Chapter IX: Pragmatism and Idealism in the Philosophy of Bergson386 (2)

[67] Especially in the open-minded and learned articles in the _Archiv für Philosophie_, 1907, Band xiv., Professor Stein (of Bern) is known as one of the most enthusiastic and voluminous writers upon Social Philosophy in Germany. His best-known work is an encyclopedic book upon the social question in the light of philosophy (_Die soziale Frage im Lichte der Philosophie_, 1903). His tendency here is realistic and naturalistic and evolutionistic, and he thinks (for a philosopher) far too much of men like Herbert Spencer and Mach and Ostwald. What one misses in Stein is a discussion of the social question in relation to some of the deeper problems of philosophy, such as we find in men of our own country like Mackenzie and Bosanquet, and Ritchie, and Jones, and others. His work, however (it has been translated into Russian and French), is a complete literary presentation of the subject, and a valuable source of information. See my review notices of it in the _Phil. Rev._ vol. xiv.

[68] Mach and Ostwald both represent (for the purposes of our study) the association that undoubtedly exists between Pragmatism and the tendency of all the physical and natural sciences to form “hypotheses” or conceptions, that are to them the best means of “describing” or “explaining” (for any purpose) either facts, or the connexions between facts. Mach (professor of the history and theory of the sciences in Vienna) is a “phenomenalist” and “methodologist” who attacks all _a priorism_, treating the matter of the arrangement of the “material” of a science under the idea of the “most economic expenditure” of our “mental energy.” One of the best known of his books is his _Analysis of the Sensations_ (translated, along with his _Popular Science Lectures_, in the “Open Court Library” of Chicago). In this work he carries out the idea of his theory of knowledge as a question of the proper relation of “facts” to “symbols.” “Thing, body, matter,” he says (p. 6), “are all nothing apart from their so-called attributes.” “Man possesses in its highest form the power of consciously and arbitrarily determining his point of view.” In his _Introduction_, he attempts to show how “the ego and the relation of bodies to the ego give rise” to “problems” in the relations simply of “certain complexes” of “sensation to each other.” While it is undoubtedly to the credit of Mach that he sees the “subjective,” or the “mental,” factor in facts and things and objects, it must be said that he ignores altogether the philosophical problems of the ego, or the “self,” as something more than a mere object among objects.

Ostwald is one of the founders of the theory of “Energetics,” the theory of the school that believes in substituting a dynamical philosophy, for the older, atomic, or mechanical philosophy of matter and motion. He put this philosophy forward in 1895 as the last gift of the nineteenth to the twentieth century. He suggests how this idea of energetics may be applied also to psychical processes, in so far as these may be understood by conceptions that have proved to be useful in our interpretation of the physical world. Our “consciousness would thus come to be looked upon as a property of a peculiar kind of energy of the nerves.” The whole idea is a piece of phenomenalistic positivism, and although Ostwald makes an attempt (somewhat in the manner of Herbert Spencer) to explain the “forms,” or the categories, of experience as simply “norms” or “rules” that have been handed on from one generation to another, he does not occupy himself with ultimate philosophical questions about the nature either of matter or of energy. His _Natural Philosophy_ has recently been translated into English (Holt & Co., 1910). Its Pragmatism lies in the fact of his looking upon concepts and classification as “not questions” of the so-called “essence” of the thing, “but rather as pertaining to purely practical arrangements for an easier and more successful mastery of scientific problems” (p. 67). He also takes a pragmatist, or “functional,” conception of the mental life towards the close of this book. Professor Ostwald lectured some years ago in the United States, and his lectures were attended by students of philosophy and students of science. Professor (now President) Hibben has written an interesting account of his theory in its philosophical bearings in the _Philosophical Review_, vol. xii.

[69] The philosophy of Avenarius (born in Paris, but died as Professor of Inductive Philosophy in Zurich) is called “Empirical Criticism,” which differs from Idealism by taking a more realistic attitude to ordinary human experience. There is an excellent elementary account of Avenarius in _Mind_ for 1897 by Carstanjen of Zurich. Avenarius goes back in some respects to the teaching of Comte as to the need of interpreting all philosophical theories in the terms of the social environment out of which they come.

[70] _Logic_, vol. ii. p. 17. English translation by Miss Dendy. In this same section of his work, Lotze talks of the demands of our thought as “postulates” whose claims rest in the end upon our will--_auf unserm Wollen_.

[71] To be traced to Fichte’s well-known initial interpretation of Kant from the standpoint of the Practical Reason of the second “Critique,” and to Schelling’s late “positive” philosophy, and to Schopenhauer, the will philosopher _par excellence_. See my _Schopenhauer’s System in its Philosophical Significance_.

[72] As an illustration of this “conceptual shorthand,” I take the following lines from Professor Needham’s book upon _General Biology_ (p. 222) in respect of “classification” and its relative and changing character. “Whatever our views of relationship, the series in which we arrange organisms are based upon the likenesses and differences we find to exist among them. This is classification. We associate organisms together under group names because, being so numerous and so diverse, it is only thus that our minds can deal with them. Classification furnishes the handles by which we move all our intellectual luggage. We base our groupings on what we know of the organisms. Our system of classification is therefore liable to change with every advance of knowledge.”

[73] Professor Jerusalem (the translator of James’s _Pragmatism_ into German) is known as one of the German discoverers of Pragmatism. His _Introduction to Philosophy_ (translated by Professor Sanders, Macmillan & Co., N.Y., 1910) is an admirable, easy, and instructive introduction to philosophy from a pragmatist point of view. It has gone through four editions in Germany. It is quite free from any taint of irrationalism and has sections upon the “theory of knowledge” and the “theory of being.” Its spirit may be inferred from the following quotations. “My philosophy is characterized by the empirical view point, the genetic method, and the biological and the social methods of interpreting the human mind” (the Preface). “Philosophy is the intellectual effort which is undertaken with a view to combining the common experiences of life and the results of scientific investigation into a harmonious and consistent world theory; a world theory, moreover, which is adapted to satisfy the requirements of the understanding and the demands of the heart. There was a time when men believed that such a theory could be constructed from the pure forms of thought, without much concern for the results of detailed investigation. But that time is for ever past” (pp. 1 and 2).

[74] Author of a work on _Philosophy and Social Economy_ (_Philosophie und Wirthschaft_), in which the fundamental idea is that philosophy is essentially nothing more or less than a “conception of life” or a view of the world in general, and that the older rationalistic philosophy will therefore have to be modified in view of modern discoveries and modern ways of looking at things. It has, of course, the limitations of such a point of view, in so far as its author seems to forget that philosophy must _lead_ human life and not merely _follow_ it. My present point is merely to mention of the existence and work of this man as one of the continental thinkers who have anticipated the essentially social conception of philosophy taken by the pragmatists.

[75] It is easy to see the influence of Fichte’s will philosophy and practical idealism in Schellwien’s books (_Philosophie und Leben_, _Wille und Erkenntniss_, _Der Geist der neuern Philosophie_). He speaks of the primacy of the will (in point of time only, of course), or of the “unconscious” in the life of man, allowing, however, that man gradually transforms this natural life in the life of “creative activity” that is his proper life. He states (in the _Spirit of the New Philosophy_) the pragmatist idea that “belief” (p. 32) or the “feeling” that we have of the ultimate “unity” of “subject and object,” precedes (also in point of “time”) knowledge, pointing out, however, in the same place the limitations of belief. These latter, he supposes, to be overcome in the higher knowledge that we have in creative activity--an idea which, I think, may be associated to some extent with the position of Blondel.

[76] In the _Phil. Rev._ (xvi. p. 250) Dr. Ewald speaks of this work of this psychologizing school as existing alongside of the renewed interest in Fichte and Schelling and Hegel. It is an attempt to revive the teaching of Fries, a Kantian (at Jena) who attempted to establish the Critique of Pure Reason upon a psychological basis, believing that psychology, “based on internal experience,” must form the basis of all philosophy. It stands squarely upon the fact that all logical laws and “categories,” even the highest and most abstract, in order to “come to consciousness in man,” must be given to him as “psychological processes”--a position which is certainly true as far as it goes, and which supports, say, the genetic psychological attitude of Professor Dewey. Its attitude has been sharply criticized in some of his books by Dr. Ernst Cassirer of Berlin, a well-known upholder of a more rationalistic form of Neo-Kantianism.

[77] Dr. Simmel of Berlin (like Stein) is a prominent representative of this school (even in a recent striking book that he wrote upon the philosophy of Kant). He has written, for example, a most erudite work upon the _Philosophy of Money_, and this at the same time with all his university work as a fascinating and learned lecturer upon both ancient and modern philosophy.

[78] Without attempting to enter upon the matter of Harnack’s philosophy as a Neo-Kantian of the school of Ritschl, I am thinking simply of things like the following from his book on the _Essence of Christianity_. “It is to man that religion pertains, to man, as one who in the midst of all change and progress himself never changes” (p. 8). “The point of view of the philosophical theorists in the strict sense of the word will find no place in these lectures. Had they been delivered sixty years ago it would have been our endeavour to try to arrive by speculative reasoning at some general conception of religion, and then to define the Christian religion accordingly. But we have rightly become sceptical about the value of this procedure. _Latet dolus in generalibus._ We know to-day that life cannot be spanned by general conceptions” (p. 9). See also his protest (on p. 220) against the substitution of a “Hellenistic” view of religion for religion itself--a protest that is, according to Pfleiderer in his _Development of Theology_ (p. 298), a marked characteristic of Harnack’s whole _History of Dogma_.

[79] I am thinking of Ritschl’s sharp distinction between “theoretical knowledge” and “religious faith” (which rises to judgments of value about the world that transcend even moral values), and of his idea that the “truth” of faith is practical, and must be “lived.” Pfleiderer says (in his _Development of Theology_, p. 184) that Ritschl’s “conception of religion is occupied with judgments of value [_Werturtheile_], _i.e._ with conceptions of our relation to the world which are of moment solely according to their value in awakening feelings of pleasure and pain, as our dominion over the world is furthered or checked.” His “acceptance of the idea of God as [with Kant] a practical ‘belief,’ and not an act of speculative cognition,” is also to some extent a pragmatist idea in the sense in which, in this book, I reject pragmatist ideas. Ritschl seems to have in the main only a strongly practical interest in dogmatics holding that “only the things vital are to be made vital in the actual service of the church.” He goes the length of holding that “a merely philosophical view of the world has no place in Christian theology,” holding that “metaphysical inquiry” applied to “nature” and to “spirit,” as “things to be analysed, for the purpose of finding _out what they are in themselves_, can from the nature of the case have no great value for Christian theology.” Of course he is right in holding that the “proofs for the existence of God, conducted by the purely metaphysical method, do not lead to the forces whose representation is given in Christianity, but merely to conceptions of a world-unity, which conceptions are neutral as regards all religion” (_The Theology of Albrecht Ritschl_, Swing. Longmans, Green & Co., 1901). I think this last quotation from Ritschl may be used as an expression of the idea of the pragmatists, that a true and complete philosophy must serve as a “dynamic” to human endeavour and to human motive.

[80] See the reference to Windelband in the footnote upon p. 150.

[81] I am thinking of Münsterberg’s contention in his _Grundzüge_ and his other books, that the life of actual persons can never be adequately described by the objective sciences, by psycho-physics, and so on, and of his apparent acceptance of the distinction of Rickert between the “descriptive” and the “normative” sciences (logic, ethics, aesthetics, and so on).

[82] The leaders of this school are the two influential thinkers and teachers Cohen and Natorp, the former the author of a well-known book upon Kant’s _Theory of Experience_ (1871), formerly much used by English and American students, and the latter the author of an equally famous book upon Plato’s _Theory of Ideas_, which makes an interesting attempt to connect Plato’s “Ideas” with the modern notion of the law of a phenomenon. Cohen has given forth recently an important development of the Kantian philosophy in his two remarkable books upon the _Logic of Pure Knowledge_ and the _Ethic of the Pure Will_. These works exercise a great influence upon the entire liberal (Protestant and Jewish) thought of the time in Germany. They teach a lofty spiritualism and idealism in the realm of ethics, which transcends altogether anything as yet attempted in this direction by Pragmatism.

[83] See the instructive reports to the _Philosophical Review_ by Dr. Ewald of Vienna upon Contemporary Philosophy in Germany. In the 1907 volume he speaks of this renewed interest, “on a new basis,” in the work of the great founders of transcendentalism as an “important movement partly within and partly outside of Neo-Kantianism,” as “a movement heralded by some and derided by others as a reaction,” as the “fulfilment of a prophecy by von Hartmann that after Kant we should have Fichte, and after Fichte, Schelling and Hegel.” The renewed interest in Schelling, and with it the revival of an interest in university courses in the subject of the Philosophy of Nature (see the recent work of Driesch upon the _Science and Philosophy of the Organism_) is all part of the recent reaction in Germany against Positivism.

[84] We may associate, I suppose, the new German journal _Logos_, an international periodical for the “Philosophie der Kultur,” with the same movement.

[85] See Chapter VII. upon “Pragmatism as Americanism.”

[86] See an article in the _Critical Review_ (edited by the late Professor Salmond, of Aberdeen), by the author upon “Recent Tendencies in American Philosophy.” The year, I think, was either 1904 or 1905.

[87] See p. 180.

[88] Without pretending to anything like a representative or an exhaustive statement in the case of this magazine literature, I may mention the following: Professor Perry of Harvard, in his valuable articles for the _Journal of Philosophy and Psychology_, 1907, vol. iv., upon “A Review of Pragmatism as a Philosophical Generalization,” and a “Review of Pragmatism as a Theory of Knowledge”; Professor Armstrong in vol. v. of the same journal upon the “Evolution of Pragmatism”; and Professor Lovejoy in the 1908 vol. upon the “Thirteen Pragmatisms.” These are but a few out of the many that might be mentioned. The reader who is interested in looking for more such must simply consult for himself the _Philosophical Review_, and _Mind_, and the _Journal of Philosophy and Psychology_, for some years after, say, 1903. There is a good list of such articles in a German Doctor Thesis by Professor MacEachran of the University of Alberta, entitled _Pragmatismus eine neue Richtung der Philosophie_, Leipzig, 1910. There is also a history of pragmatist articles in the 1907 (January) number of the _Revue des Sciences, Philosophiques et Theologiques._

[89] That this has really taken place can be clearly seen, I think, if we inspect the official programmes of the Proceedings of the American Philosophical Association for the last year or two.

[90] P. 144.

[91] See p. 149.

[92] See Chapter VI., p. 149, upon the doctrine and the fact of “Meaning.”

[93] Professor Pratt, _What is Pragmatism?_ (Macmillan & Co., 1909); H. H. Bawden, _The Principles of Pragmatism, a Philosophical Interpretation of Experience_, Boston, 1910 (a useful book presenting what may be called a “phenomenological” account of Pragmatism); Moore, _Pragmatism and Its Critics_.

[94] _In Pragmatism and Its Critics_ (Univ. of Chicago Press).

[95] The manifesto has now become a book. _The New Realism_ (Macmillan). For a useful account of the New Realism and the Old see Professor Perry, _Present Philosophical Tendencies_, Part V.

[96] The following are my reasons for saying that the “New Realism” was already to some extent lurking in the “radical empiricism” of James. (1) Although teaching unmistakably the “activity” of mind, James seemed to think this activity “selective” rather than “creative” (falling in this idea behind his much-admired Bergson). (2) Despite this belief in the activity of the mind, he had the way of regarding consciousness as (to some extent) the mind’s “content”--an attitude common to all empirical psychologists since Hume and the English associationists. And from this position (legitimate so far from the psychological point of view) he went on to the idea (expressed in a troublesome form in the article, “Does Consciousness exist?”) that consciousness is _not an entity or substance_--of course it is not in the ordinary sense of “entity.” (3) Then from this he seemed to develop the idea that the various “elements” that enter into consciousness to be transformed into various “relationships” do not suffer any substantial change in this quasi-subjective “activity.” Therefore, as Professor Perry puts it (_Present Tendencies_, p. 353), “the elements or terms which enter into consciousness and become its content may now be regarded as _the same elements which, in so far as otherwise related, compose physical nature_ [italics mine]. The elements themselves, the ‘_materia prima_,’ or stuff of pure experience, are neither psychical nor physical.” It is in this last absurd sentence [simply a piece of quasi-scientific analysis, the error of which Critical Idealism would expose in a moment] that the roots, I think, of “new realism” are to be found--a doctrine whose unmitigated externalism is the negation of all philosophy.

[97] See p. 164 and p. 230.

[98] I refer to his Aberdeen “Gifford Lectures” on “The World and The Individual,” and to a well-known address of his upon “The Eternal and the Practical” in the _Proceedings of the American Philosophical Association_. In this latter pamphlet he shows that Pragmatism and the philosophy of Consequences are impossible without “the Eternal” and without Idealism.

[99] The criticisms of which I am thinking are (to select but a few from memory) Green’s well-known admission in respect of Hegelianism, that it would have “to be done all over again”; Mr. Bradley’s admission that he is “not a Hegelian” and (recently) that he has “seen too much of metaphysics” to place any serious weight upon its reasonings; Jowett’s complaint (in the “life” by Campbell) that the Oxford Hegelianism of his day was teaching students to place an undue reliance upon “words” and “concepts” in the place of facts and things; Dr. Bosanquet’s admission (many years ago) that, of course, “gods and men” were more than “bloodless categories”; Professor Pringle Pattison’s criticism of Hegel in his _Hegelianism and Personality_; Professor Baillie’s criticisms at the end of his _Logic of Hegel_; Mr. Sturt’s criticism of Neo-Hegelianism in his _Idola Theatri_, etc.

[100] See the following, for example, from Professor Stout: “Every agreeable or disagreeable sensation has a conative or quasi-conative aspect” (_Manual of Psychology_, p. 233). Also: “Perception is never merely cognitive” (_ibid._ p. 242); it has a “conative character and a feeling tone,” etc.

[101] A. Sidgwick’s “Applied Axioms” (_Mind_, N.S. xiv. p. 42). This is extremely useful, connecting the recent pragmatist movement with the work of the English logicians. See in the same connexion the articles of Captain Knox in the _Quarterly Review_ (April 1909) on “Pragmatism.”

[102] During the last ten years _Mind_ has contained articles on the pragmatist controversy by nearly all our prominent academic authorities: Dr. Bradley, Dr. McTaggart, Professor Taylor, Professor Hoernle, Dr. Schiller, Dr. Mellone, Dr. Boyce-Gibson, Mr. Hobhouse, and so on.

[103] Particularly in his valuable book on _Truth_ in which the weakness of the Hegelian conception of truth is set forth along with that of other views.

[104] In _Idealism as a Practical Creed_, in his _Browning as a Religious and Philosophical Teacher_, and elsewhere.

[105] In his _Elements of Metaphysic_, and in many of his recent reviews; in his review, for example, of Professor Bosanquet’s _Individuality and Value_, in the _Review of Theology and Philosophy_, and in his Mind (July 1912) review of Professor Ward’s _Realm of Ends_.

[106] In his book upon the _Philosophy of Eucken_, in _God With Us_, and elsewhere.

[107] In _Idola Theatri_ (an important criticism of Neo-Hegelian writers), and elsewhere.

[108] In _Essays in Philosophical Construction_, and in his book upon Logic.

[109] In his _Introduction to Logic_.

[110] See p. 154.

[111] “If God has this perfect authority and perfect knowledge, His authority cannot rule us, nor His knowledge know us, or any human thing; just as our authority does not extend to the gods, nor our knowledge know anything which is divine; so by parity of reason they, being gods, are not our masters, neither do they know the things of men” (_Parmenides_, 134, Jowett’s _Plato_, vol. iv.).

[112] This is, of course, a very old difficulty, involved in the problem of the supposed pre-knowledge of God. Bradley deals with it in the _Mind_ (July 1911) article upon “Some Aspects of Truth.” His solution (as Professor Dawes Hicks notices in the _Hibbert Journal_, January 1912) is the familiar Neo-Hegelian finding, that as a “particular judgment” with a “unique context” my truth is “new,” but “as an element in an eternal reality” it was “waiting for me.” Readers of Green’s _Prolegomena_ are quite ready for this finding. Pragmatists, of course, while insisting on the man-made character of truth, have not as yet come in sight of the difficulties of the divine foreknowledge--in relation to the free purposes and the free discoveries of mortals.

[113] There is, it seems to me, a suggestion of this rationalist position in the fact, for example, that Mr. Bertrana Russell begins his recent booklet upon _The Problems of Philosophy_ with the following inquiry about knowledge: “Is there any knowledge in the world which is so certain that no reasonable man could doubt it?” I mean that the initial and paramount importance attached here to this question conveys the impression that the supreme reality for philosophy is still some independently certain piece of knowledge. I prefer, with the pragmatists and the humanists, to think of knowledge as concerned with the purposes of persons as intelligent beings, or with the realities revealed in the knowing process. Although there are passages in his book that show Mr. Russell to be aware of the selves and the psychical elements and processes that enter into knowing, they do not affect his prevailingly rationalistic and impersonal conception of knowledge and philosophy.

[114] In his sympathetic and characteristic review of James’s “Pragmatism” in the _Journ. of Philos._, 1908.

[115] See p. 203 (the _note_), and p. 263, where I suggest that no philosophy can exist, or can possibly begin, without some direct contact with reality, without the experience of some person or persons, without assumptions of one kind or another.

[116] See p. 162.

[117] In this attitude Pragmatism is manifestly in a state of rebellion against “Platonism,” if we allow ourselves to think of Pragmatism as capable of confronting Plato. Plato, as we know, definitely subordinates “belief” to “knowledge” and “truth.” “As being is to becoming,” he says, “so is truth to belief” (_Timaeus_, Jowett’s translation). To Plato belief is a conjectural, or imaginative, estimate of reality; it deals rather with “appearance” or “becoming” than with “reality.” “True being” he thinks of as revealed in the Ideas, or the rational entities that are his development and transformation of the “definition” of Socrates. Against all this rationalism Pragmatism (it is enough meantime merely to indicate the fact) would have us return to the common-sense, or the religious, position that it is invariably what we believe in that determines our notion of reality.

[118] Cf. p. 159.

[119] From Dr. Schiller’s _Humanism_.

[120] _Pragmatism_, p. 207.

[121] It is this dissatisfaction at once with the abstractions of science and of rationalism and with the contradictions that seem to exist between them all and the facts of life and experience as we feel them that constitutes _the great dualism_, or _the great opposition of modern times_. I do not wish to emphasize this dualism, nor do I wish to set forth faith or belief in opposition to reason when I extract from both Pragmatism and Idealism the position that it is belief rather than knowledge that is our fundamental estimate of reality. I do not believe, as I indicate in the text above, that this dualism is ultimate. It has come about only from an unfortunate setting of some parts of our nature, or of our experience in opposition to the whole of our nature, or the whole of our experience. That the opposition, however, between reason and faith still exists in many quarters, and that it is and has been _the_ opposition of modern times, and that the great want of our times is a rational faith that shall recall the world of to-day out of its endless “distraction” (the word is Dr. Bosanquet’s), I am certainly inclined to maintain. In proof of this statement it is enough to recall things like the words of Goethe about the conflict of belief and unbelief as the unique theme of the history of the world, or the “ethical headache which was literally a splitting headache,” that Mr. Chesterton finds in the minds of many of our great Victorian writers. I shall take leave of it here with three references to its existence taken from the words or the work of living writers. The first shall be the opposition which Mr. Bertrand Russell finds in his _Philosophical Essays_ (in the “Free Man’s Worship”) between the “world which science presents for our belief” and the “lofty thoughts that ennoble his little day.” The second shall be the inconsistency that exists in Mr. Hugh S. R. Elliot’s book upon _Modern Science and the Illusions of Professor Bergson_, between his initial acceptance of the mechanical, evolutionary system of modern science and his closing acceptance of feeling and poetry and love as the “deepest forms of happiness.” The third shall be the declaration of Professor Sir Henry Jones of Glasgow (in the _Hibbert Journal_, 1903) that “one of the characteristics of our time is the contradiction that exists between its practical faith in morality and its theoretical distrust of the conceptions on which they rest.”

[122] See p. 203 (note).

[123] See p. 7.

[124] From _Pragmatism and its Misunderstanders_.

[125] See p. 173.

[126] “You will be surprised to learn, then, that Messrs. Schiller’s and Dewey’s theories have suffered a hailstorm of contempt and ridicule. All rationalism has risen up against them. In influential quarters, Mr. Schiller in particular has been treated like an impudent school-boy who deserves a spanking. I should not mention this but for the fact that it throws so much light upon _that rationalist temper to which I have opposed the temper of pragmatism. Pragmatism is uncomfortable away from facts. Rationalism is comfortable only in the presence of abstractions._ This pragmatist talk about truths in the plural, about their utility and satisfactoriness, about the success with which they ‘work,’ etc., suggests to the typical intellectualist mind a sort of coarse, lame, second-rate makeshift article of truth” (James, _Pragmatism_, pp. 66–67; italics mine). The words about Rationalism being comfortable only in the world of abstractions are substantiated by the procedure of Bosanquet, to whom I refer in Chapter VIII., or by the procedure of Mr. Bertrand Russell, referred to on p. 169.

[127] See p. 235 in the Bergson chapter where it is suggested that perception is limited to what interests us for vital or for practical purposes.

[128] Cf. p. 92.

[129] See p. 65.

[130] See p. 234 upon the “anti-intellectualism” in the philosophy of Bergson.

[131] See p. 4 and p. 237.

[132] From “Truth and Copying,” _Mind_, No. 62.

[133] From “Truth and Practice,” in _Mind_. Cf. “This denial of transcendence, this insistence that all ideas, and more especially such ideas as those of God, are true and real just so far as they work, is to myself most welcome” (Bradley, in _Mind_, 1908, p. 227, “Ambiguity of Pragmatism”). Mr. Bradley has of recent years made so many such concessions, and has philosophized with such an admirable degree of independence, and has (also admirably) attached so much weight to his own _experience_ of “metaphysics,” and of other things besides, that many thinkers like Knox and Dewey and Schiller have been discussing whether he can any longer be regarded as a rationalist. One could certainly study, profitably, the whole evolution of philosophy in England during the last forty years by studying Mr. Bradley’s development. He never was, of course, a Hegelian in the complete sense (who ever was?), and he has now certainly abandoned an abstract, formalistic Rationalism.

By way of an additional quotation or two from Mr. Bradley, typical of his advance in the direction of the practical philosophy for which Pragmatism stands, we may append the following: “I long ago pointed out that theory takes its origin from practical collision [the main contention of Professor Dewey and his associates]. _If Pragmatism means this, I am a pragmatist_” (from an article in _Mind_ on the “Ambiguity of Pragmatism”--italics mine). “We may reject the limitation of knowledge to the mere world of events which happen, and may deny the claim of this world to be taken as an ultimate foundation. Reality or the Good will be the satisfaction of all the wants of our nature, and _theoretical truth will be the perception of ideas which directly satisfy one of those wants, and so invariably make part of the general satisfaction_. This is a doctrine which, to my mind, commends itself as true, though it naturally would call for a great deal of explanation” (from _Mind_, July 1904, p. 325). And, as typical of the kind of final philosophy to which the philosophical reconstruction of the future must somehow attain out of the present quarrel between Pragmatism and Rationalism, the following: “If there were no force in the world but the vested love of God, if the wills in the past were one in effort and in substance with the one Will, if in that Will they are living still and still are so loving, and if again by faith, suffering, and love my will is made really one with theirs, here indeed we should have found at once our answer and our refuge. But with this we should pass surely beyond the limits of any personal individualism” (from _Mind_, July 1904, p. 316). Dr. Schiller, by the way, has a list of such concessions to Pragmatism on the part of Mr. Bradley in _Mind_, 1910, p. 35.

[134] Cf. the saying of Herbert Spencer (_Autobiography_, i. 253) that a “belief in the unqualified supremacy of reason [is] the superstition of philosophers.”

[135] See p. 147.

[136] “Truth and Practice,” _Mind_, No. 51.

[137] It would be easy to quote to the same effect from other Hegelian students, or, for that part of it, from Hegel himself.

[138] _Elements of Metaphysics_, p. 411.

[139] _Ibid._ p. 414.

[140] Cf. p. 14.

[141] See the well-known volume _Personal Idealism_, edited by Mr. Sturt.

[142] Cf. pp. 147 and 193.

[143] By this notion is meant the common-sense idea that truth in all cases “corresponds” to fact, my perception of the sunset to the real sunset, my “idea” of a “true” friend to a real person whose outward acts “correspond to” or “faithfully reflect” his inner feelings. See the first chapter of Mr. Joachim’s book upon _The Nature of Truth_, where this notion is examined and found wanting. It is probably the oldest notion of truth, and yet one that takes us readily into philosophy from whatever point of view we examine it. It was held by nearly all the Greek philosophers before the time of the Sophists, who first began to teach that truth is what it “appears to be”--the “relativity” position that is upheld, for example, by Goethe, who said that “When I know my relation to myself and to the outer world I call this truth. And thus every man can have his own truth, and yet truth is always the same.” The common-sense view was held also by St. Augustine in the words, “That is true what is really what it seems to be (_verum est quod ita est, ut videtur_),” by Thomas Aquinas as the “adequacy of the intellect to the thing,” in so far as the intellect says that that is which really is, or that that is not which is not (_adaequatio intellectus et rei_), by Suarez, by Goclen, who made it a conformity of the judgment with the thing. Its technical difficulties begin to appear, say in Hobbes, who held that truth consists in the fact of the subject and the predicate being a name of the same thing, or even in Locke, who says: “Truth then seems to me in the proper import of the word to signify nothing but the joining or separating of signs, as the things signified by them, do agree, or disagree, one with another” (_Essay_, iv. 5. 2). How can _things_ “agree” or “disagree” with one another? And an “idea” of course is, anyhow, not a “thing” with a shape and with dimensions that “correspond” to “things,” any more than is a “judgment” a relation of two “ideas” “corresponding” to the “relations” of two “things.”

[144] “The mind is not a ‘mirror’ which passively reflects what it chances to come upon. It initiates and tries; and its correspondence with the ‘outer world’ means that its effort successfully meets the environment in behalf of the organic interest from which it sprang. The mind, like an antenna, feels the way for the organism. It gropes about, advances and recoils, making many random efforts and many failures; but it is always urged into taking the _initiative_ by the pressure of interest, and doomed to success or failure in some hour of trial when it meets and engages the environment. Such is mind, and such, according to James, _are all its operations_” (Perry, _Present Philosophical Tendencies_, p. 351). Or the following: “I hope that,” said James in the “lectures” embodied in _Pragmatism_ (New York, 1908) ... “the concreteness and closeness to facts of pragmatism ... may be what approves itself to you as its most satisfactory peculiarity. It only follows here the example of the sister sciences, interpreting the unobserved by the observed. It brings old and new harmoniously together. _It converts the absolutely empty notion of a static relation of ‘correspondence’ between our minds and reality, into that of a rich and active commerce_ (that any one may follow in detail and understand) _between particular thoughts of ours and the great universe of other experiences in which they play their parts and have their uses_” (p. 68; italics mine).

[145] “On any view like mine to speak of truth as in the end copying reality, would be senseless” (Bradley in _Mind_, July 1911, “On some Aspects of Truth”).

[146] See p. 143 and p. 265.

[147] See p. 127 and p. 133.

[148] See pp. 148–9.

[149] See p. 162.

[150] _What is Pragmatism?_ (Pratt), p. 21.

[151] _Principles of Pragmatism_, Houghton Mifflin, 1910.

[152] _Ibid._, Preface. This last sentence, by the way, may be taken as one of the many illustrations that may be given of the crudities and difficulties of some of the literature of Pragmatism. It shows that Pragmatism may sometimes be as guilty of abstractionism as is Rationalism itself. It is not “experience” that becomes “self-conscious,” but only “persons.” And, similarly, it is only “persons” who pursue “ends” and “satisfy” desires, and who may be said to have a “method.” Professor Bawden, of course, means that it is to the credit of Pragmatism that it approaches experience just as it finds it, and that its chief method is the interpretation of the same experience--an easy thing, doubtless, to profess, but somewhat difficult to carry out.

[153] _Principles of Pragmatism_, Houghton Mifflin, 1910, pp. 44–45.

[154] P. 253.

[155] P. 256.

[156] See p. 146.

[157] See p. 240 _et ff._

[158] Wallace’s _Logic of Hegel_, p. 304.

[159] There is a sentence in one of Hawthorne’s stories to the effect that man’s work is always illusory to some extent, while God is the only worker of realities. I would not go as far as this, believing, as I do, with the pragmatists, that man is at least a fellow-worker with God. But I do find Pragmatism lacking, as 1 indicate elsewhere, in any adequate recognition of the work of God, or the Absolute in the universe.

[160] I am thinking of such considerations as are suggested in the following sentences from Maeterlinck: “As we advance through life, it is more and more brought home to us that nothing takes place that is not in accord with some curious, preconceived design; and of this we never breathe a word, we scarcely let our minds dwell upon it, but of its existence, somewhere above our heads, we are absolutely convinced” (_The Treasure of the Humble_, p. 17). “But this much at least is abundantly proved to us, that in the work-a-day lives of the very humblest of men spiritual phenomena manifest themselves--mysterious, direct workings, that bring soul nearer to soul” (_ibid._ 33). “Is it to-day or to-morrow that moulds us? Do we not all spend the greater part of our lives under the shadow of an event that has not yet come to pass?” (_ibid._ 51). I do not of course for one moment imply that the facts of experience referred to in such sentences as these should be received at any higher value than their face value, for there are indeed many considerations to be thought of in connexion with this matter of the realization of our plans and our destiny as individuals. But I do mean that the beliefs to which men cling in this respect are just as much part of the subject-matter of philosophy as other beliefs, say the belief in truth as a whole, or the beliefs investigated by the Society for Psychical Research. And there may conceivably be a view of human nature upon which the beliefs in question are both natural and rational.

[161] See p. 101.

[162] See p. 198 on Dr. Bosanquet’s dismissal of the problem of teleology from the sphere of reasoned philosophy.

[163] _Appearance and Reality_, p. 561.

[164] See p. 155.

[165] I think that I have taken this phrase from _Some Dogmas of Religion_.

[166] From “Truth and Copying,” _Mind_, No. 62.

[167] By action in this chapter and elsewhere in this book, I do not mean the mere exhibition or expenditure of physical energy. I mean human activity in general, inclusive of the highest manifestations of this activity, such as the search for truth, contemplation, belief, creative activity of one kind or another, and so on. There is no belief and no contemplation that is not practical as well as theoretical, no truth that fails to shape and to mould the life of the person who entertains it. I quite agree with Maeterlinck, and with Bergson and others, that the soul is to some extent limited by the demands of action and speech, and by the duties and the conventions of social life, but I still believe in the action test for contemplations and thoughts and beliefs and ideas, however lofty. It is only the thoughts that we can act out, that we can consciously act upon in our present human life, and that we can persuade others to act upon, that are valuable to ourselves and to humanity. It is to their discredit that so many men and so many thinkers entertain, and give expression to, views about the universe which renders their activities as agents and as thinkers and as seekers quite inexplicable.

[168] There are, of course, no heavens in the old mediaeval and Aristotelian sense after the work of Copernicus and Galileo in the physical sciences, and of Kant in the realm of mind.

[169] Professor Moore well points out (_Pragmatism and its Critics_, p. 13) that the “challenge” of the idea that our thinking has “two foundations: one, as the method of purposing--its ‘practical’ function; the other as merely the expression of the specific and independent instinct to know--its ‘intellectual’ function,” marks the “beginnings of the pragmatic movement.” The idea of two kinds of thought goes back to Aristotle and is one of the most famous distinctions of thought. It dominated the entire Middle Ages, and it is still at the root of the false idea that “culture” can be separated from work and service for the common good. I am glad, as I indicate in the text, a few lines further on, that the idealists are doing their share with the pragmatists in breaking it up. In America there is no practical distinction between culture and work. See my chapter on Pragmatism as Americanism.

[170] The importance of this consideration about the “attention” that is (as a matter of fact and a matter of necessity) involved in all “perception,” cannot possibly be exaggerated. We perceive in childhood and throughout life in the main what interests us, and what affects our total and organic activity. It is, that is to say, our motor activity, and its direction, that determine what we see and perceive and experience. And in the higher reaches of our life, on the levels of art and religion and philosophy, this determining power becomes what we call our reason and our will and our selective attention. Perception, in other words, is a kind of selective activity, involving what we call impulse and effort and will. Modern philosophy has forgotten this in its treatment of our supposed perception of the world, taking this to be something _given_ instead of something that is _constructed_ by our activity. Hence its long struggle to overcome both the apparent materialism of the world of the senses, and the gap, or hiatus, that has been created by Rationalism between the world as we think it, and the world as it really is.

[171] _E.g._ Professor Bosanquet, in his 1908 inaugural lecture at St. Andrews upon _The Practical Value of Moral Philosophy_. “Theory does indeed belong to Practice. _It is a form of conation_” (p. 9). It “should no doubt be understood as Theoria, or _the entire unimpeded life of the soul_” (p. 11; italics mine).

[172] This is surely the teaching of the new physics in respect of the radio-active view of matter. I take up this point again in the Bergson chapter.

[173] See p. 238.

[174] See p. 143 or p. 229 (note).

[175] See p. 34 in Chapter II. in reference to the idea of M. Blondel.

[176] See p. 147 and p. 265.

[177] See p. 65, note 3.

[178] See p. 192, note 3.

[179] Needham, _General Biology_, 1911. For the mention of this book as a reliable recent manual I am indebted to my colleague, Professor Willey of McGill University.

[180] Marett, _Anthropology_, p. 155.

[181] Cf. _supra_, p. 101.

[182] So much may, I suppose, be inferred from the contentions (explicit and implicit) of all biologists and evolutionists. Human life they all seem to regard as a kind of continuity or development of the life of universal nature, whether their theory of the origin of life be that of (1) “spontaneous generation,” (2) “cosmozoa” (germs capable of life scattered throughout space), (3) “Preyer’s theory of the continuity of life,” (4) “Pflüger’s theory of the chemical characteristics of proteid,” or (5) the conclusion of Verworn himself, “that existing organisms are derived in uninterrupted descent from the first living substance that originated from lifeless substance” (_General Physiology_, p. 315).

[183] _Creative Evolution_, pp. 245–5.

[184] It is, I think, an important reflection that it is precisely in this very reality of “action” that science and philosophy come together. That all the sciences meet in the concept, or the fact, of action is, of course, quite evident from the new knowledge of the new physics. Professor M’Dougall has recently brought psychology into line with the natural sciences by defining its subject-matter as the actions or the “behaviour” of human beings and animals. And it is surely not difficult to see that--as I try to indicate--it is in human behaviour that philosophy and science come together. Another consideration in respect of the philosophy of action that has long impressed me is this. If there is one realm in which, more than anywhere else, our traditional rationalism and our traditional empiricism really came together in England, it is the realm of social philosophy, the realm of human activity. It was the breaking down of the entire philosophy of sensations in the matter of the proof of utilitarianism that caused John Stuart Mill to take up the “social philosophy” in respect to which the followers of positivism joined hands with the idealists.

[185] See p. 185.

[186] See p. 27.

[187] See Chapter VII. p. 179.

[188] I am thinking of Pyrrho and Arcesilaus and some of the Greek sceptics and of their ἐποχή and ἀταραξία.

[189] See p. 26.

[190] _Man’s Place in the Cosmos_, a book consisting of essays and reviews published by the author during the last four or five years. They all advocate “humanism in opposition to naturalism,” or “ethicism in opposition to a too narrow intellectualism.”

[191] _The Will to Believe_, 1897.

[192] “Progress in Philosophy,” art. _Mind_, 15, p. 213.

[193] _Practical Ethics_; Essays.

[194] _Mental Development--Social and Ethical Interpretations_ (a work crowned by the Royal Academy of Denmark). We can see in this book how a psychologist has been led into a far-reaching study of social and ethical development in order to gain an understanding of the growth of even the individual mind. We may indeed say that the individualistic intellectualism of the older psychology is now no more. It was too “abstract” a way of looking at mind. Professor Royce, it is well known, has given, from the stand-point of a professed metaphysician, a cordial welcome to the work of Professor Baldwin. In an important review of Mr. Stout’s two admirable volumes on _Analytic Psychology_ (_Mind_, July, 1897), Professor Royce has insisted strongly upon the need of supplementing introspection by the “interpretation of the reports and the conduct of other people” if we would know much about “dynamic” psychology. It is this “dynamic” psychology--the “dynamics” of the will and of the “feelings”--that I think constitutes such an important advance upon the traditional “intellectual” and “individualistic” psychology.

[195] _The Psychology of the Moral Self._ Macmillan, 1897. I have tried, in a short notice of this book in the _Philosophical Review_ (March, 1898), to indicate the importance of some of its chief contentions.

[196] _Philosophical Lectures and Remains_, edited by Professor Bradley.

[197] Editor of _La Science Sociale_. His recent work on the _Superiority of the Anglo-Saxons_ (_À quoi tient la supériorité des Anglo-Saxons?_)--a chapter in the study of the conditions of race survival--ran through seventeen editions in a few months, and set the whole press of France and Germany (other countries following suit) into commotion, as well as calling forth _pronunciamientos_ from most of the prominent editors and critics of France,--men like Jules Lemaître, Paul Bourget, Marcel Prevost, François Coppée, Édouard Rod, G. Valbert, etc.

[198] Now Professor A. Seth Pringle-Pattison.

[199] In different ways by all of the following English writers: Professor A. Seth (“It is not in knowledge, then, as such, but in feeling and action that reality is given,” _Man’s Place_, etc., p. 122, etc. etc.), by Mr. Bradley (_Appearance and Reality_), by Mr. Balfour (in his _Foundations of Belief_), and by Professor James. Professor Eucken, of Jena, in his different books, also insists strongly upon the idea that it is not in knowledge as such, but in the totality of our psychical experience that the principles of philosophy must be sought. Paulsen, in his _Einleitung in die Philosophie_, and Weber, in his _History of Philosophy_ (books in general use to-day), both advocate a kind of philosophy of the will, the idea that the world is to be regarded as a striving on the part of wills after a partly unconscious ideal. Simmel, in an important article in the _Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale_, IV. 2, expresses the idea (which it would be well to recognize generally at the present time) that truth is not something objectively apart from us, but rather the name we give to conceptions that have proved to be the guides to useful actions, and so become part of the psychical heritage of human beings. Professor Ribot, of Paris, has written more extensively upon the will and the feelings than upon the intellect,--a fact in keeping with the scientific demands of our day.

[200] See, _e.g._, an article by Fouillée in the _Revue Philosophique_, XXI. 5, with the very title “Nécessité d’une interprétation psychologique et sociologique du monde.” Fouillée finds there, as he does elsewhere, that will is the principle that enables us to unify the physical with the psychical world,--an illustration of the fact that the two characteristics I am referring to are really one. A present instance of the introduction of the element of will (the will of man, even) is to be seen in the contention of such a book as M. Lucien Arréat’s _Les Croyances de Demain_ (1898). According to _Mind_, M. Arréat proposes to substitute the idea that man can by his efforts bring about the supremacy of justice for the traditional idea that justice reigns in the universe.

[201] _Manual of Ethics_, according to Mr. Stout, _International Journal of Ethics_, October 1894. There are many similar sentences and ideas in the book.

[202] _Elements of Ethics_, p. 232.

[203] Now Professor of Logic in St. Andrews.

[204] _International Journal of Ethics_, October 1894, p. 119.

[205] I think that I must here have meant Professor Watson’s _Christianity and Idealism_.

[206] And apart from the idealism and the ethical philosophy of which I speak, in the next chapter, as necessary to convert Pragmatism into the Humanism it would like to become, Pragmatism is really a kind of romanticism, the reaction of a personal enthusiasm against the abstractions of a classical rationalism in philosophy. There is an element of this romanticism in James’s heroic philosophy of life, although I would prefer to be the last man in the world to talk against this heroic romanticism in any one. It is the great want of our time, and it is the thing that is prized most in some of the men whom this ephemeral age of ours still delights to honour. It was exhibited both in Browning and in George Meredith, for example. Of the former Mr. Chesterton writes in his trenchant, clean-sweeping little book on _The Victorian Age in Literature_, p. 175: “What he really was was a romantic. He offered the cosmos as an adventure rather than a scheme.” The same thing could be said about James’s “Will to Believe” Philosophy. Meredith, although far less of an idealist than Browning, was also an optimist by temperament rather than by knowledge or by conviction--hence the elevation of his tone and style in spite of his belated naturalism.

[207] In _Un Romantisme utilitaire_ (Paris, Alcan, 1911), chiefly a study of the Pragmatism of Nietzsche and Poincaré.

[208] I am indebted for this saying of one of my old teachers to Mr. C. F. G. Masterman, in his essay upon Sidgwick in that judicious and interesting book upon the transition from the nineteenth to the twentieth century, _In Peril of Change_.