Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking
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Boughton","FilterTerra":"North America","ClickText":"William James","ClickHref":"https://chrisdeasy.com/theos/humanities/philosophy/philosophers/william-james/","Copies":["1842 CE – 1910 CE","New York City, New York","American philosopher and psychologist whose pragmatism, radical empiricism, stream-of-consciousness psychology, pluralism, and philosophy of religion reshaped modern philosophy."]},"ContextCards":[{"Label":"Period","Key":"Period:4","Title":"Modern History","DateText":"1800 CE – 1944 CE","Url":"https://chrisdeasy.com/theos/humanities/philosophy/eras-of-thought/philosophers-of-modern-history/"},{"Label":"Era","Key":"Era:11","Title":"Long 19th Century","DateText":"1870 CE – 1913 CE","Url":"https://chrisdeasy.com/theos/humanities/philosophy/eras-of-thought/philosophers-of-modern-history/philosophers-of-the-long-19th-century/"},{"Label":"Composition","Title":"1907 CE","Url":"","DateText":""}],"DateNote":"Displayed as 1907 CE for the published Lowell lectures.","GeoCards":[{"Label":"Region","Key":"Region:1"},{"Label":"Terra Avita","Key":"TerraAvita:6"},{"Label":"Terra Avita Region","Key":"TerraAvitaRegion:25"},{"Label":"Modern Country","Key":"Country:USA:6"}],"OriginalTitle":"Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking","Language":"English","DisciplineCards":[{"Label":"Primary Discipline","Key":"Discipline:epistemology"},{"Label":"Secondary Discipline","Key":"Discipline:metaphysics"}],"Tradition":"American pragmatism, radical empiricism, psychology, moral philosophy, and philosophy of religion","FullText":{"Title":"Full Text","Copy":"Public-domain full text from Project Gutenberg eBook #5116 .","Url":"","Label":"","Kicker":"","Cards":[]},"CoreThesis":["James presents pragmatism as a method and theory of truth that tests ideas by practical bearings, consequences, and experiential differences."],"Classification":{"AlternateTitles":"Pragmatism","KeyConcepts":"pragmatism; truth; consequences; method; meaning; pluralism; experience","Methodology":"Direct William James work-cluster record based on SEP, IEP, Britannica, Harvard/Houghton, William James Studies, public edition surfaces, catalog records, and scholarship. 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No full text is imported."},{"Label":"Structure","Value":"Work page with explicit integer display year, date note, evidence note, source linkage, and no full-text badge."}]},{"Kind":"TextSection","Title":"Arguments","Paragraphs":["James presents pragmatism as a method and theory of truth that tests ideas by practical bearings, consequences, and experiential differences."]},{"Kind":"FieldSection","Title":"Influence","Fields":[{"Label":"Influenced By","Value":"Charles Sanders Peirce, British empiricism, Renouvier, Darwinian science, psychical research, medical psychology, religious experience, Henry James Sr., Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Harvard intellectual culture."},{"Label":"Influence On","Value":"American pragmatism, radical empiricism, psychology, phenomenology of experience, philosophy of religion, pluralism, moral psychology, process thought, analytic pragmatism, and modern discussions of consciousness."}]},{"Kind":"TextSection","Title":"Significance","Paragraphs":["Accepted as James\u0027s major pragmatist statement via SEP/IEP/Britannica, Gutenberg, catalog records, and scholarship.","James remains central for pragmatism, truth, belief, experience, pluralism, stream of consciousness, religious experience, psychology, moral choice, and democratic public philosophy."]},{"Kind":"TextSection","Title":"Evidence Note","Paragraphs":["Accepted as James\u0027s major pragmatist statement via SEP/IEP/Britannica, Gutenberg, catalog records, and scholarship."]},{"Kind":"RawSection","Title":"Full Text","BodyHtml":"\u003cp class=\"dz-philo__section-copy dz-philo__full-text-source\"\u003ePublic-domain full text from \u003ca href=\"https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/5116\"\u003eProject Gutenberg eBook #5116\u003c/a\u003e.\u003c/p\u003e\n \u003carticle class=\"dz-philo__full-text-body\"\u003e\r\n\u003ch1\u003e\r\n PRAGMATISM\r\n \u003c/h1\u003e\r\n \u003ch3\u003e\r\n A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking\r\n \u003c/h3\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n \u003cbr /\u003e\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003ch2\u003e\r\n By William James\r\n \u003c/h2\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n \u003cbr /\u003e \u003cbr /\u003e\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003ch4\u003e\r\n To the Memory of John Stuart Mill \u003cbr /\u003e \u003cbr /\u003e from whom I first learned\r\n the pragmatic openness of mind \u003cbr /\u003e and whom my fancy likes to picture as\r\n our leader were he alive to-day.\r\n \u003c/h4\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n \u003cbr /\u003e\u003cbr /\u003e\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003chr /\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n \u003ca name=\"link2H_PREF\" id=\"link2H_PREF\"\u003e \u003c/a\u003e\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cdiv style=\"height: 4em;\"\u003e\r\n \u003cbr /\u003e\u003cbr /\u003e\u003cbr /\u003e\u003cbr /\u003e\r\n \u003c/div\u003e\r\n \u003ch2\u003e\r\n Preface\r\n \u003c/h2\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n The lectures that follow were delivered at the Lowell Institute in Boston\r\n in November and December, 1906, and in January, 1907, at Columbia\r\n University, in New York. They are printed as delivered, without\r\n developments or notes. The pragmatic movement, so-called\u0026mdash;I do not\r\n like the name, but apparently it is too late to change it\u0026mdash;seems to\r\n have rather suddenly precipitated itself out of the air. A number of\r\n tendencies that have always existed in philosophy have all at once become\r\n conscious of themselves collectively, and of their combined mission; and\r\n this has occurred in so many countries, and from so many different points\r\n of view, that much unconcerted statement has resulted. I have sought to\r\n unify the picture as it presents itself to my own eyes, dealing in broad\r\n strokes, and avoiding minute controversy. Much futile controversy might\r\n have been avoided, I believe, if our critics had been willing to wait\r\n until we got our message fairly out.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n If my lectures interest any reader in the general subject, he will\r\n doubtless wish to read farther. I therefore give him a few references.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n In America, John Dewey\u0027s \u0027Studies in Logical Theory\u0027 are the foundation.\r\n Read also by Dewey the articles in the Philosophical Review, vol. xv, pp.\r\n 113 and 465, in Mind, vol. xv, p. 293, and in the Journal of Philosophy,\r\n vol. iv, p. 197.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n Probably the best statements to begin with however, are F. C. S.\r\n Schiller\u0027s in his \u0027Studies in Humanism,\u0027 especially the essays numbered i,\r\n v, vi, vii, xviii and xix. His previous essays and in general the polemic\r\n literature of the subject are fully referred to in his footnotes.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n Furthermore, see G. Milhaud: le Rationnel, 1898, and the fine articles by\r\n Le Roy in the Revue de Metaphysique, vols. 7, 8 and 9. Also articles by\r\n Blondel and de Sailly in the Annales de Philosophie Chretienne, 4me Serie,\r\n vols. 2 and 3. Papini announces a book on Pragmatism, in the French\r\n language, to be published very soon.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n To avoid one misunderstanding at least, let me say that there is no\r\n logical connexion between pragmatism, as I understand it, and a doctrine\r\n which I have recently set forth as \u0027radical empiricism.\u0027 The latter stands\r\n on its own feet. One may entirely reject it and still be a pragmatist.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n Harvard University, April, 1907.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n \u003cbr /\u003e\u003cbr /\u003e\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003chr /\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n \u003cbr /\u003e\u003cbr /\u003e\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n \u003cb\u003eCONTENTS\u003c/b\u003e\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp class=\"toc\"\u003e\r\n \u003ca href=\"#link2H_PREF\"\u003e Preface \u003c/a\u003e\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp class=\"toc\"\u003e\r\n \u003ca href=\"#link2H_TOC\"\u003e EXPANDED CONTENTS \u003c/a\u003e\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n \u003cbr /\u003e\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp class=\"toc\"\u003e\r\n \u003ca href=\"#link2H_4_0002\"\u003e \u003cb\u003ePRAGMATISM\u003c/b\u003e \u003c/a\u003e\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp class=\"toc\"\u003e\r\n \u003ca href=\"#link2H_4_0003\"\u003e Lecture I. \u0026mdash; The Present Dilemma in\r\n Philosophy \u003c/a\u003e\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp class=\"toc\"\u003e\r\n \u003ca href=\"#link2H_4_0004\"\u003e Lecture II. \u0026mdash; What Pragmatism Means \u003c/a\u003e\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp class=\"toc\"\u003e\r\n \u003ca href=\"#link2H_4_0005\"\u003e Lecture III. \u0026mdash; Some Metaphysical Problems\r\n Pragmatically Considered \u003c/a\u003e\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp class=\"toc\"\u003e\r\n \u003ca href=\"#link2H_4_0006\"\u003e Lecture IV. \u0026mdash; The One and the Many \u003c/a\u003e\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp class=\"toc\"\u003e\r\n \u003ca href=\"#link2H_4_0007\"\u003e Lecture V. \u0026mdash; Pragmatism and Common Sense\r\n \u003c/a\u003e\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp class=\"toc\"\u003e\r\n \u003ca href=\"#link2H_4_0008\"\u003e Lecture VI. \u0026mdash; Pragmatism\u0027s Conception of\r\n Truth \u003c/a\u003e\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp class=\"toc\"\u003e\r\n \u003ca href=\"#link2H_4_0009\"\u003e Lecture VII. \u0026mdash; Pragmatism and Humanism\r\n \u003c/a\u003e\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp class=\"toc\"\u003e\r\n \u003ca href=\"#link2H_4_0010\"\u003e Lecture VIII. \u0026mdash; Pragmatism and Religion\r\n \u003c/a\u003e\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n \u003cbr /\u003e\u003cbr /\u003e\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003chr /\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n \u003ca name=\"link2H_TOC\" id=\"link2H_TOC\"\u003e \u003c/a\u003e\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cdiv style=\"height: 4em;\"\u003e\r\n \u003cbr /\u003e\u003cbr /\u003e\u003cbr /\u003e\u003cbr /\u003e\r\n \u003c/div\u003e\r\n \u003cdiv class=\"middle\"\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n CONTENTS\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n Lecture I \u003cbr /\u003e The Present Dilemma in Philosophy \u003cbr /\u003e Chesterton quoted.\r\n Everyone has a philosophy. Temperament is a factor in \u003cbr /\u003e all\r\n philosophizing. Rationalists and empiricists. The tender-minded \u003cbr /\u003e and\r\n the tough-minded. Most men wish both facts and religion. Empiricism \u003cbr /\u003e\r\n gives facts without religion. Rationalism gives religion without facts.\r\n \u003cbr /\u003e The layman\u0027s dilemma. The unreality in rationalistic systems.\r\n Leibnitz \u003cbr /\u003e on the damned, as an example. M. I. Swift on the optimism\r\n of idealists. \u003cbr /\u003e Pragmatism as a mediating system. An objection. Reply:\r\n philosophies have \u003cbr /\u003e characters like men, and are liable to as summary\r\n judgments. Spencer as \u003cbr /\u003e an example. \u003cbr /\u003e Lecture II \u003cbr /\u003e What\r\n Pragmatism Means \u003cbr /\u003e The squirrel. Pragmatism as a method. History of\r\n the method. Its \u003cbr /\u003e character and affinities. How it contrasts with\r\n rationalism and \u003cbr /\u003e intellectualism. A \u0027corridor theory.\u0027 Pragmatism as\r\n a theory of truth, \u003cbr /\u003e equivalent to \u0027humanism.\u0027 Earlier views of\r\n mathematical, logical, and \u003cbr /\u003e natural truth. More recent views.\r\n Schiller\u0027s and Dewey\u0027s \u0027instrumental\u0027 \u003cbr /\u003e view. The formation of new\r\n beliefs. Older truth always has to be kept \u003cbr /\u003e account of. Older truth\r\n arose similarly. The \u0027humanistic\u0027 doctrine. \u003cbr /\u003e Rationalistic criticisms\r\n of it. Pragmatism as mediator between \u003cbr /\u003e empiricism and religion.\r\n Barrenness of transcendental idealism. How far \u003cbr /\u003e the concept of the\r\n Absolute must be called true. The true is the good \u003cbr /\u003e in the way of\r\n belief. The clash of truths. Pragmatism unstiffens \u003cbr /\u003e discussion. \u003cbr /\u003e\r\n Lecture III \u003cbr /\u003e Some Metaphysical Problems Pragmatically Considered\r\n \u003cbr /\u003e The problem of substance. The Eucharist. Berkeley\u0027s pragmatic\r\n treatment \u003cbr /\u003e of material substance. Locke\u0027s of personal identity. The\r\n problem of \u003cbr /\u003e materialism. Rationalistic treatment of it. Pragmatic\r\n treatment. \u0027God\u0027 \u003cbr /\u003e is no better than \u0027Matter\u0027 as a principle, unless\r\n he promise more. \u003cbr /\u003e Pragmatic comparison of the two principles. The\r\n problem of design. \u003cbr /\u003e \u0027Design\u0027 per se is barren. The question is WHAT\r\n design. The problem of \u003cbr /\u003e \u0027free-will.\u0027 Its relations to\r\n \u0027accountability.\u0027 Free-will a cosmological \u003cbr /\u003e theory. The pragmatic\r\n issue at stake in all these problems is what do \u003cbr /\u003e the alternatives\r\n PROMISE. \u003cbr /\u003e Lecture IV \u003cbr /\u003e The One and the Many \u003cbr /\u003e Total\r\n reflection. Philosophy seeks not only unity, but totality. \u003cbr /\u003e\r\n Rationalistic feeling about unity. Pragmatically considered, the world\r\n \u003cbr /\u003e is one in many ways. One time and space. One subject of discourse.\r\n Its \u003cbr /\u003e parts interact. Its oneness and manyness are co-ordinate.\r\n Question of \u003cbr /\u003e one origin. Generic oneness. One purpose. One story. One\r\n knower. Value \u003cbr /\u003e of pragmatic method. Absolute monism. Vivekananda.\r\n Various types of \u003cbr /\u003e union discussed. Conclusion: We must oppose\r\n monistic dogmatism and \u003cbr /\u003e follow empirical findings. \u003cbr /\u003e Lecture V\r\n \u003cbr /\u003e Pragmatism and Common Sense \u003cbr /\u003e Noetic pluralism. How our\r\n knowledge grows. Earlier ways of thinking \u003cbr /\u003e remain. Prehistoric\r\n ancestors DISCOVERED the common sense concepts. List \u003cbr /\u003e of them. They\r\n came gradually into use. Space and time. \u0027Things.\u0027 Kinds. \u003cbr /\u003e \u0027Cause\u0027\r\n and \u0027law.\u0027 Common sense one stage in mental evolution, due \u003cbr /\u003e to\r\n geniuses. The \u0027critical\u0027 stages: 1) scientific and 2) philosophic, \u003cbr /\u003e\r\n compared with common sense. Impossible to say which is the more \u0027true.\u0027\r\n \u003cbr /\u003e Lecture VI \u003cbr /\u003e Pragmatism\u0027s Conception of Truth \u003cbr /\u003e The polemic\r\n situation. What does agreement with reality mean? It means \u003cbr /\u003e\r\n verifiability. Verifiability means ability to guide us prosperously \u003cbr /\u003e\r\n through experience. Completed verifications seldom needful. \u0027Eternal\u0027\r\n \u003cbr /\u003e truths. Consistency, with language, with previous truths.\r\n Rationalist \u003cbr /\u003e objections. Truth is a good, like health, wealth, etc.\r\n It is expedient \u003cbr /\u003e thinking. The past. Truth grows. Rationalist\r\n objections. Reply to them. \u003cbr /\u003e Lecture VII \u003cbr /\u003e Pragmatism and Humanism\r\n \u003cbr /\u003e The notion of THE Truth. Schiller on \u0027Humanism.\u0027 Three sorts of\r\n \u003cbr /\u003e reality of which any new truth must take account. To \u0027take account\u0027\r\n is \u003cbr /\u003e ambiguous. Absolutely independent reality is hard to find. The\r\n human \u003cbr /\u003e contribution is ubiquitous and builds out the given. Essence\r\n of \u003cbr /\u003e pragmatism\u0027s contrast with rationalism. Rationalism affirms a\r\n \u003cbr /\u003e transempirical world. Motives for this. Tough-mindedness rejects\r\n them. A \u003cbr /\u003e genuine alternative. Pragmatism mediates. \u003cbr /\u003e Lecture VIII\r\n \u003cbr /\u003e Pragmatism and Religion \u003cbr /\u003e Utility of the Absolute. Whitman\u0027s\r\n poem \u0027To You.\u0027 Two ways of taking \u003cbr /\u003e it. My friend\u0027s letter.\r\n Necessities versus possibilities. \u0027Possibility\u0027 \u003cbr /\u003e defined. Three views\r\n of the world\u0027s salvation. Pragmatism is \u003cbr /\u003e melioristic. We may create\r\n reality. Why should anything BE? Supposed \u003cbr /\u003e choice before creation.\r\n The healthy and the morbid reply. The \u0027tender\u0027 \u003cbr /\u003e and the \u0027tough\u0027 types\r\n of religion. Pragmatism mediates. \u003cbr /\u003e\r\n \u003c/div\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n \u003cbr /\u003e\u003cbr /\u003e\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003chr /\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n \u003ca name=\"link2H_4_0002\" id=\"link2H_4_0002\"\u003e \u003c/a\u003e\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cdiv style=\"height: 4em;\"\u003e\r\n \u003cbr /\u003e\u003cbr /\u003e\u003cbr /\u003e\u003cbr /\u003e\r\n \u003c/div\u003e\r\n \u003ch1\u003e\r\n PRAGMATISM\r\n \u003c/h1\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n \u003cbr /\u003e\u003cbr /\u003e\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003chr /\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n \u003ca name=\"link2H_4_0003\" id=\"link2H_4_0003\"\u003e \u003c/a\u003e\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cdiv style=\"height: 4em;\"\u003e\r\n \u003cbr /\u003e\u003cbr /\u003e\u003cbr /\u003e\u003cbr /\u003e\r\n \u003c/div\u003e\r\n \u003ch2\u003e\r\n Lecture I. \u0026mdash; The Present Dilemma in Philosophy\r\n \u003c/h2\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n In the preface to that admirable collection of essays of his called\r\n \u0027Heretics,\u0027 Mr. Chesterton writes these words: \"There are some people\u0026mdash;and\r\n I am one of them\u0026mdash;who think that the most practical and important\r\n thing about a man is still his view of the universe. We think that for a\r\n landlady considering a lodger, it is important to know his income, but\r\n still more important to know his philosophy. We think that for a general\r\n about to fight an enemy, it is important to know the enemy\u0027s numbers, but\r\n still more important to know the enemy\u0027s philosophy. We think the question\r\n is not whether the theory of the cosmos affects matters, but whether, in\r\n the long run, anything else affects them.\"\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n I think with Mr. Chesterton in this matter. I know that you, ladies and\r\n gentlemen, have a philosophy, each and all of you, and that the most\r\n interesting and important thing about you is the way in which it\r\n determines the perspective in your several worlds. You know the same of\r\n me. And yet I confess to a certain tremor at the audacity of the\r\n enterprise which I am about to begin. For the philosophy which is so\r\n important in each of us is not a technical matter; it is our more or less\r\n dumb sense of what life honestly and deeply means. It is only partly got\r\n from books; it is our individual way of just seeing and feeling the total\r\n push and pressure of the cosmos. I have no right to assume that many of\r\n you are students of the cosmos in the class-room sense, yet here I stand\r\n desirous of interesting you in a philosophy which to no small extent has\r\n to be technically treated. I wish to fill you with sympathy with a\r\n contemporaneous tendency in which I profoundly believe, and yet I have to\r\n talk like a professor to you who are not students. Whatever universe a\r\n professor believes in must at any rate be a universe that lends itself to\r\n lengthy discourse. A universe definable in two sentences is something for\r\n which the professorial intellect has no use. No faith in anything of that\r\n cheap kind! I have heard friends and colleagues try to popularize\r\n philosophy in this very hall, but they soon grew dry, and then technical,\r\n and the results were only partially encouraging. So my enterprise is a\r\n bold one. The founder of pragmatism himself recently gave a course of\r\n lectures at the Lowell Institute with that very word in its title-flashes\r\n of brilliant light relieved against Cimmerian darkness! None of us, I\r\n fancy, understood ALL that he said\u0026mdash;yet here I stand, making a very\r\n similar venture.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n I risk it because the very lectures I speak of DREW\u0026mdash;they brought\r\n good audiences. There is, it must be confessed, a curious fascination in\r\n hearing deep things talked about, even tho neither we nor the disputants\r\n understand them. We get the problematic thrill, we feel the presence of\r\n the vastness. Let a controversy begin in a smoking-room anywhere, about\r\n free-will or God\u0027s omniscience, or good and evil, and see how everyone in\r\n the place pricks up his ears. Philosophy\u0027s results concern us all most\r\n vitally, and philosophy\u0027s queerest arguments tickle agreeably our sense of\r\n subtlety and ingenuity.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n Believing in philosophy myself devoutly, and believing also that a kind of\r\n new dawn is breaking upon us philosophers, I feel impelled, per fas aut\r\n nefas, to try to impart to you some news of the situation.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n Philosophy is at once the most sublime and the most trivial of human\r\n pursuits. It works in the minutest crannies and it opens out the widest\r\n vistas. It \u0027bakes no bread,\u0027 as has been said, but it can inspire our\r\n souls with courage; and repugnant as its manners, its doubting and\r\n challenging, its quibbling and dialectics, often are to common people, no\r\n one of us can get along without the far-flashing beams of light it sends\r\n over the world\u0027s perspectives. These illuminations at least, and the\r\n contrast-effects of darkness and mystery that accompany them, give to what\r\n it says an interest that is much more than professional.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n The history of philosophy is to a great extent that of a certain clash of\r\n human temperaments. Undignified as such a treatment may seem to some of my\r\n colleagues, I shall have to take account of this clash and explain a good\r\n many of the divergencies of philosophers by it. Of whatever temperament a\r\n professional philosopher is, he tries when philosophizing to sink the fact\r\n of his temperament. Temperament is no conventionally recognized reason, so\r\n he urges impersonal reasons only for his conclusions. Yet his temperament\r\n really gives him a stronger bias than any of his more strictly objective\r\n premises. It loads the evidence for him one way or the other, making for a\r\n more sentimental or a more hard-hearted view of the universe, just as this\r\n fact or that principle would. He trusts his temperament. Wanting a\r\n universe that suits it, he believes in any representation of the universe\r\n that does suit it. He feels men of opposite temper to be out of key with\r\n the world\u0027s character, and in his heart considers them incompetent and\r\n \u0027not in it,\u0027 in the philosophic business, even tho they may far excel him\r\n in dialectical ability.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n Yet in the forum he can make no claim, on the bare ground of his\r\n temperament, to superior discernment or authority. There arises thus a\r\n certain insincerity in our philosophic discussions: the potentest of all\r\n our premises is never mentioned. I am sure it would contribute to\r\n clearness if in these lectures we should break this rule and mention it,\r\n and I accordingly feel free to do so.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n Of course I am talking here of very positively marked men, men of radical\r\n idiosyncracy, who have set their stamp and likeness on philosophy and\r\n figure in its history. Plato, Locke, Hegel, Spencer, are such\r\n temperamental thinkers. Most of us have, of course, no very definite\r\n intellectual temperament, we are a mixture of opposite ingredients, each\r\n one present very moderately. We hardly know our own preferences in\r\n abstract matters; some of us are easily talked out of them, and end by\r\n following the fashion or taking up with the beliefs of the most impressive\r\n philosopher in our neighborhood, whoever he may be. But the one thing that\r\n has COUNTED so far in philosophy is that a man should see things, see them\r\n straight in his own peculiar way, and be dissatisfied with any opposite\r\n way of seeing them. There is no reason to suppose that this strong\r\n temperamental vision is from now onward to count no longer in the history\r\n of man\u0027s beliefs.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n Now the particular difference of temperament that I have in mind in making\r\n these remarks is one that has counted in literature, art, government and\r\n manners as well as in philosophy. In manners we find formalists and\r\n free-and-easy persons. In government, authoritarians and anarchists. In\r\n literature, purists or academicals, and realists. In art, classics and\r\n romantics. You recognize these contrasts as familiar; well, in philosophy\r\n we have a very similar contrast expressed in the pair of terms\r\n \u0027rationalist\u0027 and \u0027empiricist,\u0027 \u0027empiricist\u0027 meaning your lover of facts\r\n in all their crude variety, \u0027rationalist\u0027 meaning your devotee to abstract\r\n and eternal principles. No one can live an hour without both facts and\r\n principles, so it is a difference rather of emphasis; yet it breeds\r\n antipathies of the most pungent character between those who lay the\r\n emphasis differently; and we shall find it extraordinarily convenient to\r\n express a certain contrast in men\u0027s ways of taking their universe, by\r\n talking of the \u0027empiricist\u0027 and of the \u0027rationalist\u0027 temper. These terms\r\n make the contrast simple and massive.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n More simple and massive than are usually the men of whom the terms are\r\n predicated. For every sort of permutation and combination is possible in\r\n human nature; and if I now proceed to define more fully what I have in\r\n mind when I speak of rationalists and empiricists, by adding to each of\r\n those titles some secondary qualifying characteristics, I beg you to\r\n regard my conduct as to a certain extent arbitrary. I select types of\r\n combination that nature offers very frequently, but by no means uniformly,\r\n and I select them solely for their convenience in helping me to my\r\n ulterior purpose of characterizing pragmatism. Historically we find the\r\n terms \u0027intellectualism\u0027 and \u0027sensationalism\u0027 used as synonyms of\r\n \u0027rationalism\u0027 and \u0027empiricism.\u0027 Well, nature seems to combine most\r\n frequently with intellectualism an idealistic and optimistic tendency.\r\n Empiricists on the other hand are not uncommonly materialistic, and their\r\n optimism is apt to be decidedly conditional and tremulous. Rationalism is\r\n always monistic. It starts from wholes and universals, and makes much of\r\n the unity of things. Empiricism starts from the parts, and makes of the\r\n whole a collection-is not averse therefore to calling itself pluralistic.\r\n Rationalism usually considers itself more religious than empiricism, but\r\n there is much to say about this claim, so I merely mention it. It is a\r\n true claim when the individual rationalist is what is called a man of\r\n feeling, and when the individual empiricist prides himself on being\r\n hard-headed. In that case the rationalist will usually also be in favor of\r\n what is called free-will, and the empiricist will be a fatalist\u0026mdash;I\r\n use the terms most popularly current. The rationalist finally will be of\r\n dogmatic temper in his affirmations, while the empiricist may be more\r\n sceptical and open to discussion.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n I will write these traits down in two columns. I think you will\r\n practically recognize the two types of mental make-up that I mean if I\r\n head the columns by the titles \u0027tender-minded\u0027 and \u0027tough-minded\u0027\r\n respectively.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n \u003cbr /\u003e\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n THE TENDER-MINDED\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n Rationalistic (going by \u0027principles\u0027), Intellectualistic, Idealistic,\r\n Optimistic, Religious, Free-willist, Monistic, Dogmatical.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n \u003cbr /\u003e\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n THE TOUGH-MINDED\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n Empiricist (going by \u0027facts\u0027), Sensationalistic, Materialistic,\r\n Pessimistic, Irreligious, Fatalistic, Pluralistic, Sceptical.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n \u003cbr /\u003e\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n Pray postpone for a moment the question whether the two contrasted\r\n mixtures which I have written down are each inwardly coherent and\r\n self-consistent or not\u0026mdash;I shall very soon have a good deal to say on\r\n that point. It suffices for our immediate purpose that tender-minded and\r\n tough-minded people, characterized as I have written them down, do both\r\n exist. Each of you probably knows some well-marked example of each type,\r\n and you know what each example thinks of the example on the other side of\r\n the line. They have a low opinion of each other. Their antagonism,\r\n whenever as individuals their temperaments have been intense, has formed\r\n in all ages a part of the philosophic atmosphere of the time. It forms a\r\n part of the philosophic atmosphere to-day. The tough think of the tender\r\n as sentimentalists and soft-heads. The tender feel the tough to be\r\n unrefined, callous, or brutal. Their mutual reaction is very much like\r\n that that takes place when Bostonian tourists mingle with a population\r\n like that of Cripple Creek. Each type believes the other to be inferior to\r\n itself; but disdain in the one case is mingled with amusement, in the\r\n other it has a dash of fear.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n Now, as I have already insisted, few of us are tender-foot Bostonians pure\r\n and simple, and few are typical Rocky Mountain toughs, in philosophy. Most\r\n of us have a hankering for the good things on both sides of the line.\r\n Facts are good, of course\u0026mdash;give us lots of facts. Principles are good\u0026mdash;give\r\n us plenty of principles. The world is indubitably one if you look at it in\r\n one way, but as indubitably is it many, if you look at it in another. It\r\n is both one and many\u0026mdash;let us adopt a sort of pluralistic monism.\r\n Everything of course is necessarily determined, and yet of course our\r\n wills are free: a sort of free-will determinism is the true philosophy.\r\n The evil of the parts is undeniable; but the whole can\u0027t be evil: so\r\n practical pessimism may be combined with metaphysical optimism. And so\r\n forth\u0026mdash;your ordinary philosophic layman never being a radical, never\r\n straightening out his system, but living vaguely in one plausible\r\n compartment of it or another to suit the temptations of successive hours.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n But some of us are more than mere laymen in philosophy. We are worthy of\r\n the name of amateur athletes, and are vexed by too much inconsistency and\r\n vacillation in our creed. We cannot preserve a good intellectual\r\n conscience so long as we keep mixing incompatibles from opposite sides of\r\n the line.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n And now I come to the first positively important point which I wish to\r\n make. Never were as many men of a decidedly empiricist proclivity in\r\n existence as there are at the present day. Our children, one may say, are\r\n almost born scientific. But our esteem for facts has not neutralized in us\r\n all religiousness. It is itself almost religious. Our scientific temper is\r\n devout. Now take a man of this type, and let him be also a philosophic\r\n amateur, unwilling to mix a hodge-podge system after the fashion of a\r\n common layman, and what does he find his situation to be, in this blessed\r\n year of our Lord 1906? He wants facts; he wants science; but he also wants\r\n a religion. And being an amateur and not an independent originator in\r\n philosophy he naturally looks for guidance to the experts and\r\n professionals whom he finds already in the field. A very large number of\r\n you here present, possibly a majority of you, are amateurs of just this\r\n sort.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n Now what kinds of philosophy do you find actually offered to meet your\r\n need? You find an empirical philosophy that is not religious enough, and a\r\n religious philosophy that is not empirical enough for your purpose. If you\r\n look to the quarter where facts are most considered you find the whole\r\n tough-minded program in operation, and the \u0027conflict between science and\r\n religion\u0027 in full blast. Either it is that Rocky Mountain tough of a\r\n Haeckel with his materialistic monism, his ether-god and his jest at your\r\n God as a \u0027gaseous vertebrate\u0027; or it is Spencer treating the world\u0027s\r\n history as a redistribution of matter and motion solely, and bowing\r\n religion politely out at the front door:\u0026mdash;she may indeed continue to\r\n exist, but she must never show her face inside the temple. For a hundred\r\n and fifty years past the progress of science has seemed to mean the\r\n enlargement of the material universe and the diminution of man\u0027s\r\n importance. The result is what one may call the growth of naturalistic or\r\n positivistic feeling. Man is no law-giver to nature, he is an absorber.\r\n She it is who stands firm; he it is who must accommodate himself. Let him\r\n record truth, inhuman tho it be, and submit to it! The romantic\r\n spontaneity and courage are gone, the vision is materialistic and\r\n depressing. Ideals appear as inert by-products of physiology; what is\r\n higher is explained by what is lower and treated forever as a case of\r\n \u0027nothing but\u0027\u0026mdash;nothing but something else of a quite inferior sort.\r\n You get, in short, a materialistic universe, in which only the\r\n tough-minded find themselves congenially at home.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n If now, on the other hand, you turn to the religious quarter for\r\n consolation, and take counsel of the tender-minded philosophies, what do\r\n you find?\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n Religious philosophy in our day and generation is, among us\r\n English-reading people, of two main types. One of these is more radical\r\n and aggressive, the other has more the air of fighting a slow retreat. By\r\n the more radical wing of religious philosophy I mean the so-called\r\n transcendental idealism of the Anglo-Hegelian school, the philosophy of\r\n such men as Green, the Cairds, Bosanquet, and Royce. This philosophy has\r\n greatly influenced the more studious members of our protestant ministry.\r\n It is pantheistic, and undoubtedly it has already blunted the edge of the\r\n traditional theism in protestantism at large.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n That theism remains, however. It is the lineal descendant, through one\r\n stage of concession after another, of the dogmatic scholastic theism still\r\n taught rigorously in the seminaries of the catholic church. For a long\r\n time it used to be called among us the philosophy of the Scottish school.\r\n It is what I meant by the philosophy that has the air of fighting a slow\r\n retreat. Between the encroachments of the hegelians and other philosophers\r\n of the \u0027Absolute,\u0027 on the one hand, and those of the scientific\r\n evolutionists and agnostics, on the other, the men that give us this kind\r\n of a philosophy, James Martineau, Professor Bowne, Professor Ladd and\r\n others, must feel themselves rather tightly squeezed. Fair-minded and\r\n candid as you like, this philosophy is not radical in temper. It is\r\n eclectic, a thing of compromises, that seeks a modus vivendi above all\r\n things. It accepts the facts of darwinism, the facts of cerebral\r\n physiology, but it does nothing active or enthusiastic with them. It lacks\r\n the victorious and aggressive note. It lacks prestige in consequence;\r\n whereas absolutism has a certain prestige due to the more radical style of\r\n it.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n These two systems are what you have to choose between if you turn to the\r\n tender-minded school. And if you are the lovers of facts I have supposed\r\n you to be, you find the trail of the serpent of rationalism, of\r\n intellectualism, over everything that lies on that side of the line. You\r\n escape indeed the materialism that goes with the reigning empiricism; but\r\n you pay for your escape by losing contact with the concrete parts of life.\r\n The more absolutistic philosophers dwell on so high a level of abstraction\r\n that they never even try to come down. The absolute mind which they offer\r\n us, the mind that makes our universe by thinking it, might, for aught they\r\n show us to the contrary, have made any one of a million other universes\r\n just as well as this. You can deduce no single actual particular from the\r\n notion of it. It is compatible with any state of things whatever being\r\n true here below. And the theistic God is almost as sterile a principle.\r\n You have to go to the world which he has created to get any inkling of his\r\n actual character: he is the kind of god that has once for all made that\r\n kind of a world. The God of the theistic writers lives on as purely\r\n abstract heights as does the Absolute. Absolutism has a certain sweep and\r\n dash about it, while the usual theism is more insipid, but both are\r\n equally remote and vacuous. What you want is a philosophy that will not\r\n only exercise your powers of intellectual abstraction, but that will make\r\n some positive connexion with this actual world of finite human lives.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n You want a system that will combine both things, the scientific loyalty to\r\n facts and willingness to take account of them, the spirit of adaptation\r\n and accommodation, in short, but also the old confidence in human values\r\n and the resultant spontaneity, whether of the religious or of the romantic\r\n type. And this is then your dilemma: you find the two parts of your\r\n quaesitum hopelessly separated. You find empiricism with inhumanism and\r\n irreligion; or else you find a rationalistic philosophy that indeed may\r\n call itself religious, but that keeps out of all definite touch with\r\n concrete facts and joys and sorrows.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n I am not sure how many of you live close enough to philosophy to realize\r\n fully what I mean by this last reproach, so I will dwell a little longer\r\n on that unreality in all rationalistic systems by which your serious\r\n believer in facts is so apt to feel repelled.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n I wish that I had saved the first couple of pages of a thesis which a\r\n student handed me a year or two ago. They illustrated my point so clearly\r\n that I am sorry I cannot read them to you now. This young man, who was a\r\n graduate of some Western college, began by saying that he had always taken\r\n for granted that when you entered a philosophic class-room you had to open\r\n relations with a universe entirely distinct from the one you left behind\r\n you in the street. The two were supposed, he said, to have so little to do\r\n with each other, that you could not possibly occupy your mind with them at\r\n the same time. The world of concrete personal experiences to which the\r\n street belongs is multitudinous beyond imagination, tangled, muddy,\r\n painful and perplexed. The world to which your philosophy-professor\r\n introduces you is simple, clean and noble. The contradictions of real life\r\n are absent from it. Its architecture is classic. Principles of reason\r\n trace its outlines, logical necessities cement its parts. Purity and\r\n dignity are what it most expresses. It is a kind of marble temple shining\r\n on a hill.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n In point of fact it is far less an account of this actual world than a\r\n clear addition built upon it, a classic sanctuary in which the rationalist\r\n fancy may take refuge from the intolerably confused and gothic character\r\n which mere facts present. It is no EXPLANATION of our concrete universe,\r\n it is another thing altogether, a substitute for it, a remedy, a way of\r\n escape.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n Its temperament, if I may use the word temperament here, is utterly alien\r\n to the temperament of existence in the concrete. REFINEMENT is what\r\n characterizes our intellectualist philosophies. They exquisitely satisfy\r\n that craving for a refined object of contemplation which is so powerful an\r\n appetite of the mind. But I ask you in all seriousness to look abroad on\r\n this colossal universe of concrete facts, on their awful bewilderments,\r\n their surprises and cruelties, on the wildness which they show, and then\r\n to tell me whether \u0027refined\u0027 is the one inevitable descriptive adjective\r\n that springs to your lips.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n Refinement has its place in things, true enough. But a philosophy that\r\n breathes out nothing but refinement will never satisfy the empiricist\r\n temper of mind. It will seem rather a monument of artificiality. So we\r\n find men of science preferring to turn their backs on metaphysics as on\r\n something altogether cloistered and spectral, and practical men shaking\r\n philosophy\u0027s dust off their feet and following the call of the wild.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n Truly there is something a little ghastly in the satisfaction with which a\r\n pure but unreal system will fill a rationalist mind. Leibnitz was a\r\n rationalist mind, with infinitely more interest in facts than most\r\n rationalist minds can show. Yet if you wish for superficiality incarnate,\r\n you have only to read that charmingly written \u0027Theodicee\u0027 of his, in which\r\n he sought to justify the ways of God to man, and to prove that the world\r\n we live in is the best of possible worlds. Let me quote a specimen of what\r\n I mean.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n Among other obstacles to his optimistic philosophy, it falls to Leibnitz\r\n to consider the number of the eternally damned. That it is infinitely\r\n greater, in our human case, than that of those saved he assumes as a\r\n premise from the theologians, and then proceeds to argue in this way. Even\r\n then, he says:\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n \"The evil will appear as almost nothing in comparison with the good, if we\r\n once consider the real magnitude of the City of God. Coelius Secundus\r\n Curio has written a little book, \u0027De Amplitudine Regni Coelestis,\u0027 which\r\n was reprinted not long ago. But he failed to compass the extent of the\r\n kingdom of the heavens. The ancients had small ideas of the works of God.\r\n … It seemed to them that only our earth had inhabitants, and even the\r\n notion of our antipodes gave them pause. The rest of the world for them\r\n consisted of some shining globes and a few crystalline spheres. But\r\n to-day, whatever be the limits that we may grant or refuse to the Universe\r\n we must recognize in it a countless number of globes, as big as ours or\r\n bigger, which have just as much right as it has to support rational\r\n inhabitants, tho it does not follow that these need all be men. Our earth\r\n is only one among the six principal satellites of our sun. As all the\r\n fixed stars are suns, one sees how small a place among visible things our\r\n earth takes up, since it is only a satellite of one among them. Now all\r\n these suns MAY be inhabited by none but happy creatures; and nothing\r\n obliges us to believe that the number of damned persons is very great; for\r\n a VERY FEW INSTANCES AND SAMPLES SUFFICE FOR THE UTILITY WHICH GOOD DRAWS\r\n FROM EVIL. Moreover, since there is no reason to suppose that there are\r\n stars everywhere, may there not be a great space beyond the region of the\r\n stars? And this immense space, surrounding all this region, … may be\r\n replete with happiness and glory. … What now becomes of the\r\n consideration of our Earth and of its denizens? Does it not dwindle to\r\n something incomparably less than a physical point, since our Earth is but\r\n a point compared with the distance of the fixed stars. Thus the part of\r\n the Universe which we know, being almost lost in nothingness compared with\r\n that which is unknown to us, but which we are yet obliged to admit; and\r\n all the evils that we know lying in this almost-nothing; it follows that\r\n the evils may be almost-nothing in comparison with the goods that the\r\n Universe contains.\"\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n Leibnitz continues elsewhere: \"There is a kind of justice which aims\r\n neither at the amendment of the criminal, nor at furnishing an example to\r\n others, nor at the reparation of the injury. This justice is founded in\r\n pure fitness, which finds a certain satisfaction in the expiation of a\r\n wicked deed. The Socinians and Hobbes objected to this punitive justice,\r\n which is properly vindictive justice and which God has reserved for\r\n himself at many junctures. … It is always founded in the fitness of\r\n things, and satisfies not only the offended party, but all wise\r\n lookers-on, even as beautiful music or a fine piece of architecture\r\n satisfies a well-constituted mind. It is thus that the torments of the\r\n damned continue, even tho they serve no longer to turn anyone away from\r\n sin, and that the rewards of the blest continue, even tho they confirm no\r\n one in good ways. The damned draw to themselves ever new penalties by\r\n their continuing sins, and the blest attract ever fresh joys by their\r\n unceasing progress in good. Both facts are founded on the principle of\r\n fitness, … for God has made all things harmonious in perfection as I\r\n have already said.\"\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n Leibnitz\u0027s feeble grasp of reality is too obvious to need comment from me.\r\n It is evident that no realistic image of the experience of a damned soul\r\n had ever approached the portals of his mind. Nor had it occurred to him\r\n that the smaller is the number of \u0027samples\u0027 of the genus \u0027lost-soul\u0027 whom\r\n God throws as a sop to the eternal fitness, the more unequitably grounded\r\n is the glory of the blest. What he gives us is a cold literary exercise,\r\n whose cheerful substance even hell-fire does not warm.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n And do not tell me that to show the shallowness of rationalist\r\n philosophizing I have had to go back to a shallow wigpated age. The\r\n optimism of present-day rationalism sounds just as shallow to the\r\n fact-loving mind. The actual universe is a thing wide open, but\r\n rationalism makes systems, and systems must be closed. For men in\r\n practical life perfection is something far off and still in process of\r\n achievement. This for rationalism is but the illusion of the finite and\r\n relative: the absolute ground of things is a perfection eternally\r\n complete.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n I find a fine example of revolt against the airy and shallow optimism of\r\n current religious philosophy in a publication of that valiant anarchistic\r\n writer Morrison I. Swift. Mr. Swift\u0027s anarchism goes a little farther than\r\n mine does, but I confess that I sympathize a good deal, and some of you, I\r\n know, will sympathize heartily with his dissatisfaction with the\r\n idealistic optimisms now in vogue. He begins his pamphlet on \u0027Human\r\n Submission\u0027 with a series of city reporter\u0027s items from newspapers\r\n (suicides, deaths from starvation and the like) as specimens of our\r\n civilized regime. For instance:\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n \"\u0027After trudging through the snow from one end of the city to the other in\r\n the vain hope of securing employment, and with his wife and six children\r\n without food and ordered to leave their home in an upper east side\r\n tenement house because of non-payment of rent, John Corcoran, a clerk,\r\n to-day ended his life by drinking carbolic acid. Corcoran lost his\r\n position three weeks ago through illness, and during the period of\r\n idleness his scanty savings disappeared. Yesterday he obtained work with a\r\n gang of city snow shovelers, but he was too weak from illness and was\r\n forced to quit after an hour\u0027s trial with the shovel. Then the weary task\r\n of looking for employment was again resumed. Thoroughly discouraged,\r\n Corcoran returned to his home late last night to find his wife and\r\n children without food and the notice of dispossession on the door.\u0027 On the\r\n following morning he drank the poison.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n \"The records of many more such cases lie before me [Mr. Swift goes on]; an\r\n encyclopedia might easily be filled with their kind. These few I cite as\r\n an interpretation of the universe. \u0027We are aware of the presence of God in\r\n His world,\u0027 says a writer in a recent English Review. [The very presence\r\n of ill in the temporal order is the condition of the perfection of the\r\n eternal order, writes Professor Royce (\u0027The World and the Individual,\u0027 II,\r\n 385).] \u0027The Absolute is the richer for every discord, and for all\r\n diversity which it embraces,\u0027 says F. H. Bradley (Appearance and Reality,\r\n 204). He means that these slain men make the universe richer, and that is\r\n Philosophy. But while Professors Royce and Bradley and a whole host of\r\n guileless thoroughfed thinkers are unveiling Reality and the Absolute and\r\n explaining away evil and pain, this is the condition of the only beings\r\n known to us anywhere in the universe with a developed consciousness of\r\n what the universe is. What these people experience IS Reality. It gives us\r\n an absolute phase of the universe. It is the personal experience of those\r\n most qualified in all our circle of knowledge to HAVE experience, to tell\r\n us WHAT is. Now, what does THINKING ABOUT the experience of these persons\r\n come to compared with directly, personally feeling it, as they feel it?\r\n The philosophers are dealing in shades, while those who live and feel know\r\n truth. And the mind of mankind-not yet the mind of philosophers and of the\r\n proprietary class-but of the great mass of the silently thinking and\r\n feeling men, is coming to this view. They are judging the universe as they\r\n have heretofore permitted the hierophants of religion and learning to\r\n judge THEM. …\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n \"This Cleveland workingman, killing his children and himself [another of\r\n the cited cases], is one of the elemental, stupendous facts of this modern\r\n world and of this universe. It cannot be glozed over or minimized away by\r\n all the treatises on God, and Love, and Being, helplessly existing in\r\n their haughty monumental vacuity. This is one of the simple irreducible\r\n elements of this world\u0027s life after millions of years of divine\r\n opportunity and twenty centuries of Christ. It is in the moral world like\r\n atoms or sub-atoms in the physical, primary, indestructible. And what it\r\n blazons to man is the … imposture of all philosophy which does not see\r\n in such events the consummate factor of conscious experience. These facts\r\n invincibly prove religion a nullity. Man will not give religion two\r\n thousand centuries or twenty centuries more to try itself and waste human\r\n time; its time is up, its probation is ended. Its own record ends it.\r\n Mankind has not sons and eternities to spare for trying out discredited\r\n systems….\" [Footnote: Morrison I. Swift, Human Submission, Part Second,\r\n Philadelphia, Liberty Press, 1905, pp. 4-10.]\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n Such is the reaction of an empiricist mind upon the rationalist bill of\r\n fare. It is an absolute \u0027No, I thank you.\u0027 \"Religion,\" says Mr. Swift, \"is\r\n like a sleep-walker to whom actual things are blank.\" And such, tho\r\n possibly less tensely charged with feeling, is the verdict of every\r\n seriously inquiring amateur in philosophy to-day who turns to the\r\n philosophy-professors for the wherewithal to satisfy the fulness of his\r\n nature\u0027s needs. Empiricist writers give him a materialism, rationalists\r\n give him something religious, but to that religion \"actual things are\r\n blank.\" He becomes thus the judge of us philosophers. Tender or tough, he\r\n finds us wanting. None of us may treat his verdicts disdainfully, for\r\n after all, his is the typically perfect mind, the mind the sum of whose\r\n demands is greatest, the mind whose criticisms and dissatisfactions are\r\n fatal in the long run.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n It is at this point that my own solution begins to appear. I offer the\r\n oddly-named thing pragmatism as a philosophy that can satisfy both kinds\r\n of demand. It can remain religious like the rationalisms, but at the same\r\n time, like the empiricisms, it can preserve the richest intimacy with\r\n facts. I hope I may be able to leave many of you with as favorable an\r\n opinion of it as I preserve myself. Yet, as I am near the end of my hour,\r\n I will not introduce pragmatism bodily now. I will begin with it on the\r\n stroke of the clock next time. I prefer at the present moment to return a\r\n little on what I have said.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n If any of you here are professional philosophers, and some of you I know\r\n to be such, you will doubtless have felt my discourse so far to have been\r\n crude in an unpardonable, nay, in an almost incredible degree.\r\n Tender-minded and tough-minded, what a barbaric disjunction! And, in\r\n general, when philosophy is all compacted of delicate intellectualities\r\n and subtleties and scrupulosities, and when every possible sort of\r\n combination and transition obtains within its bounds, what a brutal\r\n caricature and reduction of highest things to the lowest possible\r\n expression is it to represent its field of conflict as a sort of\r\n rough-and-tumble fight between two hostile temperaments! What a childishly\r\n external view! And again, how stupid it is to treat the abstractness of\r\n rationalist systems as a crime, and to damn them because they offer\r\n themselves as sanctuaries and places of escape, rather than as\r\n prolongations of the world of facts. Are not all our theories just\r\n remedies and places of escape? And, if philosophy is to be religious, how\r\n can she be anything else than a place of escape from the crassness of\r\n reality\u0027s surface? What better thing can she do than raise us out of our\r\n animal senses and show us another and a nobler home for our minds in that\r\n great framework of ideal principles subtending all reality, which the\r\n intellect divines? How can principles and general views ever be anything\r\n but abstract outlines? Was Cologne cathedral built without an architect\u0027s\r\n plan on paper? Is refinement in itself an abomination? Is concrete\r\n rudeness the only thing that\u0027s true?\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n Believe me, I feel the full force of the indictment. The picture I have\r\n given is indeed monstrously over-simplified and rude. But like all\r\n abstractions, it will prove to have its use. If philosophers can treat the\r\n life of the universe abstractly, they must not complain of an abstract\r\n treatment of the life of philosophy itself. In point of fact the picture I\r\n have given is, however coarse and sketchy, literally true. Temperaments\r\n with their cravings and refusals do determine men in their philosophies,\r\n and always will. The details of systems may be reasoned out piecemeal, and\r\n when the student is working at a system, he may often forget the forest\r\n for the single tree. But when the labor is accomplished, the mind always\r\n performs its big summarizing act, and the system forthwith stands over\r\n against one like a living thing, with that strange simple note of\r\n individuality which haunts our memory, like the wraith of the man, when a\r\n friend or enemy of ours is dead.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n Not only Walt Whitman could write \"who touches this book touches a man.\"\r\n The books of all the great philosophers are like so many men. Our sense of\r\n an essential personal flavor in each one of them, typical but\r\n indescribable, is the finest fruit of our own accomplished philosophic\r\n education. What the system pretends to be is a picture of the great\r\n universe of God. What it is\u0026mdash;and oh so flagrantly!\u0026mdash;is the\r\n revelation of how intensely odd the personal flavor of some fellow\r\n creature is. Once reduced to these terms (and all our philosophies get\r\n reduced to them in minds made critical by learning) our commerce with the\r\n systems reverts to the informal, to the instinctive human reaction of\r\n satisfaction or dislike. We grow as peremptory in our rejection or\r\n admission, as when a person presents himself as a candidate for our favor;\r\n our verdicts are couched in as simple adjectives of praise or dispraise.\r\n We measure the total character of the universe as we feel it, against the\r\n flavor of the philosophy proffered us, and one word is enough.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n \"Statt der lebendigen Natur,\" we say, \"da Gott die Menschen schuf hinein\"\u0026mdash;that\r\n nebulous concoction, that wooden, that straight-laced thing, that crabbed\r\n artificiality, that musty schoolroom product, that sick man\u0027s dream! Away\r\n with it. Away with all of them! Impossible! Impossible!\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n Our work over the details of his system is indeed what gives us our\r\n resultant impression of the philosopher, but it is on the resultant\r\n impression itself that we react. Expertness in philosophy is measured by\r\n the definiteness of our summarizing reactions, by the immediate perceptive\r\n epithet with which the expert hits such complex objects off. But great\r\n expertness is not necessary for the epithet to come. Few people have\r\n definitely articulated philosophies of their own. But almost everyone has\r\n his own peculiar sense of a certain total character in the universe, and\r\n of the inadequacy fully to match it of the peculiar systems that he knows.\r\n They don\u0027t just cover HIS world. One will be too dapper, another too\r\n pedantic, a third too much of a job-lot of opinions, a fourth too morbid,\r\n and a fifth too artificial, or what not. At any rate he and we know\r\n offhand that such philosophies are out of plumb and out of key and out of\r\n \u0027whack,\u0027 and have no business to speak up in the universe\u0027s name. Plato,\r\n Locke, Spinoza, Mill, Caird, Hegel\u0026mdash;I prudently avoid names nearer\r\n home!\u0026mdash;I am sure that to many of you, my hearers, these names are\r\n little more than reminders of as many curious personal ways of falling\r\n short. It would be an obvious absurdity if such ways of taking the\r\n universe were actually true. We philosophers have to reckon with such\r\n feelings on your part. In the last resort, I repeat, it will be by them\r\n that all our philosophies shall ultimately be judged. The finally\r\n victorious way of looking at things will be the most completely IMPRESSIVE\r\n way to the normal run of minds.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n One word more\u0026mdash;namely about philosophies necessarily being abstract\r\n outlines. There are outlines and outlines, outlines of buildings that are\r\n FAT, conceived in the cube by their planner, and outlines of buildings\r\n invented flat on paper, with the aid of ruler and compass. These remain\r\n skinny and emaciated even when set up in stone and mortar, and the outline\r\n already suggests that result. An outline in itself is meagre, truly, but\r\n it does not necessarily suggest a meagre thing. It is the essential\r\n meagreness of WHAT IS SUGGESTED by the usual rationalistic philosophies\r\n that moves empiricists to their gesture of rejection. The case of Herbert\r\n Spencer\u0027s system is much to the point here. Rationalists feel his fearful\r\n array of insufficiencies. His dry schoolmaster temperament, the\r\n hurdy-gurdy monotony of him, his preference for cheap makeshifts in\r\n argument, his lack of education even in mechanical principles, and in\r\n general the vagueness of all his fundamental ideas, his whole system\r\n wooden, as if knocked together out of cracked hemlock boards\u0026mdash;and yet\r\n the half of England wants to bury him in Westminster Abbey.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n Why? Why does Spencer call out so much reverence in spite of his weakness\r\n in rationalistic eyes? Why should so many educated men who feel that\r\n weakness, you and I perhaps, wish to see him in the Abbey notwithstanding?\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n Simply because we feel his heart to be IN THE RIGHT PLACE philosophically.\r\n His principles may be all skin and bone, but at any rate his books try to\r\n mould themselves upon the particular shape of this, particular world\u0027s\r\n carcase. The noise of facts resounds through all his chapters, the\r\n citations of fact never cease, he emphasizes facts, turns his face towards\r\n their quarter; and that is enough. It means the right kind of thing for\r\n the empiricist mind.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n The pragmatistic philosophy of which I hope to begin talking in my next\r\n lecture preserves as cordial a relation with facts, and, unlike Spencer\u0027s\r\n philosophy, it neither begins nor ends by turning positive religious\r\n constructions out of doors\u0026mdash;it treats them cordially as well.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n I hope I may lead you to find it just the mediating way of thinking that\r\n you require.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n \u003cbr /\u003e\u003cbr /\u003e\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003chr /\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n \u003ca name=\"link2H_4_0004\" id=\"link2H_4_0004\"\u003e \u003c/a\u003e\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cdiv style=\"height: 4em;\"\u003e\r\n \u003cbr /\u003e\u003cbr /\u003e\u003cbr /\u003e\u003cbr /\u003e\r\n \u003c/div\u003e\r\n \u003ch2\u003e\r\n Lecture II. \u0026mdash; What Pragmatism Means\r\n \u003c/h2\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n Some years ago, being with a camping party in the mountains, I returned\r\n from a solitary ramble to find everyone engaged in a ferocious\r\n metaphysical dispute. The corpus of the dispute was a squirrel\u0026mdash;a\r\n live squirrel supposed to be clinging to one side of a tree-trunk; while\r\n over against the tree\u0027s opposite side a human being was imagined to stand.\r\n This human witness tries to get sight of the squirrel by moving rapidly\r\n round the tree, but no matter how fast he goes, the squirrel moves as fast\r\n in the opposite direction, and always keeps the tree between himself and\r\n the man, so that never a glimpse of him is caught. The resultant\r\n metaphysical problem now is this: DOES THE MAN GO ROUND THE SQUIRREL OR\r\n NOT? He goes round the tree, sure enough, and the squirrel is on the tree;\r\n but does he go round the squirrel? In the unlimited leisure of the\r\n wilderness, discussion had been worn threadbare. Everyone had taken sides,\r\n and was obstinate; and the numbers on both sides were even. Each side,\r\n when I appeared, therefore appealed to me to make it a majority. Mindful\r\n of the scholastic adage that whenever you meet a contradiction you must\r\n make a distinction, I immediately sought and found one, as follows: \"Which\r\n party is right,\" I said, \"depends on what you PRACTICALLY MEAN by \u0027going\r\n round\u0027 the squirrel. If you mean passing from the north of him to the\r\n east, then to the south, then to the west, and then to the north of him\r\n again, obviously the man does go round him, for he occupies these\r\n successive positions. But if on the contrary you mean being first in front\r\n of him, then on the right of him, then behind him, then on his left, and\r\n finally in front again, it is quite as obvious that the man fails to go\r\n round him, for by the compensating movements the squirrel makes, he keeps\r\n his belly turned towards the man all the time, and his back turned away.\r\n Make the distinction, and there is no occasion for any farther dispute.\r\n You are both right and both wrong according as you conceive the verb \u0027to\r\n go round\u0027 in one practical fashion or the other.\"\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n Altho one or two of the hotter disputants called my speech a shuffling\r\n evasion, saying they wanted no quibbling or scholastic hair-splitting, but\r\n meant just plain honest English \u0027round,\u0027 the majority seemed to think that\r\n the distinction had assuaged the dispute.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n I tell this trivial anecdote because it is a peculiarly simple example of\r\n what I wish now to speak of as THE PRAGMATIC METHOD. The pragmatic method\r\n is primarily a method of settling metaphysical disputes that otherwise\r\n might be interminable. Is the world one or many?\u0026mdash;fated or free?\u0026mdash;material\r\n or spiritual?\u0026mdash;here are notions either of which may or may not hold\r\n good of the world; and disputes over such notions are unending. The\r\n pragmatic method in such cases is to try to interpret each notion by\r\n tracing its respective practical consequences. What difference would it\r\n practically make to anyone if this notion rather than that notion were\r\n true? If no practical difference whatever can be traced, then the\r\n alternatives mean practically the same thing, and all dispute is idle.\r\n Whenever a dispute is serious, we ought to be able to show some practical\r\n difference that must follow from one side or the other\u0027s being right.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n A glance at the history of the idea will show you still better what\r\n pragmatism means. The term is derived from the same Greek word [pi rho\r\n alpha gamma mu alpha], meaning action, from which our words \u0027practice\u0027 and\r\n \u0027practical\u0027 come. It was first introduced into philosophy by Mr. Charles\r\n Peirce in 1878. In an article entitled \u0027How to Make Our Ideas Clear,\u0027 in\r\n the \u0027Popular Science Monthly\u0027 for January of that year [Footnote:\r\n Translated in the Revue Philosophique for January, 1879 (vol. vii).] Mr.\r\n Peirce, after pointing out that our beliefs are really rules for action,\r\n said that to develope a thought\u0027s meaning, we need only determine what\r\n conduct it is fitted to produce: that conduct is for us its sole\r\n significance. And the tangible fact at the root of all our\r\n thought-distinctions, however subtle, is that there is no one of them so\r\n fine as to consist in anything but a possible difference of practice. To\r\n attain perfect clearness in our thoughts of an object, then, we need only\r\n consider what conceivable effects of a practical kind the object may\r\n involve\u0026mdash;what sensations we are to expect from it, and what reactions\r\n we must prepare. Our conception of these effects, whether immediate or\r\n remote, is then for us the whole of our conception of the object, so far\r\n as that conception has positive significance at all.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n This is the principle of Peirce, the principle of pragmatism. It lay\r\n entirely unnoticed by anyone for twenty years, until I, in an address\r\n before Professor Howison\u0027s philosophical union at the university of\r\n California, brought it forward again and made a special application of it\r\n to religion. By that date (1898) the times seemed ripe for its reception.\r\n The word \u0027pragmatism\u0027 spread, and at present it fairly spots the pages of\r\n the philosophic journals. On all hands we find the \u0027pragmatic movement\u0027\r\n spoken of, sometimes with respect, sometimes with contumely, seldom with\r\n clear understanding. It is evident that the term applies itself\r\n conveniently to a number of tendencies that hitherto have lacked a\r\n collective name, and that it has \u0027come to stay.\u0027\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n To take in the importance of Peirce\u0027s principle, one must get accustomed\r\n to applying it to concrete cases. I found a few years ago that Ostwald,\r\n the illustrious Leipzig chemist, had been making perfectly distinct use of\r\n the principle of pragmatism in his lectures on the philosophy of science,\r\n tho he had not called it by that name.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n \"All realities influence our practice,\" he wrote me, \"and that influence\r\n is their meaning for us. I am accustomed to put questions to my classes in\r\n this way: In what respects would the world be different if this\r\n alternative or that were true? If I can find nothing that would become\r\n different, then the alternative has no sense.\"\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n That is, the rival views mean practically the same thing, and meaning,\r\n other than practical, there is for us none. Ostwald in a published lecture\r\n gives this example of what he means. Chemists have long wrangled over the\r\n inner constitution of certain bodies called \u0027tautomerous.\u0027 Their\r\n properties seemed equally consistent with the notion that an instable\r\n hydrogen atom oscillates inside of them, or that they are instable\r\n mixtures of two bodies. Controversy raged; but never was decided. \"It\r\n would never have begun,\" says Ostwald, \"if the combatants had asked\r\n themselves what particular experimental fact could have been made\r\n different by one or the other view being correct. For it would then have\r\n appeared that no difference of fact could possibly ensue; and the quarrel\r\n was as unreal as if, theorizing in primitive times about the raising of\r\n dough by yeast, one party should have invoked a \u0027brownie,\u0027 while another\r\n insisted on an \u0027elf\u0027 as the true cause of the phenomenon.\" [Footnote:\r\n \u0027Theorie und Praxis,\u0027 Zeitsch. des Oesterreichischen Ingenieur u.\r\n Architecten-Vereines, 1905, Nr. 4 u. 6. I find a still more radical\r\n pragmatism than Ostwald\u0027s in an address by Professor W. S. Franklin: \"I\r\n think that the sickliest notion of physics, even if a student gets it, is\r\n that it is \u0027the science of masses, molecules and the ether.\u0027 And I think\r\n that the healthiest notion, even if a student does not wholly get it, is\r\n that physics is the science of the ways of taking hold of bodies and\r\n pushing them!\" (Science, January 2, 1903.)]\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n It is astonishing to see how many philosophical disputes collapse into\r\n insignificance the moment you subject them to this simple test of tracing\r\n a concrete consequence. There can BE no difference any-where that doesn\u0027t\r\n MAKE a difference elsewhere\u0026mdash;no difference in abstract truth that\r\n doesn\u0027t express itself in a difference in concrete fact and in conduct\r\n consequent upon that fact, imposed on somebody, somehow, somewhere and\r\n somewhen. The whole function of philosophy ought to be to find out what\r\n definite difference it will make to you and me, at definite instants of\r\n our life, if this world-formula or that world-formula be the true one.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n There is absolutely nothing new in the pragmatic method. Socrates was an\r\n adept at it. Aristotle used it methodically. Locke, Berkeley and Hume made\r\n momentous contributions to truth by its means. Shadworth Hodgson keeps\r\n insisting that realities are only what they are \u0027known-as.\u0027 But these\r\n forerunners of pragmatism used it in fragments: they were preluders only.\r\n Not until in our time has it generalized itself, become conscious of a\r\n universal mission, pretended to a conquering destiny. I believe in that\r\n destiny, and I hope I may end by inspiring you with my belief.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n Pragmatism represents a perfectly familiar attitude in philosophy, the\r\n empiricist attitude, but it represents it, as it seems to me, both in a\r\n more radical and in a less objectionable form than it has ever yet\r\n assumed. A pragmatist turns his back resolutely and once for all upon a\r\n lot of inveterate habits dear to professional philosophers. He turns away\r\n from abstraction and insufficiency, from verbal solutions, from bad a\r\n priori reasons, from fixed principles, closed systems, and pretended\r\n absolutes and origins. He turns towards concreteness and adequacy, towards\r\n facts, towards action, and towards power. That means the empiricist temper\r\n regnant, and the rationalist temper sincerely given up. It means the open\r\n air and possibilities of nature, as against dogma, artificiality and the\r\n pretence of finality in truth.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n At the same time it does not stand for any special results. It is a method\r\n only. But the general triumph of that method would mean an enormous change\r\n in what I called in my last lecture the \u0027temperament\u0027 of philosophy.\r\n Teachers of the ultra-rationalistic type would be frozen out, much as the\r\n courtier type is frozen out in republics, as the ultramontane type of\r\n priest is frozen out in protestant lands. Science and metaphysics would\r\n come much nearer together, would in fact work absolutely hand in hand.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n Metaphysics has usually followed a very primitive kind of quest. You know\r\n how men have always hankered after unlawful magic, and you know what a\r\n great part, in magic, WORDS have always played. If you have his name, or\r\n the formula of incantation that binds him, you can control the spirit,\r\n genie, afrite, or whatever the power may be. Solomon knew the names of all\r\n the spirits, and having their names, he held them subject to his will. So\r\n the universe has always appeared to the natural mind as a kind of enigma,\r\n of which the key must be sought in the shape of some illuminating or\r\n power-bringing word or name. That word names the universe\u0027s PRINCIPLE, and\r\n to possess it is, after a fashion, to possess the universe itself. \u0027God,\u0027\r\n \u0027Matter,\u0027 \u0027Reason,\u0027 \u0027the Absolute,\u0027 \u0027Energy,\u0027 are so many solving names.\r\n You can rest when you have them. You are at the end of your metaphysical\r\n quest.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n But if you follow the pragmatic method, you cannot look on any such word\r\n as closing your quest. You must bring out of each word its practical\r\n cash-value, set it at work within the stream of your experience. It\r\n appears less as a solution, then, than as a program for more work, and\r\n more particularly as an indication of the ways in which existing realities\r\n may be CHANGED.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n THEORIES THUS BECOME INSTRUMENTS, NOT ANSWERS TO ENIGMAS, IN WHICH WE CAN\r\n REST. We don\u0027t lie back upon them, we move forward, and, on occasion, make\r\n nature over again by their aid. Pragmatism unstiffens all our theories,\r\n limbers them up and sets each one at work. Being nothing essentially new,\r\n it harmonizes with many ancient philosophic tendencies. It agrees with\r\n nominalism for instance, in always appealing to particulars; with\r\n utilitarianism in emphasizing practical aspects; with positivism in its\r\n disdain for verbal solutions, useless questions, and metaphysical\r\n abstractions.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n All these, you see, are ANTI-INTELLECTUALIST tendencies. Against\r\n rationalism as a pretension and a method, pragmatism is fully armed and\r\n militant. But, at the outset, at least, it stands for no particular\r\n results. It has no dogmas, and no doctrines save its method. As the young\r\n Italian pragmatist Papini has well said, it lies in the midst of our\r\n theories, like a corridor in a hotel. Innumerable chambers open out of it.\r\n In one you may find a man writing an atheistic volume; in the next someone\r\n on his knees praying for faith and strength; in a third a chemist\r\n investigating a body\u0027s properties. In a fourth a system of idealistic\r\n metaphysics is being excogitated; in a fifth the impossibility of\r\n metaphysics is being shown. But they all own the corridor, and all must\r\n pass through it if they want a practicable way of getting into or out of\r\n their respective rooms.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n No particular results then, so far, but only an attitude of orientation,\r\n is what the pragmatic method means. THE ATTITUDE OF LOOKING AWAY FROM\r\n FIRST THINGS, PRINCIPLES, \u0027CATEGORIES,\u0027 SUPPOSED NECESSITIES; AND OF\r\n LOOKING TOWARDS LAST THINGS, FRUITS, CONSEQUENCES, FACTS.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n So much for the pragmatic method! You may say that I have been praising it\r\n rather than explaining it to you, but I shall presently explain it\r\n abundantly enough by showing how it works on some familiar problems.\r\n Meanwhile the word pragmatism has come to be used in a still wider sense,\r\n as meaning also a certain theory of TRUTH. I mean to give a whole lecture\r\n to the statement of that theory, after first paving the way, so I can be\r\n very brief now. But brevity is hard to follow, so I ask for your redoubled\r\n attention for a quarter of an hour. If much remains obscure, I hope to\r\n make it clearer in the later lectures.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n One of the most successfully cultivated branches of philosophy in our time\r\n is what is called inductive logic, the study of the conditions under which\r\n our sciences have evolved. Writers on this subject have begun to show a\r\n singular unanimity as to what the laws of nature and elements of fact\r\n mean, when formulated by mathematicians, physicists and chemists. When the\r\n first mathematical, logical and natural uniformities, the first LAWS, were\r\n discovered, men were so carried away by the clearness, beauty and\r\n simplification that resulted, that they believed themselves to have\r\n deciphered authentically the eternal thoughts of the Almighty. His mind\r\n also thundered and reverberated in syllogisms. He also thought in conic\r\n sections, squares and roots and ratios, and geometrized like Euclid. He\r\n made Kepler\u0027s laws for the planets to follow; he made velocity increase\r\n proportionally to the time in falling bodies; he made the law of the sines\r\n for light to obey when refracted; he established the classes, orders,\r\n families and genera of plants and animals, and fixed the distances between\r\n them. He thought the archetypes of all things, and devised their\r\n variations; and when we rediscover any one of these his wondrous\r\n institutions, we seize his mind in its very literal intention.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n But as the sciences have developed farther, the notion has gained ground\r\n that most, perhaps all, of our laws are only approximations. The laws\r\n themselves, moreover, have grown so numerous that there is no counting\r\n them; and so many rival formulations are proposed in all the branches of\r\n science that investigators have become accustomed to the notion that no\r\n theory is absolutely a transcript of reality, but that any one of them may\r\n from some point of view be useful. Their great use is to summarize old\r\n facts and to lead to new ones. They are only a man-made language, a\r\n conceptual shorthand, as someone calls them, in which we write our reports\r\n of nature; and languages, as is well known, tolerate much choice of\r\n expression and many dialects.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n Thus human arbitrariness has driven divine necessity from scientific\r\n logic. If I mention the names of Sigwart, Mach, Ostwald, Pearson, Milhaud,\r\n Poincare, Duhem, Ruyssen, those of you who are students will easily\r\n identify the tendency I speak of, and will think of additional names.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n Riding now on the front of this wave of scientific logic Messrs. Schiller\r\n and Dewey appear with their pragmatistic account of what truth everywhere\r\n signifies. Everywhere, these teachers say, \u0027truth\u0027 in our ideas and\r\n beliefs means the same thing that it means in science. It means, they say,\r\n nothing but this, THAT IDEAS (WHICH THEMSELVES ARE BUT PARTS OF OUR\r\n EXPERIENCE) BECOME TRUE JUST IN SO FAR AS THEY HELP US TO GET INTO\r\n SATISFACTORY RELATION WITH OTHER PARTS OF OUR EXPERIENCE, to summarize\r\n them and get about among them by conceptual short-cuts instead of\r\n following the interminable succession of particular phenomena. Any idea\r\n upon which we can ride, so to speak; any idea that will carry us\r\n prosperously from any one part of our experience to any other part,\r\n linking things satisfactorily, working securely, simplifying, saving\r\n labor; is true for just so much, true in so far forth, true\r\n INSTRUMENTALLY. This is the \u0027instrumental\u0027 view of truth taught so\r\n successfully at Chicago, the view that truth in our ideas means their\r\n power to \u0027work,\u0027 promulgated so brilliantly at Oxford.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n Messrs. Dewey, Schiller and their allies, in reaching this general\r\n conception of all truth, have only followed the example of geologists,\r\n biologists and philologists. In the establishment of these other sciences,\r\n the successful stroke was always to take some simple process actually\r\n observable in operation\u0026mdash;as denudation by weather, say, or variation\r\n from parental type, or change of dialect by incorporation of new words and\r\n pronunciations\u0026mdash;and then to generalize it, making it apply to all\r\n times, and produce great results by summating its effects through the\r\n ages.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n The observable process which Schiller and Dewey particularly singled out\r\n for generalization is the familiar one by which any individual settles\r\n into NEW OPINIONS. The process here is always the same. The individual has\r\n a stock of old opinions already, but he meets a new experience that puts\r\n them to a strain. Somebody contradicts them; or in a reflective moment he\r\n discovers that they contradict each other; or he hears of facts with which\r\n they are incompatible; or desires arise in him which they cease to\r\n satisfy. The result is an inward trouble to which his mind till then had\r\n been a stranger, and from which he seeks to escape by modifying his\r\n previous mass of opinions. He saves as much of it as he can, for in this\r\n matter of belief we are all extreme conservatives. So he tries to change\r\n first this opinion, and then that (for they resist change very variously),\r\n until at last some new idea comes up which he can graft upon the ancient\r\n stock with a minimum of disturbance of the latter, some idea that mediates\r\n between the stock and the new experience and runs them into one another\r\n most felicitously and expediently.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n This new idea is then adopted as the true one. It preserves the older\r\n stock of truths with a minimum of modification, stretching them just\r\n enough to make them admit the novelty, but conceiving that in ways as\r\n familiar as the case leaves possible. An outree explanation, violating all\r\n our preconceptions, would never pass for a true account of a novelty. We\r\n should scratch round industriously till we found something less excentric.\r\n The most violent revolutions in an individual\u0027s beliefs leave most of his\r\n old order standing. Time and space, cause and effect, nature and history,\r\n and one\u0027s own biography remain untouched. New truth is always a\r\n go-between, a smoother-over of transitions. It marries old opinion to new\r\n fact so as ever to show a minimum of jolt, a maximum of continuity. We\r\n hold a theory true just in proportion to its success in solving this\r\n \u0027problem of maxima and minima.\u0027 But success in solving this problem is\r\n eminently a matter of approximation. We say this theory solves it on the\r\n whole more satisfactorily than that theory; but that means more\r\n satisfactorily to ourselves, and individuals will emphasize their points\r\n of satisfaction differently. To a certain degree, therefore, everything\r\n here is plastic.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n The point I now urge you to observe particularly is the part played by the\r\n older truths. Failure to take account of it is the source of much of the\r\n unjust criticism leveled against pragmatism. Their influence is absolutely\r\n controlling. Loyalty to them is the first principle\u0026mdash;in most cases it\r\n is the only principle; for by far the most usual way of handling phenomena\r\n so novel that they would make for a serious rearrangement of our\r\n preconceptions is to ignore them altogether, or to abuse those who bear\r\n witness for them.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n You doubtless wish examples of this process of truth\u0027s growth, and the\r\n only trouble is their superabundance. The simplest case of new truth is of\r\n course the mere numerical addition of new kinds of facts, or of new single\r\n facts of old kinds, to our experience\u0026mdash;an addition that involves no\r\n alteration in the old beliefs. Day follows day, and its contents are\r\n simply added. The new contents themselves are not true, they simply COME\r\n and ARE. Truth is what we say about them, and when we say that they have\r\n come, truth is satisfied by the plain additive formula.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n But often the day\u0027s contents oblige a rearrangement. If I should now utter\r\n piercing shrieks and act like a maniac on this platform, it would make\r\n many of you revise your ideas as to the probable worth of my philosophy.\r\n \u0027Radium\u0027 came the other day as part of the day\u0027s content, and seemed for a\r\n moment to contradict our ideas of the whole order of nature, that order\r\n having come to be identified with what is called the conservation of\r\n energy. The mere sight of radium paying heat away indefinitely out of its\r\n own pocket seemed to violate that conservation. What to think? If the\r\n radiations from it were nothing but an escape of unsuspected \u0027potential\u0027\r\n energy, pre-existent inside of the atoms, the principle of conservation\r\n would be saved. The discovery of \u0027helium\u0027 as the radiation\u0027s outcome,\r\n opened a way to this belief. So Ramsay\u0027s view is generally held to be\r\n true, because, altho it extends our old ideas of energy, it causes a\r\n minimum of alteration in their nature.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n I need not multiply instances. A new opinion counts as \u0027true\u0027 just in\r\n proportion as it gratifies the individual\u0027s desire to assimilate the novel\r\n in his experience to his beliefs in stock. It must both lean on old truth\r\n and grasp new fact; and its success (as I said a moment ago) in doing\r\n this, is a matter for the individual\u0027s appreciation. When old truth grows,\r\n then, by new truth\u0027s addition, it is for subjective reasons. We are in the\r\n process and obey the reasons. That new idea is truest which performs most\r\n felicitously its function of satisfying our double urgency. It makes\r\n itself true, gets itself classed as true, by the way it works; grafting\r\n itself then upon the ancient body of truth, which thus grows much as a\r\n tree grows by the activity of a new layer of cambium.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n Now Dewey and Schiller proceed to generalize this observation and to apply\r\n it to the most ancient parts of truth. They also once were plastic. They\r\n also were called true for human reasons. They also mediated between still\r\n earlier truths and what in those days were novel observations. Purely\r\n objective truth, truth in whose establishment the function of giving human\r\n satisfaction in marrying previous parts of experience with newer parts\r\n played no role whatever, is nowhere to be found. The reasons why we call\r\n things true is the reason why they ARE true, for \u0027to be true\u0027 MEANS only\r\n to perform this marriage-function.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n The trail of the human serpent is thus over everything. Truth independent;\r\n truth that we FIND merely; truth no longer malleable to human need; truth\r\n incorrigible, in a word; such truth exists indeed superabundantly\u0026mdash;or\r\n is supposed to exist by rationalistically minded thinkers; but then it\r\n means only the dead heart of the living tree, and its being there means\r\n only that truth also has its paleontology and its \u0027prescription,\u0027 and may\r\n grow stiff with years of veteran service and petrified in men\u0027s regard by\r\n sheer antiquity. But how plastic even the oldest truths nevertheless\r\n really are has been vividly shown in our day by the transformation of\r\n logical and mathematical ideas, a transformation which seems even to be\r\n invading physics. The ancient formulas are reinterpreted as special\r\n expressions of much wider principles, principles that our ancestors never\r\n got a glimpse of in their present shape and formulation.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n Mr. Schiller still gives to all this view of truth the name of \u0027Humanism,\u0027\r\n but, for this doctrine too, the name of pragmatism seems fairly to be in\r\n the ascendant, so I will treat it under the name of pragmatism in these\r\n lectures.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n Such then would be the scope of pragmatism\u0026mdash;first, a method; and\r\n second, a genetic theory of what is meant by truth. And these two things\r\n must be our future topics.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n What I have said of the theory of truth will, I am sure, have appeared\r\n obscure and unsatisfactory to most of you by reason of us brevity. I shall\r\n make amends for that hereafter. In a lecture on \u0027common sense\u0027 I shall try\r\n to show what I mean by truths grown petrified by antiquity. In another\r\n lecture I shall expatiate on the idea that our thoughts become true in\r\n proportion as they successfully exert their go-between function. In a\r\n third I shall show how hard it is to discriminate subjective from\r\n objective factors in Truth\u0027s development. You may not follow me wholly in\r\n these lectures; and if you do, you may not wholly agree with me. But you\r\n will, I know, regard me at least as serious, and treat my effort with\r\n respectful consideration.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n You will probably be surprised to learn, then, that Messrs. Schiller\u0027s and\r\n Dewey\u0027s theories have suffered a hailstorm of contempt and ridicule. All\r\n rationalism has risen against them. In influential quarters Mr. Schiller,\r\n in particular, has been treated like an impudent schoolboy who deserves a\r\n spanking. I should not mention this, but for the fact that it throws so\r\n much sidelight upon that rationalistic temper to which I have opposed the\r\n temper of pragmatism. Pragmatism is uncomfortable away from facts.\r\n Rationalism is comfortable only in the presence of abstractions. This\r\n pragmatist talk about truths in the plural, about their utility and\r\n satisfactoriness, about the success with which they \u0027work,\u0027 etc., suggests\r\n to the typical intellectualist mind a sort of coarse lame second-rate\r\n makeshift article of truth. Such truths are not real truth. Such tests are\r\n merely subjective. As against this, objective truth must be something\r\n non-utilitarian, haughty, refined, remote, august, exalted. It must be an\r\n absolute correspondence of our thoughts with an equally absolute reality.\r\n It must be what we OUGHT to think, unconditionally. The conditioned ways\r\n in which we DO think are so much irrelevance and matter for psychology.\r\n Down with psychology, up with logic, in all this question!\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n See the exquisite contrast of the types of mind! The pragmatist clings to\r\n facts and concreteness, observes truth at its work in particular cases,\r\n and generalizes. Truth, for him, becomes a class-name for all sorts of\r\n definite working-values in experience. For the rationalist it remains a\r\n pure abstraction, to the bare name of which we must defer. When the\r\n pragmatist undertakes to show in detail just WHY we must defer, the\r\n rationalist is unable to recognize the concretes from which his own\r\n abstraction is taken. He accuses us of DENYING truth; whereas we have only\r\n sought to trace exactly why people follow it and always ought to follow\r\n it. Your typical ultra-abstractionist fairly shudders at concreteness:\r\n other things equal, he positively prefers the pale and spectral. If the\r\n two universes were offered, he would always choose the skinny outline\r\n rather than the rich thicket of reality. It is so much purer, clearer,\r\n nobler.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n I hope that as these lectures go on, the concreteness and closeness to\r\n facts of the pragmatism which they advocate may be what approves itself to\r\n you as its most satisfactory peculiarity. It only follows here the example\r\n of the sister-sciences, interpreting the unobserved by the observed. It\r\n brings old and new harmoniously together. It converts the absolutely empty\r\n notion of a static relation of \u0027correspondence\u0027 (what that may mean we\r\n must ask later) between our minds and reality, into that of a rich and\r\n active commerce (that anyone may follow in detail and understand) between\r\n particular thoughts of ours, and the great universe of other experiences\r\n in which they play their parts and have their uses.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n But enough of this at present? The justification of what I say must be\r\n postponed. I wish now to add a word in further explanation of the claim I\r\n made at our last meeting, that pragmatism may be a happy harmonizer of\r\n empiricist ways of thinking, with the more religious demands of human\r\n beings.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n Men who are strongly of the fact-loving temperament, you may remember me\r\n to have said, are liable to be kept at a distance by the small sympathy\r\n with facts which that philosophy from the present-day fashion of idealism\r\n offers them. It is far too intellectualistic. Old fashioned theism was bad\r\n enough, with its notion of God as an exalted monarch, made up of a lot of\r\n unintelligible or preposterous \u0027attributes\u0027; but, so long as it held\r\n strongly by the argument from design, it kept some touch with concrete\r\n realities. Since, however, darwinism has once for all displaced design\r\n from the minds of the \u0027scientific,\u0027 theism has lost that foothold; and\r\n some kind of an immanent or pantheistic deity working IN things rather\r\n than above them is, if any, the kind recommended to our contemporary\r\n imagination. Aspirants to a philosophic religion turn, as a rule, more\r\n hopefully nowadays towards idealistic pantheism than towards the older\r\n dualistic theism, in spite of the fact that the latter still counts able\r\n defenders.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n But, as I said in my first lecture, the brand of pantheism offered is hard\r\n for them to assimilate if they are lovers of facts, or empirically minded.\r\n It is the absolutistic brand, spurning the dust and reared upon pure\r\n logic. It keeps no connexion whatever with concreteness. Affirming the\r\n Absolute Mind, which is its substitute for God, to be the rational\r\n presupposition of all particulars of fact, whatever they may be, it\r\n remains supremely indifferent to what the particular facts in our world\r\n actually are. Be they what they may, the Absolute will father them. Like\r\n the sick lion in Esop\u0027s fable, all footprints lead into his den, but nulla\r\n vestigia retrorsum. You cannot redescend into the world of particulars by\r\n the Absolute\u0027s aid, or deduce any necessary consequences of detail\r\n important for your life from your idea of his nature. He gives you indeed\r\n the assurance that all is well with Him, and for his eternal way of\r\n thinking; but thereupon he leaves you to be finitely saved by your own\r\n temporal devices.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n Far be it from me to deny the majesty of this conception, or its capacity\r\n to yield religious comfort to a most respectable class of minds. But from\r\n the human point of view, no one can pretend that it doesn\u0027t suffer from\r\n the faults of remoteness and abstractness. It is eminently a product of\r\n what I have ventured to call the rationalistic temper. It disdains\r\n empiricism\u0027s needs. It substitutes a pallid outline for the real world\u0027s\r\n richness. It is dapper; it is noble in the bad sense, in the sense in\r\n which to be noble is to be inapt for humble service. In this real world of\r\n sweat and dirt, it seems to me that when a view of things is \u0027noble,\u0027 that\r\n ought to count as a presumption against its truth, and as a philosophic\r\n disqualification. The prince of darkness may be a gentleman, as we are\r\n told he is, but whatever the God of earth and heaven is, he can surely be\r\n no gentleman. His menial services are needed in the dust of our human\r\n trials, even more than his dignity is needed in the empyrean.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n Now pragmatism, devoted tho she be to facts, has no such materialistic\r\n bias as ordinary empiricism labors under. Moreover, she has no objection\r\n whatever to the realizing of abstractions, so long as you get about among\r\n particulars with their aid and they actually carry you somewhere.\r\n Interested in no conclusions but those which our minds and our experiences\r\n work out together, she has no a priori prejudices against theology. IF\r\n THEOLOGICAL IDEAS PROVE TO HAVE A VALUE FOR CONCRETE LIFE, THEY WILL BE\r\n TRUE, FOR PRAGMATISM, IN THE SENSE OF BEING GOOD FOR SO MUCH. FOR HOW MUCH\r\n MORE THEY ARE TRUE, WILL DEPEND ENTIRELY ON THEIR RELATIONS TO THE OTHER\r\n TRUTHS THAT ALSO HAVE TO BE ACKNOWLEDGED.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n What I said just now about the Absolute of transcendental idealism is a\r\n case in point. First, I called it majestic and said it yielded religious\r\n comfort to a class of minds, and then I accused it of remoteness and\r\n sterility. But so far as it affords such comfort, it surely is not\r\n sterile; it has that amount of value; it performs a concrete function. As\r\n a good pragmatist, I myself ought to call the Absolute true \u0027in so far\r\n forth,\u0027 then; and I unhesitatingly now do so.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n But what does TRUE IN SO FAR FORTH mean in this case? To answer, we need\r\n only apply the pragmatic method. What do believers in the Absolute mean by\r\n saying that their belief affords them comfort? They mean that since in the\r\n Absolute finite evil is \u0027overruled\u0027 already, we may, therefore, whenever\r\n we wish, treat the temporal as if it were potentially the eternal, be sure\r\n that we can trust its outcome, and, without sin, dismiss our fear and drop\r\n the worry of our finite responsibility. In short, they mean that we have a\r\n right ever and anon to take a moral holiday, to let the world wag in its\r\n own way, feeling that its issues are in better hands than ours and are\r\n none of our business.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n The universe is a system of which the individual members may relax their\r\n anxieties occasionally, in which the don\u0027t-care mood is also right for\r\n men, and moral holidays in order\u0026mdash;that, if I mistake not, is part, at\r\n least, of what the Absolute is \u0027known-as,\u0027 that is the great difference in\r\n our particular experiences which his being true makes for us, that is part\r\n of his cash-value when he is pragmatically interpreted. Farther than that\r\n the ordinary lay-reader in philosophy who thinks favorably of absolute\r\n idealism does not venture to sharpen his conceptions. He can use the\r\n Absolute for so much, and so much is very precious. He is pained at\r\n hearing you speak incredulously of the Absolute, therefore, and disregards\r\n your criticisms because they deal with aspects of the conception that he\r\n fails to follow.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n If the Absolute means this, and means no more than this, who can possibly\r\n deny the truth of it? To deny it would be to insist that men should never\r\n relax, and that holidays are never in order. I am well aware how odd it\r\n must seem to some of you to hear me say that an idea is \u0027true\u0027 so long as\r\n to believe it is profitable to our lives. That it is GOOD, for as much as\r\n it profits, you will gladly admit. If what we do by its aid is good, you\r\n will allow the idea itself to be good in so far forth, for we are the\r\n better for possessing it. But is it not a strange misuse of the word\r\n \u0027truth,\u0027 you will say, to call ideas also \u0027true\u0027 for this reason?\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n To answer this difficulty fully is impossible at this stage of my account.\r\n You touch here upon the very central point of Messrs. Schiller\u0027s, Dewey\u0027s\r\n and my own doctrine of truth, which I cannot discuss with detail until my\r\n sixth lecture. Let me now say only this, that truth is ONE SPECIES OF\r\n GOOD, and not, as is usually supposed, a category distinct from good, and\r\n co-ordinate with it. THE TRUE IS THE NAME OF WHATEVER PROVES ITSELF TO BE\r\n GOOD IN THE WAY OF BELIEF, AND GOOD, TOO, FOR DEFINITE, ASSIGNABLE\r\n REASONS. Surely you must admit this, that if there were NO good for life\r\n in true ideas, or if the knowledge of them were positively disadvantageous\r\n and false ideas the only useful ones, then the current notion that truth\r\n is divine and precious, and its pursuit a duty, could never have grown up\r\n or become a dogma. In a world like that, our duty would be to SHUN truth,\r\n rather. But in this world, just as certain foods are not only agreeable to\r\n our taste, but good for our teeth, our stomach and our tissues; so certain\r\n ideas are not only agreeable to think about, or agreeable as supporting\r\n other ideas that we are fond of, but they are also helpful in life\u0027s\r\n practical struggles. If there be any life that it is really better we\r\n should lead, and if there be any idea which, if believed in, would help us\r\n to lead that life, then it would be really BETTER FOR US to believe in\r\n that idea, UNLESS, INDEED, BELIEF IN IT INCIDENTALLY CLASHED WITH OTHER\r\n GREATER VITAL BENEFITS.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n \u0027What would be better for us to believe\u0027! This sounds very like a\r\n definition of truth. It comes very near to saying \u0027what we OUGHT to\r\n believe\u0027: and in THAT definition none of you would find any oddity. Ought\r\n we ever not to believe what it is BETTER FOR US to believe? And can we\r\n then keep the notion of what is better for us, and what is true for us,\r\n permanently apart?\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n Pragmatism says no, and I fully agree with her. Probably you also agree,\r\n so far as the abstract statement goes, but with a suspicion that if we\r\n practically did believe everything that made for good in our own personal\r\n lives, we should be found indulging all kinds of fancies about this\r\n world\u0027s affairs, and all kinds of sentimental superstitions about a world\r\n hereafter. Your suspicion here is undoubtedly well founded, and it is\r\n evident that something happens when you pass from the abstract to the\r\n concrete, that complicates the situation.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n I said just now that what is better for us to believe is true UNLESS THE\r\n BELIEF INCIDENTALLY CLASHES WITH SOME OTHER VITAL BENEFIT. Now in real\r\n life what vital benefits is any particular belief of ours most liable to\r\n clash with? What indeed except the vital benefits yielded by OTHER BELIEFS\r\n when these prove incompatible with the first ones? In other words, the\r\n greatest enemy of any one of our truths may be the rest of our truths.\r\n Truths have once for all this desperate instinct of self-preservation and\r\n of desire to extinguish whatever contradicts them. My belief in the\r\n Absolute, based on the good it does me, must run the gauntlet of all my\r\n other beliefs. Grant that it may be true in giving me a moral holiday.\r\n Nevertheless, as I conceive it,\u0026mdash;and let me speak now confidentially,\r\n as it were, and merely in my own private person,\u0026mdash;it clashes with\r\n other truths of mine whose benefits I hate to give up on its account. It\r\n happens to be associated with a kind of logic of which I am the enemy, I\r\n find that it entangles me in metaphysical paradoxes that are inacceptable,\r\n etc., etc.. But as I have enough trouble in life already without adding\r\n the trouble of carrying these intellectual inconsistencies, I personally\r\n just give up the Absolute. I just TAKE my moral holidays; or else as a\r\n professional philosopher, I try to justify them by some other principle.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n If I could restrict my notion of the Absolute to its bare holiday-giving\r\n value, it wouldn\u0027t clash with my other truths. But we cannot easily thus\r\n restrict our hypotheses. They carry supernumerary features, and these it\r\n is that clash so. My disbelief in the Absolute means then disbelief in\r\n those other supernumerary features, for I fully believe in the legitimacy\r\n of taking moral holidays.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n You see by this what I meant when I called pragmatism a mediator and\r\n reconciler and said, borrowing the word from Papini, that he unstiffens\r\n our theories. She has in fact no prejudices whatever, no obstructive\r\n dogmas, no rigid canons of what shall count as proof. She is completely\r\n genial. She will entertain any hypothesis, she will consider any evidence.\r\n It follows that in the religious field she is at a great advantage both\r\n over positivistic empiricism, with its anti-theological bias, and over\r\n religious rationalism, with its exclusive interest in the remote, the\r\n noble, the simple, and the abstract in the way of conception.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n In short, she widens the field of search for God. Rationalism sticks to\r\n logic and the empyrean. Empiricism sticks to the external senses.\r\n Pragmatism is willing to take anything, to follow either logic or the\r\n senses, and to count the humblest and most personal experiences. She will\r\n count mystical experiences if they have practical consequences. She will\r\n take a God who lives in the very dirt of private fact-if that should seem\r\n a likely place to find him.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n Her only test of probable truth is what works best in the way of leading\r\n us, what fits every part of life best and combines with the collectivity\r\n of experience\u0027s demands, nothing being omitted. If theological ideas\r\n should do this, if the notion of God, in particular, should prove to do\r\n it, how could pragmatism possibly deny God\u0027s existence? She could see no\r\n meaning in treating as \u0027not true\u0027 a notion that was pragmatically so\r\n successful. What other kind of truth could there be, for her, than all\r\n this agreement with concrete reality?\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n In my last lecture I shall return again to the relations of pragmatism\r\n with religion. But you see already how democratic she is. Her manners are\r\n as various and flexible, her resources as rich and endless, and her\r\n conclusions as friendly as those of mother nature.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n \u003cbr /\u003e\u003cbr /\u003e\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003chr /\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n \u003ca name=\"link2H_4_0005\" id=\"link2H_4_0005\"\u003e \u003c/a\u003e\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cdiv style=\"height: 4em;\"\u003e\r\n \u003cbr /\u003e\u003cbr /\u003e\u003cbr /\u003e\u003cbr /\u003e\r\n \u003c/div\u003e\r\n \u003ch2\u003e\r\n Lecture III. \u0026mdash; Some Metaphysical Problems Pragmatically Considered\r\n \u003c/h2\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n I am now to make the pragmatic method more familiar by giving you some\r\n illustrations of its application to particular problems. I will begin with\r\n what is driest, and the first thing I shall take will be the problem of\r\n Substance. Everyone uses the old distinction between substance and\r\n attribute, enshrined as it is in the very structure of human language, in\r\n the difference between grammatical subject and predicate. Here is a bit of\r\n blackboard crayon. Its modes, attributes, properties, accidents, or\r\n affections,\u0026mdash;use which term you will,\u0026mdash;are whiteness,\r\n friability, cylindrical shape, insolubility in water, etc., etc. But the\r\n bearer of these attributes is so much chalk, which thereupon is called the\r\n substance in which they inhere. So the attributes of this desk inhere in\r\n the substance \u0027wood,\u0027 those of my coat in the substance \u0027wool,\u0027 and so\r\n forth. Chalk, wood and wool, show again, in spite of their differences,\r\n common properties, and in so far forth they are themselves counted as\r\n modes of a still more primal substance, matter, the attributes of which\r\n are space occupancy and impenetrability. Similarly our thoughts and\r\n feelings are affections or properties of our several souls, which are\r\n substances, but again not wholly in their own right, for they are modes of\r\n the still deeper substance \u0027spirit.\u0027\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n Now it was very early seen that all we know of the chalk is the whiteness,\r\n friability, etc., all WE KNOW of the wood is the combustibility and\r\n fibrous structure. A group of attributes is what each substance here is\r\n known-as, they form its sole cash-value for our actual experience. The\r\n substance is in every case revealed through THEM; if we were cut off from\r\n THEM we should never suspect its existence; and if God should keep sending\r\n them to us in an unchanged order, miraculously annihilating at a certain\r\n moment the substance that supported them, we never could detect the\r\n moment, for our experiences themselves would be unaltered. Nominalists\r\n accordingly adopt the opinion that substance is a spurious idea due to our\r\n inveterate human trick of turning names into things. Phenomena come in\r\n groups\u0026mdash;the chalk-group, the wood-group, etc.\u0026mdash;and each group\r\n gets its name. The name we then treat as in a way supporting the group of\r\n phenomena. The low thermometer to-day, for instance, is supposed to come\r\n from something called the \u0027climate.\u0027 Climate is really only the name for a\r\n certain group of days, but it is treated as if it lay BEHIND the day, and\r\n in general we place the name, as if it were a being, behind the facts it\r\n is the name of. But the phenomenal properties of things, nominalists say,\r\n surely do not really inhere in names, and if not in names then they do not\r\n inhere in anything. They ADhere, or COhere, rather, WITH EACH OTHER, and\r\n the notion of a substance inaccessible to us, which we think accounts for\r\n such cohesion by supporting it, as cement might support pieces of mosaic,\r\n must be abandoned. The fact of the bare cohesion itself is all that the\r\n notion of the substance signifies. Behind that fact is nothing.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n Scholasticism has taken the notion of substance from common sense and made\r\n it very technical and articulate. Few things would seem to have fewer\r\n pragmatic consequences for us than substances, cut off as we are from\r\n every contact with them. Yet in one case scholasticism has proved the\r\n importance of the substance-idea by treating it pragmatically. I refer to\r\n certain disputes about the mystery of the Eucharist. Substance here would\r\n appear to have momentous pragmatic value. Since the accidents of the wafer\r\n don\u0027t change in the Lord\u0027s supper, and yet it has become the very body of\r\n Christ, it must be that the change is in the substance solely. The\r\n bread-substance must have been withdrawn, and the divine substance\r\n substituted miraculously without altering the immediate sensible\r\n properties. But tho these don\u0027t alter, a tremendous difference has been\r\n made, no less a one than this, that we who take the sacrament, now feed\r\n upon the very substance of divinity. The substance-notion breaks into\r\n life, then, with tremendous effect, if once you allow that substances can\r\n separate from their accidents, and exchange these latter.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n This is the only pragmatic application of the substance-idea with which I\r\n am acquainted; and it is obvious that it will only be treated seriously by\r\n those who already believe in the \u0027real presence\u0027 on independent grounds.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n MATERIAL SUBSTANCE was criticized by Berkeley with such telling effect\r\n that his name has reverberated through all subsequent philosophy.\r\n Berkeley\u0027s treatment of the notion of matter is so well known as to need\r\n hardly more than a mention. So far from denying the external world which\r\n we know, Berkeley corroborated it. It was the scholastic notion of a\r\n material substance unapproachable by us, BEHIND the external world, deeper\r\n and more real than it, and needed to support it, which Berkeley maintained\r\n to be the most effective of all reducers of the external world to\r\n unreality. Abolish that substance, he said, believe that God, whom you can\r\n understand and approach, sends you the sensible world directly, and you\r\n confirm the latter and back it up by his divine authority. Berkeley\u0027s\r\n criticism of \u0027matter\u0027 was consequently absolutely pragmatistic. Matter is\r\n known as our sensations of colour, figure, hardness and the like. They are\r\n the cash-value of the term. The difference matter makes to us by truly\r\n being is that we then get such sensations; by not being, is that we lack\r\n them. These sensations then are its sole meaning. Berkeley doesn\u0027t deny\r\n matter, then; he simply tells us what it consists of. It is a true name\r\n for just so much in the way of sensations.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n Locke, and later Hume, applied a similar pragmatic criticism to the notion\r\n of SPIRITUAL SUBSTANCE. I will only mention Locke\u0027s treatment of our\r\n \u0027personal identity.\u0027 He immediately reduces this notion to its pragmatic\r\n value in terms of experience. It means, he says, so much consciousness,\u0027\r\n namely the fact that at one moment of life we remember other moments, and\r\n feel them all as parts of one and the same personal history. Rationalism\r\n had explained this practical continuity in our life by the unity of our\r\n soul-substance. But Locke says: suppose that God should take away the\r\n consciousness, should WE be any the better for having still the\r\n soul-principle? Suppose he annexed the same consciousness to different\r\n souls, | should we, as WE realize OURSELVES, be any the worse for that\r\n fact? In Locke\u0027s day the soul was chiefly a thing to be rewarded or\r\n punished. See how Locke, discussing it from this point of view, keeps the\r\n question pragmatic:\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n Suppose, he says, one to think himself to be the same soul that once was\r\n Nestor or Thersites. Can he think their actions his own any more than the\r\n actions of any other man that ever existed? But | let him once find\r\n himself CONSCIOUS of any of the actions of Nestor, he then finds himself\r\n the same person with Nestor. … In this personal identity is founded all\r\n the right and justice of reward and punishment. It may be reasonable to\r\n think, no one shall be made to answer for what he knows nothing of, but\r\n shall receive his doom, his consciousness accusing or excusing. Supposing\r\n a man punished now for what he had done in another life, whereof he could\r\n be made to have no consciousness at all, what difference is there between\r\n that punishment and being created miserable?\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n Our personal identity, then, consists, for Locke, solely in pragmatically\r\n definable particulars. Whether, apart from these verifiable facts, it also\r\n inheres in a spiritual principle, is a merely curious speculation. Locke,\r\n compromiser that he was, passively tolerated the belief in a substantial\r\n soul behind our consciousness. But his successor Hume, and most empirical\r\n psychologists after him, have denied the soul, save as the name for\r\n verifiable cohesions in our inner life. They redescend into the stream of\r\n experience with it, and cash it into so much small-change value in the way\r\n of \u0027ideas\u0027 and their peculiar connexions with each other. As I said of\r\n Berkeley\u0027s matter, the soul is good or \u0027true\u0027 for just SO MUCH, but no\r\n more.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n The mention of material substance naturally suggests the doctrine of\r\n \u0027materialism,\u0027 but philosophical materialism is not necessarily knit up\r\n with belief in \u0027matter,\u0027 as a metaphysical principle. One may deny matter\r\n in that sense, as strongly as Berkeley did, one may be a phenomenalist\r\n like Huxley, and yet one may still be a materialist in the wider sense, of\r\n explaining higher phenomena by lower ones, and leaving the destinies of\r\n the world at the mercy of its blinder parts and forces. It is in this\r\n wider sense of the word that materialism is opposed to spiritualism or\r\n theism. The laws of physical nature are what run things, materialism says.\r\n The highest productions of human genius might be ciphered by one who had\r\n complete acquaintance with the facts, out of their physiological\r\n conditions, regardless whether nature be there only for our minds, as\r\n idealists contend, or not. Our minds in any case would have to record the\r\n kind of nature it is, and write it down as operating through blind laws of\r\n physics. This is the complexion of present day materialism, which may\r\n better be called naturalism. Over against it stands \u0027theism,\u0027 or what in a\r\n wide sense may be termed \u0027spiritualism.\u0027 Spiritualism says that mind not\r\n only witnesses and records things, but also runs and operates them: the\r\n world being thus guided, not by its lower, but by its higher element.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n Treated as it often is, this question becomes little more than a conflict\r\n between aesthetic preferences. Matter is gross, coarse, crass, muddy;\r\n spirit is pure, elevated, noble; and since it is more consonant with the\r\n dignity of the universe to give the primacy in it to what appears\r\n superior, spirit must be affirmed as the ruling principle. To treat\r\n abstract principles as finalities, before which our intellects may come to\r\n rest in a state of admiring contemplation, is the great rationalist\r\n failing. Spiritualism, as often held, may be simply a state of admiration\r\n for one kind, and of dislike for another kind, of abstraction. I remember\r\n a worthy spiritualist professor who always referred to materialism as the\r\n \u0027mud-philosophy,\u0027 and deemed it thereby refuted.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n To such spiritualism as this there is an easy answer, and Mr. Spencer\r\n makes it effectively. In some well-written pages at the end of the first\r\n volume of his Psychology he shows us that a \u0027matter\u0027 so infinitely\r\n subtile, and performing motions as inconceivably quick and fine as those\r\n which modern science postulates in her explanations, has no trace of\r\n grossness left. He shows that the conception of spirit, as we mortals\r\n hitherto have framed it, is itself too gross to cover the exquisite\r\n tenuity of nature\u0027s facts. Both terms, he says, are but symbols, pointing\r\n to that one unknowable reality in which their oppositions cease.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n To an abstract objection an abstract rejoinder suffices; and so far as\r\n one\u0027s opposition to materialism springs from one\u0027s disdain of matter as\r\n something \u0027crass,\u0027 Mr. Spencer cuts the ground from under one. Matter is\r\n indeed infinitely and incredibly refined. To anyone who has ever looked on\r\n the face of a dead child or parent the mere fact that matter COULD have\r\n taken for a time that precious form, ought to make matter sacred ever\r\n after. It makes no difference what the PRINCIPLE of life may be, material\r\n or immaterial, matter at any rate co-operates, lends itself to all life\u0027s\r\n purposes. That beloved incarnation was among matter\u0027s possibilities.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n But now, instead of resting in principles after this stagnant\r\n intellectualist fashion, let us apply the pragmatic method to the\r\n question. What do we MEAN by matter? What practical difference can it make\r\n NOW that the world should be run by matter or by spirit? I think we find\r\n that the problem takes with this a rather different character.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n And first of all I call your attention to a curious fact. It makes not a\r\n single jot of difference so far as the PAST of the world goes, whether we\r\n deem it to have been the work of matter or whether we think a divine\r\n spirit was its author.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n Imagine, in fact, the entire contents of the world to be once for all\r\n irrevocably given. Imagine it to end this very moment, and to have no\r\n future; and then let a theist and a materialist apply their rival\r\n explanations to its history. The theist shows how a God made it; the\r\n materialist shows, and we will suppose with equal success, how it resulted\r\n from blind physical forces. Then let the pragmatist be asked to choose\r\n between their theories. How can he apply his test if the world is already\r\n completed? Concepts for him are things to come back into experience with,\r\n things to make us look for differences. But by hypothesis there is to be\r\n no more experience and no possible differences can now be looked for. Both\r\n theories have shown all their consequences and, by the hypothesis we are\r\n adopting, these are identical. The pragmatist must consequently say that\r\n the two theories, in spite of their different-sounding names, mean exactly\r\n the same thing, and that the dispute is purely verbal. [I am opposing, of\r\n course, that the theories HAVE been equally successful in their\r\n explanations of what is.]\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n For just consider the case sincerely, and say what would be the WORTH of a\r\n God if he WERE there, with his work accomplished and his world run down.\r\n He would be worth no more than just that world was worth. To that amount\r\n of result, with its mixed merits and defects, his creative power could\r\n attain, but go no farther. And since there is to be no future; since the\r\n whole value and meaning of the world has been already paid in and\r\n actualized in the feelings that went with it in the passing, and now go\r\n with it in the ending; since it draws no supplemental significance (such\r\n as our real world draws) from its function of preparing something yet to\r\n come; why then, by it we take God\u0027s measure, as it were. He is the Being\r\n who could once for all do THAT; and for that much we are thankful to him,\r\n but for nothing more. But now, on the contrary hypothesis, namely, that\r\n the bits of matter following their laws could make that world and do no\r\n less, should we not be just as thankful to them? Wherein should we suffer\r\n loss, then, if we dropped God as an hypothesis and made the matter alone\r\n responsible? Where would any special deadness, or crassness, come in? And\r\n how, experience being what is once for all, would God\u0027s presence in it\r\n make it any more living or richer?\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n Candidly, it is impossible to give any answer to this question. The\r\n actually experienced world is supposed to be the same in its details on\r\n either hypothesis, \"the same, for our praise or blame,\" as Browning says.\r\n It stands there indefeasibly: a gift which can\u0027t be taken back. Calling\r\n matter the cause of it retracts no single one of the items that have made\r\n it up, nor does calling God the cause augment them. They are the God or\r\n the atoms, respectively, of just that and no other world. The God, if\r\n there, has been doing just what atoms could do\u0026mdash;appearing in the\r\n character of atoms, so to speak\u0026mdash;and earning such gratitude as is due\r\n to atoms, and no more. If his presence lends no different turn or issue to\r\n the performance, it surely can lend it no increase of dignity. Nor would\r\n indignity come to it were he absent, and did the atoms remain the only\r\n actors on the stage. When a play is once over, and the curtain down, you\r\n really make it no better by claiming an illustrious genius for its author,\r\n just as you make it no worse by calling him a common hack.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n Thus if no future detail of experience or conduct is to be deduced from\r\n our hypothesis, the debate between materialism and theism becomes quite\r\n idle and insignificant. Matter and God in that event mean exactly the same\r\n thing\u0026mdash;the power, namely, neither more nor less, that could make just\r\n this completed world\u0026mdash;and the wise man is he who in such a case would\r\n turn his back on such a supererogatory discussion. Accordingly, most men\r\n instinctively, and positivists and scientists deliberately, do turn their\r\n backs on philosophical disputes from which nothing in the line of definite\r\n future consequences can be seen to follow. The verbal and empty character\r\n of philosophy is surely a reproach with which we are, but too familiar. If\r\n pragmatism be true, it is a perfectly sound reproach unless the theories\r\n under fire can be shown to have alternative practical outcomes, however\r\n delicate and distant these may be. The common man and the scientist say\r\n they discover no such outcomes, and if the metaphysician can discern none\r\n either, the others certainly are in the right of it, as against him. His\r\n science is then but pompous trifling; and the endowment of a professorship\r\n for such a being would be silly.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n Accordingly, in every genuine metaphysical debate some practical issue,\r\n however conjectural and remote, is involved. To realize this, revert with\r\n me to our question, and place yourselves this time in the world we live\r\n in, in the world that HAS a future, that is yet uncompleted whilst we\r\n speak. In this unfinished world the alternative of \u0027materialism or\r\n theism?\u0027 is intensely practical; and it is worth while for us to spend\r\n some minutes of our hour in seeing that it is so.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n How, indeed, does the program differ for us, according as we consider that\r\n the facts of experience up to date are purposeless configurations of blind\r\n atoms moving according to eternal laws, or that on the other hand they are\r\n due to the providence of God? As far as the past facts go, indeed there is\r\n no difference. Those facts are in, are bagged, are captured; and the good\r\n that\u0027s in them is gained, be the atoms or be the God their cause. There\r\n are accordingly many materialists about us to-day who, ignoring altogether\r\n the future and practical aspects of the question, seek to eliminate the\r\n odium attaching to the word materialism, and even to eliminate the word\r\n itself, by showing that, if matter could give birth to all these gains,\r\n why then matter, functionally considered, is just as divine an entity as\r\n God, in fact coalesces with God, is what you mean by God. Cease, these\r\n persons advise us, to use either of these terms, with their outgrown\r\n opposition. Use a term free of the clerical connotations, on the one hand;\r\n of the suggestion of gross-ness, coarseness, ignobility, on the other.\r\n Talk of the primal mystery, of the unknowable energy, of the one and only\r\n power, instead of saying either God or matter. This is the course to which\r\n Mr. Spencer urges us; and if philosophy were purely retrospective, he\r\n would thereby proclaim himself an excellent pragmatist.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n But philosophy is prospective also, and, after finding what the world has\r\n been and done and yielded, still asks the further question \u0027what does the\r\n world PROMISE?\u0027 Give us a matter that promises SUCCESS, that is bound by\r\n its laws to lead our world ever nearer to perfection, and any rational man\r\n will worship that matter as readily as Mr. Spencer worships his own\r\n so-called unknowable power. It not only has made for righteousness up to\r\n date, but it will make for righteousness forever; and that is all we need.\r\n Doing practically all that a God can do, it is equivalent to God, its\r\n function is a God\u0027s function, and is exerted in a world in which a God\r\n would now be superfluous; from such a world a God could never lawfully be\r\n missed. \u0027Cosmic emotion\u0027 would here be the right name for religion.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n But is the matter by which Mr. Spencer\u0027s process of cosmic evolution is\r\n carried on any such principle of never-ending perfection as this? Indeed\r\n it is not, for the future end of every cosmically evolved thing or system\r\n of things is foretold by science to be death and tragedy; and Mr. Spencer,\r\n in confining himself to the aesthetic and ignoring the practical side of\r\n the controversy, has really contributed nothing serious to its relief. But\r\n apply now our principle of practical results, and see what a vital\r\n significance the question of materialism or theism immediately acquires.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n Theism and materialism, so indifferent when taken retrospectively, point,\r\n when we take them prospectively, to wholly different outlooks of\r\n experience. For, according to the theory of mechanical evolution, the laws\r\n of redistribution of matter and motion, tho they are certainly to thank\r\n for all the good hours which our organisms have ever yielded us and for\r\n all the ideals which our minds now frame, are yet fatally certain to undo\r\n their work again, and to redissolve everything that they have once\r\n evolved. You all know the picture of the last state of the universe which\r\n evolutionary science foresees. I cannot state it better than in Mr.\r\n Balfour\u0027s words: \"The energies of our system will decay, the glory of the\r\n sun will be dimmed, and the earth, tideless and inert, will no longer\r\n tolerate the race which has for a moment disturbed its solitude. Man will\r\n go down into the pit, and all his thoughts will perish. The uneasy,\r\n consciousness which in this obscure corner has for a brief space broken\r\n the contented silence of the universe, will be at rest. Matter will know\r\n itself no longer. \u0027Imperishable monuments\u0027 and \u0027immortal deeds,\u0027 death\r\n itself, and love stronger than death, will be as though they had never\r\n been. Nor will anything that is, be better or be worse for all that the\r\n labour, genius, devotion, and suffering of man have striven through\r\n countless generations to effect.\" [Footnote: The Foundations of Belief, p.\r\n 30.]\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n That is the sting of it, that in the vast driftings of the cosmic weather,\r\n tho many a jeweled shore appears, and many an enchanted cloud-bank floats\r\n away, long lingering ere it be dissolved\u0026mdash;even as our world now\r\n lingers, for our joy-yet when these transient products are gone, nothing,\r\n absolutely NOTHING remains, of represent those particular qualities, those\r\n elements of preciousness which they may have enshrined. Dead and gone are\r\n they, gone utterly from the very sphere and room of being. Without an\r\n echo; without a memory; without an influence on aught that may come after,\r\n to make it care for similar ideals. This utter final wreck and tragedy is\r\n of the essence of scientific materialism as at present understood. The\r\n lower and not the higher forces are the eternal forces, or the last\r\n surviving forces within the only cycle of evolution which we can\r\n definitely see. Mr. Spencer believes this as much as anyone; so why should\r\n he argue with us as if we were making silly aesthetic objections to the\r\n \u0027grossness\u0027 of \u0027matter and motion,\u0027 the principles of his philosophy, when\r\n what really dismays us is the disconsolateness of its ulterior practical\r\n results?\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n No the true objection to materialism is not positive but negative. It\r\n would be farcical at this day to make complaint of it for what it IS for\r\n \u0027grossness.\u0027 Grossness is what grossness DOES\u0026mdash;we now know THAT. We\r\n make complaint of it, on the contrary, for what it is NOT\u0026mdash;not a\r\n permanent warrant for our more ideal interests, not a fulfiller of our\r\n remotest hopes.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n The notion of God, on the other hand, however inferior it may be in\r\n clearness to those mathematical notions so current in mechanical\r\n philosophy, has at least this practical superiority over them, that it\r\n guarantees an ideal order that shall be permanently preserved. A world\r\n with a God in it to say the last word, may indeed burn up or freeze, but\r\n we then think of him as still mindful of the old ideals and sure to bring\r\n them elsewhere to fruition; so that, where he is, tragedy is only\r\n provisional and partial, and shipwreck and dissolution not the absolutely\r\n final things. This need of an eternal moral order is one of the deepest\r\n needs of our breast. And those poets, like Dante and Wordsworth, who live\r\n on the conviction of such an order, owe to that fact the extraordinary\r\n tonic and consoling power of their verse. Here then, in these different\r\n emotional and practical appeals, in these adjustments of our concrete\r\n attitudes of hope and expectation, and all the delicate consequences which\r\n their differences entail, lie the real meanings of materialism and\r\n spiritualism\u0026mdash;not in hair-splitting abstractions about matter\u0027s inner\r\n essence, or about the metaphysical attributes of God. Materialism means\r\n simply the denial that the moral order is eternal, and the cutting off of\r\n ultimate hopes; spiritualism means the affirmation of an eternal moral\r\n order and the letting loose of hope. Surely here is an issue genuine\r\n enough, for anyone who feels it; and, as long as men are men, it will\r\n yield matter for a serious philosophic debate.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n But possibly some of you may still rally to their defence. Even whilst\r\n admitting that spiritualism and materialism make different prophecies of\r\n the world\u0027s future, you may yourselves pooh-pooh the difference as\r\n something so infinitely remote as to mean nothing for a sane mind. The\r\n essence of a sane mind, you may say, is to take shorter views, and to feel\r\n no concern about such chimaeras as the latter end of the world. Well, I\r\n can only say that if you say this, you do injustice to human nature.\r\n Religious melancholy is not disposed of by a simple flourish of the word\r\n insanity. The absolute things, the last things, the overlapping things,\r\n are the truly philosophic concerns; all superior minds feel seriously\r\n about them, and the mind with the shortest views is simply the mind of the\r\n more shallow man.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n The issues of fact at stake in the debate are of course vaguely enough\r\n conceived by us at present. But spiritualistic faith in all its forms\r\n deals with a world of PROMISE, while materialism\u0027s sun sets in a sea of\r\n disappointment. Remember what I said of the Absolute: it grants us moral\r\n holidays. Any religious view does this. It not only incites our more\r\n strenuous moments, but it also takes our joyous, careless, trustful\r\n moments, and it justifies them. It paints the grounds of justification\r\n vaguely enough, to be sure. The exact features of the saving future facts\r\n that our belief in God insures, will have to be ciphered out by the\r\n interminable methods of science: we can STUDY our God only by studying his\r\n Creation. But we can ENJOY our God, if we have one, in advance of all that\r\n labor. I myself believe that the evidence for God lies primarily in inner\r\n personal experiences. When they have once given you your God, his name\r\n means at least the benefit of the holiday. You remember what I said\r\n yesterday about the way in which truths clash and try to \u0027down\u0027 each\r\n other. The truth of \u0027God\u0027 has to run the gauntlet of all our other truths.\r\n It is on trial by them and they on trial by it. Our FINAL opinion about\r\n God can be settled only after all the truths have straightened themselves\r\n out together. Let us hope that they shall find a modus vivendi!\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n Let me pass to a very cognate philosophic problem, the QUESTION of DESIGN\r\n IN NATURE. God\u0027s existence has from time immemorial been held to be proved\r\n by certain natural facts. Many facts appear as if expressly designed in\r\n view of one another. Thus the woodpecker\u0027s bill, tongue, feet, tail, etc.,\r\n fit him wondrously for a world of trees with grubs hid in their bark to\r\n feed upon. The parts of our eye fit the laws of light to perfection,\r\n leading its rays to a sharp picture on our retina. Such mutual fitting of\r\n things diverse in origin argued design, it was held; and the designer was\r\n always treated as a man-loving deity.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n The first step in these arguments was to prove that the design existed.\r\n Nature was ransacked for results obtained through separate things being\r\n co-adapted. Our eyes, for instance, originate in intra-uterine darkness,\r\n and the light originates in the sun, yet see how they fit each other. They\r\n are evidently made FOR each other. Vision is the end designed, light and\r\n eyes the separate means devised for its attainment.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n It is strange, considering how unanimously our ancestors felt the force of\r\n this argument, to see how little it counts for since the triumph of the\r\n darwinian theory. Darwin opened our minds to the power of\r\n chance-happenings to bring forth \u0027fit\u0027 results if only they have time to\r\n add themselves together. He showed the enormous waste of nature in\r\n producing results that get destroyed because of their unfitness. He also\r\n emphasized the number of adaptations which, if designed, would argue an\r\n evil rather than a good designer. Here all depends upon the point of view.\r\n To the grub under the bark the exquisite fitness of the woodpecker\u0027s\r\n organism to extract him would certainly argue a diabolical designer.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n Theologians have by this time stretched their minds so as to embrace the\r\n darwinian facts, and yet to interpret them as still showing divine\r\n purpose. It used to be a question of purpose AGAINST mechanism, of one OR\r\n the other. It was as if one should say \"My shoes are evidently designed to\r\n fit my feet, hence it is impossible that they should have been produced by\r\n machinery.\" We know that they are both: they are made by a machinery\r\n itself designed to fit the feet with shoes. Theology need only stretch\r\n similarly the designs of God. As the aim of a football-team is not merely\r\n to get the ball to a certain goal (if that were so, they would simply get\r\n up on some dark night and place it there), but to get it there by a fixed\r\n MACHINERY OF CONDITIONS\u0026mdash;the game\u0027s rules and the opposing players;\r\n so the aim of God is not merely, let us say, to make men and to save them,\r\n but rather to get this done through the sole agency of nature\u0027s vast\r\n machinery. Without nature\u0027s stupendous laws and counterforces, man\u0027s\r\n creation and perfection, we might suppose, would be too insipid\r\n achievements for God to have designed them.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n This saves the form of the design-argument at the expense of its old easy\r\n human content. The designer is no longer the old man-like deity. His\r\n designs have grown so vast as to be incomprehensible to us humans. The\r\n WHAT of them so overwhelms us that to establish the mere THAT of a\r\n designer for them becomes of very little consequence in comparison. We can\r\n with difficulty comprehend the character of a cosmic mind whose purposes\r\n are fully revealed by the strange mixture of goods and evils that we find\r\n in this actual world\u0027s particulars. Or rather we cannot by any possibility\r\n comprehend it. The mere word \u0027design\u0027 by itself has, we see, no\r\n consequences and explains nothing. It is the barrenest of principles. The\r\n old question of WHETHER there is design is idle. The real question is WHAT\r\n is the world, whether or not it have a designer\u0026mdash;and that can be\r\n revealed only by the study of all nature\u0027s particulars.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n Remember that no matter what nature may have produced or may be producing,\r\n the means must necessarily have been adequate, must have been FITTED TO\r\n THAT PRODUCTION. The argument from fitness to design would consequently\r\n always apply, whatever were the product\u0027s character. The recent Mont-Pelee\r\n eruption, for example, required all previous history to produce that exact\r\n combination of ruined houses, human and animal corpses, sunken ships,\r\n volcanic ashes, etc., in just that one hideous configuration of positions.\r\n France had to be a nation and colonize Martinique. Our country had to\r\n exist and send our ships there. IF God aimed at just that result, the\r\n means by which the centuries bent their influences towards it, showed\r\n exquisite intelligence. And so of any state of things whatever, either in\r\n nature or in history, which we find actually realized. For the parts of\r\n things must always make SOME definite resultant, be it chaotic or\r\n harmonious. When we look at what has actually come, the conditions must\r\n always appear perfectly designed to ensure it. We can always say,\r\n therefore, in any conceivable world, of any conceivable character, that\r\n the whole cosmic machinery MAY have been designed to produce it.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n Pragmatically, then, the abstract word \u0027design\u0027 is a blank cartridge. It\r\n carries no consequences, it does no execution. What sort of design? and\r\n what sort of a designer? are the only serious questions, and the study of\r\n facts is the only way of getting even approximate answers. Meanwhile,\r\n pending the slow answer from facts, anyone who insists that there is a\r\n designer and who is sure he is a divine one, gets a certain pragmatic\r\n benefit from the term\u0026mdash;the same, in fact which we saw that the terms\r\n God, Spirit, or the Absolute, yield us \u0027Design,\u0027 worthless tho it be as a\r\n mere rationalistic principle set above or behind things for our\r\n admiration, becomes, if our faith concretes it into something theistic, a\r\n term of PROMISE. Returning with it into experience, we gain a more\r\n confiding outlook on the future. If not a blind force but a seeing force\r\n runs things, we may reasonably expect better issues. This vague confidence\r\n in the future is the sole pragmatic meaning at present discernible in the\r\n terms design and designer. But if cosmic confidence is right not wrong,\r\n better not worse, that is a most important meaning. That much at least of\r\n possible \u0027truth\u0027 the terms will then have in them.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n Let me take up another well-worn controversy, THE FREE-WILL PROBLEM. Most\r\n persons who believe in what is called their free-will do so after the\r\n rationalistic fashion. It is a principle, a positive faculty or virtue\r\n added to man, by which his dignity is enigmatically augmented. He ought to\r\n believe it for this reason. Determinists, who deny it, who say that\r\n individual men originate nothing, but merely transmit to the future the\r\n whole push of the past cosmos of which they are so small an expression,\r\n diminish man. He is less admirable, stripped of this creative principle. I\r\n imagine that more than half of you share our instinctive belief in\r\n free-will, and that admiration of it as a principle of dignity has much to\r\n do with your fidelity.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n But free-will has also been discussed pragmatically, and, strangely\r\n enough, the same pragmatic interpretation has been put upon it by both\r\n disputants. You know how large a part questions of ACCOUNTABILITY have\r\n played in ethical controversy. To hear some persons, one would suppose\r\n that all that ethics aims at is a code of merits and demerits. Thus does\r\n the old legal and theological leaven, the interest in crime and sin and\r\n punishment abide with us. \u0027Who\u0027s to blame? whom can we punish? whom will\r\n God punish?\u0027\u0026mdash;these preoccupations hang like a bad dream over man\u0027s\r\n religious history.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n So both free-will and determinism have been inveighed against and called\r\n absurd, because each, in the eyes of its enemies, has seemed to prevent\r\n the \u0027imputability\u0027 of good or bad deeds to their authors. Queer antinomy\r\n this! Free-will means novelty, the grafting on to the past of something\r\n not involved therein. If our acts were predetermined, if we merely\r\n transmitted the push of the whole past, the free-willists say, how could\r\n we be praised or blamed for anything? We should be \u0027agents\u0027 only, not\r\n \u0027principals,\u0027 and where then would be our precious imputability and\r\n responsibility?\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n But where would it be if we HAD free-will? rejoin the determinists. If a\r\n \u0027free\u0027 act be a sheer novelty, that comes not FROM me, the previous me,\r\n but ex nihilo, and simply tacks itself on to me, how can \u003ci\u003eI\u003c/i\u003e, the\r\n previous I, be responsible? How can I have any permanent CHARACTER that\r\n will stand still long enough for praise or blame to be awarded? The\r\n chaplet of my days tumbles into a cast of disconnected beads as soon as\r\n the thread of inner necessity is drawn out by the preposterous\r\n indeterminist doctrine. Messrs. Fullerton and McTaggart have recently laid\r\n about them doughtily with this argument.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n It may be good ad hominem, but otherwise it is pitiful. For I ask you,\r\n quite apart from other reasons, whether any man, woman or child, with a\r\n sense for realities, ought not to be ashamed to plead such principles as\r\n either dignity or imputability. Instinct and utility between them can\r\n safely be trusted to carry on the social business of punishment and\r\n praise. If a man does good acts we shall praise him, if he does bad acts\r\n we shall punish him\u0026mdash;anyhow, and quite apart from theories as to\r\n whether the acts result from what was previous in him or are novelties in\r\n a strict sense. To make our human ethics revolve about the question of\r\n \u0027merit\u0027 is a piteous unreality\u0026mdash;God alone can know our merits, if we\r\n have any. The real ground for supposing free-will is indeed pragmatic, but\r\n it has nothing to do with this contemptible right to punish which had made\r\n such a noise in past discussions of the subject.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n Free-will pragmatically means NOVELTIES IN THE WORLD, the right to expect\r\n that in its deepest elements as well as in its surface phenomena, the\r\n future may not identically repeat and imitate the past. That imitation en\r\n masse is there, who can deny? The general \u0027uniformity of nature\u0027 is\r\n presupposed by every lesser law. But nature may be only approximately\r\n uniform; and persons in whom knowledge of the world\u0027s past has bred\r\n pessimism (or doubts as to the world\u0027s good character, which become\r\n certainties if that character be supposed eternally fixed) may naturally\r\n welcome free-will as a MELIORISTIC doctrine. It holds up improvement as at\r\n least possible; whereas determinism assures us that our whole notion of\r\n possibility is born of human ignorance, and that necessity and\r\n impossibility between them rule the destinies of the world.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n Free-will is thus a general cosmological theory of PROMISE, just like the\r\n Absolute, God, Spirit or Design. Taken abstractly, no one of these terms\r\n has any inner content, none of them gives us any picture, and no one of\r\n them would retain the least pragmatic value in a world whose character was\r\n obviously perfect from the start. Elation at mere existence, pure cosmic\r\n emotion and delight, would, it seems to me, quench all interest in those\r\n speculations, if the world were nothing but a lubberland of happiness\r\n already. Our interest in religious metaphysics arises in the fact that our\r\n empirical future feels to us unsafe, and needs some higher guarantee. If\r\n the past and present were purely good, who could wish that the future\r\n might possibly not resemble them? Who could desire free-will? Who would\r\n not say, with Huxley, \"let me be wound up every day like a watch, to go\r\n right fatally, and I ask no better freedom.\" \u0027Freedom\u0027 in a world already\r\n perfect could only mean freedom to BE WORSE, and who could be so insane as\r\n to wish that? To be necessarily what it is, to be impossibly aught else,\r\n would put the last touch of perfection upon optimism\u0027s universe. Surely\r\n the only POSSIBILITY that one can rationally claim is the possibility that\r\n things may be BETTER. That possibility, I need hardly say, is one that, as\r\n the actual world goes, we have ample grounds for desiderating.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n Free-will thus has no meaning unless it be a doctrine of RELIEF. As such,\r\n it takes its place with other religious doctrines. Between them, they\r\n build up the old wastes and repair the former desolations. Our spirit,\r\n shut within this courtyard of sense-experience, is always saying to the\r\n intellect upon the tower: \u0027Watchman, tell us of the night, if it aught of\r\n promise bear,\u0027 and the intellect gives it then these terms of promise.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n Other than this practical significance, the words God, free-will, design,\r\n etc., have none. Yet dark tho they be in themselves, or\r\n intellectualistically taken, when we bear them into life\u0027s thicket with us\r\n the darkness THERE grows light about us. If you stop, in dealing with such\r\n words, with their definition, thinking that to be an intellectual\r\n finality, where are you? Stupidly staring at a pretentious sham! \"Deus est\r\n Ens, a se, extra et supra omne genus, necessarium, unum, infinite\r\n perfectum, simplex, immutabile, immensum, aeternum, intelligens,\" etc.,\u0026mdash;wherein\r\n is such a definition really instructive? It means less, than nothing, in\r\n its pompous robe of adjectives. Pragmatism alone can read a positive\r\n meaning into it, and for that she turns her back upon the intellectualist\r\n point of view altogether. \u0027God\u0027s in his heaven; all\u0027s right with the\r\n world!\u0027\u0026mdash;THAT\u0027S the heart of your theology, and for that you need no\r\n rationalist definitions.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n Why shouldn\u0027t we all of us, rationalists as well as pragmatists, confess\r\n this? Pragmatism, so far from keeping her eyes bent on the immediate\r\n practical foreground, as she is accused of doing, dwells just as much upon\r\n the world\u0027s remotest perspectives.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n See then how all these ultimate questions turn, as it were, up their\r\n hinges; and from looking backwards upon principles, upon an\r\n erkenntnisstheoretische Ich, a God, a Kausalitaetsprinzip, a Design, a\r\n Free-will, taken in themselves, as something august and exalted above\r\n facts,\u0026mdash;see, I say, how pragmatism shifts the emphasis and looks\r\n forward into facts themselves. The really vital question for us all is,\r\n What is this world going to be? What is life eventually to make of itself?\r\n The centre of gravity of philosophy must therefore alter its place. The\r\n earth of things, long thrown into shadow by the glories of the upper\r\n ether, must resume its rights. To shift the emphasis in this way means\r\n that philosophic questions will fall to be treated by minds of a less\r\n abstractionist type than heretofore, minds more scientific and\r\n individualistic in their tone yet not irreligious either. It will be an\r\n alteration in \u0027the seat of authority\u0027 that reminds one almost of the\r\n protestant reformation. And as, to papal minds, protestantism has often\r\n seemed a mere mess of anarchy and confusion, such, no doubt, will\r\n pragmatism often seem to ultra-rationalist minds in philosophy. It will\r\n seem so much sheer trash, philosophically. But life wags on, all the same,\r\n and compasses its ends, in protestant countries. I venture to think that\r\n philosophic protestantism will compass a not dissimilar prosperity.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n \u003cbr /\u003e\u003cbr /\u003e\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003chr /\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n \u003ca name=\"link2H_4_0006\" id=\"link2H_4_0006\"\u003e \u003c/a\u003e\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cdiv style=\"height: 4em;\"\u003e\r\n \u003cbr /\u003e\u003cbr /\u003e\u003cbr /\u003e\u003cbr /\u003e\r\n \u003c/div\u003e\r\n \u003ch2\u003e\r\n Lecture IV. \u0026mdash; The One and the Many\r\n \u003c/h2\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n We saw in the last lecture that the pragmatic method, in its dealings with\r\n certain concepts, instead of ending with admiring contemplation, plunges\r\n forward into the river of experience with them and prolongs the\r\n perspective by their means. Design, free-will, the absolute mind, spirit\r\n instead of matter, have for their sole meaning a better promise as to this\r\n world\u0027s outcome. Be they false or be they true, the meaning of them is\r\n this meliorism. I have sometimes thought of the phenomenon called \u0027total\r\n reflexion\u0027 in optics as a good symbol of the relation between abstract\r\n ideas and concrete realities, as pragmatism conceives it. Hold a tumbler\r\n of water a little above your eyes and look up through the water at its\r\n surface\u0026mdash;or better still look similarly through the flat wall of an\r\n aquarium. You will then see an extraordinarily brilliant reflected image\r\n say of a candle-flame, or any other clear object, situated on the opposite\r\n side of the vessel. No candle-ray, under these circumstances gets beyond\r\n the water\u0027s surface: every ray is totally reflected back into the depths\r\n again. Now let the water represent the world of sensible facts, and let\r\n the air above it represent the world of abstract ideas. Both worlds are\r\n real, of course, and interact; but they interact only at their boundary,\r\n and the locus of everything that lives, and happens to us, so far as full\r\n experience goes, is the water. We are like fishes swimming in the sea of\r\n sense, bounded above by the superior element, but unable to breathe it\r\n pure or penetrate it. We get our oxygen from it, however, we touch it\r\n incessantly, now in this part, now in that, and every time we touch it we\r\n are reflected back into the water with our course re-determined and\r\n re-energized. The abstract ideas of which the air consists, indispensable\r\n for life, but irrespirable by themselves, as it were, and only active in\r\n their re-directing function. All similes are halting but this one rather\r\n takes my fancy. It shows how something, not sufficient for life in itself,\r\n may nevertheless be an effective determinant of life elsewhere.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n In this present hour I wish to illustrate the pragmatic method by one more\r\n application. I wish to turn its light upon the ancient problem of \u0027the one\r\n and the many.\u0027 I suspect that in but few of you has this problem\r\n occasioned sleepless nights, and I should not be astonished if some of you\r\n told me it had never vexed you. I myself have come, by long brooding over\r\n it, to consider it the most central of all philosophic problems, central\r\n because so pregnant. I mean by this that if you know whether a man is a\r\n decided monist or a decided pluralist, you perhaps know more about the\r\n rest of his opinions than if you give him any other name ending in IST. To\r\n believe in the one or in the many, that is the classification with the\r\n maximum number of consequences. So bear with me for an hour while I try to\r\n inspire you with my own interest in the problem.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n Philosophy has often been defined as the quest or the vision of the\r\n world\u0027s unity. We never hear this definition challenged, and it is true as\r\n far as it goes, for philosophy has indeed manifested above all things its\r\n interest in unity. But how about the VARIETY in things? Is that such an\r\n irrelevant matter? If instead of using the term philosophy, we talk in\r\n general of our intellect and its needs we quickly see that unity is only\r\n one of these. Acquaintance with the details of fact is always reckoned,\r\n along with their reduction to system, as an indispensable mark of mental\r\n greatness. Your \u0027scholarly\u0027 mind, of encyclopedic, philological type, your\r\n man essentially of learning, has never lacked for praise along with your\r\n philosopher. What our intellect really aims at is neither variety nor\r\n unity taken singly but totality.[Footnote: Compare A. Bellanger: Les\r\n concepts de Cause, et l\u0027activite intentionelle de l\u0027Esprit. Paris, Alcan,\r\n 1905, p. 79 ff.] In this, acquaintance with reality\u0027s diversities is as\r\n important as understanding their connexion. The human passion of curiosity\r\n runs on all fours with the systematizing passion.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n In spite of this obvious fact the unity of things has always been\r\n considered more illustrious, as it were, than their variety. When a young\r\n man first conceives the notion that the whole world forms one great fact,\r\n with all its parts moving abreast, as it were, and interlocked, he feels\r\n as if he were enjoying a great insight, and looks superciliously on all\r\n who still fall short of this sublime conception. Taken thus abstractly as\r\n it first comes to one, the monistic insight is so vague as hardly to seem\r\n worth defending intellectually. Yet probably everyone in this audience in\r\n some way cherishes it. A certain abstract monism, a certain emotional\r\n response to the character of oneness, as if it were a feature of the world\r\n not coordinate with its manyness, but vastly more excellent and eminent,\r\n is so prevalent in educated circles that we might almost call it a part of\r\n philosophic common sense. Of COURSE the world is one, we say. How else\r\n could it be a world at all? Empiricists as a rule, are as stout monists of\r\n this abstract kind as rationalists are.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n The difference is that the empiricists are less dazzled. Unity doesn\u0027t\r\n blind them to everything else, doesn\u0027t quench their curiosity for special\r\n facts, whereas there is a kind of rationalist who is sure to interpret\r\n abstract unity mystically and to forget everything else, to treat it as a\r\n principle; to admire and worship it; and thereupon to come to a full stop\r\n intellectually.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n \u0027The world is One!\u0027\u0026mdash;the formula may become a sort of number-worship.\r\n \u0027Three\u0027 and \u0027seven\u0027 have, it is true, been reckoned sacred numbers; but,\r\n abstractly taken, why is \u0027one\u0027 more excellent than \u0027forty-three,\u0027 or than\r\n \u0027two million and ten\u0027? In this first vague conviction of the world\u0027s\r\n unity, there is so little to take hold of that we hardly know what we mean\r\n by it.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n The only way to get forward with our notion is to treat it pragmatically.\r\n Granting the oneness to exist, what facts will be different in\r\n consequence? What will the unity be known-as? The world is one\u0026mdash;yes,\r\n but HOW one? What is the practical value of the oneness for US?\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n Asking such questions, we pass from the vague to the definite, from the\r\n abstract to the concrete. Many distinct ways in which oneness predicated\r\n of the universe might make a difference, come to view. I will note\r\n successively the more obvious of these ways.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n 1. First, the world is at least ONE SUBJECT OF DISCOURSE. If its manyness\r\n were so irremediable as to permit NO union whatever of it parts, not even\r\n our minds could \u0027mean\u0027 the whole of it at once: the would be like eyes\r\n trying to look in opposite directions. But in point of fact we mean to\r\n cover the whole of it by our abstract term \u0027world\u0027 or \u0027universe,\u0027 which\r\n expressly intends that no part shall be left out. Such unity of discourse\r\n carries obviously no farther monistic specifications. A \u0027chaos,\u0027 once so\r\n named, has as much unity of discourse as a cosmos. It is an odd fact that\r\n many monists consider a great victory scored for their side when\r\n pluralists say \u0027the universe is many.\u0027 \"\u0027The universe\u0027!\" they chuckle\u0026mdash;\"his\r\n speech bewrayeth him. He stands confessed of monism out of his own mouth.\"\r\n Well, let things be one in that sense! You can then fling such a word as\r\n universe at the whole collection of them, but what matters it? It still\r\n remains to be ascertained whether they are one in any other sense that is\r\n more valuable.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n 2. Are they, for example, CONTINUOUS? Can you pass from one to another,\r\n keeping always in your one universe without any danger of falling out? In\r\n other words, do the parts of our universe HANG together, instead of being\r\n like detached grains of sand?\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n Even grains of sand hang together through the space in which they are\r\n embedded, and if you can in any way move through such space, you can pass\r\n continuously from number one of them to number two. Space and time are\r\n thus vehicles of continuity, by which the world\u0027s parts hang together. The\r\n practical difference to us, resultant from these forms of union, is\r\n immense. Our whole motor life is based upon them.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n 3. There are innumerable other paths of practical continuity among things.\r\n Lines of INFLUENCE can be traced by which they together. Following any\r\n such line you pass from one thing to another till you may have covered a\r\n good part of the universe\u0027s extent. Gravity and heat-conduction are such\r\n all-uniting influences, so far as the physical world goes. Electric,\r\n luminous and chemical influences follow similar lines of influence. But\r\n opaque and inert bodies interrupt the continuity here, so that you have to\r\n step round them, or change your mode of progress if you wish to get\r\n farther on that day. Practically, you have then lost your universe\u0027s\r\n unity, SO FAR AS IT WAS CONSTITUTED BY THOSE FIRST LINES OF INFLUENCE.\r\n There are innumerable kinds of connexion that special things have with\r\n other special things; and the ENSEMBLE of any one of these connexions\r\n forms one sort of system by which things are conjoined. Thus men are\r\n conjoined in a vast network of ACQUAINTANCESHIP. Brown knows Jones, Jones\r\n knows Robinson, etc.; and BY CHOOSING YOUR FARTHER INTERMEDIARIES RIGHTLY\r\n you may carry a message from Jones to the Empress of China, or the Chief\r\n of the African Pigmies, or to anyone else in the inhabited world. But you\r\n are stopped short, as by a non-conductor, when you choose one man wrong in\r\n this experiment. What may be called love-systems are grafted on the\r\n acquaintance-system. A loves (or hates) B; B loves (or hates) C, etc. But\r\n these systems are smaller than the great acquaintance-system that they\r\n presuppose.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n Human efforts are daily unifying the world more and more in definite\r\n systematic ways. We found colonial, postal, consular, commercial systems,\r\n all the parts of which obey definite influences that propagate themselves\r\n within the system but not to facts outside of it. The result is\r\n innumerable little hangings-together of the world\u0027s parts within the\r\n larger hangings-together, little worlds, not only of discourse but of\r\n operation, within the wider universe. Each system exemplifies one type or\r\n grade of union, its parts being strung on that peculiar kind of relation,\r\n and the same part may figure in many different systems, as a man may hold\r\n several offices and belong to various clubs. From this \u0027systematic\u0027 point\r\n of view, therefore, the pragmatic value of the world\u0027s unity is that all\r\n these definite networks actually and practically exist. Some are more\r\n enveloping and extensive, some less so; they are superposed upon each\r\n other; and between them all they let no individual elementary part of the\r\n universe escape. Enormous as is the amount of disconnexion among things\r\n (for these systematic influences and conjunctions follow rigidly exclusive\r\n paths), everything that exists is influenced in SOME way by something\r\n else, if you can only pick the way out rightly Loosely speaking, and in\r\n general, it may be said that all things cohere and adhere to each other\r\n SOMEHOW, and that the universe exists practically in reticulated or\r\n concatenated forms which make of it a continuous or \u0027integrated\u0027 affair.\r\n Any kind of influence whatever helps to make the world one, so far as you\r\n can follow it from next to next. You may then say that \u0027the world IS One\u0027\u0026mdash;meaning\r\n in these respects, namely, and just so far as they obtain. But just as\r\n definitely is it NOT one, so far as they do not obtain; and there is no\r\n species of connexion which will not fail, if, instead of choosing\r\n conductors for it, you choose non-conductors. You are then arrested at\r\n your very first step and have to write the world down as a pure MANY from\r\n that particular point of view. If our intellect had been as much\r\n interested in disjunctive as it is in conjunctive relations, philosophy\r\n would have equally successfully celebrated the world\u0027s DISUNION.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n The great point is to notice that the oneness and the manyness are\r\n absolutely co-ordinate here. Neither is primordial or more essential or\r\n excellent than the other. Just as with space, whose separating of things\r\n seems exactly on a par with its uniting of them, but sometimes one\r\n function and sometimes the other is what come home to us most, so, in our\r\n general dealings with the world of influences, we now need conductors and\r\n now need non-conductors, and wisdom lies in knowing which is which at the\r\n appropriate moment.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n 4. All these systems of influence or non-influence may be listed under the\r\n general problem of the world\u0027s CAUSAL UNITY. If the minor causal\r\n influences among things should converge towards one common causal origin\r\n of them in the past, one great first cause for all that is, one might then\r\n speak of the absolute causal unity of the world. God\u0027s fiat on creation\u0027s\r\n day has figured in traditional philosophy as such an absolute cause and\r\n origin. Transcendental Idealism, translating \u0027creation\u0027 into \u0027thinking\u0027\r\n (or \u0027willing to\u0027 think\u0027) calls the divine act \u0027eternal\u0027 rather than\r\n \u0027first\u0027; but the union of the many here is absolute, just the same\u0026mdash;the\r\n many would not BE, save for the One. Against this notion of the unity of\r\n origin of all there has always stood the pluralistic notion of an eternal\r\n self-existing many in the shape of atoms or even of spiritual units of\r\n some sort. The alternative has doubtless a pragmatic meaning, but perhaps,\r\n as far as these lectures go, we had better leave the question of unity of\r\n origin unsettled.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n 5. The most important sort of union that obtains among things,\r\n pragmatically speaking, is their GENERIC UNITY. Things exist in kinds,\r\n there are many specimens in each kind, and what the \u0027kind\u0027 implies for one\r\n specimen, it implies also for every other specimen of that kind. We can\r\n easily conceive that every fact in the world might be singular, that is,\r\n unlike any other fact and sole of its kind. In such a world of singulars\r\n our logic would be useless, for logic works by predicating of the single\r\n instance what is true of all its kind. With no two things alike in the\r\n world, we should be unable to reason from our past experiences to our\r\n future ones. The existence of so much generic unity in things is thus\r\n perhaps the most momentous pragmatic specification of what it may mean to\r\n say \u0027the world is One.\u0027 ABSOLUTE generic unity would obtain if there were\r\n one summum genus under which all things without exception could be\r\n eventually subsumed. \u0027Beings,\u0027 \u0027thinkables,\u0027 \u0027experiences,\u0027 would be\r\n candidates for this position. Whether the alternatives expressed by such\r\n words have any pragmatic significance or not, is another question which I\r\n prefer to leave unsettled just now.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n 6. Another specification of what the phrase \u0027the world is One\u0027 may mean is\r\n UNITY OF PURPOSE. An enormous number of things in the world subserve a\r\n common purpose. All the man-made systems, administrative, industrial,\r\n military, or what not, exist each for its controlling purpose. Every\r\n living being pursues its own peculiar purposes. They co-operate, according\r\n to the degree of their development, in collective or tribal purposes,\r\n larger ends thus enveloping lesser ones, until an absolutely single, final\r\n and climacteric purpose subserved by all things without exception might\r\n conceivably be reached. It is needless to say that the appearances\r\n conflict with such a view. Any resultant, as I said in my third lecture,\r\n MAY have been purposed in advance, but none of the results we actually\r\n know in is world have in point of fact been purposed in advance in all\r\n their details. Men and nations start with a vague notion of being rich, or\r\n great, or good. Each step they make brings unforeseen chances into sight,\r\n and shuts out older vistas, and the specifications of the general purpose\r\n have to be daily changed. What is reached in the end may be better or\r\n worse than what was proposed, but it is always more complex and different.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n Our different purposes also are at war with each other. Where one can\u0027t\r\n crush the other out, they compromise; and the result is again different\r\n from what anyone distinctly proposed beforehand. Vaguely and generally,\r\n much of what was purposed may be gained; but everything makes strongly for\r\n the view that our world is incompletely unified teleologically and is\r\n still trying to get its unification better organized.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n Whoever claims ABSOLUTE teleological unity, saying that there is one\r\n purpose that every detail of the universe subserves, dogmatizes at his own\r\n risk. Theologians who dogmalize thus find it more and more impossible, as\r\n our acquaintance with the warring interests of the world\u0027s parts grows\r\n more concrete, to imagine what the one climacteric purpose may possibly be\r\n like. We see indeed that certain evils minister to ulterior goods, that\r\n the bitter makes the cocktail better, and that a bit of danger or hardship\r\n puts us agreeably to our trumps. We can vaguely generalize this into the\r\n doctrine that all the evil in the universe is but instrumental to its\r\n greater perfection. But the scale of the evil actually in sight defies all\r\n human tolerance; and transcendental idealism, in the pages of a Bradley or\r\n a Royce, brings us no farther than the book of Job did\u0026mdash;God\u0027s ways\r\n are not our ways, so let us put our hands upon our mouth. A God who can\r\n relish such superfluities of horror is no God for human beings to appeal\r\n to. His animal spirits are too high. In other words the \u0027Absolute\u0027 with\r\n his one purpose, is not the man-like God of common people.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n 7. AESTHETIC UNION among things also obtains, and is very analogous to\r\n ideological union. Things tell a story. Their parts hang together so as to\r\n work out a climax. They play into each other\u0027s hands expressively.\r\n Retrospectively, we can see that altho no definite purpose presided over a\r\n chain of events, yet the events fell into a dramatic form, with a start, a\r\n middle, and a finish. In point of fact all stories end; and here again the\r\n point of view of a many is that more natural one to take. The world is\r\n full of partial stories that run parallel to one another, beginning and\r\n ending at odd times. They mutually interlace and interfere at points, but\r\n we cannot unify them completely in our minds. In following your\r\n life-history, I must temporarily turn my attention from my own. Even a\r\n biographer of twins would have to press them alternately upon his reader\u0027s\r\n attention.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n It follows that whoever says that the whole world tells one story utters\r\n another of those monistic dogmas that a man believes at his risk. It is\r\n easy to see the world\u0027s history pluralistically, as a rope of which each\r\n fibre tells a separate tale; but to conceive of each cross-section of the\r\n rope as an absolutely single fact, and to sum the whole longitudinal\r\n series into one being living an undivided life, is harder. We have indeed\r\n the analogy of embryology to help us. The microscopist makes a hundred\r\n flat cross-sections of a given embryo, and mentally unites them into one\r\n solid whole. But the great world\u0027s ingredients, so far as they are beings,\r\n seem, like the rope\u0027s fibres, to be discontinuous cross-wise, and to\r\n cohere only in the longitudinal direction. Followed in that direction they\r\n are many. Even the embryologist, when he follows the DEVELOPMENT of his\r\n object, has to treat the history of each single organ in turn. ABSOLUTE\r\n aesthetic union is thus another barely abstract ideal. The world appears\r\n as something more epic than dramatic.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n So far, then, we see how the world is unified by its many systems, kinds,\r\n purposes, and dramas. That there is more union in all these ways than\r\n openly appears is certainly true. That there MAY be one sovereign purpose,\r\n system, kind, and story, is a legitimate hypothesis. All I say here is\r\n that it is rash to affirm this dogmatically without better evidence than\r\n we possess at present.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n 8. The GREAT monistic DENKMITTEL for a hundred years past has been the\r\n notion of THE ONE KNOWER. The many exist only as objects for his thought\u0026mdash;exist\r\n in his dream, as it were; and AS HE KNOWS them, they have one purpose,\r\n form one system, tell one tale for him. This notion of an ALL-ENVELOPING\r\n NOETIC UNITY in things is the sublimest achievement of intellectualist\r\n philosophy. Those who believe in the Absolute, as the all-knower is\r\n termed, usually say that they do so for coercive reasons, which clear\r\n thinkers cannot evade. The Absolute has far-reaching practical\r\n consequences, some of which I drew attention in my second lecture. Many\r\n kinds of difference important to us would surely follow from its being\r\n true. I cannot here enter into all the logical proofs of such a Being\u0027s\r\n existence, farther than to say that none of them seem to me sound. I must\r\n therefore treat the notion of an All-Knower simply as an hypothesis,\r\n exactly on a par logically with the pluralist notion that there is no\r\n point of view, no focus of information extant, from which the entire\r\n content of the universe is visible at once. \"God\u0027s consciousness,\" says\r\n Professor Royce,[Footnote: The Conception of God, New York, 1897, p. 292.]\r\n \"forms in its wholeness one luminously transparent conscious moment\"\u0026mdash;this\r\n is the type of noetic unity on which rationalism insists. Empiricism on\r\n the other hand is satisfied with the type of noetic unity that is humanly\r\n familiar. Everything gets known by SOME knower along with something else;\r\n but the knowers may in the end be irreducibly many, and the greatest\r\n knower of them all may yet not know the whole of everything, or even know\r\n what he does know at one single stroke:\u0026mdash;he may be liable to forget.\r\n Whichever type obtained, the world would still be a universe noetically.\r\n Its parts would be conjoined by knowledge, but in the one case the\r\n knowledge would be absolutely unified, in the other it would be strung\r\n along and overlapped.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n The notion of one instantaneous or eternal Knower\u0026mdash;either adjective\r\n here means the same thing\u0026mdash;is, as I said, the great intellectualist\r\n achievement of our time. It has practically driven out that conception of\r\n \u0027Substance\u0027 which earlier philosophers set such store by, and by which so\r\n much unifying work used to be done\u0026mdash;universal substance which alone\r\n has being in and from itself, and of which all the particulars of\r\n experience are but forms to which it gives support. Substance has\r\n succumbed to the pragmatic criticisms of the English school. It appears\r\n now only as another name for the fact that phenomena as they come are\r\n actually grouped and given in coherent forms, the very forms in which we\r\n finite knowers experience or think them together. These forms of\r\n conjunction are as much parts of the tissue of experience as are the terms\r\n which they connect; and it is a great pragmatic achievement for recent\r\n idealism to have made the world hang together in these directly\r\n representable ways instead of drawing its unity from the \u0027inherence\u0027 of\r\n its parts\u0026mdash;whatever that may mean\u0026mdash;in an unimaginable principle\r\n behind the scenes.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n \u0027The world is one,\u0027 therefore, just so far as we experience it to be\r\n concatenated, one by as many definite conjunctions as appear. But then\r\n also NOT one by just as many definite DISjunctions as we find. The oneness\r\n and the manyness of it thus obtain in respects which can be separately\r\n named. It is neither a universe pure and simple nor a multiverse pure and\r\n simple. And its various manners of being one suggest, for their accurate\r\n ascertainment, so many distinct programs of scientific work. Thus the\r\n pragmatic question \u0027What is the oneness known-as? What practical\r\n difference will it make?\u0027 saves us from all feverish excitement over it as\r\n a principle of sublimity and carries us forward into the stream of\r\n experience with a cool head. The stream may indeed reveal far more\r\n connexion and union than we now suspect, but we are not entitled on\r\n pragmatic principles to claim absolute oneness in any respect in advance.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n It is so difficult to see definitely what absolute oneness can mean, that\r\n probably the majority of you are satisfied with the sober attitude which\r\n we have reached. Nevertheless there are possibly some radically monistic\r\n souls among you who are not content to leave the one and the many on a\r\n par. Union of various grades, union of diverse types, union that stops at\r\n non-conductors, union that merely goes from next to next, and means in\r\n many cases outer nextness only, and not a more internal bond, union of\r\n concatenation, in short; all that sort of thing seems to you a halfway\r\n stage of thought. The oneness of things, superior to their manyness, you\r\n think must also be more deeply true, must be the more real aspect of the\r\n world. The pragmatic view, you are sure, gives us a universe imperfectly\r\n rational. The real universe must form an unconditional unit of being,\r\n something consolidated, with its parts co-implicated through and through.\r\n Only then could we consider our estate completely rational. There is no\r\n doubt whatever that this ultra-monistic way of thinking means a great deal\r\n to many minds. \"One Life, One Truth, one Love, one Principle, One Good,\r\n One God\"\u0026mdash;I quote from a Christian Science leaflet which the day\u0027s\r\n mail brings into my hands\u0026mdash;beyond doubt such a confession of faith\r\n has pragmatically an emotional value, and beyond doubt the word \u0027one\u0027\r\n contributes to the value quite as much as the other words. But if we try\r\n to realize INTELLECTUALLY what we can possibly MEAN by such a glut of\r\n oneness we are thrown right back upon our pragmatistic determinations\r\n again. It means either the mere name One, the universe of discourse; or it\r\n means the sum total of all the ascertainable particular conjunctions and\r\n concatenations; or, finally, it means some one vehicle of conjunction\r\n treated as all-inclusive, like one origin, one purpose, or one knower. In\r\n point of fact it always means one KNOWER to those who take it\r\n intellectually to-day. The one knower involves, they think, the other\r\n forms of conjunction. His world must have all its parts co-implicated in\r\n the one logical-aesthetical-teleological unit-picture which is his eternal\r\n dream.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n The character of the absolute knower\u0027s picture is however so impossible\r\n for us to represent clearly, that we may fairly suppose that the authority\r\n which absolute monism undoubtedly possesses, and probably always will\r\n possess over some persons, draws its strength far less from intellectual\r\n than from mystical grounds. To interpret absolute monism worthily, be a\r\n mystic. Mystical states of mind in every degree are shown by history,\r\n usually tho not always, to make for the monistic view. This is no proper\r\n occasion to enter upon the general subject of mysticism, but I will quote\r\n one mystical pronouncement to show just what I mean. The paragon of all\r\n monistic systems is the Vedanta philosophy of Hindostan, and the paragon\r\n of Vedantist missionaries was the late Swami Vivekananda who visited our\r\n shores some years ago. The method of Vedantism is the mystical method. You\r\n do not reason, but after going through a certain discipline YOU SEE, and\r\n having seen, you can report the truth. Vivekananda thus reports the truth\r\n in one of his lectures here:\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n \"Where is any more misery for him who sees this Oneness in the\r\n Universe…this Oneness of life, Oneness of everything? …This separation\r\n between man and man, man and woman, man and child, nation from nation,\r\n earth from moon, moon from sun, this separation between atom and atom is\r\n the cause really of all the misery, and the Vedanta says this separation\r\n does not exist, it is not real. It is merely apparent, on the surface. In\r\n the heart of things there is Unity still. If you go inside you find that\r\n Unity between man and man, women and children, races and races, high and\r\n low, rich and poor, the gods and men: all are One, and animals too, if you\r\n go deep enough, and he who has attained to that has no more delusion. …\r\n Where is any more delusion for him? What can delude him? He knows the\r\n reality of everything, the secret of everything. Where is there any more\r\n misery for him? What does he desire? He has traced the reality of\r\n everything unto the Lord, that centre, that Unity of everything, and that\r\n is Eternal Bliss, Eternal Knowledge, Eternal Existence. Neither death nor\r\n disease, nor sorrow nor misery, nor discontent is there … in the centre,\r\n the reality, there is no one to be mourned for, no one to be sorry for. He\r\n has penetrated everything, the Pure One, the Formless, the Bodiless, the\r\n Stainless, He the Knower, He the Great Poet, the Self-Existent, He who is\r\n giving to everyone what he deserves.\"\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n Observe how radical the character of the monism here is. Separation is not\r\n simply overcome by the One, it is denied to exist. There is no many. We\r\n are not parts of the One; It has no parts; and since in a sense we\r\n undeniably ARE, it must be that each of us is the One, indivisibly and\r\n totally. AN ABSOLUTE ONE, AND I THAT ONE\u0026mdash;surely we have here a\r\n religion which, emotionally considered, has a high pragmatic value; it\r\n imparts a perfect sumptuosity of security. As our Swami says in another\r\n place:\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n \"When man has seen himself as one with the infinite Being of the universe,\r\n when all separateness has ceased, when all men, all women, all angels, all\r\n gods, all animals, all plants, the whole universe has been melted into\r\n that oneness, then all fear disappears. Whom to fear? Can I hurt myself?\r\n Can I kill myself? Can I injure myself? Do you fear yourself? Then will\r\n all sorrow disappear. What can cause me sorrow? I am the One Existence of\r\n the universe. Then all jealousies will disappear; of whom to be jealous?\r\n Of myself? Then all bad feelings disappear. Against whom will I have this\r\n bad feeling? Against myself? There is none in the universe but me. …\r\n Kill out this differentiation; kill out this superstition that there are\r\n many. \u0027He who, in this world of many, sees that One; he who in this mass\r\n of insentiency sees that One Sentient Being; he who in this world of\r\n shadow catches that Reality, unto him belongs eternal peace, unto none\r\n else, unto none else.\u0027\"\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n We all have some ear for this monistic music: it elevates and reassures.\r\n We all have at least the germ of mysticism in us. And when our idealists\r\n recite their arguments for the Absolute, saying that the slightest union\r\n admitted anywhere carries logically absolute Oneness with it, and that the\r\n slightest separation admitted anywhere logically carries disunion\r\n remediless and complete, I cannot help suspecting that the palpable weak\r\n places in the intellectual reasonings they use are protected from their\r\n own criticism by a mystical feeling that, logic or no logic, absolute\r\n Oneness must somehow at any cost be true. Oneness overcomes MORAL\r\n separateness at any rate. In the passion of love we have the mystic germ\r\n of what might mean a total union of all sentient life. This mystical germ\r\n wakes up in us on hearing the monistic utterances, acknowledges their\r\n authority, and assigns to intellectual considerations a secondary place.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n I will dwell no longer on these religious and moral aspects of the\r\n question in this lecture. When I come to my final lecture there will be\r\n something more to say.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n Leave then out of consideration for the moment the authority which\r\n mystical insights may be conjectured eventually to possess; treat the\r\n problem of the One and the Many in a purely intellectual way; and we see\r\n clearly enough where pragmatism stands. With her criterion of the\r\n practical differences that theories make, we see that she must equally\r\n abjure absolute monism and absolute pluralism. The world is one just so\r\n far as its parts hang together by any definite connexion. It is many just\r\n so far as any definite connexion fails to obtain. And finally it is\r\n growing more and more unified by those systems of connexion at least which\r\n human energy keeps framing as time goes on.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n It is possible to imagine alternative universes to the one we know, in\r\n which the most various grades and types of union should be embodied. Thus\r\n the lowest grade of universe would be a world of mere WITHNESS, of which\r\n the parts were only strung together by the conjunction \u0027and.\u0027 Such a\r\n universe is even now the collection of our several inner lives. The spaces\r\n and times of your imagination, the objects and events of your day-dreams\r\n are not only more or less incoherent inter se, but are wholly out of\r\n definite relation with the similar contents of anyone else\u0027s mind. Our\r\n various reveries now as we sit here compenetrate each other idly without\r\n influencing or interfering. They coexist, but in no order and in no\r\n receptacle, being the nearest approach to an absolute \u0027many\u0027 that we can\r\n conceive. We cannot even imagine any reason why they SHOULD be known all\r\n together, and we can imagine even less, if they were known together, how\r\n they could be known as one systematic whole.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n But add our sensations and bodily actions, and the union mounts to a much\r\n higher grade. Our audita et visa and our acts fall into those receptacles\r\n of time and space in which each event finds its date and place. They form\r\n \u0027things\u0027 and are of \u0027kinds\u0027 too, and can be classed. Yet we can imagine a\r\n world of things and of kinds in which the causal interactions with which\r\n we are so familiar should not exist. Everything there might be inert\r\n towards everything else, and refuse to propagate its influence. Or gross\r\n mechanical influences might pass, but no chemical action. Such worlds\r\n would be far less unified than ours. Again there might be complete\r\n physico-chemical interaction, but no minds; or minds, but altogether\r\n private ones, with no social life; or social life limited to acquaintance,\r\n but no love; or love, but no customs or institutions that should\r\n systematize it. No one of these grades of universe would be absolutely\r\n irrational or disintegrated, inferior tho it might appear when looked at\r\n from the higher grades. For instance, if our minds should ever become\r\n \u0027telepathically\u0027 connected, so that we knew immediately, or could under\r\n certain conditions know immediately, each what the other was thinking, the\r\n world we now live in would appear to the thinkers in that world to have\r\n been of an inferior grade.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n With the whole of past eternity open for our conjectures to range in, it\r\n may be lawful to wonder whether the various kinds of union now realized in\r\n the universe that we inhabit may not possibly have been successively\r\n evolved after the fashion in which we now see human systems evolving in\r\n consequence of human needs. If such an hypothesis were legitimate, total\r\n oneness would appear at the end of things rather than at their origin. In\r\n other words the notion of the \u0027Absolute\u0027 would have to be replaced by that\r\n of the \u0027Ultimate.\u0027 The two notions would have the same content\u0026mdash;the\r\n maximally unified content of fact, namely\u0026mdash;but their time-relations\r\n would be positively reversed. [Footnote: Compare on the Ultimate, Mr.\r\n Schiller\u0027s essay \"Activity and Substance,\" in his book entitled Humanism,\r\n p. 204.]\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n After discussing the unity of the universe in this pragmatic way, you\r\n ought to see why I said in my second lecture, borrowing the word from my\r\n friend G. Papini, that pragmatism tends to UNSTIFFEN all our theories. The\r\n world\u0027s oneness has generally been affirmed abstractly only, and as if\r\n anyone who questioned it must be an idiot. The temper of monists has been\r\n so vehement, as almost at times to be convulsive; and this way of holding\r\n a doctrine does not easily go with reasonable discussion and the drawing\r\n of distinctions. The theory of the Absolute, in particular, has had to be\r\n an article of faith, affirmed dogmatically and exclusively. The One and\r\n All, first in the order of being and of knowing, logically necessary\r\n itself, and uniting all lesser things in the bonds of mutual necessity,\r\n how could it allow of any mitigation of its inner rigidity? The slightest\r\n suspicion of pluralism, the minutest wiggle of independence of any one of\r\n its parts from the control of the totality, would ruin it. Absolute unity\r\n brooks no degrees\u0026mdash;as well might you claim absolute purity for a\r\n glass of water because it contains but a single little cholera-germ. The\r\n independence, however infinitesimal, of a part, however small, would be to\r\n the Absolute as fatal as a cholera-germ.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n Pluralism on the other hand has no need of this dogmatic rigoristic\r\n temper. Provided you grant SOME separation among things, some tremor of\r\n independence, some free play of parts on one another, some real novelty or\r\n chance, however minute, she is amply satisfied, and will allow you any\r\n amount, however great, of real union. How much of union there may be is a\r\n question that she thinks can only be decided empirically. The amount may\r\n be enormous, colossal; but absolute monism is shattered if, along with all\r\n the union, there has to be granted the slightest modicum, the most\r\n incipient nascency, or the most residual trace, of a separation that is\r\n not \u0027overcome.\u0027\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n Pragmatism, pending the final empirical ascertainment of just what the\r\n balance of union and disunion among things may be, must obviously range\r\n herself upon the pluralistic side. Some day, she admits, even total union,\r\n with one knower, one origin, and a universe consolidated in every\r\n conceivable way, may turn out to be the most acceptable of all hypotheses.\r\n Meanwhile the opposite hypothesis, of a world imperfectly unified still,\r\n and perhaps always to remain so, must be sincerely entertained. This\r\n latter hypothesis is pluralism\u0027s doctrine. Since absolute monism forbids\r\n its being even considered seriously, branding it as irrational from the\r\n start, it is clear that pragmatism must turn its back on absolute monism,\r\n and follow pluralism\u0027s more empirical path.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n This leaves us with the common-sense world, in which we find things partly\r\n joined and partly disjoined. \u0027Things,\u0027 then, and their \u0027conjunctions\u0027\u0026mdash;what\r\n do such words mean, pragmatically handled? In my next lecture, I will\r\n apply the pragmatic method to the stage of philosophizing known as Common\r\n Sense.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n \u003cbr /\u003e\u003cbr /\u003e\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003chr /\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n \u003ca name=\"link2H_4_0007\" id=\"link2H_4_0007\"\u003e \u003c/a\u003e\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cdiv style=\"height: 4em;\"\u003e\r\n \u003cbr /\u003e\u003cbr /\u003e\u003cbr /\u003e\u003cbr /\u003e\r\n \u003c/div\u003e\r\n \u003ch2\u003e\r\n Lecture V. \u0026mdash; Pragmatism and Common Sense\r\n \u003c/h2\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n In the last lecture we turned ourselves from the usual way of talking of\r\n the universe\u0027s oneness as a principle, sublime in all its blankness,\r\n towards a study of the special kinds of union which the universe enfolds.\r\n We found many of these to coexist with kinds of separation equally real.\r\n \"How far am I verified?\" is the question which each kind of union and each\r\n kind of separation asks us here, so as good pragmatists we have to turn\r\n our face towards experience, towards \u0027facts.\u0027\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n Absolute oneness remains, but only as an hypothesis, and that hypothesis\r\n is reduced nowadays to that of an omniscient knower who sees all things\r\n without exception as forming one single systematic fact. But the knower in\r\n question may still be conceived either as an Absolute or as an Ultimate;\r\n and over against the hypothesis of him in either form the\r\n counter-hypothesis that the widest field of knowledge that ever was or\r\n will be still contains some ignorance, may be legitimately held. Some bits\r\n of information always may escape.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n This is the hypothesis of NOETIC PLURALISM, which monists consider so\r\n absurd. Since we are bound to treat it as respectfully as noetic monism,\r\n until the facts shall have tipped the beam, we find that our pragmatism,\r\n tho originally nothing but a method, has forced us to be friendly to the\r\n pluralistic view. It MAY be that some parts of the world are connected so\r\n loosely with some other parts as to be strung along by nothing but the\r\n copula AND. They might even come and go without those other parts\r\n suffering any internal change. This pluralistic view, of a world of\r\n ADDITIVE constitution, is one that pragmatism is unable to rule out from\r\n serious consideration. But this view leads one to the farther hypothesis\r\n that the actual world, instead of being complete \u0027eternally,\u0027 as the\r\n monists assure us, may be eternally incomplete, and at all times subject\r\n to addition or liable to loss.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n It IS at any rate incomplete in one respect, and flagrantly so. The very\r\n fact that we debate this question shows that our KNOWLEDGE is incomplete\r\n at present and subject to addition. In respect of the knowledge it\r\n contains the world does genuinely change and grow. Some general remarks on\r\n the way in which our knowledge completes itself\u0026mdash;when it does\r\n complete itself\u0026mdash;will lead us very conveniently into our subject for\r\n this lecture, which is \u0027Common Sense.\u0027\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n To begin with, our knowledge grows IN SPOTS. The spots may be large or\r\n small, but the knowledge never grows all over: some old knowledge always\r\n remains what it was. Your knowledge of pragmatism, let us suppose, is\r\n growing now. Later, its growth may involve considerable modification of\r\n opinions which you previously held to be true. But such modifications are\r\n apt to be gradual. To take the nearest possible example, consider these\r\n lectures of mine. What you first gain from them is probably a small amount\r\n of new information, a few new definitions, or distinctions, or points of\r\n view. But while these special ideas are being added, the rest of your\r\n knowledge stands still, and only gradually will you \u0027line up\u0027 your\r\n previous opinions with the novelties I am trying to instil, and modify to\r\n some slight degree their mass.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n You listen to me now, I suppose, with certain prepossessions as to my\r\n competency, and these affect your reception of what I say, but were I\r\n suddenly to break off lecturing, and to begin to sing \u0027We won\u0027t go home\r\n till morning\u0027 in a rich baritone voice, not only would that new fact be\r\n added to your stock, but it would oblige you to define me differently, and\r\n that might alter your opinion of the pragmatic philosophy, and in general\r\n bring about a rearrangement of a number of your ideas. Your mind in such\r\n processes is strained, and sometimes painfully so, between its older\r\n beliefs and the novelties which experience brings along.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n Our minds thus grow in spots; and like grease-spots, the spots spread. But\r\n we let them spread as little as possible: we keep unaltered as much of our\r\n old knowledge, as many of our old prejudices and beliefs, as we can. We\r\n patch and tinker more than we renew. The novelty soaks in; it stains the\r\n ancient mass; but it is also tinged by what absorbs it. Our past\r\n apperceives and co-operates; and in the new equilibrium in which each step\r\n forward in the process of learning terminates, it happens relatively\r\n seldom that the new fact is added RAW. More usually it is embedded cooked,\r\n as one might say, or stewed down in the sauce of the old.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n New truths thus are resultants of new experiences and of old truths\r\n combined and mutually modifying one another. And since this is the case in\r\n the changes of opinion of to-day, there is no reason to assume that it has\r\n not been so at all times. It follows that very ancient modes of thought\r\n may have survived through all the later changes in men\u0027s opinions. The\r\n most primitive ways of thinking may not yet be wholly expunged. Like our\r\n five fingers, our ear-bones, our rudimentary caudal appendage, or our\r\n other \u0027vestigial\u0027 peculiarities, they may remain as indelible tokens of\r\n events in our race-history. Our ancestors may at certain moments have\r\n struck into ways of thinking which they might conceivably not have found.\r\n But once they did so, and after the fact, the inheritance continues. When\r\n you begin a piece of music in a certain key, you must keep the key to the\r\n end. You may alter your house ad libitum, but the ground-plan of the first\r\n architect persists\u0026mdash;you can make great changes, but you cannot change\r\n a Gothic church into a Doric temple. You may rinse and rinse the bottle,\r\n but you can\u0027t get the taste of the medicine or whiskey that first filled\r\n it wholly out.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n My thesis now is this, that OUR FUNDAMENTAL WAYS OF THINKING ABOUT THINGS\r\n ARE DISCOVERIES OF EXCEEDINGLY REMOTE ANCESTORS, WHICH HAVE BEEN ABLE TO\r\n PRESERVE THEMSELVES THROUGHOUT THE EXPERIENCE OF ALL SUBSEQUENT TIME. They\r\n form one great stage of equilibrium in the human mind\u0027s development, the\r\n stage of common sense. Other stages have grafted themselves upon this\r\n stage, but have never succeeded in displacing it. Let us consider this\r\n common-sense stage first, as if it might be final.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n In practical talk, a man\u0027s common sense means his good judgment, his\r\n freedom from excentricity, his GUMPTION, to use the vernacular word. In\r\n philosophy it means something entirely different, it means his use of\r\n certain intellectual forms or categories of thought. Were we lobsters, or\r\n bees, it might be that our organization would have led to our using quite\r\n different modes from these of apprehending our experiences. It MIGHT be\r\n too (we cannot dogmatically deny this) that such categories, unimaginable\r\n by us to-day, would have proved on the whole as serviceable for handling\r\n our experiences mentally as those which we actually use.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n If this sounds paradoxical to anyone, let him think of analytical\r\n geometry. The identical figures which Euclid defined by intrinsic\r\n relations were defined by Descartes by the relations of their points to\r\n adventitious co-ordinates, the result being an absolutely different and\r\n vastly more potent way of handling curves. All our conceptions are what\r\n the Germans call denkmittel, means by which we handle facts by thinking\r\n them. Experience merely as such doesn\u0027t come ticketed and labeled, we have\r\n first to discover what it is. Kant speaks of it as being in its first\r\n intention a gewuehl der erscheinungen, a rhapsodie der wahrnehmungen, a\r\n mere motley which we have to unify by our wits. What we usually do is\r\n first to frame some system of concepts mentally classified, serialized, or\r\n connected in some intellectual way, and then to use this as a tally by\r\n which we \u0027keep tab\u0027 on the impressions that present themselves. When each\r\n is referred to some possible place in the conceptual system, it is thereby\r\n \u0027understood.\u0027 This notion of parallel \u0027manifolds\u0027 with their elements\r\n standing reciprocally in \u0027one-to-one relations,\u0027 is proving so convenient\r\n nowadays in mathematics and logic as to supersede more and more the older\r\n classificatory conceptions. There are many conceptual systems of this\r\n sort; and the sense manifold is also such a system. Find a one-to-one\r\n relation for your sense-impressions ANYWHERE among the concepts, and in so\r\n far forth you rationalize the impressions. But obviously you can\r\n rationalize them by using various conceptual systems.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n The old common-sense way of rationalizing them is by a set of concepts of\r\n which the most important are these:\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n Thing;\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n The same or different;\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n Kinds;\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n Minds;\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n Bodies;\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n One Time;\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n One Space;\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n Subjects and attributes;\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n Causal influences;\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n The fancied;\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n The real.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n We are now so familiar with the order that these notions have woven for us\r\n out of the everlasting weather of our perceptions that we find it hard to\r\n realize how little of a fixed routine the perceptions follow when taken by\r\n themselves. The word weather is a good one to use here. In Boston, for\r\n example, the weather has almost no routine, the only law being that if you\r\n have had any weather for two days, you will probably but not certainly\r\n have another weather on the third. Weather-experience as it thus comes to\r\n Boston, is discontinuous and chaotic. In point of temperature, of wind,\r\n rain or sunshine, it MAY change three times a day. But the Washington\r\n weather-bureau intellectualizes this disorder by making each successive\r\n bit of Boston weather EPISODIC. It refers it to its place and moment in a\r\n continental cyclone, on the history of which the local changes everywhere\r\n are strung as beads are strung upon a cord.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n Now it seems almost certain that young children and the inferior animals\r\n take all their experiences very much as uninstructed Bostonians take their\r\n weather. They know no more of time or space as world-receptacles, or of\r\n permanent subjects and changing predicates, or of causes, or kinds, or\r\n thoughts, or things, than our common people know of continental cyclones.\r\n A baby\u0027s rattle drops out of his hand, but the baby looks not for it. It\r\n has \u0027gone out\u0027 for him, as a candle-flame goes out; and it comes back,\r\n when you replace it in his hand, as the flame comes back when relit. The\r\n idea of its being a \u0027thing,\u0027 whose permanent existence by itself he might\r\n interpolate between its successive apparitions has evidently not occurred\r\n to him. It is the same with dogs. Out of sight, out of mind, with them. It\r\n is pretty evident that they have no GENERAL tendency to interpolate\r\n \u0027things.\u0027 Let me quote here a passage from my colleague G. Santayana\u0027s\r\n book.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n \"If a dog, while sniffing about contentedly, sees afar off his master\r\n arriving after long absence…the poor brute asks for no reason why his\r\n master went, why he has come again, why he should be loved, or why\r\n presently while lying at his feet you forget him and begin to grunt and\r\n dream of the chase\u0026mdash;all that is an utter mystery, utterly\r\n unconsidered. Such experience has variety, scenery, and a certain vital\r\n rhythm; its story might be told in dithyrambic verse. It moves wholly by\r\n inspiration; every event is providential, every act unpremeditated.\r\n Absolute freedom and absolute helplessness have met together: you depend\r\n wholly on divine favour, yet that unfathomable agency is not\r\n distinguishable from your own life. …[But] the figures even of that\r\n disordered drama have their exits and their entrances; and their cues can\r\n be gradually discovered by a being capable of fixing his attention and\r\n retaining the order of events. …In proportion as such understanding\r\n advances each moment of experience becomes consequential and prophetic of\r\n the rest. The calm places in life are filled with power and its spasms\r\n with resource. No emotion can overwhelm the mind, for of none is the basis\r\n or issue wholly hidden; no event can disconcert it altogether, because it\r\n sees beyond. Means can be looked for to escape from the worst predicament;\r\n and whereas each moment had been formerly filled with nothing but its own\r\n adventure and surprised emotion, each now makes room for the lesson of\r\n what went before and surmises what may be the plot of the\r\n whole.\"[Footnote: The Life of Reason: Reason in Common Sense, 1905, p.\r\n 59.]\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n Even to-day science and philosophy are still laboriously trying to part\r\n fancies from realities in our experience; and in primitive times they made\r\n only the most incipient distinctions in this line. Men believed whatever\r\n they thought with any liveliness, and they mixed their dreams with their\r\n realities inextricably. The categories of \u0027thought\u0027 and \u0027things\u0027 are\r\n indispensable here\u0026mdash;instead of being realities we now call certain\r\n experiences only \u0027thoughts.\u0027 There is not a category, among those\r\n enumerated, of which we may not imagine the use to have thus originated\r\n historically and only gradually spread.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n That one Time which we all believe in and in which each event has its\r\n definite date, that one Space in which each thing has its position, these\r\n abstract notions unify the world incomparably; but in their finished shape\r\n as concepts how different they are from the loose unordered time-and-space\r\n experiences of natural men! Everything that happens to us brings its own\r\n duration and extension, and both are vaguely surrounded by a marginal\r\n \u0027more\u0027 that runs into the duration and extension of the next thing that\r\n comes. But we soon lose all our definite bearings; and not only do our\r\n children make no distinction between yesterday and the day before\r\n yesterday, the whole past being churned up together, but we adults still\r\n do so whenever the times are large. It is the same with spaces. On a map I\r\n can distinctly see the relation of London, Constantinople, and Pekin to\r\n the place where I am; in reality I utterly fail to FEEL the facts which\r\n the map symbolizes. The directions and distances are vague, confused and\r\n mixed. Cosmic space and cosmic time, so far from being the intuitions that\r\n Kant said they were, are constructions as patently artificial as any that\r\n science can show. The great majority of the human race never use these\r\n notions, but live in plural times and spaces, interpenetrant and\r\n DURCHEINANDER.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n Permanent \u0027things\u0027 again; the \u0027same\u0027 thing and its various \u0027appearances\u0027\r\n and \u0027alterations\u0027; the different \u0027kinds\u0027 of thing; with the \u0027kind\u0027 used\r\n finally as a \u0027predicate,\u0027 of which the thing remains the \u0027subject\u0027\u0026mdash;what\r\n a straightening of the tangle of our experience\u0027s immediate flux and\r\n sensible variety does this list of terms suggest! And it is only the\r\n smallest part of his experience\u0027s flux that anyone actually does\r\n straighten out by applying to it these conceptual instruments. Out of them\r\n all our lowest ancestors probably used only, and then most vaguely and\r\n inaccurately, the notion of \u0027the same again.\u0027 But even then if you had\r\n asked them whether the same were a \u0027thing\u0027 that had endured throughout the\r\n unseen interval, they would probably have been at a loss, and would have\r\n said that they had never asked that question, or considered matters in\r\n that light.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n Kinds, and sameness of kind\u0026mdash;what colossally useful DENKMITTEL for\r\n finding our way among the many! The manyness might conceivably have been\r\n absolute. Experiences might have all been singulars, no one of them\r\n occurring twice. In such a world logic would have had no application; for\r\n kind and sameness of kind are logic\u0027s only instruments. Once we know that\r\n whatever is of a kind is also of that kind\u0027s kind, we can travel through\r\n the universe as if with seven-league boots. Brutes surely never use these\r\n abstractions, and civilized men use them in most various amounts.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n Causal influence, again! This, if anything, seems to have been an\r\n antediluvian conception; for we find primitive men thinking that almost\r\n everything is significant and can exert influence of some sort. The search\r\n for the more definite influences seems to have started in the question:\r\n \"Who, or what, is to blame?\"\u0026mdash;for any illness, namely, or disaster,\r\n or untoward thing. From this centre the search for causal influences has\r\n spread. Hume and \u0027Science\u0027 together have tried to eliminate the whole\r\n notion of influence, substituting the entirely different DENKMITTEL of\r\n \u0027law.\u0027 But law is a comparatively recent invention, and influence reigns\r\n supreme in the older realm of common sense.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n The \u0027possible,\u0027 as something less than the actual and more than the wholly\r\n unreal, is another of these magisterial notions of common sense. Criticize\r\n them as you may, they persist; and we fly back to them the moment critical\r\n pressure is relaxed. \u0027Self,\u0027 \u0027body,\u0027 in the substantial or metaphysical\r\n sense\u0026mdash;no one escapes subjection to THOSE forms of thought. In\r\n practice, the common-sense DENKMITTEL are uniformly victorious. Everyone,\r\n however instructed, still thinks of a \u0027thing\u0027 in the common-sense way, as\r\n a permanent unit-subject that \u0027supports\u0027 its attributes interchangeably.\r\n No one stably or sincerely uses the more critical notion, of a group of\r\n sense-qualities united by a law. With these categories in our hand, we\r\n make our plans and plot together, and connect all the remoter parts of\r\n experience with what lies before our eyes. Our later and more critical\r\n philosophies are mere fads and fancies compared with this natural\r\n mother-tongue of thought.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n Common sense appears thus as a perfectly definite stage in our\r\n understanding of things, a stage that satisfies in an extraordinarily\r\n successful way the purposes for which we think. \u0027Things\u0027 do exist, even\r\n when we do not see them. Their \u0027kinds\u0027 also exist. Their \u0027qualities\u0027 are\r\n what they act by, and are what we act on; and these also exist. These\r\n lamps shed their quality of light on every object in this room. We\r\n intercept IT on its way whenever we hold up an opaque screen. It is the\r\n very sound that my lips emit that travels into your ears. It is the\r\n sensible heat of the fire that migrates into the water in which we boil an\r\n egg; and we can change the heat into coolness by dropping in a lump of\r\n ice. At this stage of philosophy all non-European men without exception\r\n have remained. It suffices for all the necessary practical ends of life;\r\n and, among our own race even, it is only the highly sophisticated\r\n specimens, the minds debauched by learning, as Berkeley calls them, who\r\n have ever even suspected common sense of not being absolutely true.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n But when we look back, and speculate as to how the common-sense categories\r\n may have achieved their wonderful supremacy, no reason appears why it may\r\n not have been by a process just like that by which the conceptions due to\r\n Democritus, Berkeley, or Darwin, achieved their similar triumphs in more\r\n recent times. In other words, they may have been successfully DISCOVERED\r\n by prehistoric geniuses whose names the night of antiquity has covered up;\r\n they may have been verified by the immediate facts of experience which\r\n they first fitted; and then from fact to fact and from man to man they may\r\n have SPREAD, until all language rested on them and we are now incapable of\r\n thinking naturally in any other terms. Such a view would only follow the\r\n rule that has proved elsewhere so fertile, of assuming the vast and remote\r\n to conform to the laws of formation that we can observe at work in the\r\n small and near.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n For all utilitarian practical purposes these conceptions amply suffice;\r\n but that they began at special points of discovery and only gradually\r\n spread from one thing to another, seems proved by the exceedingly dubious\r\n limits of their application to-day. We assume for certain purposes one\r\n \u0027objective\u0027 Time that AEQUABILITER FLUIT, but we don\u0027t livingly believe in\r\n or realize any such equally-flowing time. \u0027Space\u0027 is a less vague notion;\r\n but \u0027things,\u0027 what are they? Is a constellation properly a thing? or an\r\n army? or is an ENS RATIONIS such as space or justice a thing? Is a knife\r\n whose handle and blade are changed the \u0027same\u0027? Is the \u0027changeling,\u0027 whom\r\n Locke so seriously discusses, of the human \u0027kind\u0027? Is \u0027telepathy\u0027 a\r\n \u0027fancy\u0027 or a \u0027fact\u0027? The moment you pass beyond the practical use of these\r\n categories (a use usually suggested sufficiently by the circumstances of\r\n the special case) to a merely curious or speculative way of thinking, you\r\n find it impossible to say within just what limits of fact any one of them\r\n shall apply.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n The peripatetic philosophy, obeying rationalist propensities, has tried to\r\n eternalize the common-sense categories by treating them very technically\r\n and articulately. A \u0027thing\u0027 for instance is a being, or ENS. An ENS is a\r\n subject in which qualities \u0027inhere.\u0027 A subject is a substance. Substances\r\n are of kinds, and kinds are definite in number, and discrete. These\r\n distinctions are fundamental and eternal. As terms of DISCOURSE they are\r\n indeed magnificently useful, but what they mean, apart from their use in\r\n steering our discourse to profitable issues, does not appear. If you ask a\r\n scholastic philosopher what a substance may be in itself, apart from its\r\n being the support of attributes, he simply says that your intellect knows\r\n perfectly what the word means.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n But what the intellect knows clearly is only the word itself and its\r\n steering function. So it comes about that intellects SIBI PERMISSI,\r\n intellects only curious and idle, have forsaken the common-sense level for\r\n what in general terms may be called the \u0027critical\u0027 level of thought. Not\r\n merely SUCH intellects either\u0026mdash;your Humes and Berkeleys and Hegels;\r\n but practical observers of facts, your Galileos, Daltons, Faradays, have\r\n found it impossible to treat the NAIFS sense-termini of common sense as\r\n ultimately real. As common sense interpolates her constant \u0027things\u0027\r\n between our intermittent sensations, so science EXTRApolates her world of\r\n \u0027primary\u0027 qualities, her atoms, her ether, her magnetic fields, and the\r\n like, beyond the common-sense world. The \u0027things\u0027 are now invisible\r\n impalpable things; and the old visible common-sense things are supposed to\r\n result from the mixture of these invisibles. Or else the whole NAIF\r\n conception of thing gets superseded, and a thing\u0027s name is interpreted as\r\n denoting only the law or REGEL DER VERBINDUNG by which certain of our\r\n sensations habitually succeed or coexist.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n Science and critical philosophy thus burst the bounds of common sense.\r\n With science NAIF realism ceases: \u0027Secondary\u0027 qualities become unreal;\r\n primary ones alone remain. With critical philosophy, havoc is made of\r\n everything. The common-sense categories one and all cease to represent\r\n anything in the way of BEING; they are but sublime tricks of human\r\n thought, our ways of escaping bewilderment in the midst of sensation\u0027s\r\n irremediable flow.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n But the scientific tendency in critical thought, tho inspired at first by\r\n purely intellectual motives, has opened an entirely unexpected range of\r\n practical utilities to our astonished view. Galileo gave us accurate\r\n clocks and accurate artillery-practice; the chemists flood us with new\r\n medicines and dye-stuffs; Ampere and Faraday have endowed us with the New\r\n York subway and with Marconi telegrams. The hypothetical things that such\r\n men have invented, defined as they have defined them, are showing an\r\n extraordinary fertility in consequences verifiable by sense. Our logic can\r\n deduce from them a consequence due under certain conditions, we can then\r\n bring about the conditions, and presto, the consequence is there before\r\n our eyes. The scope of the practical control of nature newly put into our\r\n hand by scientific ways of thinking vastly exceeds the scope of the old\r\n control grounded on common sense. Its rate of increase accelerates so that\r\n no one can trace the limit; one may even fear that the BEING of man may be\r\n crushed by his own powers, that his fixed nature as an organism may not\r\n prove adequate to stand the strain of the ever increasingly tremendous\r\n functions, almost divine creative functions, which his intellect will more\r\n and more enable him to wield. He may drown in his wealth like a child in a\r\n bath-tub, who has turned on the water and who cannot turn it off.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n The philosophic stage of criticism, much more thorough in its negations\r\n than the scientific stage, so far gives us no new range of practical\r\n power. Locke, Hume, Berkeley, Kant, Hegel, have all been utterly sterile,\r\n so far as shedding any light on the details of nature goes, and I can\r\n think of no invention or discovery that can be directly traced to anything\r\n in their peculiar thought, for neither with Berkeley\u0027s tar-water nor with\r\n Kant\u0027s nebular hypothesis had their respective philosophic tenets anything\r\n to do. The satisfactions they yield to their disciples are intellectual,\r\n not practical; and even then we have to confess that there is a large\r\n minus-side to the account.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n There are thus at least three well-characterized levels, stages or types\r\n of thought about the world we live in, and the notions of one stage have\r\n one kind of merit, those of another stage another kind. It is impossible,\r\n however, to say that any stage as yet in sight is absolutely more TRUE\r\n than any other. Common sense is the more CONSOLIDATED stage, because it\r\n got its innings first, and made all language into its ally. Whether it or\r\n science be the more AUGUST stage may be left to private judgment. But\r\n neither consolidation nor augustness are decisive marks of truth. If\r\n common sense were true, why should science have had to brand the secondary\r\n qualities, to which our world owes all its living interest, as false, and\r\n to invent an invisible world of points and curves and mathematical\r\n equations instead? Why should it have needed to transform causes and\r\n activities into laws of \u0027functional variation\u0027? Vainly did scholasticism,\r\n common sense\u0027s college-trained younger sister, seek to stereotype the\r\n forms the human family had always talked with, to make them definite and\r\n fix them for eternity. Substantial forms (in other words our secondary\r\n qualities) hardly outlasted the year of our Lord 1600. People were already\r\n tired of them then; and Galileo, and Descartes, with his \u0027new philosophy,\u0027\r\n gave them only a little later their coup de grace.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n But now if the new kinds of scientific \u0027thing,\u0027 the corpuscular and\r\n etheric world, were essentially more \u0027true,\u0027 why should they have excited\r\n so much criticism within the body of science itself? Scientific logicians\r\n are saying on every hand that these entities and their determinations,\r\n however definitely conceived, should not be held for literally real. It is\r\n AS IF they existed; but in reality they are like co-ordinates or\r\n logarithms, only artificial short-cuts for taking us from one part to\r\n another of experience\u0027s flux. We can cipher fruitfully with them; they\r\n serve us wonderfully; but we must not be their dupes.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n There is no RINGING conclusion possible when we compare these types of\r\n thinking, with a view to telling which is the more absolutely true. Their\r\n naturalness, their intellectual economy, their fruitfulness for practice,\r\n all start up as distinct tests of their veracity, and as a result we get\r\n confused. Common sense is BETTER for one sphere of life, science for\r\n another, philosophic criticism for a third; but whether either be TRUER\r\n absolutely, Heaven only knows. Just now, if I understand the matter\r\n rightly, we are witnessing a curious reversion to the common-sense way of\r\n looking at physical nature, in the philosophy of science favored by such\r\n men as Mach, Ostwald and Duhem. According to these teachers no hypothesis\r\n is truer than any other in the sense of being a more literal copy of\r\n reality. They are all but ways of talking on our part, to be compared\r\n solely from the point of view of their USE. The only literally true thing\r\n is REALITY; and the only reality we know is, for these logicians, sensible\r\n reality, the flux of our sensations and emotions as they pass. \u0027Energy\u0027 is\r\n the collective name (according to Ostwald) for the sensations just as they\r\n present themselves (the movement, heat, magnetic pull, or light, or\r\n whatever it may be) when they are measured in certain ways. So measuring\r\n them, we are enabled to describe the correlated changes which they show\r\n us, in formulas matchless for their simplicity and fruitfulness for human\r\n use. They are sovereign triumphs of economy in thought.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n No one can fail to admire the \u0027energetic\u0027 philosophy. But the\r\n hypersensible entities, the corpuscles and vibrations, hold their own with\r\n most physicists and chemists, in spite of its appeal. It seems too\r\n economical to be all-sufficient. Profusion, not economy, may after all be\r\n reality\u0027s key-note.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n I am dealing here with highly technical matters, hardly suitable for\r\n popular lecturing, and in which my own competence is small. All the better\r\n for my conclusion, however, which at this point is this. The whole notion\r\n of truth, which naturally and without reflexion we assume to mean the\r\n simple duplication by the mind of a ready-made and given reality, proves\r\n hard to understand clearly. There is no simple test available for\r\n adjudicating offhand between the divers types of thought that claim to\r\n possess it. Common sense, common science or corpuscular philosophy,\r\n ultra-critical science, or energetics, and critical or idealistic\r\n philosophy, all seem insufficiently true in some regard and leave some\r\n dissatisfaction. It is evident that the conflict of these so widely\r\n differing systems obliges us to overhaul the very idea of truth, for at\r\n present we have no definite notion of what the word may mean. I shall face\r\n that task in my next lecture, and will add but a few words, in finishing\r\n the present one.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n There are only two points that I wish you to retain from the present\r\n lecture. The first one relates to common sense. We have seen reason to\r\n suspect it, to suspect that in spite of their being so venerable, of their\r\n being so universally used and built into the very structure of language,\r\n its categories may after all be only a collection of extraordinarily\r\n successful hypotheses (historically discovered or invented by single men,\r\n but gradually communicated, and used by everybody) by which our\r\n forefathers have from time immemorial unified and straightened the\r\n discontinuity of their immediate experiences, and put themselves into an\r\n equilibrium with the surface of nature so satisfactory for ordinary\r\n practical purposes that it certainly would have lasted forever, but for\r\n the excessive intellectual vivacity of Democritus, Archimedes, Galileo,\r\n Berkeley, and other excentric geniuses whom the example of such men\r\n inflamed. Retain, I pray you, this suspicion about common sense.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n The other point is this. Ought not the existence of the various types of\r\n thinking which we have reviewed, each so splendid for certain purposes,\r\n yet all conflicting still, and neither one of them able to support a claim\r\n of absolute veracity, to awaken a presumption favorable to the\r\n pragmatistic view that all our theories are INSTRUMENTAL, are mental modes\r\n of ADAPTATION to reality, rather than revelations or gnostic answers to\r\n some divinely instituted world-enigma? I expressed this view as clearly as\r\n I could in the second of these lectures. Certainly the restlessness of the\r\n actual theoretic situation, the value for some purposes of each\r\n thought-level, and the inability of either to expel the others decisively,\r\n suggest this pragmatistic view, which I hope that the next lectures may\r\n soon make entirely convincing. May there not after all be a possible\r\n ambiguity in truth?\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n \u003cbr /\u003e\u003cbr /\u003e\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003chr /\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n \u003ca name=\"link2H_4_0008\" id=\"link2H_4_0008\"\u003e \u003c/a\u003e\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cdiv style=\"height: 4em;\"\u003e\r\n \u003cbr /\u003e\u003cbr /\u003e\u003cbr /\u003e\u003cbr /\u003e\r\n \u003c/div\u003e\r\n \u003ch2\u003e\r\n Lecture VI. \u0026mdash; Pragmatism\u0027s Conception of Truth\r\n \u003c/h2\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n When Clerk Maxwell was a child it is written that he had a mania for\r\n having everything explained to him, and that when people put him off with\r\n vague verbal accounts of any phenomenon he would interrupt them\r\n impatiently by saying, \"Yes; but I want you to tell me the PARTICULAR GO\r\n of it!\" Had his question been about truth, only a pragmatist could have\r\n told him the particular go of it. I believe that our contemporary\r\n pragmatists, especially Messrs. Schiller and Dewey, have given the only\r\n tenable account of this subject. It is a very ticklish subject, sending\r\n subtle rootlets into all kinds of crannies, and hard to treat in the\r\n sketchy way that alone befits a public lecture. But the Schiller-Dewey\r\n view of truth has been so ferociously attacked by rationalistic\r\n philosophers, and so abominably misunderstood, that here, if anywhere, is\r\n the point where a clear and simple statement should be made.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n I fully expect to see the pragmatist view of truth run through the classic\r\n stages of a theory\u0027s career. First, you know, a new theory is attacked as\r\n absurd; then it is admitted to be true, but obvious and insignificant;\r\n finally it is seen to be so important that its adversaries claim that they\r\n themselves discovered it. Our doctrine of truth is at present in the first\r\n of these three stages, with symptoms of the second stage having begun in\r\n certain quarters. I wish that this lecture might help it beyond the first\r\n stage in the eyes of many of you.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n Truth, as any dictionary will tell you, is a property of certain of our\r\n ideas. It means their \u0027agreement,\u0027 as falsity means their disagreement,\r\n with \u0027reality.\u0027 Pragmatists and intellectualists both accept this\r\n definition as a matter of course. They begin to quarrel only after the\r\n question is raised as to what may precisely be meant by the term\r\n \u0027agreement,\u0027 and what by the term \u0027reality,\u0027 when reality is taken as\r\n something for our ideas to agree with.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n In answering these questions the pragmatists are more analytic and\r\n painstaking, the intellectualists more offhand and irreflective. The\r\n popular notion is that a true idea must copy its reality. Like other\r\n popular views, this one follows the analogy of the most usual experience.\r\n Our true ideas of sensible things do indeed copy them. Shut your eyes and\r\n think of yonder clock on the wall, and you get just such a true picture or\r\n copy of its dial. But your idea of its \u0027works\u0027 (unless you are a\r\n clock-maker) is much less of a copy, yet it passes muster, for it in no\r\n way clashes with the reality. Even tho it should shrink to the mere word\r\n \u0027works,\u0027 that word still serves you truly; and when you speak of the\r\n \u0027time-keeping function\u0027 of the clock, or of its spring\u0027s \u0027elasticity,\u0027 it\r\n is hard to see exactly what your ideas can copy.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n You perceive that there is a problem here. Where our ideas cannot copy\r\n definitely their object, what does agreement with that object mean? Some\r\n idealists seem to say that they are true whenever they are what God means\r\n that we ought to think about that object. Others hold the copy-view all\r\n through, and speak as if our ideas possessed truth just in proportion as\r\n they approach to being copies of the Absolute\u0027s eternal way of thinking.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n These views, you see, invite pragmatistic discussion. But the great\r\n assumption of the intellectualists is that truth means essentially an\r\n inert static relation. When you\u0027ve got your true idea of anything, there\u0027s\r\n an end of the matter. You\u0027re in possession; you KNOW; you have fulfilled\r\n your thinking destiny. You are where you ought to be mentally; you have\r\n obeyed your categorical imperative; and nothing more need follow on that\r\n climax of your rational destiny. Epistemologically you are in stable\r\n equilibrium.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n Pragmatism, on the other hand, asks its usual question. \"Grant an idea or\r\n belief to be true,\" it says, \"what concrete difference will its being true\r\n make in anyone\u0027s actual life? How will the truth be realized? What\r\n experiences will be different from those which would obtain if the belief\r\n were false? What, in short, is the truth\u0027s cash-value in experiential\r\n terms?\"\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n The moment pragmatism asks this question, it sees the answer: TRUE IDEAS\r\n ARE THOSE THAT WE CAN ASSIMILATE, VALIDATE, CORROBORATE AND VERIFY. FALSE\r\n IDEAS ARE THOSE THAT WE CANNOT. That is the practical difference it makes\r\n to us to have true ideas; that, therefore, is the meaning of truth, for it\r\n is all that truth is known-as.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n This thesis is what I have to defend. The truth of an idea is not a\r\n stagnant property inherent in it. Truth HAPPENS to an idea. It BECOMES\r\n true, is MADE true by events. Its verity is in fact an event, a process:\r\n the process namely of its verifying itself, its veri-FICATION. Its\r\n validity is the process of its valid-ATION.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n But what do the words verification and validation themselves pragmatically\r\n mean? They again signify certain practical consequences of the verified\r\n and validated idea. It is hard to find any one phrase that characterizes\r\n these consequences better than the ordinary agreement-formula\u0026mdash;just\r\n such consequences being what we have in mind whenever we say that our\r\n ideas \u0027agree\u0027 with reality. They lead us, namely, through the acts and\r\n other ideas which they instigate, into or up to, or towards, other parts\r\n of experience with which we feel all the while-such feeling being among\r\n our potentialities\u0026mdash;that the original ideas remain in agreement. The\r\n connexions and transitions come to us from point to point as being\r\n progressive, harmonious, satisfactory. This function of agreeable leading\r\n is what we mean by an idea\u0027s verification. Such an account is vague and it\r\n sounds at first quite trivial, but it has results which it will take the\r\n rest of my hour to explain.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n Let me begin by reminding you of the fact that the possession of true\r\n thoughts means everywhere the possession of invaluable instruments of\r\n action; and that our duty to gain truth, so far from being a blank command\r\n from out of the blue, or a \u0027stunt\u0027 self-imposed by our intellect, can\r\n account for itself by excellent practical reasons.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n The importance to human life of having true beliefs about matters of fact\r\n is a thing too notorious. We live in a world of realities that can be\r\n infinitely useful or infinitely harmful. Ideas that tell us which of them\r\n to expect count as the true ideas in all this primary sphere of\r\n verification, and the pursuit of such ideas is a primary human duty. The\r\n possession of truth, so far from being here an end in itself, is only a\r\n preliminary means towards other vital satisfactions. If I am lost in the\r\n woods and starved, and find what looks like a cow-path, it is of the\r\n utmost importance that I should think of a human habitation at the end of\r\n it, for if I do so and follow it, I save myself. The true thought is\r\n useful here because the house which is its object is useful. The practical\r\n value of true ideas is thus primarily derived from the practical\r\n importance of their objects to us. Their objects are, indeed, not\r\n important at all times. I may on another occasion have no use for the\r\n house; and then my idea of it, however verifiable, will be practically\r\n irrelevant, and had better remain latent. Yet since almost any object may\r\n some day become temporarily important, the advantage of having a general\r\n stock of extra truths, of ideas that shall be true of merely possible\r\n situations, is obvious. We store such extra truths away in our memories,\r\n and with the overflow we fill our books of reference. Whenever such an\r\n extra truth becomes practically relevant to one of our emergencies, it\r\n passes from cold-storage to do work in the world, and our belief in it\r\n grows active. You can say of it then either that \u0027it is useful because it\r\n is true\u0027 or that \u0027it is true because it is useful.\u0027 Both these phrases\r\n mean exactly the same thing, namely that here is an idea that gets\r\n fulfilled and can be verified. True is the name for whatever idea starts\r\n the verification-process, useful is the name for its completed function in\r\n experience. True ideas would never have been singled out as such, would\r\n never have acquired a class-name, least of all a name suggesting value,\r\n unless they had been useful from the outset in this way.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n From this simple cue pragmatism gets her general notion of truth as\r\n something essentially bound up with the way in which one moment in our\r\n experience may lead us towards other moments which it will be worth while\r\n to have been led to. Primarily, and on the common-sense level, the truth\r\n of a state of mind means this function of A LEADING THAT IS WORTH WHILE.\r\n When a moment in our experience, of any kind whatever, inspires us with a\r\n thought that is true, that means that sooner or later we dip by that\r\n thought\u0027s guidance into the particulars of experience again and make\r\n advantageous connexion with them. This is a vague enough statement, but I\r\n beg you to retain it, for it is essential.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n Our experience meanwhile is all shot through with regularities. One bit of\r\n it can warn us to get ready for another bit, can \u0027intend\u0027 or be\r\n \u0027significant of\u0027 that remoter object. The object\u0027s advent is the\r\n significance\u0027s verification. Truth, in these cases, meaning nothing but\r\n eventual verification, is manifestly incompatible with waywardness on our\r\n part. Woe to him whose beliefs play fast and loose with the order which\r\n realities follow in his experience: they will lead him nowhere or else\r\n make false connexions.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n By \u0027realities\u0027 or \u0027objects\u0027 here, we mean either things of common sense,\r\n sensibly present, or else common-sense relations, such as dates, places,\r\n distances, kinds, activities. Following our mental image of a house along\r\n the cow-path, we actually come to see the house; we get the image\u0027s full\r\n verification. SUCH SIMPLY AND FULLY VERIFIED LEADINGS ARE CERTAINLY THE\r\n ORIGINALS AND PROTOTYPES OF THE TRUTH-PROCESS. Experience offers indeed\r\n other forms of truth-process, but they are all conceivable as being\r\n primary verifications arrested, multiplied or substituted one for another.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n Take, for instance, yonder object on the wall. You and I consider it to be\r\n a \u0027clock,\u0027 altho no one of us has seen the hidden works that make it one.\r\n We let our notion pass for true without attempting to verify. If truths\r\n mean verification-process essentially, ought we then to call such\r\n unverified truths as this abortive? No, for they form the overwhelmingly\r\n large number of the truths we live by. Indirect as well as direct\r\n verifications pass muster. Where circumstantial evidence is sufficient, we\r\n can go without eye-witnessing. Just as we here assume Japan to exist\r\n without ever having been there, because it WORKS to do so, everything we\r\n know conspiring with the belief, and nothing interfering, so we assume\r\n that thing to be a clock. We USE it as a clock, regulating the length of\r\n our lecture by it. The verification of the assumption here means its\r\n leading to no frustration or contradiction. VerifiABILITY of wheels and\r\n weights and pendulum is as good as verification. For one truth-process\r\n completed there are a million in our lives that function in this state of\r\n nascency. They turn us TOWARDS direct verification; lead us into the\r\n SURROUNDINGS of the objects they envisage; and then, if everything runs on\r\n harmoniously, we are so sure that verification is possible that we omit\r\n it, and are usually justified by all that happens.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n Truth lives, in fact, for the most part on a credit system. Our thoughts\r\n and beliefs \u0027pass,\u0027 so long as nothing challenges them, just as bank-notes\r\n pass so long as nobody refuses them. But this all points to direct\r\n face-to-face verifications somewhere, without which the fabric of truth\r\n collapses like a financial system with no cash-basis whatever. You accept\r\n my verification of one thing, I yours of another. We trade on each other\u0027s\r\n truth. But beliefs verified concretely by SOMEBODY are the posts of the\r\n whole superstructure.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n Another great reason\u0026mdash;beside economy of time\u0026mdash;for waiving\r\n complete verification in the usual business of life is that all things\r\n exist in kinds and not singly. Our world is found once for all to have\r\n that peculiarity. So that when we have once directly verified our ideas\r\n about one specimen of a kind, we consider ourselves free to apply them to\r\n other specimens without verification. A mind that habitually discerns the\r\n kind of thing before it, and acts by the law of the kind immediately,\r\n without pausing to verify, will be a \u0027true\u0027 mind in ninety-nine out of a\r\n hundred emergencies, proved so by its conduct fitting everything it meets,\r\n and getting no refutation.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n INDIRECTLY OR ONLY POTENTIALLY VERIFYING PROCESSES MAY THUS BE TRUE AS\r\n WELL AS FULL VERIFICATION-PROCESSES. They work as true processes would\r\n work, give us the same advantages, and claim our recognition for the same\r\n reasons. All this on the common-sense level of, matters of fact, which we\r\n are alone considering.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n But matters of fact are not our only stock in trade. RELATIONS AMONG\r\n PURELY MENTAL IDEAS form another sphere where true and false beliefs\r\n obtain, and here the beliefs are absolute, or unconditional. When they are\r\n true they bear the name either of definitions or of principles. It is\r\n either a principle or a definition that 1 and 1 make 2, that 2 and 1 make\r\n 3, and so on; that white differs less from gray than it does from black;\r\n that when the cause begins to act the effect also commences. Such\r\n propositions hold of all possible \u0027ones,\u0027 of all conceivable \u0027whites\u0027 and\r\n \u0027grays\u0027 and \u0027causes.\u0027 The objects here are mental objects. Their relations\r\n are perceptually obvious at a glance, and no sense-verification is\r\n necessary. Moreover, once true, always true, of those same mental objects.\r\n Truth here has an \u0027eternal\u0027 character. If you can find a concrete thing\r\n anywhere that is \u0027one\u0027 or \u0027white\u0027 or \u0027gray,\u0027 or an \u0027effect,\u0027 then your\r\n principles will everlastingly apply to it. It is but a case of\r\n ascertaining the kind, and then applying the law of its kind to the\r\n particular object. You are sure to get truth if you can but name the kind\r\n rightly, for your mental relations hold good of everything of that kind\r\n without exception. If you then, nevertheless, failed to get truth\r\n concretely, you would say that you had classed your real objects wrongly.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n In this realm of mental relations, truth again is an affair of leading. We\r\n relate one abstract idea with another, framing in the end great systems of\r\n logical and mathematical truth, under the respective terms of which the\r\n sensible facts of experience eventually arrange themselves, so that our\r\n eternal truths hold good of realities also. This marriage of fact and\r\n theory is endlessly fertile. What we say is here already true in advance\r\n of special verification, IF WE HAVE SUBSUMED OUR OBJECTS RIGHTLY. Our\r\n ready-made ideal framework for all sorts of possible objects follows from\r\n the very structure of our thinking. We can no more play fast and loose\r\n with these abstract relations than we can do so with our\r\n sense-experiences. They coerce us; we must treat them consistently,\r\n whether or not we like the results. The rules of addition apply to our\r\n debts as rigorously as to our assets. The hundredth decimal of pi, the\r\n ratio of the circumference to its diameter, is predetermined ideally now,\r\n tho no one may have computed it. If we should ever need the figure in our\r\n dealings with an actual circle we should need to have it given rightly,\r\n calculated by the usual rules; for it is the same kind of truth that those\r\n rules elsewhere calculate.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n Between the coercions of the sensible order and those of the ideal order,\r\n our mind is thus wedged tightly. Our ideas must agree with realities, be\r\n such realities concrete or abstract, be they facts or be they principles,\r\n under penalty of endless inconsistency and frustration. So far,\r\n intellectualists can raise no protest. They can only say that we have\r\n barely touched the skin of the matter.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n Realities mean, then, either concrete facts, or abstract kinds of things\r\n and relations perceived intuitively between them. They furthermore and\r\n thirdly mean, as things that new ideas of ours must no less take account\r\n of, the whole body of other truths already in our possession. But what now\r\n does \u0027agreement\u0027 with such three-fold realities mean?\u0026mdash;to use again\r\n the definition that is current.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n Here it is that pragmatism and intellectualism begin to part company.\r\n Primarily, no doubt, to agree means to copy, but we saw that the mere word\r\n \u0027clock\u0027 would do instead of a mental picture of its works, and that of\r\n many realities our ideas can only be symbols and not copies. \u0027Past time,\u0027\r\n \u0027power,\u0027 \u0027spontaneity\u0027\u0026mdash;how can our mind copy such realities?\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n To \u0027agree\u0027 in the widest sense with a reality, CAN ONLY MEAN TO BE GUIDED\r\n EITHER STRAIGHT UP TO IT OR INTO ITS SURROUNDINGS, OR TO BE PUT INTO SUCH\r\n WORKING TOUCH WITH IT AS TO HANDLE EITHER IT OR SOMETHING CONNECTED WITH\r\n IT BETTER THAN IF WE DISAGREED. Better either intellectually or\r\n practically! And often agreement will only mean the negative fact that\r\n nothing contradictory from the quarter of that reality comes to interfere\r\n with the way in which our ideas guide us elsewhere. To copy a reality is,\r\n indeed, one very important way of agreeing with it, but it is far from\r\n being essential. The essential thing is the process of being guided. Any\r\n idea that helps us to DEAL, whether practically or intellectually, with\r\n either the reality or its belongings, that doesn\u0027t entangle our progress\r\n in frustrations, that FITS, in fact, and adapts our life to the reality\u0027s\r\n whole setting, will agree sufficiently to meet the requirement. It will\r\n hold true of that reality.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n Thus, NAMES are just as \u0027true\u0027 or \u0027false\u0027 as definite mental pictures are.\r\n They set up similar verification-processes, and lead to fully equivalent\r\n practical results.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n All human thinking gets discursified; we exchange ideas; we lend and\r\n borrow verifications, get them from one another by means of social\r\n intercourse. All truth thus gets verbally built out, stored up, and made\r\n available for everyone. Hence, we must TALK consistently just as we must\r\n THINK consistently: for both in talk and thought we deal with kinds. Names\r\n are arbitrary, but once understood they must be kept to. We mustn\u0027t now\r\n call Abel \u0027Cain\u0027 or Cain \u0027Abel.\u0027 If we do, we ungear ourselves from the\r\n whole book of Genesis, and from all its connexions with the universe of\r\n speech and fact down to the present time. We throw ourselves out of\r\n whatever truth that entire system of speech and fact may embody.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n The overwhelming majority of our true ideas admit of no direct or\r\n face-to-face verification-those of past history, for example, as of Cain\r\n and Abel. The stream of time can be remounted only verbally, or verified\r\n indirectly by the present prolongations or effects of what the past\r\n harbored. Yet if they agree with these verbalities and effects, we can\r\n know that our ideas of the past are true. AS TRUE AS PAST TIME ITSELF WAS,\r\n so true was Julius Caesar, so true were antediluvian monsters, all in\r\n their proper dates and settings. That past time itself was, is guaranteed\r\n by its coherence with everything that\u0027s present. True as the present is,\r\n the past was also.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n Agreement thus turns out to be essentially an affair of leading\u0026mdash;leading\r\n that is useful because it is into quarters that contain objects that are\r\n important. True ideas lead us into useful verbal and conceptual quarters\r\n as well as directly up to useful sensible termini. They lead to\r\n consistency, stability and flowing human intercourse. They lead away from\r\n excentricity and isolation, from foiled and barren thinking. The\r\n untrammeled flowing of the leading-process, its general freedom from clash\r\n and contradiction, passes for its indirect verification; but all roads\r\n lead to Rome, and in the end and eventually, all true processes must lead\r\n to the face of directly verifying sensible experiences SOMEWHERE, which\r\n somebody\u0027s ideas have copied.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n Such is the large loose way in which the pragmatist interprets the word\r\n agreement. He treats it altogether practically. He lets it cover any\r\n process of conduction from a present idea to a future terminus, provided\r\n only it run prosperously. It is only thus that \u0027scientific\u0027 ideas, flying\r\n as they do beyond common sense, can be said to agree with their realities.\r\n It is, as I have already said, as if reality were made of ether, atoms or\r\n electrons, but we mustn\u0027t think so literally. The term \u0027energy\u0027 doesn\u0027t\r\n even pretend to stand for anything \u0027objective.\u0027 It is only a way of\r\n measuring the surface of phenomena so as to string their changes on a\r\n simple formula.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n Yet in the choice of these man-made formulas we cannot be capricious with\r\n impunity any more than we can be capricious on the common-sense practical\r\n level. We must find a theory that will WORK; and that means something\r\n extremely difficult; for our theory must mediate between all previous\r\n truths and certain new experiences. It must derange common sense and\r\n previous belief as little as possible, and it must lead to some sensible\r\n terminus or other that can be verified exactly. To \u0027work\u0027 means both these\r\n things; and the squeeze is so tight that there is little loose play for\r\n any hypothesis. Our theories are wedged and controlled as nothing else is.\r\n Yet sometimes alternative theoretic formulas are equally compatible with\r\n all the truths we know, and then we choose between them for subjective\r\n reasons. We choose the kind of theory to which we are already partial; we\r\n follow \u0027elegance\u0027 or \u0027economy.\u0027 Clerk Maxwell somewhere says it would be\r\n \"poor scientific taste\" to choose the more complicated of two equally\r\n well-evidenced conceptions; and you will all agree with him. Truth in\r\n science is what gives us the maximum possible sum of satisfactions, taste\r\n included, but consistency both with previous truth and with novel fact is\r\n always the most imperious claimant.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n I have led you through a very sandy desert. But now, if I may be allowed\r\n so vulgar an expression, we begin to taste the milk in the cocoanut. Our\r\n rationalist critics here discharge their batteries upon us, and to reply\r\n to them will take us out from all this dryness into full sight of a\r\n momentous philosophical alternative.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n Our account of truth is an account of truths in the plural, of processes\r\n of leading, realized in rebus, and having only this quality in common,\r\n that they PAY. They pay by guiding us into or towards some part of a\r\n system that dips at numerous points into sense-percepts, which we may copy\r\n mentally or not, but with which at any rate we are now in the kind of\r\n commerce vaguely designated as verification. Truth for us is simply a\r\n collective name for verification-processes, just as health, wealth,\r\n strength, etc., are names for other processes connected with life, and\r\n also pursued because it pays to pursue them. Truth is MADE, just as\r\n health, wealth and strength are made, in the course of experience.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n Here rationalism is instantaneously up in arms against us. I can imagine a\r\n rationalist to talk as follows:\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n \"Truth is not made,\" he will say; \"it absolutely obtains, being a unique\r\n relation that does not wait upon any process, but shoots straight over the\r\n head of experience, and hits its reality every time. Our belief that yon\r\n thing on the wall is a clock is true already, altho no one in the whole\r\n history of the world should verify it. The bare quality of standing in\r\n that transcendent relation is what makes any thought true that possesses\r\n it, whether or not there be verification. You pragmatists put the cart\r\n before the horse in making truth\u0027s being reside in verification-processes.\r\n These are merely signs of its being, merely our lame ways of ascertaining\r\n after the fact, which of our ideas already has possessed the wondrous\r\n quality. The quality itself is timeless, like all essences and natures.\r\n Thoughts partake of it directly, as they partake of falsity or of\r\n irrelevancy. It can\u0027t be analyzed away into pragmatic consequences.\"\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n The whole plausibility of this rationalist tirade is due to the fact to\r\n which we have already paid so much attention. In our world, namely,\r\n abounding as it does in things of similar kinds and similarly associated,\r\n one verification serves for others of its kind, and one great use of\r\n knowing things is to be led not so much to them as to their associates,\r\n especially to human talk about them. The quality of truth, obtaining ante\r\n rem, pragmatically means, then, the fact that in such a world innumerable\r\n ideas work better by their indirect or possible than by their direct and\r\n actual verification. Truth ante rem means only verifiability, then; or\r\n else it is a case of the stock rationalist trick of treating the NAME of a\r\n concrete phenomenal reality as an independent prior entity, and placing it\r\n behind the reality as its explanation. Professor Mach quotes somewhere an\r\n epigram of Lessing\u0027s:\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n Sagt Hanschen Schlau zu Vetter Fritz, \"Wie kommt es, Vetter Fritzen, Dass\r\n grad\u0027 die Reichsten in der Welt, Das meiste Geld besitzen?\"\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n Hanschen Schlau here treats the principle \u0027wealth\u0027 as something distinct\r\n from the facts denoted by the man\u0027s being rich. It antedates them; the\r\n facts become only a sort of secondary coincidence with the rich man\u0027s\r\n essential nature.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n In the case of \u0027wealth\u0027 we all see the fallacy. We know that wealth is but\r\n a name for concrete processes that certain men\u0027s lives play a part in, and\r\n not a natural excellence found in Messrs. Rockefeller and Carnegie, but\r\n not in the rest of us.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n Like wealth, health also lives in rebus. It is a name for processes, as\r\n digestion, circulation, sleep, etc., that go on happily, tho in this\r\n instance we are more inclined to think of it as a principle and to say the\r\n man digests and sleeps so well BECAUSE he is so healthy.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n With \u0027strength\u0027 we are, I think, more rationalistic still, and decidedly\r\n inclined to treat it as an excellence pre-existing in the man and\r\n explanatory of the herculean performances of his muscles.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n With \u0027truth\u0027 most people go over the border entirely, and treat the\r\n rationalistic account as self-evident. But really all these words in TH\r\n are exactly similar. Truth exists ante rem just as much and as little as\r\n the other things do.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n The scholastics, following Aristotle, made much of the distinction between\r\n habit and act. Health in actu means, among other things, good sleeping and\r\n digesting. But a healthy man need not always be sleeping, or always\r\n digesting, any more than a wealthy man need be always handling money, or a\r\n strong man always lifting weights. All such qualities sink to the status\r\n of \u0027habits\u0027 between their times of exercise; and similarly truth becomes a\r\n habit of certain of our ideas and beliefs in their intervals of rest from\r\n their verifying activities. But those activities are the root of the whole\r\n matter, and the condition of there being any habit to exist in the\r\n intervals.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n \u0027The true,\u0027 to put it very briefly, is only the expedient in the way of\r\n our thinking, just as \u0027the right\u0027 is only the expedient in the way of our\r\n behaving. Expedient in almost any fashion; and expedient in the long run\r\n and on the whole of course; for what meets expediently all the experience\r\n in sight won\u0027t necessarily meet all farther experiences equally\r\n satisfactorily. Experience, as we know, has ways of BOILING OVER, and\r\n making us correct our present formulas.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n The \u0027absolutely\u0027 true, meaning what no farther experience will ever alter,\r\n is that ideal vanishing-point towards which we imagine that all our\r\n temporary truths will some day converge. It runs on all fours with the\r\n perfectly wise man, and with the absolutely complete experience; and, if\r\n these ideals are ever realized, they will all be realized together.\r\n Meanwhile we have to live to-day by what truth we can get to-day, and be\r\n ready to-morrow to call it falsehood. Ptolemaic astronomy, euclidean\r\n space, aristotelian logic, scholastic metaphysics, were expedient for\r\n centuries, but human experience has boiled over those limits, and we now\r\n call these things only relatively true, or true within those borders of\r\n experience. \u0027Absolutely\u0027 they are false; for we know that those limits\r\n were casual, and might have been transcended by past theorists just as\r\n they are by present thinkers.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n When new experiences lead to retrospective judgments, using the past\r\n tense, what these judgments utter WAS true, even tho no past thinker had\r\n been led there. We live forwards, a Danish thinker has said, but we\r\n understand backwards. The present sheds a backward light on the world\u0027s\r\n previous processes. They may have been truth-processes for the actors in\r\n them. They are not so for one who knows the later revelations of the\r\n story.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n This regulative notion of a potential better truth to be established\r\n later, possibly to be established some day absolutely, and having powers\r\n of retroactive legislation, turns its face, like all pragmatist notions,\r\n towards concreteness of fact, and towards the future. Like the\r\n half-truths, the absolute truth will have to be MADE, made as a relation\r\n incidental to the growth of a mass of verification-experience, to which\r\n the half-true ideas are all along contributing their quota.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n I have already insisted on the fact that truth is made largely out of\r\n previous truths. Men\u0027s beliefs at any time are so much experience funded.\r\n But the beliefs are themselves parts of the sum total of the world\u0027s\r\n experience, and become matter, therefore, for the next day\u0027s funding\r\n operations. So far as reality means experienceable reality, both it and\r\n the truths men gain about it are everlastingly in process of\r\n mutation-mutation towards a definite goal, it may be\u0026mdash;but still\r\n mutation.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n Mathematicians can solve problems with two variables. On the Newtonian\r\n theory, for instance, acceleration varies with distance, but distance also\r\n varies with acceleration. In the realm of truth-processes facts come\r\n independently and determine our beliefs provisionally. But these beliefs\r\n make us act, and as fast as they do so, they bring into sight or into\r\n existence new facts which re-determine the beliefs accordingly. So the\r\n whole coil and ball of truth, as it rolls up, is the product of a double\r\n influence. Truths emerge from facts; but they dip forward into facts again\r\n and add to them; which facts again create or reveal new truth (the word is\r\n indifferent) and so on indefinitely. The \u0027facts\u0027 themselves meanwhile are\r\n not TRUE. They simply ARE. Truth is the function of the beliefs that start\r\n and terminate among them.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n The case is like a snowball\u0027s growth, due as it is to the distribution of\r\n the snow on the one hand, and to the successive pushes of the boys on the\r\n other, with these factors co-determining each other incessantly.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n The most fateful point of difference between being a rationalist and being\r\n a pragmatist is now fully in sight. Experience is in mutation, and our\r\n psychological ascertainments of truth are in mutation\u0026mdash;so much\r\n rationalism will allow; but never that either reality itself or truth\r\n itself is mutable. Reality stands complete and ready-made from all\r\n eternity, rationalism insists, and the agreement of our ideas with it is\r\n that unique unanalyzable virtue in them of which she has already told us.\r\n As that intrinsic excellence, their truth has nothing to do with our\r\n experiences. It adds nothing to the content of experience. It makes no\r\n difference to reality itself; it is supervenient, inert, static, a\r\n reflexion merely. It doesn\u0027t EXIST, it HOLDS or OBTAINS, it belongs to\r\n another dimension from that of either facts or fact-relations, belongs, in\r\n short, to the epistemological dimension\u0026mdash;and with that big word\r\n rationalism closes the discussion.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n Thus, just as pragmatism faces forward to the future, so does rationalism\r\n here again face backward to a past eternity. True to her inveterate habit,\r\n rationalism reverts to \u0027principles,\u0027 and thinks that when an abstraction\r\n once is named, we own an oracular solution.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n The tremendous pregnancy in the way of consequences for life of this\r\n radical difference of outlook will only become apparent in my later\r\n lectures. I wish meanwhile to close this lecture by showing that\r\n rationalism\u0027s sublimity does not save it from inanity.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n When, namely, you ask rationalists, instead of accusing pragmatism of\r\n desecrating the notion of truth, to define it themselves by saying exactly\r\n what THEY understand by it, the only positive attempts I can think of are\r\n these two:\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n 1. \"Truth is just the system of propositions which have an un-conditional\r\n claim to be recognized as valid.\" [Footnote: A. E. Taylor, Philosophical\r\n Review, vol. xiv, p. 288.]\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n 2. Truth is a name for all those judgments which we find ourselves under\r\n obligation to make by a kind of imperative duty. [Footnote: H. Rickert,\r\n Der Gegenstand der Erkenntniss, chapter on \u0027Die Urtheilsnothwendigkeit.\u0027]\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n The first thing that strikes one in such definitions is their unutterable\r\n triviality. They are absolutely true, of course, but absolutely\r\n insignificant until you handle them pragmatically. What do you mean by\r\n \u0027claim\u0027 here, and what do you mean by \u0027duty\u0027? As summary names for the\r\n concrete reasons why thinking in true ways is overwhelmingly expedient and\r\n good for mortal men, it is all right to talk of claims on reality\u0027s part\r\n to be agreed with, and of obligations on our part to agree. We feel both\r\n the claims and the obligations, and we feel them for just those reasons.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n But the rationalists who talk of claim and obligation EXPRESSLY SAY THAT\r\n THEY HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH OUR PRACTICAL INTERESTS OR PERSONAL REASONS.\r\n Our reasons for agreeing are psychological facts, they say, relative to\r\n each thinker, and to the accidents of his life. They are his evidence\r\n merely, they are no part of the life of truth itself. That life transacts\r\n itself in a purely logical or epistemological, as distinguished from a\r\n psychological, dimension, and its claims antedate and exceed all personal\r\n motivations whatsoever. Tho neither man nor God should ever ascertain\r\n truth, the word would still have to be defined as that which OUGHT to be\r\n ascertained and recognized.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n There never was a more exquisite example of an idea abstracted from the\r\n concretes of experience and then used to oppose and negate what it was\r\n abstracted from.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n Philosophy and common life abound in similar instances. The\r\n \u0027sentimentalist fallacy\u0027 is to shed tears over abstract justice and\r\n generosity, beauty, etc., and never to know these qualities when you meet\r\n them in the street, because there the circumstances make them vulgar. Thus\r\n I read in the privately printed biography of an eminently rationalistic\r\n mind: \"It was strange that with such admiration for beauty in the\r\n abstract, my brother had no enthusiasm for fine architecture, for\r\n beautiful painting, or for flowers.\" And in almost the last philosophic\r\n work I have read, I find such passages as the following: \"Justice is\r\n ideal, solely ideal. Reason conceives that it ought to exist, but\r\n experience shows that it can-not. … Truth, which ought to be, cannot be.\r\n … Reason is deformed by experience. As soon as reason enters experience,\r\n it becomes contrary to reason.\"\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n The rationalist\u0027s fallacy here is exactly like the sentimentalist\u0027s. Both\r\n extract a quality from the muddy particulars of experience, and find it so\r\n pure when extracted that they contrast it with each and all its muddy\r\n instances as an opposite and higher nature. All the while it is THEIR\r\n nature. It is the nature of truths to be validated, verified. It pays for\r\n our ideas to be validated. Our obligation to seek truth is part of our\r\n general obligation to do what pays. The payments true ideas bring are the\r\n sole why of our duty to follow them.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n Identical whys exist in the case of wealth and health. Truth makes no\r\n other kind of claim and imposes no other kind of ought than health and\r\n wealth do. All these claims are conditional; the concrete benefits we gain\r\n are what we mean by calling the pursuit a duty. In the case of truth,\r\n untrue beliefs work as perniciously in the long run as true beliefs work\r\n beneficially. Talking abstractly, the quality \u0027true\u0027 may thus be said to\r\n grow absolutely precious, and the quality \u0027untrue\u0027 absolutely damnable:\r\n the one may be called good, the other bad, unconditionally. We ought to\r\n think the true, we ought to shun the false, imperatively.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n But if we treat all this abstraction literally and oppose it to its mother\r\n soil in experience, see what a preposterous position we work ourselves\r\n into.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n We cannot then take a step forward in our actual thinking. When shall I\r\n acknowledge this truth and when that? Shall the acknowledgment be loud?\u0026mdash;or\r\n silent? If sometimes loud, sometimes silent, which NOW? When may a truth\r\n go into cold-storage in the encyclopedia? and when shall it come out for\r\n battle? Must I constantly be repeating the truth \u0027twice two are four\u0027\r\n because of its eternal claim on recognition? or is it sometimes\r\n irrelevant? Must my thoughts dwell night and day on my personal sins and\r\n blemishes, because I truly have them?\u0026mdash;or may I sink and ignore them\r\n in order to be a decent social unit, and not a mass of morbid melancholy\r\n and apology?\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n It is quite evident that our obligation to acknowledge truth, so far from\r\n being unconditional, is tremendously conditioned. Truth with a big T, and\r\n in the singular, claims abstractly to be recognized, of course; but\r\n concrete truths in the plural need be recognized only when their\r\n recognition is expedient. A truth must always be preferred to a falsehood\r\n when both relate to the situation; but when neither does, truth is as\r\n little of a duty as falsehood. If you ask me what o\u0027clock it is and I tell\r\n you that I live at 95 Irving Street, my answer may indeed be true, but you\r\n don\u0027t see why it is my duty to give it. A false address would be as much\r\n to the purpose.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n With this admission that there are conditions that limit the application\r\n of the abstract imperative, THE PRAGMATISTIC TREATMENT OF TRUTH SWEEPS\r\n BACK UPON US IN ITS FULNESS. Our duty to agree with reality is seen to be\r\n grounded in a perfect jungle of concrete expediencies.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n When Berkeley had explained what people meant by matter, people thought\r\n that he denied matter\u0027s existence. When Messrs. Schiller and Dewey now\r\n explain what people mean by truth, they are accused of denying ITS\r\n existence. These pragmatists destroy all objective standards, critics say,\r\n and put foolishness and wisdom on one level. A favorite formula for\r\n describing Mr. Schiller\u0027s doctrines and mine is that we are persons who\r\n think that by saying whatever you find it pleasant to say and calling it\r\n truth you fulfil every pragmatistic requirement.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n I leave it to you to judge whether this be not an impudent slander. Pent\r\n in, as the pragmatist more than anyone else sees himself to be, between\r\n the whole body of funded truths squeezed from the past and the coercions\r\n of the world of sense about him, who so well as he feels the immense\r\n pressure of objective control under which our minds perform their\r\n operations? If anyone imagines that this law is lax, let him keep its\r\n commandment one day, says Emerson. We have heard much of late of the uses\r\n of the imagination in science. It is high time to urge the use of a little\r\n imagination in philosophy. The unwillingness of some of our critics to\r\n read any but the silliest of possible meanings into our statements is as\r\n discreditable to their imaginations as anything I know in recent\r\n philosophic history. Schiller says the true is that which \u0027works.\u0027\r\n Thereupon he is treated as one who limits verification to the lowest\r\n material utilities. Dewey says truth is what gives \u0027satisfaction.\u0027 He is\r\n treated as one who believes in calling everything true which, if it were\r\n true, would be pleasant.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n Our critics certainly need more imagination of realities. I have honestly\r\n tried to stretch my own imagination and to read the best possible meaning\r\n into the rationalist conception, but I have to confess that it still\r\n completely baffles me. The notion of a reality calling on us to \u0027agree\u0027\r\n with it, and that for no reasons, but simply because its claim is\r\n \u0027unconditional\u0027 or \u0027transcendent,\u0027 is one that I can make neither head nor\r\n tail of. I try to imagine myself as the sole reality in the world, and\r\n then to imagine what more I would \u0027claim\u0027 if I were allowed to. If you\r\n suggest the possibility of my claiming that a mind should come into being\r\n from out of the void inane and stand and COPY me, I can indeed imagine\r\n what the copying might mean, but I can conjure up no motive. What good it\r\n would do me to be copied, or what good it would do that mind to copy me,\r\n if farther consequences are expressly and in principle ruled out as\r\n motives for the claim (as they are by our rationalist authorities) I\r\n cannot fathom. When the Irishman\u0027s admirers ran him along to the place of\r\n banquet in a sedan chair with no bottom, he said, \"Faith, if it wasn\u0027t for\r\n the honor of the thing, I might as well have come on foot.\" So here: but\r\n for the honor of the thing, I might as well have remained uncopied.\r\n Copying is one genuine mode of knowing (which for some strange reason our\r\n contemporary transcendentalists seem to be tumbling over each other to\r\n repudiate); but when we get beyond copying, and fall back on unnamed forms\r\n of agreeing that are expressly denied to be either copyings or leadings or\r\n fittings, or any other processes pragmatically definable, the WHAT of the\r\n \u0027agreement\u0027 claimed becomes as unintelligible as the why of it. Neither\r\n content nor motive can be imagined for it. It is an absolutely meaningless\r\n abstraction. [Footnote: I am not forgetting that Professor Rickert long\r\n ago gave up the whole notion of truth being founded on agreement with\r\n reality. Reality, according to him, is whatever agrees with truth, and\r\n truth is founded solely on our primal duty. This fantastic flight,\r\n together with Mr. Joachim\u0027s candid confession of failure in his book The\r\n Nature of Truth, seems to me to mark the bankruptcy of rationalism when\r\n dealing with this subject. Rickert deals with part of the pragmatistic\r\n position under the head of what he calls \u0027Relativismus.\u0027 I cannot discuss\r\n his text here. Suffice it to say that his argumentation in that chapter is\r\n so feeble as to seem almost incredible in so generally able a writer.]\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n Surely in this field of truth it is the pragmatists and not the\r\n rationalists who are the more genuine defenders of the universe\u0027s\r\n rationality.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n \u003cbr /\u003e\u003cbr /\u003e\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003chr /\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n \u003ca name=\"link2H_4_0009\" id=\"link2H_4_0009\"\u003e \u003c/a\u003e\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cdiv style=\"height: 4em;\"\u003e\r\n \u003cbr /\u003e\u003cbr /\u003e\u003cbr /\u003e\u003cbr /\u003e\r\n \u003c/div\u003e\r\n \u003ch2\u003e\r\n Lecture VII. \u0026mdash; Pragmatism and Humanism\r\n \u003c/h2\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n What hardens the heart of everyone I approach with the view of truth\r\n sketched in my last lecture is that typical idol of the tribe, the notion\r\n of THE Truth, conceived as the one answer, determinate and complete, to\r\n the one fixed enigma which the world is believed to propound. For popular\r\n tradition, it is all the better if the answer be oracular, so as itself to\r\n awaken wonder as an enigma of the second order, veiling rather than\r\n revealing what its profundities are supposed to contain. All the great\r\n single-word answers to the world\u0027s riddle, such as God, the One, Reason,\r\n Law, Spirit, Matter, Nature, Polarity, the Dialectic Process, the Idea,\r\n the Self, the Oversoul, draw the admiration that men have lavished on them\r\n from this oracular role. By amateurs in philosophy and professionals\r\n alike, the universe is represented as a queer sort of petrified sphinx\r\n whose appeal to man consists in a monotonous challenge to his divining\r\n powers. THE Truth: what a perfect idol of the rationalistic mind! I read\r\n in an old letter\u0026mdash;from a gifted friend who died too young\u0026mdash;these\r\n words: \"In everything, in science, art, morals and religion, there MUST be\r\n one system that is right and EVERY other wrong.\" How characteristic of the\r\n enthusiasm of a certain stage of youth! At twenty-one we rise to such a\r\n challenge and expect to find the system. It never occurs to most of us\r\n even later that the question \u0027what is THE truth?\u0027 is no real question\r\n (being irrelative to all conditions) and that the whole notion of THE\r\n truth is an abstraction from the fact of truths in the plural, a mere\r\n useful summarizing phrase like THE Latin Language or THE Law.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n Common-law judges sometimes talk about the law, and school-masters talk\r\n about the latin tongue, in a way to make their hearers think they mean\r\n entities pre-existent to the decisions or to the words and syntax,\r\n determining them unequivocally and requiring them to obey. But the\r\n slightest exercise of reflexion makes us see that, instead of being\r\n principles of this kind, both law and latin are results. Distinctions\r\n between the lawful and the unlawful in conduct, or between the correct and\r\n incorrect in speech, have grown up incidentally among the interactions of\r\n men\u0027s experiences in detail; and in no other way do distinctions between\r\n the true and the false in belief ever grow up. Truth grafts itself on\r\n previous truth, modifying it in the process, just as idiom grafts itself\r\n on previous idiom, and law on previous law. Given previous law and a novel\r\n case, and the judge will twist them into fresh law. Previous idiom; new\r\n slang or metaphor or oddity that hits the public taste:\u0026mdash;and presto,\r\n a new idiom is made. Previous truth; fresh facts:\u0026mdash;and our mind finds\r\n a new truth.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n All the while, however, we pretend that the eternal is unrolling, that the\r\n one previous justice, grammar or truth is simply fulgurating, and not\r\n being made. But imagine a youth in the courtroom trying cases with his\r\n abstract notion of \u0027the\u0027 law, or a censor of speech let loose among the\r\n theatres with his idea of \u0027the\u0027 mother-tongue, or a professor setting up\r\n to lecture on the actual universe with his rationalistic notion of \u0027the\r\n Truth\u0027 with a big T, and what progress do they make? Truth, law, and\r\n language fairly boil away from them at the least touch of novel fact.\r\n These things MAKE THEMSELVES as we go. Our rights, wrongs, prohibitions,\r\n penalties, words, forms, idioms, beliefs, are so many new creations that\r\n add themselves as fast as history proceeds. Far from being antecedent\r\n principles that animate the process, law, language, truth are but abstract\r\n names for its results.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n Laws and languages at any rate are thus seen to be man-made: things. Mr.\r\n Schiller applies the analogy to beliefs, and proposes the name of\r\n \u0027Humanism\u0027 for the doctrine that to an unascertainable extent our truths\r\n are man-made products too. Human motives sharpen all our questions, human\r\n satisfactions lurk in all our answers, all our formulas have a human\r\n twist. This element is so inextricable in the products that Mr. Schiller\r\n sometimes seems almost to leave it an open question whether there be\r\n anything else. \"The world,\" he says, \"is essentially [u lambda nu], it is\r\n what we make of it. It is fruitless to define it by what it originally was\r\n or by what it is apart from us; it IS what is made of it. Hence … the\r\n world is PLASTIC.\" [Footnote: Personal Idealism, p. 60.] He adds that we\r\n can learn the limits of the plasticity only by trying, and that we ought\r\n to start as if it were wholly plastic, acting methodically on that\r\n assumption, and stopping only when we are decisively rebuked.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n This is Mr. Schiller\u0027s butt-end-foremost statement of the humanist\r\n position, and it has exposed him to severe attack. I mean to defend the\r\n humanist position in this lecture, so I will insinuate a few remarks at\r\n this point.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n Mr. Schiller admits as emphatically as anyone the presence of resisting\r\n factors in every actual experience of truth-making, of which the new-made\r\n special truth must take account, and with which it has perforce to\r\n \u0027agree.\u0027 All our truths are beliefs about \u0027Reality\u0027; and in any particular\r\n belief the reality acts as something independent, as a thing FOUND, not\r\n manufactured. Let me here recall a bit of my last lecture.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n \u0027REALITY\u0027 IS IN GENERAL WHAT TRUTHS HAVE TO TAKE ACCOUNT OF; [Footnote:\r\n Mr. Taylor in his Elements of Metaphysics uses this excellent pragmatic\r\n definition.] and the FIRST part of reality from this point of view is the\r\n flux of our sensations. Sensations are forced upon us, coming we know not\r\n whence. Over their nature, order, and quantity we have as good as no\r\n control. THEY are neither true nor false; they simply ARE. It is only what\r\n we say about them, only the names we give them, our theories of their\r\n source and nature and remote relations, that may be true or not.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n The SECOND part of reality, as something that our beliefs must also\r\n obediently take account of, is the RELATIONS that obtain between our\r\n sensations or between their copies in our minds. This part falls into two\r\n sub-parts: 1) the relations that are mutable and accidental, as those of\r\n date and place; and 2) those that are fixed and essential because they are\r\n grounded on the inner natures of their terms\u0026mdash;such as likeness and\r\n unlikeness. Both sorts of relation are matters of immediate perception.\r\n Both are \u0027facts.\u0027 But it is the latter kind of fact that forms the more\r\n important sub-part of reality for our theories of knowledge. Inner\r\n relations namely are \u0027eternal,\u0027 are perceived whenever their sensible\r\n terms are compared; and of them our thought\u0026mdash;mathematical and logical\r\n thought, so-called\u0026mdash;must eternally take account.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n The THIRD part of reality, additional to these perceptions (tho largely\r\n based upon them), is the PREVIOUS TRUTHS of which every new inquiry takes\r\n account. This third part is a much less obdurately resisting factor: it\r\n often ends by giving way. In speaking of these three portions of reality\r\n as at all times controlling our belief\u0027s formation, I am only reminding\r\n you of what we heard in our last hour.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n Now however fixed these elements of reality may be, we still have a\r\n certain freedom in our dealings with them. Take our sensations. THAT they\r\n are is undoubtedly beyond our control; but WHICH we attend to, note, and\r\n make emphatic in our conclusions depends on our own interests; and,\r\n according as we lay the emphasis here or there, quite different\r\n formulations of truth result. We read the same facts differently.\r\n \u0027Waterloo,\u0027 with the same fixed details, spells a \u0027victory\u0027 for an\r\n englishman; for a frenchman it spells a \u0027defeat.\u0027 So, for an optimist\r\n philosopher the universe spells victory, for a pessimist, defeat.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n What we say about reality thus depends on the perspective into which we\r\n throw it. The THAT of it is its own; but the WHAT depends on the WHICH;\r\n and the which depends on US. Both the sensational and the relational parts\r\n of reality are dumb: they say absolutely nothing about themselves. We it\r\n is who have to speak for them. This dumbness of sensations has led such\r\n intellectualists as T.H. Green and Edward Caird to shove them almost\r\n beyond the pale of philosophic recognition, but pragmatists refuse to go\r\n so far. A sensation is rather like a client who has given his case to a\r\n lawyer and then has passively to listen in the courtroom to whatever\r\n account of his affairs, pleasant or unpleasant, the lawyer finds it most\r\n expedient to give.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n Hence, even in the field of sensation, our minds exert a certain arbitrary\r\n choice. By our inclusions and omissions we trace the field\u0027s extent; by\r\n our emphasis we mark its foreground and its background; by our order we\r\n read it in this direction or in that. We receive in short the block of\r\n marble, but we carve the statue ourselves.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n This applies to the \u0027eternal\u0027 parts of reality as well: we shuffle our\r\n perceptions of intrinsic relation and arrange them just as freely. We read\r\n them in one serial order or another, class them in this way or in that,\r\n treat one or the other as more fundamental, until our beliefs about them\r\n form those bodies of truth known as logics, geometries, or arithmetics, in\r\n each and all of which the form and order in which the whole is cast is\r\n flagrantly man-made.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n Thus, to say nothing of the new FACTS which men add to the matter of\r\n reality by the acts of their own lives, they have already impressed their\r\n mental forms on that whole third of reality which I have called \u0027previous\r\n truths.\u0027 Every hour brings its new percepts, its own facts of sensation\r\n and relation, to be truly taken account of; but the whole of our PAST\r\n dealings with such facts is already funded in the previous truths. It is\r\n therefore only the smallest and recentest fraction of the first two parts\r\n of reality that comes to us without the human touch, and that fraction has\r\n immediately to become humanized in the sense of being squared,\r\n assimilated, or in some way adapted, to the humanized mass already there.\r\n As a matter of fact we can hardly take in an impression at all, in the\r\n absence of a pre-conception of what impressions there may possibly be.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n When we talk of reality \u0027independent\u0027 of human thinking, then, it seems a\r\n thing very hard to find. It reduces to the notion of what is just entering\r\n into experience, and yet to be named, or else to some imagined aboriginal\r\n presence in experience, before any belief about the presence had arisen,\r\n before any human conception had been applied. It is what is absolutely\r\n dumb and evanescent, the merely ideal limit of our minds. We may glimpse\r\n it, but we never grasp it; what we grasp is always some substitute for it\r\n which previous human thinking has peptonized and cooked for our\r\n consumption. If so vulgar an expression were allowed us, we might say that\r\n wherever we find it, it has been already FAKED. This is what Mr. Schiller\r\n has in mind when he calls independent reality a mere unresisting [u lambda\r\n nu], which IS only to be made over by us.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n That is Mr. Schiller\u0027s belief about the sensible core of reality. We\r\n \u0027encounter\u0027 it (in Mr. Bradley\u0027s words) but don\u0027t possess it.\r\n Superficially this sounds like Kant\u0027s view; but between categories\r\n fulminated before nature began, and categories gradually forming\r\n themselves in nature\u0027s presence, the whole chasm between rationalism and\r\n empiricism yawns. To the genuine \u0027Kantianer\u0027 Schiller will always be to\r\n Kant as a satyr to Hyperion.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n Other pragmatists may reach more positive beliefs about the sensible core\r\n of reality. They may think to get at it in its independent nature, by\r\n peeling off the successive man-made wrappings. They may make theories that\r\n tell us where it comes from and all about it; and if these theories work\r\n satisfactorily they will be true. The transcendental idealists say there\r\n is no core, the finally completed wrapping being reality and truth in one.\r\n Scholasticism still teaches that the core is \u0027matter.\u0027 Professor Bergson,\r\n Heymans, Strong, and others, believe in the core and bravely try to define\r\n it. Messrs. Dewey and Schiller treat it as a \u0027limit.\u0027 Which is the truer\r\n of all these diverse accounts, or of others comparable with them, unless\r\n it be the one that finally proves the most satisfactory? On the one hand\r\n there will stand reality, on the other an account of it which proves\r\n impossible to better or to alter. If the impossibility prove permanent,\r\n the truth of the account will be absolute. Other content of truth than\r\n this I can find nowhere. If the anti-pragmatists have any other meaning,\r\n let them for heaven\u0027s sake reveal it, let them grant us access to it!\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n Not BEING reality, but only our belief ABOUT reality, it will contain\r\n human elements, but these will KNOW the non-human element, in the only\r\n sense in which there can be knowledge of anything. Does the river make its\r\n banks, or do the banks make the river? Does a man walk with his right leg\r\n or with his left leg more essentially? Just as impossible may it be to\r\n separate the real from the human factors in the growth of our cognitive\r\n experience.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n Let this stand as a first brief indication of the humanistic position.\r\n Does it seem paradoxical? If so, I will try to make it plausible by a few\r\n illustrations, which will lead to a fuller acquaintance with the subject.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n In many familiar objects everyone will recognize the human element. We\r\n conceive a given reality in this way or in that, to suit our purpose, and\r\n the reality passively submits to the conception. You can take the number\r\n 27 as the cube of 3, or as the product of 3 and 9, or as 26 PLUS 1, or 100\r\n MINUS 73, or in countless other ways, of which one will be just as true as\r\n another. You can take a chessboard as black squares on a white ground, or\r\n as white squares on a black ground, and neither conception is a false one.\r\n You can treat the adjoined figure [Figure of a \u0027Star of David\u0027] as a star,\r\n as two big triangles crossing each other, as a hexagon with legs set up on\r\n its angles, as six equal triangles hanging together by their tips, etc.\r\n All these treatments are true treatments\u0026mdash;the sensible THAT upon the\r\n paper resists no one of them. You can say of a line that it runs east, or\r\n you can say that it runs west, and the line per se accepts both\r\n descriptions without rebelling at the inconsistency.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n We carve out groups of stars in the heavens, and call them constellations,\r\n and the stars patiently suffer us to do so\u0026mdash;tho if they knew what we\r\n were doing, some of them might feel much surprised at the partners we had\r\n given them. We name the same constellation diversely, as Charles\u0027s Wain,\r\n the Great Bear, or the Dipper. None of the names will be false, and one\r\n will be as true as another, for all are applicable.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n In all these cases we humanly make an addition to some sensible reality,\r\n and that reality tolerates the addition. All the additions \u0027agree\u0027 with\r\n the reality; they fit it, while they build it out. No one of them is\r\n false. Which may be treated as the more true, depends altogether on the\r\n human use of it. If the 27 is a number of dollars which I find in a drawer\r\n where I had left 28, it is 28 minus 1. If it is the number of inches in a\r\n shelf which I wish to insert into a cupboard 26 inches wide, it is 26 plus\r\n 1. If I wish to ennoble the heavens by the constellations I see there,\r\n \u0027Charles\u0027s Wain\u0027 would be more true than \u0027Dipper.\u0027 My friend Frederick\r\n Myers was humorously indignant that that prodigious star-group should\r\n remind us Americans of nothing but a culinary utensil.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n What shall we call a THING anyhow? It seems quite arbitrary, for we carve\r\n out everything, just as we carve out constellations, to suit our human\r\n purposes. For me, this whole \u0027audience\u0027 is one thing, which grows now\r\n restless, now attentive. I have no use at present for its individual\r\n units, so I don\u0027t consider them. So of an \u0027army,\u0027 of a \u0027nation.\u0027 But in\r\n your own eyes, ladies and gentlemen, to call you \u0027audience\u0027 is an\r\n accidental way of taking you. The permanently real things for you are your\r\n individual persons. To an anatomist, again, those persons are but\r\n organisms, and the real things are the organs. Not the organs, so much as\r\n their constituent cells, say the histologists; not the cells, but their\r\n molecules, say in turn the chemists.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n We break the flux of sensible reality into things, then, at our will. We\r\n create the subjects of our true as well as of our false propositions.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n We create the predicates also. Many of the predicates of things express\r\n only the relations of the things to us and to our feelings. Such\r\n predicates of course are human additions. Caesar crossed the Rubicon, and\r\n was a menace to Rome\u0027s freedom. He is also an American school-room pest,\r\n made into one by the reaction of our schoolboys on his writings. The added\r\n predicate is as true of him as the earlier ones.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n You see how naturally one comes to the humanistic principle: you can\u0027t\r\n weed out the human contribution. Our nouns and adjectives are all\r\n humanized heirlooms, and in the theories we build them into, the inner\r\n order and arrangement is wholly dictated by human considerations,\r\n intellectual consistency being one of them. Mathematics and logic\r\n themselves are fermenting with human rearrangements; physics, astronomy\r\n and biology follow massive cues of preference. We plunge forward into the\r\n field of fresh experience with the beliefs our ancestors and we have made\r\n already; these determine what we notice; what we notice determines what we\r\n do; what we do again determines what we experience; so from one thing to\r\n another, altho the stubborn fact remains that there IS a sensible flux,\r\n what is true of it seems from first to last to be largely a matter of our\r\n own creation.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n We build the flux out inevitably. The great question is: does it, with our\r\n additions, rise or fall in value? Are the additions WORTHY or UNWORTHY?\r\n Suppose a universe composed of seven stars, and nothing else but three\r\n human witnesses and their critic. One witness names the stars \u0027Great\r\n Bear\u0027; one calls them \u0027Charles\u0027s Wain\u0027; one calls them the \u0027Dipper.\u0027 Which\r\n human addition has made the best universe of the given stellar material?\r\n If Frederick Myers were the critic, he would have no hesitation in\r\n \u0027turning-down\u0027 the American witness.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n Lotze has in several places made a deep suggestion. We naively assume, he\r\n says, a relation between reality and our minds which may be just the\r\n opposite of the true one. Reality, we naturally think, stands ready-made\r\n and complete, and our intellects supervene with the one simple duty of\r\n describing it as it is already. But may not our descriptions, Lotze asks,\r\n be themselves important additions to reality? And may not previous reality\r\n itself be there, far less for the purpose of reappearing unaltered in our\r\n knowledge, than for the very purpose of stimulating our minds to such\r\n additions as shall enhance the universe\u0027s total value. \"Die erhohung des\r\n vorgefundenen daseins\" is a phrase used by Professor Eucken somewhere,\r\n which reminds one of this suggestion by the great Lotze.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n It is identically our pragmatistic conception. In our cognitive as well as\r\n in our active life we are creative. We ADD, both to the subject and to the\r\n predicate part of reality. The world stands really malleable, waiting to\r\n receive its final touches at our hands. Like the kingdom of heaven, it\r\n suffers human violence willingly. Man ENGENDERS truths upon it.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n No one can deny that such a role would add both to our dignity and to our\r\n responsibility as thinkers. To some of us it proves a most inspiring\r\n notion. Signer Papini, the leader of italian pragmatism, grows fairly\r\n dithyrambic over the view that it opens, of man\u0027s divinely-creative\r\n functions.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n The import of the difference between pragmatism and rationalism is now in\r\n sight throughout its whole extent. The essential contrast is that for\r\n rationalism reality is ready-made and complete from all eternity, while\r\n for pragmatism it is still in the making, and awaits part of its\r\n complexion from the future. On the one side the universe is absolutely\r\n secure, on the other it is still pursuing its adventures.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n We have got into rather deep water with this humanistic view, and it is no\r\n wonder that misunderstanding gathers round it. It is accused of being a\r\n doctrine of caprice. Mr. Bradley, for example, says that a humanist, if he\r\n understood his own doctrine, would have to \"hold any end however perverted\r\n to be rational if I insist on it personally, and any idea however mad to\r\n be the truth if only some one is resolved that he will have it so.\" The\r\n humanist view of \u0027reality,\u0027 as something resisting, yet malleable, which\r\n controls our thinking as an energy that must be taken \u0027account\u0027 of\r\n incessantly (tho not necessarily merely COPIED) is evidently a difficult\r\n one to introduce to novices. The situation reminds me of one that I have\r\n personally gone through. I once wrote an essay on our right to believe,\r\n which I unluckily called the WILL to Believe. All the critics, neglecting\r\n the essay, pounced upon the title. Psychologically it was impossible,\r\n morally it was iniquitous. The \"will to deceive,\" the \"will to\r\n make-believe,\" were wittily proposed as substitutes for it.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n THE ALTERNATIVE BETWEEN PRAGMATISM AND RATIONALISM, IN THE SHAPE IN WHICH\r\n WE NOW HAVE IT BEFORE US, IS NO LONGER A QUESTION IN THE THEORY OF\r\n KNOWLEDGE, IT CONCERNS THE STRUCTURE OF THE UNIVERSE ITSELF.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n On the pragmatist side we have only one edition of the universe,\r\n unfinished, growing in all sorts of places, especially in the places where\r\n thinking beings are at work.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n On the rationalist side we have a universe in many editions, one real one,\r\n the infinite folio, or edition de luxe, eternally complete; and then the\r\n various finite editions, full of false readings, distorted and mutilated\r\n each in its own way.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n So the rival metaphysical hypotheses of pluralism and monism here come\r\n back upon us. I will develope their differences during the remainder of\r\n our hour.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n And first let me say that it is impossible not to see a temperamental\r\n difference at work in the choice of sides. The rationalist mind, radically\r\n taken, is of a doctrinaire and authoritative complexion: the phrase \u0027must\r\n be\u0027 is ever on its lips. The belly-band of its universe must be tight. A\r\n radical pragmatist on the other hand is a happy-go-lucky anarchistic sort\r\n of creature. If he had to live in a tub like Diogenes he wouldn\u0027t mind at\r\n all if the hoops were loose and the staves let in the sun.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n Now the idea of this loose universe affects your typical rationalists in\r\n much the same way as \u0027freedom of the press\u0027 might affect a veteran\r\n official in the russian bureau of censorship; or as \u0027simplified spelling\u0027\r\n might affect an elderly schoolmistress. It affects him as the swarm of\r\n protestant sects affects a papist onlooker. It appears as backboneless and\r\n devoid of principle as \u0027opportunism\u0027 in politics appears to an\r\n old-fashioned french legitimist, or to a fanatical believer in the divine\r\n right of the people.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n For pluralistic pragmatism, truth grows up inside of all the finite\r\n experiences. They lean on each other, but the whole of them, if such a\r\n whole there be, leans on nothing. All \u0027homes\u0027 are in finite experience;\r\n finite experience as such is homeless. Nothing outside of the flux secures\r\n the issue of it. It can hope salvation only from its own intrinsic\r\n promises and potencies.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n To rationalists this describes a tramp and vagrant world, adrift in space,\r\n with neither elephant nor tortoise to plant the sole of its foot upon. It\r\n is a set of stars hurled into heaven without even a centre of gravity to\r\n pull against. In other spheres of life it is true that we have got used to\r\n living in a state of relative insecurity. The authority of \u0027the State,\u0027\r\n and that of an absolute \u0027moral law,\u0027 have resolved themselves into\r\n expediencies, and holy church has resolved itself into \u0027meeting-houses.\u0027\r\n Not so as yet within the philosophic class-rooms. A universe with such as\r\n US contributing to create its truth, a world delivered to OUR opportunisms\r\n and OUR private judgments! Home-rule for Ireland would be a millennium in\r\n comparison. We\u0027re no more fit for such a part than the Filipinos are \u0027fit\r\n for self-government.\u0027 Such a world would not be RESPECTABLE,\r\n philosophically. It is a trunk without a tag, a dog without a collar, in\r\n the eyes of most professors of philosophy.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n What then would tighten this loose universe, according to the professors?\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n Something to support the finite many, to tie it to, to unify and anchor\r\n it. Something unexposed to accident, something eternal and unalterable.\r\n The mutable in experience must be founded on immutability. Behind our de\r\n facto world, our world in act, there must be a de jure duplicate fixed and\r\n previous, with all that can happen here already there in posse, every drop\r\n of blood, every smallest item, appointed and provided, stamped and\r\n branded, without chance of variation. The negatives that haunt our ideals\r\n here below must be themselves negated in the absolutely Real. This alone\r\n makes the universe solid. This is the resting deep. We live upon the\r\n stormy surface; but with this our anchor holds, for it grapples rocky\r\n bottom. This is Wordsworth\u0027s \"central peace subsisting at the heart of\r\n endless agitation.\" This is Vivekananda\u0027s mystical One of which I read to\r\n you. This is Reality with the big R, reality that makes the timeless\r\n claim, reality to which defeat can\u0027t happen. This is what the men of\r\n principles, and in general all the men whom I called tender-minded in my\r\n first lecture, think themselves obliged to postulate.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n And this, exactly this, is what the tough-minded of that lecture find\r\n themselves moved to call a piece of perverse abstraction-worship. The\r\n tough-minded are the men whose alpha and omega are FACTS. Behind the bare\r\n phenomenal facts, as my tough-minded old friend Chauncey Wright, the great\r\n Harvard empiricist of my youth, used to say, there is NOTHING. When a\r\n rationalist insists that behind the facts there is the GROUND of the\r\n facts, the POSSIBILITY of the facts, the tougher empiricists accuse him of\r\n taking the mere name and nature of a fact and clapping it behind the fact\r\n as a duplicate entity to make it possible. That such sham grounds are\r\n often invoked is notorious. At a surgical operation I heard a bystander\r\n ask a doctor why the patient breathed so deeply. \"Because ether is a\r\n respiratory stimulant,\" the doctor answered. \"Ah!\" said the questioner, as\r\n if relieved by the explanation. But this is like saying that cyanide of\r\n potassium kills because it is a \u0027poison,\u0027 or that it is so cold to-night\r\n because it is \u0027winter,\u0027 or that we have five fingers because we are\r\n \u0027pentadactyls.\u0027 These are but names for the facts, taken from the facts,\r\n and then treated as previous and explanatory. The tender-minded notion of\r\n an absolute reality is, according to the radically tough-minded, framed on\r\n just this pattern. It is but our summarizing name for the whole spread-out\r\n and strung-along mass of phenomena, treated as if it were a different\r\n entity, both one and previous.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n You see how differently people take things. The world we live in exists\r\n diffused and distributed, in the form of an indefinitely numerous lot of\r\n eaches, coherent in all sorts of ways and degrees; and the tough-minded\r\n are perfectly willing to keep them at that valuation. They can stand that\r\n kind of world, their temper being well adapted to its insecurity. Not so\r\n the tender-minded party. They must back the world we find ourselves born\r\n into by \"another and a better\" world in which the eaches form an All and\r\n the All a One that logically presupposes, co-implicates, and secures each\r\n EACH without exception.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n Must we as pragmatists be radically tough-minded? or can we treat the\r\n absolute edition of the world as a legitimate hypothesis? It is certainly\r\n legitimate, for it is thinkable, whether we take it in its abstract or in\r\n its concrete shape.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n By taking it abstractly I mean placing it behind our finite life as we\r\n place the word \u0027winter\u0027 behind to-night\u0027s cold weather. \u0027Winter\u0027 is only\r\n the name for a certain number of days which we find generally\r\n characterized by cold weather, but it guarantees nothing in that line, for\r\n our thermometer to-morrow may soar into the 70\u0027s. Nevertheless the word is\r\n a useful one to plunge forward with into the stream of our experience. It\r\n cuts off certain probabilities and sets up others: you can put away your\r\n straw-hats; you can unpack your arctics. It is a summary of things to look\r\n for. It names a part of nature\u0027s habits, and gets you ready for their\r\n continuation. It is a definite instrument abstracted from experience, a\r\n conceptual reality that you must take account of, and which reflects you\r\n totally back into sensible realities. The pragmatist is the last person to\r\n deny the reality of such abstractions. They are so much past experience\r\n funded.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n But taking the absolute edition of the world concretely means a different\r\n hypothesis. Rationalists take it concretely and OPPOSE it to the world\u0027s\r\n finite editions. They give it a particular nature. It is perfect,\r\n finished. Everything known there is known along with everything else;\r\n here, where ignorance reigns, far otherwise. If there is want there, there\r\n also is the satisfaction provided. Here all is process; that world is\r\n timeless. Possibilities obtain in our world; in the absolute world, where\r\n all that is NOT is from eternity impossible, and all that IS is necessary,\r\n the category of possibility has no application. In this world crimes and\r\n horrors are regrettable. In that totalized world regret obtains not, for\r\n \"the existence of ill in the temporal order is the very condition of the\r\n perfection of the eternal order.\"\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n Once more, either hypothesis is legitimate in pragmatist eyes, for either\r\n has its uses. Abstractly, or taken like the word winter, as a memorandum\r\n of past experience that orients us towards the future, the notion of the\r\n absolute world is indispensable. Concretely taken, it is also\r\n indispensable, at least to certain minds, for it determines them\r\n religiously, being often a thing to change their lives by, and by changing\r\n their lives, to change whatever in the outer order depends on them.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n We cannot therefore methodically join the tough minds in their rejection\r\n of the whole notion of a world beyond our finite experience. One\r\n misunderstanding of pragmatism is to identify it with positivistic\r\n tough-mindedness, to suppose that it scorns every rationalistic notion as\r\n so much jabber and gesticulation, that it loves intellectual anarchy as\r\n such and prefers a sort of wolf-world absolutely unpent and wild and\r\n without a master or a collar to any philosophic class-room product,\r\n whatsoever. I have said so much in these lectures against the over-tender\r\n forms of rationalism, that I am prepared for some misunderstanding here,\r\n but I confess that the amount of it that I have found in this very\r\n audience surprises me, for I have simultaneously defended rationalistic\r\n hypotheses so far as these re-direct you fruitfully into experience.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n For instance I receive this morning this question on a post-card: \"Is a\r\n pragmatist necessarily a complete materialist and agnostic?\" One of my\r\n oldest friends, who ought to know me better, writes me a letter that\r\n accuses the pragmatism I am recommending, of shutting out all wider\r\n metaphysical views and condemning us to the most terre-a-terre naturalism.\r\n Let me read you some extracts from it.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n \"It seems to me,\" my friend writes, \"that the pragmatic objection to\r\n pragmatism lies in the fact that it might accentuate the narrowness of\r\n narrow minds.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n \"Your call to the rejection of the namby-pamby and the wishy-washy is of\r\n course inspiring. But although it is salutary and stimulating to be told\r\n that one should be responsible for the immediate issues and bearings of\r\n his words and thoughts, I decline to be deprived of the pleasure and\r\n profit of dwelling also on remoter bearings and issues, and it is the\r\n TENDENCY of pragmatism to refuse this privilege.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n \"In short, it seems to me that the limitations, or rather the dangers, of\r\n the pragmatic tendency, are analogous to those which beset the unwary\r\n followers of the \u0027natural sciences.\u0027 Chemistry and physics are eminently\r\n pragmatic and many of their devotees, smugly content with the data that\r\n their weights and measures furnish, feel an infinite pity and disdain for\r\n all students of philosophy and meta-physics, whomsoever. And of course\r\n everything can be expressed\u0026mdash;after a fashion, and \u0027theoretically\u0027\u0026mdash;in\r\n terms of chemistry and physics, that is, EVERYTHING EXCEPT THE VITAL\r\n PRINCIPLE OF THE WHOLE, and that, they say, there is no pragmatic use in\r\n trying to express; it has no bearings\u0026mdash;FOR THEM. I for my part refuse\r\n to be persuaded that we cannot look beyond the obvious pluralism of the\r\n naturalist and the pragmatist to a logical unity in which they take no\r\n interest.\"\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n How is such a conception of the pragmatism I am advocating possible, after\r\n my first and second lectures? I have all along been offering it expressly\r\n as a mediator between tough-mindedness and tender-mindedness. If the\r\n notion of a world ante rem, whether taken abstractly like the word winter,\r\n or concretely as the hypothesis of an Absolute, can be shown to have any\r\n consequences whatever for our life, it has a meaning. If the meaning\r\n works, it will have SOME truth that ought to be held to through all\r\n possible reformulations, for pragmatism.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n The absolutistic hypothesis, that perfection is eternal, aboriginal, and\r\n most real, has a perfectly definite meaning, and it works religiously. To\r\n examine how, will be the subject of my next and final lecture.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n \u003cbr /\u003e\u003cbr /\u003e\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003chr /\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n \u003ca name=\"link2H_4_0010\" id=\"link2H_4_0010\"\u003e \u003c/a\u003e\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cdiv style=\"height: 4em;\"\u003e\r\n \u003cbr /\u003e\u003cbr /\u003e\u003cbr /\u003e\u003cbr /\u003e\r\n \u003c/div\u003e\r\n \u003ch2\u003e\r\n Lecture VIII. \u0026mdash; Pragmatism and Religion\r\n \u003c/h2\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n At the close of the last lecture I reminded you of the first one, in which\r\n I had opposed tough-mindedness to tender-mindedness and recommended\r\n pragmatism as their mediator. Tough-mindedness positively rejects\r\n tender-mindedness\u0027s hypothesis of an eternal perfect edition of the\r\n universe coexisting with our finite experience.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n On pragmatic principles we cannot reject any hypothesis if consequences\r\n useful to life flow from it. Universal conceptions, as things to take\r\n account of, may be as real for pragmatism as particular sensations are.\r\n They have indeed no meaning and no reality if they have no use. But if\r\n they have any use they have that amount of meaning. And the meaning will\r\n be true if the use squares well with life\u0027s other uses.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n Well, the use of the Absolute is proved by the whole course of men\u0027s\r\n religious history. The eternal arms are then beneath. Remember\r\n Vivekananda\u0027s use of the Atman: it is indeed not a scientific use, for we\r\n can make no particular deductions from it. It is emotional and spiritual\r\n altogether.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n It is always best to discuss things by the help of concrete examples. Let\r\n me read therefore some of those verses entitled \"To You\" by Walt Whitman\u0026mdash;\"You\"\r\n of course meaning the reader or hearer of the poem whosoever he or she may\r\n be.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n Whoever you are, now I place my hand upon you, that you be my poem; I\r\n whisper with my lips close to your ear, I have loved many women and men,\r\n but I love none better than you.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n O I have been dilatory and dumb; I should have made my way straight to you\r\n long ago; I should have blabb\u0027d nothing but you, I should have chanted\r\n nothing but you.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n I will leave all, and come and make the hymns of you; None have understood\r\n you, but I understand you; None have done justice to you\u0026mdash;you have\r\n not done justice to yourself; None but have found you imperfect\u0026mdash;I\r\n only find no imperfection in you.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n O I could sing such grandeurs and glories about you! You have not known\r\n what you are\u0026mdash;you have slumber\u0027d upon yourself all your life; What\r\n you have done returns already in mockeries.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n But the mockeries are not you; Underneath them, and within them, I see you\r\n lurk; I pursue you where none else has pursued you; Silence, the desk, the\r\n flippant expression, the night, the accustom\u0027d routine, if these conceal\r\n you from others, or from yourself, they do not conceal you from me; The\r\n shaved face, the unsteady eye, the impure complexion, if these balk\r\n others, they do not balk me, The pert apparel, the deform\u0027d attitude,\r\n drunkenness, greed, premature death, all these I part aside.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n There is no endowment in man or woman that is not tallied in you; There is\r\n no virtue, no beauty, in man or woman, but as good is in you; No pluck, no\r\n endurance in others, but as good is in you; No pleasure waiting for\r\n others, but an equal pleasure waits for you.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n Whoever you are! claim your own at any hazard! These shows of the east and\r\n west are tame, compared to you; These immense meadows\u0026mdash;these\r\n interminable rivers\u0026mdash;you are immense and interminable as they; You\r\n are he or she who is master or mistress over them, Master or mistress in\r\n your own right over Nature, elements, pain, passion, dissolution.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n The hopples fall from your ankles\u0026mdash;you find an unfailing sufficiency;\r\n Old or young, male or female, rude, low, rejected by the rest, whatever\r\n you are promulges itself; Through birth, life, death, burial, the means\r\n are provided, nothing is scanted; Through angers, losses, ambition,\r\n ignorance, ennui, what you are picks its way.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n Verily a fine and moving poem, in any case, but there are two ways of\r\n taking it, both useful.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n One is the monistic way, the mystical way of pure cosmic emotion. The\r\n glories and grandeurs, they are yours absolutely, even in the midst of\r\n your defacements. Whatever may happen to you, whatever you may appear to\r\n be, inwardly you are safe. Look back, LIE back, on your true principle of\r\n being! This is the famous way of quietism, of indifferentism. Its enemies\r\n compare it to a spiritual opium. Yet pragmatism must respect this way, for\r\n it has massive historic vindication.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n But pragmatism sees another way to be respected also, the pluralistic way\r\n of interpreting the poem. The you so glorified, to which the hymn is sung,\r\n may mean your better possibilities phenomenally taken, or the specific\r\n redemptive effects even of your failures, upon yourself or others. It may\r\n mean your loyalty to the possibilities of others whom you admire and love\r\n so, that you are willing to accept your own poor life, for it is that\r\n glory\u0027s partner. You can at least appreciate, applaud, furnish the\r\n audience, of so brave a total world. Forget the low in yourself, then,\r\n think only of the high. Identify your life therewith; then, through\r\n angers, losses, ignorance, ennui, whatever you thus make yourself,\r\n whatever you thus most deeply are, picks its way.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n In either way of taking the poem, it encourages fidelity to ourselves.\r\n Both ways satisfy; both sanctify the human flux. Both paint the portrait\r\n of the YOU on a gold-background. But the background of the first way is\r\n the static One, while in the second way it means possibles in the plural,\r\n genuine possibles, and it has all the restlessness of that conception.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n Noble enough is either way of reading the poem; but plainly the\r\n pluralistic way agrees with the pragmatic temper best, for it immediately\r\n suggests an infinitely larger number of the details of future experience\r\n to our mind. It sets definite activities in us at work. Altho this second\r\n way seems prosaic and earthborn in comparison with the first way, yet no\r\n one can accuse it of tough-mindedness in any brutal sense of the term. Yet\r\n if, as pragmatists, you should positively set up the second way AGAINST\r\n the first way, you would very likely be misunderstood. You would be\r\n accused of denying nobler conceptions, and of being an ally of\r\n tough-mindedness in the worst sense.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n You remember the letter from a member of this audience from which I read\r\n some extracts at our previous meeting. Let me read you an additional\r\n extract now. It shows a vagueness in realizing the alternatives before us\r\n which I think is very widespread.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n \"I believe,\" writes my friend and correspondent, \"in pluralism; I believe\r\n that in our search for truth we leap from one floating cake of ice to\r\n another, on an infinite sea, and that by each of our acts we make new\r\n truths possible and old ones impossible; I believe that each man is\r\n responsible for making the universe better, and that if he does not do\r\n this it will be in so far left undone.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n \"Yet at the same time I am willing to endure that my children should be\r\n incurably sick and suffering (as they are not) and I myself stupid and yet\r\n with brains enough to see my stupidity, only on one condition, namely,\r\n that through the construction, in imagination and by reasoning, of a\r\n RATIONAL UNITY OF ALL THINGS, I can conceive my acts and my thoughts and\r\n my troubles as SUPPLEMENTED: BY ALL THE OTHER PHENOMENA OF THE WORLD, AND\r\n AS FORMING\u0026mdash;WHEN THUS SUPPLEMENTED\u0026mdash;A SCHEME WHICH I APPROVE AND\r\n ADOPT AS MY I OWN; and for my part I refuse to be persuaded that we cannot\r\n look beyond the obvious pluralism of the naturalist and pragmatist to a\r\n logical unity in which they take no interest or stock.\"\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n Such a fine expression of personal faith warms the heart of the hearer.\r\n But how much does it clear his philosophic head? Does the writer\r\n consistently favor the monistic, or the pluralistic, interpretation of the\r\n world\u0027s poem? His troubles become atoned for WHEN THUS SUPPLEMENTED, he\r\n says, supplemented, that is, by all the remedies that THE OTHER PHENOMENA\r\n may supply. Obviously here the writer faces forward into the particulars\r\n of experience, which he interprets in a pluralistic-melioristic way.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n But he believes himself to face backward. He speaks of what he calls the\r\n rational UNITY of things, when all the while he really means their\r\n possible empirical UNIFICATION. He supposes at the same time that the\r\n pragmatist, because he criticizes rationalism\u0027s abstract One, is cut off\r\n from the consolation of believing in the saving possibilities of the\r\n concrete many. He fails in short to distinguish between taking the world\u0027s\r\n perfection as a necessary principle, and taking it only as a possible\r\n terminus ad quem.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n I regard the writer of this letter as a genuine pragmatist, but as a\r\n pragmatist sans le savoir. He appears to me as one of that numerous class\r\n of philosophic amateurs whom I spoke of in my first lecture, as wishing to\r\n have all the good things going, without being too careful as to how they\r\n agree or disagree. \"Rational unity of all things\" is so inspiring a\r\n formula, that he brandishes it offhand, and abstractly accuses pluralism\r\n of conflicting with it (for the bare names do conflict), altho concretely\r\n he means by it just the pragmatistically unified and ameliorated world.\r\n Most of us remain in this essential vagueness, and it is well that we\r\n should; but in the interest of clear-headedness it is well that some of us\r\n should go farther, so I will try now to focus a little more\r\n discriminatingly on this particular religious point.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n Is then this you of yous, this absolutely real world, this unity that\r\n yields the moral inspiration and has the religious value, to be taken\r\n monistically or pluralistically? Is it ante rem or in rebus? Is it a\r\n principle or an end, an absolute or an ultimate, a first or a last? Does\r\n it make you look forward or lie back? It is certainly worth while not to\r\n clump the two things together, for if discriminated, they have decidedly\r\n diverse meanings for life.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n Please observe that the whole dilemma revolves pragmatically about the\r\n notion of the world\u0027s possibilities. Intellectually, rationalism invokes\r\n its absolute principle of unity as a ground of possibility for the many\r\n facts. Emotionally, it sees it as a container and limiter of\r\n possibilities, a guarantee that the upshot shall be good. Taken in this\r\n way, the absolute makes all good things certain, and all bad things\r\n impossible (in the eternal, namely), and may be said to transmute the\r\n entire category of possibility into categories more secure. One sees at\r\n this point that the great religious difference lies between the men who\r\n insist that the world MUST AND SHALL BE, and those who are contented with\r\n believing that the world MAY BE, saved. The whole clash of rationalistic\r\n and empiricist religion is thus over the validity of possibility. It is\r\n necessary therefore to begin by focusing upon that word. What may the word\r\n \u0027possible\u0027 definitely mean?\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n To unreflecting men the possible means a sort of third estate of being,\r\n less real than existence, more real than non-existence, a twilight realm,\r\n a hybrid status, a limbo into which and out of which realities ever and\r\n anon are made to pass. Such a conception is of course too vague and\r\n nondescript to satisfy us. Here, as elsewhere, the only way to extract a\r\n term\u0027s meaning is to use the pragmatic method on it. When you say that a\r\n thing is possible, what difference does it make?\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n It makes at least this difference that if anyone calls it impossible you\r\n can contradict him, if anyone calls it actual you can contradict HIM, and\r\n if anyone calls it necessary you can contradict him too. But these\r\n privileges of contradiction don\u0027t amount to much. When you say a thing is\r\n possible, does not that make some farther difference in terms of actual\r\n fact?\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n It makes at least this negative difference that if the statement be true,\r\n it follows that there is nothing extant capable of preventing the possible\r\n thing. The absence of real grounds of interference may thus be said to\r\n make things not impossible, possible therefore in the bare or abstract\r\n sense.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n But most possibles are not bare, they are concretely grounded, or\r\n well-grounded, as we say. What does this mean pragmatically? It means, not\r\n only that there are no preventive conditions present, but that some of the\r\n conditions of production of the possible thing actually are here. Thus a\r\n concretely possible chicken means: (1) that the idea of chicken contains\r\n no essential self-contradiction; (2) that no boys, skunks, or other\r\n enemies are about; and (3) that at least an actual egg exists. Possible\r\n chicken means actual egg\u0026mdash;plus actual sitting hen, or incubator, or\r\n what not. As the actual conditions approach completeness the chicken\r\n becomes a better-and-better-grounded possibility. When the conditions are\r\n entirely complete, it ceases to be a possibility, and turns into an actual\r\n fact.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n Let us apply this notion to the salvation of the world. What does it\r\n pragmatically mean to say that this is possible? It means that some of the\r\n conditions of the world\u0027s deliverance do actually exist. The more of them\r\n there are existent, the fewer preventing conditions you can find, the\r\n better-grounded is the salvation\u0027s possibility, the more PROBABLE does the\r\n fact of the deliverance become.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n So much for our preliminary look at possibility.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n Now it would contradict the very spirit of life to say that our minds must\r\n be indifferent and neutral in questions like that of the world\u0027s\r\n salvation. Anyone who pretends to be neutral writes himself down here as a\r\n fool and a sham. We all do wish to minimize the insecurity of the\r\n universe; we are and ought to be unhappy when we regard it as exposed to\r\n every enemy and open to every life-destroying draft. Nevertheless there\r\n are unhappy men who think the salvation of the world impossible. Theirs is\r\n the doctrine known as pessimism.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n Optimism in turn would be the doctrine that thinks the world\u0027s salvation\r\n inevitable.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n Midway between the two there stands what may be called the doctrine of\r\n meliorism, tho it has hitherto figured less as a doctrine than as an\r\n attitude in human affairs. Optimism has always been the regnant DOCTRINE\r\n in european philosophy. Pessimism was only recently introduced by\r\n Schopenhauer and counts few systematic defenders as yet. Meliorism treats\r\n salvation as neither inevitable nor impossible. It treats it as a\r\n possibility, which becomes more and more of a probability the more\r\n numerous the actual conditions of salvation become.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n It is clear that pragmatism must incline towards meliorism. Some\r\n conditions of the world\u0027s salvation are actually extant, and she cannot\r\n possibly close her eyes to this fact: and should the residual conditions\r\n come, salvation would become an accomplished reality. Naturally the terms\r\n I use here are exceedingly summary. You may interpret the word \u0027salvation\u0027\r\n in any way you like, and make it as diffuse and distributive, or as\r\n climacteric and integral a phenomenon as you please.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n Take, for example, any one of us in this room with the ideals which he\r\n cherishes, and is willing to live and work for. Every such ideal realized\r\n will be one moment in the world\u0027s salvation. But these particular ideals\r\n are not bare abstract possibilities. They are grounded, they are LIVE\r\n possibilities, for we are their live champions and pledges, and if the\r\n complementary conditions come and add themselves, our ideals will become\r\n actual things. What now are the complementary conditions? They are first\r\n such a mixture of things as will in the fulness of time give us a chance,\r\n a gap that we can spring into, and, finally, OUR ACT.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n Does our act then CREATE the world\u0027s salvation so far as it makes room for\r\n itself, so far as it leaps into the gap? Does it create, not the whole\r\n world\u0027s salvation of course, but just so much of this as itself covers of\r\n the world\u0027s extent?\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n Here I take the bull by the horns, and in spite of the whole crew of\r\n rationalists and monists, of whatever brand they be, I ask WHY NOT? Our\r\n acts, our turning-places, where we seem to ourselves to make ourselves and\r\n grow, are the parts of the world to which we are closest, the parts of\r\n which our knowledge is the most intimate and complete. Why should we not\r\n take them at their face-value? Why may they not be the actual\r\n turning-places and growing-places which they seem to be, of the world\u0026mdash;why\r\n not the workshop of being, where we catch fact in the making, so that\r\n nowhere may the world grow in any other kind of way than this?\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n Irrational! we are told. How can new being come in local spots and patches\r\n which add themselves or stay away at random, independently of the rest?\r\n There must be a reason for our acts, and where in the last resort can any\r\n reason be looked for save in the material pressure or the logical\r\n compulsion of the total nature of the world? There can be but one real\r\n agent of growth, or seeming growth, anywhere, and that agent is the\r\n integral world itself. It may grow all-over, if growth there be, but that\r\n single parts should grow per se is irrational.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n But if one talks of rationality and of reasons for things, and insists\r\n that they can\u0027t just come in spots, what KIND of a reason can there\r\n ultimately be why anything should come at all? Talk of logic and necessity\r\n and categories and the absolute and the contents of the whole\r\n philosophical machine-shop as you will, the only REAL reason I can think\r\n of why anything should ever come is that someone wishes it to be here. It\r\n is DEMANDED, demanded, it may be, to give relief to no matter how small a\r\n fraction of the world\u0027s mass. This is living reason, and compared with it\r\n material causes and logical necessities are spectral things.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n In short the only fully rational world would be the world of wishing-caps,\r\n the world of telepathy, where every desire is fulfilled instanter, without\r\n having to consider or placate surrounding or intermediate powers. This is\r\n the Absolute\u0027s own world. He calls upon the phenomenal world to be, and it\r\n IS, exactly as he calls for it, no other condition being required. In our\r\n world, the wishes of the individual are only one condition. Other\r\n individuals are there with other wishes and they must be propitiated\r\n first. So Being grows under all sorts of resistances in this world of the\r\n many, and, from compromise to compromise, only gets organized gradually\r\n into what may be called secondarily rational shape. We approach the\r\n wishing-cap type of organization only in a few departments of life. We\r\n want water and we turn a faucet. We want a kodak-picture and we press a\r\n button. We want information and we telephone. We want to travel and we buy\r\n a ticket. In these and similar cases, we hardly need to do more than the\r\n wishing\u0026mdash;the world is rationally organized to do the rest.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n But this talk of rationality is a parenthesis and a digression. What we\r\n were discussing was the idea of a world growing not integrally but\r\n piecemeal by the contributions of its several parts. Take the hypothesis\r\n seriously and as a live one. Suppose that the world\u0027s author put the case\r\n to you before creation, saying: \"I am going to make a world not certain to\r\n be saved, a world the perfection of which shall be conditional merely, the\r\n condition being that each several agent does its own \u0027level best.\u0027 I offer\r\n you the chance of taking part in such a world. Its safety, you see, is\r\n unwarranted. It is a real adventure, with real danger, yet it may win\r\n through. It is a social scheme of co-operative work genuinely to be done.\r\n Will you join the procession? Will you trust yourself and trust the other\r\n agents enough to face the risk?\"\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n Should you in all seriousness, if participation in such a world were\r\n proposed to you, feel bound to reject it as not safe enough? Would you say\r\n that, rather than be part and parcel of so fundamentally pluralistic and\r\n irrational a universe, you preferred to relapse into the slumber of\r\n nonentity from which you had been momentarily aroused by the tempter\u0027s\r\n voice?\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n Of course if you are normally constituted, you would do nothing of the\r\n sort. There is a healthy-minded buoyancy in most of us which such a\r\n universe would exactly fit. We would therefore accept the offer\u0026mdash;\"Top!\r\n und schlag auf schlag!\" It would be just like the world we practically\r\n live in; and loyalty to our old nurse Nature would forbid us to say no.\r\n The world proposed would seem \u0027rational\u0027 to us in the most living way.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n Most of us, I say, would therefore welcome the proposition and add our\r\n fiat to the fiat of the creator. Yet perhaps some would not; for there are\r\n morbid minds in every human collection, and to them the prospect of a\r\n universe with only a fighting chance of safety would probably make no\r\n appeal. There are moments of discouragement in us all, when we are sick of\r\n self and tired of vainly striving. Our own life breaks down, and we fall\r\n into the attitude of the prodigal son. We mistrust the chances of things.\r\n We want a universe where we can just give up, fall on our father\u0027s neck,\r\n and be absorbed into the absolute life as a drop of water melts into the\r\n river or the sea.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n The peace and rest, the security desiderated at such moments is security\r\n against the bewildering accidents of so much finite experience. Nirvana\r\n means safety from this everlasting round of adventures of which the world\r\n of sense consists. The hindoo and the buddhist, for this is essentially\r\n their attitude, are simply afraid, afraid of more experience, afraid of\r\n life.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n And to men of this complexion, religious monism comes with its consoling\r\n words: \"All is needed and essential\u0026mdash;even you with your sick soul and\r\n heart. All are one with God, and with God all is well. The everlasting\r\n arms are beneath, whether in the world of finite appearances you seem to\r\n fail or to succeed.\" There can be no doubt that when men are reduced to\r\n their last sick extremity absolutism is the only saving scheme.\r\n Pluralistic moralism simply makes their teeth chatter, it refrigerates the\r\n very heart within their breast.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n So we see concretely two types of religion in sharp contrast. Using our\r\n old terms of comparison, we may say that the absolutistic scheme appeals\r\n to the tender-minded while the pluralistic scheme appeals to the tough.\r\n Many persons would refuse to call the pluralistic scheme religious at all.\r\n They would call it moralistic, and would apply the word religious to the\r\n monistic scheme alone. Religion in the sense of self-surrender, and\r\n moralism in the sense of self-sufficingness, have been pitted against each\r\n other as incompatibles frequently enough in the history of human thought.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n We stand here before the final question of philosophy. I said in my fourth\r\n lecture that I believed the monistic-pluralistic alternative to be the\r\n deepest and most pregnant question that our minds can frame. Can it be\r\n that the disjunction is a final one? that only one side can be true? Are a\r\n pluralism and monism genuine incompatibles? So that, if the world were\r\n really pluralistically constituted, if it really existed distributively\r\n and were made up of a lot of eaches, it could only be saved piecemeal and\r\n de facto as the result of their behavior, and its epic history in no wise\r\n short-circuited by some essential oneness in which the severalness were\r\n already \u0027taken up\u0027 beforehand and eternally \u0027overcome\u0027? If this were so,\r\n we should have to choose one philosophy or the other. We could not say\r\n \u0027yes, yes\u0027 to both alternatives. There would have to be a \u0027no\u0027 in our\r\n relations with the possible. We should confess an ultimate disappointment:\r\n we could not remain healthy-minded and sick-minded in one indivisible act.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n Of course as human beings we can be healthy minds on one day and sick\r\n souls on the next; and as amateur dabblers in philosophy we may perhaps be\r\n allowed to call ourselves monistic pluralists, or free-will determinists,\r\n or whatever else may occur to us of a reconciling kind. But as\r\n philosophers aiming at clearness and consistency, and feeling the\r\n pragmatistic need of squaring truth with truth, the question is forced\r\n upon us of frankly adopting either the tender or the robustious type of\r\n thought. In particular THIS query has always come home to me: May not the\r\n claims of tender-mindedness go too far? May not the notion of a world\r\n already saved in toto anyhow, be too saccharine to stand? May not\r\n religious optimism be too idyllic? Must ALL be saved? Is NO price to be\r\n paid in the work of salvation? Is the last word sweet? Is all \u0027yes, yes\u0027\r\n in the universe? Doesn\u0027t the fact of \u0027no\u0027 stand at the very core of life?\r\n Doesn\u0027t the very \u0027seriousness\u0027 that we attribute to life mean that\r\n ineluctable noes and losses form a part of it, that there are genuine\r\n sacrifices somewhere, and that something permanently drastic and bitter\r\n always remains at the bottom of its cup?\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n I can not speak officially as a pragmatist here; all I can say is that my\r\n own pragmatism offers no objection to my taking sides with this more\r\n moralistic view, and giving up the claim of total reconciliation. The\r\n possibility of this is involved in the pragmatistic willingness to treat\r\n pluralism as a serious hypothesis. In the end it is our faith and not our\r\n logic that decides such questions, and I deny the right of any pretended\r\n logic to veto my own faith. I find myself willing to take the universe to\r\n be really dangerous and adventurous, without therefore backing out and\r\n crying \u0027no play.\u0027 I am willing to think that the prodigal-son attitude,\r\n open to us as it is in many vicissitudes, is not the right and final\r\n attitude towards the whole of life. I am willing that there should be real\r\n losses and real losers, and no total preservation of all that is. I can\r\n believe in the ideal as an ultimate, not as an origin, and as an extract,\r\n not the whole. When the cup is poured off, the dregs are left behind\r\n forever, but the possibility of what is poured off is sweet enough to\r\n accept.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n As a matter of fact countless human imaginations live in this moralistic\r\n and epic kind of a universe, and find its disseminated and strung-along\r\n successes sufficient for their rational needs. There is a finely\r\n translated epigram in the greek anthology which admirably expresses this\r\n state of mind, this acceptance of loss as unatoned for, even tho the lost\r\n element might be one\u0027s self:\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n \"A shipwrecked sailor, buried on this coast, Bids you set sail. Full many\r\n a gallant bark, when we were lost, Weathered the gale.\"\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n Those puritans who answered \u0027yes\u0027 to the question: Are you willing to be\r\n damned for God\u0027s glory? were in this objective and magnanimous condition\r\n of mind. The way of escape from evil on this system is NOT by getting it\r\n \u0027aufgehoben,\u0027 or preserved in the whole as an element essential but\r\n \u0027overcome.\u0027 It is by dropping it out altogether, throwing it overboard and\r\n getting beyond it, helping to make a universe that shall forget its very\r\n place and name.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n It is then perfectly possible to accept sincerely a drastic kind of a\r\n universe from which the element of \u0027seriousness\u0027 is not to be expelled.\r\n Whoso does so is, it seems to me, a genuine pragmatist. He is willing to\r\n live on a scheme of uncertified possibilities which he trusts; willing to\r\n pay with his own person, if need be, for the realization of the ideals\r\n which he frames.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n What now actually ARE the other forces which he trusts to co-operate with\r\n him, in a universe of such a type? They are at least his fellow men, in\r\n the stage of being which our actual universe has reached. But are there\r\n not superhuman forces also, such as religious men of the pluralistic type\r\n we have been considering have always believed in? Their words may have\r\n sounded monistic when they said \"there is no God but God\"; but the\r\n original polytheism of mankind has only imperfectly and vaguely sublimated\r\n itself into monotheism, and monotheism itself, so far as it was religious\r\n and not a scheme of class-room instruction for the metaphysicians, has\r\n always viewed God as but one helper, primus inter pares, in the midst of\r\n all the shapers of the great world\u0027s fate.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n I fear that my previous lectures, confined as they have been to human and\r\n humanistic aspects, may have left the impression on many of you that\r\n pragmatism means methodically to leave the superhuman out. I have shown\r\n small respect indeed for the Absolute, and I have until this moment spoken\r\n of no other superhuman hypothesis but that. But I trust that you see\r\n sufficiently that the Absolute has nothing but its superhumanness in\r\n common with the theistic God. On pragmatistic principles, if the\r\n hypothesis of God works satisfactorily in the widest sense of the word, it\r\n is true. Now whatever its residual difficulties may be, experience shows\r\n that it certainly does work, and that the problem is to build it out and\r\n determine it, so that it will combine satisfactorily with all the other\r\n working truths. I cannot start upon a whole theology at the end of this\r\n last lecture; but when I tell you that I have written a book on men\u0027s\r\n religious experience, which on the whole has been regarded as making for\r\n the reality of God, you will perhaps exempt my own pragmatism from the\r\n charge of being an atheistic system. I firmly disbelieve, myself, that our\r\n human experience is the highest form of experience extant in the universe.\r\n I believe rather that we stand in much the same relation to the whole of\r\n the universe as our canine and feline pets do to the whole of human life.\r\n They inhabit our drawing-rooms and libraries. They take part in scenes of\r\n whose significance they have no inkling. They are merely tangent to curves\r\n of history the beginnings and ends and forms of which pass wholly beyond\r\n their ken. So we are tangents to the wider life of things. But, just as\r\n many of the dog\u0027s and cat\u0027s ideals coincide with our ideals, and the dogs\r\n and cats have daily living proof of the fact, so we may well believe, on\r\n the proofs that religious experience affords, that higher powers exist and\r\n are at work to save the world on ideal lines similar to our own.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n You see that pragmatism can be called religious, if you allow that\r\n religion can be pluralistic or merely melioristic in type. But whether you\r\n will finally put up with that type of religion or not is a question that\r\n only you yourself can decide. Pragmatism has to postpone dogmatic answer,\r\n for we do not yet know certainly which type of religion is going to work\r\n best in the long run. The various overbeliefs of men, their several\r\n faith-ventures, are in fact what are needed to bring the evidence in. You\r\n will probably make your own ventures severally. If radically tough, the\r\n hurly-burly of the sensible facts of nature will be enough for you, and\r\n you will need no religion at all. If radically tender, you will take up\r\n with the more monistic form of religion: the pluralistic form, with its\r\n reliance on possibilities that are not necessities, will not seem to\r\n afford you security enough.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n But if you are neither tough nor tender in an extreme and radical sense,\r\n but mixed as most of us are, it may seem to you that the type of\r\n pluralistic and moralistic religion that I have offered is as good a\r\n religious synthesis as you are likely to find. Between the two extremes of\r\n crude naturalism on the one hand and transcendental absolutism on the\r\n other, you may find that what I take the liberty of calling the\r\n pragmatistic or melioristic type of theism is exactly what you require.\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cp\u003e\r\n The End\r\n \u003c/p\u003e\r\n \u003cdiv style=\"height: 6em;\"\u003e\r\n \u003cbr /\u003e\u003cbr /\u003e\u003cbr /\u003e\u003cbr /\u003e\u003cbr /\u003e\u003cbr /\u003e\r\n \u003c/div\u003e\r\n\u003c/article\u003e"}],"SectionSequence":["Back Link","Work Title","Deck","Author","Period","Era","Composition","Date Note","Region","Terra Avita","Terra Avita Region","Modern Country","Original Title","Language","Primary Discipline","Secondary Discipline","Tradition","Full Versions","Core Thesis","Classification","Arguments","Influence","Significance","Evidence Note","Full Text"],"Counts":{"ContextCards":3,"GeoCards":4,"DisciplineCards":2,"Links":11,"Sections":25,"Styles":3,"Scripts":1}}