Chapter IX: Pragmatism and Idealism in the Philosophy of Bergson386 (1)

The pragmatist elements in the philosophy of Bergson of which it is, perhaps, legitimate for us to speak here are (1) his “Anti-Intellectualism,” and (2) his “Activism” or “Actionism.” The latter culminates in his freedom-philosophy and his spiritualism. I shall comment shortly upon these two things, and then suggest one or two general criticisms of his philosophy as a whole.

Bergson’s anti-intellectualism rests ultimately upon his contention that the human intellect is related in the main to the needs of action, that the brain is an organ of action rather than an organ of thought, that our intelligence is at home only in the realm of the physical and the mathematical sciences,[387] that contrivance and invention and the practical comprehension of the “material” are its proper activities, and that for these latter purposes it splits up the world of the senses and the understanding into a discontinuous aggregate of physical units, which it then proceeds to reconstruct in a spatial and temporal order. We perceive in Nature, he holds, what interests[388] us in the way of our vital needs; our intellect is adapted, not for the understanding or the purely rational (“abstract”) comprehension of “causality” and the “life of things,” but for the maintenance and furtherance of our own lives, and for the creation of the instruments and agencies (signs, language, tools, imagined sequences and laws, essences, causes, the “descriptions” of science, the special senses, the convolutions of the brain, etc.) that minister to this. Science is to-day still penetrated through and through with primitive metaphysics, with the metaphysics of animism, with a belief in separate things like forces, atoms, elements, or what not--indicative all of them of its attempt to “divide up” the real that it may command it for theoretical and practical purposes. We can see this in the “structural psychology”[389] of the day and its analysis of our mental life into “elements,” in respect of the number and character of which there are lasting differences of opinion among the masters of the science--into “impressions,” and “affections,” and sensations, images, memories, ideas, and so on. And we can see it, too, in the erroneous attempts sometimes made by psychologists to treat these entities as if they had clearly defined temporal and spatial characteristics or qualities.

The supreme mistake of philosophy, according to Bergson, has been to import into the domain of speculation a method of thinking that was originally destined for action. It has forgotten that nearly all the leading conceptions of common sense and of science and of “analysis” have been invented, not for final and general, but for relative and particular purposes. And it has fallen too readily under the influence of a certain traditional view of the relations between metaphysics and science--the view, namely, that philosophy should just take the findings of science and of common-sense about the world as its initial material, subjecting them, of course, to a certain preliminary reinterpretation, but finally reconstructing them, almost as they were, into a system.[390] The one thing, in short, that philosophy has failed to understand is the life and the movement and the process of the world, as an infinitely more important fact than the endless terms and conceptions and entities (“will,” “reason,” “Ideas,” etc.) into which it has been analysed. We might sum up the whole by saying that Bergson’s anti-intellectualism is simply a protest, not against the use, but only against the “systematic misuse”[391] of general conceptions that have been current in science and philosophy “since the time of Socrates,” a protest, however, that in his case is not merely general and negative, but particularised and positive.[392]

Like any and all anti-intellectualism, Bergson’s anti-intellectualism is liable to serious misinterpretation, and it is currently misinterpreted and misrepresented as “irrationalism.” His intention, however, is not to destroy and to condemn philosophy and reasoning, and to exalt mere intuition and faith, but rather to “liberate”[393] our human consciousness of ourselves and of the world from the dogmatism of what he regards to be the utilitarian intellect, from the many hopeless contradictions and antinomies and puzzles of the mere analytic understanding. Philosophy, in particular, he would free from the last traces and symptoms of scientific rationalism, although fully aware of the fact that our modern philosophy had its very departure from the rationalism of the great founders of modern science like Kepler and Galileo and the rest.

He would strike at the roots of all this confident rationalism or scientific philosophy by opening up a broader and a deeper view of truth than that afforded to the merely piece-meal and utilitarian view.

As for the Actionism and the action philosophy of Bergson, this is perhaps more in line than any other tendency of the day with the new life and the new thought of the twentieth century, although (like Pragmatism) it stands in need of correction or revision by the principles of a sound ethical philosophy, by the Idealism that is not, and cannot be, the mere creation of to-day or yesterday. In essence it is, to begin with, but an extension to the mind as a whole and to all its so-called special faculties (“sensation,” “perception,” “memory,” “ideation,” “judgment,” “thinking,” “emotion,” and the rest) of the “dynamic,”[394] instead of the older, static point of view that the recent science of our time has applied to matter and to life, and that Pragmatism and the “hypothetical method” have sought to apply to all the ordinary conceptions and constructions that exist in the different domains of the different sciences.[395] It is also, from our point of view, as we may see, an attempt at the expression, in the terms of a comparatively simple philosophy, of many of the considerations in respect of knowledge and conduct that have been brought forward in the preceding pages of this book. We have already dwelt in different ways, for example, upon the fact that there is no perception or sensation without an organic reaction on the part of the percipient or the sentient being, that an idea is in a sense a motor attitude (a way of comprehending particulars or particular facts in relation to our purposes and our ends), that a logical judgment represents a “division” of the real, or of the processes of Nature, for some purpose or other, that our whole mental life is purposive, that there is no “pure” cognition without attendant emotion and[396] volition, that it is in action that desire and thought come together, that our whole knowledge of the world is necessarily a knowledge of it in terms of our purposes and our highest attitudes, and so on. All of this is, as it were, an indication of the psychological and the logical considerations upon which Bergson bases his positive,[397] activistic, philosophy of mind.

It is to be remembered in Bergson’s interest that when we speak of his Actionism[398] we do not mean a narrowing down[399] on his part of the activities of the soul to physical labour and to mere utilitarian effort, but its capacity, also, for that creative activity which he takes to be the very keynote of personal life and the evolutionary process.

As for the freedom-philosophy with which Bergson’s Actionism is to be associated, this is worked out by him, firstly, in the most perfect correspondence with what he believes to be the facts of life and mind; and, secondly, in terms of that anti-rationalism (or hostility to the merely scientific intellect) which is his working theory of knowledge. His views upon this subject have also been depreciated and misunderstood by some of his opponents who attack what they call his “intuitional” treatment of the freedom-question--his insistence upon the direct intuition of our life that we have when we act consciously, and when we are “most ourselves”--when we act out “freely” our own nature. To him the primary fact for any human being is the life-impulse that is both instinctive and reflective, that is certainly far more of a fundamental reality than any of those entities or concepts (“cells,” “atoms,” “forces,” “laws,” or what not) which, with Kant, he clearly sees to be the creation of the intellect for its descriptive and practical purposes. This life is “free” in the sense that we are not “determined” by any or all of those forces and laws to which our intellect subjects everything else, but which it cannot apply to the life that is more than mere matter, that is a real becoming and a real process, a real creation and development.

The “spiritualism,” again, of his interpretation of this life and activity rests, to begin with, upon his opinion that the very inception of the activity, and the adjustment, and the selection in which the simplest life-effort, and the simplest perception of a living being consist, indicate the presence and the operation of a controlling agency,[400] or mind, or principle of spiritual “choice” that is not, and cannot be, explained on the principles of a mechanical science or philosophy. This principle is, in a word, the life-force, or the creative activity, the _élan vital_ of which we read so much in his books, that has “seized upon matter,” vitalizing it into force and energy, into the “play” upon each other of all the varied activities and grades and forms of the will to live, and into the various forms of socialized and co-operative living on the part of animals and men. We shall immediately remark upon the matter of the apparent limitations of this spiritual philosophy of life, or reality, that is here but indicated or stated.

One of its essential features, so far as we are at present concerned, is his claim that his introduction of a spiritual principle into the life-force, or the creative activity that has expressed itself in the various grades and forms of life, both animal and human, is not a phase of the old philosophy[401] or theology of “final causes” or of a predetermined[402] “teleology.” To this old finalism or teleology[403] the life of organic nature (the “organs” and “cells,” the “instinctive” actions, and the “adjustments” of animals, and so on) were all due to the work of a pre-existing, calculating intelligence operating upon matter; whereas to him they are but different expressions or creations of the life-force that is as little predetermined in organic evolution, as it is in the realm of the activities interpreted for us (in part) by the newer physics and the newer chemistry--in the processes, for example, that are exemplified in the generation of a star out of a nebula. This entire treatment, however, of the notion of purpose in nature is a matter of great difficulty in the philosophy of Bergson, and his own thought (as I shall presently state) is apt to strike us as just as hypothetical as some of the views he attempts to combat. It raises, too, the question of the valuation of his philosophy as a whole, and of its relation to the great thinker who still stands in the very centre of the entire modern movement from Copernicus to Comte and Darwin--Immanuel Kant.[404]

We shall best get at the matter of the fuller developments of the philosophy of Bergson that are of interest to us at present, by indicating some of the results that would accrue from it to the constructive philosophy in which we are interested as the outcome of Pragmatism and Idealism. Among these would be, firstly, a new and a fresh, and yet a perfectly rational apprehension of the fact of the necessarily abstract and hypothetical[405] character of the analyses to which our world is subjected by the science and by the technic and the supposed “economy” of our present culture.[406] Then an equally new and equally rational (or “rationally grounded”) conviction of the inadequacy of the physical and the scientific categories to the comprehension and the explanation of life and of the life of the spirit. Thirdly, a confirmation of many of the tendencies to which the Pragmatism and the Voluntarism and the Humanism of the last century have given a more or less one-sided and imperfect formulation. Among such confirmed tendencies are (α) the attempt they have all made to attain to a deeper[407] view of human nature than the view hitherto taken by rationalism and intellectualism, (β) their emphasis upon the freedom and the initiative[408] of the individual and upon the necessity, on the part of philosophy, of a “dynamic” or “motive-awakening”[409] theory of reality, (γ) their insistence[410] similarly upon the necessity to our thought of a _direct contact_ with reality, and upon the impossibility of our beginning in philosophy without assumptions of one kind or another, (δ) their refusal to make any ultimate separation[411] between the intellect and the will, between the highest thought and the highest emotion, (ε) their tendency to regard belief[412] rather than knowledge as our fundamental estimate of truth and reality.

A fourth constructive result, however, of the philosophy of Bergson would be not the mere confirmation of any number of pragmatist and humanist tendencies, but their integration, and their transformation into the evidences and the manifestation of a new spiritual philosophy of life and of the universe generally. It is this possible _quasi_ integration and transformation of so many of the tendencies of Pragmatism and Voluntarism and of the Philosophy of Science of the day, that makes Bergson the greatest of all the pragmatists--although the term hardly occurs in his main writings, and although he breathes from first to last the air of an idealism[413] and a spiritualism that is above and beyond all the mere instrumentalism, and the mere empiricism and the ethical opportunism of Pragmatism.

* * * * *

The following are some of the difficulties and counter-considerations that stand in the way of the intelligibility and the supposed novelty of the philosophy of Bergson. (1) It is in some respects but a biological philosophy after all, a would-be philosophical interpretation of the “evolutionary process” which takes many things for granted and ignores many difficulties. Some of these things are the life-force itself, the _élan de vie_, the vital aspects that he sees in the forces of nature, the “eternal movement” of which he is always speaking as the only reality and as the very life of the universe, the whole “adaptation” philosophy that characterises his own teleology despite his attacks on “mechanism” and on “finalism,” and so on. One is tempted, indeed, to think that in much of all this he forgets his own doctrine of the hypothetical character of science and philosophy, and that, in his very anxiety to escape from mechanism and from rationalism, and Paleyism, he credits Nature with a contingency and a “freedom”[414] that corresponds in their way to the chaos, of which the Greeks thought as a necessary background to the cosmos. He seems, in other words, to deify into a kind of eternal “becoming” and a _quasi_ free and creative “duration,” his own (necessary) inability to grasp the system of things.

Then, secondly, there is a veritable crop of difficulties that arise out of his contention that our intellect is adapted “only to matter.” What, for example, of the various non-utilitarian[415] intuitions of art and morality and religion, that are as undoubtedly facts of our conscious experience as is our comprehension and utilisation of “matter” for the various purposes of civilisation?[416] If it be literally true that our understanding is “incapacitated” for the comprehension of life and of the creative activities of the soul, a new set of categories and a higher form of intelligence (than the merely material) must be elaborated for this special purpose. And if this higher form of intelligence be the “intuition” of which Bergson undoubtedly makes so much, then he must be more careful than he often is in suggesting that intuition and a philosophy of our intuitions “must go _counter to the intellect_.”[417] His theory of art reduces itself, for example, in the main to the negative contention that spiritual perception is always simply “anti-mechanical,”[418] simply the power of seeing things in another way than that of the engineer or the craftsman, the _homo faber_.

Thirdly, there are many dualisms or oppositions in his doctrine or expressed teaching, reducible all of them to the one great Cartesian dualism between the mind and the matter that are said by him to intersect in memory, and in perception, and in the life of the spirit generally--the opposition, for example, between instinct and intelligence, that between intelligence and intuition,[419] between the “mechanical” and the “organic,” between the “upward” and the “downward” movements that he attributes to the life-force. And there is a striking inconsistency between his apparent acceptance of the teaching of Kant in respect of the limitations of the physical and the temporal way of looking at things (ourselves included and our actions) and his belief in an eternal “duration,”[420] or movement, or process of which he is always speaking as the very life and texture of everything. This “real” or “pure” “duration” is a thing that troubles all students of his philosophy; it seems to make Bergson believe in what James talked of as a “strung-along” universe. And there is an inconsistency between the supremacy that he seems willing to accord to mind and spirit in the case of the new individuals who are always being born into the world, and the absence of a similar supremacy (or determining rôle) in the case of the mind or spirit without whose existence and operation the universe is unthinkable.[421]

As for the latter contradiction, we may note in his favour that he talks, at least once or twice, of “God” as “unceasing life”[422] and “active freedom,” and I am inclined to take this master thought as possibly a kind of foundation for his rich and suggestive philosophy of life and reality. But there is in his writings nothing like the thorough-going attempt that we find in the philosophy of Aristotle[423] to ground the motion and the life of the world in God as its final cause and its ultimate explanation. Equally little is there in Bergson a thorough-going attempt to work out the Idealism[424] upon which his whole system reposes--his initial conception of objects as “images,” or “ideas” for a consciousness, or for the life-force, or for the different “centres of activity” with which he peoples the worlds.

Fourthly, there is the drawback from the point of view of social philosophy about the thought of Bergson to which we have already made reference--that it lacks somehow the ethical and the social idealism that would warrant us in thinking of it as a worthy rival or substitute for the philosophy of history of the great idealists of the past and the present. It is necessary to speak here with the utmost caution if we would avoid doing injustice[425] to Bergson. We cannot mean, for example, that he does not do justice[426] to the social factor in human development of which we have heard so much, perhaps too much, from the sociologists.[427] We might mean, however, and we do in a sense mean that he has not made as much as he might have done of this factor, by developing for the thought of to-day the reality of that world of “spiritual communion” and “inter-subjective intercourse” of which we have spoken more than once.

Then we might also contend that Bergson has not as yet, in his philosophy of human life, taken much cognizance of the deeper[428] experiences of life, of the specifically ethical and religious feelings and thoughts of men. With the pragmatists he is unduly optimistic about the free expansive development of the individual. Against this objection it may be replied, that he has so thoroughly assimilated into the very texture of his thought and feeling some of the finest things in the spiritualism and the idealism of the reflective thought of France[429] that we would not, if we could, wish the germinal or fructifying elements in his system to be different from what they are. His “social” message is perhaps after all the best thing that it can be--the need of the inward spiritualization of the life and thought of the individual.

Lastly, in addition to the fine traditional spiritualism and libertarianism of French philosophy, we may think of the voluntarism of Kant and Schopenhauer as also militating somewhat against the idea of Bergson’s originality[430] in philosophy. Despite this it is still possible to regard him as one of important, modern, exponents of just that development of the Kantian philosophy that became imperative after Darwinism. He has indeed inaugurated for us that reading of the “theory of knowledge” in terms of the “theory of life”[431] which is his true and real continuation of the critical work of Kant. Hypothetical although it may be in many respects, it moves (owing to his thorough absorption in the many facts and theories of the biology of recent years) in an atmosphere that is altogether above the confines of the physical and the mathematical[432] sciences with which alone Kant was (in the main) directly acquainted. It is time that, with the help he affords in his free handling of the facts of life and of the supposed facts and theories of science, we should transform the exiguous “epistemology”[433] of the past generation into the more perfect hold upon “criticism” and upon the life of things that is represented in his thought.

CONCLUDING REMARKS

Enough has now been said in the foregoing pages about Pragmatism and the philosophy of Actionism in relation to Rationalism, and to the Personalism and the Humanism that they would substitute for it and for Absolutism. Indications have been given too of the shortcomings and the defects of this very Personalism or Humanism, and of some of the different lines along which it would require to be reconsidered and developed to constitute a satisfactory philosophy. In addition to some of the greater names in the history of philosophy, I have referred--in the footnotes and elsewhere--to the thoughts and the works of living writers who might be profitably studied by the reader in this connexion.

Pragmatism is in some respects but a sociological or an anthropological doctrine significant of the rediscovery by our age of the doctrine of man, and of its desire to accord to this doctrine the importance that is its due. It represented, to begin with (in its Instrumentalism chiefly), the discontent of a dying century with the weight of its own creations in the realm of science and theory along with a newer and fresher consciousness of the fact that there can be no rigid separation of philosophy from the general thought and practice of mankind. And even if we accept this idea of the supremacy of the doctrine of man over both philosophy and science, this does not mean that we exalt the worker and the prophet over all knowledge, but simply that philosophy must have a theory of reality that provides for their existence and function alongside of those of the thinker or the student as such. The true philosophy is in fact the true doctrine of man.

Another lesson that we may learn from Pragmatism and Humanism is the truth of the contention that there can be no philosophy without assumptions of one kind or another, without facts and intuitions and immediate experiences. A philosophy itself is an act or a creation, representative of the attention of the thinker to certain aspects of his experience and of the experience of the world which he shares with other thinkers and with other agents. And, as Bergson has reminded us, it is often the great intuition underlying the attention and the thought of a philosopher that is of more worth to the world than the dialectic, or the logic, through the aid of which it is set forth and elaborated. This latter he may frequently have inherited or absorbed from the schools of his time.

The reason why the idealists and the dialecticians of our time have so often fought shy of beginning with the immediate or the “given,” is partly that they are not yet in their thoughts perfectly free of some taint or tincture of the supposed realism or dualism of the common-sense philosophy or the correspondence view of truth. They seem to have the fear that if they admit a given element of fact in speculation they will unconsciously be admitting that there is something outside thought and immediate experience in the true sense of these terms. In this fear they are forgetful of the great lesson of Idealism that there is nothing “outside” thought and consciousness, no “object” without a “subject,” that the world is “phenomenal” of a great experience, which they and other men are engaged in interpreting, and of which we may all become directly conscious. And while to God the end of all experiences and processes is known from the beginning, or apart from the mere time and space limitations that affect us as finite beings, it is still true that for us as men and as thinkers the reality of things is not “given” apart from the contribution to it that we ourselves make in our responsive and in our creative activity. In contending, therefore, for the reality, in every philosophy, of this assumption of ourselves and of the working value of our thought and of our activity, Pragmatism has been contending in its own fashion for the great doctrine of the sovereignty of the spirit which (when properly interpreted) is the one thing that can indeed recall the modern mind out of its endless dispersion and distraction, and out of its reputed present indifference. It is in the placing of this great reality before the world, or, rather, of the view of human nature that makes it a possibility, and in intelligibility, that (in my opinion) the significance of Pragmatism consists, along with that of the various doctrines with which it may be naturally associated. There are many indications in the best thought and practice of our time that humanity is again awakening to a creative and a self-determinative view of itself, of its experience, and of its powers. Of the presuppositions and the conditions under which this idea may be regarded as true and intelligible I have already spoken. Its proper interpretation, however, along with the exposition of the metaphysic upon which it must be made to repose, is at least part of the work of the philosophy of the future--if philosophy is true to its task of leading and guiding the thought of mankind.

FOOTNOTES

[1] See, for example, the concessions and the fresh statements of the problem of philosophy, and the “clearing of the ground,” etc., referred to on p. 76 and p. 74. Also p. 27 in reference to the stir and the activity that have been excited by the pragmatist controversy. See also p. 230, in the eighth chapter, in reference to some things in such a typical intellectualist as Professor Bosanquet that may be construed as a concession to Pragmatism and Humanism.

[2] Dr. Edward Caird affirmed in his memoir of his brother (Principal John Caird) that idealists admit some pragmatist charges.

[3] Professor Stein, a contemporary European authority, to whom we shall again refer below, says, for example, in his well-known articles in the _Archiv für Philosophie_ (1908), in reference to Pragmatism, that we have had nothing like it [as a ‘movement’] “since Nietzsche” (“Der Pragmatismus,” p. 9).

[4] See Chapter VIII., where I discuss the natural theology that bases itself upon these supposed principles of a “whole of truth” and the “Absolute.”

[5] This statement I think would be warranted by the fact of the tendency of the newer physical science of the day to substitute an electrical, for the old material, or corpuscular, conception of matter, or by the admission, for example, of a contemporary biologist of importance (Verworn, _General Physiology_, p. 39) that “all attempts to explain the psychical by the physical must fail. The actual problem is ... not in explaining psychical by physical phenomena but rather in reducing to its psychical elements physical, like all other psychical phenomena.”

[6] See p. 81, and p. 150.

[7] See Chapter V. pp. 136, 138, where we examine, or reflect upon, the ethics of Pragmatism.

[8] The importance of these volumes in the matter of the development, in the minds of thinking people everywhere, of a dynamic and an organic (instead of the older rationalistic and intellectualistic) conception of religion and of the religious life cannot possibly be overestimated. Of course it is only right to add here that such a dynamic and organic view of religion is the property not only of Professor James and his associates, but also of the army of workers of to-day in the realms of comparative religion and anthropology.

[9] _Pragmatism_, p. 300.

[10] Or an admission like the following in the _Meaning of Truth_ (p. 243): “It may be that the truest of all beliefs shall be that in transsubjective realities.”

[11] _Meaning of Truth_, p. 124, 5.

[12] See p. 40 and p. 149.

[13] _Pragmatism_, pp. 244–245.

[14] _A Pluralistic Universe_, p. 34.

[15] In respect of James’ later doctrine of “radical empiricism” we may quote, for the sake of intelligibility, from Professor Perry (his friend and literary executor) the following: “James’ empiricism means, then, first, that ideas are to be tested by direct knowledge, and, second, that knowledge is limited to what can be presented. There is, however, a third consideration which is an application of these, and the means of avoiding a difficulty which is supposed to be fatal to them. This is what James calls ‘radical empiricism,’ the discovery that ‘the relations between things, conjunctive as well as disjunctive, are just as much matters of direct particular experience, neither more nor less so, than the things themselves.’ ‘Adjacent minima of experience’ are united by the ‘persistent identity of certain units, or emphases, or points, or objects, or members ... of the experience-continuum.’ Owing to the fact that the connexions of things are thus found along with them, it is unnecessary to introduce any substance below them, or any subject above them, to hold things together” (_Present Philosophical Tendencies_, p. 365). In regard to this radical empiricism, I am obliged, as a Kantian, to say that, to my mind, it represents the reduction of all Pragmatism and Empiricism to an impossibility--to the fatuous attempt (exploded for ever by Hume) to attempt to explain knowledge and experience _without first principles_ of some kind or another. It is a “new Humism,” a thing which no one who has penetrated into the meaning of Hume’s _Treatise_ can possibly advocate. A philosophy without first principles, or a philosophy that reduces the relations between experiences to mere “bits” of experience, is indeed no philosophy at all.

[16] See p. 82 and p. 154.

[17] The Preface, pp. xv., xix.

[18] See p. 159 and p. 212.

[19] As for Dr. Schiller’s charge that Absolutism is essentially “irreligious” in spite of the fact of its having been (in England) religious at the outset, the best way of meeting this is to insist that it is mainly in its form, rather than its content, that Absolutism is (or was) irreligious in both Germany and England.

[20] British students of philosophy are quite well aware that it was the religious and the spiritual motive that seemed to weigh most with Hutchison Stirling and John Caird and Green in their attempts (thirty years ago) to introduce German transcendental philosophy to their fellow-countrymen. Stirling was impressed with the idea of a working correspondence between Hegelianism and Calvinism. John Caird’s animus was against the agnosticism of Herbert Spencer and of Mansel, and he found inspiration in this connexion in Hegel’s treatment of Kant’s theory of the limitations of the understanding. And to Green the attractive thing about Kant was his vindication of a “spiritual principle” in “nature,” and in “knowledge,” and in “conduct,” a principle which rendered absurd the naturalism of the evolutionary philosophy. Friends of this spiritualistic interpretation of German Critical Rationalism find its richest and fullest expression in the books of Edward Caird upon the _Evolution of Religion_ and the _Evolution of Theology in the Greek Philosophers_.

[21] The idea of a left wing is generally associated in the minds of British students with the destructive criticism of Mr. Bradley in _Appearance and Reality_, in which many, or most, of our ordinary ways of regarding reality (our beliefs in “primary” and “secondary” qualities of matter, in “space” and “time,” in “causation,” “activity,” a “self,” in “things in themselves,” etc.) are convicted of “fatal inconsistencies.” See, however, Professor Pringle-Pattison’s instructive account of his book in _Man’s Place in the Cosmos_, bringing out the positive side. The “left” is represented too, now, in Dr. Bosanquet’s _Individuality and Value_, which we examine below as the last striking output of British transcendentalism or absolutism. See in this entire connexion Professor James Seth’s recent account of the “Idealist Answers to Hume” in his _English Philosophy and Schools of Philosophy_.

[22] See p. 244. I find a confirmation of this idea in what a biologist like Professor Needham treats of as the “autogenetic nature of responses” (_General Biology_, p. 474) in animals.

[23] See the _Studies in Humanism_ for all the positions referred to, or quoted, or paraphrased, in these two paragraphs.

[24] This is an important essay. It reminds the modern reader, for one thing, of the importance of the natural theology of Aristotle. It is an anticipation, too, in its way, of the tendency of modern physics to substitute a dynamic for a static conception of matter, or atoms, or substance. In it Dr. Schiller points out how Aristotle’s doctrine of a perfect and self-perfecting Activity [an ἐνέργεια that is not mere change or motion, but a perfect “life” involving the disappearance of “time” and imperfection] is in a sense the solution of the old [Greek] and the modern demand for the substance or essence of things. We shall take occasion (in speaking of the importance to Philosophy of the concept of activity, and in speaking of the Philosophy of Bergson) to use the same idea, to which Dr. Schiller has given an expression in this essay, of God as the eternal or the perfect life of the world.

[25] For a favourable estimate of the services of Dr. Schiller in regard to Pragmatism and Humanism the reader may consult the articles of Captain Knox in the _Quarterly Review_, 1909.

[26] _Studies in Humanism_, p. 19. The remarks made in this paragraph will have to be modified, to some extent, in view of the recent (1911) appearance of the third edition of Dr. Schiller’s _Riddles of the Sphinx_. This noteworthy book contains, to say the very least, a great deal in the way of a positive ontology, or theory of being, and also many quite different rulings in respect of the nature of metaphysic and of the matter of its relation to science and to common sense. It rests, in the main, upon the idea of a perfect society of perfected individuals as at once the true reality and the end of the world-process--an idea which exists also, at least in germ, in the pluralistic philosophy of Professor James; and we shall indeed return to this practical, or sociological, philosophy as the outcome, not only of Pragmatism, but also of Idealism, as conceived by representative living thinkers. Despite, however, these many positive and constructive merits of this work of Dr. Schiller’s, it is for many reasons not altogether unfair to its spirit to contend that his philosophy is still, in the main, that of a humanistic pragmatism in which both “theory” and “practice” are conceived as experimentally and as hypothetically as they are by Professor Dewey.

[27] See p. 106.

[28] See Professor Bawden’s book upon Pragmatism.

[29] _Pragmatism_, p. 58.

[30] _Ibid._ 76.

[31] _Studies in Logical Theory_, p. 2.

[32] I endeavour to indicate what this Humanism and Personalism may be in my sixth chapter.

[33] _Journ. of Phil. Psychol._, 1906, p. 338.

[34] From vol. ii. (p. 322) of Baldwin’s _Dictionary of Philosophy_. Dr. C. S. Peirce, formerly a teacher of mathematics and philosophy at Johns Hopkins University, was made by James into the father or patron saint of Pragmatism. James confesses to have been stimulated into Pragmatism by the teachings of Peirce.

[35] _Journ. of Phil. Psy._, 1906, p. 340.

[36] See pp. 78, 148; and in reference to the last striking presentation of Absolutism, p. 230.

[37] See Bourdeau, _Pragmatisme et Modernisme_, and W. Riley in the _Journ. of Phil. Psy._, April and May 1911; the James article, _Journ. of Phil._, 1906; _Journ. of Phil._, 1907, pp. 26–37, on Papini’s “Introduction to Pragmatism”; _The Nation_ (N.Y.), November 1907, on “Papini’s view of the ‘daily tragedy’ of life.”

[38] Reported to have been inaugurated by a Franco-Italian poet, Martinetti. Of the question of any possible connexion between this “Futurism” with the present Art movement bearing the same name I know nothing definite.

[39] I refer to the recent volume dedicated by some of his old pupils to Professor Garman--a celebrated teacher of philosophy in one of the older colleges of the United States.

[40] The two large volumes on the _Psychology of Adolescence_.

[41] The _Psychology of Religion_.

[42] Even such a book--and it is no doubt in its way a genuine and a noteworthy book--as Harold H. Begbie’s _Twice-born Men_ is pointed to by this wing as another instance of the truth of pragmatist principles in the sphere of experimental religion. Schopenhauer, by the way, was inclined to estimate the efficacy of a religion by its power of affecting the will, of converting men so that they were able to overcome the selfish will to live. See my _Schopenhauer’s System in its Philosophical Significance_.

[43] See, for example, the declaration of James and Schiller (in the prefaces to their books and elsewhere) in respect of their attitudes to the work of men like Renouvier, Poincaré, Milhaud, Wilbois, Le Roy, Blondel, Pradines, the valuable reports of M. Lalande to the _Philosophical Review_ (1906–7–8), the articles of Woodbridge Riley in the _Journal of Philosophy_ (1911) upon the continental critics of Pragmatism, the books of Bourdeau, Hebert, Rey, Tonquedoc, Armand Sabatier, Schinz, Picard, Berthelot, those of Poincaré, Renouvier, Pradines, and the rest, the older books upon nineteenth-century French philosophy by men like Fouillée, Levy-Bruhl, etc. There are also valuable references upon the French pragmatists in Father Walker’s _Theories of Knowledge_ (in the Stoneyhurst Series), and in Professor Inge’s valuable little book upon _Faith and its Psychology_.

[44] The outstanding representative in France during the entire second half of the nineteenth century of “Neo-Criticism” or “Neo-Kantianism,” a remarkable and comprehensive thinker, to whose influence, for example, James attributed a part of his mental development. His review, the _Critique Philosophique_, was a worthy (idealist) rival of the more positivistically inclined, and merely psychological, review of Ribot, the _Revue Philosophique_. French Neo-Kantianism, holding, as Renouvier does, that Kant’s ethics is the keystone of his system, is not in general inclined to the “positivism” or the “scientific” philosophy of some of the German Neo-Kantians. The critical work of Renouvier proposes some very ingenious and systematic rearrangements of Kant’s philosophy of the categories, and his freedom-philosophy must certainly have done a good deal (along with the work of others) to create the atmosphere in which Bergson lives and moves to-day. With Renouvier, Neo-Kantianism merges itself too in the newer philosophy of “Personalism,” and he wrote, indeed, an important book upon this very subject (_Le Personnalisme_, 1902). In this work, we find a criticism of rationalism that anticipates Pragmatism, the author explicitly contending for a substitution of the principle of “rational belief” instead of the “false principle” of demonstrable or _a priori_ “evidence.” Consciousness, he teaches, is the foundation of existence, and “personality” the first “causal principle” of the world (although admitting “creation” to be beyond our comprehension). He examines critically, too, the notions of the “Absolute” and of the “Unconditioned,” holding that they should not be substantiated into entities. “Belief” is involved in “every act,” he teaches--also another pragmatist doctrine. And like his great predecessor Malebranche, and like our English Berkeley, he teaches that God is our “natural object,” the true “other” of our life. The philosophy of Personalism, the foundations of which are laid in this work, is further developed by Renouvier in a comprehensive work which he published in 1899, in conjunction with M. Prat, on _The New Monadology_ (_La Nouvelle Monadologie_). This is one of the most complete presentations of a philosophy of “Pluralism” that is at the same time a “Theism”--to be associated, in my opinion, say, with the recent work of Dr. James Ward upon the _Realm of Ends_, referred to on p. 162.

[45] _Philos. Rev._ (1906), article by Lalande.

[46] H. Poincaré (talked of in recent scientific circles as one of the greatest mathematicians of history) is (he died about a year ago), so far as our present purpose is concerned, one of the important scientific writers of the day upon the subject of the “logic of hypotheses,” and of the “hypothetical method” in science--the method which the pragmatists are so anxious to apply to philosophy. He seems (see his _La Science et l’Hypothèse_, as well as the later book, _La Valeur de la Science_, referred to by Lalande in his professional reports to the _Philosophical Review_) to accept to some extent the idea of the “hypothetical” character of the constructions of both the mathematical and the physical sciences, believing, however, at the same time that we must not be “unduly sceptical” about their conclusions, revealing as they do something of the “nature of reality.” He discusses among other topics the theory of “energetics” of which we speak below in the case of Ostwald. He insists, too, upon the idea that the real is known only by “experience,” and that this “experience” includes the comparison of the thoughts of many minds. And yet he believes to some extent in the Kantian theory of the _a priori_ element in knowledge (see _La Science_, etc., p. 64). It is, however, quite unnecessary for me to presume to enter into the large subject of the precise nature of “hypotheses” in the mathematical and the physical sciences.

[47] A professor of mathematics in Paris and an ardent Bergsonian, and along with Laberthonnière one of the prominent Catholic defenders of Pragmatism and Modernism, author of a book on _Dogmatism and Criticism_ (_Dogme et Critique_). Not having had the time to examine this book, as somewhat removed from my immediate subject, I append for the benefit of the reader the following statements and quotations from the useful book _Faith and its Psychology_, by Professor Inge of Cambridge. It is easy to see that the positions represented therein would give rise to controversy as to the historicity or fact of Christianity. “Le Roy gives us some examples of this Catholic Pragmatism. When we say ‘God is personal,’ we mean ‘behave in our relations with God as you do in your relations with a human person.’ When we say, ‘Jesus is risen from the dead,’ we mean ‘treat him as if he were your contemporary.’... His main theses may be summed up in his own words. ‘The current intellectualist conception renders insoluble most of the objections which are now raised against the idea of dogma. A doctrine of the primacy of action, on the contrary, permits us to solve the problem without abandoning anything of the rights of thought or of the exigencies of dogma.’” Le Roy, by the way, has published a book upon the philosophy of Bergson, which is said to be the best book upon the subject. It has been translated into English.

[48] M. Abel Rey, author of a work on the _Theory of Physical Science in the hands of Contemporary Scientists_ (_La Théorie de la physique chez les physiciens contemporains_). In this book (I have not had the time to examine it carefully) M. Rey examines the theories and methods of Newton, and also of modern thinkers like Mach and Ostwald, reaching the conclusion that the philosophy with which physical science is most compatible is a “modified form of Positivism,” which bears a striking resemblance to “Pragmatism” and the “philosophy of experience.” The English reader will find many useful references to Rey in the pages of Father Leslie J. Walker’s _Theories of Knowledge_, in the “Stoneyhurst Philosophical Series.”

[49] _Ibidem._

[50] It was impossible to procure a copy of this work of M. Blondel. I have tried to do so twice in Paris.

[51] M. Lalande in the _Philosophical Review_ (1906), p. 246.

[52] _Ibid._ pp. 245–246.

[53] I am inclined to attach a great importance to this idea (Kant obviously had it) of “consulting moral experience directly,” provided only that the “moral” in our experience is not too rigidly separated from the intellectual. And it would so far, therefore, be only to the credit of Pragmatism if we could associate it with a rational effort to do justice to our moral experience, as indeed possibly presupposing a “reality” that transcends the limits of our mere individuality, a reality that transcends, too, the subjective idealism that figures but too prominently in modern philosophy. See my eighth chapter, p. 223, where I criticize Dr. Bosanquet for not consulting moral experience directly.

[54] _Phil. Rev._, 1906, p. 243.

[55] See p. 160.

[56] See p. 200 _et. ff._

[57] See p. 64.

[58] For a later statement upon the philosophy of religion in France see a report for the _Phil. Rev._ (vol. xvi. p. 304), by Le Roy. This whole matter is, of course, a subject in itself of the greatest theoretical and practical importance. It is enough for our purpose to have indicated the different ways in which Pragmatism and the “Will-to-Believe” philosophy have been received in France, and the different issues raised by this reception. The reader who would care to look at a constructive, philosophical view (by the _doyen_ of French philosophy professors) of the whole issue between the pragmatist or “voluntarist” point of view in religion and the older “intellectual” view, cannot do better than consult _Science and Religion in Contemporary Philosophy_, by E. Boutroux, a book that is apparently studied everywhere at present in France. Its spirit and substance may be indicated by the following quotations, which follow after some pages in which M. Boutroux exposes the error of “the radical distinction between theory and practice.” “The starting point of science is an abstraction, _i.e._ an element extracted from the given fact and considered separately. We cannot expect man to be satisfied with the abstract when the concrete is at his disposal. That would be ‘something like offering a printed bill of fare as the equivalent for a solid meal.’ _Man uses science but he lives religion._ The part cannot replace the whole; the symbol cannot suppress reality.”... “Not only is science unable to replace religion, but she cannot dispense with the subjective reality upon which the latter is grounded. It is pure Scholastic realism to imagine that the objective and the impersonal suffice apart from the subjective in our experience. Between the subjective and the objective no demarcation is given which justifies from the philosophical standpoint the divisions which science imagines for her own convenience.” (p. 329).

[59] Since writing these words, I have made (thanks firstly to Dr. Schiller’s review in _Mind_, July 1911) the acquaintance of the important work of M. Pradines upon the _Conditions of Action_. In the central conception of this work, that action is “all-including” and that all knowledge is a form of action, I find an important development of much that the pragmatists have long been endeavouring to express, and also in particular a development of the celebrated action philosophy of M. Blondel. I am inclined, with Dr. Schiller, to regard the volumes of M. Pradines as apparently the high-water mark of French pragmatist philosophy in the general sense of the term, although I cannot but at the same time hail with approval their occasional sharp criticism of Pragmatism as to some extent “scepticism and irrationalism.” I am inclined to think, too, that the ethical philosophy of M. Pradines has some of the same defects that I shall venture to discuss later in dealing with the application (mainly by Dewey) of Pragmatism to moral theory. Of course his _Conditions of Action_ is by no means as original a production as Blondel’s book upon _Action_.

[60] Fouillée speaks in his book upon the _Idealist Movement and the Reaction against Positive Science_ of the year 1851, as the time of the triumph of “force,” of “Naturalism” (Zola, Goncourt, etc.), and of the revival of Idealism by Lachelier, Renouvier, and Boutroux.

[61] See the celebrated work of A. Fouillée, _La Psychologie des idées-forces_ (Paris, 1890). I confess to having been greatly impressed by this book when I first made its acquaintance. In particular, I can think of an idea in Fouillée’s book that anticipates even Bergson, namely the fact that every idea or sensation is an effort that is furthered or impeded. But Fouillée’s works out in this book the active of the volitional side of nearly every mental power and of the mental life itself, refusing to separate “mind” and “bodily activity.” It really anticipates a great deal of the whole French philosophy and psychology of action, including the work of Blondel and Bergson.

[62] M. Paul Desjardins (at present a professor of “letters” at Sévres) was influential in Paris about 1892–93 as the founder of a _Union pour l’Action morale_, which published a monthly bulletin. This society still exists, but under the name (and the change is indeed highly significant of what Pragmatism in general really needs) _L’Union pour la vérité morale et sociale_. I append a few words from one of the bulletins I received from M. Desjardins. They are indicative of the spiritualizations of thought and action for which the old society stood. “Il ne s’agit de rien moins que de renverser entièrement l’échelle de nos jugements, de nos attaches, de mettre en haut ce qui était en bas, et en bas ce qui était en haut. Il s’agit d’une conversion totale, en somme....” “La règle commune c’est la médiocrité d’âme, ou même ce qu’on pourrait appeler _l’athéisme pratique_. En effet, Dieu étant, par rapport à notre conscience, la Volonté que le bien se réalise, ou la Règle vivante, on devient pratiquement, athée, fût-on d’ailleurs très persuadé par les preuves philosophiques de l’existence de Dieu, lorsqu’on perd la notion de cette Volonté immuable avec laquelle la nôtre se confond activement _dès qu’elle mérite le nom de volonté libre_, etc.” In this last sentence there is a distinctly pragmatist note in the sense of the action philosophy of Blondel and Bergson and the rest.

[63] See also the recent book by Flournoy on the _Philosophy of James_ (Paris, 1911), in which this interesting special subject is discussed as well as the important difference between James and Bergson.

[64] Rey in his _Philosophie Moderne_, 1908, speaks of the “gleaning of the practical factors of rationalistic systems” as the “new line” in French philosophy (_Journ. of Phil._, 1911, p. 226).

[65] From the Lalande article already mentioned.

[66] This can be seen, for example, in the Preface to _Die Philosophie des Als Ob_, the quasi-Pragmatist book recently edited by Vaihinger, the famous commentator on Kant. “We must distinguish in Pragmatism,” it is there stated, “what is valuable from the uncritical exaggerations. Uncritical Pragmatism is an epistemological Utilitarianism of the worst sort; what helps us to make life tolerable is true, etc.... Thus Philosophy becomes again an _ancilla theologiae_; nay, the state of matters is even worse than this; it becomes a _meretrix theologorum_.” This, by the way, is a strange and a striking book, and is perhaps the last conspicuous instance from Germany of the vitality, and of the depths of the roots of some of the principles of the pragmatists. The very appearance of the name of Vaihinger in connexion with it (as the editor) must be a considerable shock to rationalists and to Kantians, who have long looked upon Vaihinger as one of the authoritative names in German Transcendentalism. Here, however, he seems to agree with those who treat Kant’s ethical philosophy of postulates as the real Kant, making him out, further, as the author of a far-reaching philosophy of the “hypotheses” and the “fictions” that we must use in the interpretation of the universe. With Dr. Schiller, who reviews this work in _Mind_ (1912), I am inclined to think that it travels too far in the direction of an entirely hypothetical conception of knowledge, out-pragmatising the pragmatists apparently. The student who reads German will find it a veritable magazine of information about nearly all the thinkers of the time who have pragmatist or quasi-pragmatist leanings. All the names, for example, of the German and French writers to whom I refer in this second chapter are mentioned there [I had, of course, written my book before I saw Vaihinger], along with many others. It is as serious an arraignment of abstract rationalism as is to be found in contemporary literature, and edited, as I say, by the Nestor of the Kant students of our time.