Chapter IX: Pragmatism and Idealism in the Philosophy of Bergson386 (3)

[209] Stoicism and Epicureanism, as the matter is generally put, both substitute the practical good of man as an individual for the wisdom or the theoretical perfection that were contemplated by Plato and Aristotle as the highest objects of human pursuit. For Cicero, too, the chief problems of philosophy were in the main practical, the question whether virtue alone is sufficient for happiness, the problem of practical certainty as opposed to scepticism, the general belief in Providence and in immortality, and so on. And Lucretius thinks of the main service of philosophy as consisting in its power of emancipating the human mind from superstition. All this is quite typical of the essentially practical nature of the Roman character, of its conception of education as in the main discipline and duty, of its distrust of Greek intellectualism, and of its preoccupation with the necessities of the struggle for existence and for government, of its lack of leisure, and so on. I do not think that the very first thing about Pragmatism is its desire to return to a practical conception of life, although a tendency in this direction doubtless exists in it.

[210] The idea that our “demonstrable knowledge is very short, if indeed we have any at all, although our certainty is as great as our happiness, beyond which we have no concernment to know or to be” (_Essay_, iv. 2–14); or Locke’s words: “I have always thought the actions of men the best interpreters of their thoughts.”

[211] Schopenhauer, for example, used to be fond of repeating that his own philosophy (which took will to be the fundamental reality) was on its very face necessarily more of an ethic than a system like that of Spinoza, for example, which could only be called an ethic by a sort of _lucus a non lucendo_.

[212] The Practical Reason to Aristotle is the reason that has to do with the pursuit of aims and ends, in distinction from the reason that has to do with knowledge, and the “universal” and science. This twofold distinction has given many problems to his students and to his commentators, and to succeeding generations. It is responsible for the entire mediæval and Renaissance separation of the intellectual life and the intellectual virtues from the practical life and the practical virtues.

[213] It might be added here that Logic has always recognized the validity, to some extent, of the argument “from consequences” of which Pragmatism makes so much. The form of argumentation that it calls the Dilemma is a proof of this statement. A chain of reasoning that leads to impossible consequences, or that leads to consequences inconsistent with previously admitted truths, is necessarily unsound. That this test of tenable or untenable consequences has often been used in philosophy in the large sense of the term must be known only too well to the well-informed reader. As Sidgwick says in his _Method of Ethics_: “The truth of a philosopher’s premises will always be tested by the acceptability of his conclusions; if in any important point he is found in flagrant conflict with common opinion, his method will be declared invalid.” Reid used the argument from consequences in his examination of the sceptical philosophy of Hume. It is used with effect in Mr. Arthur Balfour’s _Foundations of Belief_ in regard to the supposed naturalism of physical science. Edmund Burke applied it to some extent to political theories, or to the abstract philosophical theories upon which some of them were supposedly based.

[214] Pragmatism has been called by some critics a “new-Humism” on the ground of its tendency to do this very thing that is mentioned here in respect of Hume. But the justice or the injustice of this appellation is a very large question, into which it is needless for us to enter here.

[215] Cf. “Intelligence is the aptitude to modify conduct in conformity to the circumstances of each case” (_The Positive Philosophy_, Martineau, i. 465).

[216] _Principles of Philosophy_, Part II. iii. It is also an eminently pragmatist idea on the part of Descartes to hold that “I should find much more truth in the reasoning of each individual with reference to the affairs in which he is personally interested, and the issue of which must presently punish him if he has judged amiss, than in those conducted by a man of letters in his study, regarding speculative matters that are of no practical moment” (_Method_, Veitch’s edition, p. 10).

[217] _Principles of Philosophy_, Part II. iii. p. 233.

[218] See _Principles of Psychology_, ch. ii., “Assumption of Metaphysicians,” and also elsewhere in his Essays.

[219] “Any power of doing or suffering in a degree however slight was held by us to be the definition of existence” (Sophist, Jowett’s _Plato_, iv. p. 465).

[220] _The Theory of Knowledge_, Preface, p. ix.

[221] “The independence of the doctrines of any science from the social life, the prevalent thought of the generation in which they arise, is indeed a fiction, a superstition of the scientist which we would fain shatter beyond all repair; but the science becomes all the sounder for recognizing its origins and its resources, its present limitations and its need of fresh light from other minds, from different social moulds” (pp. 215–216).

[222] See p. 81.

[223] Cf. p. 13.

[224] _The New Knowledge_, p. 255.

[225] It would indeed be easy to quote from popular writers of the day, like Mr. Chesterton or Mr. A. C. Benson or Mr. H. G. Wells, to show that a knowledge of the existence of Pragmatism as a newer experimental or “sociological” philosophy is now a commonplace of the day. Take the following, for example, from Mr. Wells’s _Marriage_ (p. 521): “It was to be a pragmatist essay, a sustained attempt to undermine the confidence of all that scholastic logic-chopping which still lingers like the _sequelae_ of a disease in our University philosophy ... a huge criticism and cleaning up of the existing methods of formulation as a preliminary to the wider and freer discussion of those religious and social issues our generation still shrinks from.” “It is grotesque,” he said, “and utterly true that the sanity and happiness of all the world lies in its habits of generalization.”

[226] I cannot meantime trace, or place, this quotation, although I remember copying it out of something by Karl Pearson.

[227] In the _Literary Digest_ for 1911.

[228] See p. 234.

[229] From a letter to Mrs. Humphry Ward, quoted in A. C. Benson’s _Walter Pater_, p. 200.

[230] Lecture I. towards the beginning.

[231] See p. 62 and p. 197. It should be remembered that our reasoned opinions rest upon our working beliefs.

[232] Vol. ii. p. 86.

[233] See the reference in Chapter II. p. 26 to the opportunistic ethic of Prezzolini.

[234] In _What is Pragmatism?_ Macmillan & Co.

[235] Cf. p. 81.

[236] Professor Pratt makes an attempt in his book on _What is Pragmatism?_ (pp. 75–6–7) to show that the true meaning of the “correspondence theory” is not inconsistent with Pragmatism or that Pragmatism is not inconsistent with this truth.

[237] Cf. _supra_, p. 64.

[238] See the Note on p. 21.

[239] Cf. _supra_, p. 67.

[240] Papini, in fact (in 1907), went the length of saying that you cannot even _define_ Pragmatism, admitting that it appeals only to certain kinds of persons.

[241] For a serviceable account, in English, of the differences between the pragmatist philosophy of hypotheses and the more fully developed philosophy of science of the day, see Father Walker’s _Theories of Knowledge_, chapter xiii., upon “Pragmatism and Physical Science.”

[242] Cf. _supra_, p. 10 and p. 15. And this failure to systematize becomes, it should be remembered, all the more exasperating, in view of the prominence given by the pragmatists to the supreme principles of “end” and “consequences.”

[243] In the “Axioms as Postulates” essay in _Personal Idealism_.

[244] Bourdeau makes the same charge, saying that all pragmatists have the illusion that “reality is unstable.” Professor Stout has something similar in view in referring to Dr. Schiller’s “primary reality” in the _Mind_ review of _Studies in Humanism_. It is only the reality with which we have to do (reality πρὸς ἡμᾶς as an Aristotelian might say) that is “in the making”: for God there can be no such distinction between process and product. But it is quite evident that Pragmatism does not go far enough to solve, or even to see, such difficulties. It confines itself in the main to the contention that man must think of himself as a maker of reality to some extent--a contention that I hold to be both true and useful, as far as it goes.

[245] _Pragmatism_, p. 264.

[246] “Pragmatism,” October 1900.

[247] The same line of reflection will be found in James’s _Pragmatism_, p. 96.

[248] Professor Moore has a chapter in his book (_Pragmatism and its Critics_) devoted to the purpose of showing the necessary failure of Absolutism (or of an Intellectualism of the absolutist order) in the realm of ethics, finding in the experimentalism and the quasi-Darwinism of Pragmatism an atmosphere that is, to say the least, more favourable to the realities of our moral experience. While I cannot find so much as he does in the hit-and-miss ethical philosophy of Pragmatism, I quite sympathize with him in his rejection of Absolutism or Rationalism as a basis for ethics. The following are some of his reasons for this rejection: (1) The “purpose” that is involved in the ethical life must, according to Absolutism, be an all-inclusive and a fixed purpose, allowing of no “advance” and no “retreat”---things that are imperative to the idea of the _reality_ of our efforts. (2) Absolutism does not provide for human responsibility; to it all actions and purposes are those of the Absolute. (3) The ethical ideal of Absolutism is too “static.” (4) Absolutism does not provide any material for “new goals and new ideals.” See pp. 218–225 in my eighth chapter, where I censure, in the interest of Pragmatism and Humanism, the ethical philosophy of Professor Bosanquet.

[249] See p. 224, where I arrive at the conclusion that the same thing may be said of the Absolutism of Dr. Bosanquet.

[250] Students of that important nineteenth-century book upon Ethics, the _Methods of Ethics_, by Henry Sidgwick, will remember that Sidgwick expressly states it as a grave argument against Utilitarianism that it is by no means confirmed by the study of the actual origin of moral distinctions. As we go back in history we do not find that moral prescriptions have merely a utilitarian value.

[251] What I understand by the “normative idea of ethical science” will become more apparent as I proceed. I may as well state, however, that I look upon the distinction between the “descriptive” ideals of science and the “normative” character of the ideals of the ethical and the socio-political sciences as both fundamental and far-reaching. There are _two_ things, as it were, that constitute what we might call the subject-matter of philosophy---“facts” and “ideals”; or, rather, it is the synthesis and reconciliation of these two orders of reality that constitute the supreme problem of philosophy. It is with the description of facts and of the laws of the sequences of things that the “methodology” of science and of Pragmatism is in the main concerned. And it is because Pragmatism has hitherto shown itself unable to rise above the descriptive and hypothetical science of the day to the ideals of the normative sciences (ethics, aesthetics, etc.) that it is an imperfect philosophy of reality as we know it, or of the different orders of reality.

[252] Cf. Professor Ward in _Naturalism and Agnosticism_ (vol. ii. p. 155): “What each one immediately deals with in his own experience is, I repeat, objective reality in the most fundamental sense.”

[253] _Introduction to Science_, p. 137.

[254] “But if the primitive Amoebae gave rise ‘in the natural course of events’ to higher organisms and these to higher, until there emerged the supreme Mammal, _who by and by had a theory of it all_, then the primitive Amoebae which had in them the promise and the potency of all this _were very wonderful Amoebae indeed_. There must have been more in them than met the eye! _We must stock them, with initiatives at least. We are taking a good deal as ‘given.’_” [Italics mine.]--J. H. Thomson, _Introduction to Science_, p. 137.

[255] See Westermarck, vol. i. pp. 74, 93, 117, and chapter iii. generally. The sentence further down in respect of the permanent fact of the moral consciousness is from Hobhouse, vol. ii. p. 54. As instances of the latter, Hobhouse talks of things like the “purity of the home, truthfulness, hospitality, help”, etc., in Iran, of the doctrine of Non-Resistance in Lao Tsze, of the high conception of personal righteousness revealed in the _Book of the Dead_, of the contributions of monotheism to ethics, etc. etc.

[256] Cf. p. 167.

[257] It may, I suppose, be possible to exaggerate here and to fall to some extent into what Mr. Bradley and Nietzsche and others have thought of as the “radical vice of all goodness”--its tendency to forget that other things, like beauty and truth, may also be thought of as absolute “values,” as revelations of the divine. What I am thinking of here is simply the realm of fact that is implied, say, in the idea of Horace, when he speaks of the upright man being undismayed even by the fall of the heavens (_impavidum ferient ruinae_) or by the idea of the Stoic sage that the virtuous man was as necessary to Jupiter as Jupiter could be to him, or by the idea (attributed to Socrates) that if the rulers of the universe do not prefer the just man to the unjust it is better to die than to live. If against all this sort of thing one is reminded by realism of the “splendid immoralism” of Nature, of its apparent indifference to all good and ill desert, I can but reply, as I have done elsewhere in this book, that the Nature of which physical science speaks is an “abstraction” and an unreality, and that it matters, therefore, very little whether such a Nature is, or is not, indifferent to morality. We know, however, of no Nature apart from life, and mind, and consciousness, and thought, and will. It is God, and not Nature, who makes the sun to shine on the just and the unjust.

[258] By this “meaning” is to be understood firstly the effects upon our appetitive and conative tendencies of the various specific items (whether sensation, or affections, or emotions, or what not) of our experience, the significance, that is to say, to our total general activity of all the particular happenings and incidents of our experience. Psychologists all tell us of the vast system of “dispositions” with which our psychophysical organism is equipped at birth, and through the help of which we interpret the sensations and occurrences of our experience. And in addition to these dispositions we have, in the case of the adult, the coming into play of the many associations and memories that are acquired during the experiences of a single lifetime. It is these various associations that interpret to us the present and give it meaning. In a higher sense we might interpret “meaning” as expressive of the higher predicates, like the good and the beautiful and the true, that we apply to some things in the world of our socialized experience. And in the highest sense we might interpret it as the significance that we attach to human history as distinguished from the mere course of events--the significance upon which the philosophy of history reposes. See Eucken in the article upon the _Philosophy of History_ in the “systematic” volume of Hinneberg’s _Kultur der Gegenwart_.

[259] See our second chapter upon the different continental and British representatives of the hypothetical treatment of scientific laws and conceptions that is such a well-marked tendency of the present time. By no one perhaps was this theory put more emphatically than by Windelband (of Strassburg) in his _Präludien_ (1884) and in his _Geschichte und Naturwissenschaft_ (1894). In the latter he contrasts the real individuals and personalities with which the historians deal with the impersonal abstractions of natural science. I fully subscribe to this distinction, and think that it underlies a great deal of the thought of recent times.

[260] See “truth and real existence” in the _Republic_, 508 D--Jowett’s rendering of ἀλήθειά τε καὶ τὸ ὄν (“over which truth and real existence are shining”). Also further in the same place, “The cause of science and of truth,” αἰτίαν δ’ ἐπιστήμης οὖσαν καὶ ἀληθείας. In 389 E we read that a “high value must be set on truth.” Of course to Plato “truth” is also, and perhaps even primarily, real existence, as when he says (_Rep._ 585), “that which has less of truth will also have less of essence.” But in any case truth always means more for him than “mere being,” or existence, or “appearance,” it is the highest form of being, the object of “science,” the great discovery of the higher reason.

[261] To Professor Bosanquet, for example; see below, p. 213, note 2.

[262] _The Poetry of the Old Testament_, Professor A. R. Gordon.

[263] _Ibid._ p. 4.

[264] _The Poetry of the Old Testament_, p. 160.

[265] _Ibid._ pp. 183–184.

[266] It is this false conception of truth as a “datum” or “content” that wrecks the whole of Mr. Bradley’s argument in _Appearance and Reality_. See on the contrary the following quotation from Professor Boyce Gibson (Eucken’s _Philosophy of Life_, p. 109) in respect of the attitude of Eucken towards the idea of truth as a personal ideal. “The ultimate criterion of truth is not the clearness and the distinctness of our thinking, nor its correspondence with a reality external to it, nor any other intellectualistic principle. It is spiritual fruitfulness as invariably realized by the personal experient, invariably realized as springing freshly and freely from the inexhaustible resources which our freedom gains from its dependence upon God.”

[267] It is part of the greatness of Hegel, I think, to have sought to include the truth of history and of the social order in the truth of philosophy, or in spiritual truth generally. His error consists in not allowing for the fresh revelations of truth that have come to the world through the insight of individuals and through the actions and the creations of original men.

[268] There is a sentence in the Metaphysics of which I cannot but think at this point, and which so far at least as the rationalist-pragmatist issue is concerned is really one of the deepest and most instructive ideas in the whole history of philosophy. It is one of Aristotle’s troublesome additional statements in reference to something that he has just been discussing--in this case the “object of desire” and the “object of thought.” And what he adds in the present instance is this (Bk. xii. 7): “_The primary objects of these two things are the same_”--τούτων τὰ πρῶτα τὰ αὐτά--rendered by Smith and Ross “_the primary objects of thought and desire are the same_.” The translation, of course, is a matter of some slight difficulty, turning upon the proper interpretation of τὰ πρῶτα, “the first things,” although, of course, the student soon becomes familiar with what Aristotle means by “first things,” and “first philosophy,” and “first in nature,” and “first for us,” and so on. Themistius in his commentary on this passage (_Commentaria in Aristotelem Graeca_, vol. v. i-vi; _Themistius in Metaphysica_, 1072 and 17–30) puts it that “in the case of immaterial existences the desirable and the intelligible are the same--in primis vero principiis materiae non immixtis _idem est desiderabile atque intelligibile_.” I am inclined to use this great idea of the identity of the desirable and the intelligible--for conscious, intelligent beings as the fundamental principle of the true Humanism of which Pragmatism is in search. It is evidently in this identity that Professor Bosanquet also believes in when he says: “I am persuaded that if we critically understand what we really want and need, we shall find it established by a straightforward argument” (Preface to _Individuality and Value_. See the eighth chapter of this book). It is certainly true that the constructive philosophy of which we are in search to-day must leave no gap between thought and desire.

[269] I find an illustration or a confirmation of this thought in the following piece of insight of Mr. Chesterton in regard to the “good,” which is no doubt a “predicate” of our total thought and feeling and volition. “Or, in other words, man cannot escape from God, _because good is God in man; and insists on omniscience_” (_Victorian Age in Literature_, p. 246--italics mine). A belief in goodness is certainly a belief in an active goodness greater than our own; and it does raise a desire for a comprehension of things.

[270] The reader will find a good deal in Professor Baldwin’s _Social and Ethical Interpretations of Mental Development_ upon the relation of truth and thought to desire, and also upon the social, or the pragmatist or the experimental test of beliefs.

[271] See Chapter IX., in reference to Bergson’s “creative activity.”

[272] The reader who is anxious to obtain a working idea of the limits of knowledge from a scientific point of view had better consult such pieces of literature as Sir Oliver Lodge’s recent examination of Haeckel’s _Riddle of the Universe_, Professor Ward’s _Naturalism and Agnosticism_, Merz’s _History of European Thought during the Nineteenth Century_, or Verworn’s _General Physiology_ (with its interesting account of the different theories of the origin of life, and its admission that after all we know matter only through mind and sensation). Perusal of the most recent accessible literature upon this whole subject will reveal the fact that these old questions about the origin of life and motion, and about the nature of evolution, are still as unsettled as they were in the last half of the last century. It is not merely, however, of the actual limits of science at any one time that we are obliged, as human beings, to think, but of the limits of science in view of the fact that our knowledge comes to us _in part_, under the conditions of space and time, and under the conditions of the limits of our senses and of our understanding. Knowledge is certainly limited in the light of what beings other than ourselves may know, and in the light of what we would _like_ to know about the universe of life and mind.

I do not think that this whole question of the limits of our knowledge is such a burning question to-day as it was some years ago, there being several reasons for this. One is that we live in an age of specialization and discursiveness and “technic.” It is quite difficult to meet with people who think that they may know, some day, everything, from even some single point of view. And then the wide acceptance of the hypothetical or the pragmatist conception of knowledge has caused us to look upon the matter of the limits of science and knowledge as a relative one, as always related to, and conditioned by, certain points of view and certain assumptions. We are not even warranted, for example, in thinking of mind and matter as separate in the old way, nor can we separate the life of the individual from the life of the race, nor the world from God, nor man from God, and so on. See an article by the writer (in 1898 in the _Psy. Rev._) upon “Professor Titchener’s View of the Self,” dealing with the actual, and the necessary limits, of the point of view of Structural Psychology in regard to the “self.” Also Professor Titchener’s reply to this article in a subsequent number of the same review, and my own rejoinder.

[273] See Chapter II. p. 35.

[274] Despite what we spoke of in Chapter V. as its “subjectivism,” p. 134.

[275] That is to say, the simple truth that there is no “object” without a “subject,” no “physical” world without a world of “psychical” experiences on the part of some beings or some being. If our earth existed before animated beings appeared upon it, it was only as a part of some other “system” which we must think of as the object of some mind or intelligence.

[276] See p. 235, note 2, in the Bergson chapter, where it is suggested that to Bergson human perceptions do not, of course, exhaust matter.

[277] Among the many other good things in Mr. Marett’s admirable _Anthropology_ (one of the freshest works upon the subject, suggestive of the need, evidently felt in Oxford as well as elsewhere, of studying philosophy and letters, and nearly everything else in the mental and moral sciences, from the point of view of social anthropology) are the clearness and the relevancy of illustration in his insistence upon the importance of the “social factor” over all our thoughts of ourselves as agents and students in the universe of things.” Payne shows us (p. 146) “reason for believing _that the collective ‘we’ precedes ‘I’_ in the order of linguistic evolution. To begin with, in America and elsewhere, ‘we’ may be inclusive and mean ‘all of us,’ or selective, meaning ‘some of us only.’ Hence a missionary must be very careful, and if he is preaching, must use the inclusive ‘we’ in saying ‘we have sinned,’ whereas, in praying, he must use the selective ‘we,’ or God would be included in the list of sinners. Similarly ‘I’ has a collective form amongst some American languages; and this is ordinarily employed, whereas the corresponding selective form is used only in special cases. Thus, if the question be ‘Who will help?’ the Apache will reply, ‘I-amongst-others,’ ‘I-for-one’; but if he were recounting his personal exploits, he says _sheedah_, ‘I-by-myself,’ to show they were wholly his own. Here we seem to have _group-consciousness holding its own against individual self-consciousness, as being for primitive folk on the whole the more normal attitude of mind_.” It is indeed to be hoped that, in the future, philosophy, by discarding its abstractionism and its (closely allied) solipsism, will do its share in making this “group consciousness,” this consciousness of our being indeed “fellow-workers” with all men, once again a property of our minds and our thoughts.

[278] One of Professor James’s last books is called _A Pluralistic Universe_, and both he and Professor Dewey have always written under the pressure of the sociological interest of modern times. In short, it is obvious that the “reality” underlying the entire pragmatist polemic against the hypothetical character of the reading of the world afforded us by the sciences, is the social and personal life that is the deepest thing in our experience.

[279] This idea of a “world of inter-subjective intercourse,” although now a commonplace of sociology, was first expressed for the writer in the first series of the _Gifford Lectures_ of Professor James Ward upon “Naturalism and Agnosticism,” in chapters xv. and xvi. The first of these chapters deals with “Experience and Life,” and the second with the “inter-subjective intercourse” that is really presupposed in the so-called individual experience of which the old psychology used to make so much. The reader who wishes to follow out a development of this idea of a “world of inter-subjective intercourse” cannot do better than follow the argument of Professor Ward’s second series of _Gifford Lectures_ (“The Realm of Ends,” or “Pluralism and Theism”), in which he will find a Humanism and Theism that is at least akin to the theodicy, or the natural theology, of which we might suppose Pragmatism to be enamoured. The double series of these Lectures might well be referred to as an instance of the kind of classical English work in philosophy of which we have spoken as not falling into the extremes either of Pragmatism or of Rationalism. The strong point of the “Realm of Ends,” from the point of view of this book upon Pragmatism and Idealism, is that it moves from first to last in the reality of that world to which the science and the philosophy of the day both seem to point the way. In opposition to “subjectivism” it teaches a Humanism and a Pluralism that we recognise as an expression of the realities of the world of our common life and our common efforts, and from this Humanism it proceeds to a Theism which its author seeks to defend from many of the familiar difficulties of Naturalism. Were the writer concerned with the matter of the development and the elaboration of the philosophy that seems to have precipitated itself into his mind after some years of reflection on the issues between the realists and the idealists, between the rationalists and the pragmatists, he would have to begin by saying that its outlines are at least represented for him in the theistic and pluralistic philosophy of Professor Ward.

[280] According to Professor Dawes Hicks in the _Hibbert Journal_ for April 1913, there is a great deal in the articles of Professor Alexander on “Collective Willing and Truth” that supports some of the positions I am here attempting to indicate, as part of the outcome of the pragmatist-rationalist controversy. “Both goodness and truth depend, in the first place, on the recognition by one man of consciousness in others, and, secondly, upon intersubjective intercourse” (p. 658).

[281] I owe this reference (which I have attempted to verify) to a suggestive and ingenious book (_The New Word_, by Mr. Allen Upward) lent to me by a Montreal friend. Skeat, in his Dictionary, gives as the meaning of truth, “_firm, established, certain, honest, faithful_,” connecting it with A.S. _tréou_, _tryw_ (“preservation of a compact”), Teut. _trewa_, saying that the “root” is “unknown.” I suppose that similar things might be said about the Greek word ἐτεόν in its different forms, which Liddel and Scott connect with “Sans., _satyas_ (_verus_), O. Nor. _Sannr_, A.S. _sóth_ (sooth).” All this seems to justify the idea of the social confirmation of truth for which I am inclined to stand, and the connexion of intellectual truth with ethical truth, with the truth of human life. I agree with Lotze that truths do not float above, or over, or between, things, but that they exist only in the thought of a thinker, in so far as he thinks, or in the action of a living being in the moment of his action--the _Microcosmos_ as quoted in Eisler, article “_Wahrheit_” in the _Wörterbuch_. The Truth for man would be the coherence of his knowledge and his beliefs, and there is no abstract truth, or truth in and for itself, no impersonal “whole” of truth.

[282] As in the Hegelian dialectic.

[283] There is another important thing to think of in connexion with this sociological character of Pragmatism. It is a characteristic that may be used to overcome what we have elsewhere talked of as its “subjectivism” and its “individualism,” and its revolutionary tendencies. It is, we might urge, a social and a collective standard of truth that Pragmatism has in view when it thinks of “consequences” and of the test of truth. Lalande takes up this idea in an article in the _Revue Philosophique_ (1906) on “Pragmatisme et Pragmaticisme,” pointing out that Dr. Peirce would apparently tend to base his pragmatism on the subordination of individual to collective thought. Dr. Schiller too, I think, contemplates this social test of truth in his would-be revival of the philosophy of Protagoras--that man is the measure of reality--for man.

[284] See below, p. 197, where we speak of this “mediation” as the first fact for Professor Bosanquet as a prominent “Neo-Hegelian” rationalist.

[285] I have been asked by a friendly critic if I would include “inference” in this “real thought.” I certainly would, because in all real inference we are, or ought to be, concerned with a real subject-matter, a set of relations among realities of one kind or another. Possibly all students in all subjects (especially in philosophy) have lost time in following out a set of inferences in and for themselves. But such a procedure is justified by the increased power that we get over the real subject-matter of our thought. When thought cannot be thus checked by the idea of such increased power, it is idle thought.

[286] I am thinking, of course, of the entire revolutionary and radical social philosophy that harks back (in theory at least) to the “Social Contract” and to the State of Nature philosophy of Rousseau and his associates and predecessors.

[287] See p. 184 of Chapter VII., where I speak of the ability to do this as the invariable possession of the successful American teacher of philosophy.

[288] An equivalent of it, of course, exists in many sayings, in many countries, in the conception of the task of the metaphysician as that of “a blind man in a dark room hunting for a black cat which--is not there,” reproduced by Sir Ray Lankester in the recent book of H. S. R. Eliot, _Modern Science and the Illusions of Bergson_. There is generally an error or a fallacy in such descriptions of philosophy--in this Lankester story the error that the secret of the world is a kind of “thing in itself” out of all relation to everything we know and experience--the very error against which the pragmatists are protesting.

[289] Mr. Bertrand Russell, for example, seems to me to have the prejudice that philosophy is at its best only when occupied with studies which (like the mathematics of his affections) are as remote as possible from human life. “Real life is,” he says, “to most men a long second-best, a perpetual compromise between the ideal and the possible; but the world of pure reason knows no compromise, no practical limitations, no barrier to the creative activity embodying in splendid edifices the passionate aspiration after the perfect form from which all great work springs. Remote from human passions, remote even from the pitiful facts of nature, the generations have gradually created an ordered cosmos where pure thought can dwell as in its natural home, and where one, at least, of our nobler impulses can escape from the dreary exile of the actual world.” I cannot--as I have indicated elsewhere in regard to Mr. Russell--see for one moment how there is any justification for looking upon this “ordered cosmos” of mathematical physics as anything other than an abstraction from the real world with which we are acquainted. It is the creation of only one of our many human interests. And I cannot see that the thought that occupies itself with this world is any nobler than the thought that occupies itself with the more complex worlds of life, and of birth and death, and of knowledge and feeling and conduct. Mr. Russell might remember, for one thing, that there have been men (Spinoza among them) who have attempted to treat of human passions under the light of ascertainable laws, and that it is (to say the very least) as legitimate for philosophy to seek for reason and law in human life, and in the evolution of human history, as in the abstract world of physical and mathematical science. Can, too, a mathematical philosophy afford any final haven for the spirit of man, without an examination of the _mind_ of the mathematician and of the nature of the concepts and symbols that he uses in his researches? There is a whole world of dispute and discussion about all these things.

[290] I have in view in fact only (or mainly) such American characteristics as may be thought of in connexion with the newer intellectual and social atmosphere of the present time, the atmosphere that impresses the visitor and the resident from the old world, the atmosphere to the creation of which he himself and his fellow-immigrants have contributed, as well as the native-born American of two generations ago--to go no further back. I mean that anything like a far-reaching analysis or consideration of the great qualities that go to make up the “soul” of the United States is, of course, altogether beyond the sphere of my attention for the present. I fully subscribe, in short, to the truth of the following words of Professor Santayana, one of the most scholarly and competent American students (both of philosophy and of life) of the passing generation: “America is not simply a young country with an old mentality; it is a country with two mentalities, one a survival of the beliefs and standards of the fathers, the other an expression of the instincts, practice, and discoveries of the younger generation. In all the higher things of the mind--in religion, literature, in the moral emotions, it is the hereditary spirit that still prevails, so much so, that Mr. Bernard Shaw finds that America is a hundred years behind the times.”--“The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy,” in _Winds of Doctrine_ (p. 187).

[291] A contemporary American authority, Professor Bliss Perry, in his book upon _The American Mind_ naturally singles out radicalism as one of the well-marked characteristics of Americans. Among the other characteristics of which he speaks are those of the “love of exaggeration,” “idealism,” “optimism,” “individualism,” “public spirit.” I refer, I think, to nearly all these things in my pages, although of course I had not the benefit of Professor Perry’s book in writing the present chapter.

[292] I am certainly one of those who insist that we must think of America as (despite some appearances to the contrary--appearances to be seen also, for example, in the West of Canada) fundamentally a religious country. It was founded upon certain great religious ideas that were a highly important counterpart to some of the eighteenth-century fallacies about liberty and equality that exercised their influence upon the fathers of the republic.

[293] He has recently published a volume dealing especially with the contributions of Biology and Darwinism to philosophy.

[294] See p. 252.

[295] The crucial characteristics of the Presidential campaign of 1912 clearly showed this.

[296] We can see this in the many valuable studies and addresses of Professor Dewey upon educational and social problems.

[297] It is this fact, or the body of fact and tendency upon which it rests, that causes Americans and all who know them or observe them, to think and speak of the _apparently_ purely “economic” or “business-like” character of the greater part of their activities. Let me quote Professor Bliss Perry here ... “_the overwhelming preponderance of the unmitigated business-man face_ [italics mine], the consummate monotonous commonness of the pushing male crowd” (p. 158). “There exists, in other words, _in all classes of American society to-day_, just as there existed during the Revolution, during the ‘transcendental’ movement, in the Civil War, an immense mass of unspiritualised, unvitalised American manhood and womanhood” (p. 160).

[298] And this despite of what I have called elsewhere the comparative failure of Pragmatism to give a rational, and tenable account of “personality” and of the “self.”

[299] At the moment of his death (_scribens est mortuus_) James was undoubtedly throughout the world the most talked-about English-speaking philosopher, and nowhere more so than in Germany, the home of the transcendentalism that he so doughtily and brilliantly attacked. Stein says, for example, in his article upon “Pragmatism” (_Archiv für Philosophie_, 14, 1907, II. Ab.), that we “have had nothing like it since Schopenhauer.” I have often thought that James and his work, along with the life and work of other notable American thinkers (and along with the “lead” that America now certainly has over at least England in some departments of study, like political and economic science, experimental psychology, and so on), are part of the debt America owed, some decades ago, to the Old World in the matter of the training of many of her best professors--a debt she has long since cancelled and overpaid. Readers, by the way, who desire more authentic information about James and his work than the present writer is either capable, or desirous, of giving in this book, may peruse either the recent work of Professor Perry of Harvard upon _Present Philosophical Tendencies_, or the work of M. Flournoy already spoken of. Boutroux has a fine appreciation of the value of James’s philosophical work in the work to which I have already referred. And there was naturally a crop of invaluable articles upon James in the American reviews shortly after his death.

[300] Think alone, for example, of what James says he learnt there from a teacher like Agassiz: “The hours I spent with Agassiz so taught me the difference between all possible abstractionists and all livers in the light of the world’s concrete fulness that I have never been able to forget it.”--From an article upon James in the _Journal of Philosophy_, ix. p. 527.

[301] While this book was passing through the press my eye fell upon the following words of Professor Santayana in respect of this very personality of James: “It was his personal spontaneity, similar to that of Emerson, and his personal vitality similar to that of nobody else. Conviction and ideas came to him, so to speak, from the subsoil. He had a prophetic sympathy with the dawning sentiments of the age, with the moods of the dumb majority. His way of thinking and feeling represents the true America, and represented in a measure the whole ultra-modern radical world” (_Winds of Doctrine_, p. 205).

[302] Including, say, the facilities of a completely indexed and authenticated estimate of the work that has been done in different countries upon his particular subject. It is easy to see that the habit and the possibility of work in an environment such as this [and again and again its system and its facilities simply stagger the European] is a thing of the greatest value to the American professor so far as the idea of his own best possible contribution to his age is concerned. Should he merely do over again what others have done? Or shall he try to work in a really new field? Or shall he give himself to the work of real teaching, to the training of competent men, or to the “organization” of his subject with his public? It must be admitted, I think, that the average American professor is a better teacher and guide in his subject than his average colleague in many places in Europe. Hence the justifiable discontent of many American students with what they occasionally find abroad in the way of academic facilities for investigation and advanced study.

[303] The latter (it is perhaps needless to state) have long been perfectly evident to all American teachers of the first rank in the shape, say, of the worthless “research” that is often represented in theses and studies handed in for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, or for other purposes. Anything that seems to be “work done,” anything that has attained to some “consequences” or other, has often been published as studies and researches, and this despite the valuable things that are to be associated with the idea of the pragmatist element in American scholarship. The faults, too, of the undue specialization that still obtains in many American institutions is also, as I have indicated, becoming more and more apparent to American authorities.

[304] I cannot see why idealists should have been so slow to accord to Pragmatism the element of truth in this idea, and to admit that it connects the pragmatist philosophy of “consequences” with the idealist “value-philosophy.”

[305] The greater part, for example, of our British teaching and writing about Kant and Hegel has taken little or no recognition of the peculiar intellectual and social atmosphere under which Criticism and Transcendentalism became intelligible and influential in Germany and elsewhere, or of the equally important matter of the very different ways in which the Kantian and the Hegelian philosophies were interpreted by different schools and different tendencies of thought. A similar thing might, I think, too, be said of the unduly “intellectualistic” manner in which the teachings of Plato and Aristotle have often been presented to our British students--under the influence partly of Hegelianism and partly of the _doctrinairism_ and the intellectualism of our academic Humanism since the time of the Renaissance. Hence the great importance in Greek philosophy of such a recent work as that of F. M. Cornford upon the relation of Religion to Philosophy (_From Religion to Philosophy_, Arnold, 1912), or of Professor Burnet’s well-known _Early Greek Philosophy_.

[306] As suggestive of the scant respect for authorities felt by the active-minded American student, I may refer to the boast of Papini that Pragmatism appeals to the virile and the proud-spirited who do not wish to accept their thought from the past.

[307] I am thinking of such events as the “World’s Parliament of Religions” (in Chicago in 1893), the recent international conferences upon “ethical instruction in different countries,” upon “racial problems,” upon “missions,” etc. It would be idle to think that such attempts at the organisation of the knowledge and the effort of the thinking people in the world are quite devoid of philosophical importance. One has only to study, say, von Hartmann, or modern social reform, to be convinced of the contrary.

[308] I trust I may be pardoned if I venture to suggest that in opposition to the democratic attitude of Pragmatism to the ordinary facts of life, and to the ordinary (but often heroic) life of ordinary men, the view of man and the universe that is taken in such an important idealistic book as Dr. Bosanquet’s _Individuality and Value_ is doubtless unduly aristocratic or intellectualistic. It speaks rather of the Greek view of life than of the modern democratic view. As an expression of the _quasi_ democratic attitude of James even in philosophy, we may cite the following: “In this real world of sweat and dirt, it seems to me that when a view of things is noble, that ought to count as a presumption its truth, as a philosophical disqualification. The Prince of Darkness may be a gentleman, as we are told he is, but whatever the God of earth and heaven is, he can surely be no gentleman. His menial services are needed in the dust of our human trials.” [Having rewritten this quotation two or three times, I have lost the reference to its place in James’s writings. It is one of the three books upon Pragmatism and Pluralism.]

[309] We may quote, I think, the following passage from Professor Perry to show that the open-mindedness of James was not merely a temperamental and an American characteristic in his case, but a quality or attitude that rested upon an intellectual conviction in respect of the function of ideas. “Since it is their office [_i.e._ the office of ideas] to pave the way for direct knowledge, or to be temporarily substituted for it, then efficiency is conditioned by their _unobtrusiveness, by the readiness with which they subordinate themselves_. The commonest case of an idea in James’s sense is the word, and the most notable example of his pragmatic or empirical method is his own scrupulous avoidance of verbalism. It follows that since ideas are in and of themselves of no cognitive value, since they are essentially instrumental, they _are always on trial_, and ‘liable to modification in the course of future experience.’”--_Present Philosophical Tendencies_, p. 364 (italics mine).

[310] It is known to all students that some of the more important writings of this prince of thinkers cannot be intelligibly approached without a long preliminary study of the peculiar “dressing up,” or transformation, to which he subjects the various facts of life and existence. And the same thing is true (to a more modified extent) of the writings of Kant.

[311] See the wise remark, in this very connexion, of the possible service of philosophy to-day, of Dr. Bosanquet, reproduced upon p. 226. And then, again, we must remember that an unduly pragmatist view of life would tend to make people impervious to ideas that transcend the range and the level of their ordinary interests and activities.

[312] Cf. the following from Professor Pace’s Preface to _Introduction to Philosophy_, by Charles A. Dubray. “In Catholic colleges, importance has always been attached to the study of philosophy both as a means of culture and as a source of information regarding the great truths which are influential in supporting Christian belief and in shaping character.” Of course these same words might be used as descriptive of what Professor Santayana calls the “older tradition” in _all_ American colleges. It is interesting, by the way, to note also the pragmatist touch in the same Preface to this Catholic manual. “But if this training is to be successful, philosophy must be presented, not as a complex of abstruse speculations on far-off inaccessible topics, but as a system of truths that enter with vital consequence into our ordinary thinking and our everyday conduct.”

[313] See p. 136.

[314] See above, p. 34 and p. 165.

[315] It is not, however, “rest” that the pragmatists want, even in heaven, but renewed opportunities for achievement. “‘_There shall be news_,’ W. James was fond of saying with rapture, quoting from the unpublished poem of a new friend, ‘there shall be _news in heaven_.’”--Professor Santayana in _Winds of Doctrine_, p. 209.

[316] In using this expression I am acutely conscious of its limitations and of its misleading character. There is nothing in which Americans so thoroughly believe as _knowledge_ and _instruction_ and _information_. A belief in education is in fact _the one prevailing religion of the country_--the one thing in which _all_ classes, without any exception, unfeignedly _believe_, and for which the entire country makes enormous sacrifices.

[317] In using this expression I am not blind to such outstanding characteristics of American life as (1) the enormous amount of preventive philanthropy that exists in the United States; (2) the well-known system of checks in the governmental machinery of the country; (3) the readiness with which Americans fly to legislation for the cure of evils; (4) the American sensitiveness to pain and their hesitation about the infliction of suffering or punishment, etc. Nor do I forget the sacrifice of life entailed by modern necessities and modern inventions in countries other than America. I simply mean that owing to the constant stream of immigration, and to the spirit of youthfulness that pervades the country, the willingness of people to make experiments with themselves and their lives is one of the many remarkable things about the United States.

[318] See p. 117.

[319] And this despite the enormous amount of work that has been done by American biologists upon the “factors” of evolution, and upon a true interpretation of Darwinism and of Weismannism and of the evolutionary theory generally.

[320] Even Professor James, for example, dismissed (far too readily, in my opinion) as a “sociological romance” a well-known book (published both in French and in English) by Professor Schinz entitled _Anti-Pragmatism_. Although in some respects a superficial and exaggerated piece of work, this book did discover certain important things about Pragmatism and about its relation to American life.

[321] It is probably a perception of this truth that has led Dr. Bosanquet to express the opinion that the whole pragmatist issue may be settled by an examination of the notion of “satisfaction.” He must mean, I think, that satisfaction is impossible to man without a recognition of many of the ideal factors that are almost entirely neglected by the pragmatists--except by Bergson, if it be fair to call him a pragmatist.

[322] Bourdeau, for example, has suggested that its God is not really God, but merely an old domestic servant destined to do us personal services---help us to carry our trunk and our cross in the midst of sweat and dirt. He is not a gentleman even. “No wonder,” he adds, “it was condemned at Rome.” See his _Pragmatisme et Modernisme_, p. 82.

[323] I am thinking here of the words in the Constitution of the State of California (they are printed in Mr. Bryce’s _American Commonwealth_--at least in the earlier editions) to the effect that it is the natural right of all men to seek and to “_obtain_ [!]” happiness.

[324] “_Epigramme_,” Venice, 1790. [“I could never abide any of those freedom-gospellers. All that they ever wanted was to get things running so as to suit themselves. If you are anxious to set people free, just make a beginning by trying to serve them. The simplest attempt will teach you how dangerous this effort may be.”]

[325] See Chapter IX.

[326] On what grounds does Professor Bosanquet think of “compensating justice” as a naïve idea? It is on the contrary one of the highest and deepest, and one of the most comprehensive to which the human mind has ever attained--giving rise to the various theogonies and theodicies and religious systems of mankind. It is at the bottom, for example, of the theodicy and the philosophy of Leibniz, the founder of the Rationalism of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Europe.

[327] Could any system of ethics which took such an impossible and such a belated conception of the individual be regarded as ethics at all?