an ideal. But humanism explicates the summarizing word 'ought' into a
mass of pragmatic motives from the midst of which our critics think that
truth itself takes flight. Truth is a name of double meaning. It stands
now for an abstract something defined only as that to which our thought
ought to conform; and again it stands for the concrete propositions
within which we believe that conformity already reigns--they being so
many 'truths.' Humanism sees that the only conformity we ever have to
deal with concretely is that between our subjects and our predicates,
using these words in a very broad sense. It sees moreover that this
conformity is 'validated' (to use Mr. Schiller's term) by an indefinite
number of pragmatic tests that vary as the predicates and subjects vary.
If an S gets superseded by an SP that gives our mind a completer sum of
satisfactions, we always say, humanism points out, that we have advanced
to a better position in regard to truth.
Now many of our judgments thus attained are retrospective. The S'es, so
the judgment runs, were SP's already ere the fact was humanly recorded.
Common sense, struck by this state of things, now rearranges the whole
field; and traditional philosophy follows her example. The general
requirement that predicates must conform to their subject, they
translate into an ontological theory. A most previous Subject of all is
substituted for the lesser subjects and conceived of as an archetypal
Reality; and the conformity required of predicates in detail is
reinterpreted as a relation which our whole mind, with all its subjects
and predicates together, must get into with respect to this Reality.
It, meanwhile, is conceived as eternal, static, and unaffected by our
thinking. Conformity to a non-human Archetype like this is probably the
notion of truth which my opponent shares with common sense and
philosophic rationalism.
When now Humanism, fully admitting both the naturalness and the grandeur
of this hypothesis, nevertheless points to its sterility, and declines
to chime in with the substitution, keeping to the concrete and still
lodging truth between the subjects and the predicates in detail, it
provokes the outcry which we hear and which my critic echoes.
One of the commonest parts of the outcry is that humanism is
subjectivistic altogether--it is supposed to labor under a necessity of
'denying trans-perceptual reality.'[132] It is not hard to see how this
misconception of humanism may have arisen; and humanistic writers,
partly from not having sufficiently guarded their expressions, and
partly from not having yet "got round" (in the poverty of their
literature) to a full discussion of the subject, are doubtless in some
degree to blame. But I fail to understand how any one with a working
grasp of their principles can charge them wholesale with subjectivism. I
myself have never thought of humanism as being subjectivistic farther
than to this extent, that, inasmuch as it treats the thinker as being
himself one portion of reality, it must also allow that _some_ of the
realities that he declares for true are created by his being there. Such
realities of course are either acts of his, or relations between other
things and him, or relations between things, which, but for him, would
never have been traced. Humanists are subjectivistic, also in this,
that, unlike rationalists (who think they carry a warrant for the
absolute truth of what they now believe in in their present pocket),
they hold all present beliefs as subject to revision in the light of
future experience. The future experience, however, may be of things
outside the thinker; and that this is so the humanist may believe as
freely as any other kind of empiricist philosopher.
The critics of humanism (though here I follow them but darkly) appear to
object to any infusion whatever of subjectivism into truth. All must be
archetypal; every truth must pre-exist to its perception. Humanism sees
that an enormous quantity of truth must be written down as having
pre-existed to its perception by us humans. In countless instances we
find it most satisfactory to believe that, though we were always
ignorant of the fact, it always _was_ a fact that S was SP. But humanism
separates this class of cases from those in which it is more
satisfactory to believe the opposite, e.g., that S is ephemeral, or P a
passing event, or SP created by the perceiving act. Our critics seem on
the other hand, to wish to universalize the retrospective type of
instance. Reality must pre-exist to every assertion for which truth is
claimed. And, not content with this overuse of one particular type of
judgment, our critics claim its monopoly. They appear to wish to cut off
Humanism from its rights to any retrospection at all.
Humanism says that satisfactoriness is what distinguishes the true from
the false. But satisfactoriness is both a subjective quality, and a
present one. _Ergo_ (the critics appear to reason) an object, _qua_
true, must always for humanism be both present and subjective, and a
humanist's belief can never be in anything that lives outside of the
belief itself or ante-dates it. Why so preposterous a charge should be
so current, I find it hard to say. Nothing is more obvious than the fact
that both the objective and the past existence of the object may be the
very things about it that most seem satisfactory, and that most invite
us to believe them. The past tense can figure in the humanist's world,
as well of belief as of representation, quite as harmoniously as in the
world of any one else.
Mr. Joseph gives a special turn to this accusation. He charges me[133]
with being self-contradictory when I say that the main categories of
thought were evolved in the course of experience itself. For I use these
very categories to define the course of experience by. Experience, as I
talk about it, is a product of their use; and yet I take it as true
anteriorly to them. This seems to Mr. Joseph to be an absurdity. I hope
it does not seem such to his readers; for if experiences can suggest
hypotheses at all (and they notoriously do so) I can see no absurdity
whatever in the notion of a retrospective hypothesis having for its
object the very train of experiences by which its own being, along with
that of other things, has been brought about. If the hypothesis is
'satisfactory' we must, of course, believe it to have been true
anteriorly to its formulation by ourselves. Every explanation of a
present by a past seems to involve this kind of circle, which is not a
vicious circle. The past is _causa existendi_ of the present, which in
turn is _causa cognoscendi_ of the past. If the present were treated as
_causa existendi_ of the past, the circle might indeed be vicious.
Closely connected with this pseudo-difficulty is another one of wider
scope and greater complication--more excusable therefore.[134]
Humanism, namely, asking how truth in point of fact is reached, and
seeing that it is by ever substituting more satisfactory for less
satisfactory opinions, is thereby led into a vague historic sketch of
truth's development. The earliest 'opinions,' it thinks, must have been
dim, unconnected 'feelings,' and only little by little did more and more
orderly views of things replace them. Our own retrospective view of this
whole evolution is now, let us say, the latest candidate for 'truth' as
yet reached in the process. To be a satisfactory candidate, it must give
some definite sort of a picture of what forces keep the process going.
On the subjective side we have a fairly definite picture--sensation,
association, interest, hypothesis, these account in a general way for
the growth into a cosmos of the relative chaos with which the mind
began.
But on the side of the object, so to call it roughly, our view is much
less satisfactory. Of which of our many objects are we to believe that
it truly _was_ there and at work before the human mind began? Time,
space, kind, number, serial order, cause, consciousness, are hard things
not to objectify--even transcendental idealism leaves them standing as
'empirically real.' Substance, matter, force, fall down more easily
before criticism, and secondary qualities make almost no resistance at
all. Nevertheless, when we survey the field of speculation, from
Scholasticism through Kantism to Spencerism, we find an ever-recurring
tendency to convert the pre-human into a merely logical object, an
unknowable _ding-an-sich_, that but starts the process, or a vague
_materia prima_ that but receives our forms.[135]
The reasons for this are not so much logical as they are material. We
can postulate an extra-mental _that_ freely enough (though some
idealists have denied us the privilege), but when we have done so, the
_what_ of it is hard to determine satisfactorily, because of the
oppositions and entanglements of the variously proposed _whats_ with one
another and with the history of the human mind. The literature of
speculative cosmology bears witness to this difficulty. Humanism suffers
from it no more than any other philosophy suffers, but it makes all our
cosmogonic theories so unsatisfactory that some thinkers seek relief in
the denial of any primal dualism. Absolute Thought or 'pure experience'
is postulated, and endowed with attributes calculated to justify the
belief that it may 'run itself.' Both these truth-claiming hypotheses
are non-dualistic in the old mind-and-matter sense; but the one is
monistic and the other pluralistic as to the world process itself. Some
humanists are non-dualists of this sort--I myself am one _und zwar_ of
the pluralistic brand. But doubtless dualistic humanists also exist, as
well as non-dualistic ones of the monistic wing.
Mr. Joseph pins these general philosophic difficulties on humanism
alone, or possibly on me alone. My article spoke vaguely of a 'most
chaotic pure experience' coming first, and building up the mind.[136]
But how can two structureless things interact so as to produce a
structure? my critic triumphantly asks. Of course they can't, as purely
so-named entities. We must make additional hypotheses. We must beg a
minimum of structure for them. The _kind_ of minimum that _might_ have
tended to increase towards what we now find actually developed is the
philosophical desideratum here. The question is that of the most
materially satisfactory hypothesis. Mr. Joseph handles it by formal
logic purely, as if he had no acquaintance with the logic of hypothesis
at all.
Mr. Joseph again is much bewildered as to what a humanist can mean when
he uses the word knowledge. He tries to convict me[137] of vaguely
identifying it with any kind of good. Knowledge is a difficult thing to
define briefly, and Mr. Joseph shows his own constructive hand here even
less than in the rest of his article. I have myself put forth on
several occasions a radically pragmatist account of knowledge,[138] the
existence of which account my critic probably does not know of--so
perhaps I had better not say anything about knowledge until he reads and
attacks that. I will say, however, that whatever the relation called
knowing may itself prove to consist in, I can think of no conceivable
kind of _object_ which may not become an object of knowledge on
humanistic principles as well as on the principles of any other
philosophy.[139]
I confess that I am pretty steadily hampered by the habit, on the part
of humanism's critics, of assuming that they have truer ideas than mine
of truth and knowledge, the nature of which I must know of and can not
need to have re-defined. I have consequently to reconstruct these ideas
in order to carry on the discussion (I have e.g. had to do so in some
parts of this article) and I thereby expose myself to charges of
caricature. In one part of Mr. Joseph's attack, however, I rejoice that
we are free from this embarrassment. It is an important point and covers
probably a genuine difficulty, so I take it up last.
When, following Schiller and Dewey, I define the true as that which
gives the maximal combination of satisfactions, and say that
satisfaction is a many-dimensional term that can be realized in various
ways, Mr. Joseph replies, rightly enough, that the chief satisfaction of
a rational creature must always be his thought that what he believes is
_true_, whether the truth brings him the satisfaction of collateral
profits or not. This would seem, however, to make of truth the prior
concept, and to relegate satisfaction to a secondary place.
Again, if to be satisfactory is what is meant by being true, _whose_
satisfactions, and _which_ of his satisfactions, are to count?
Discriminations notoriously have to be made; and the upshot is that only
rational candidates and intellectual satisfactions stand the test. We
are then driven to a purely theoretic notion of truth, and get out of
the pragmatic atmosphere altogether. And with this Mr. Joseph leaves
us--truth is truth, and there is an end of the matter. But he makes a
very pretty show of convicting me of self-stultification in according to
our purely theoretic satisfactions any place in the humanistic scheme.
They crowd the collateral satisfactions out of house and home, he
thinks, and pragmatism has to go into bankruptcy if she recognizes them
at all.
There is no room for disagreement about the facts here; but the
destructive force of the reasoning disappears as soon as we talk
concretely instead of abstractly, and ask, in our quality of good
pragmatists, just what the famous theoretic needs are known as and in
what the intellectual satisfactions consist. Mr. Joseph, faithful to the
habits of his party, makes no attempt at characterizing them, but
assumes that their nature is self-evident to all.
Are they not all mere matters of _consistency_--and emphatically _not_
of consistency between an Absolute Reality and the mind's copies of it,
but of actually felt consistency among judgments, objects, and manners
of reacting, in the mind? And are not both our need of such consistency
and our pleasure in it conceivable as outcomes of the natural fact that
we are beings that develop mental _habits_--habit itself proving
adaptively beneficial in an environment where the same objects, or the
same kinds of objects, recur and follow 'law'? If this were so, what
would have come first would have been the collateral profits of habit,
and the theoretic life would have grown up in aid of these. In point of
fact this seems to have been the probable case. At life's origin, any
present perception may have been 'true'--if such a word could then be
applicable. Later, when reactions became organized, the reactions became
'true' whenever expectation was fulfilled by them. Otherwise they were
'false' or 'mistaken' reactions. But the same class of objects needs the
same kind of reaction, so the impulse to react consistently must
gradually have been established, with a disappointment felt whenever
the results frustrated expectation. Here is a perfectly plausible germ
for all our higher consistencies. Nowadays, if an object claims from us
a reaction of the kind habitually accorded only to the opposite class of
objects, our mental machinery refuses to run smoothly. The situation is
intellectually unsatisfactory. To gain relief we seek either to preserve
the reaction by re-interpreting the object, or, leaving the object as it
is, we react in a way contrary to the way claimed of us. Neither
solution is easy. Such a situation might be that of Mr. Joseph, with me
claiming assent to humanism from him. He can not apperceive it so as to
permit him to gratify my claim; but there is enough appeal in the claim
to induce him to write a whole article in justification of his refusal.
If he should assent to humanism, on the other hand, that would drag
after it an unwelcome, yea incredible, alteration of his previous mental
beliefs. Whichever alternative he might adopt, however, a new
equilibrium of intellectual consistency would in the end be reached. He
would feel, whichever way he decided, that he was now thinking truly.
But if, with his old habits unaltered, he should simply add to them the
new one of advocating humanism quietly or noisily, his mind would be
rent into two systems, each of which would accuse the other of
falsehood. The resultant situation, being profoundly unsatisfactory,
would also be instable.
Theoretic truth is thus no relation between our mind and archetypal
reality. It falls _within_ the mind, being the accord of some of its
processes and objects with other processes and objects--'accord'
consisting here in well-definable relations. So long as the satisfaction
of feeling such an accord is denied us, whatever collateral profits may
seem to inure from what we believe in are but as dust in the
balance--provided always that we are highly organized intellectually,
which the majority of us are not. The amount of accord which satisfies
most men and women is merely the absence of violent clash between their
usual thoughts and statements and the limited sphere of
sense-perceptions in which their lives are cast. The theoretic truth
that most of us think we 'ought' to attain to is thus the possession of
a set of predicates that do not contradict their subjects. We preserve
it as often as not by leaving other predicates and subjects out.
In some men theory is a passion, just as music is in others. The form of
inner consistency is pursued far beyond the line at which collateral
profits stop. Such men systematize and classify and schematize and make
synoptical tables and invent ideal objects for the pure love of
unifying. Too often the results, glowing with 'truth' for the inventors,
seem pathetically personal and artificial to bystanders. Which is as
much as to say that the purely theoretic criterion of truth can leave us
in the lurch as easily as any other criterion.
I think that if Mr. Joseph will but consider all these things a little
more concretely, he may find that the humanistic scheme and the notion
of theoretic truth fall into line consistently enough to yield him also
intellectual satisfaction.
FOOTNOTES:
[129] [Reprinted without change from _Mind_, N. S., vol. XIV, No. 54,
April, 1905, pp. 190-198. Pages 245-247, and pp. 261-265, have also been
reprinted in _The Meaning of Truth_, pp. 54-57, and pp. 97-100. The
present essay is referred to above, p. 203. ED.]
[130] ['Humanism and Truth' first appeared in _Mind_, N. S., vol. XIII,
No. 52, October, 1904. It is reprinted in _The Meaning of Truth_, pp.
51-101. Cf. this article _passim_. Mr. H. W. B. Joseph's criticism,
entitled "Professor James on 'Humanism and Truth,'" appeared in _Mind_,
N. S., vol. XIV, No. 53, January, 1905. ED.]
[131] _Op. cit._, p. 37.
[132] [Cf. above, pp. 241-243.]
[133] _Op. cit._, p. 32.
[134] [This] Mr. Joseph deals with (though in much too pettifogging and
logic-chopping a way) on pp. 33-34 of his article.
[135] Compare some elaborate articles by M. Le Roy and M. Wilbois in the
_Revue de Metaphysique et de Morale_, vols. VIII, IX, and X, [1900,
1901, and 1902.]
[136] [Cf. _The Meaning of Truth_, p. 64.]
[137] [Joseph: _op. cit._, p. 36.]
[138] Most recently in two articles, "Does 'Consciousness' Exist?" and
"A World of Pure Experience." [See above, pp. 1-91.]
[139] For a recent attempt, effective on the whole, at squaring humanism
with knowing, I may refer to Prof. Woodbridge's very able address at the
Saint Louis Congress, "The Field of Logic," printed in _Science_, N. Y.,
November 4, 1904.
XII
ABSOLUTISM AND EMPIRICISM[140]
No seeker of truth can fail to rejoice at the terre-a-terre sort of
discussion of the issues between Empiricism and Transcendentalism (or,
as the champions of the latter would probably prefer to say, between
Irrationalism and Rationalism) that seems to have begun in _Mind_.[141]
It would seem as if, over concrete examples like Mr. J. S. Haldane's,
both parties ought inevitably to come to a better understanding. As a
reader with a strong bias towards Irrationalism, I have studied his
article[142] with the liveliest admiration of its temper and its
painstaking effort to be clear. But the cases discussed failed to
satisfy me, and I was at first tempted to write a Note animadverting
upon them in detail. The growth of the limb, the sea's contour, the
vicarious functioning of the nerve-centre, the digitalis curing the
heart, are unfortunately _not_ cases where we can _see_ any
_through-and-through_ conditioning of the parts by the whole. They are
all cases of reciprocity where subjects, supposed independently to
exist, acquire certain attributes through their relations to other
subjects. That they also _exist_ through similar relations is only an
ideal supposition, not verified to our understanding in these or any
other concrete cases whatsoever.
If, however, one were to urge this solemnly, Mr. Haldane's friends could
easily reply that he only gave us such examples on account of the
hardness of our hearts. He knew full well their imperfection, but he
hoped that to those who would not spontaneously ascend to the Notion of
the Totality, these cases might prove a spur and suggest and symbolize
something better than themselves. No particular case that can be brought
forward is a real concrete. They are all abstractions from the Whole,
and of course the "through-and-through" character can not be found in
them. Each of them still contains among its elements what we call
_things_, grammatical subjects, forming a sort of residual _caput
mortuum_ of Existence after all the relations that figure in the
examples have been told off. On this "existence," thinks popular
philosophy, things may live on, like the winter bears on their own fat,
never entering relations at all, or, if entering them, entering an
entirely different set of them from those treated of in Mr. Haldane's
examples. Thus _if_ the digitalis were to weaken instead of
strengthening the heart, and to produce death (as sometimes happens), it
would determine itself, through determining the organism, to the
function of "kill" instead of that of "cure." The function and relation
seem adventitious, depending on what kind of a heart the digitalis gets
hold of, the digitalis and the heart being facts external and, so to
speak, accidental to each other. But this popular view, Mr. Haldane's
friends will continue, is an illusion. What seems to us the "existence"
of digitalis and heart outside of the relations of killing or curing, is
but a function in a wider system of relations, of which, _pro hac vice_,
we take no account. The larger system determines the _existence_ just
as absolutely as the system "kill," or the system "cure," determined the
_function_ of the digitalis. Ascend to the absolute system, instead of
biding with these relative and partial ones, and you shall see that the
law of through-and-throughness must and does obtain.
Of course, this argument is entirely reasonable, and debars us
completely from chopping logic about the concrete examples Mr. Haldane
has chosen. It is not his fault if his categories are so fine an
instrument that nothing but the sum total of things can be taken to show
us the manner of their use. It is simply our misfortune that he has not
the sum total of things to show it by. Let us fall back from all
concrete attempts and see what we can do with his notion of
through-and-throughness, avowedly taken _in abstracto_. In abstract
systems the "through-and-through" Ideal is realized on every hand. In
any system, as such, the members are only _members_ in the system.
Abolish the system and you abolish its members, for you have conceived
them through no other property than the abstract one of membership.
Neither rightness nor leftness, except through bi-laterality. Neither
mortgager nor mortgagee, except through mortgage. The logic of these
cases is this:--_If_ A, then B; but _if_ B, then A: wherefore _if_
either, Both; and if not Both, Nothing.