the following: “What
is truth _known as_?” “What is philosophy _known as_?” “What are the
different ‘thought-levels’ upon which we seem to move in our ordinary
experience?” They never exactly seem to “define” philosophy for you,
preferring to indicate what it can _do_ for you, and so on.
Turning now to the matter of American characteristics that are broader
and deeper than the merely academic, we may find an illustration,
for example, of the American practicality and the love of the
concrete (instead of the abstract or the merely general) in the
following declaration of Professor James that “the whole originality
of Pragmatism, the whole point in it, is its use of the _concrete_
way of seeing. It begins with _concreteness_ and returns and ends
with it.” Of the American love of novelty and of interest we may
find an illustration in the determination of Pragmatism “never to
discuss a question that has absolutely no interest and no meaning to
any one.” Of Pragmatism as an exemplification of the American love
of experiment, and of experimentation, with a view to definite and
appreciable “returns,” we may give the following: “If you fully believe
the pragmatic method you cannot look on any such word, _i.e._ ‘God,’
‘Matter,’ ‘Reason,’ ‘The Absolute,’ ‘Energy,’ and such ‘solving’
names, as closing your quest. You must bring out in 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 programme for
more work and more particularly as an indication of the ways in which
existing realities _may be changed_.” Of the American intolerance for
mere scholarship and book-learning, and of the American inability
to leave any discovery or any finished product alone without some
attempt to “improve” upon it or to put it to some new use, we may
cite the following: “When may a truth go into cold storage in the
encyclopaedias, and when shall it come out for battle?”
Another very strongly marked characteristic of American life is the
thoroughly eclectic and composite character of its general culture
and of the general tone of its public life. American daily life has
become, as it were, a kind of social solvent, a huge melting-pot for
the culture and the habits and the customs of peoples from all over
the earth. This also may be thought of as reflected in the confessedly
complex and amalgam-like character of Pragmatism, in its boast and
profession of being a synthesis and a fusion of so many different
tendencies of human thought. As a juxtaposition, or kind of compound
solution, of such a variety of things as the affirmations of religion,
the hypothetical method of science, realism, romanticism, idealism,
utilitarianism, and so on, it reminds us only too forcibly of the
endless number of social groups and traditions, the endless number of
interests and activities and projects to be seen and felt in any large
American city.
Still another general characteristic of American life of which we may
well think in connexion with Pragmatism is the sociological interest
of the country, the pressure of which upon the pragmatists and their
writings has already been referred to. The social problem in America
has now become[295] the one problem that is present with everybody, and
present most of all, perhaps, with the European immigrant, who has for
various reasons hoped that he had left this problem behind him. The
effect of this upon Pragmatism is to be seen, not merely in the very
living hold that it is inclined to take of philosophy and philosophical
problems,[296] but in the fact of its boast of being a “way of living”
as well as a “way of thinking.” We have examined this idea in our
remarks upon the ethics of Pragmatism.
Of course the outstanding temperamental American characteristic that
is most clearly seen in Pragmatism is the great fact of the inevitable
bent of the American mind to action and to accomplishment,--its
positive inability to entertain any idea, or any set of ideas upon
any subject whatsoever, without experiencing at the same time the
inclination to use these ideas for invention and contrivance,[297] for
organization and exploitation. Any one who has lived in the United
States must in fact have become so habituated and so accustomed to
think of his thought and his knowledge and his capacities in terms
of their possible social utility, that he simply cannot refrain from
judging of any scheme of thought or of any set of ideas in the same
light. Anywhere, to be sure, in the United States will they allow a man
to think all he pleases about anything whatsoever--even pre-Socratic
philosophy, say, or esoteric Buddhism. And there is nothing indeed of
which the country is said, by those who know it best, to stand so much
in need as the most persistent and the most profound thought about all
important matters. But such thought, it is always added, must prove to
be constructive and positive in character, to be directed not merely to
the solution of useless questions or of questions which have long ago
been settled by others.
We shall now endeavour to think of the value[298] to philosophy and to
the thought and practice of the world (the two things are inseparable)
of some or all of these general and special characteristics which we
have sought to illustrate in Pragmatism.
We might begin by suggesting the importance to the world of the
production and development of a man of genius like James,[299] whose
fresh and living presentation of the problems of philosophy (as seen
by a psychologist) has brought the sense of a lasting and far-reaching
obligation upon his fellow-students everywhere. In no more favourable
soil could James have grown up into the range and plenitude of his
influence than in that of America and of Harvard University,[300] that
great nursing-ground of the finest kind of American imperialism. The
great thing, of course, about James was his invasion, through the
activities of his own personality,[301] of the realm of philosophical
rationalism by the fact and the principle of active personality. His
whole general activity was a living embodiment of the principle of
all humanism, that personality and the various phases of personal
experience are of more importance to philosophy in the way of theory
than any number of supposedly self-coherent, rational or abstract
systems, than any amount of reasoning that is determined solely by the
ideal of conceptual consistency.
Then again, it might be held that the entire academic world of to-day
has a great deal to learn from the conditions under which all subjects
(philosophy included) are taught and investigated in the typical
American university of the day. We have referred to the fact that the
American professor or investigator faces the work of instruction and
research in an environment replete with all modern facilities and
conveniences.[302] The very existence of this environment along with
the presence throughout his country of university men and workers
from all over the world with all their obvious merits and defects as
“social types” prevent him in a hundred ways from that slavery to
some one school of thought, to some one method of research that is so
often a characteristic of the scholar of the old world. The entire
information and scholarship in any one science (say, philosophy) is
worth to him what he can make of it, here and now, for himself and for
his age and for his immediate environment. He simply cannot think of
any idea or any line of reflection, in his own or in any other field,
without thinking at the same time of its “consequences,” immediate,
secondary, and remote. This inability is an instance of the working
of the pragmatist element in scholarship and in thought with all its
advantages and disadvantages.[303]
And it is true too, it might be held, even upon the principles of
Idealism that the mere facts of knowledge (for they are as endless in
number as are the different points of view from which we may perceive
and analyse phenomena) are “worth”[304] to-day very largely only what
they have meant and what they may yet mean to human life, to human
thought, to civilization. While there is certainly no useless truth
and no utterly unimportant fact, it is quite possible to burden and
hamper the mind of youth with supposed truths and facts that have
little or no relevancy to any coherent or any real point of view about
human knowledge and human interests either of the past or the present.
It is merely, for example, in the light of the effects that they
have had upon the life and thought of humanity[305] that the great
philosophical systems of the past ought (after the necessary period of
preliminary study on the part of the pupil) to be presented to students
in university lectures. A teacher who cannot set them forth in this
spirit is really not a teacher at all--a man who can make his subject
live again in the thought of the present.[306]
If the limits of our space and our subject permitted of the attempt, we
might easily continue the study of the pragmatist element in American
scholarship from the point of view of the whole general economy of a
university as a social institution, and from that of the benefit that
has accrued to the modern world from the many successful attempts at
the organization of knowledge from an international point of view, that
have come into being under American initiative.[307]
Lastly it is surely impossible to exaggerate the value to philosophy
of the so-called “democratic,”[308] open-minded attitude of Pragmatism
that is seen in its unprejudiced recognition of such things as the
ordinary facts of life, the struggle that constitutes the life of the
average man, the fragmentary and partial[309] character of most of our
knowledge, and so on. All this contrasts in the most favourable way
with the scholastic and the Procrustean attitude to facts that has so
long characterized philosophical rationalism from Leibniz and Wolff to
the Kantians and to the Neo-Kantians and the Neo-Hegelians of our own
time. Thanks partly to this direct and democratic attitude of mind on
the part of the pragmatists and humanists, and thanks too to the entire
psychological and sociological movement of modern times, the points
of view of the different leading thinkers of different countries are
beginning to receive their fitting recognition in the general economy
of human thought to be compared with each other, and with still other
possible points of view.
No one, it seems to me, can read the books of James without feeling
that philosophy can again, as the universal science indeed, “begin
anywhere” in a far less restricted sense than that in which Hegel
interpreted this ingenious saying of his in respect of the freedom of
human thinking.[310]
As for the inevitable drawbacks and limitations of the very Americanism
which we have been endeavouring to discover in Pragmatism, it cannot,
to begin with, be entirely without an element of risk to philosophy,
and to the real welfare of a country, that the highest kind of insight
should be brought too ruthlessly into competition with the various
specialized studies, and the various utilitarian[311] pursuits of
modern times, and with popular tendencies generally. The public,
for many reasons, should not be too readily encouraged to think of
philosophy as merely “a” study like other studies and pursuits, to be
baited with the idea of its utility and its profitable consequences.
Philosophy, on the contrary, is the universal study that gives to all
other studies and pursuits their relative place and value. If left too
much to be a mere matter of choice on the part of the young and the
unthinking, it will soon find itself in the neglected position of the
wisdom that utters her voice at the street corners. It must be secured
an integral, and even a necessary place in the world of instruction--a
condition that is still the case, it is to be remembered, in
Catholic[312] as distinguished from many so-called “liberal” and
“Protestant” seats of learning.
It is possible indeed, as we have already suggested, that the
recognition of an aristocratic or a Catholic element in learning would,
in some respects, be of more true use in the schools of America than a
mere pragmatist philosophy of life and education. And it is therefore
not to be wondered at that Americans themselves should already have
expressed something of a distrust for a philosophy and an educational
policy that are too akin to the practical commercialism of the
hour.[313]
Then again, despite the large element of truth that there is in the
idea of philosophy “discovering” (rather than itself “being”) the true
“dynamic” or “motive-awakening” view of the system of things in which
we live, philosophy itself was never intended to bear the entire weight
and strain that are put upon it by the pragmatists. In their enthusiasm
they would make out of it, as we have seen, a religion (and a new one
at that!) and a social philosophy, as well as the theory of knowledge
and the “approach” to reality that we are accustomed to look for in a
system of philosophy.
It is only in periods of transition and reconstruction, like the
present age, when men have become acutely sensible of the limitations
of traditional views of things, that they are inclined in their
disappointment to look to scientific and professional thinkers for
creeds that shall take the place of what they seem for the moment to
be losing. It is in such times chiefly that philosophy flourishes, and
that it is apt to acquire an undue importance by being called upon to
do things that of itself it cannot do. Among the latter impossibilities
is to be placed, for example, the idea of its being able to offer
(almost in any sense) a substitute for the direct experience[314]
of the common life, or for the realities of our affections and our
emotions, or for the ideals engendered by the common life.
Owing partly to the limitations of the Intellectualism that has
hitherto characterized so much of the culture and the educational
policy of the last century there are still everywhere scores of people
under the illusion that the truth of life will be revealed to them
in the theory of some book, in the new views or the new gospel of
some emancipated and original thinker. In this vain hope of theirs
they are obviously forgetful of even the pragmatist truth that all
theories are but a kind of transformation, or abstract expression,
of the experiences of real life and of real living. And part of the
trouble with the pragmatists is that they themselves have unwittingly
ministered to this mistaken attitude of mind by creating the impression
that their theory of taking the kingdom of Heaven by storm, by the
violence of their postulations and of their plea for a “working view”
of things, is indeed the new gospel of which men have long been in
search. The race, however, is not always to the swift and the eager,
nor the kingdom to those who are loudest in their cryings of “Lord,
Lord.” And as a friend of mine aptly applied it as against all
practicalism and Pragmatism, “there remaineth a rest to the people of
God.”[315] The ordinary man, it should be borne in mind, does not in a
certain sense really need philosophy. Its audience is with the few, and
it is to do it but scant service to think of making it attractive to
the many by the obliteration of most of its distinctive characteristics
and difficulties, and by the failure to point out its inherent
limitations. It is not by any means, as we have been indicating, a
substitute either for life, or for positive religion. Nor can it ever
have much of a message, even for the few, if they imagine themselves,
on account of their wisdom, to be elevated above the needs of the
ordinary discipline of life.
Then again, there is surely an element of considerable danger in
the American-like depreciation of doctrine and theory which we
have noticed in two or three different connexions on the part of
Pragmatism. In the busy, necessitous life of the United States this
depreciation[316] is sometimes said to be visible in the great
sacrifice of life[317] and energy that is continually taking place
there owing to an unduly literal acceptance on the part of every one
of the idea that each individual has a sort of divine right to seek
and to interpret his experience for himself. In Pragmatism it might be
said to be illustrated in the comparative weakness in the essentials
of logic and ethics to which we have already referred, in the matter
of a sound theory of first principles. And also in its failure to take
any really critical recognition[318] of the question of its theoretical
and practical affiliations to tendencies new and old, many or most of
which have long ago been estimated at their true worth and value. Then
there is its comparatively superficial interpretation[319] of what is
known in the thought of the day as “Darwinism” and “Evolutionism” and
the endless belief of the unthinking in “progress,” and its failure
to see that its very Americanism[320] and its very popularity are
things that are deserving of the most careful study and criticism.
What have the pragmatists left in their hands of their theory, if its
mere “methodology” and its “efficiency-philosophy” and its would-be
enthusiasm were eliminated from it?
Like Americanism in general (which began, of course, as a revolutionary
and a “liberationist” policy), Pragmatism is inclined in some ways
to make too much of peoples’ rights and interests, and too little
of their duties and privileges and of their real needs and their
fundamental, human instincts. It is in the understanding alone of these
latter things that true wisdom and true satisfaction[321] are to be
found. And like the American demand for pleasure and for a good time
generally, Pragmatism is in many respects too much a mere philosophy
of “postulations” and “demands,” too much a mere formulation of the
eager and impetuous demands of the emancipated man and woman of the
time---as forgetful as they of many of the deeper[322] facts of life
and of the economy of our human civilization. In demanding that the
“consequences” of all pursuits (even those of study and philosophy)
shall be “satisfying,” and that philosophy shall satisfy our active
nature, it forgets the sense of disillusionment that comes to all rash
and mistaken effort. It certainly does not follow that a man is going
to get certain things from the world and from philosophy merely because
he demands them any more than does the _discovery_ and the _possession_
of happiness follow from the “right”[323] of the individual to seek
it in his own best way. Nor is it even true that man is called upon
to “act” to anything like the extent contemplated by an unduly
enthusiastic Americanism and an unduly enthusiastic Pragmatism. The
writer is glad to be able to append in this connexion a quotation taken
by an American critic of Pragmatism from Forberg in his criticism of
the action-philosophy of Fichte: “Action, action, is the vocation of
man! Strictly speaking, this principle is false. Man is not called upon
to act, but to act justly. If he cannot act without acting unjustly he
had better remain inactive.”
It would not be difficult to match this quotation, or perhaps to
surpass it, with something from Carlyle in respect of the littleness of
man’s claims, not merely for enjoyment, but even for existence; but we
will pass on.
Pragmatism, as we have suggested, certainly falls too readily into
line with the tendency of the age to demand means and instruments and
utilities and working satisfactions, instead of ends and purposes and
values, to demand pleasure and enjoyment instead of happiness and
blessedness. Instead of allowing itself to do this it should have
undertaken a criticism both of the so-called “wants” of the age, and
of the soundness of its own views in respect of the truth and the
happiness that are proper to man as man. There is a fine epigram of
Goethe’s in respect of the limitations of the revolutionary and the
liberationist attitude of those who would seek to “free” men without
first trying to understand them, and to help them to their true inward
development.
Aile Freiheits-Apostel, sie waren mir immer zuwider.
Willkur suchte doch nur jeder am Ende für sich.
Willst du viele befrein, so wag’ es vielen zu dienen.
Wie gefährlich das sey, willst du es wissen?
Versuch’s.[324]
Until Pragmatism then makes it clear that it is the free rational
activity, and the higher spiritual nature of man that is to it the
norm of all our thought, and all our activity, and the true test of
all “consequences,” it has not risen to the height of the distinctive
message that it is capable of giving to the thought of the present
time. Unqualified by some of the ideal considerations to which we have
attempted, in its name, and in its interest, to give an expression, it
would not be, for example, a philosophy that could be looked upon by
the great East as the last word of our Western wisdom or our Western
experience. It will be well, however, to say nothing more in this
connexion until we have looked at the considerations that follow (in
our next chapter) upon the lofty, but impersonal, idealisation of the
life and thought of man attempted by our Anglo-Hegelian Rationalism,
and until we have reflected, too, upon the more feasible form of
Idealism attempted in the remarkable philosophy of Bergson,[325] the
greatest of all the pragmatists.
CHAPTER VIII
PRAGMATISM AND ANGLO-HEGELIAN RATIONALISM
The form of Anglo-German Rationalism or Intellectualism which I shall
venture to select for the purposes of consideration from the point
of view of Pragmatism and Humanism is the first volume of the recent
_Gifford Lectures_ of Dr. Bernard Bosanquet, who has long been regarded
by the philosophical public of Great Britain as one of the most
characteristic members of a certain section of our Neo-Hegelian school.
I shall first give the barest outline of the argument and contentions
of “The Principle of Individuality and Value,” and then venture upon
some paragraphs of what shall seem to me to be relevant criticism.
Dr. Bosanquet’s initial position is a conception of philosophy, and
its task which is for him and his book final and all-determining.
To him Philosophy is (as it is to some extent to Hegel) “logic” or
“the spirit of totality.” It is “essentially of the concrete and the
whole,” as Science is of the “abstract and the part.” Although the
best thing in life is not necessarily “philosophy,” philosophy in
this sense of “logic” is the clue to “reality and value and freedom,”
the key to everything, in short, that we can, or that we should, or
that we actually do desire and need. It [philosophy] is “a rendering
in coherent thought of what lies at the heart of actual life and
love.” His next step is to indicate “the sort of things,” or the sort
of “experiences,” or the sort of “facts” that philosophy needs as its
material, if it would accomplish its task as “universal logic.” This he
does (1) negatively, by the rejection of any form of “immediateness,”
or “simple apprehension,” such as the “solid fact,” the “sense of
being,” or the “unshareable self” of which we sometimes seem to
hear, or such as the “naïve ideas” of “compensating justice,”[326]
“ethics[327] which treats the individual as isolated” and
“teleology”[328] as “guidance by finite minds,” as the data (or as part
of the data) of philosophy; and (2) positively, by declaring that his
subject-matter throughout will be “the principle of ‘individuality,’
of ‘self-completeness,’ as the clue to reality.” This “individuality”
or “self-completeness” is then set forth in a quasi-Platonic manner as
the “universal,” the real “universal” being (he insists) the “concrete
universal,” the “whole,” that is to say, “the logical system of
connected members,” that is to him the “ideal of all thought.” We must
think of this “individuality,” therefore, either as “a living world,
complete and acting out of itself, a positive, self-moulding cosmos,”
or “as a definite _striving of the universe_”[!][329]
The next question (so far as our partial purposes are concerned) that
Dr. Bosanquet asks is, “What help do we get from the notion of a
‘mind’ which ‘purposes’ or ‘desires’ things in appreciating the work
of factors in the universe, or of the universe as [_ex-hypothesi_]
self-directing and self-experiencing whole?” The answer is spread
over several chapters, and is practically this, that although there
is undoubtedly a “teleology” in the universe (in the shape of the
“conjunctions and results of the co-operation of men,” or of “the
harmony of geological and biological evolution”), and although “minds
such as ours play a part in the work of direction, we cannot judge of
this work in question in any human manner.” The real test of teleology
or value is “wholeness,” “completeness,” “individuality” [the topic
of the book], and it is made quite clear that it is the “Absolute”
who is “real” and “individual” _and not we_. We are, indeed, in our
lives “_carried to the Absolute without a break_,”[330] and our
nature “_is only in process of being communicated to us_.”[331] “We
should not think of ourselves after the pattern of separate things
or personalities in the legal sense, nor even as selves in the sense
of isolation and exclusion of others.” “Individuality” being this
“logical self-completeness,” there can be only one “Individual,” and
this one Individual is the one criterion of “value,” or “reality,”
or “existence,” “importance” and “_reality_ [!]” being sides of
the one “characteristic” [_i.e._ “thinkableness” as a whole]. Dr.
Bosanquet confesses in his seventh chapter that this idea of his of
“individuality,” or “reality,” is essentially the Greek idea that it
is only the “whole nature” of things that gives them their reality or
value.
We are then assured, towards the close of this remarkable book, that
“freedom” (the one thing that we mortals value as the greatest of all
“goods”) is “_the inherent effort of mind considered as a [!] world_,
and that the ”Absolute“ [the ”universal” of logic, Plato’s “Idea”] is
the “high-water mark of our effort,” and that each “self” is “more
like _a rising and a falling tide_ than an isolated pillar with a
fixed circumference.” The great fact of the book, the fact upon which
its accomplished author rests when he talks in his Preface of his
belief, “that in the main the work [of philosophy] has been done,” is
the daily “transmutation of experience according to the level of the
mind’s energy and self-completeness,” the continued and the continuous
“self-interpretation [of ‘experience’] through the fundamental
principle of individuality.”
Now it is quite obvious that according to many of the considerations
that have been put forward as true in the foregoing chapters, this
philosophy of Dr. Bosanquet’s which treats the “concept,” or the
“universal” as an end in itself (as the _one answer_ to all possible
demands for a “teleology”) and as an “individual,” “_a perfected and
self-perfecting [!] individual_,” can be regarded as but another
instance of the abstract Rationalism against which Pragmatism and
Humanism have entered their protests. It is untrue, therefore, to the
real facts of knowledge and the real facts of human nature. It will be
sufficient to state that the considerations of which we are thinking
are (in the main) the positions that have been taken in respect
of such things as: (1) the claim that a true metaphysic must serve
not merely as an intellectual “system” but as a “dynamic,” and as a
“motive” for action and achievement; (2) the fact of the “instrumental”
character of thought and of ideas, and of all systems (of science or
of philosophy or of politics) that fail to include as part of their
data the various ideals of mankind; (3) the idea that all truth and
all thought imply a belief in the existence of objects and persons
independent of the mere mental states or activities of the thinking
individual, and that belief rather than knowledge is, and always has
been, man’s fundamental and working estimate of reality; (4) the fact
that our human actions and re-actions upon reality are a part of what
we mean by “reality,” and that these actions and re-actions of ours
are real and not imaginary; (5) the attitude in general of Pragmatism
to Rationalism; (6) the various concessions that have been made by
representative rationalists to the pragmatist movement.
Dr. Bosanquet’s theory of reality has already impressed some of
his most competent critics as utterly inadequate as a motive or an
incentive to the efforts and endeavours of men as we know them in
history and in actual life, and we shall immediately return to this
topic. And although there are many signs in his Lectures that he is
himself quite aware of the probability of such an impression, his
book proceeds upon the even tenor of its way, following wherever his
argument may lead him, irrespective entirely of the truth contained
in the facts and the positions we have just recounted and reaffirmed.
It lends itself, therefore, only too naturally to our present use
of it as a highly instructive presentation of many, or most, of the
tendencies of Rationalism and Intellectualism, against which Pragmatism
and Humanism would fain protest. At the same time there is in it, as we
hope to show, a fundamental element[332] of truth and of fact without
which there could be no Pragmatism and no Humanism, and indeed no
philosophy at all.
A broad, pervading inconsistency[333] in “Individuality and Value”
which militates somewhat seriously against the idea of its being
regarded as a tenable philosophy, is the obvious one between the
position (1) that true reality is necessarily individual, and the
position (2) that reality is to be found in the “universal” (or the
“concept”) of logic.[334] It would, however, perhaps be unfair to
expect Dr. Bosanquet to effect a harmony between these two positions
that Aristotle (who held them both) was himself very largely unable to
do. There is, in other words, a standing and a lasting contradiction
between any and all philosophy which holds that it is _reason_ [or
_logic_] _alone that attains to truth_ and reality, and the apparently
natural and inevitable tendency of the human mind [it is represented
in Dr. Bosanquet’s own procedure] to seek after “reality” in the
“individual” thing, or person, or being, and in the perfecting of
“individuality” in God (or in a kingdom of perfected individuals).
The positive errors, however, which we would venture to refer to as
even more fatal to Dr. Bosanquet’s book than any of its incidental
inconsistencies are those connected with the following pieces of
procedure on his part: (1) his manifest tendency to treat the
“universal” as if it were an entity on its own account with a sort of
development and “value” and “culmination” of its own;[335] (2) his
tendency to talk and think as if a “characteristic” or a “predicate”
(_i.e._ the “characteristic” or “quality” that some experiencing being
or some thinker attributes to reality) could be treated as anything
at all _apart from the action and the reaction of this “experient”_
(or “thinker”) _conceived as an agent_; (3) the tendency to talk of
“minds”[336] _rather than persons_, as “purposing” and “desiring”
things; (4) his tendency to talk as if “teleology” were “wholeness”;
(5) his tendency to regard (somewhat in the manner of Spinoza) “selves”
and “persons” as like “rising and falling tides,” and of the self as a
“world of content”[337] engaged in certain “transformations”; and (6)
his tendency to think and speak _as if demonstration_ [“mediation” is
perhaps his favourite way of thinking of the logical process] _were an
end in itself, as if we lived to think, instead of thinking to live_.
In opposition to all this it may be affirmed firstly that every
“conception” of the human mind is but the more or less clear
consciousness of a _disposition to activity_, and is representative,
not so much of the “features” of objects which might appear to be
their “characteristics” from a purely theoretical point of view, as of
the different ways in which objects have seemed to men to subserve
the needs of their souls and bodies. The study of the development of
the “concept” in connexion with the facts of memory and with the slow
evolution of language, and with the “socialized percepts” of daily life
will all tend to confirm this position. The phenomena of religion,
for example, and all the main concepts of all the religions are to be
studied _not merely as intellectual phenomena_, as solutions of some of
the many difficulties of modern Agnosticism, or of modern Rationalism,
or of modern Criticism, but as an expressive of the _modes of behaviour
of human beings_ (with all their needs and all their ideals) towards
the universe in which they find themselves, and towards the various
beings, seen and unseen, which this universe symbolises to them. These
phenomena and these conceptions are unintelligible, in short, apart
from the various activities and cults and social practices and social
experiences and what not, with which they have dealt from first to last.
Then it is literally impossible to separate in the manner of Dr.
Bosanquet the “predicate” of thought from the active relations
sustained by things towards each other, or towards the human beings who
seek to interpret these active relations for any or for all “purposes,”
Dr. Bosanquet’s idea, however, of the relation of “mind” to “matter,”
to use these _symbols_ for the nonce (for they are but such), is in
the main purely “representational”[338] or intellectualistic.[339] To
him “mind” seems to reflect either a “bodily content” or some other
kind of “content”[340] that seems to exist for a “spectator” of the
world, or for the “Absolute,” _rather than for the man himself as an
agent_, who of course _uses_ his memories of himself, or his “ideal” of
himself, _for renewed effort and activity_. One of the most important
consequences of this unduly intellectualistic view of mind is that Dr.
Bosanquet seems (both theoretically and practically) unable to see the
place of “mind,” as “purpose,” in ordinary life,[341] or of the place
of mind in evolution,[342] giving us in his difficult but important
chapter on the “relation of mind and body” a version of things that
approaches only too perilously close to Parallelism or Dualism, or
even to Materialism.[343] And along with this quasi-“representational”
or “copy-like” theory of mind there are to be associated his
representational and intellectualistic views of the “self”[344] and
the “universal”[345] and “spirit.”[346]
There are, doubtless, hints in Dr. Bosanquet’s pages of a more
“dynamic” view of mind or of a deeper view[347] than this merely
“representational” view, but they are not developed or worked into the
main portion of his argument, which they would doubtless very largely
transform. This is greatly to be regretted, for we remember that even
Hegel seemed to notice the splitting-up of the real for our human
purposes which takes place in the ordinary judgment. And of course, as
we have noticed, all “purpose” is practical and theoretical at one and
the same time.
Then, thirdly, it is persons, and not “minds,” who desire and purpose
things, “mind” being a concept invented by the spectator of activity
in a person other than himself, which (from the analogy of his own
conscious activity and experience) he believes to be purposive.[348]
Dr. Bosanquet’s use, too, of the expression “mind” invariably
leaves out of the range of consideration the phenomena of desire
and volition--intelligible, both of them, only by reference to an
end that is to be understood from within, and not from outside of
the personality, from the point of view of the mere spectator. The
phenomena of desire and volition are just as integral ingredients of
our lives as persons as are our cognitive states.
Fourthly, it is doubtful whether the treatment of teleology as
“wholeness” (or its sublimation in “Individuality and Value” into
“wholeness”) is much of an explanation of this difficult topic, or
indeed whether it is any explanation at all. Dr. Bosanquet, in fact,
confesses that teleology is a conception which “_loses its distinctive
meaning_ as we deepen its philosophical interpretation, and that it has
very little meaning when applied to the universe as a whole” [a thing
that is apparent to any Kantian student]. “It is impossible seriously,”
he says, “to treat a mind _which is the universe_[!] as a workman of
limited resources, aiming at some things and obliged to accept others
as means to these.” And it is equally impossible, he holds, to apply
“to the universe” the distinction of “what is purpose for its own sake
and what is not so.” In fact, Dr. Bosanquet’s treatment of teleology is
thus mainly negative, as including not only this rejection[349] of the
notion in reference to the “universe as a whole,” but its rejection,
too, in reference to the purposes of our human life;[350] although he
admits (as of course he must) that the conception of end or purpose
is drawn from some of the features (“the simplest features,” he says)
of our “finite life,” or “finite consciousness.” If the notion were
“to be retained at all,” he says, “it could only be a name for some
principle which would help to tell us what has _value quite independent
of being or not being, the purpose of some mind_.”[351] Now, of course,
according to the Pragmatism and Humanism that we have been considering
in this book, no intelligent person could take any conceivable interest
in such a useless fancy as a teleology of this kind. Thus teleology is
really blotted out altogether of existence in this volume, and with its
disappearance there must go also the notion of any value that might be
intelligibly associated with the idea of the attainment of purposes or
ends by the human beings with whom we are acquainted in our ordinary
daily life.
We shall below[352] refer to the fact that this rejection of teleology
and value is one that must be regarded as fatal to ethics or to
Absolutism in the realm of ethics. It requires, too, to be added here
that even the most unprejudiced reading of Dr. Bosanquet’s work must
create in the mind of the reader the conviction that its author is
altogether unfair to the views of those who believe in the existence
of definite manifestations of purpose in human life.[353] He talks as
if those who uphold this idea or this fact are committed either to the
absurd notion that man is “the end of the universe,” or to the equally
absurd notion that “art, thought, society, history, in which mind
begins to transcend its finiteness should be ascribed to the directive
abilities of units in a plurality, precisely apart from the world
content and the underlying solidarity of spirits, the medium through
which all great things are done.”
With a view of bringing our discussion of these striking _Gifford
Lectures_ within the scope of the general subject of this book
the following might be regarded as their leading, fundamental
characteristics to which the most serious kind of exception might well
be taken: (1) its “abstractionism”[354] and its general _injustice to
fact_ due to its initial and persistent “conviction”[355] [strange to
say, this is the very word used by Bosanquet] that the real movement
in things is a “logical” movement; (2) its fallacious conception of
the task of philosophy as mainly the obligation to think the world
“without contradiction”; (3) its obvious tendency in the direction
of the “subjective idealism”[356] that has been the bane of so much
modern philosophy and that is discarded altogether[357] by Pragmatism
and Humanism; (4) its retention of many of the characteristic
polemical[358] faults of Neo-Hegelianism and its manifestation of
a similar spirit of polemical unfairness[359] on the part of their
accomplished author; (5) its implication in several really hopeless
contradictions in addition to the broad contradiction already referred
to; (6) its failure [a common Neo-Hegelian failing] to do justice to
the spirit and (in certain important regards) the letter of Kant; (7)
its essential non-moralism or its apparently anti-ethical character.
As for the first of these charges, the “abstractionism” of
“Individuality and Value,” coming as it does on the top of the general
perversity of the book, is really a very disastrous thing for
philosophy. While we may pardon an enthusiastic literary Frenchman[360]
for saying that, “_The fact is, you see, that a fine book is the
end for which the world was made_,” there is hardly any excuse for
a philosopher like Dr. Bosanquet coming before the world with the
appearance of believing that the richly differentiated universe that
we know only in part, exists for the benefit of the science that he
represents, for the dialectic of the metaphysician, to enable the
“universal” to “become more differentiated” and “more individualized,”
to become “more representative” _of the “whole.”_[361] We might
compare, says Dr. Bosanquet, in a striking and an enthralling[362]
passage, “the Absolute to Dante’s mind as uttered in the _Divine
Comedy_ ... as including in a single, whole poetic experience a
world of space and persons, ... things that, to any ordinary mind,
fall apart.” Now even apart from the highly interesting question
of the manifestly great and far-reaching influence of Dante over
Dr. Bosanquet, and apart, too, from the notable modesty of Dr.
Bosanquet’s confession as to the “imperfect” character of the simile
just reproduced, no one to-day can think of attaching any ultimate
importance to “Dante’s mind” without thinking of the extent to which
this truly great man[363] was under the influence, not only of his
own passions and of the general “problem” of his own life, but of
such specialized influences as, for example (1) the mediaeval dualism
between the City of God and the Empire of the World, (2) Aristotle’s
unfortunate separation of the “intellectual” and the “practical”
virtues, (3) the evil as well as the good of the dogmatic theology of
the fathers of the Church. Goethe is of infinitely more value to us
men of the twentieth century than Dante. And one of the very things
Goethe is most calculated to teach us is precisely this very matter of
the limitations of the cultural ideal of the Middle Ages and of the
entire Renaissance period that succeeded it.[364] We should never,
therefore, think for a moment of taking Dr. Bosanquet’s intellectual
abstractionism about the “universal” literally without thinking at the
same time of its limitations, and of its sources in Plato and in Hegel
and in Neo-Hegelian rationalism, and of remembering with Hegel himself,
“after all, the movement of the notion _is a sort of illusion_.”
Then, secondly, to attempt to think in philosophy or any other science
_merely in accordance with the Principle of “Non-Contradiction”_ will
never[365] take us beyond the few initial positions of fact or of
principle (God, “substance,” pure being, matter, identity, final cause,
freedom, force, the will, the idea a perfect being, or what not) with
which we happen for one reason or another to start in our reflections.
Nor will this procedure account, of course, for these initial
assumptions or facts.
Thirdly, in virtue of its implication in the “solipsism” and the
“representationalism” of Subjective Idealism, Dr. Bosanquet’s
“Absolute” is inferior (both so far as fact and theory are concerned)
to the Pluralism and the possible Theism of Pragmatism and Humanism to
which we have already made partial references.[366]
Fourthly, it is only natural that, on account of these, its many
polemical mannerisms, “Individuality and Value” has already made upon
some of its critics the impression of being a book that refuses to see
things as they are--in the interests of their forced adaptation to the
purposes of a preconceived philosophical theory.
Fifthly, there is certainly a sufficient number of contradictions
in “Individuality and Value” to prevent it from being regarded as
a consistent and a workable (_i.e._ really explanatory) account of
our experience as we actually know it. Of these contradictions we
think the following may well be enumerated here: (1) That between Dr.
Bosanquet’s professed principle of accepting as real only that which is
“mediated” or established by proof, and the arbitrariness he displays
in announcing convictions like the following: “That what really matters
is not the preservation of separate minds as such, but the qualities
and achievement which, as trustees of the universe, they elicit from
the resources assigned them.” (2) The contradiction between his belief
in the conservation of “values” without the conservation of the
existence of the individuals who “elicit” these “values,” or who are,
as he puts it, the “trustees” for the “universe.” (3) That between what
he logically wants (his “concrete individual”) and what he gives us
(an impersonal “system”). (4) The contradiction between the completed
personal life in God (or in a perfected society of individuals) that
most of us (judging from the great religions of the world) want as
human beings, and the impersonal “conceptual” experience of his book.
(5) The contradiction that exists between his intellectualism and
his commendable belief in “great convictions” and “really satisfying
emotions and experiences.” (6) The standing contradiction between his
“solipsistic” view of reality (his reduction of the universe to the
conceptual experience of a single self-perfecting individual), and the
facts of history in support of the idea of the “new,” or the “creative”
character of the contributions of countless individuals and groups of
individuals, to the evolution of the life of the world, or the life
of the infinite number of worlds that make up what we think of as the
universe. (7) The remarkable contradiction between Dr. Bosanquet’s
calm rejection in his argumentation of all “naïve ideas” and his own
naïve or Greek-like faith in reason, in the substantial existence of
the concept or the idea over and above the phenomena and the phenomenal
experiences which it is used to intepret.
Lastly, as for the matter of the _non-moralism or the essentially
anti-ethical character of_ “Individuality and Value,” this is a
characteristic of the book that should, as such, be partly apparent
from what has already been said, in respect of its main argument and
its main contentions, and in respect of the apparent contributions of
Pragmatism and Humanism to philosophy generally. The abstractionism
of the book, and the absence in it of any real provision for the
realities of purpose and of accomplishment (and even of “movement” and
“process” in any real sense of these words), are all obviously against
the interests of ethics and of conduct, as purposive, human action. So,
too, are the findings of the critics that Dr. Bosanquet’s “Absolute” is
not a reality (for, with Professor Taylor and others, man _must_[367]
have an Absolute, or a God, in _whom he can believe as real_) that
inspires to action and to motive on the part of ordinary human beings.
And it is also fatal to the ethical interests of his book that he does
not see with the pragmatists that our human actions and reactions must
be regarded as part of what we mean by “reality.” And so on.
Apart, however, from these and other hostile pre-suppositions the
following would seem to be the chief reasons for pronouncing, as
unsatisfactory, the merely incidental treatment that is accorded in
“Individuality and Value” to ethics and to the ethical life.
(1) It is not “conduct” or the _normative_[368] voluntary actions of
human beings (in a world or society of real human beings) requiring
“justice” and “guidance” and “help” that is discussed in these
Lectures, but abstractions like “desire,” or “ordinary desire,” or
“the selective conations of finite minds,” or “the active form of a
totality of striving” or [worst of all] the “self _as it happens to
be_,” that are discussed there.
(2) Even if conduct, as of course an “organic totality” in its way,
be faced for the nonce in “Individuality and Value,” it is invariably
branded and thought of by Dr. Bosanquet as “naïve morality,”[369] and
it is forthwith promptly transformed and transmuted, in the most open
and unabashed manner in the interests and exigencies of (1) logical
theory, (2) aesthetics and aesthetic products [perhaps Dr. Bosanquet’s
deepest or most emotional interest], and (3) metaphysical theory of a
highly abstract character.
(3) The conception of ethics as a “normative science” and of conduct as
free and autonomous,[370] and as the voluntary affirmation of a norm or
standard or type or ideal, is conspicuous by its absence.
(4) There is really no place either in Dr. Bosanquet’s “concrete
universal” or in his fugitive pages upon ethics for the reality of the
distinction between good and evil (as “willed” in actions or as present
in dispositions and tendencies). Good and evil[371] are for him,
“contents” either for himself as a spectator of man’s actions, or for
the “concrete universal,” or the “whole,” or the completed “individual”
of his too consummate book.
(5) Like nearly all forms of Absolutism (Hegelianism, Neo-Hegelianism,
Spinozism, Hobbism) Dr. Bosanquet’s ethics (or the vestigial ethics
with which he leaves us) comes perilously near to what is known as
Determinism[372] or Fatalism or even Materialism.
As for the first of the preceding five points, it is perfectly evident
that any discussion of the various psychological phenomena that are
doubtless involved in conduct can be regarded as but a preliminary step
to the discussion of the real problems of ethics--that of the actions
and habits and standards of persons who are the subjects of rights
and duties and who affirm certain actions to be right, and certain
other actions to be wrong. The point, however, about Dr. Bosanquet’s
psychological abstractionism, especially when it rises to the height
of writing as if the “self” as the “active form of a totality of
striving,” or the “self as it happens to be,” were the same thing
as the “personal self” with which we alone are mainly concerned in
ethics, is that it is but another instance of the old “spectator”[373]
fallacy that we have already found to underlie his whole treatment
of the “self” and of “purpose” and of “striving.” Such a philosophy,
or point of view, is quite foreign to ethics, because it is only in
the ethical life that we think of ourselves as “persons,” as beings
playing a part, as actors or players upon the great stage of life. By
not facing the ethical life directly, from within, instead of from
without, Dr. Bosanquet has entirely failed to understand it. And if he
had attempted this internal consideration of “personality,” his whole
metaphysic of “individuality” and of the great society of beings who
inhabit (or who may be thought of as inhabiting) this universe, would
have been very different from what it is.
Then as for the second and third points, it is surely evident from the
footnotes that have been appended in connexion with the matter of his
transformation of the facts of ethics in the interests of other things
like logic, and aesthetics, and metaphysics, that there is indeed,
in Bosanquet, no recognition of what must be called the genuine, or
independent reality of the moral life, or of the moral ideal as a
force in human nature. And as for the fourth point, students of modern
ethics are naturally by this time perfectly familiar with the tendency
of Rationalism to make evil action and the “evil self” simply the
affirmation of a “logically incoherent” point of view. It exists in an
English writer like Wollaston[374] as well as in a German philosopher
like Hegel. This tendency is indeed a piece of sophistry and illusion
because the distinction between good and evil, and the distinction
between right and wrong (perhaps the better and the more crucial
formulation of the two--for us moderns at least) is unintelligible
apart from the fact or the idea of the existence of moral agents, who
make (in their volition, and in the judgments that accompany or precede
their volitions) a “norm,” or rule, or line between the ethically
permissible and the ethically unpermissible. The rationalism that makes
these distinctions merely a matter of “logic,” overlooks the fact that
in actual life men must be warded off from wrong-doing (and they are
in many cases actually so warded off by their consciences and by other
things, like the love of home, or the love of honour, or the love of
God) by something stronger than the mere idea of a possible theoretical
mistake.
As for the fifth point of the Determinism or the Necessitarianism that
hangs like a sword of Damocles over the entire ethic of Dr. Bosanquet,
the nature of this should be perfectly apparent from many of the
statements and considerations that have been brought forward as typical
of his entire line of thought. He teaches a “passivism”[375] and an
“intellectualism” that are just as pronounced and just as essential to
his thought as they are to the great system of his master, Hegel, in
whose ambitious philosophy of spirit man’s whole destiny is unfolded
without the possibility of his playing himself any appreciable part in
the impersonal, dialectic movement in which it is made to consist.
It is now necessary to speak definitely and outspokenly of the
element of supreme truth and value in Dr. Bosanquet’s unique book,
of the positive contribution it makes to philosophy and to natural
theology.[376] This is, in a word, its tribute to the permanent element
of truth and reality in the idealistic philosophy. And he testifies
to this in his _“belief” that in the main the work of philosophy has
been done_, and “that what is now needed is to recall and concentrate
the modern mind from its distraction rather than to invent wholly new
theoretic conceptions.” This declaration is of itself a position of
considerable importance, however widely one is obliged to differ from
its author as to what exactly it is that has already been demonstrated
and accomplished “in philosophy.” If there has really been “nothing
done” in philosophy since the time of Socrates, if philosophy is
to-day no true antithesis of, and corrective to science, then there
is possible neither Pragmatism, nor Humanism, nor any other, possibly
more fundamental, philosophy. There can, as Dr. Bosanquet puts it,
“indeed be _no progress if no definite ground is ever to be recognized
as gained_.” This then is the first thing of transcendent importance
in “Individuality and Value,” its insistance upon the fundamentally
different estimate of reality given by philosophy in distinction
from science and its merely hypothetical treatment of reality. This
“difference” is, of course, but natural, seeing that to philosophy
there are no things or phenomena without minds, or persons or beings to
whom they appear as things and phenomena.
The second great thing of “Individuality and Value” is its insistence
upon the need to all philosophy of a recognized grasp of the principle
of “Meaning.”[377] What this instance implies to Dr. Bosanquet is,
that “_at no point in our lives_ [either] as [agents or] thinkers
are we to accept any supposed element of fact or circumstance as
having _any significance_” apart from the great “whole” or the great
“reality,” with which we believe ourselves to be in contact in our
daily experience, when interpreted in the light of our consciousness
of ourselves as persons. In the letter of the book his interpretation
of the great “whole,” or the great reality, of life is by no means
as broad and as deep as the one at which we have just hinted in
attempting to describe his position. But overriding altogether the
mere intellectualism of Dr. Bosanquet’s interpretation, is the fact
of the _dynamic idealism_ for which he virtually stands,[378] in
virtue of the great and the simple effort of his lectures[379] to find
“value” in “our daily experience with its _huge obstinate plurality of
independent facts_.” He would start, as we mentioned (at the beginning
of this chapter), with what he believes to be “the daily transformation
of our experience as verified within what we uncritically take as our
private consciousness, so far as its weakness may permit,” and “as
verified on a larger scale when we think of _such splendid creations as
the State and fine art and religion_,” and when we think, too, of “_the
mode of our participation in them_.” Now again nothing could indeed be
more nobly true (in idea) of the great work of the philosopher than the
proper theory and description of this “daily transformation” of our
lives, out of the life of “sense” and the life of selfishness, into the
spiritual communion[380] that is the essence of all right thinking and
all right living.
But we may go further than all this and signalize one or two things
in Dr. Bosanquet that we venture to construe as a kind of unconscious
testimony, on his part, to the very humanism for which we have been
contending throughout.
The things to which we refer are, firstly, his use of the word
“belief”[381] in speaking of his opinion that the work of philosophy
has in the main been accomplished, and, second, his fine and really
praiseworthy[382] confession that his lectures, whatever they may
have done or may not have done, at least “contain the record of a very
strong conviction.” Dr. Bosanquet’s departure, in the letter of his
argumentation, from the spirit of these declarations only accentuates
what we regard as the regrettable failure and abstractionism of his
whole official (or professed) philosophy.
His use of the word belief[383] shows that it is, after all his
professional homage to “mediation” and to the necessary abstractions
of logic and system, _belief and not knowledge_ that is to him the
final and “working” estimate of truth and of reality. And the same
conclusion follows from the second matter of the confession of which
we have spoken, that his entire argumentation is but the expression of
a strong conviction.[384] It is again, therefore, we would insist a
_spiritual conviction_, and not a conceptual system that is actually
and necessarily the moving force of _his_ entire intellectual activity.
And, we would add to his own face, it is a conviction moreover that
“_works_,” and not a “logical whole” or a mere conceptual ideal, that
he must (as a philosopher) engender in the mind of his average reader
about reality. His “logical whole” and his “individuality as logical
completeness,” “work” with him [Professor Bosanquet] for the reason
that he is primarily an intellectual worker, a worker in the realm of
mind. But reality (as the whole world of human work and human effort
is there to tell us) is more than an intellectual system. And what is
a conviction to him is not necessarily a conviction that works with
the ordinary man, who knows reality better than he does, or who knows
it (like himself) in his desires and in his beliefs rather than in the
terms and conceptions that are the mere tools of the intellect and the
specialist. For, taking his book as a whole, we may say about it that
the dissolution of reality into a conceptual system that is effected
there is at best but another convincing proof of the truth of the
words of the great David Hume,[385] that the understanding, “_when it
acts alone_, and according to its most general principles, _entirely
subverts itself_, and leaves not the slightest degree of evidence in
any proposition, either in philosophy or common life.”
NOTE
It is necessary for me to append a few words as to the possible
connexion between the foregoing criticism of the first volume of Dr.
Bosanquet’s _Gifford Lectures_ and the subject-matter of the second
volume, which appeared while I was preparing the manuscript of this
book for the press. I have been able only to inspect its contents
and to inform myself about the ways in which it has impressed some
of its representative critics. What I have thus learned does not,
in my opinion, make it necessary for me to unsay or to rewrite what
I have said in this chapter. My desire was to indicate the kind
of criticism that the pragmatists and the humanists, as far as I
understand them, would be inclined to make of Absolutism as represented
in the _Principle of Individuality and Value_ as the last significant
Anglo-Hegelian output. This, I think, I have done, and the reader may
be desirably left to himself to settle the question of the relation
of the first of Dr. Bosanquet’s books to its companion volume that
appeared in the following calendar year. I cannot, however, be so
wilfully blind to the existence of this second great “Gifford” book
of his as to appear to ignore the fact, that on its very face and
surface it seems to do many of the things that I have allowed myself
to signalize as things that Absolutism and Anglo-Hegelianism have not
done, or have done but imperfectly. Its very title, _The Value and
Destiny of the Individual_, and the titles of many of its chapters,
and the reception accorded to it in such instructive reviews as
those of Professor Sir Henry Jones and Professor Muirhead (in the
July numbers of the _Hibbert Journal_ and _Mind_ respectively),
are to my mind convincing proof that it is by far the most serious
Anglo-Hegelian attempt of the passing generation to deal with many of
the objections that have been brought against Rationalistic Idealism
by the pragmatists and the voluntarists, by the defenders of faith and
feeling and experience, and (before all these recent people) by many
independent idealist writers of our time in England and elsewhere.
In the interest of truth and of the thinking public generally, I
append the mere titles of some of the chapters and divisions of Dr.
Bosanquet’s second volume: “The Value of Personal Feeling, and the
Grounds of the Distinctness of Persons,” “The Moulding of Souls,” “The
Miracle of Will,” the “Hazards and Hardships of Finite Selfhood,”
the “Stability and Security of Finite Selfhood,” “The Religious
Consciousness,” “The Destiny of the Finite Self,” “The Gates of the
Future.” There is in all the rich content that is thus indicated,
and in all the high and deep discussion of “the ideas of a lifetime”
that it includes, a veritable mine of philosophical reflection
for the reader who desires to think in a connected, or Hegelian,
manner about things--a mine, too, that is at least indicative of the
wide territory both of fact and of principle upon which pragmatist
philosophy must enter before it can become a true philosophy. I cannot
find, however--this was surely not to be expected in a thinker of Dr.
Bosanquet’s power--that the principles of argumentation that determined
the nature and contents of the earlier volume have undergone any
modification in its success or successor; indeed, what is here offered,
and discovered by the reader and the critics, is but a continuation and
application of the same dialectic principles to “finite beings, that
is, in effect to human souls.” If any one will take upon himself the
task of estimating the success or the non-success of the enterprise
he will travel through a piece of philosophical writing that is as
comprehensive and as coherent, and as elevating in its tone, as
anything that has appeared from the Neo-Hegelian camp. The things that
I chiefly feel and believe about it are, firstly, that its account of
the facts of life and thought are, again, all determined by certain
presuppositions about conceivability and about the principles of
contradiction and negation; secondly, that it is still the same “whole”
of logic that is to it the test of all reality and individuality; and,
thirdly, that it is, again, a great pity that Dr. Bosanquet should not
have acted upon some sort of recognition of the relation of his own
dialectical principles to those of his master Hegel, or to those of
some of his Neo-Hegelian predecessors in England and America. Although
it is almost an impertinence on the part of one who has just made the
acquaintance of this outstanding volume to speak in any detail of its
contents, I can indicate part of my meaning by pointing out that it
is throughout such things as “finite mind,” the “finite mind” that is
“best understood by approaching it from the side of the continuum” [the
“whole”], the “finite mind” that is “shaped by the universe,” that
is “torn between existence and self-transcendence,” “appearance,” an
“externality which is the object of mind,” the “positive principle of
totality or individuality manifesting itself in a number of forms,”
“good” and “evil as attitudes concerning a creature’s whole being,”
“volition” in terms of the “principle that there is for every situation
a larger and more effective point of view than the given”--that are
discussed, and not the real persons who have _what they call_ “minds”
and “volitions” and “attitudes,” and who invent all these principles
and distinctions to describe the world of their experience and the
world of their thoughts. As against him Pragmatism and Humanism
would, I think, both insist that the first reality for all thought
and speculation is not the “logical whole” that underlies, in the
mind of the thinker, the greater number of all his categories and
distinctions, but the life and the lives of the persons in a world of
inter-subjective intercourse, wherein these points of view are used
for different purposes. And I cannot see how Dr. Bosanquet is entitled
to scorn all those who hold to the idea of the reality of the lives of
the persons who are agents and thinkers in this personal realm, which
is for us the highest reality of the universe, as believers in the
“exclusiveness of personality,” although I would certainly agree with
him that our experience, when properly interpreted, carries us beyond
the subjectivism and the individualism of some forms of Pragmatism or
Pluralism. The reader who is anxious to know about the real value of
the Hegelianism upon which Dr. Bosanquet’s philosophy reposes should
consult the work of Croce upon the “living” and the “dead” elements
in Hegel’s System. It has recently been translated into English. Dr.
Bosanquet, like many Hegelians, seems to me to overlook almost entirely
the important elements in the philosophy of Kant--of some of which
I speak of in the next chapter as developed in the spiritualistic
philosophy of Bergson.
CHAPTER IX
PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF BERGSON[386]
The pragmatist elements in the philosophy of Bergson of which
it is, perhaps, legitimate for us to speak here are (1) his
“Anti-Intellectualism,” and (2) his “Activism” or “Actionism.” The
latter culminates in his freedom-philosophy and his spiritualism. I
shall comment shortly upon these two things, and then suggest one or
two general criticisms of his philosophy as a whole.
Bergson’s anti-intellectualism rests ultimately upon his contention
that the human intellect is related in the main to the needs of action,
that the brain is an organ of action rather than an organ of thought,
that our intelligence is at home only in the realm of the physical and
the mathematical sciences,[387] that contrivance and invention and the
practical comprehension of the “material” are its proper activities,
and that for these latter purposes it splits up the world of the senses
and the understanding into a discontinuous aggregate of physical units,
which it then proceeds to reconstruct in a spatial and temporal order.
We perceive in Nature, he holds, what interests[388] us in the way of
our vital needs; our intellect is adapted, not for the understanding
or the purely rational (“abstract”) comprehension of “causality” and
the “life of things,” but for the maintenance and furtherance of our
own lives, and for the creation of the instruments and agencies (signs,
language, tools, imagined sequences and laws, essences, causes, the
“descriptions” of science, the special senses, the convolutions of the
brain, etc.) that minister to this. Science is to-day still penetrated
through and through with primitive metaphysics, with the metaphysics of
animism, with a belief in separate things like forces, atoms, elements,
or what not--indicative all of them of its attempt to “divide up” the
real that it may command it for theoretical and practical purposes. We
can see this in the “structural psychology”[389] of the day and its
analysis of our mental life into “elements,” in respect of the number
and character of which there are lasting differences of opinion among
the masters of the science--into “impressions,” and “affections,” and
sensations, images, memories, ideas, and so on. And we can see it, too,
in the erroneous attempts sometimes made by psychologists to treat
these entities as if they had clearly defined temporal and spatial
characteristics or qualities.
The supreme mistake of philosophy, according to Bergson, has been to
import into the domain of speculation a method of thinking that was
originally destined for action. It has forgotten that nearly all the
leading conceptions of common sense and of science and of “analysis”
have been invented, not for final and general, but for relative and
particular purposes. And it has fallen too readily under the influence
of a certain traditional view of the relations between metaphysics
and science--the view, namely, that philosophy should just take
the findings of science and of common-sense about the world as its
initial material, subjecting them, of course, to a certain preliminary
reinterpretation, but finally reconstructing them, almost as they
were, into a system.[390] The one thing, in short, that philosophy
has failed to understand is the life and the movement and the process
of the world, as an infinitely more important fact than the endless
terms and conceptions and entities (“will,” “reason,” “Ideas,” etc.)
into which it has been analysed. We might sum up the whole by saying
that Bergson’s anti-intellectualism is simply a protest, not against
the use, but only against the “systematic misuse”[391] of general
conceptions that have been current in science and philosophy “since the
time of Socrates,” a protest, however, that in his case is not merely
general and negative, but particularised and positive.[392]
Like any and all anti-intellectualism, Bergson’s anti-intellectualism
is liable to serious misinterpretation, and it is currently
misinterpreted and misrepresented as “irrationalism.” His intention,
however, is not to destroy and to condemn philosophy and reasoning, and
to exalt mere intuition and faith, but rather to “liberate”[393] our
human consciousness of ourselves and of the world from the dogmatism
of what he regards to be the utilitarian intellect, from the many
hopeless contradictions and antinomies and puzzles of the mere analytic
understanding. Philosophy, in particular, he would free from the last
traces and symptoms of scientific rationalism, although fully aware of
the fact that our modern philosophy had its very departure from the
rationalism of the great founders of modern science like Kepler and
Galileo and the rest.
He would strike at the roots of all this confident rationalism or
scientific philosophy by opening up a broader and a deeper view of
truth than that afforded to the merely piece-meal and utilitarian view.
As for the Actionism and the action philosophy of Bergson, this is
perhaps more in line than any other tendency of the day with the
new life and the new thought of the twentieth century, although
(like Pragmatism) it stands in need of correction or revision by the
principles of a sound ethical philosophy, by the Idealism that is not,
and cannot be, the mere creation of to-day or yesterday. In essence it
is, to begin with, but an extension to the mind as a whole and to all
its so-called special faculties (“sensation,” “perception,” “memory,”
“ideation,” “judgment,” “thinking,” “emotion,” and the rest) of the
“dynamic,”[394] instead of the older, static point of view that the
recent science of our time has applied to matter and to life, and that
Pragmatism and the “hypothetical method” have sought to apply to all
the ordinary conceptions and constructions that exist in the different
domains of the different sciences.[395] It is also, from our point of
view, as we may see, an attempt at the expression, in the terms of
a comparatively simple philosophy, of many of the considerations in
respect of knowledge and conduct that have been brought forward in the
preceding pages of this book. We have already dwelt in different ways,
for example, upon the fact that there is no perception or sensation
without an organic reaction on the part of the percipient or the
sentient being, that an idea is in a sense a motor attitude (a way
of comprehending particulars or particular facts in relation to our
purposes and our ends), that a logical judgment represents a “division”
of the real, or of the processes of Nature, for some purpose or other,
that our whole mental life is purposive, that there is no “pure”
cognition without attendant emotion and[396] volition, that it is in
action that desire and thought come together, that our whole knowledge
of the world is necessarily a knowledge of it in terms of our purposes
and our highest attitudes, and so on. All of this is, as it were, an
indication of the psychological and the logical considerations upon
which Bergson bases his positive,[397] activistic, philosophy of mind.
It is to be remembered in Bergson’s interest that when we speak of his
Actionism[398] we do not mean a narrowing down[399] on his part of
the activities of the soul to physical labour and to mere utilitarian
effort, but its capacity, also, for that creative activity which he
takes to be the very keynote of personal life and the evolutionary
process.
As for the freedom-philosophy with which Bergson’s Actionism is to be
associated, this is worked out by him, firstly, in the most perfect
correspondence with what he believes to be the facts of life and
mind; and, secondly, in terms of that anti-rationalism (or hostility
to the merely scientific intellect) which is his working theory of
knowledge. His views upon this subject have also been depreciated and
misunderstood by some of his opponents who attack what they call his
“intuitional” treatment of the freedom-question--his insistence upon
the direct intuition of our life that we have when we act consciously,
and when we are “most ourselves”--when we act out “freely” our own
nature. To him the primary fact for any human being is the life-impulse
that is both instinctive and reflective, that is certainly far more
of a fundamental reality than any of those entities or concepts
(“cells,” “atoms,” “forces,” “laws,” or what not) which, with Kant, he
clearly sees to be the creation of the intellect for its descriptive
and practical purposes. This life is “free” in the sense that we are
not “determined” by any or all of those forces and laws to which our
intellect subjects everything else, but which it cannot apply to the
life that is more than mere matter, that is a real becoming and a real
process, a real creation and development.
The “spiritualism,” again, of his interpretation of this life and
activity rests, to begin with, upon his opinion that the very inception
of the activity, and the adjustment, and the selection in which the
simplest life-effort, and the simplest perception of a living being
consist, indicate the presence and the operation of a controlling
agency,[400] or mind, or principle of spiritual “choice” that is not,
and cannot be, explained on the principles of a mechanical science
or philosophy. This principle is, in a word, the life-force, or the
creative activity, the _élan vital_ of which we read so much in his
books, that has “seized upon matter,” vitalizing it into force and
energy, into the “play” upon each other of all the varied activities
and grades and forms of the will to live, and into the various forms of
socialized and co-operative living on the part of animals and men. We
shall immediately remark upon the matter of the apparent limitations
of this spiritual philosophy of life, or reality, that is here but
indicated or stated.
One of its essential features, so far as we are at present concerned,
is his claim that his introduction of a spiritual principle into the
life-force, or the creative activity that has expressed itself in the
various grades and forms of life, both animal and human, is not a
phase of the old philosophy[401] or theology of “final causes” or of a
predetermined[402] “teleology.” To this old finalism or teleology[403]
the life of organic nature (the “organs” and “cells,” the “instinctive”
actions, and the “adjustments” of animals, and so on) were all due to
the work of a pre-existing, calculating intelligence operating upon
matter; whereas to him they are but different expressions or creations
of the life-force that is as little predetermined in organic evolution,
as it is in the realm of the activities interpreted for us (in part)
by the newer physics and the newer chemistry--in the processes, for
example, that are exemplified in the generation of a star out of a
nebula. This entire treatment, however, of the notion of purpose in
nature is a matter of great difficulty in the philosophy of Bergson,
and his own thought (as I shall presently state) is apt to strike us
as just as hypothetical as some of the views he attempts to combat.
It raises, too, the question of the valuation of his philosophy as a
whole, and of its relation to the great thinker who still stands in the
very centre of the entire modern movement from Copernicus to Comte and
Darwin--Immanuel Kant.[404]
We shall best get at the matter of the fuller developments of the
philosophy of Bergson that are of interest to us at present, by
indicating some of the results that would accrue from it to the
constructive philosophy in which we are interested as the outcome of
Pragmatism and Idealism. Among these would be, firstly, a new and a
fresh, and yet a perfectly rational apprehension of the fact of the
necessarily abstract and hypothetical[405] character of the analyses
to which our world is subjected by the science and by the technic and
the supposed “economy” of our present culture.[406] Then an equally
new and equally rational (or “rationally grounded”) conviction of
the inadequacy of the physical and the scientific categories to the
comprehension and the explanation of life and of the life of the
spirit. Thirdly, a confirmation of many of the tendencies to which
the Pragmatism and the Voluntarism and the Humanism of the last
century have given a more or less one-sided and imperfect formulation.
Among such confirmed tendencies are (α) the attempt they have all
made to attain to a deeper[407] view of human nature than the view
hitherto taken by rationalism and intellectualism, (β) their emphasis
upon the freedom and the initiative[408] of the individual and
upon the necessity, on the part of philosophy, of a “dynamic” or
“motive-awakening”[409] theory of reality, (γ) their insistence[410]
similarly upon the necessity to our thought of a _direct contact_ with
reality, and upon the impossibility of our beginning in philosophy
without assumptions of one kind or another, (δ) their refusal to make
any ultimate separation[411] between the intellect and the will,
between the highest thought and the highest emotion, (ε) their tendency
to regard belief[412] rather than knowledge as our fundamental
estimate of truth and reality.
A fourth constructive result, however, of the philosophy of Bergson
would be not the mere confirmation of any number of pragmatist and
humanist tendencies, but their integration, and their transformation
into the evidences and the manifestation of a new spiritual philosophy
of life and of the universe generally. It is this possible _quasi_
integration and transformation of so many of the tendencies of
Pragmatism and Voluntarism and of the Philosophy of Science of the day,
that makes Bergson the greatest of all the pragmatists--although the
term hardly occurs in his main writings, and although he breathes from
first to last the air of an idealism[413] and a spiritualism that is
above and beyond all the mere instrumentalism, and the mere empiricism
and the ethical opportunism of Pragmatism.
* * * * *
The following are some of the difficulties and counter-considerations
that stand in the way of the intelligibility and the supposed
novelty of the philosophy of Bergson. (1) It is in some respects
but a biological philosophy after all, a would-be philosophical
interpretation of the “evolutionary process” which takes many things
for granted and ignores many difficulties. Some of these things are
the life-force itself, the _élan de vie_, the vital aspects that he
sees in the forces of nature, the “eternal movement” of which he
is always speaking as the only reality and as the very life of the
universe, the whole “adaptation” philosophy that characterises his own
teleology despite his attacks on “mechanism” and on “finalism,” and
so on. One is tempted, indeed, to think that in much of all this he
forgets his own doctrine of the hypothetical character of science and
philosophy, and that, in his very anxiety to escape from mechanism and
from rationalism, and Paleyism, he credits Nature with a contingency
and a “freedom”[414] that corresponds in their way to the chaos, of
which the Greeks thought as a necessary background to the cosmos. He
seems, in other words, to deify into a kind of eternal “becoming” and a
_quasi_ free and creative “duration,” his own (necessary) inability to
grasp the system of things.
Then, secondly, there is a veritable crop of difficulties that arise
out of his contention that our intellect is adapted “only to matter.”
What, for example, of the various non-utilitarian[415] intuitions
of art and morality and religion, that are as undoubtedly facts of
our conscious experience as is our comprehension and utilisation of
“matter” for the various purposes of civilisation?[416] If it be
literally true that our understanding is “incapacitated” for the
comprehension of life and of the creative activities of the soul, a
new set of categories and a higher form of intelligence (than the
merely material) must be elaborated for this special purpose. And if
this higher form of intelligence be the “intuition” of which Bergson
undoubtedly makes so much, then he must be more careful than he often
is in suggesting that intuition and a philosophy of our intuitions
“must go _counter to the intellect_.”[417] His theory of art reduces
itself, for example, in the main to the negative contention that
spiritual perception is always simply “anti-mechanical,”[418] simply
the power of seeing things in another way than that of the engineer or
the craftsman, the _homo faber_.
Thirdly, there are many dualisms or oppositions in his doctrine or
expressed teaching, reducible all of them to the one great Cartesian
dualism between the mind and the matter that are said by him to
intersect in memory, and in perception, and in the life of the
spirit generally--the opposition, for example, between instinct and
intelligence, that between intelligence and intuition,[419] between the
“mechanical” and the “organic,” between the “upward” and the “downward”
movements that he attributes to the life-force. And there is a striking
inconsistency between his apparent acceptance of the teaching of Kant
in respect of the limitations of the physical and the temporal way of
looking at things (ourselves included and our actions) and his belief
in an eternal “duration,”[420] or movement, or process of which he
is always speaking as the very life and texture of everything. This
“real” or “pure” “duration” is a thing that troubles all students of
his philosophy; it seems to make Bergson believe in what James talked
of as a “strung-along” universe. And there is an inconsistency between
the supremacy that he seems willing to accord to mind and spirit in the
case of the new individuals who are always being born into the world,
and the absence of a similar supremacy (or determining rôle) in the
case of the mind or spirit without whose existence and operation the
universe is unthinkable.[421]
As for the latter contradiction, we may note in his favour that he
talks, at least once or twice, of “God” as “unceasing life”[422] and
“active freedom,” and I am inclined to take this master thought as
possibly a kind of foundation for his rich and suggestive philosophy
of life and reality. But there is in his writings nothing like the
thorough-going attempt that we find in the philosophy of Aristotle[423]
to ground the motion and the life of the world in God as its final
cause and its ultimate explanation. Equally little is there in Bergson
a thorough-going attempt to work out the Idealism[424] upon which his
whole system reposes--his initial conception of objects as “images,”
or “ideas” for a consciousness, or for the life-force, or for the
different “centres of activity” with which he peoples the worlds.
Fourthly, there is the drawback from the point of view of social
philosophy about the thought of Bergson to which we have already made
reference--that it lacks somehow the ethical and the social idealism
that would warrant us in thinking of it as a worthy rival or substitute
for the philosophy of history of the great idealists of the past and
the present. It is necessary to speak here with the utmost caution if
we would avoid doing injustice[425] to Bergson. We cannot mean, for
example, that he does not do justice[426] to the social factor in human
development of which we have heard so much, perhaps too much, from the
sociologists.[427] We might mean, however, and we do in a sense mean
that he has not made as much as he might have done of this factor,
by developing for the thought of to-day the reality of that world of
“spiritual communion” and “inter-subjective intercourse” of which we
have spoken more than once.
Then we might also contend that Bergson has not as yet, in his
philosophy of human life, taken much cognizance of the deeper[428]
experiences of life, of the specifically ethical and religious feelings
and thoughts of men. With the pragmatists he is unduly optimistic
about the free expansive development of the individual. Against this
objection it may be replied, that he has so thoroughly assimilated
into the very texture of his thought and feeling some of the finest
things in the spiritualism and the idealism of the reflective thought
of France[429] that we would not, if we could, wish the germinal or
fructifying elements in his system to be different from what they are.
His “social” message is perhaps after all the best thing that it can
be--the need of the inward spiritualization of the life and thought of
the individual.
Lastly, in addition to the fine traditional spiritualism and
libertarianism of French philosophy, we may think of the voluntarism
of Kant and Schopenhauer as also militating somewhat against the idea
of Bergson’s originality[430] in philosophy. Despite this it is still
possible to regard him as one of important, modern, exponents of just
that development of the Kantian philosophy that became imperative after
Darwinism. He has indeed inaugurated for us that reading of the “theory
of knowledge” in terms of the “theory of life”[431] which is his true
and real continuation of the critical work of Kant. Hypothetical
although it may be in many respects, it moves (owing to his thorough
absorption in the many facts and theories of the biology of recent
years) in an atmosphere that is altogether above the confines of the
physical and the mathematical[432] sciences with which alone Kant was
(in the main) directly acquainted. It is time that, with the help he
affords in his free handling of the facts of life and of the supposed
facts and theories of science, we should transform the exiguous
“epistemology”[433] of the past generation into the more perfect hold
upon “criticism” and upon the life of things that is represented in his
thought.
CONCLUDING REMARKS
Enough has now been said in the foregoing pages about Pragmatism and
the philosophy of Actionism in relation to Rationalism, and to the
Personalism and the Humanism that they would substitute for it and for
Absolutism. Indications have been given too of the shortcomings and
the defects of this very Personalism or Humanism, and of some of the
different lines along which it would require to be reconsidered and
developed to constitute a satisfactory philosophy. In addition to some
of the greater names in the history of philosophy, I have referred--in
the footnotes and elsewhere--to the thoughts and the works of living
writers who might be profitably studied by the reader in this connexion.
Pragmatism is in some respects but a sociological or an anthropological
doctrine significant of the rediscovery by our age of the doctrine
of man, and of its desire to accord to this doctrine the importance
that is its due. It represented, to begin with (in its Instrumentalism
chiefly), the discontent of a dying century with the weight of its own
creations in the realm of science and theory along with a newer and
fresher consciousness of the fact that there can be no rigid separation
of philosophy from the general thought and practice of mankind. And
even if we accept this idea of the supremacy of the doctrine of man
over both philosophy and science, this does not mean that we exalt the
worker and the prophet over all knowledge, but simply that philosophy
must have a theory of reality that provides for their existence and
function alongside of those of the thinker or the student as such. The
true philosophy is in fact the true doctrine of man.
Another lesson that we may learn from Pragmatism and Humanism is
the truth of the contention that there can be no philosophy without
assumptions of one kind or another, without facts and intuitions and
immediate experiences. A philosophy itself is an act or a creation,
representative of the attention of the thinker to certain aspects of
his experience and of the experience of the world which he shares with
other thinkers and with other agents. And, as Bergson has reminded
us, it is often the great intuition underlying the attention and the
thought of a philosopher that is of more worth to the world than the
dialectic, or the logic, through the aid of which it is set forth and
elaborated. This latter he may frequently have inherited or absorbed
from the schools of his time.
The reason why the idealists and the dialecticians of our time have
so often fought shy of beginning with the immediate or the “given,”
is partly that they are not yet in their thoughts perfectly free of
some taint or tincture of the supposed realism or dualism of the
common-sense philosophy or the correspondence view of truth. They
seem to have the fear that if they admit a given element of fact
in speculation they will unconsciously be admitting that there is
something outside thought and immediate experience in the true sense
of these terms. In this fear they are forgetful of the great lesson of
Idealism that there is nothing “outside” thought and consciousness,
no “object” without a “subject,” that the world is “phenomenal” of a
great experience, which they and other men are engaged in interpreting,
and of which we may all become directly conscious. And while to God
the end of all experiences and processes is known from the beginning,
or apart from the mere time and space limitations that affect us as
finite beings, it is still true that for us as men and as thinkers the
reality of things is not “given” apart from the contribution to it that
we ourselves make in our responsive and in our creative activity. In
contending, therefore, for the reality, in every philosophy, of this
assumption of ourselves and of the working value of our thought and
of our activity, Pragmatism has been contending in its own fashion
for the great doctrine of the sovereignty of the spirit which (when
properly interpreted) is the one thing that can indeed recall the
modern mind out of its endless dispersion and distraction, and out of
its reputed present indifference. It is in the placing of this great
reality before the world, or, rather, of the view of human nature that
makes it a possibility, and in intelligibility, that (in my opinion)
the significance of Pragmatism consists, along with that of the various
doctrines with which it may be naturally associated. There are many
indications in the best thought and practice of our time that humanity
is again awakening to a creative and a self-determinative view of
itself, of its experience, and of its powers. Of the presuppositions
and the conditions under which this idea may be regarded as true and
intelligible I have already spoken. Its proper interpretation, however,
along with the exposition of the metaphysic upon which it must be
made to repose, is at least part of the work of the philosophy of the
future--if philosophy is true to its task of leading and guiding the
thought of mankind.
FOOTNOTES
[1] See, for example, the concessions and the fresh statements of the
problem of philosophy, and the “clearing of the ground,” etc., referred
to on p. 76 and p. 74. Also p. 27 in reference to the stir and the
activity that have been excited by the pragmatist controversy. See also
p. 230, in the eighth chapter, in reference to some things in such a
typical intellectualist as Professor Bosanquet that may be construed as
a concession to Pragmatism and Humanism.
[2] Dr. Edward Caird affirmed in his memoir of his brother (Principal
John Caird) that idealists admit some pragmatist charges.
[3] Professor Stein, a contemporary European authority, to whom we
shall again refer below, says, for example, in his well-known articles
in the _Archiv für Philosophie_ (1908), in reference to Pragmatism,
that we have had nothing like it [as a ‘movement’] “since Nietzsche”
(“Der Pragmatismus,” p. 9).
[4] See Chapter VIII., where I discuss the natural theology that bases
itself upon these supposed principles of a “whole of truth” and the
“Absolute.”
[5] This statement I think would be warranted by the fact of the
tendency of the newer physical science of the day to substitute an
electrical, for the old material, or corpuscular, conception of matter,
or by the admission, for example, of a contemporary biologist of
importance (Verworn, _General Physiology_, p. 39) that “all attempts
to explain the psychical by the physical must fail. The actual problem
is ... not in explaining psychical by physical phenomena but rather in
reducing to its psychical elements physical, like all other psychical
phenomena.”
[6] See p. 81, and p. 150.
[7] See Chapter V. pp. 136, 138, where we examine, or reflect upon, the
ethics of Pragmatism.
[8] The importance of these volumes in the matter of the development,
in the minds of thinking people everywhere, of a dynamic and an organic
(instead of the older rationalistic and intellectualistic) conception
of religion and of the religious life cannot possibly be overestimated.
Of course it is only right to add here that such a dynamic and organic
view of religion is the property not only of Professor James and his
associates, but also of the army of workers of to-day in the realms of
comparative religion and anthropology.
[9] _Pragmatism_, p. 300.
[10] Or an admission like the following in the _Meaning of Truth_
(p. 243): “It may be that the truest of all beliefs shall be that in
transsubjective realities.”
[11] _Meaning of Truth_, p. 124, 5.
[12] See p. 40 and p. 149.
[13] _Pragmatism_, pp. 244–245.
[14] _A Pluralistic Universe_, p. 34.
[15] In respect of James’ later doctrine of “radical empiricism” we
may quote, for the sake of intelligibility, from Professor Perry
(his friend and literary executor) the following: “James’ empiricism
means, then, first, that ideas are to be tested by direct knowledge,
and, second, that knowledge is limited to what can be presented.
There is, however, a third consideration which is an application of
these, and the means of avoiding a difficulty which is supposed to
be fatal to them. This is what James calls ‘radical empiricism,’ the
discovery that ‘the relations between things, conjunctive as well as
disjunctive, are just as much matters of direct particular experience,
neither more nor less so, than the things themselves.’ ‘Adjacent
minima of experience’ are united by the ‘persistent identity of
certain units, or emphases, or points, or objects, or members ... of
the experience-continuum.’ Owing to the fact that the connexions of
things are thus found along with them, it is unnecessary to introduce
any substance below them, or any subject above them, to hold things
together” (_Present Philosophical Tendencies_, p. 365). In regard to
this radical empiricism, I am obliged, as a Kantian, to say that, to my
mind, it represents the reduction of all Pragmatism and Empiricism to
an impossibility--to the fatuous attempt (exploded for ever by Hume) to
attempt to explain knowledge and experience _without first principles_
of some kind or another. It is a “new Humism,” a thing which no one
who has penetrated into the meaning of Hume’s _Treatise_ can possibly
advocate. A philosophy without first principles, or a philosophy that
reduces the relations between experiences to mere “bits” of experience,
is indeed no philosophy at all.
[16] See p. 82 and p. 154.
[17] The Preface, pp. xv., xix.
[18] See p. 159 and p. 212.
[19] As for Dr. Schiller’s charge that Absolutism is essentially
“irreligious” in spite of the fact of its having been (in England)
religious at the outset, the best way of meeting this is to insist that
it is mainly in its form, rather than its content, that Absolutism is
(or was) irreligious in both Germany and England.
[20] British students of philosophy are quite well aware that it was
the religious and the spiritual motive that seemed to weigh most
with Hutchison Stirling and John Caird and Green in their attempts
(thirty years ago) to introduce German transcendental philosophy to
their fellow-countrymen. Stirling was impressed with the idea of a
working correspondence between Hegelianism and Calvinism. John Caird’s
animus was against the agnosticism of Herbert Spencer and of Mansel,
and he found inspiration in this connexion in Hegel’s treatment of
Kant’s theory of the limitations of the understanding. And to Green
the attractive thing about Kant was his vindication of a “spiritual
principle” in “nature,” and in “knowledge,” and in “conduct,” a
principle which rendered absurd the naturalism of the evolutionary
philosophy. Friends of this spiritualistic interpretation of German
Critical Rationalism find its richest and fullest expression in
the books of Edward Caird upon the _Evolution of Religion_ and the
_Evolution of Theology in the Greek Philosophers_.
[21] The idea of a left wing is generally associated in the minds of
British students with the destructive criticism of Mr. Bradley in
_Appearance and Reality_, in which many, or most, of our ordinary
ways of regarding reality (our beliefs in “primary” and “secondary”
qualities of matter, in “space” and “time,” in “causation,” “activity,”
a “self,” in “things in themselves,” etc.) are convicted of “fatal
inconsistencies.” See, however, Professor Pringle-Pattison’s
instructive account of his book in _Man’s Place in the Cosmos_,
bringing out the positive side. The “left” is represented too, now, in
Dr. Bosanquet’s _Individuality and Value_, which we examine below as
the last striking output of British transcendentalism or absolutism.
See in this entire connexion Professor James Seth’s recent account of
the “Idealist Answers to Hume” in his _English Philosophy and Schools
of Philosophy_.
[22] See p. 244. I find a confirmation of this idea in what a biologist
like Professor Needham treats of as the “autogenetic nature of
responses” (_General Biology_, p. 474) in animals.
[23] See the _Studies in Humanism_ for all the positions referred to,
or quoted, or paraphrased, in these two paragraphs.
[24] This is an important essay. It reminds the modern reader, for one
thing, of the importance of the natural theology of Aristotle. It is
an anticipation, too, in its way, of the tendency of modern physics to
substitute a dynamic for a static conception of matter, or atoms, or
substance. In it Dr. Schiller points out how Aristotle’s doctrine of
a perfect and self-perfecting Activity [an ἐνέργεια that is not mere
change or motion, but a perfect “life” involving the disappearance of
“time” and imperfection] is in a sense the solution of the old [Greek]
and the modern demand for the substance or essence of things. We shall
take occasion (in speaking of the importance to Philosophy of the
concept of activity, and in speaking of the Philosophy of Bergson) to
use the same idea, to which Dr. Schiller has given an expression in
this essay, of God as the eternal or the perfect life of the world.
[25] For a favourable estimate of the services of Dr. Schiller in
regard to Pragmatism and Humanism the reader may consult the articles
of Captain Knox in the _Quarterly Review_, 1909.
[26] _Studies in Humanism_, p. 19. The remarks made in this paragraph
will have to be modified, to some extent, in view of the recent
(1911) appearance of the third edition of Dr. Schiller’s _Riddles of
the Sphinx_. This noteworthy book contains, to say the very least,
a great deal in the way of a positive ontology, or theory of being,
and also many quite different rulings in respect of the nature of
metaphysic and of the matter of its relation to science and to common
sense. It rests, in the main, upon the idea of a perfect society of
perfected individuals as at once the true reality and the end of the
world-process--an idea which exists also, at least in germ, in the
pluralistic philosophy of Professor James; and we shall indeed return
to this practical, or sociological, philosophy as the outcome, not only
of Pragmatism, but also of Idealism, as conceived by representative
living thinkers. Despite, however, these many positive and constructive
merits of this work of Dr. Schiller’s, it is for many reasons not
altogether unfair to its spirit to contend that his philosophy is
still, in the main, that of a humanistic pragmatism in which both
“theory” and “practice” are conceived as experimentally and as
hypothetically as they are by Professor Dewey.
[27] See p. 106.
[28] See Professor Bawden’s book upon Pragmatism.
[29] _Pragmatism_, p. 58.
[30] _Ibid._ 76.
[31] _Studies in Logical Theory_, p. 2.
[32] I endeavour to indicate what this Humanism and Personalism may be
in my sixth chapter.
[33] _Journ. of Phil. Psychol._, 1906, p. 338.
[34] From vol. ii. (p. 322) of Baldwin’s _Dictionary of Philosophy_.
Dr. C. S. Peirce, formerly a teacher of mathematics and philosophy at
Johns Hopkins University, was made by James into the father or patron
saint of Pragmatism. James confesses to have been stimulated into
Pragmatism by the teachings of Peirce.
[35] _Journ. of Phil. Psy._, 1906, p. 340.
[36] See pp. 78, 148; and in reference to the last striking
presentation of Absolutism, p. 230.
[37] See Bourdeau, _Pragmatisme et Modernisme_, and W. Riley in the
_Journ. of Phil. Psy._, April and May 1911; the James article, _Journ.
of Phil._, 1906; _Journ. of Phil._, 1907, pp. 26–37, on Papini’s
“Introduction to Pragmatism”; _The Nation_ (N.Y.), November 1907, on
“Papini’s view of the ‘daily tragedy’ of life.”
[38] Reported to have been inaugurated by a Franco-Italian poet,
Martinetti. Of the question of any possible connexion between this
“Futurism” with the present Art movement bearing the same name I know
nothing definite.
[39] I refer to the recent volume dedicated by some of his old pupils
to Professor Garman--a celebrated teacher of philosophy in one of the
older colleges of the United States.
[40] The two large volumes on the _Psychology of Adolescence_.
[41] The _Psychology of Religion_.
[42] Even such a book--and it is no doubt in its way a genuine and a
noteworthy book--as Harold H. Begbie’s _Twice-born Men_ is pointed to
by this wing as another instance of the truth of pragmatist principles
in the sphere of experimental religion. Schopenhauer, by the way,
was inclined to estimate the efficacy of a religion by its power
of affecting the will, of converting men so that they were able to
overcome the selfish will to live. See my _Schopenhauer’s System in its
Philosophical Significance_.
[43] See, for example, the declaration of James and Schiller (in the
prefaces to their books and elsewhere) in respect of their attitudes
to the work of men like Renouvier, Poincaré, Milhaud, Wilbois, Le
Roy, Blondel, Pradines, the valuable reports of M. Lalande to the
_Philosophical Review_ (1906–7–8), the articles of Woodbridge Riley
in the _Journal of Philosophy_ (1911) upon the continental critics
of Pragmatism, the books of Bourdeau, Hebert, Rey, Tonquedoc, Armand
Sabatier, Schinz, Picard, Berthelot, those of Poincaré, Renouvier,
Pradines, and the rest, the older books upon nineteenth-century French
philosophy by men like Fouillée, Levy-Bruhl, etc. There are also
valuable references upon the French pragmatists in Father Walker’s
_Theories of Knowledge_ (in the Stoneyhurst Series), and in Professor
Inge’s valuable little book upon _Faith and its Psychology_.
[44] The outstanding representative in France during the entire second
half of the nineteenth century of “Neo-Criticism” or “Neo-Kantianism,”
a remarkable and comprehensive thinker, to whose influence, for
example, James attributed a part of his mental development. His review,
the _Critique Philosophique_, was a worthy (idealist) rival of the
more positivistically inclined, and merely psychological, review of
Ribot, the _Revue Philosophique_. French Neo-Kantianism, holding, as
Renouvier does, that Kant’s ethics is the keystone of his system,
is not in general inclined to the “positivism” or the “scientific”
philosophy of some of the German Neo-Kantians. The critical work of
Renouvier proposes some very ingenious and systematic rearrangements
of Kant’s philosophy of the categories, and his freedom-philosophy
must certainly have done a good deal (along with the work of others)
to create the atmosphere in which Bergson lives and moves to-day.
With Renouvier, Neo-Kantianism merges itself too in the newer
philosophy of “Personalism,” and he wrote, indeed, an important book
upon this very subject (_Le Personnalisme_, 1902). In this work, we
find a criticism of rationalism that anticipates Pragmatism, the
author explicitly contending for a substitution of the principle of
“rational belief” instead of the “false principle” of demonstrable or
_a priori_ “evidence.” Consciousness, he teaches, is the foundation
of existence, and “personality” the first “causal principle” of the
world (although admitting “creation” to be beyond our comprehension).
He examines critically, too, the notions of the “Absolute” and of the
“Unconditioned,” holding that they should not be substantiated into
entities. “Belief” is involved in “every act,” he teaches--also another
pragmatist doctrine. And like his great predecessor Malebranche,
and like our English Berkeley, he teaches that God is our “natural
object,” the true “other” of our life. The philosophy of Personalism,
the foundations of which are laid in this work, is further developed
by Renouvier in a comprehensive work which he published in 1899,
in conjunction with M. Prat, on _The New Monadology_ (_La Nouvelle
Monadologie_). This is one of the most complete presentations of a
philosophy of “Pluralism” that is at the same time a “Theism”--to be
associated, in my opinion, say, with the recent work of Dr. James Ward
upon the _Realm of Ends_, referred to on p. 162.
[45] _Philos. Rev._ (1906), article by Lalande.
[46] H. Poincaré (talked of in recent scientific circles as one of the
greatest mathematicians of history) is (he died about a year ago),
so far as our present purpose is concerned, one of the important
scientific writers of the day upon the subject of the “logic of
hypotheses,” and of the “hypothetical method” in science--the method
which the pragmatists are so anxious to apply to philosophy. He seems
(see his _La Science et l’Hypothèse_, as well as the later book, _La
Valeur de la Science_, referred to by Lalande in his professional
reports to the _Philosophical Review_) to accept to some extent the
idea of the “hypothetical” character of the constructions of both the
mathematical and the physical sciences, believing, however, at the same
time that we must not be “unduly sceptical” about their conclusions,
revealing as they do something of the “nature of reality.” He discusses
among other topics the theory of “energetics” of which we speak below
in the case of Ostwald. He insists, too, upon the idea that the real
is known only by “experience,” and that this “experience” includes the
comparison of the thoughts of many minds. And yet he believes to some
extent in the Kantian theory of the _a priori_ element in knowledge
(see _La Science_, etc., p. 64). It is, however, quite unnecessary for
me to presume to enter into the large subject of the precise nature of
“hypotheses” in the mathematical and the physical sciences.
[47] A professor of mathematics in Paris and an ardent Bergsonian, and
along with Laberthonnière one of the prominent Catholic defenders of
Pragmatism and Modernism, author of a book on _Dogmatism and Criticism_
(_Dogme et Critique_). Not having had the time to examine this book, as
somewhat removed from my immediate subject, I append for the benefit
of the reader the following statements and quotations from the useful
book _Faith and its Psychology_, by Professor Inge of Cambridge. It
is easy to see that the positions represented therein would give rise
to controversy as to the historicity or fact of Christianity. “Le Roy
gives us some examples of this Catholic Pragmatism. When we say ‘God is
personal,’ we mean ‘behave in our relations with God as you do in your
relations with a human person.’ When we say, ‘Jesus is risen from the
dead,’ we mean ‘treat him as if he were your contemporary.’... His main
theses may be summed up in his own words. ‘The current intellectualist
conception renders insoluble most of the objections which are now
raised against the idea of dogma. A doctrine of the primacy of action,
on the contrary, permits us to solve the problem without abandoning
anything of the rights of thought or of the exigencies of dogma.’” Le
Roy, by the way, has published a book upon the philosophy of Bergson,
which is said to be the best book upon the subject. It has been
translated into English.
[48] M. Abel Rey, author of a work on the _Theory of Physical Science
in the hands of Contemporary Scientists_ (_La Théorie de la physique
chez les physiciens contemporains_). In this book (I have not had the
time to examine it carefully) M. Rey examines the theories and methods
of Newton, and also of modern thinkers like Mach and Ostwald, reaching
the conclusion that the philosophy with which physical science is most
compatible is a “modified form of Positivism,” which bears a striking
resemblance to “Pragmatism” and the “philosophy of experience.” The
English reader will find many useful references to Rey in the pages of
Father Leslie J. Walker’s _Theories of Knowledge_, in the “Stoneyhurst
Philosophical Series.”
[49] _Ibidem._
[50] It was impossible to procure a copy of this work of M. Blondel. I
have tried to do so twice in Paris.
[51] M. Lalande in the _Philosophical Review_ (1906), p. 246.
[52] _Ibid._ pp. 245–246.
[53] I am inclined to attach a great importance to this idea (Kant
obviously had it) of “consulting moral experience directly,” provided
only that the “moral” in our experience is not too rigidly separated
from the intellectual. And it would so far, therefore, be only to the
credit of Pragmatism if we could associate it with a rational effort
to do justice to our moral experience, as indeed possibly presupposing
a “reality” that transcends the limits of our mere individuality, a
reality that transcends, too, the subjective idealism that figures but
too prominently in modern philosophy. See my eighth chapter, p. 223,
where I criticize Dr. Bosanquet for not consulting moral experience
directly.
[54] _Phil. Rev._, 1906, p. 243.
[55] See p. 160.
[56] See p. 200 _et. ff._
[57] See p. 64.
[58] For a later statement upon the philosophy of religion in France
see a report for the _Phil. Rev._ (vol. xvi. p. 304), by Le Roy.
This whole matter is, of course, a subject in itself of the greatest
theoretical and practical importance. It is enough for our purpose
to have indicated the different ways in which Pragmatism and the
“Will-to-Believe” philosophy have been received in France, and the
different issues raised by this reception. The reader who would
care to look at a constructive, philosophical view (by the _doyen_
of French philosophy professors) of the whole issue between the
pragmatist or “voluntarist” point of view in religion and the older
“intellectual” view, cannot do better than consult _Science and
Religion in Contemporary Philosophy_, by E. Boutroux, a book that is
apparently studied everywhere at present in France. Its spirit and
substance may be indicated by the following quotations, which follow
after some pages in which M. Boutroux exposes the error of “the radical
distinction between theory and practice.” “The starting point of
science is an abstraction, _i.e._ an element extracted from the given
fact and considered separately. We cannot expect man to be satisfied
with the abstract when the concrete is at his disposal. That would be
‘something like offering a printed bill of fare as the equivalent for a
solid meal.’ _Man uses science but he lives religion._ The part cannot
replace the whole; the symbol cannot suppress reality.”... “Not only
is science unable to replace religion, but she cannot dispense with
the subjective reality upon which the latter is grounded. It is pure
Scholastic realism to imagine that the objective and the impersonal
suffice apart from the subjective in our experience. Between the
subjective and the objective no demarcation is given which justifies
from the philosophical standpoint the divisions which science imagines
for her own convenience.” (p. 329).
[59] Since writing these words, I have made (thanks firstly to Dr.
Schiller’s review in _Mind_, July 1911) the acquaintance of the
important work of M. Pradines upon the _Conditions of Action_. In
the central conception of this work, that action is “all-including”
and that all knowledge is a form of action, I find an important
development of much that the pragmatists have long been endeavouring
to express, and also in particular a development of the celebrated
action philosophy of M. Blondel. I am inclined, with Dr. Schiller,
to regard the volumes of M. Pradines as apparently the high-water
mark of French pragmatist philosophy in the general sense of the
term, although I cannot but at the same time hail with approval their
occasional sharp criticism of Pragmatism as to some extent “scepticism
and irrationalism.” I am inclined to think, too, that the ethical
philosophy of M. Pradines has some of the same defects that I shall
venture to discuss later in dealing with the application (mainly by
Dewey) of Pragmatism to moral theory. Of course his _Conditions of
Action_ is by no means as original a production as Blondel’s book upon
_Action_.
[60] Fouillée speaks in his book upon the _Idealist Movement and the
Reaction against Positive Science_ of the year 1851, as the time of the
triumph of “force,” of “Naturalism” (Zola, Goncourt, etc.), and of the
revival of Idealism by Lachelier, Renouvier, and Boutroux.
[61] See the celebrated work of A. Fouillée, _La Psychologie des
idées-forces_ (Paris, 1890). I confess to having been greatly impressed
by this book when I first made its acquaintance. In particular, I can
think of an idea in Fouillée’s book that anticipates even Bergson,
namely the fact that every idea or sensation is an effort that is
furthered or impeded. But Fouillée’s works out in this book the active
of the volitional side of nearly every mental power and of the mental
life itself, refusing to separate “mind” and “bodily activity.” It
really anticipates a great deal of the whole French philosophy and
psychology of action, including the work of Blondel and Bergson.
[62] M. Paul Desjardins (at present a professor of “letters” at Sévres)
was influential in Paris about 1892–93 as the founder of a _Union pour
l’Action morale_, which published a monthly bulletin. This society
still exists, but under the name (and the change is indeed highly
significant of what Pragmatism in general really needs) _L’Union pour
la vérité morale et sociale_. I append a few words from one of the
bulletins I received from M. Desjardins. They are indicative of the
spiritualizations of thought and action for which the old society
stood. “Il ne s’agit de rien moins que de renverser entièrement
l’échelle de nos jugements, de nos attaches, de mettre en haut ce
qui était en bas, et en bas ce qui était en haut. Il s’agit d’une
conversion totale, en somme....” “La règle commune c’est la médiocrité
d’âme, ou même ce qu’on pourrait appeler _l’athéisme pratique_. En
effet, Dieu étant, par rapport à notre conscience, la Volonté que le
bien se réalise, ou la Règle vivante, on devient pratiquement, athée,
fût-on d’ailleurs très persuadé par les preuves philosophiques de
l’existence de Dieu, lorsqu’on perd la notion de cette Volonté immuable
avec laquelle la nôtre se confond activement _dès qu’elle mérite le nom
de volonté libre_, etc.” In this last sentence there is a distinctly
pragmatist note in the sense of the action philosophy of Blondel and
Bergson and the rest.
[63] See also the recent book by Flournoy on the _Philosophy of James_
(Paris, 1911), in which this interesting special subject is discussed
as well as the important difference between James and Bergson.
[64] Rey in his _Philosophie Moderne_, 1908, speaks of the “gleaning of
the practical factors of rationalistic systems” as the “new line” in
French philosophy (_Journ. of Phil._, 1911, p. 226).
[65] From the Lalande article already mentioned.
[66] This can be seen, for example, in the Preface to _Die Philosophie
des Als Ob_, the quasi-Pragmatist book recently edited by Vaihinger,
the famous commentator on Kant. “We must distinguish in Pragmatism,” it
is there stated, “what is valuable from the uncritical exaggerations.
Uncritical Pragmatism is an epistemological Utilitarianism of the
worst sort; what helps us to make life tolerable is true, etc.... Thus
Philosophy becomes again an _ancilla theologiae_; nay, the state of
matters is even worse than this; it becomes a _meretrix theologorum_.”
This, by the way, is a strange and a striking book, and is perhaps the
last conspicuous instance from Germany of the vitality, and of the
depths of the roots of some of the principles of the pragmatists. The
very appearance of the name of Vaihinger in connexion with it (as the
editor) must be a considerable shock to rationalists and to Kantians,
who have long looked upon Vaihinger as one of the authoritative
names in German Transcendentalism. Here, however, he seems to agree
with those who treat Kant’s ethical philosophy of postulates as the
real Kant, making him out, further, as the author of a far-reaching
philosophy of the “hypotheses” and the “fictions” that we must use in
the interpretation of the universe. With Dr. Schiller, who reviews this
work in _Mind_ (1912), I am inclined to think that it travels too far
in the direction of an entirely hypothetical conception of knowledge,
out-pragmatising the pragmatists apparently. The student who reads
German will find it a veritable magazine of information about nearly
all the thinkers of the time who have pragmatist or quasi-pragmatist
leanings. All the names, for example, of the German and French writers
to whom I refer in this second chapter are mentioned there [I had,
of course, written my book before I saw Vaihinger], along with many
others. It is as serious an arraignment of abstract rationalism as is
to be found in contemporary literature, and edited, as I say, by the
Nestor of the Kant students of our time.
[67] Especially in the open-minded and learned articles in the _Archiv
für Philosophie_, 1907, Band xiv., Professor Stein (of Bern) is known
as one of the most enthusiastic and voluminous writers upon Social
Philosophy in Germany. His best-known work is an encyclopedic book upon
the social question in the light of philosophy (_Die soziale Frage im
Lichte der Philosophie_, 1903). His tendency here is realistic and
naturalistic and evolutionistic, and he thinks (for a philosopher) far
too much of men like Herbert Spencer and Mach and Ostwald. What one
misses in Stein is a discussion of the social question in relation to
some of the deeper problems of philosophy, such as we find in men of
our own country like Mackenzie and Bosanquet, and Ritchie, and Jones,
and others. His work, however (it has been translated into Russian
and French), is a complete literary presentation of the subject, and
a valuable source of information. See my review notices of it in the
_Phil. Rev._ vol. xiv.
[68] Mach and Ostwald both represent (for the purposes of our study)
the association that undoubtedly exists between Pragmatism and the
tendency of all the physical and natural sciences to form “hypotheses”
or conceptions, that are to them the best means of “describing” or
“explaining” (for any purpose) either facts, or the connexions between
facts. Mach (professor of the history and theory of the sciences in
Vienna) is a “phenomenalist” and “methodologist” who attacks all _a
priorism_, treating the matter of the arrangement of the “material”
of a science under the idea of the “most economic expenditure” of our
“mental energy.” One of the best known of his books is his _Analysis
of the Sensations_ (translated, along with his _Popular Science
Lectures_, in the “Open Court Library” of Chicago). In this work he
carries out the idea of his theory of knowledge as a question of the
proper relation of “facts” to “symbols.” “Thing, body, matter,” he says
(p. 6), “are all nothing apart from their so-called attributes.” “Man
possesses in its highest form the power of consciously and arbitrarily
determining his point of view.” In his _Introduction_, he attempts to
show how “the ego and the relation of bodies to the ego give rise” to
“problems” in the relations simply of “certain complexes” of “sensation
to each other.” While it is undoubtedly to the credit of Mach that he
sees the “subjective,” or the “mental,” factor in facts and things and
objects, it must be said that he ignores altogether the philosophical
problems of the ego, or the “self,” as something more than a mere
object among objects.
Ostwald is one of the founders of the theory of “Energetics,” the
theory of the school that believes in substituting a dynamical
philosophy, for the older, atomic, or mechanical philosophy of matter
and motion. He put this philosophy forward in 1895 as the last gift of
the nineteenth to the twentieth century. He suggests how this idea of
energetics may be applied also to psychical processes, in so far as
these may be understood by conceptions that have proved to be useful in
our interpretation of the physical world. Our “consciousness would thus
come to be looked upon as a property of a peculiar kind of energy of
the nerves.” The whole idea is a piece of phenomenalistic positivism,
and although Ostwald makes an attempt (somewhat in the manner of
Herbert Spencer) to explain the “forms,” or the categories, of
experience as simply “norms” or “rules” that have been handed on from
one generation to another, he does not occupy himself with ultimate
philosophical questions about the nature either of matter or of energy.
His _Natural Philosophy_ has recently been translated into English
(Holt & Co., 1910). Its Pragmatism lies in the fact of his looking
upon concepts and classification as “not questions” of the so-called
“essence” of the thing, “but rather as pertaining to purely practical
arrangements for an easier and more successful mastery of scientific
problems” (p. 67). He also takes a pragmatist, or “functional,”
conception of the mental life towards the close of this book. Professor
Ostwald lectured some years ago in the United States, and his lectures
were attended by students of philosophy and students of science.
Professor (now President) Hibben has written an interesting account of
his theory in its philosophical bearings in the _Philosophical Review_,
vol. xii.
[69] The philosophy of Avenarius (born in Paris, but died as Professor
of Inductive Philosophy in Zurich) is called “Empirical Criticism,”
which differs from Idealism by taking a more realistic attitude to
ordinary human experience. There is an excellent elementary account
of Avenarius in _Mind_ for 1897 by Carstanjen of Zurich. Avenarius
goes back in some respects to the teaching of Comte as to the need of
interpreting all philosophical theories in the terms of the social
environment out of which they come.
[70] _Logic_, vol. ii. p. 17. English translation by Miss Dendy.
In this same section of his work, Lotze talks of the demands of
our thought as “postulates” whose claims rest in the end upon our
will--_auf unserm Wollen_.
[71] To be traced to Fichte’s well-known initial interpretation of Kant
from the standpoint of the Practical Reason of the second “Critique,”
and to Schelling’s late “positive” philosophy, and to Schopenhauer, the
will philosopher _par excellence_. See my _Schopenhauer’s System in its
Philosophical Significance_.
[72] As an illustration of this “conceptual shorthand,” I take the
following lines from Professor Needham’s book upon _General Biology_
(p. 222) in respect of “classification” and its relative and changing
character. “Whatever our views of relationship, the series in which we
arrange organisms are based upon the likenesses and differences we find
to exist among them. This is classification. We associate organisms
together under group names because, being so numerous and so diverse,
it is only thus that our minds can deal with them. Classification
furnishes the handles by which we move all our intellectual luggage.
We base our groupings on what we know of the organisms. Our system of
classification is therefore liable to change with every advance of
knowledge.”
[73] Professor Jerusalem (the translator of James’s _Pragmatism_ into
German) is known as one of the German discoverers of Pragmatism.
His _Introduction to Philosophy_ (translated by Professor Sanders,
Macmillan & Co., N.Y., 1910) is an admirable, easy, and instructive
introduction to philosophy from a pragmatist point of view. It has
gone through four editions in Germany. It is quite free from any taint
of irrationalism and has sections upon the “theory of knowledge” and
the “theory of being.” Its spirit may be inferred from the following
quotations. “My philosophy is characterized by the empirical view
point, the genetic method, and the biological and the social methods
of interpreting the human mind” (the Preface). “Philosophy is the
intellectual effort which is undertaken with a view to combining
the common experiences of life and the results of scientific
investigation into a harmonious and consistent world theory; a world
theory, moreover, which is adapted to satisfy the requirements of the
understanding and the demands of the heart. There was a time when
men believed that such a theory could be constructed from the pure
forms of thought, without much concern for the results of detailed
investigation. But that time is for ever past” (pp. 1 and 2).
[74] Author of a work on _Philosophy and Social Economy_ (_Philosophie
und Wirthschaft_), in which the fundamental idea is that philosophy is
essentially nothing more or less than a “conception of life” or a view
of the world in general, and that the older rationalistic philosophy
will therefore have to be modified in view of modern discoveries and
modern ways of looking at things. It has, of course, the limitations
of such a point of view, in so far as its author seems to forget
that philosophy must _lead_ human life and not merely _follow_ it.
My present point is merely to mention of the existence and work of
this man as one of the continental thinkers who have anticipated the
essentially social conception of philosophy taken by the pragmatists.
[75] It is easy to see the influence of Fichte’s will philosophy and
practical idealism in Schellwien’s books (_Philosophie und Leben_,
_Wille und Erkenntniss_, _Der Geist der neuern Philosophie_). He
speaks of the primacy of the will (in point of time only, of course),
or of the “unconscious” in the life of man, allowing, however, that
man gradually transforms this natural life in the life of “creative
activity” that is his proper life. He states (in the _Spirit of the New
Philosophy_) the pragmatist idea that “belief” (p. 32) or the “feeling”
that we have of the ultimate “unity” of “subject and object,” precedes
(also in point of “time”) knowledge, pointing out, however, in the
same place the limitations of belief. These latter, he supposes, to be
overcome in the higher knowledge that we have in creative activity--an
idea which, I think, may be associated to some extent with the position
of Blondel.
[76] In the _Phil. Rev._ (xvi. p. 250) Dr. Ewald speaks of this work
of this psychologizing school as existing alongside of the renewed
interest in Fichte and Schelling and Hegel. It is an attempt to revive
the teaching of Fries, a Kantian (at Jena) who attempted to establish
the Critique of Pure Reason upon a psychological basis, believing
that psychology, “based on internal experience,” must form the basis
of all philosophy. It stands squarely upon the fact that all logical
laws and “categories,” even the highest and most abstract, in order to
“come to consciousness in man,” must be given to him as “psychological
processes”--a position which is certainly true as far as it goes, and
which supports, say, the genetic psychological attitude of Professor
Dewey. Its attitude has been sharply criticized in some of his books
by Dr. Ernst Cassirer of Berlin, a well-known upholder of a more
rationalistic form of Neo-Kantianism.
[77] Dr. Simmel of Berlin (like Stein) is a prominent representative
of this school (even in a recent striking book that he wrote upon the
philosophy of Kant). He has written, for example, a most erudite work
upon the _Philosophy of Money_, and this at the same time with all his
university work as a fascinating and learned lecturer upon both ancient
and modern philosophy.
[78] Without attempting to enter upon the matter of Harnack’s
philosophy as a Neo-Kantian of the school of Ritschl, I am thinking
simply of things like the following from his book on the _Essence of
Christianity_. “It is to man that religion pertains, to man, as one
who in the midst of all change and progress himself never changes” (p.
8). “The point of view of the philosophical theorists in the strict
sense of the word will find no place in these lectures. Had they been
delivered sixty years ago it would have been our endeavour to try to
arrive by speculative reasoning at some general conception of religion,
and then to define the Christian religion accordingly. But we have
rightly become sceptical about the value of this procedure. _Latet
dolus in generalibus._ We know to-day that life cannot be spanned by
general conceptions” (p. 9). See also his protest (on p. 220) against
the substitution of a “Hellenistic” view of religion for religion
itself--a protest that is, according to Pfleiderer in his _Development
of Theology_ (p. 298), a marked characteristic of Harnack’s whole
_History of Dogma_.
[79] I am thinking of Ritschl’s sharp distinction between “theoretical
knowledge” and “religious faith” (which rises to judgments of value
about the world that transcend even moral values), and of his idea that
the “truth” of faith is practical, and must be “lived.” Pfleiderer says
(in his _Development of Theology_, p. 184) that Ritschl’s “conception
of religion is occupied with judgments of value [_Werturtheile_],
_i.e._ with conceptions of our relation to the world which are of
moment solely according to their value in awakening feelings of
pleasure and pain, as our dominion over the world is furthered or
checked.” His “acceptance of the idea of God as [with Kant] a practical
‘belief,’ and not an act of speculative cognition,” is also to some
extent a pragmatist idea in the sense in which, in this book, I reject
pragmatist ideas. Ritschl seems to have in the main only a strongly
practical interest in dogmatics holding that “only the things vital
are to be made vital in the actual service of the church.” He goes the
length of holding that “a merely philosophical view of the world has
no place in Christian theology,” holding that “metaphysical inquiry”
applied to “nature” and to “spirit,” as “things to be analysed, for
the purpose of finding _out what they are in themselves_, can from the
nature of the case have no great value for Christian theology.” Of
course he is right in holding that the “proofs for the existence of
God, conducted by the purely metaphysical method, do not lead to the
forces whose representation is given in Christianity, but merely to
conceptions of a world-unity, which conceptions are neutral as regards
all religion” (_The Theology of Albrecht Ritschl_, Swing. Longmans,
Green & Co., 1901). I think this last quotation from Ritschl may be
used as an expression of the idea of the pragmatists, that a true and
complete philosophy must serve as a “dynamic” to human endeavour and to
human motive.
[80] See the reference to Windelband in the footnote upon p. 150.
[81] I am thinking of Münsterberg’s contention in his _Grundzüge_
and his other books, that the life of actual persons can never be
adequately described by the objective sciences, by psycho-physics, and
so on, and of his apparent acceptance of the distinction of Rickert
between the “descriptive” and the “normative” sciences (logic, ethics,
aesthetics, and so on).
[82] The leaders of this school are the two influential thinkers and
teachers Cohen and Natorp, the former the author of a well-known book
upon Kant’s _Theory of Experience_ (1871), formerly much used by
English and American students, and the latter the author of an equally
famous book upon Plato’s _Theory of Ideas_, which makes an interesting
attempt to connect Plato’s “Ideas” with the modern notion of the law of
a phenomenon. Cohen has given forth recently an important development
of the Kantian philosophy in his two remarkable books upon the _Logic
of Pure Knowledge_ and the _Ethic of the Pure Will_. These works
exercise a great influence upon the entire liberal (Protestant and
Jewish) thought of the time in Germany. They teach a lofty spiritualism
and idealism in the realm of ethics, which transcends altogether
anything as yet attempted in this direction by Pragmatism.
[83] See the instructive reports to the _Philosophical Review_ by
Dr. Ewald of Vienna upon Contemporary Philosophy in Germany. In the
1907 volume he speaks of this renewed interest, “on a new basis,” in
the work of the great founders of transcendentalism as an “important
movement partly within and partly outside of Neo-Kantianism,” as
“a movement heralded by some and derided by others as a reaction,”
as the “fulfilment of a prophecy by von Hartmann that after Kant
we should have Fichte, and after Fichte, Schelling and Hegel.” The
renewed interest in Schelling, and with it the revival of an interest
in university courses in the subject of the Philosophy of Nature
(see the recent work of Driesch upon the _Science and Philosophy of
the Organism_) is all part of the recent reaction in Germany against
Positivism.
[84] We may associate, I suppose, the new German journal _Logos_, an
international periodical for the “Philosophie der Kultur,” with the
same movement.
[85] See Chapter VII. upon “Pragmatism as Americanism.”
[86] See an article in the _Critical Review_ (edited by the late
Professor Salmond, of Aberdeen), by the author upon “Recent Tendencies
in American Philosophy.” The year, I think, was either 1904 or 1905.
[87] See p. 180.
[88] Without pretending to anything like a representative or an
exhaustive statement in the case of this magazine literature, I may
mention the following: Professor Perry of Harvard, in his valuable
articles for the _Journal of Philosophy and Psychology_, 1907, vol.
iv., upon “A Review of Pragmatism as a Philosophical Generalization,”
and a “Review of Pragmatism as a Theory of Knowledge”; Professor
Armstrong in vol. v. of the same journal upon the “Evolution of
Pragmatism”; and Professor Lovejoy in the 1908 vol. upon the “Thirteen
Pragmatisms.” These are but a few out of the many that might be
mentioned. The reader who is interested in looking for more such must
simply consult for himself the _Philosophical Review_, and _Mind_,
and the _Journal of Philosophy and Psychology_, for some years after,
say, 1903. There is a good list of such articles in a German Doctor
Thesis by Professor MacEachran of the University of Alberta, entitled
_Pragmatismus eine neue Richtung der Philosophie_, Leipzig, 1910. There
is also a history of pragmatist articles in the 1907 (January) number
of the _Revue des Sciences, Philosophiques et Theologiques._
[89] That this has really taken place can be clearly seen, I think, if
we inspect the official programmes of the Proceedings of the American
Philosophical Association for the last year or two.
[90] P. 144.
[91] See p. 149.
[92] See Chapter VI., p. 149, upon the doctrine and the fact of
“Meaning.”
[93] Professor Pratt, _What is Pragmatism?_ (Macmillan & Co.,
1909); H. H. Bawden, _The Principles of Pragmatism, a Philosophical
Interpretation of Experience_, Boston, 1910 (a useful book presenting
what may be called a “phenomenological” account of Pragmatism); Moore,
_Pragmatism and Its Critics_.
[94] _In Pragmatism and Its Critics_ (Univ. of Chicago Press).
[95] The manifesto has now become a book. _The New Realism_
(Macmillan). For a useful account of the New Realism and the Old see
Professor Perry, _Present Philosophical Tendencies_, Part V.
[96] The following are my reasons for saying that the “New Realism” was
already to some extent lurking in the “radical empiricism” of James.
(1) Although teaching unmistakably the “activity” of mind, James seemed
to think this activity “selective” rather than “creative” (falling in
this idea behind his much-admired Bergson). (2) Despite this belief in
the activity of the mind, he had the way of regarding consciousness
as (to some extent) the mind’s “content”--an attitude common to all
empirical psychologists since Hume and the English associationists.
And from this position (legitimate so far from the psychological point
of view) he went on to the idea (expressed in a troublesome form in
the article, “Does Consciousness exist?”) that consciousness is _not
an entity or substance_--of course it is not in the ordinary sense of
“entity.” (3) Then from this he seemed to develop the idea that the
various “elements” that enter into consciousness to be transformed
into various “relationships” do not suffer any substantial change in
this quasi-subjective “activity.” Therefore, as Professor Perry puts
it (_Present Tendencies_, p. 353), “the elements or terms which enter
into consciousness and become its content may now be regarded as _the
same elements which, in so far as otherwise related, compose physical
nature_ [italics mine]. The elements themselves, the ‘_materia prima_,’
or stuff of pure experience, are neither psychical nor physical.” It
is in this last absurd sentence [simply a piece of quasi-scientific
analysis, the error of which Critical Idealism would expose in a
moment] that the roots, I think, of “new realism” are to be found--a
doctrine whose unmitigated externalism is the negation of all
philosophy.
[97] See p. 164 and p. 230.
[98] I refer to his Aberdeen “Gifford Lectures” on “The World and The
Individual,” and to a well-known address of his upon “The Eternal
and the Practical” in the _Proceedings of the American Philosophical
Association_. In this latter pamphlet he shows that Pragmatism and the
philosophy of Consequences are impossible without “the Eternal” and
without Idealism.
[99] The criticisms of which I am thinking are (to select but a few
from memory) Green’s well-known admission in respect of Hegelianism,
that it would have “to be done all over again”; Mr. Bradley’s admission
that he is “not a Hegelian” and (recently) that he has “seen too much
of metaphysics” to place any serious weight upon its reasonings;
Jowett’s complaint (in the “life” by Campbell) that the Oxford
Hegelianism of his day was teaching students to place an undue reliance
upon “words” and “concepts” in the place of facts and things; Dr.
Bosanquet’s admission (many years ago) that, of course, “gods and men”
were more than “bloodless categories”; Professor Pringle Pattison’s
criticism of Hegel in his _Hegelianism and Personality_; Professor
Baillie’s criticisms at the end of his _Logic of Hegel_; Mr. Sturt’s
criticism of Neo-Hegelianism in his _Idola Theatri_, etc.
[100] See the following, for example, from Professor Stout: “Every
agreeable or disagreeable sensation has a conative or quasi-conative
aspect” (_Manual of Psychology_, p. 233). Also: “Perception is never
merely cognitive” (_ibid._ p. 242); it has a “conative character and a
feeling tone,” etc.
[101] A. Sidgwick’s “Applied Axioms” (_Mind_, N.S. xiv. p. 42). This is
extremely useful, connecting the recent pragmatist movement with the
work of the English logicians. See in the same connexion the articles
of Captain Knox in the _Quarterly Review_ (April 1909) on “Pragmatism.”
[102] During the last ten years _Mind_ has contained articles on
the pragmatist controversy by nearly all our prominent academic
authorities: Dr. Bradley, Dr. McTaggart, Professor Taylor, Professor
Hoernle, Dr. Schiller, Dr. Mellone, Dr. Boyce-Gibson, Mr. Hobhouse, and
so on.
[103] Particularly in his valuable book on _Truth_ in which the
weakness of the Hegelian conception of truth is set forth along with
that of other views.
[104] In _Idealism as a Practical Creed_, in his _Browning as a
Religious and Philosophical Teacher_, and elsewhere.
[105] In his _Elements of Metaphysic_, and in many of his recent
reviews; in his review, for example, of Professor Bosanquet’s
_Individuality and Value_, in the _Review of Theology and Philosophy_,
and in his Mind (July 1912) review of Professor Ward’s _Realm of Ends_.
[106] In his book upon the _Philosophy of Eucken_, in _God With Us_,
and elsewhere.
[107] In _Idola Theatri_ (an important criticism of Neo-Hegelian
writers), and elsewhere.
[108] In _Essays in Philosophical Construction_, and in his book upon
Logic.
[109] In his _Introduction to Logic_.
[110] See p. 154.
[111] “If God has this perfect authority and perfect knowledge, His
authority cannot rule us, nor His knowledge know us, or any human
thing; just as our authority does not extend to the gods, nor our
knowledge know anything which is divine; so by parity of reason they,
being gods, are not our masters, neither do they know the things of
men” (_Parmenides_, 134, Jowett’s _Plato_, vol. iv.).
[112] This is, of course, a very old difficulty, involved in the
problem of the supposed pre-knowledge of God. Bradley deals with
it in the _Mind_ (July 1911) article upon “Some Aspects of Truth.”
His solution (as Professor Dawes Hicks notices in the _Hibbert
Journal_, January 1912) is the familiar Neo-Hegelian finding, that as
a “particular judgment” with a “unique context” my truth is “new,”
but “as an element in an eternal reality” it was “waiting for me.”
Readers of Green’s _Prolegomena_ are quite ready for this finding.
Pragmatists, of course, while insisting on the man-made character
of truth, have not as yet come in sight of the difficulties of the
divine foreknowledge--in relation to the free purposes and the free
discoveries of mortals.
[113] There is, it seems to me, a suggestion of this rationalist
position in the fact, for example, that Mr. Bertrana Russell begins his
recent booklet upon _The Problems of Philosophy_ with the following
inquiry about knowledge: “Is there any knowledge in the world which
is so certain that no reasonable man could doubt it?” I mean that
the initial and paramount importance attached here to this question
conveys the impression that the supreme reality for philosophy is still
some independently certain piece of knowledge. I prefer, with the
pragmatists and the humanists, to think of knowledge as concerned with
the purposes of persons as intelligent beings, or with the realities
revealed in the knowing process. Although there are passages in his
book that show Mr. Russell to be aware of the selves and the psychical
elements and processes that enter into knowing, they do not affect his
prevailingly rationalistic and impersonal conception of knowledge and
philosophy.
[114] In his sympathetic and characteristic review of James’s
“Pragmatism” in the _Journ. of Philos._, 1908.
[115] See p. 203 (the _note_), and p. 263, where I suggest that no
philosophy can exist, or can possibly begin, without some direct
contact with reality, without the experience of some person or persons,
without assumptions of one kind or another.
[116] See p. 162.
[117] In this attitude Pragmatism is manifestly in a state of rebellion
against “Platonism,” if we allow ourselves to think of Pragmatism
as capable of confronting Plato. Plato, as we know, definitely
subordinates “belief” to “knowledge” and “truth.” “As being is to
becoming,” he says, “so is truth to belief” (_Timaeus_, Jowett’s
translation). To Plato belief is a conjectural, or imaginative,
estimate of reality; it deals rather with “appearance” or “becoming”
than with “reality.” “True being” he thinks of as revealed in
the Ideas, or the rational entities that are his development and
transformation of the “definition” of Socrates. Against all this
rationalism Pragmatism (it is enough meantime merely to indicate the
fact) would have us return to the common-sense, or the religious,
position that it is invariably what we believe in that determines our
notion of reality.
[118] Cf. p. 159.
[119] From Dr. Schiller’s _Humanism_.
[120] _Pragmatism_, p. 207.
[121] It is this dissatisfaction at once with the abstractions of
science and of rationalism and with the contradictions that seem to
exist between them all and the facts of life and experience as we feel
them that constitutes _the great dualism_, or _the great opposition of
modern times_. I do not wish to emphasize this dualism, nor do I wish
to set forth faith or belief in opposition to reason when I extract
from both Pragmatism and Idealism the position that it is belief
rather than knowledge that is our fundamental estimate of reality. I
do not believe, as I indicate in the text above, that this dualism is
ultimate. It has come about only from an unfortunate setting of some
parts of our nature, or of our experience in opposition to the whole
of our nature, or the whole of our experience. That the opposition,
however, between reason and faith still exists in many quarters, and
that it is and has been _the_ opposition of modern times, and that
the great want of our times is a rational faith that shall recall the
world of to-day out of its endless “distraction” (the word is Dr.
Bosanquet’s), I am certainly inclined to maintain. In proof of this
statement it is enough to recall things like the words of Goethe about
the conflict of belief and unbelief as the unique theme of the history
of the world, or the “ethical headache which was literally a splitting
headache,” that Mr. Chesterton finds in the minds of many of our great
Victorian writers. I shall take leave of it here with three references
to its existence taken from the words or the work of living writers.
The first shall be the opposition which Mr. Bertrand Russell finds in
his _Philosophical Essays_ (in the “Free Man’s Worship”) between the
“world which science presents for our belief” and the “lofty thoughts
that ennoble his little day.” The second shall be the inconsistency
that exists in Mr. Hugh S. R. Elliot’s book upon _Modern Science and
the Illusions of Professor Bergson_, between his initial acceptance of
the mechanical, evolutionary system of modern science and his closing
acceptance of feeling and poetry and love as the “deepest forms of
happiness.” The third shall be the declaration of Professor Sir Henry
Jones of Glasgow (in the _Hibbert Journal_, 1903) that “one of the
characteristics of our time is the contradiction that exists between
its practical faith in morality and its theoretical distrust of the
conceptions on which they rest.”
[122] See p. 203 (note).
[123] See p. 7.
[124] From _Pragmatism and its Misunderstanders_.
[125] See p. 173.
[126] “You will 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 up against them. In influential
quarters, Mr. Schiller in particular has been treated like an impudent
school-boy who deserves a spanking. I should not mention this but for
the fact that it throws so much light upon _that rationalist 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”
(James, _Pragmatism_, pp. 66–67; italics mine). The words about
Rationalism being comfortable only in the world of abstractions are
substantiated by the procedure of Bosanquet, to whom I refer in Chapter
VIII., or by the procedure of Mr. Bertrand Russell, referred to on p.
169.
[127] See p. 235 in the Bergson chapter where it is suggested that
perception is limited to what interests us for vital or for practical
purposes.
[128] Cf. p. 92.
[129] See p. 65.
[130] See p. 234 upon the “anti-intellectualism” in the philosophy of
Bergson.
[131] See p. 4 and p. 237.
[132] From “Truth and Copying,” _Mind_, No. 62.
[133] From “Truth and Practice,” in _Mind_. Cf. “This denial of
transcendence, this insistence that all ideas, and more especially
such ideas as those of God, are true and real just so far as they
work, is to myself most welcome” (Bradley, in _Mind_, 1908, p. 227,
“Ambiguity of Pragmatism”). Mr. Bradley has of recent years made so
many such concessions, and has philosophized with such an admirable
degree of independence, and has (also admirably) attached so much
weight to his own _experience_ of “metaphysics,” and of other things
besides, that many thinkers like Knox and Dewey and Schiller have been
discussing whether he can any longer be regarded as a rationalist. One
could certainly study, profitably, the whole evolution of philosophy
in England during the last forty years by studying Mr. Bradley’s
development. He never was, of course, a Hegelian in the complete sense
(who ever was?), and he has now certainly abandoned an abstract,
formalistic Rationalism.
By way of an additional quotation or two from Mr. Bradley, typical of
his advance in the direction of the practical philosophy for which
Pragmatism stands, we may append the following: “I long ago pointed
out that theory takes its origin from practical collision [the main
contention of Professor Dewey and his associates]. _If Pragmatism
means this, I am a pragmatist_” (from an article in _Mind_ on the
“Ambiguity of Pragmatism”--italics mine). “We may reject the limitation
of knowledge to the mere world of events which happen, and may deny
the claim of this world to be taken as an ultimate foundation. Reality
or the Good will be the satisfaction of all the wants of our nature,
and _theoretical truth will be the perception of ideas which directly
satisfy one of those wants, and so invariably make part of the general
satisfaction_. This is a doctrine which, to my mind, commends itself as
true, though it naturally would call for a great deal of explanation”
(from _Mind_, July 1904, p. 325). And, as typical of the kind of final
philosophy to which the philosophical reconstruction of the future
must somehow attain out of the present quarrel between Pragmatism and
Rationalism, the following: “If there were no force in the world but
the vested love of God, if the wills in the past were one in effort and
in substance with the one Will, if in that Will they are living still
and still are so loving, and if again by faith, suffering, and love my
will is made really one with theirs, here indeed we should have found
at once our answer and our refuge. But with this we should pass surely
beyond the limits of any personal individualism” (from _Mind_, July
1904, p. 316). Dr. Schiller, by the way, has a list of such concessions
to Pragmatism on the part of Mr. Bradley in _Mind_, 1910, p. 35.
[134] Cf. the saying of Herbert Spencer (_Autobiography_, i. 253) that
a “belief in the unqualified supremacy of reason [is] the superstition
of philosophers.”
[135] See p. 147.
[136] “Truth and Practice,” _Mind_, No. 51.
[137] It would be easy to quote to the same effect from other Hegelian
students, or, for that part of it, from Hegel himself.
[138] _Elements of Metaphysics_, p. 411.
[139] _Ibid._ p. 414.
[140] Cf. p. 14.
[141] See the well-known volume _Personal Idealism_, edited by Mr.
Sturt.
[142] Cf. pp. 147 and 193.
[143] By this notion is meant the common-sense idea that truth in all
cases “corresponds” to fact, my perception of the sunset to the real
sunset, my “idea” of a “true” friend to a real person whose outward
acts “correspond to” or “faithfully reflect” his inner feelings. See
the first chapter of Mr. Joachim’s book upon _The Nature of Truth_,
where this notion is examined and found wanting. It is probably
the oldest notion of truth, and yet one that takes us readily into
philosophy from whatever point of view we examine it. It was held by
nearly all the Greek philosophers before the time of the Sophists,
who first began to teach that truth is what it “appears to be”--the
“relativity” position that is upheld, for example, by Goethe, who said
that “When I know my relation to myself and to the outer world I call
this truth. And thus every man can have his own truth, and yet truth is
always the same.” The common-sense view was held also by St. Augustine
in the words, “That is true what is really what it seems to be (_verum
est quod ita est, ut videtur_),” by Thomas Aquinas as the “adequacy
of the intellect to the thing,” in so far as the intellect says that
that is which really is, or that that is not which is not (_adaequatio
intellectus et rei_), by Suarez, by Goclen, who made it a conformity
of the judgment with the thing. Its technical difficulties begin to
appear, say in Hobbes, who held that truth consists in the fact of the
subject and the predicate being a name of the same thing, or even in
Locke, who says: “Truth then seems to me in the proper import of the
word to signify nothing but the joining or separating of signs, as the
things signified by them, do agree, or disagree, one with another”
(_Essay_, iv. 5. 2). How can _things_ “agree” or “disagree” with one
another? And an “idea” of course is, anyhow, not a “thing” with a shape
and with dimensions that “correspond” to “things,” any more than is a
“judgment” a relation of two “ideas” “corresponding” to the “relations”
of two “things.”
[144] “The mind is not a ‘mirror’ which passively reflects what it
chances to come upon. It initiates and tries; and its correspondence
with the ‘outer world’ means that its effort successfully meets the
environment in behalf of the organic interest from which it sprang.
The mind, like an antenna, feels the way for the organism. It gropes
about, advances and recoils, making many random efforts and many
failures; but it is always urged into taking the _initiative_ by the
pressure of interest, and doomed to success or failure in some hour
of trial when it meets and engages the environment. Such is mind, and
such, according to James, _are all its operations_” (Perry, _Present
Philosophical Tendencies_, p. 351). Or the following: “I hope that,”
said James in the “lectures” embodied in _Pragmatism_ (New York, 1908)
... “the concreteness and closeness to facts of pragmatism ... 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’ between our minds and reality, into that of a rich
and active commerce_ (that any one 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.
68; italics mine).
[145] “On any view like mine to speak of truth as in the end copying
reality, would be senseless” (Bradley in _Mind_, July 1911, “On some
Aspects of Truth”).
[146] See p. 143 and p. 265.
[147] See p. 127 and p. 133.
[148] See pp. 148–9.
[149] See p. 162.
[150] _What is Pragmatism?_ (Pratt), p. 21.
[151] _Principles of Pragmatism_, Houghton Mifflin, 1910.
[152] _Ibid._, Preface. This last sentence, by the way, may be
taken as one of the many illustrations that may be given of the
crudities and difficulties of some of the literature of Pragmatism.
It shows that Pragmatism may sometimes be as guilty of abstractionism
as is Rationalism itself. It is not “experience” that becomes
“self-conscious,” but only “persons.” And, similarly, it is only
“persons” who pursue “ends” and “satisfy” desires, and who may be
said to have a “method.” Professor Bawden, of course, means that it
is to the credit of Pragmatism that it approaches experience just as
it finds it, and that its chief method is the interpretation of the
same experience--an easy thing, doubtless, to profess, but somewhat
difficult to carry out.
[153] _Principles of Pragmatism_, Houghton Mifflin, 1910, pp. 44–45.
[154] P. 253.
[155] P. 256.
[156] See p. 146.
[157] See p. 240 _et ff._
[158] Wallace’s _Logic of Hegel_, p. 304.
[159] There is a sentence in one of Hawthorne’s stories to the effect
that man’s work is always illusory to some extent, while God is the
only worker of realities. I would not go as far as this, believing,
as I do, with the pragmatists, that man is at least a fellow-worker
with God. But I do find Pragmatism lacking, as 1 indicate elsewhere,
in any adequate recognition of the work of God, or the Absolute in the
universe.
[160] I am thinking of such considerations as are suggested in the
following sentences from Maeterlinck: “As we advance through life, it
is more and more brought home to us that nothing takes place that is
not in accord with some curious, preconceived design; and of this we
never breathe a word, we scarcely let our minds dwell upon it, but of
its existence, somewhere above our heads, we are absolutely convinced”
(_The Treasure of the Humble_, p. 17). “But this much at least is
abundantly proved to us, that in the work-a-day lives of the very
humblest of men spiritual phenomena manifest themselves--mysterious,
direct workings, that bring soul nearer to soul” (_ibid._ 33). “Is it
to-day or to-morrow that moulds us? Do we not all spend the greater
part of our lives under the shadow of an event that has not yet come
to pass?” (_ibid._ 51). I do not of course for one moment imply that
the facts of experience referred to in such sentences as these should
be received at any higher value than their face value, for there are
indeed many considerations to be thought of in connexion with this
matter of the realization of our plans and our destiny as individuals.
But I do mean that the beliefs to which men cling in this respect are
just as much part of the subject-matter of philosophy as other beliefs,
say the belief in truth as a whole, or the beliefs investigated by the
Society for Psychical Research. And there may conceivably be a view of
human nature upon which the beliefs in question are both natural and
rational.
[161] See p. 101.
[162] See p. 198 on Dr. Bosanquet’s dismissal of the problem of
teleology from the sphere of reasoned philosophy.
[163] _Appearance and Reality_, p. 561.
[164] See p. 155.
[165] I think that I have taken this phrase from _Some Dogmas of
Religion_.
[166] From “Truth and Copying,” _Mind_, No. 62.
[167] By action in this chapter and elsewhere in this book, I do not
mean the mere exhibition or expenditure of physical energy. I mean
human activity in general, inclusive of the highest manifestations of
this activity, such as the search for truth, contemplation, belief,
creative activity of one kind or another, and so on. There is no belief
and no contemplation that is not practical as well as theoretical,
no truth that fails to shape and to mould the life of the person who
entertains it. I quite agree with Maeterlinck, and with Bergson and
others, that the soul is to some extent limited by the demands of
action and speech, and by the duties and the conventions of social
life, but I still believe in the action test for contemplations and
thoughts and beliefs and ideas, however lofty. It is only the thoughts
that we can act out, that we can consciously act upon in our present
human life, and that we can persuade others to act upon, that are
valuable to ourselves and to humanity. It is to their discredit that so
many men and so many thinkers entertain, and give expression to, views
about the universe which renders their activities as agents and as
thinkers and as seekers quite inexplicable.
[168] There are, of course, no heavens in the old mediaeval and
Aristotelian sense after the work of Copernicus and Galileo in the
physical sciences, and of Kant in the realm of mind.
[169] Professor Moore well points out (_Pragmatism and its Critics_,
p. 13) that the “challenge” of the idea that our thinking has “two
foundations: one, as the method of purposing--its ‘practical’ function;
the other as merely the expression of the specific and independent
instinct to know--its ‘intellectual’ function,” marks the “beginnings
of the pragmatic movement.” The idea of two kinds of thought goes
back to Aristotle and is one of the most famous distinctions of
thought. It dominated the entire Middle Ages, and it is still at the
root of the false idea that “culture” can be separated from work and
service for the common good. I am glad, as I indicate in the text, a
few lines further on, that the idealists are doing their share with
the pragmatists in breaking it up. In America there is no practical
distinction between culture and work. See my chapter on Pragmatism as
Americanism.
[170] The importance of this consideration about the “attention” that
is (as a matter of fact and a matter of necessity) involved in all
“perception,” cannot possibly be exaggerated. We perceive in childhood
and throughout life in the main what interests us, and what affects
our total and organic activity. It is, that is to say, our motor
activity, and its direction, that determine what we see and perceive
and experience. And in the higher reaches of our life, on the levels of
art and religion and philosophy, this determining power becomes what we
call our reason and our will and our selective attention. Perception,
in other words, is a kind of selective activity, involving what we
call impulse and effort and will. Modern philosophy has forgotten this
in its treatment of our supposed perception of the world, taking this
to be something _given_ instead of something that is _constructed_ by
our activity. Hence its long struggle to overcome both the apparent
materialism of the world of the senses, and the gap, or hiatus, that
has been created by Rationalism between the world as we think it, and
the world as it really is.
[171] _E.g._ Professor Bosanquet, in his 1908 inaugural lecture at
St. Andrews upon _The Practical Value of Moral Philosophy_. “Theory
does indeed belong to Practice. _It is a form of conation_” (p. 9). It
“should no doubt be understood as Theoria, or _the entire unimpeded
life of the soul_” (p. 11; italics mine).
[172] This is surely the teaching of the new physics in respect of the
radio-active view of matter. I take up this point again in the Bergson
chapter.
[173] See p. 238.
[174] See p. 143 or p. 229 (note).
[175] See p. 34 in Chapter II. in reference to the idea of M. Blondel.
[176] See p. 147 and p. 265.
[177] See p. 65, note 3.
[178] See p. 192, note 3.
[179] Needham, _General Biology_, 1911. For the mention of this book
as a reliable recent manual I am indebted to my colleague, Professor
Willey of McGill University.
[180] Marett, _Anthropology_, p. 155.
[181] Cf. _supra_, p. 101.
[182] So much may, I suppose, be inferred from the contentions
(explicit and implicit) of all biologists and evolutionists. Human
life they all seem to regard as a kind of continuity or development of
the life of universal nature, whether their theory of the origin of
life be that of (1) “spontaneous generation,” (2) “cosmozoa” (germs
capable of life scattered throughout space), (3) “Preyer’s theory
of the continuity of life,” (4) “Pflüger’s theory of the chemical
characteristics of proteid,” or (5) the conclusion of Verworn himself,
“that existing organisms are derived in uninterrupted descent from
the first living substance that originated from lifeless substance”
(_General Physiology_, p. 315).
[183] _Creative Evolution_, pp. 245–5.
[184] It is, I think, an important reflection that it is precisely
in this very reality of “action” that science and philosophy come
together. That all the sciences meet in the concept, or the fact, of
action is, of course, quite evident from the new knowledge of the new
physics. Professor M’Dougall has recently brought psychology into line
with the natural sciences by defining its subject-matter as the actions
or the “behaviour” of human beings and animals. And it is surely not
difficult to see that--as I try to indicate--it is in human behaviour
that philosophy and science come together. Another consideration in
respect of the philosophy of action that has long impressed me is
this. If there is one realm in which, more than anywhere else, our
traditional rationalism and our traditional empiricism really came
together in England, it is the realm of social philosophy, the realm
of human activity. It was the breaking down of the entire philosophy
of sensations in the matter of the proof of utilitarianism that caused
John Stuart Mill to take up the “social philosophy” in respect to which
the followers of positivism joined hands with the idealists.
[185] See p. 185.
[186] See p. 27.
[187] See Chapter VII. p. 179.
[188] I am thinking of Pyrrho and Arcesilaus and some of the Greek
sceptics and of their ἐποχή and ἀταραξία.
[189] See p. 26.
[190] _Man’s Place in the Cosmos_, a book consisting of essays and
reviews published by the author during the last four or five years.
They all advocate “humanism in opposition to naturalism,” or “ethicism
in opposition to a too narrow intellectualism.”
[191] _The Will to Believe_, 1897.
[192] “Progress in Philosophy,” art. _Mind_, 15, p. 213.
[193] _Practical Ethics_; Essays.
[194] _Mental Development--Social and Ethical Interpretations_ (a work
crowned by the Royal Academy of Denmark). We can see in this book how
a psychologist has been led into a far-reaching study of social and
ethical development in order to gain an understanding of the growth of
even the individual mind. We may indeed say that the individualistic
intellectualism of the older psychology is now no more. It was too
“abstract” a way of looking at mind. Professor Royce, it is well known,
has given, from the stand-point of a professed metaphysician, a cordial
welcome to the work of Professor Baldwin. In an important review of
Mr. Stout’s two admirable volumes on _Analytic Psychology_ (_Mind_,
July, 1897), Professor Royce has insisted strongly upon the need of
supplementing introspection by the “interpretation of the reports and
the conduct of other people” if we would know much about “dynamic”
psychology. It is this “dynamic” psychology--the “dynamics” of the
will and of the “feelings”--that I think constitutes such an important
advance upon the traditional “intellectual” and “individualistic”
psychology.
[195] _The Psychology of the Moral Self._ Macmillan, 1897. I have
tried, in a short notice of this book in the _Philosophical Review_
(March, 1898), to indicate the importance of some of its chief
contentions.
[196] _Philosophical Lectures and Remains_, edited by Professor Bradley.
[197] Editor of _La Science Sociale_. His recent work on the
_Superiority of the Anglo-Saxons_ (_À quoi tient la supériorité des
Anglo-Saxons?_)--a chapter in the study of the conditions of race
survival--ran through seventeen editions in a few months, and set the
whole press of France and Germany (other countries following suit) into
commotion, as well as calling forth _pronunciamientos_ from most of the
prominent editors and critics of France,--men like Jules Lemaître, Paul
Bourget, Marcel Prevost, François Coppée, Édouard Rod, G. Valbert, etc.
[198] Now Professor A. Seth Pringle-Pattison.
[199] In different ways by all of the following English writers:
Professor A. Seth (“It is not in knowledge, then, as such, but in
feeling and action that reality is given,” _Man’s Place_, etc., p. 122,
etc. etc.), by Mr. Bradley (_Appearance and Reality_), by Mr. Balfour
(in his _Foundations of Belief_), and by Professor James. Professor
Eucken, of Jena, in his different books, also insists strongly upon the
idea that it is not in knowledge as such, but in the totality of our
psychical experience that the principles of philosophy must be sought.
Paulsen, in his _Einleitung in die Philosophie_, and Weber, in his
_History of Philosophy_ (books in general use to-day), both advocate
a kind of philosophy of the will, the idea that the world is to be
regarded as a striving on the part of wills after a partly unconscious
ideal. Simmel, in an important article in the _Revue de Métaphysique
et de Morale_, IV. 2, expresses the idea (which it would be well to
recognize generally at the present time) that truth is not something
objectively apart from us, but rather the name we give to conceptions
that have proved to be the guides to useful actions, and so become part
of the psychical heritage of human beings. Professor Ribot, of Paris,
has written more extensively upon the will and the feelings than upon
the intellect,--a fact in keeping with the scientific demands of our
day.
[200] See, _e.g._, an article by Fouillée in the _Revue Philosophique_,
XXI. 5, with the very title “Nécessité d’une interprétation
psychologique et sociologique du monde.” Fouillée finds there, as he
does elsewhere, that will is the principle that enables us to unify the
physical with the psychical world,--an illustration of the fact that
the two characteristics I am referring to are really one. A present
instance of the introduction of the element of will (the will of man,
even) is to be seen in the contention of such a book as M. Lucien
Arréat’s _Les Croyances de Demain_ (1898). According to _Mind_, M.
Arréat proposes to substitute the idea that man can by his efforts
bring about the supremacy of justice for the traditional idea that
justice reigns in the universe.
[201] _Manual of Ethics_, according to Mr. Stout, _International
Journal of Ethics_, October 1894. There are many similar sentences and
ideas in the book.
[202] _Elements of Ethics_, p. 232.
[203] Now Professor of Logic in St. Andrews.
[204] _International Journal of Ethics_, October 1894, p. 119.
[205] I think that I must here have meant Professor Watson’s
_Christianity and Idealism_.
[206] And apart from the idealism and the ethical philosophy of which
I speak, in the next chapter, as necessary to convert Pragmatism
into the Humanism it would like to become, Pragmatism is really a
kind of romanticism, the reaction of a personal enthusiasm against
the abstractions of a classical rationalism in philosophy. There is
an element of this romanticism in James’s heroic philosophy of life,
although I would prefer to be the last man in the world to talk against
this heroic romanticism in any one. It is the great want of our time,
and it is the thing that is prized most in some of the men whom this
ephemeral age of ours still delights to honour. It was exhibited
both in Browning and in George Meredith, for example. Of the former
Mr. Chesterton writes in his trenchant, clean-sweeping little book
on _The Victorian Age in Literature_, p. 175: “What he really was
was a romantic. He offered the cosmos as an adventure rather than a
scheme.” The same thing could be said about James’s “Will to Believe”
Philosophy. Meredith, although far less of an idealist than Browning,
was also an optimist by temperament rather than by knowledge or by
conviction--hence the elevation of his tone and style in spite of his
belated naturalism.
[207] In _Un Romantisme utilitaire_ (Paris, Alcan, 1911), chiefly a
study of the Pragmatism of Nietzsche and Poincaré.
[208] I am indebted for this saying of one of my old teachers to Mr.
C. F. G. Masterman, in his essay upon Sidgwick in that judicious
and interesting book upon the transition from the nineteenth to the
twentieth century, _In Peril of Change_.
[209] Stoicism and Epicureanism, as the matter is generally put,
both substitute the practical good of man as an individual for the
wisdom or the theoretical perfection that were contemplated by Plato
and Aristotle as the highest objects of human pursuit. For Cicero,
too, the chief problems of philosophy were in the main practical, the
question whether virtue alone is sufficient for happiness, the problem
of practical certainty as opposed to scepticism, the general belief in
Providence and in immortality, and so on. And Lucretius thinks of the
main service of philosophy as consisting in its power of emancipating
the human mind from superstition. All this is quite typical of the
essentially practical nature of the Roman character, of its conception
of education as in the main discipline and duty, of its distrust of
Greek intellectualism, and of its preoccupation with the necessities of
the struggle for existence and for government, of its lack of leisure,
and so on. I do not think that the very first thing about Pragmatism
is its desire to return to a practical conception of life, although a
tendency in this direction doubtless exists in it.
[210] The idea that our “demonstrable knowledge is very short, if
indeed we have any at all, although our certainty is as great as our
happiness, beyond which we have no concernment to know or to be”
(_Essay_, iv. 2–14); or Locke’s words: “I have always thought the
actions of men the best interpreters of their thoughts.”
[211] Schopenhauer, for example, used to be fond of repeating that his
own philosophy (which took will to be the fundamental reality) was on
its very face necessarily more of an ethic than a system like that of
Spinoza, for example, which could only be called an ethic by a sort of
_lucus a non lucendo_.
[212] The Practical Reason to Aristotle is the reason that has to do
with the pursuit of aims and ends, in distinction from the reason
that has to do with knowledge, and the “universal” and science. This
twofold distinction has given many problems to his students and to his
commentators, and to succeeding generations. It is responsible for the
entire mediæval and Renaissance separation of the intellectual life
and the intellectual virtues from the practical life and the practical
virtues.
[213] It might be added here that Logic has always recognized the
validity, to some extent, of the argument “from consequences” of which
Pragmatism makes so much. The form of argumentation that it calls the
Dilemma is a proof of this statement. A chain of reasoning that leads
to impossible consequences, or that leads to consequences inconsistent
with previously admitted truths, is necessarily unsound. That this test
of tenable or untenable consequences has often been used in philosophy
in the large sense of the term must be known only too well to the
well-informed reader. As Sidgwick says in his _Method of Ethics_:
“The truth of a philosopher’s premises will always be tested by the
acceptability of his conclusions; if in any important point he is found
in flagrant conflict with common opinion, his method will be declared
invalid.” Reid used the argument from consequences in his examination
of the sceptical philosophy of Hume. It is used with effect in Mr.
Arthur Balfour’s _Foundations of Belief_ in regard to the supposed
naturalism of physical science. Edmund Burke applied it to some extent
to political theories, or to the abstract philosophical theories upon
which some of them were supposedly based.
[214] Pragmatism has been called by some critics a “new-Humism” on the
ground of its tendency to do this very thing that is mentioned here in
respect of Hume. But the justice or the injustice of this appellation
is a very large question, into which it is needless for us to enter
here.
[215] Cf. “Intelligence is the aptitude to modify conduct in conformity
to the circumstances of each case” (_The Positive Philosophy_,
Martineau, i. 465).
[216] _Principles of Philosophy_, Part II. iii. It is also an eminently
pragmatist idea on the part of Descartes to hold that “I should find
much more truth in the reasoning of each individual with reference to
the affairs in which he is personally interested, and the issue of
which must presently punish him if he has judged amiss, than in those
conducted by a man of letters in his study, regarding speculative
matters that are of no practical moment” (_Method_, Veitch’s edition,
p. 10).
[217] _Principles of Philosophy_, Part II. iii. p. 233.
[218] See _Principles of Psychology_, ch. ii., “Assumption of
Metaphysicians,” and also elsewhere in his Essays.
[219] “Any power of doing or suffering in a degree however slight
was held by us to be the definition of existence” (Sophist, Jowett’s
_Plato_, iv. p. 465).
[220] _The Theory of Knowledge_, Preface, p. ix.
[221] “The independence of the doctrines of any science from the social
life, the prevalent thought of the generation in which they arise, is
indeed a fiction, a superstition of the scientist which we would fain
shatter beyond all repair; but the science becomes all the sounder for
recognizing its origins and its resources, its present limitations and
its need of fresh light from other minds, from different social moulds”
(pp. 215–216).
[222] See p. 81.
[223] Cf. p. 13.
[224] _The New Knowledge_, p. 255.
[225] It would indeed be easy to quote from popular writers of the day,
like Mr. Chesterton or Mr. A. C. Benson or Mr. H. G. Wells, to show
that a knowledge of the existence of Pragmatism as a newer experimental
or “sociological” philosophy is now a commonplace of the day. Take
the following, for example, from Mr. Wells’s _Marriage_ (p. 521):
“It was to be a pragmatist essay, a sustained attempt to undermine
the confidence of all that scholastic logic-chopping which still
lingers like the _sequelae_ of a disease in our University philosophy
... a huge criticism and cleaning up of the existing methods of
formulation as a preliminary to the wider and freer discussion of those
religious and social issues our generation still shrinks from.” “It is
grotesque,” he said, “and utterly true that the sanity and happiness of
all the world lies in its habits of generalization.”
[226] I cannot meantime trace, or place, this quotation, although I
remember copying it out of something by Karl Pearson.
[227] In the _Literary Digest_ for 1911.
[228] See p. 234.
[229] From a letter to Mrs. Humphry Ward, quoted in A. C. Benson’s
_Walter Pater_, p. 200.
[230] Lecture I. towards the beginning.
[231] See p. 62 and p. 197. It should be remembered that our reasoned
opinions rest upon our working beliefs.
[232] Vol. ii. p. 86.
[233] See the reference in Chapter II. p. 26 to the opportunistic ethic
of Prezzolini.
[234] In _What is Pragmatism?_ Macmillan & Co.
[235] Cf. p. 81.
[236] Professor Pratt makes an attempt in his book on _What is
Pragmatism?_ (pp. 75–6–7) to show that the true meaning of the
“correspondence theory” is not inconsistent with Pragmatism or that
Pragmatism is not inconsistent with this truth.
[237] Cf. _supra_, p. 64.
[238] See the Note on p. 21.
[239] Cf. _supra_, p. 67.
[240] Papini, in fact (in 1907), went the length of saying that you
cannot even _define_ Pragmatism, admitting that it appeals only to
certain kinds of persons.
[241] For a serviceable account, in English, of the differences between
the pragmatist philosophy of hypotheses and the more fully developed
philosophy of science of the day, see Father Walker’s _Theories of
Knowledge_, chapter xiii., upon “Pragmatism and Physical Science.”
[242] Cf. _supra_, p. 10 and p. 15. And this failure to systematize
becomes, it should be remembered, all the more exasperating, in view of
the prominence given by the pragmatists to the supreme principles of
“end” and “consequences.”
[243] In the “Axioms as Postulates” essay in _Personal Idealism_.
[244] Bourdeau makes the same charge, saying that all pragmatists have
the illusion that “reality is unstable.” Professor Stout has something
similar in view in referring to Dr. Schiller’s “primary reality” in
the _Mind_ review of _Studies in Humanism_. It is only the reality
with which we have to do (reality πρὸς ἡμᾶς as an Aristotelian might
say) that is “in the making”: for God there can be no such distinction
between process and product. But it is quite evident that Pragmatism
does not go far enough to solve, or even to see, such difficulties. It
confines itself in the main to the contention that man must think of
himself as a maker of reality to some extent--a contention that I hold
to be both true and useful, as far as it goes.
[245] _Pragmatism_, p. 264.
[246] “Pragmatism,” October 1900.
[247] The same line of reflection will be found in James’s
_Pragmatism_, p. 96.
[248] Professor Moore has a chapter in his book (_Pragmatism and its
Critics_) devoted to the purpose of showing the necessary failure of
Absolutism (or of an Intellectualism of the absolutist order) in the
realm of ethics, finding in the experimentalism and the quasi-Darwinism
of Pragmatism an atmosphere that is, to say the least, more favourable
to the realities of our moral experience. While I cannot find so much
as he does in the hit-and-miss ethical philosophy of Pragmatism, I
quite sympathize with him in his rejection of Absolutism or Rationalism
as a basis for ethics. The following are some of his reasons for this
rejection: (1) The “purpose” that is involved in the ethical life must,
according to Absolutism, be an all-inclusive and a fixed purpose,
allowing of no “advance” and no “retreat”---things that are imperative
to the idea of the _reality_ of our efforts. (2) Absolutism does not
provide for human responsibility; to it all actions and purposes are
those of the Absolute. (3) The ethical ideal of Absolutism is too
“static.” (4) Absolutism does not provide any material for “new goals
and new ideals.” See pp. 218–225 in my eighth chapter, where I censure,
in the interest of Pragmatism and Humanism, the ethical philosophy of
Professor Bosanquet.
[249] See p. 224, where I arrive at the conclusion that the same thing
may be said of the Absolutism of Dr. Bosanquet.
[250] Students of that important nineteenth-century book upon Ethics,
the _Methods of Ethics_, by Henry Sidgwick, will remember that Sidgwick
expressly states it as a grave argument against Utilitarianism that it
is by no means confirmed by the study of the actual origin of moral
distinctions. As we go back in history we do not find that moral
prescriptions have merely a utilitarian value.
[251] What I understand by the “normative idea of ethical science”
will become more apparent as I proceed. I may as well state, however,
that I look upon the distinction between the “descriptive” ideals of
science and the “normative” character of the ideals of the ethical and
the socio-political sciences as both fundamental and far-reaching.
There are _two_ things, as it were, that constitute what we might
call the subject-matter of philosophy---“facts” and “ideals”; or,
rather, it is the synthesis and reconciliation of these two orders of
reality that constitute the supreme problem of philosophy. It is with
the description of facts and of the laws of the sequences of things
that the “methodology” of science and of Pragmatism is in the main
concerned. And it is because Pragmatism has hitherto shown itself
unable to rise above the descriptive and hypothetical science of the
day to the ideals of the normative sciences (ethics, aesthetics, etc.)
that it is an imperfect philosophy of reality as we know it, or of the
different orders of reality.
[252] Cf. Professor Ward in _Naturalism and Agnosticism_ (vol. ii. p.
155): “What each one immediately deals with in his own experience is, I
repeat, objective reality in the most fundamental sense.”
[253] _Introduction to Science_, p. 137.
[254] “But if the primitive Amoebae gave rise ‘in the natural course of
events’ to higher organisms and these to higher, until there emerged
the supreme Mammal, _who by and by had a theory of it all_, then the
primitive Amoebae which had in them the promise and the potency of all
this _were very wonderful Amoebae indeed_. There must have been more in
them than met the eye! _We must stock them, with initiatives at least.
We are taking a good deal as ‘given.’_” [Italics mine.]--J. H. Thomson,
_Introduction to Science_, p. 137.
[255] See Westermarck, vol. i. pp. 74, 93, 117, and chapter iii.
generally. The sentence further down in respect of the permanent
fact of the moral consciousness is from Hobhouse, vol. ii. p. 54. As
instances of the latter, Hobhouse talks of things like the “purity
of the home, truthfulness, hospitality, help”, etc., in Iran, of the
doctrine of Non-Resistance in Lao Tsze, of the high conception of
personal righteousness revealed in the _Book of the Dead_, of the
contributions of monotheism to ethics, etc. etc.
[256] Cf. p. 167.
[257] It may, I suppose, be possible to exaggerate here and to fall to
some extent into what Mr. Bradley and Nietzsche and others have thought
of as the “radical vice of all goodness”--its tendency to forget that
other things, like beauty and truth, may also be thought of as absolute
“values,” as revelations of the divine. What I am thinking of here is
simply the realm of fact that is implied, say, in the idea of Horace,
when he speaks of the upright man being undismayed even by the fall of
the heavens (_impavidum ferient ruinae_) or by the idea of the Stoic
sage that the virtuous man was as necessary to Jupiter as Jupiter could
be to him, or by the idea (attributed to Socrates) that if the rulers
of the universe do not prefer the just man to the unjust it is better
to die than to live. If against all this sort of thing one is reminded
by realism of the “splendid immoralism” of Nature, of its apparent
indifference to all good and ill desert, I can but reply, as I have
done elsewhere in this book, that the Nature of which physical science
speaks is an “abstraction” and an unreality, and that it matters,
therefore, very little whether such a Nature is, or is not, indifferent
to morality. We know, however, of no Nature apart from life, and mind,
and consciousness, and thought, and will. It is God, and not Nature,
who makes the sun to shine on the just and the unjust.
[258] By this “meaning” is to be understood firstly the effects
upon our appetitive and conative tendencies of the various specific
items (whether sensation, or affections, or emotions, or what not)
of our experience, the significance, that is to say, to our total
general activity of all the particular happenings and incidents of
our experience. Psychologists all tell us of the vast system of
“dispositions” with which our psychophysical organism is equipped at
birth, and through the help of which we interpret the sensations and
occurrences of our experience. And in addition to these dispositions
we have, in the case of the adult, the coming into play of the many
associations and memories that are acquired during the experiences of
a single lifetime. It is these various associations that interpret
to us the present and give it meaning. In a higher sense we might
interpret “meaning” as expressive of the higher predicates, like the
good and the beautiful and the true, that we apply to some things in
the world of our socialized experience. And in the highest sense we
might interpret it as the significance that we attach to human history
as distinguished from the mere course of events--the significance upon
which the philosophy of history reposes. See Eucken in the article upon
the _Philosophy of History_ in the “systematic” volume of Hinneberg’s
_Kultur der Gegenwart_.
[259] See our second chapter upon the different continental and British
representatives of the hypothetical treatment of scientific laws and
conceptions that is such a well-marked tendency of the present time. By
no one perhaps was this theory put more emphatically than by Windelband
(of Strassburg) in his _Präludien_ (1884) and in his _Geschichte
und Naturwissenschaft_ (1894). In the latter he contrasts the real
individuals and personalities with which the historians deal with the
impersonal abstractions of natural science. I fully subscribe to this
distinction, and think that it underlies a great deal of the thought of
recent times.
[260] See “truth and real existence” in the _Republic_, 508 D--Jowett’s
rendering of ἀλήθειά τε καὶ τὸ ὄν (“over which truth and real existence
are shining”). Also further in the same place, “The cause of science
and of truth,” αἰτίαν δ’ ἐπιστήμης οὖσαν καὶ ἀληθείας. In 389 E we read
that a “high value must be set on truth.” Of course to Plato “truth”
is also, and perhaps even primarily, real existence, as when he says
(_Rep._ 585), “that which has less of truth will also have less of
essence.” But in any case truth always means more for him than “mere
being,” or existence, or “appearance,” it is the highest form of being,
the object of “science,” the great discovery of the higher reason.
[261] To Professor Bosanquet, for example; see below, p. 213, note 2.
[262] _The Poetry of the Old Testament_, Professor A. R. Gordon.
[263] _Ibid._ p. 4.
[264] _The Poetry of the Old Testament_, p. 160.
[265] _Ibid._ pp. 183–184.
[266] It is this false conception of truth as a “datum” or “content”
that wrecks the whole of Mr. Bradley’s argument in _Appearance and
Reality_. See on the contrary the following quotation from Professor
Boyce Gibson (Eucken’s _Philosophy of Life_, p. 109) in respect of the
attitude of Eucken towards the idea of truth as a personal ideal. “The
ultimate criterion of truth is not the clearness and the distinctness
of our thinking, nor its correspondence with a reality external to it,
nor any other intellectualistic principle. It is spiritual fruitfulness
as invariably realized by the personal experient, invariably realized
as springing freshly and freely from the inexhaustible resources which
our freedom gains from its dependence upon God.”
[267] It is part of the greatness of Hegel, I think, to have sought to
include the truth of history and of the social order in the truth of
philosophy, or in spiritual truth generally. His error consists in not
allowing for the fresh revelations of truth that have come to the world
through the insight of individuals and through the actions and the
creations of original men.
[268] There is a sentence in the Metaphysics of which I cannot
but think at this point, and which so far at least as the
rationalist-pragmatist issue is concerned is really one of the deepest
and most instructive ideas in the whole history of philosophy. It is
one of Aristotle’s troublesome additional statements in reference
to something that he has just been discussing--in this case the
“object of desire” and the “object of thought.” And what he adds in
the present instance is this (Bk. xii. 7): “_The primary objects of
these two things are the same_”--τούτων τὰ πρῶτα τὰ αὐτά--rendered
by Smith and Ross “_the primary objects of thought and desire are
the same_.” The translation, of course, is a matter of some slight
difficulty, turning upon the proper interpretation of τὰ πρῶτα, “the
first things,” although, of course, the student soon becomes familiar
with what Aristotle means by “first things,” and “first philosophy,”
and “first in nature,” and “first for us,” and so on. Themistius in his
commentary on this passage (_Commentaria in Aristotelem Graeca_, vol.
v. i-vi; _Themistius in Metaphysica_, 1072 and 17–30) puts it that “in
the case of immaterial existences the desirable and the intelligible
are the same--in primis vero principiis materiae non immixtis _idem
est desiderabile atque intelligibile_.” I am inclined to use this
great idea of the identity of the desirable and the intelligible--for
conscious, intelligent beings as the fundamental principle of the
true Humanism of which Pragmatism is in search. It is evidently in
this identity that Professor Bosanquet also believes in when he says:
“I am persuaded that if we critically understand what we really want
and need, we shall find it established by a straightforward argument”
(Preface to _Individuality and Value_. See the eighth chapter of this
book). It is certainly true that the constructive philosophy of which
we are in search to-day must leave no gap between thought and desire.
[269] I find an illustration or a confirmation of this thought in the
following piece of insight of Mr. Chesterton in regard to the “good,”
which is no doubt a “predicate” of our total thought and feeling and
volition. “Or, in other words, man cannot escape from God, _because
good is God in man; and insists on omniscience_” (_Victorian Age in
Literature_, p. 246--italics mine). A belief in goodness is certainly a
belief in an active goodness greater than our own; and it does raise a
desire for a comprehension of things.
[270] The reader will find a good deal in Professor Baldwin’s _Social
and Ethical Interpretations of Mental Development_ upon the relation
of truth and thought to desire, and also upon the social, or the
pragmatist or the experimental test of beliefs.
[271] See Chapter IX., in reference to Bergson’s “creative activity.”
[272] The reader who is anxious to obtain a working idea of the limits
of knowledge from a scientific point of view had better consult
such pieces of literature as Sir Oliver Lodge’s recent examination
of Haeckel’s _Riddle of the Universe_, Professor Ward’s _Naturalism
and Agnosticism_, Merz’s _History of European Thought during the
Nineteenth Century_, or Verworn’s _General Physiology_ (with its
interesting account of the different theories of the origin of life,
and its admission that after all we know matter only through mind and
sensation). Perusal of the most recent accessible literature upon this
whole subject will reveal the fact that these old questions about the
origin of life and motion, and about the nature of evolution, are still
as unsettled as they were in the last half of the last century. It is
not merely, however, of the actual limits of science at any one time
that we are obliged, as human beings, to think, but of the limits of
science in view of the fact that our knowledge comes to us _in part_,
under the conditions of space and time, and under the conditions of the
limits of our senses and of our understanding. Knowledge is certainly
limited in the light of what beings other than ourselves may know, and
in the light of what we would _like_ to know about the universe of life
and mind.
I do not think that this whole question of the limits of our knowledge
is such a burning question to-day as it was some years ago, there
being several reasons for this. One is that we live in an age of
specialization and discursiveness and “technic.” It is quite difficult
to meet with people who think that they may know, some day, everything,
from even some single point of view. And then the wide acceptance of
the hypothetical or the pragmatist conception of knowledge has caused
us to look upon the matter of the limits of science and knowledge as
a relative one, as always related to, and conditioned by, certain
points of view and certain assumptions. We are not even warranted, for
example, in thinking of mind and matter as separate in the old way, nor
can we separate the life of the individual from the life of the race,
nor the world from God, nor man from God, and so on. See an article by
the writer (in 1898 in the _Psy. Rev._) upon “Professor Titchener’s
View of the Self,” dealing with the actual, and the necessary limits,
of the point of view of Structural Psychology in regard to the “self.”
Also Professor Titchener’s reply to this article in a subsequent number
of the same review, and my own rejoinder.
[273] See Chapter II. p. 35.
[274] Despite what we spoke of in Chapter V. as its “subjectivism,” p.
134.
[275] That is to say, the simple truth that there is no “object”
without a “subject,” no “physical” world without a world of “psychical”
experiences on the part of some beings or some being. If our earth
existed before animated beings appeared upon it, it was only as a part
of some other “system” which we must think of as the object of some
mind or intelligence.
[276] See p. 235, note 2, in the Bergson chapter, where it is suggested
that to Bergson human perceptions do not, of course, exhaust matter.
[277] Among the many other good things in Mr. Marett’s admirable
_Anthropology_ (one of the freshest works upon the subject, suggestive
of the need, evidently felt in Oxford as well as elsewhere, of studying
philosophy and letters, and nearly everything else in the mental and
moral sciences, from the point of view of social anthropology) are the
clearness and the relevancy of illustration in his insistence upon the
importance of the “social factor” over all our thoughts of ourselves as
agents and students in the universe of things.” Payne shows us (p. 146)
“reason for believing _that the collective ‘we’ precedes ‘I’_ in the
order of linguistic evolution. To begin with, in America and elsewhere,
‘we’ may be inclusive and mean ‘all of us,’ or selective, meaning
‘some of us only.’ Hence a missionary must be very careful, and if he
is preaching, must use the inclusive ‘we’ in saying ‘we have sinned,’
whereas, in praying, he must use the selective ‘we,’ or God would be
included in the list of sinners. Similarly ‘I’ has a collective form
amongst some American languages; and this is ordinarily employed,
whereas the corresponding selective form is used only in special cases.
Thus, if the question be ‘Who will help?’ the Apache will reply,
‘I-amongst-others,’ ‘I-for-one’; but if he were recounting his personal
exploits, he says _sheedah_, ‘I-by-myself,’ to show they were wholly
his own. Here we seem to have _group-consciousness holding its own
against individual self-consciousness, as being for primitive folk on
the whole the more normal attitude of mind_.” It is indeed to be hoped
that, in the future, philosophy, by discarding its abstractionism and
its (closely allied) solipsism, will do its share in making this “group
consciousness,” this consciousness of our being indeed “fellow-workers”
with all men, once again a property of our minds and our thoughts.
[278] One of Professor James’s last books is called _A Pluralistic
Universe_, and both he and Professor Dewey have always written under
the pressure of the sociological interest of modern times. In short, it
is obvious that the “reality” underlying the entire pragmatist polemic
against the hypothetical character of the reading of the world afforded
us by the sciences, is the social and personal life that is the deepest
thing in our experience.
[279] This idea of a “world of inter-subjective intercourse,” although
now a commonplace of sociology, was first expressed for the writer in
the first series of the _Gifford Lectures_ of Professor James Ward
upon “Naturalism and Agnosticism,” in chapters xv. and xvi. The first
of these chapters deals with “Experience and Life,” and the second
with the “inter-subjective intercourse” that is really presupposed in
the so-called individual experience of which the old psychology used
to make so much. The reader who wishes to follow out a development of
this idea of a “world of inter-subjective intercourse” cannot do better
than follow the argument of Professor Ward’s second series of _Gifford
Lectures_ (“The Realm of Ends,” or “Pluralism and Theism”), in which he
will find a Humanism and Theism that is at least akin to the theodicy,
or the natural theology, of which we might suppose Pragmatism to be
enamoured. The double series of these Lectures might well be referred
to as an instance of the kind of classical English work in philosophy
of which we have spoken as not falling into the extremes either of
Pragmatism or of Rationalism. The strong point of the “Realm of Ends,”
from the point of view of this book upon Pragmatism and Idealism, is
that it moves from first to last in the reality of that world to which
the science and the philosophy of the day both seem to point the way.
In opposition to “subjectivism” it teaches a Humanism and a Pluralism
that we recognise as an expression of the realities of the world of our
common life and our common efforts, and from this Humanism it proceeds
to a Theism which its author seeks to defend from many of the familiar
difficulties of Naturalism. Were the writer concerned with the matter
of the development and the elaboration of the philosophy that seems to
have precipitated itself into his mind after some years of reflection
on the issues between the realists and the idealists, between the
rationalists and the pragmatists, he would have to begin by saying
that its outlines are at least represented for him in the theistic and
pluralistic philosophy of Professor Ward.
[280] According to Professor Dawes Hicks in the _Hibbert Journal_
for April 1913, there is a great deal in the articles of Professor
Alexander on “Collective Willing and Truth” that supports some of
the positions I am here attempting to indicate, as part of the
outcome of the pragmatist-rationalist controversy. “Both goodness
and truth depend, in the first place, on the recognition by one man
of consciousness in others, and, secondly, upon intersubjective
intercourse” (p. 658).
[281] I owe this reference (which I have attempted to verify) to a
suggestive and ingenious book (_The New Word_, by Mr. Allen Upward)
lent to me by a Montreal friend. Skeat, in his Dictionary, gives as the
meaning of truth, “_firm, established, certain, honest, faithful_,”
connecting it with A.S. _tréou_, _tryw_ (“preservation of a compact”),
Teut. _trewa_, saying that the “root” is “unknown.” I suppose that
similar things might be said about the Greek word ἐτεόν in its
different forms, which Liddel and Scott connect with “Sans., _satyas_
(_verus_), O. Nor. _Sannr_, A.S. _sóth_ (sooth).” All this seems to
justify the idea of the social confirmation of truth for which I am
inclined to stand, and the connexion of intellectual truth with ethical
truth, with the truth of human life. I agree with Lotze that truths do
not float above, or over, or between, things, but that they exist only
in the thought of a thinker, in so far as he thinks, or in the action
of a living being in the moment of his action--the _Microcosmos_ as
quoted in Eisler, article “_Wahrheit_” in the _Wörterbuch_. The Truth
for man would be the coherence of his knowledge and his beliefs, and
there is no abstract truth, or truth in and for itself, no impersonal
“whole” of truth.
[282] As in the Hegelian dialectic.
[283] There is another important thing to think of in connexion with
this sociological character of Pragmatism. It is a characteristic
that may be used to overcome what we have elsewhere talked of as
its “subjectivism” and its “individualism,” and its revolutionary
tendencies. It is, we might urge, a social and a collective standard
of truth that Pragmatism has in view when it thinks of “consequences”
and of the test of truth. Lalande takes up this idea in an article in
the _Revue Philosophique_ (1906) on “Pragmatisme et Pragmaticisme,”
pointing out that Dr. Peirce would apparently tend to base his
pragmatism on the subordination of individual to collective thought.
Dr. Schiller too, I think, contemplates this social test of truth in
his would-be revival of the philosophy of Protagoras--that man is the
measure of reality--for man.
[284] See below, p. 197, where we speak of this “mediation” as the
first fact for Professor Bosanquet as a prominent “Neo-Hegelian”
rationalist.
[285] I have been asked by a friendly critic if I would include
“inference” in this “real thought.” I certainly would, because in
all real inference we are, or ought to be, concerned with a real
subject-matter, a set of relations among realities of one kind
or another. Possibly all students in all subjects (especially in
philosophy) have lost time in following out a set of inferences in and
for themselves. But such a procedure is justified by the increased
power that we get over the real subject-matter of our thought. When
thought cannot be thus checked by the idea of such increased power, it
is idle thought.
[286] I am thinking, of course, of the entire revolutionary and radical
social philosophy that harks back (in theory at least) to the “Social
Contract” and to the State of Nature philosophy of Rousseau and his
associates and predecessors.
[287] See p. 184 of Chapter VII., where I speak of the ability to do
this as the invariable possession of the successful American teacher of
philosophy.
[288] An equivalent of it, of course, exists in many sayings, in many
countries, in the conception of the task of the metaphysician as that
of “a blind man in a dark room hunting for a black cat which--is
not there,” reproduced by Sir Ray Lankester in the recent book of
H. S. R. Eliot, _Modern Science and the Illusions of Bergson_. There is
generally an error or a fallacy in such descriptions of philosophy--in
this Lankester story the error that the secret of the world is a kind
of “thing in itself” out of all relation to everything we know and
experience--the very error against which the pragmatists are protesting.
[289] Mr. Bertrand Russell, for example, seems to me to have the
prejudice that philosophy is at its best only when occupied with
studies which (like the mathematics of his affections) are as remote as
possible from human life. “Real life is,” he says, “to most men a long
second-best, a perpetual compromise between the ideal and the possible;
but the world of pure reason knows no compromise, no practical
limitations, no barrier to the creative activity embodying in splendid
edifices the passionate aspiration after the perfect form from which
all great work springs. Remote from human passions, remote even from
the pitiful facts of nature, the generations have gradually created
an ordered cosmos where pure thought can dwell as in its natural
home, and where one, at least, of our nobler impulses can escape from
the dreary exile of the actual world.” I cannot--as I have indicated
elsewhere in regard to Mr. Russell--see for one moment how there is any
justification for looking upon this “ordered cosmos” of mathematical
physics as anything other than an abstraction from the real world with
which we are acquainted. It is the creation of only one of our many
human interests. And I cannot see that the thought that occupies itself
with this world is any nobler than the thought that occupies itself
with the more complex worlds of life, and of birth and death, and of
knowledge and feeling and conduct. Mr. Russell might remember, for one
thing, that there have been men (Spinoza among them) who have attempted
to treat of human passions under the light of ascertainable laws,
and that it is (to say the very least) as legitimate for philosophy
to seek for reason and law in human life, and in the evolution of
human history, as in the abstract world of physical and mathematical
science. Can, too, a mathematical philosophy afford any final haven
for the spirit of man, without an examination of the _mind_ of the
mathematician and of the nature of the concepts and symbols that
he uses in his researches? There is a whole world of dispute and
discussion about all these things.
[290] I have in view in fact only (or mainly) such American
characteristics as may be thought of in connexion with the newer
intellectual and social atmosphere of the present time, the
atmosphere that impresses the visitor and the resident from the old
world, the atmosphere to the creation of which he himself and his
fellow-immigrants have contributed, as well as the native-born American
of two generations ago--to go no further back. I mean that anything
like a far-reaching analysis or consideration of the great qualities
that go to make up the “soul” of the United States is, of course,
altogether beyond the sphere of my attention for the present. I fully
subscribe, in short, to the truth of the following words of Professor
Santayana, one of the most scholarly and competent American students
(both of philosophy and of life) of the passing generation: “America
is not simply a young country with an old mentality; it is a country
with two mentalities, one a survival of the beliefs and standards of
the fathers, the other an expression of the instincts, practice, and
discoveries of the younger generation. In all the higher things of
the mind--in religion, literature, in the moral emotions, it is the
hereditary spirit that still prevails, so much so, that Mr. Bernard
Shaw finds that America is a hundred years behind the times.”--“The
Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy,” in _Winds of Doctrine_ (p.
187).
[291] A contemporary American authority, Professor Bliss Perry, in
his book upon _The American Mind_ naturally singles out radicalism
as one of the well-marked characteristics of Americans. Among the
other characteristics of which he speaks are those of the “love of
exaggeration,” “idealism,” “optimism,” “individualism,” “public
spirit.” I refer, I think, to nearly all these things in my pages,
although of course I had not the benefit of Professor Perry’s book in
writing the present chapter.
[292] I am certainly one of those who insist that we must think of
America as (despite some appearances to the contrary--appearances
to be seen also, for example, in the West of Canada) fundamentally
a religious country. It was founded upon certain great religious
ideas that were a highly important counterpart to some of the
eighteenth-century fallacies about liberty and equality that exercised
their influence upon the fathers of the republic.
[293] He has recently published a volume dealing especially with the
contributions of Biology and Darwinism to philosophy.
[294] See p. 252.
[295] The crucial characteristics of the Presidential campaign of 1912
clearly showed this.
[296] We can see this in the many valuable studies and addresses of
Professor Dewey upon educational and social problems.
[297] It is this fact, or the body of fact and tendency upon which
it rests, that causes Americans and all who know them or observe
them, to think and speak of the _apparently_ purely “economic” or
“business-like” character of the greater part of their activities.
Let me quote Professor Bliss Perry here ... “_the overwhelming
preponderance of the unmitigated business-man face_ [italics mine],
the consummate monotonous commonness of the pushing male crowd” (p.
158). “There exists, in other words, _in all classes of American
society to-day_, just as there existed during the Revolution, during
the ‘transcendental’ movement, in the Civil War, an immense mass of
unspiritualised, unvitalised American manhood and womanhood” (p. 160).
[298] And this despite of what I have called elsewhere the comparative
failure of Pragmatism to give a rational, and tenable account of
“personality” and of the “self.”
[299] At the moment of his death (_scribens est mortuus_) James was
undoubtedly throughout the world the most talked-about English-speaking
philosopher, and nowhere more so than in Germany, the home of the
transcendentalism that he so doughtily and brilliantly attacked.
Stein says, for example, in his article upon “Pragmatism” (_Archiv
für Philosophie_, 14, 1907, II. Ab.), that we “have had nothing like
it since Schopenhauer.” I have often thought that James and his work,
along with the life and work of other notable American thinkers (and
along with the “lead” that America now certainly has over at least
England in some departments of study, like political and economic
science, experimental psychology, and so on), are part of the debt
America owed, some decades ago, to the Old World in the matter of the
training of many of her best professors--a debt she has long since
cancelled and overpaid. Readers, by the way, who desire more authentic
information about James and his work than the present writer is either
capable, or desirous, of giving in this book, may peruse either the
recent work of Professor Perry of Harvard upon _Present Philosophical
Tendencies_, or the work of M. Flournoy already spoken of. Boutroux has
a fine appreciation of the value of James’s philosophical work in the
work to which I have already referred. And there was naturally a crop
of invaluable articles upon James in the American reviews shortly after
his death.
[300] Think alone, for example, of what James says he learnt there
from a teacher like Agassiz: “The hours I spent with Agassiz so taught
me the difference between all possible abstractionists and all livers
in the light of the world’s concrete fulness that I have never been
able to forget it.”--From an article upon James in the _Journal of
Philosophy_, ix. p. 527.
[301] While this book was passing through the press my eye fell upon
the following words of Professor Santayana in respect of this very
personality of James: “It was his personal spontaneity, similar to that
of Emerson, and his personal vitality similar to that of nobody else.
Conviction and ideas came to him, so to speak, from the subsoil. He had
a prophetic sympathy with the dawning sentiments of the age, with the
moods of the dumb majority. His way of thinking and feeling represents
the true America, and represented in a measure the whole ultra-modern
radical world” (_Winds of Doctrine_, p. 205).
[302] Including, say, the facilities of a completely indexed and
authenticated estimate of the work that has been done in different
countries upon his particular subject. It is easy to see that the habit
and the possibility of work in an environment such as this [and again
and again its system and its facilities simply stagger the European]
is a thing of the greatest value to the American professor so far as
the idea of his own best possible contribution to his age is concerned.
Should he merely do over again what others have done? Or shall he
try to work in a really new field? Or shall he give himself to the
work of real teaching, to the training of competent men, or to the
“organization” of his subject with his public? It must be admitted,
I think, that the average American professor is a better teacher and
guide in his subject than his average colleague in many places in
Europe. Hence the justifiable discontent of many American students with
what they occasionally find abroad in the way of academic facilities
for investigation and advanced study.
[303] The latter (it is perhaps needless to state) have long been
perfectly evident to all American teachers of the first rank in the
shape, say, of the worthless “research” that is often represented in
theses and studies handed in for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy,
or for other purposes. Anything that seems to be “work done,” anything
that has attained to some “consequences” or other, has often been
published as studies and researches, and this despite the valuable
things that are to be associated with the idea of the pragmatist
element in American scholarship. The faults, too, of the undue
specialization that still obtains in many American institutions is
also, as I have indicated, becoming more and more apparent to American
authorities.
[304] I cannot see why idealists should have been so slow to accord
to Pragmatism the element of truth in this idea, and to admit that it
connects the pragmatist philosophy of “consequences” with the idealist
“value-philosophy.”
[305] The greater part, for example, of our British teaching and
writing about Kant and Hegel has taken little or no recognition of
the peculiar intellectual and social atmosphere under which Criticism
and Transcendentalism became intelligible and influential in Germany
and elsewhere, or of the equally important matter of the very
different ways in which the Kantian and the Hegelian philosophies
were interpreted by different schools and different tendencies of
thought. A similar thing might, I think, too, be said of the unduly
“intellectualistic” manner in which the teachings of Plato and
Aristotle have often been presented to our British students--under the
influence partly of Hegelianism and partly of the _doctrinairism_ and
the intellectualism of our academic Humanism since the time of the
Renaissance. Hence the great importance in Greek philosophy of such a
recent work as that of F. M. Cornford upon the relation of Religion
to Philosophy (_From Religion to Philosophy_, Arnold, 1912), or of
Professor Burnet’s well-known _Early Greek Philosophy_.
[306] As suggestive of the scant respect for authorities felt by the
active-minded American student, I may refer to the boast of Papini that
Pragmatism appeals to the virile and the proud-spirited who do not wish
to accept their thought from the past.
[307] I am thinking of such events as the “World’s Parliament of
Religions” (in Chicago in 1893), the recent international conferences
upon “ethical instruction in different countries,” upon “racial
problems,” upon “missions,” etc. It would be idle to think that such
attempts at the organisation of the knowledge and the effort of
the thinking people in the world are quite devoid of philosophical
importance. One has only to study, say, von Hartmann, or modern social
reform, to be convinced of the contrary.
[308] I trust I may be pardoned if I venture to suggest that in
opposition to the democratic attitude of Pragmatism to the ordinary
facts of life, and to the ordinary (but often heroic) life of ordinary
men, the view of man and the universe that is taken in such an
important idealistic book as Dr. Bosanquet’s _Individuality and Value_
is doubtless unduly aristocratic or intellectualistic. It speaks
rather of the Greek view of life than of the modern democratic view.
As an expression of the _quasi_ democratic attitude of James even in
philosophy, we may cite the following: “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 its truth, as a philosophical 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.”
[Having rewritten this quotation two or three times, I have lost the
reference to its place in James’s writings. It is one of the three
books upon Pragmatism and Pluralism.]
[309] We may quote, I think, the following passage from Professor
Perry to show that the open-mindedness of James was not merely a
temperamental and an American characteristic in his case, but a
quality or attitude that rested upon an intellectual conviction in
respect of the function of ideas. “Since it is their office [_i.e._
the office of ideas] to pave the way for direct knowledge, or to be
temporarily substituted for it, then efficiency is conditioned by
their _unobtrusiveness, by the readiness with which they subordinate
themselves_. The commonest case of an idea in James’s sense is the
word, and the most notable example of his pragmatic or empirical
method is his own scrupulous avoidance of verbalism. It follows that
since ideas are in and of themselves of no cognitive value, since
they are essentially instrumental, they _are always on trial_, and
‘liable to modification in the course of future experience.’”--_Present
Philosophical Tendencies_, p. 364 (italics mine).
[310] It is known to all students that some of the more important
writings of this prince of thinkers cannot be intelligibly approached
without a long preliminary study of the peculiar “dressing up,” or
transformation, to which he subjects the various facts of life and
existence. And the same thing is true (to a more modified extent) of
the writings of Kant.
[311] See the wise remark, in this very connexion, of the possible
service of philosophy to-day, of Dr. Bosanquet, reproduced upon p. 226.
And then, again, we must remember that an unduly pragmatist view of
life would tend to make people impervious to ideas that transcend the
range and the level of their ordinary interests and activities.
[312] Cf. the following from Professor Pace’s Preface to _Introduction
to Philosophy_, by Charles A. Dubray. “In Catholic colleges, importance
has always been attached to the study of philosophy both as a means
of culture and as a source of information regarding the great truths
which are influential in supporting Christian belief and in shaping
character.” Of course these same words might be used as descriptive of
what Professor Santayana calls the “older tradition” in _all_ American
colleges. It is interesting, by the way, to note also the pragmatist
touch in the same Preface to this Catholic manual. “But if this
training is to be successful, philosophy must be presented, not as a
complex of abstruse speculations on far-off inaccessible topics, but as
a system of truths that enter with vital consequence into our ordinary
thinking and our everyday conduct.”
[313] See p. 136.
[314] See above, p. 34 and p. 165.
[315] It is not, however, “rest” that the pragmatists want, even in
heaven, but renewed opportunities for achievement. “‘_There shall
be news_,’ W. James was fond of saying with rapture, quoting from
the unpublished poem of a new friend, ‘there shall be _news in
heaven_.’”--Professor Santayana in _Winds of Doctrine_, p. 209.
[316] In using this expression I am acutely conscious of its
limitations and of its misleading character. There is nothing in which
Americans so thoroughly believe as _knowledge_ and _instruction_ and
_information_. A belief in education is in fact _the one prevailing
religion of the country_--the one thing in which _all_ classes, without
any exception, unfeignedly _believe_, and for which the entire country
makes enormous sacrifices.
[317] In using this expression I am not blind to such outstanding
characteristics of American life as (1) the enormous amount of
preventive philanthropy that exists in the United States; (2) the
well-known system of checks in the governmental machinery of the
country; (3) the readiness with which Americans fly to legislation for
the cure of evils; (4) the American sensitiveness to pain and their
hesitation about the infliction of suffering or punishment, etc. Nor
do I forget the sacrifice of life entailed by modern necessities and
modern inventions in countries other than America. I simply mean that
owing to the constant stream of immigration, and to the spirit of
youthfulness that pervades the country, the willingness of people to
make experiments with themselves and their lives is one of the many
remarkable things about the United States.
[318] See p. 117.
[319] And this despite the enormous amount of work that has been done
by American biologists upon the “factors” of evolution, and upon a true
interpretation of Darwinism and of Weismannism and of the evolutionary
theory generally.
[320] Even Professor James, for example, dismissed (far too readily,
in my opinion) as a “sociological romance” a well-known book
(published both in French and in English) by Professor Schinz entitled
_Anti-Pragmatism_. Although in some respects a superficial and
exaggerated piece of work, this book did discover certain important
things about Pragmatism and about its relation to American life.
[321] It is probably a perception of this truth that has led Dr.
Bosanquet to express the opinion that the whole pragmatist issue may
be settled by an examination of the notion of “satisfaction.” He
must mean, I think, that satisfaction is impossible to man without
a recognition of many of the ideal factors that are almost entirely
neglected by the pragmatists--except by Bergson, if it be fair to call
him a pragmatist.
[322] Bourdeau, for example, has suggested that its God is not really
God, but merely an old domestic servant destined to do us personal
services---help us to carry our trunk and our cross in the midst of
sweat and dirt. He is not a gentleman even. “No wonder,” he adds, “it
was condemned at Rome.” See his _Pragmatisme et Modernisme_, p. 82.
[323] I am thinking here of the words in the Constitution of the
State of California (they are printed in Mr. Bryce’s _American
Commonwealth_--at least in the earlier editions) to the effect that it
is the natural right of all men to seek and to “_obtain_ [!]” happiness.
[324] “_Epigramme_,” Venice, 1790. [“I could never abide any of those
freedom-gospellers. All that they ever wanted was to get things running
so as to suit themselves. If you are anxious to set people free, just
make a beginning by trying to serve them. The simplest attempt will
teach you how dangerous this effort may be.”]
[325] See Chapter IX.
[326] On what grounds does Professor Bosanquet think of “compensating
justice” as a naïve idea? It is on the contrary one of the highest and
deepest, and one of the most comprehensive to which the human mind has
ever attained--giving rise to the various theogonies and theodicies and
religious systems of mankind. It is at the bottom, for example, of the
theodicy and the philosophy of Leibniz, the founder of the Rationalism
of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Europe.
[327] Could any system of ethics which took such an impossible and such
a belated conception of the individual be regarded as ethics at all?
[328] I do not think that this is a fair preliminary description of
the problem of teleology. A person who believes in the realization
of purpose in some experiences with which he thinks himself to be
acquainted does not plead for the guidance of the universe by finite
minds, but simply for a view of it that shall include the truth of
human purposes. And of course there may be in the universe beings other
than ourselves who also realize purposes.
[329] Italics and exclamation mine.
[330] Italics mine. There is a large element of truth in this great
idea of Professor Bosanquet’s, connecting [for our purposes] his
philosophy with the theism and the personalism for which we are
contending as the only true and real basis for Humanism.
[331] Readers who remember Green’s _Prolegomena to Ethics_ will
remember that it is one of the difficulties of that remarkable, but
one-sided, production (exposed, I think, with many other defects in
Professor Taylor’s brilliant, but unduly intellectualistic _Problem
of Conduct_) that it also seems to teach a kind of “Determinism”
in ethics, in what our nature is unduly communicated to us by the
Absolute, or the “Eternal Consciousness.” This whole way of looking at
things must largely be abandoned to-day.
[332] See below, p. 226.
[333] It is, I am inclined to think, the existence of this
contradiction in Dr. Bosanquet’s Lectures that will cause the average
intelligent person to turn away from them as not affording an adequate
account of the reality of the world of persons and things with which
he knows himself to be directly and indirectly acquainted. Another
way of stating the same thing would be to say that Absolutism fails
to take any adequate recognition of that most serious contradiction
(or “defect”) in our experience of which we have already spoken as
the great dualism of modern times, the opposition between reason and
faith an opposition that is not relieved either by the greatest of
the continually increasing discoveries of science, or by any, or all,
of the systems of all the thinkers. Hegelianism in general assures us
that from the point of view of a “higher synthesis” this opposition
does not exist or that it is somehow “transcended.” And its method of
effecting this synthesis is to convert the opposition between faith
and reason into the opposition between what it calls “Understanding”
and what it calls “Reason” [an opposition that is to some extent a
fictitious one, “reason” being, to begin with, but another name for
our power of framing general conceptions or notions, and not therefore
different from “understanding”]. It removes, that is to say, the
opposition between two different phases or aspects of our experience
by denying the existence of one of them altogether. It changes the
opposition between knowledge and faith into an opposition between an
alleged lower and an alleged higher way of _knowing_. This alleged
higher way of knowing, however, is, when we look into it, but the old
ideal of the perfect demonstration of _all the supposed contents_ of
our knowledge (principles and facts alike) that has haunted modern
philosophy from the time of Descartes. It is an unattainable ideal
because no philosophy in the world can begin without some assumption
(either of “fact” or of principle), and because our knowledge of
the world comes to us in a piecemeal fashion--under the conditions
of time and space. A fact prior to all the issues of the demand of
Rationalism for a supposedly perfect demonstration is the _existence
of the conscious beings_ (Dr. Bosanquet himself, for example) who
seek this supposed certainty in order that they may act better--in
ignorance of the fact that complete initial certainty on our part as
to all the issues and aspects of our actions would tend to destroy
the personal character of our choice as moral agents, as beings who
may occasionally act beyond the given and the calculable, and set up
precedents and ideals for ourselves and for others--for humanity. It is
this underlying faith then in the reality of our moral and spiritual
nature that we would alone oppose (and only in a relative sense) to
the supposed certainties of a completely rational, or _a priori_,
demonstration, the whole contention of humanism being that it is in the
interests of the former reality that the latter certainties exist. The
apparent opposition between faith and reason would be surmounted by a
philosophy that should make consciousness of ourselves _as persons_ the
primal certainty, and all other forms of consciousness or of knowledge
secondary and tributary, as it were, to this.
[334] I am aware that there is a difference between the “universal”
of ordinary formal logic and Dr. Bosanquet’s (or Hegel’s) “concrete
universal,” but it is needless for me to think of it here. Dr.
Bosanquet uses in his Lectures the phrase “logical universal” for his
“concrete universal” or his principle of positive coherence. It is
always logical coherence that he has in view.
[335] “For everywhere it is creative Logic, the nature of the whole
working in the detail, which constitutes experience, and is appreciable
in so far as experience has value.” Now Logic of itself does not thus
“work” or “do” anything. It is men or persons who do things by the help
of logic and reasoning and other things--realities and forces, etc.
[336] Cf. p. 31. “We are minds,” he says, “_i.e._ living microcosms,
not with hard and fast limits, but determined by our range and powers
which fluctuate very greatly.” My point simply is that this is too
intellectualistic a conception of man’s personality. We have minds, but
we are not minds.
[337] See p. 192. “But as the self is essentially a world of content
engaged in certain transformations”; and p. 193, “a conscious being
... is a world ... in which the Absolute begins to reveal its proper
nature.” How can a “world of content” [that is to say, the “sphere of
discourse” of what some person is thinking for some purpose or other]
be “engaged” in certain transformations? It is the _person_, or the
thinker, who is transforming the various data of his experience for his
purposes as a man among men. It is time that philosophy ceased to make
itself ridiculous by calmly writing down such abstractions as if they
were facts.
[338] Cf. “Mind as the significance and interpretation of reality,” p.
27.
[339] “Mind has nothing of its own but the active form of totality,
everything positive it draws from Nature.”
[340] This again is an abstraction, and how on earth can it be said
that “mind” and conscious life “reflect” merely certain abstractions
(or creations) of their own? They have invented such terms as “content”
for certain purposes, and their own being and nature is therefore more
than these terms. Mind is not a “content”; it makes all other things
“contents” for itself.
[341] It has even there, according to Dr. Bosanquet, only its purely
theoretic function of working after its own perfection in the way of
attaining to a logical “universal.” “The peculiarity of mind for us,
is to be a world of experience working itself out towards harmony and
completeness.” This is simply not true.
[342] “Finite consciousness, whether animal or human, did not make its
body.”
[343] “Thus there is nothing in mind _which the physical counterpart
cannot represent_.” (Italics mine.)
[344] “What we call the individual, then, is not a fixed essence, but a
living world of content representing a certain range of externality.”
P. 289.
[345] “The _system of the universe_, as was said in an earlier
Lecture, might be described as _a representative system_. Nature, or
externality[!] lives in the lives of conscious beings. (Italics mine.)
[346] “Spirit is a light, a focus, a significance[!] which can only be
by contact with a ‘nature’ an external world.”
[347] “For, on the other hand, it has been urged and we feel,
that it is _thought which constructs and sustains the fabric of
experience_, and that it is thought-determinations which invest
even sense-experience _with its value_ and _its meaning_. . . . The
ultimate tendency of thought, we have seen, is not to generalise, but
to _constitute a world_,” p. 55. Again, “the true office of thought,
we begin to see, _is to build up_, _to inspire with meaning_, _to
intensify_, _to vivify_. The object which thought, in the true sense,
has worked upon, is not a relic of decaying sense, _but is a living
world_, analogous to a perception of the beautiful, in which every
thought-determination adds fresh point and deeper bearing to every
element of the whole,” p. 58. And on p. 178 he says that he sees
no objection to an idealist recognising the “use made of” “laws”
and “_dispositions_” in recent psychology. [How one wishes that Dr.
Bosanquet had really worked into his philosophy the idea that every
mental “element” is in a sense a “disposition” to _activity_!] Some
of these statements of Dr. Bosanquet’s have almost a pragmatist ring
about them, a suggestion of a _living_ and dynamic (rather than a
merely intellectualistic) conception of thought. They may therefore be
associated by the reader with the concessions to Pragmatism by other
rationalists of which we spoke in an early chapter (see p. 74).
[348] See Chapter III. p. 90.
[349] I must say that apart from any questions in detail about
this rejection of teleology by Dr. Bosanquet, there is something
inexplicable about it to me. He cannot retain his own great notion of
“wholeness” without the idea of “end,” because “wholeness” is a demand
of thought that is guided by some idea of purpose or end.
[350] See p. 90.
[351] Italics mine.
[352] P. 225.
[353] See p. 90.
[354] Having already given instances of this abstractionism in the
case of such things as the “self” and the “universal” and “spirit,” it
will suffice to point out here in addition (1) its tendency to talk of
“experience” and “experiences” _as if there could be such things apart
from the prior real existence of the experients or the experiencing
persons_ with whom we are acquainted in our daily life, and (2) its
tendency to talk of getting at “the heart of actual life and love” in a
“system” which leaves no place for the real existence of either gods or
men who live and love. And then I trust that it may not be regarded as
an impertinence to allege as another puzzling piece of abstractionism
on the part of Dr. Bosanquet, that he has allowed himself to speak and
think in his book as if his theory of the “concrete universal” were
practically a new thing in the thought of our time--apart altogether,
that is to say, from the important work in this same direction of other
Neo-Hegelian writers, and apart, too, from the unique work of Hegel in
the same connexion.
[355] See below, p. 230.
[356] This is revealed in the main in its exposition of the world
as the logical system of a single complete individual experience--a
tendency that students of philosophy know to exist in Neo-Hegelianism
generally from Green to Bradley. I admit that this tendency is
literally a different thing from solipsism in the ordinary sense, as
the inability of a particular finite person to prove to himself that
any person or thing exists except himself. It is still, however, it
seems to me, possible to regard as solipsistic the tendency to set
forth the universe as the experience, or the thought, of a single
experient or a single thinker, even although the impersonalism of Dr.
Bosanquet’s logical “whole” conflicts somewhat with the individuality
of his Absolute.
[357] Cf. p. 160.
[358] The well-known inability of Mr. Bradley, for example, to be
content with the reality of any portion or any phase of reality that
falls short of what he regards as absolute reality, and with the merely
relative meaning that he attaches to any category of the “finite.”
Also the well-known Neo-Hegelian tendency to make an opponent forge
the weapon by which he is to be dislodged from any particular point
of view. In the case of Dr. Bosanquet this tendency takes the form
of making out any one who holds to a belief in the real existence of
finite conscious persons to hold the absurd position of believing in
“an impervious and isolated self,” a thing, of course, that no one who
knows anything about biology or ethics, or social psychology, really
does.
[359] As another instance of Dr. Bosanquet’s unintentional unfairness
to his opponents, I would note his positive injustice to Theism as
such. What many of us think of (however imperfectly) and believe in
as God is invariably to him “a theistic Demiurge in his blankness and
isolation.” I do not believe in such an abstract Demiurge any more
than I believe in the separate, isolated self that he conjures up to
his mind when he thinks of personality. The problem of the twentieth
century may well be what Dr. Ward has signalised as the relation of God
to the “Absolute” of the Hegelian metaphysicians, but this suggestion
simply means to me the discovery on the part of philosophers of terms
and concepts more adequate to the Supreme Being than either the
Absolute, or the external deity rejected by Dr. Bosanquet.
[360] Stéphane Mallarmé, according to Nordau in _Degeneration_, p. 103.
[361] And the general reader must remember that the “whole” is always
(with all due respect to his high dialectic ability and his high
temper of mind and his scholarship) a kind of _ignis fatuus_ in Dr.
Bosanquet’s book, a kind of shadow thrown by the lamps and the tools of
his own choosing in his Quixotic search. The “whole” is the “perfected
individuality” of the individual who sets out to find truth in this
great world of ours with all its _real possibilities_ of gain and loss.
It is the completion of the “system” of truth to which the truth-seeker
would fain reduce the entire universe, that becomes for him (for the
time being) the mere “subject-matter” of his thought. It is, that is
to say, in both cases, a purely formal conception--an abstraction,
although to Dr. Bosanquet it is the reality implied in the very
existence and activity of the individual thinker. But the latter is
the case to him only because he looks upon man as _existing to think_
instead of as _thinking to exist_.
[362] That is to say, for the scholar and the lover of Dante and
Dante’s world.
[363] For he was not merely a “mind,” reflecting “Italy” and “minds”
and “experiences.”
[364] And that, we might add, is still kept alive by some of our
humanists and educators of to-day as the ideal for both primary and
secondary education.
[365] This is a thing that the beginner is taught in lectures
introductory to the study of the philosophy of Kant--in regard to
Kant’s relation to the barren, dogmatic formalism of Wolff--a one-sided
interpreter of the philosophy of Leibniz. I am quite aware that Dr.
Bosanquet does not merely use the Principle of Non-Contradiction in
the aggressive, or polemical, manner of Mr. Bradley in _Appearance and
Reality_. The principle of positive coherence at which he aims, begins,
to some extent, where Mr. Bradley stopped. But it is still the idea of
consistency or inconsistency, with certain presuppositions of his own,
that rules his thinking; it determines, from the very outset of his
Lectures, what he accepts and what he rejects.
[366] See p. 152 and p. 156, note 2.
[367] I use this word “must” in a logical as well as in an ethical
sense, seeing that all judgment implies a belief in the reality of a
world of persons independent of the mere fact of “judgment” as a piece
of mental process.
[368] See p. 145.
[369] On p. 345 the words are: “_When we consider the naïve or
elementary life of morality and religion_”; and on p. 346: “_The
naïve, or simple self of every-day morality and religion_,” and the
marginal heading of the page upon which these words occur is “_The
naïve good self compared to grasp of a fundamental principle alone_.”
Could anything more clearly indicate what the Kantians call a confusion
of categories [in the case in point the categories of “goodness” and
the categories of “truth”] or what Aristotle calls a μετάβασις εἰς
ἄλλο γένος, the unconscious treatment of one order of facts by the
terms and conceptions of another order of facts. To Dr. Bosanquet
as the Neo-Hellenist that he is in his professed creed, badness is
practically stupidity, and “lack of unification of life,” and “failure
of theoretical grasp.” This confusion between goodness and wisdom is
again indicated on p. 347 in the words: “_A man is good in so far as
his being is ‘unified at’ all in any sphere of wisdom or activity_.”
[This is simply not true, and its falsity is a more unforgivable
thing in the case of Dr. Bosanquet than it is in the case of the
pragmatists who also tend to make the ‘moral’ a kind of ‘unification’
or ‘effectiveness’ in ‘purpose.’] As a proof of Dr. Bosanquet’s
transformation of the facts of the ethical life in the interest of
logical theory, we can point to p. 334: “_Our actions and ideas issue
from our world as a conclusion from its premises, or as a poem from its
author’s spirit_,” or to p. 53, where it is definitely stated that the
“_self, as it happens to be_,” cannot, in any of its “three aspects,”
“_serve as a test of reality_.” To do the latter, it must, in his
opinion, follow the law of the “universal,” _i.e._ _become a logical
conception_. Now of course (1) _it is not the self “as it happens to
be”_ that is chiefly dealt with in ethics, but rather the _self as
it ought to be_. And (2) the ethical self, or the “person,” does not
follow the “law of the universal” [a logical law] but the law of right
and wrong [an ethical law]. As a proof of the subordination of the
facts of conduct to the facts of aesthetics, we may take the words on
p. 348 where aesthetic excellence is said to be “_goodness in the wider
or_ (‘_shall we say_’) _in the narrower sense_.” Now the distinction
between ethics and aesthetics is not one of degree, but one of kind.
And as another illustration of his tendency to transform ethical facts
in the light of a metaphysical, or a logical, theory [they are the
same thing to him] we may quote the emphatic declaration on p. 356:
“_Our effort has been to bring the conception of moral_ and individual
initiative _nearer to the idea of logical determination_,” or the
equally outspoken declaration on p. 353: “_But metaphysical theory,
viewing the self in its essential basis_ of moral solidarity with the
natural and social world ... _cannot admit_ that the independence
of the self, _though a fact, is more than a partial fact_.” Or the
words at the top of this same page: “The primary principle _that
should govern the whole discussion_ is this, that the attitude of
moral judgment and responsibility for decisions _is only one among
other attitudes_ and spheres of experience.” These last words alone
would prove definitely the non-ethical character of “Individuality
and Value.” The ethical life is to its author only a “_quatenus
consideratur_,” only a possible point of view, only an aspect of
reality, only an aspect, therefore, of a “logical system.” Now if the
ethical life of the world is to count for anything at all, it may be
said that the ethical life is no mere aspect of the life of the self,
and no mere aspect of the life of the world, seeing that “nature” in
the sense of mere “physical nature” does not come into the sphere of
morality at all. It is rather the activity of the “whole self,” or
the “normative” reflection of the self as a whole upon all the merely
partial or subordinate aspects of its activity, upon bodily life,
economic life, intellectual activity, and so on that constitutes the
world of morality.
[370] See p. 147, and p. 244.
[371] Good and evil to Dr. Bosanquet are two quasi-rational systems
in active antagonism as claiming to attach different “principles and
predicates” to identical data. The essence of their antagonism to Dr.
Bosanquet is not, however, that evil is contemplated, as it must be
sooner or later, in repentance for example as _wrong_, but rather that
the “evil” is an imperfect “_logical_ striving (p. 351) of the self
_after unity_” which is in “contradiction with a _fuller_ and sounder
striving” after the same. The evil self is to him merely the vehicle of
a logical contradiction in the self.
[372] This is seen in his admission (on p. 351) that the “bad will” no
less than the “good will” is a logical necessity, when taken along with
his doctrine about mind and body, his doctrine of the “dependence” (p.
318) of the finite individual upon the external mechanical world. Dr.
Bosanquet, of course, thinks that even in this apparent Determinism
he is justifiably supplementing the ordinary ideas about the “self”
as “creative” and “originative” (p. 354), by the wider recognition
that I am more or less completely doing the work of the “universe”
as a “member” in a “greater self.” And he adds in the same sentence
the words that “_I am in a large measure continuous with the greater_
(p. 355) _self_,” and “_dyed with its colours_”--a further step in
Determinism, as it were, and a step which, with the preceding one to
which we have just referred, no critic can fail to connect with the
Determinism that we have already found to be implicated in his doctrine
of the “self,” and in his general doctrine that the “external” must be
frankly accepted as a factor in the universe.
[373] By the “spectator” fallacy we mean his tendency to talk and think
of the self as it is for a spectator or student, looking at matters
from the outside, and not as the self is for the man himself.
[374] Wollaston is the English ethical philosopher who, according to
Leslie Stephen’s account, thought, after thirty years of meditation,
that the only reason he had for not breaking his wife’s head with a
stick was, that this would be tantamount to a denial that his wife was
his wife.
[375] See _Idola Theatri_ by Henry Sturt (the editor of the well-known
“Personal Idealism” volume) of Oxford--a book that enumerates and
examines many of the fallacies of the Neo-Hegelian school. Mr. Sturt’s
first chapter is entitled the “Passive Fallacy,” which he calls, with
some degree of justice, the prime mistake of the idealistic philosophy,
meaning by this the “ignoring” of the “kinetic” and the “dynamic”
character of our experience.
[376] It is Natural Theology that is the subject proper of the _Gifford
Lectures_.
[377] See p. 149 of Chapter VI.
[378] With, we might almost say, the pragmatists and the humanists.
[379] This is really their main distinguishing characteristic and merit.
[380] See p. 162.
[381] “Indeed, I do not conceal my belief that in the main the work has
been done.”--_Preface._
[382] I think that the confession is a praiseworthy one in view of the
fact of the prejudice of Rationalism, that philosophy has nothing to do
with convictions but only with knowledge.
[383] By belief I have understood throughout this book simply man’s
working sense for reality, and I am inclined to think that this is
almost the best definition that could be given of it--our working sense
for reality. It is at least, despite its apparent evasiveness, most in
harmony with the pragmatist-humanist inclusion of will elements and
feeling elements in our knowledge and in our apprehension of reality.
It is also in harmony with the conception of reality which may, in my
opinion, be extracted from both Pragmatism and Idealism--that reality
is what it proves itself to be in the daily transformation of our
experience. By the retention of the term “working” in this attempted
definition I express my agreement with the idea that action, and the
willingness to act, is an essential element in belief. The outstanding
positions in the definitions of belief that are generally given in
philosophical dictionaries are, firstly, that belief is a conviction
or subjective apprehension of truth or reality in distinction from
demonstrable knowledge or direct evidence; and, secondly, that feeling
elements and action elements enter into it. I am inclined to think that
the sharp antithesis between belief and knowledge, or the tendency of
philosophical books to emphasise the difference between belief and
knowledge, is a characteristic, or consequence, of our modern way
of looking at things, of our break with the unfortunate, medieval
conception of faith and of the higher reason. The study of the facts
either of the history of religion or of the history of science, will
convince us, I think, that it is always belief, and that it still
is belief (as the working sense for reality), that is man’s measure
of reality, our knowledge about the universe being at all times
but a more or less perfect working out of our beliefs and of their
implications--of our sense of the different ways in which the world
affects us, and of the ways in which we are affected towards it. Nor do
I think, as I have indicated in different places, that “reality” can
be defined apart from belief, reality being that in which we believe
for all purposes, theoretical and practical and emotional. In the
conception of reality as a world of intersubjective intercourse in
which beings, or persons at different stages of development, share in a
common spiritual life, we have attained so far (and only so far) to the
truth that is common to an idealism of the type of Dr. Bosanquet’s, and
to pragmatist-humanism when properly developed and interpreted. There
are, I find, upon thinking of the matter, any number of philosophers
and thinkers who interpret belief, in the larger sense of the term,
as our complete and final estimate of reality, and as therefore not
exclusive of, but inclusive of knowledge in the ordinary sense of the
term.
[384] He even says in the Abstract of his first lecture upon the
“Central Experiences,” that Lord Gifford’s desire that his lecturers
should “try to communicate” a “grave experience” is the demand that
“introduces us to the double task of philosophy. It [philosophy] needs
the best of logic, but also the best of life, and neither can be had in
philosophy without the other.”
[385] _Treatise upon Human Nature_, sect. vii. (Green and Grose, i.
547).
[386] I had originally the idea of calling this chapter by the more
modest title of a note upon “pragmatist elements” in the teaching of
Bergson. I have allowed myself to call it a chapter partly for the sake
of symmetry, and partly because the footnotes and the criticism (of his
Idealism) have carried it beyond the limits of a note. I find, too, (as
I have partly indicated in my preface) in the teaching of Bergson so
many things that make up almost the very body of truth and fact upon
which Pragmatism, and Humanism, and Idealism all repose (or ought to
repose) that I quote them directly in my footnotes. They indicate to
me the scope and the territory of my entire subject. And they are a
confirmation to me of much that I had myself arrived at before I read a
line of Bergson.
[387] “Our intelligence, as it leaves the hands of nature, has for its
chief object the unorganised solid” (_Creative Evolution_, p. 162); “of
immobility alone does the intellect form a clear idea” (_ibid._ 164).
“The aspect of life that is accessible to the intellect--as indeed to
our senses, of which our intellect is the extension--is that which
offers a hold to action” (_ibid._ 170). “We see that the intellect, so
skilful in dealing with the inert, is awkward the moment it touches
the living. Whether it wants to treat the life of the body or the
life of the mind, it proceeds with the rigour, the stiffness, and the
brutality of the instrument _not designed_ for such use. The history
of hygiene or of pedagogy teaches us much in this matter. When we
think of the cardinal, urgent, and constant need we have to preserve
our bodies and to raise our souls, of the special facilities given to
each of us in this field to experiment continually on ourselves and on
others, of the palpable injury by which the wrongness of a medical or
a pedagogical practice is made manifest and punished at once, we are
amazed at the stupidity and especially at the persistence of errors.
We may easily find their origin in the natural obstinacy _with which
we treat the living like the lifeless_, and think all reality, however
fluid, under the form of the sharply-defined solid. _We are at ease
only in the discontinuous, in the immobile, in the dead. The intellect
is characterised by a natural inability to comprehend life_” (_Creative
Evolution_, p. 174). (Italics mine.)
[388] “I look and I think I see, I listen and I think I hear, I examine
myself and I think I am reading the very depths of my heart. But what
I see and hear of the outer world is purely and simply a _selection
made by my senses to serve as a light to my conduct_; what I know of
myself is what comes to the surface, what participates in my actions.
My senses and my consciousness, therefore, give me no more than a
_practical simplification_ of reality in the vision they furnish me
of myself and of things, the differences that are useless to man are
obliterated, the resemblances that are useful to him are emphasised;
ways are traced out for me in advance along which my activity is to
travel. These ways are the ways which all mankind has trod before
me. Things have been classified with a view to the use I can derive
from them” (_Laughter_, p. 151). “Life implies the acceptance of the
_utilitarian_ side of things in order to respond to them by appropriate
reactions; all other impressions must be dimmed or else reach us vague
and blurred” (_ibid._ p. 131). These last words give us a glimpse of a
very important part of Bergson’s teaching--his idea, namely (Voltaire
has it in his _Micromégas_), that “matter” is greater than our
perceptions, that our perceptions reveal to us only those aspects of
the physical universe with which we are practically concerned.
[389] Some years ago psychologists began to distinguish a “structural”
from a “functional” psychology, meaning by the former what is otherwise
called Psycho-Physics or (to some extent) Experimental Psychology.
[390] Cf. “At first sight it may seem prudent to leave the
consideration of facts to positive science, to let physics and
chemistry busy themselves with matter, the biological and psychological
sciences _with life_. The task of the philosopher is then clearly
defined. _He takes facts and laws_ from the _scientist’s hand_, and
whether he tries to go beyond them in order to reach their deeper
causes, or whether he thinks it impossible to go further, and even
proves it by the analysis of scientific knowledge, in both cases he
has for _the facts and relations, handed over by science, the sort of
respect that is due to a final verdict_. To this knowledge he adds a
critique of the faculty of knowing, and also, if he thinks proper, a
metaphysic; but the _matter_ of knowledge he regards as the affair of
science, and not of philosophy” (_Creative Evolution_, pp. 204–5). [All
this represents only too faithfully what even some of our Neo-Kantians
have been saying, and teaching, although there is an error in their
whole procedure here.]
[391] Schopenhauer’s phrase. See my book upon _Schopenhauer’s System_.
[392] It is chiefly in _Matter and Memory_ (in which, by the way, there
are pages and pages of criticism of the rationalism of philosophy that
are as valuable as anything we have in philosophy since the time of
Descartes--Kant not excepted) that we are to look for the detailed
philosophy of sensation and of perception, and the detailed philosophy
of science upon which this protest of Bergson’s against the excesses
of “conceptualism” rests. I indicate, too, at different places in this
chapter some of the other special considerations upon which it rests.
The gist of the whole is to be found, perhaps, in his contention that
our science and our philosophy of the past centuries have both regarded
“perception” as teaching us (somehow) what things _are_ independently
of their effect upon us, and of their place in the moving equilibrium
of things--the truth being on the contrary (with Pragmatism and
Humanism) that our knowledge has throughout a necessary relation to
ourselves and to our place in the universe, and to our liberation from
matter in the life of the spirit.
[393] He expresses this idea in the following way in the Introduction
to _Matter and Memory_: “Psychology has for its object the study
of the human mind for practical utility,” whereas in “metaphysics”
we see “this same mind striving (the idea, as we say elsewhere, is
not free from difficulty) to transcend the conditions of useful
action and to come back to itself _as to a pure creative energy_.”
Or in the following sentences from his _Creative Evolution_: “We
must remember that philosophy, as we define it, _has not yet become
completely conscious of itself_. Physics understands its role when it
pushes matter into the direction of spatiality; but has metaphysics
understood its role when it has simply trodden the steps of physics,
in the chimerical hope of going farther in the same direction? _Should
not its own task be, on the contrary, to remount the incline that
physics descends, to bring matters back to its origins, and to build
up progressively a cosmology which would be, so to speak, a reversed
psychology._ All that which seems _positive_ to the physicist and
to the geometrician would become, from this new point of view, an
interruption or inversion of the true positivity which _would have to
be defined in psychological terms_” (pp. 219–20, italics mine).
[394] As an indication of what the acceptance of the dynamic instead
of the static view of matter on the part of Bergson means, I cite the
phrase (or the conception) on p. 82 of _Matter and Memory_, the effect
that “_matter is here as elsewhere the vehicle of an action_,” or the
even more emphatic declaration on p. 261 of _Creative Evolution_,
“_There are no things, there are only actions_.” It is impossible, of
course, that these mere extracts can convey to the mind of the casual
reader the same significance that they obtain in their setting in the
pages of Bergson, although it is surely almost a matter of common
knowledge about his teaching, that one of the first things it does is
to begin with the same activistic or “actionistic” view of nature and
matter that seems to be the stock in trade of the physics of our time
since the discoveries pertaining to radio-activity, etc. Being only
a layman in such matters, I may be excused for quoting from a recent
booklet (whose very presence in the series in which it appears is to
people like myself a guarantee of its scientific reliability) in which
I find this same activistic view of matter that I find in Bergson.
“What are the processes by which the primary rock material is shifted?
There is the wind that, etc. etc.... There are the streams and rivers
that, etc.... There is the sea constantly wearing away, etc.... Then
there are ‘subtle’ physical and ‘chemical’ forces. And the action
of plants.... Hence by various mechanical, organic, and chemical
processes the materials originally scattered through the rocks of the
earth’s crust, and floating in the air or water, are collected into
layers and form beds of sand, clay, limestone, salt, and the various
mineral fuels, including peat and coal” (_The Making of the Earth_, by
Professor Gregory, F.R.S., of Glasgow University: Williams and Norgate).
It is only right to state here, or to remind the reader in this matter
of a “dynamic” view of matter, that Bergson not only dissipates matter
into force or energy or activity (as do the physicists of to-day),
but also actually credits the world of matter and life with a kind of
consciousness (and why not be courageous about it?) in which what I
have already called the “susceptibility of everything to everything
else,” or the _action_ of everything upon everything else, becomes
credible and intelligible. “_No doubt, also, the material universe
itself, defined as the totality of images, is a kind of consciousness
in which everything compensates and neutralises everything else, a
consciousness of which all the potential parts, balancing each other
by a reaction which is always equal to the action, reciprocally hinder
each from standing out_” (_Matter and Memory_, p. 313).
[395] See Chapter III., and also the references to Mach, Ostwald,
Poincaré, and others, in the second chapter and elsewhere.
[396] “There is no intelligence in which some traces of instinct are
not to be discovered, more, no instinct that is not surrounded with a
fringe of intelligence” (_Creative Evolution_, p. 143).
[397] “We will not dwell here upon a point we have dealt with in former
works. Let us merely recall that a theory [the theory of contemporary
physiological psychology] such as that according to which consciousness
is attached to certain neurons, and is thrown off from their work
like a phosphorescence, may be accepted by the scientist for the
detail of analysis; _it is a convenient mode of expression. But it is
nothing else. In reality, a living being is a centre of action._ It
represents a certain sum of contingency entering into the world, that
is to say, a certain quantity of possible action--a quantity variable
with individuals and especially with species. The nervous system of
an animal marks out the flexible lines on which its action will run
(although the potential energy is accumulated in the muscles rather
than in the nervous system itself); its nervous centres indicate, by
their development and their configuration, the more or less extended
choice it will have among more or less numerous and complicated
actions. Now, since the awakening of consciousness in a living creature
is the more complete, the greater the latitude of choice allowed to it
and the larger the amount of action bestowed upon it, it is clear that
the development of consciousness will appear to be dependent on that of
the nervous centres. On the other hand, every state of consciousness
being, in one aspect of it, a question put to the motor activity and
even the beginning of a reply, there is no psychical event that does
not imply the entry into play of the cortical mechanisms. Everything
seems, therefore, to happen _as if_ consciousness sprang from the
brain, and _as if_ the detail of conscious activity were modelled on
that of the cerebral activity. In reality consciousness does not spring
from the brain, but brain and consciousness correspond because equally
they measure ... the quantity of _choice_ that the living being has at
its disposal” (_Creative Evolution_, pp. 266–7).
[398] “Instead of starting from _affection_ [or ‘sensation’ in the
old sense of the haphazard sensation] of which we can say nothing,
since there is no reason why it should be what it is rather than
anything else, we start from _action_, that is to say, from our power
of effecting changes in things, a faculty attested by consciousness,
and towards which all the powers of the organised body are seen to
converge. So we place ourselves at once in the midst of extended images
[to Bergson as an idealist things are at the same time images or ideas
for a consciousness in other things, or in us, or in beings other
than ourselves], and in this material universe we perceive centres of
indetermination characteristic of life” (_Matter and Memory_, p. 67).
[399] Cf. the words in the Preface to _Matter and Memory_: “_The whole
personality, which, normally narrowed down by action, expands with the
unscrewing of the vice in which it has allowed itself to be squeezed_,”
or the words in the same place about the task of metaphysics being the
attempt of the “_mind striving to transcend the conditions of useful
action_.”
[400] We refer elsewhere in this chapter to Bergson’s idea that living
beings are “centres of indetermination,” that is to say, creatures who
hold their place in nature and that of their species by “persisting
in their own being” (the language of Spinoza) by acting and reacting
upon some of the many forces of nature that act upon them, and by
avoiding the action of other forces and other animals. “They allow to
pass through them,” he says, “so to speak, those external influences
which are indifferent to them; the others isolated become ‘perceptions’
by their very isolation” (_Matter and Memory_, pp. 28, 29). We also
refer to Bergson’s idea that the life-force has expressed itself along
different grades of being (mineral, animal, and so on). Both these
ideas are a partial explanation of what we mean by the presence of
a spiritual activity in both inanimate and animate nature. So also
is Bergson’s idea that the purely mechanical explanation either of
nature or of life is but a device of the intellect for the purposes of
description. More specifically it is expressed, too, in his idea that
“Our representation of matter is the measure of our possible action
upon bodies; it results from the discarding of what has no interest for
our needs, or more generally for our functions” (_Matter and Memory_,
p. 30), or that “Consciousness” is just this choice of “attaining to”
or attending to “certain parts and certain aspects of those parts” of
the “material universe” (_ibid._ p. 31), or that “sense-perception” is
an “elementary question to my motor activity.” “The truth is that my
nervous system, interposed between the objects which affect my body
and those which I can influence, is a mere conductor, transmitting,
sending back, or inhibiting movement. This conductor is composed of
an enormous number of threads which stretch from the periphery to the
centre, and from the centre to the periphery. As many threads pass from
the periphery to the centre, so many points of space are there able
to make an appeal to my will, and to put, so to speak, _an elementary
question to my motor activity. Every such question is what is termed a
perception_” (_ibid._ 40, 41; italics mine). Or, as he puts it, on p.
313, “No doubt the choice of perception from among images in general
is the effect of a _discernment which foreshadows spirit_.... But to
touch the reality of spirit we must place ourselves at the _point
where an individual consciousness_, continuing and retaining the past
in a present enriched by it, _thus escapes the law of necessity_, the
law which ordains that the past shall ever follow itself in a present
which merely repeats it in another form, and that all things shall
ever be flowing away. _When we pass from pure perception to memory, we
definitely abandon matter for spirit._”
[401] Bergson is always able to detect the relapses even of “mechanism”
and of the mechanical philosophy of science into “finalism,” as
when he says on p. 72 of his _Creative Evolution_, “To sum up, if
the accidental variations that bring about evolution are insensible
variations, some good genius must be appealed to--the genius of the
future species--in order to preserve and accumulate these variations,
for “selection” will not look after this. If, on the other hand, the
accidental variations are sudden, then, for the previous function to go
on, or for a new function to take its place, all the changes that have
happened together must be complementary. So we have to fall back on the
good genius again to obtain the convergence of simultaneous changes,
as before to be assured of the continuity of direction of successive
variations.”
[402] We must remember that to Bergson evolution has taken place along
different lines--those of Automatism (in plant-life), Instinct (in
animal life), and Intelligence (in human life and the higher animals),
and that along none of those lines are we to fall into the errors
either of materialism, or of “Darwinism” (the belief in “accidental
variations”), or of the “design-philosophy,” or even of theories like
“neo-Lamarckianism” or neo-vitalism. To him all these philosophies are
but imperfect and hypothetical attempts to grasp “movement” and “life”
which both “_transcend finality, if we understand by finality the
realisation of an idea conceived or conceivable in advance_” (_Creative
Evolution_, p. 236).
[403] “Paleyism” or “Miltonism” are still good names for the thing, I
have read in some competent book upon Evolution.
[404] See below, p. 261.
[405] To Bergson concepts are just as hypothetical in the realm of
science, as they are to thinkers like Mach and Poincaré, and Professor
Ward of Cambridge. See the following, for example, from _Matter and
Memory_ (p. 263): “We shall never explain by means of particles,
whatever these may be, the simple properties of matter; at most we can
thus follow out into corpuscles as artificial as the _corpus_, the body
itself--the actions and reactions of this body with regard to all the
others. This is precisely the object of chemistry. It studies bodies
rather than _matter_; and so we understand why it stops at the atom,
which is still endowed with the general properties of matter. But the
materiality of the atom dissolves more and more under the eyes of the
physicist. We have no reason, for instance, for representing the atom
to ourselves as a solid, rather than as a liquid or gaseous, nor for
picturing the reciprocal action of atoms by shocks rather than in any
other way.” Or, the following characteristic passage from the same book
(p. 280) in respect of the hypothetical character of the concepts of
“pure _time_” and “pure _space_”: “Homogeneous _space_ and homogeneous
_time_ are then neither properties of things nor essential conditions
of our faculty of knowing them; they express, in an abstract form,
the double work of solidification and of division, which we effect on
the moving continuity of the real in order to obtain there a fulcrum
for our action, in order to fix within it starting-points for our
operation, in short, to introduce into it real changes. They are the
_diagrammatic designs_ of our eventual action upon matter.”
[406] Like his celebrated contemporary Eucken, and like many other
thinkers of their time, Bergson is profoundly convinced of the
one-sidedness of the so-called scientific culture of our day, and of
the error of any and all conceptions of education and of social policy
that are based upon it. Although I refer below to the limitations of
his view that the intellect is adapted only to matter and to mechanical
construction, I append the following quotation as symptomatic of
his value as a spiritual teacher in our scientific age: “As regards
human intelligence (_Creative Evolution_, pp. 145–6) it has not been
sufficiently noted that mechanical invention has been from the first
its essential feature, _that even to-day our social life gravitates
around the manufacture and use of artificial instruments_.... This
we hardly realise, _because it takes longer to change ourselves than
to change our tools_.... In thousands of years, when seen from the
distance, _only the broad lines of our present age will be visible_,
our wars and our revolutions will count for little, even supposing they
are remembered at all, but the steam-engine, and the procession of
inventions of every kind that accompanied it, will perhaps be spoken of
as we speak of the bronze or of the chipped stone of prehistoric times;
it will serve to define an age.”
[407] I find this in Bergson’s whole attribution of much of our
“perceptual” and “scientific” knowledge of things to the “needs of
action,” and in the detailed reasons that we attempt on pp. 236–238 to
indicate for his polemic against rationalism.
[408] This confirmation I find in Bergson’s whole philosophy of
perception and sensation referred to on p. 236, and in his idea of a
living being as a “centre of action” or “a centre of indetermination.”
In fact it is obvious that he is one of the very greatest of the
upholders of the “freedom” of the life of the individual, and of the
fact that each new individual contributes something new of its own to
the sum-total of existence, to the life of its species, and to the life
of the world. Of course there is no more an explanation in his teaching
of the causes of “variation” or the differences at birth between the
off-spring of men and of animals, than there is in the philosophy of
Darwin.
[409] The idea of this necessity is confirmed in Bergson’s whole
philosophy of man’s life as a life of action, as a constant surmounting
of obstacles, as a life that reacts in its own way upon the life
of nature, upon the life of the human species as such, upon the
infinite life and energy and “love” of God--if we may soar to this
great thought. See, for example, what he writes in explanation of
the “discordance” of which he speaks thus: “Our freedom, in the very
movements by which it is affirmed, creates the growing habits that
will stifle it if it fails to renew itself by a constant effort: it
is dogged by automatism. The letter kills the spirit. And our most
ardent enthusiasm, as soon as it is externalised into action, is so
naturally congealed into the cold calculation of interest or vanity,
the one takes so easily the shape of the other, that we might confuse
them together, doubt our sincerity, deny goodness and love.” The
explanatory words are the following. [They are quite typical of the
kind of philosophy of life that Bergson thinks of as alone worthy of
the name of a philosophy of the living. And the reference to “love,”
as the highest “dynamic” force in this world of ours, occurs at their
close.] “The profound cause of this discordance lies in an irremediable
difference of rhythm. Life is general, is mobility itself; particular
manifestations of life accept this mobility reluctantly, and constantly
lag behind. It is always going ahead; they want to mark time. Evolution
in general would fain go on in a straight line; each special evolution
is a kind of circle. Like eddies of dust raised by the wind as it
passes, the living turn on themselves, borne up by the great blast of
life. They are therefore relatively stable, and counterfeit immobility
so well that we treat each of them as a _thing_ rather than as a
_progress_, forgetting that the very permanence of their form is only
the outline of a movement. At times, however, in a fleeting vision,
the invisible breath that bears them is materialised before our eyes.
We have this _sudden illumination before certain forms of maternal
love_, so striking and in most animals so touching, observable even in
the solicitude of the plant for its seed. This _love, in which some
have seen the great mystery of life, may possibly deliver us life’s
secret_. It shows us each generation leaning over the generation that
shall follow. It allows us a glimpse of the fact that the living being
is above all a thoroughfare, and that the essence of life is in the
movement by which life is transmitted” (_Creative Evolution_, pp.
134–5; italics mine). It is surely needless to point out how much truer
to human nature, truer therefore to an important part of reality, this
life-philosophy is than the abstractionism of Professor Bosanquet in
the preceding chapter.
[410] This insistence is, I think, amply confirmed by the very
fact of the _immediate_ contact with life and reality indicated
in the quotation that is given in the preceding note upon the
“motive-awakening,” or the “dynamic” character of the philosophy of
Bergson. It is also confirmed in his manifest insistence upon the one
fact that all philosophy must assume (and has for ever assumed) the
fact of life, the fact of the life and thought of God that underlies
all our life and all our thought.
[411] This position of the pragmatists is certainly confirmed by
Bergson’s entire doctrine of the brain and of the intellect--that
their main service is, in the first instance, to interpret the
“life” of things, its relation to our own will and to our practical
activity. I have suggested, too, in this chapter that it is obviously a
characteristic, or a consequence, of the philosophy of Bergson that our
highest thought about ourselves and about the world should be relative
to, and provocative, of our highest emotion.
[412] It is only with some degree of care and reservation that I wish
to refer to any apparent confirmation of this idea by Bergson. And, as
always, I object to the idea of any ultimate separation or “dualism”
between faith and knowledge--faith being implied in all “knowledge.”
There is no opposition in Bergson, or in the principles of his
philosophy, between faith and knowledge; it is rather his idea that
“the faculty of _seeing_ should be made one with the act of _willing_”
(_Creative Evolution_, 250; his italics), and that “philosophy” should
“proceed, _with the powers of conceptual thought alone, to the ideal
reconstruction of all things, even of life_” (_C.E._ xi.; italics
mine). My reasons for finding in his writings a confirmation of the
idea that it is indeed our rational and spiritual faith, rather than
our demonstrable knowledge, that is to us the measure of truth and
reality, are such considerations as the following (in addition to
those of the clauses just quoted), his close association between the
intellectual and the “volitional,” his general faith in “creative
evolution,” in the idea that our “consciousness” means for us “new
choices” and (real) “new possibilities,” his faith in the higher
intuitions of the mind, in the spiritual nature of man, his belief that
the building up of the true philosophy of the future will involve “the
collective and progressive effort of many thinkers, of many observers
also, completing, correcting, and improving one another” (_C.E._ xiv.),
etc. etc.
[413] See below, p. 257, note 1.
[414] See p. 14 in reference to Dr. Schiller’s suggestion that
“freedom” may “pervade the universe.”
[415] “From time to time, however, in a fit of absent-mindedness,
nature raises up souls that are more detached from life.... Were this
detachment complete, did the soul no longer cleave to action by any of
its perceptions, it would be the soul of an artist such as the world
has never yet seen” (_Laughter_, p. 154).
[416] Cf. p. 235.
[417] Cf. “We must break with scientific habits which are adapted to
the fundamental requirements of thought, _we must do violence to the
mind, go counter to the natural bent of the intellect_. But that is
just the function of philosophy” (_Creative Evolution_, p. 31).
[418] “So art, whether it be painting or sculpture, poetry or music,
has no other object than to brush aside the utilitarian symbols,
the conventional and socially accepted generalities, in short,
everything that veils reality from us, in order to bring us face to
face with reality itself” (_Laughter_, p. 157). It is true that if
we read further on this page, and elsewhere in Bergson, we will be
able to see that there is for him in art and in the spiritual life a
kind of intelligence and knowledge. But it is difficult to work out
an expression or a characterisation of this intelligence and this
knowledge. “Art,” he says, “is only a more direct vision of reality.”
And again: “Realism is in the work when idealism is in the soul, and
it is only through ideality that we can resume contact with reality”
(_ibid._).
[419] It is only fair to Bergson to remember that he is himself aware
of the appearances of this dualism in his writings, that he apologises
as it were for them, intending the distinction to be, not absolute, but
relative. “Let us say at the outset that the distinctions we are going
to make will be too sharply drawn, just because we wish to define in
instinct what is instinctive, and in intelligence what is intelligent,
_whereas all concrete instinct is mingled with intelligence, as all
real intelligence is penetrated by instinct. Moreover_ [this is quite
an important expression of Bergson’s objection to the old “faculty”
psychology], _neither intelligence nor instinct lends itself to rigid
definition; they are tendencies and not things_. Also it must not be
forgotten that ... we are considering intelligence and _instinct as
going out of life_ which deposits them along its course” (_Creative
Evolution_, p. 143).
[420] He talks in the _Creative Evolution_ of a “real time” and a “pure
duration” of a real duration that “bites” into things and leaves on
them the mark of its tooth, of a “ceaseless upspringing of something
new,” of “our progress in pure duration,” or a “movement which creates
at once the intellectuality of mind and the materiality of things”
(p. 217). I have no hesitation in saying that all this is unthinkable
to me, and that it might indeed be criticised by Rationalism as
inconsistent with our highest and most real view of things.
[421] He admits himself that “If our analysis is correct, it is
consciousness, or rather supra-consciousness that is at the origin of
life” (_Creative Evolution_, p. 275).
[422] “Now, if the same kind of action is going on everywhere, whether
it is that which is striving to remake itself, I simply express this
probable similitude when I speak of a centre _from which worlds shoot
out as rockets in a fireworks display_--provided, however, _that I do
not present_ [there is a great idea here, a true piece of ‘Kantianism’]
this centre as a _thing_, but as a continuity of shooting out. God thus
defined _has nothing of the already made. He is unceasing life, action,
freedom._ Creation so conceived is not a mystery; we experience it in
ourselves when we act freely” (_Creative Evolution_, p. 262).
[423] See p. 155, note 1.
[424] It is somewhat difficult, and it is not necessary for our
purposes, to explain what might be meant by the “Idealism” of
Bergson--at least in the sense of a cosmology, a theory of the “real.”
It is claimed for him, and he claims for himself that he is in a
sense both an “idealist” and a “realist,” believing at once (1) that
matter is an “abstraction” (an unreality), and (2) that there is more
in matter than the qualities revealed by our perceptions. [We must
remember that he objects to the idea of qualities in things in the old
static sense. “_There are no things; there are only actions._”] What we
might mean by his initial idealism is the following: “_Matter, in our
view_, is an aggregate of images. And by ‘image’ we mean [_Matter and
Memory_, the Introduction] a certain existence which is more than that
which the idealist calls a _representation_, but less than that which
the realist calls a _thing_--an existence placed half-way between the
‘thing’ and the ‘representation.’ This conception of matter is simply
that of common sense.” ... “For common sense, then, the object exists
in itself, and, on the other hand, the object is in itself pictorial,
as we perceive it: _image it is, but a self-existing image_.” Now, this
very idea of a “self-existing image” implies to me the whole idealism
of philosophy, and Bergson is not free of it. And, of course, as we
have surely seen, his “creative-evolution” philosophy is a stupendous
piece of idealism, but an idealism moreover to which the science of the
day is also inclining.
[425] There is so much that is positive and valuable in his teaching,
that he is but little affected by formal criticism.
[426] Cf. “We have now enumerated a few of the essential features of
human intelligence. But we have hitherto considered the individual in
isolation, without taking account of social life. _In reality man is
a being who lives in society._ If it be true [even] that the human
intellect aims at fabrication, we must add that, for that as well as
other purposes, it is associated with _other intellects_. Now it is
difficult to imagine a society whose members do not communicate by
signs,” etc. etc. (_Creative Evolution_, p. 166). Indeed all readers
of Bergson know that he is constantly making use of the social factor
and of “co-operation” by way of accounting for the general advance
of mankind. It may be appropriate in this same connexion to cite the
magnificent passage towards the close of _Creative Evolution_ in which
he rises to the very heights of the idea [Schopenhauer and Hartmann had
it before him, and also before the socialists and the collectivists]
of humanity’s being possibly able to surmount even the greatest of the
obstacles that beset it in its onward path: “As the smallest grain of
dust [_Creative Evolution_, pp. 285–6] is bound up with our entire
solar system, drawn along with it in that undivided movement of descent
which is materiality itself, so all organised beings, from the humblest
to the highest, ... do but evidence a single impulsion, the inverse
of the movement of matter, and in itself indivisible. All the living
hold together, and all yield to the same tremendous push. The animal
takes its stand on the plant, man bestrides animality, and the whole of
humanity, in space and in time, is one immense army galloping beside
and before and behind each of us in an overwhelming charge to beat down
every resistance and clear the most formidable obstacles, perhaps even
death.”
[427] Cf. p. 160 and p. 262.
[428] He comes in sight of some of them, as he often does of so many
things. “It is as if a vague and formless being, whom we may call,
as we will [_C.E._, p. 281], man or superman, had sought to realise
himself, and had succeeded only by abandoning a part of himself on
the way. The losses are represented by the rest of the animal world,
and even by the vegetable world, at least in what these have that is
positive and above the accidents of evolution.”
[429] From what has been said in this chapter about Bergson, and from
the remarks that were made in the second chapter about Renouvier and
the French Critical Philosophy, the reader may perhaps be willing
to admit that our Anglo-American Transcendental philosophy would
perhaps not have been so abstract and so rationalistic had it devoted
more attention, than it has evidently given, to some of the more
representative French thinkers of the nineteenth century.
[430] We must remember that nowhere in his writings does Bergson claim
any great originality for his many illuminative points of view. He
is at once far too much of a catholic scholar (in the matter of the
history of philosophy, say), and far too much of a scientist (a man
in living touch with the realities and the theories of the science of
the day) for this. His findings about life and mind are the outcome
of a broad study of the considerations of science and of history and
of criticism. By way, for example, of a quotation from a scientific
work upon biology that seems to me to reveal some apparent basis in
fact (as seen by naturalists) for the “creative evolution” upon which
Bergson bases his philosophy, I append the following: “We have gone
far enough to see that the development of an organism from an egg is a
_truly wonderful process_. We need but go back again and look at the
marvellous simplicity of the egg to be convinced of it. Not only do
cells _differentiate_, but cell-groups _act together like well-drilled
battalions_, cleaving apart here, fusing together there, forming
protective coverings or communicating channels, _apparently creating
out of nothing_, a whole set of nutritive and reproductive organs, all
in orderly and progressive sequence, producing in the end that orderly
disposed cell aggregate, that individual life unit which we know as
an earthworm. Although _the forces involved are beyond our ken_, the
grosser processes are evident” (Needham, _General Biology_, p. 175;
italics mine). Of course it is evident from his books that Bergson
does not take much account of such difficult facts and topics as the
mistakes of instinct, etc. And I have just spoken of his optimistic
avoidance of some of the deeper problems of the moral and spiritual
life of man.
[431] “This amounts to saying that the _theory of knowledge_ and
_theory of life_ seem to us inseparable [_Creative Evolution_, p.
xiii.; italics Bergson’s]. A theory of life that is not accompanied
by a criticism of knowledge is obliged to accept, as they stand, the
concepts which the understanding puts at its disposal: it can but
enclose the facts, willing or not, in pre-existing frames which it
regards as ultimate. It thus obtains a symbolism which is convenient,
perhaps even necessary to positive science, but not a direct vision of
its object.”
[432] I more than agree with Bergson that our whole modern philosophy
since Descartes has been unduly influenced by physics and mathematics.
And I deplore the fact that the “New Realism” which has come upon us
by way of a reaction (see p. 53) from the subjectivism of Pragmatism,
should be travelling apparently in this backward direction--away,
to say the very least, from some of the things clearly seen even by
biologists and psychologists. See p. 144.
[433] As I have indicated in my Preface, I am certainly the last person
in the world to affect to disparage the importance of the thin end of
the wedge of Critical Idealism introduced into the English-speaking
world by Green and the Cairds, and their first followers (like the
writers in the old Seth-Haldane, _Essays on Philosophical Criticism_).
Their theory of knowledge, or “epistemology,” was simply everything
to the impoverished condition of our philosophy at the time, but, as
Bergson points out, it still left many of us [the fault perhaps was our
own, to some extent] in the position of “taking” the scientific reading
of the world _as so far true_, and of thinking that we had done well in
philosophy when we simply partly “transformed” it. The really important
thing was to see _with this epistemology_ that the scientific reading
of the world is not in any sense initial “fact” for philosophy.
INDEX
Absolutism, 13, chap. viii.
Action, 91 _n._, 105, chap. iv.
Activity-Experience, 105, 109
Alexander, S., 163
Anti-Intellectualism, 73, 239
Appearance and Reality, 84
Arcesilaus, 155
Aristotle, 155
Armstrong (Prof.), 49 _n._
Attention, 119
Augustine, 107
Avenarius, 41
Bain, 120
Baldwin, J. M., 156, 110 _n._
Bawden (Prof.), 17, 85
Belief, 64, 65, 229 _n._, 251
Bergson, 72, 104, 126
Berthelot, 117
Blondel, 32, 34
Bosanquet, B., 110, 185, chap. viii.
Bourdeau, 26, 133 _n._, 193
Boyce-Gibson (Prof.), 154
Bradley, F. H., 74, 75, 91
Browning, R., 117
Brunschvig, 30
Bryce, James, 193
Butler, 119
Caird, E., 112
Carlyle, 125
Chesterton, W. K., 117, 156
Cohen, 48 _n._
Common-sense Beliefs, 7
Common-sense Philosophy, 117
Comte, 120
Contemplation, 96
Cornford, 184
Curtis (Prof. M. M.), 22
Dawes-Hicks (Prof.), 163
De Maistre, 170
Descartes, 66, 121
Desjardins, P., 37
Dewey, J., 16, 17, 37, 62, 147, 173, 175
Du Bois Reymond, 110
Duncan (Prof.), 122
Duns Scotus, 119
Eleutheropulos, 43
Elliot, H. S. R., 66
Epicureanism, 118
Eucken, 39, 154
Ewald (Dr.), 44, 48
Flournoy, 180
Fouillée, 37 _n._
Fraser, A. C., 112
Futurism, 26
Geddes, P., 123
Goethe, 195, 215
Gordon, A., 152–3
Green, T. H., 199
Gregory (Prof.), 24
Inge (Dean), 29, 31
Invention, 192
James, W., 3, 4, 24, 35, 39, 45, 50, 65, 135, 182, 192 _n._
Jerusalem, W., 43
Joachim, 56
Jones, Sir H., 56
Joseph, 57
Kant, 119, 121, 247
Kant and Hegel, 183
Knox (Capt.), 15
Lalande, A., 29, 33, 164
Lankester (Sir R.), 167
Lecky, 70
Leighton (Prof.), 133
Le Roy, 31
Locke, 61, 119
Lovejoy (Prof.), 49
MacEachran (Prof.), 49 _n._
Mach, 40
Mackenzie, J. S., 112
Maeterlinck, 90
Mallarmé, 214
Marett, 160
Mastermann, G. F. G., 118
M’Dougall, 104
McTaggart, J. M. E., 92
Meaning, 21, 51, 149
Mellone, 57
Merz, 157
Münsterberg, 46
Natorp, 48
Needham (Prof.), 101, 260
New Realism, 53
Nietzsche, 118, 139, 151
Ostwald, 40, 41
Pace (Prof.), 187
Paleyism, 247
Papini, 24, 135
Pascal, 119
Pater, W., 124
Peirce, 3, 22
Perry (Prof.), 53, 185
Perry, Bliss, 171, 179
Plato, 57, 61, 121, 150, 151
Pluralism, 87
Poincaré, 30
Pradines, 36 _n._
Pragmatism, and American philosophy, 49, chap. vii.;
and British thought, 54;
and French thought, 28;
and German thought, 38;
and Italian thought, 23;
a democratic doctrine, 105;
its ethics, 136;
its pluralism, 162;
its sociological character, 164, 262;
its theory of knowledge, 131;
its theory of truth, 127;
its theory of reality, 135
Pratt (Prof.), 51, 127
Radical Empiricism, 85
Renan, 110
Renouvier, 29
Rey, 31
Riley, W., 26 _n._
Ritzsche, 45
Royce, J., 54
Russell, B., 61, 66 _n._, 169
Santayana, 171, 181, 190
Schellwien, 44
Schiller, F. C. S., 12, 14, 16, 132, 133
Schinz, 192 _n._
Schopenhauer, 28, 119, 151, 260
Seth, James, 14 _n._
Seth-Haldane, 260
Shaw, Bernard, 124
Sidgwick, H., 56, 118, 119 _n._, 140
Sigwart, 42
Simmel, 44
Spencer, 41 _n._
Starbuck, 28
Stoicism, 118
Stout, G. F., 55
Subjective Idealism, 259
Taylor, A. E., 57, 77, 78, 199 _n._, 219
Teleology, 88, 198
Tertullian, 119
Theism, 215 _n._
Themistius, 155
Thompson, J. H., 144
Titchener, 157
Truth, 59, 81, 163
Tufts, 147
Tyndall, 110
Vaihinger, 39
Walker, L. J., 31
Ward, James, 30, 55, 143, 162
Wells, H. G., 123
Westermarck, 145
Windelband, 46, 150
Wollaston, 224
_Printed by_ R. & R. CLARK, LIMITED, _Edinburgh_.
Transcriber’s Notes
Inconsistent punctuation, hyphenation, and spelling were not changed.
Simple typographical errors were corrected; unbalanced quotation
marks were remedied when the change was obvious, and otherwise left
unbalanced.
The index was not checked for proper alphabetization or correct page
references.
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