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PRAGMATISM
A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking
By William James
To the Memory of John Stuart Mill
from whom I first learned the pragmatic openness of mind and whom my
fancy likes to picture as our leader were he alive to-day.
Preface
The lectures that follow were delivered at the Lowell Institute in
Boston in November and December, 1906, and in January, 1907, at
Columbia University, in New York. They are printed as delivered, without
developments or notes. The pragmatic movement, so-called--I do not like
the name, but apparently it is too late to change it--seems to have
rather suddenly precipitated itself out of the air. A number of
tendencies that have always existed in philosophy have all at once
become conscious of themselves collectively, and of their combined
mission; and this has occurred in so many countries, and from so many
different points of view, that much unconcerted statement has resulted.
I have sought to unify the picture as it presents itself to my own eyes,
dealing in broad strokes, and avoiding minute controversy. Much futile
controversy might have been avoided, I believe, if our critics had been
willing to wait until we got our message fairly out.
If my lectures interest any reader in the general subject, he will
doubtless wish to read farther. I therefore give him a few references.
In America, John Dewey's 'Studies in Logical Theory' are the foundation.
Read also by Dewey the articles in the Philosophical Review, vol.
xv, pp. 113 and 465, in Mind, vol. xv, p. 293, and in the Journal of
Philosophy, vol. iv, p. 197.
Probably the best statements to begin with however, are F. C. S.
Schiller's in his 'Studies in Humanism,' especially the essays numbered
i, v, vi, vii, xviii and xix. His previous essays and in general
the polemic literature of the subject are fully referred to in his
footnotes.
Furthermore, see G. Milhaud: le Rationnel, 1898, and the fine articles
by Le Roy in the Revue de Metaphysique, vols. 7, 8 and 9. Also articles
by Blondel and de Sailly in the Annales de Philosophie Chretienne, 4me
Serie, vols. 2 and 3. Papini announces a book on Pragmatism, in the
French language, to be published very soon.
To avoid one misunderstanding at least, let me say that there is no
logical connexion between pragmatism, as I understand it, and a doctrine
which I have recently set forth as 'radical empiricism.' The latter
stands on its own feet. One may entirely reject it and still be a
pragmatist.
Harvard University, April, 1907.
Contents
Lecture I
The Present Dilemma in Philosophy
Chesterton quoted. Everyone has a philosophy. Temperament is a factor in
all philosophizing. Rationalists and empiricists. The tender-minded
and the tough-minded. Most men wish both facts and religion. Empiricism
gives facts without religion. Rationalism gives religion without facts.
The layman's dilemma. The unreality in rationalistic systems. Leibnitz
on the damned, as an example. M. I. Swift on the optimism of idealists.
Pragmatism as a mediating system. An objection. Reply: philosophies have
characters like men, and are liable to as summary judgments. Spencer as
an example.
Lecture II
What Pragmatism Means
The squirrel. Pragmatism as a method. History of the method. Its
character and affinities. How it contrasts with rationalism and
intellectualism. A 'corridor theory.' Pragmatism as a theory of truth,
equivalent to 'humanism.' Earlier views of mathematical, logical, and
natural truth. More recent views. Schiller's and Dewey's 'instrumental'
view. The formation of new beliefs. Older truth always has to be kept
account of. Older truth arose similarly. The 'humanistic' doctrine.
Rationalistic criticisms of it. Pragmatism as mediator between
empiricism and religion. Barrenness of transcendental idealism. How far
the concept of the Absolute must be called true. The true is the good
in the way of belief. The clash of truths. Pragmatism unstiffens
discussion.
Lecture III
Some Metaphysical Problems Pragmatically Considered
The problem of substance. The Eucharist. Berkeley's pragmatic treatment
of material substance. Locke's of personal identity. The problem of
materialism. Rationalistic treatment of it. Pragmatic treatment. 'God'
is no better than 'Matter' as a principle, unless he promise more.
Pragmatic comparison of the two principles. The problem of design.
'Design' per se is barren. The question is WHAT design. The problem of
'free-will.' Its relations to 'accountability.' Free-will a cosmological
theory. The pragmatic issue at stake in all these problems is what do
the alternatives PROMISE.
Lecture IV
The One and the Many
Total reflection. Philosophy seeks not only unity, but totality.
Rationalistic feeling about unity. Pragmatically considered, the world
is one in many ways. One time and space. One subject of discourse. Its
parts interact. Its oneness and manyness are co-ordinate. Question of
one origin. Generic oneness. One purpose. One story. One knower. Value
of pragmatic method. Absolute monism. Vivekananda. Various types of
union discussed. Conclusion: We must oppose monistic dogmatism and
follow empirical findings.
Lecture V
Pragmatism and Common Sense
Noetic pluralism. How our knowledge grows. Earlier ways of thinking
remain. Prehistoric ancestors DISCOVERED the common sense concepts. List
of them. They came gradually into use. Space and time. 'Things.' Kinds.
'Cause' and 'law.' Common sense one stage in mental evolution, due
to geniuses. The 'critical' stages: 1) scientific and 2) philosophic,
compared with common sense. Impossible to say which is the more 'true.'
Lecture VI
Pragmatism's Conception of Truth
The polemic situation. What does agreement with reality mean? It means
verifiability. Verifiability means ability to guide us prosperously
through experience. Completed verifications seldom needful. 'Eternal'
truths. Consistency, with language, with previous truths. Rationalist
objections. Truth is a good, like health, wealth, etc. It is expedient
thinking. The past. Truth grows. Rationalist objections. Reply to them.
Lecture VII
Pragmatism and Humanism
The notion of THE Truth. Schiller on 'Humanism.' Three sorts of
reality of which any new truth must take account. To 'take account' is
ambiguous. Absolutely independent reality is hard to find. The human
contribution is ubiquitous and builds out the given. Essence of
pragmatism's contrast with rationalism. Rationalism affirms a
transempirical world. Motives for this. Tough-mindedness rejects them. A
genuine alternative. Pragmatism mediates.
Lecture VIII
Pragmatism and Religion
Utility of the Absolute. Whitman's poem 'To You.' Two ways of taking
it. My friend's letter. Necessities versus possibilities. 'Possibility'
defined. Three views of the world's salvation. Pragmatism is
melioristic. We may create reality. Why should anything BE? Supposed
choice before creation. The healthy and the morbid reply. The 'tender'
and the 'tough' types of religion. Pragmatism mediates.
PRAGMATISM
Lecture I
The Present Dilemma in Philosophy
In the preface to that admirable collection of essays of his called
'Heretics,' Mr. Chesterton writes these words: "There are some
people--and I am one of them--who think that the most practical and
important thing about a man is still his view of the universe. We think
that for a landlady considering a lodger, it is important to know his
income, but still more important to know his philosophy. We think that
for a general about to fight an enemy, it is important to know
the enemy's numbers, but still more important to know the enemy's
philosophy. We think the question is not whether the theory of the
cosmos affects matters, but whether, in the long run, anything else
affects them."
I think with Mr. Chesterton in this matter. I know that you, ladies and
gentlemen, have a philosophy, each and all of you, and that the most
interesting and important thing about you is the way in which it
determines the perspective in your several worlds. You know the same
of me. And yet I confess to a certain tremor at the audacity of the
enterprise which I am about to begin. For the philosophy which is so
important in each of us is not a technical matter; it is our more or
less dumb sense of what life honestly and deeply means. It is only
partly got from books; it is our individual way of just seeing and
feeling the total push and pressure of the cosmos. I have no right to
assume that many of you are students of the cosmos in the class-room
sense, yet here I stand desirous of interesting you in a philosophy
which to no small extent has to be technically treated. I wish to fill
you with sympathy with a contemporaneous tendency in which I profoundly
believe, and yet I have to talk like a professor to you who are not
students. Whatever universe a professor believes in must at any rate be
a universe that lends itself to lengthy discourse. A universe definable
in two sentences is something for which the professorial intellect has
no use. No faith in anything of that cheap kind! I have heard friends
and colleagues try to popularize philosophy in this very hall, but they
soon grew dry, and then technical, and the results were only partially
encouraging. So my enterprise is a bold one. The founder of pragmatism
himself recently gave a course of lectures at the Lowell Institute with
that very word in its title-flashes of brilliant light relieved
against Cimmerian darkness! None of us, I fancy, understood ALL that he
said--yet here I stand, making a very similar venture.
I risk it because the very lectures I speak of DREW--they brought good
audiences. There is, it must be confessed, a curious fascination in
hearing deep things talked about, even tho neither we nor the disputants
understand them. We get the problematic thrill, we feel the presence of
the vastness. Let a controversy begin in a smoking-room anywhere, about
free-will or God's omniscience, or good and evil, and see how everyone
in the place pricks up his ears. Philosophy's results concern us all
most vitally, and philosophy's queerest arguments tickle agreeably our
sense of subtlety and ingenuity.
Believing in philosophy myself devoutly, and believing also that a kind
of new dawn is breaking upon us philosophers, I feel impelled, per fas
aut nefas, to try to impart to you some news of the situation.
Philosophy is at once the most sublime and the most trivial of human
pursuits. It works in the minutest crannies and it opens out the widest
vistas. It 'bakes no bread,' as has been said, but it can inspire our
souls with courage; and repugnant as its manners, its doubting and
challenging, its quibbling and dialectics, often are to common people,
no one of us can get along without the far-flashing beams of light it
sends over the world's perspectives. These illuminations at least, and
the contrast-effects of darkness and mystery that accompany them, give
to what it says an interest that is much more than professional.
The history of philosophy is to a great extent that of a certain clash
of human temperaments. Undignified as such a treatment may seem to some
of my colleagues, I shall have to take account of this clash and explain
a good many of the divergencies of philosophers by it. Of whatever
temperament a professional philosopher is, he tries when philosophizing
to sink the fact of his temperament. Temperament is no conventionally
recognized reason, so he urges impersonal reasons only for his
conclusions. Yet his temperament really gives him a stronger bias than
any of his more strictly objective premises. It loads the evidence
for him one way or the other, making for a more sentimental or a more
hard-hearted view of the universe, just as this fact or that principle
would. He trusts his temperament. Wanting a universe that suits it, he
believes in any representation of the universe that does suit it.
He feels men of opposite temper to be out of key with the world's
character, and in his heart considers them incompetent and 'not in
it,' in the philosophic business, even tho they may far excel him in
dialectical ability.
Yet in the forum he can make no claim, on the bare ground of his
temperament, to superior discernment or authority. There arises thus a
certain insincerity in our philosophic discussions: the potentest of
all our premises is never mentioned. I am sure it would contribute to
clearness if in these lectures we should break this rule and mention it,
and I accordingly feel free to do so.
Of course I am talking here of very positively marked men, men
of radical idiosyncracy, who have set their stamp and likeness on
philosophy and figure in its history. Plato, Locke, Hegel, Spencer,
are such temperamental thinkers. Most of us have, of course, no
very definite intellectual temperament, we are a mixture of opposite
ingredients, each one present very moderately. We hardly know our own
preferences in abstract matters; some of us are easily talked out of
them, and end by following the fashion or taking up with the beliefs of
the most impressive philosopher in our neighborhood, whoever he may be.
But the one thing that has COUNTED so far in philosophy is that a man
should see things, see them straight in his own peculiar way, and be
dissatisfied with any opposite way of seeing them. There is no reason
to suppose that this strong temperamental vision is from now onward to
count no longer in the history of man's beliefs.
Now the particular difference of temperament that I have in mind
in making these remarks is one that has counted in literature, art,
government and manners as well as in philosophy. In manners we find
formalists and free-and-easy persons. In government, authoritarians and
anarchists. In literature, purists or academicals, and realists. In art,
classics and romantics. You recognize these contrasts as familiar; well,
in philosophy we have a very similar contrast expressed in the pair of
terms 'rationalist' and 'empiricist,' 'empiricist' meaning your lover of
facts in all their crude variety, 'rationalist' meaning your devotee to
abstract and eternal principles. No one can live an hour without both
facts and principles, so it is a difference rather of emphasis; yet it
breeds antipathies of the most pungent character between those who
lay the emphasis differently; and we shall find it extraordinarily
convenient to express a certain contrast in men's ways of taking their
universe, by talking of the 'empiricist' and of the 'rationalist'
temper. These terms make the contrast simple and massive.
More simple and massive than are usually the men of whom the terms are
predicated. For every sort of permutation and combination is possible in
human nature; and if I now proceed to define more fully what I have in
mind when I speak of rationalists and empiricists, by adding to each
of those titles some secondary qualifying characteristics, I beg you to
regard my conduct as to a certain extent arbitrary. I select types
of combination that nature offers very frequently, but by no means
uniformly, and I select them solely for their convenience in helping
me to my ulterior purpose of characterizing pragmatism. Historically we
find the terms 'intellectualism' and 'sensationalism' used as synonyms
of 'rationalism' and 'empiricism.' Well, nature seems to combine most
frequently with intellectualism an idealistic and optimistic tendency.
Empiricists on the other hand are not uncommonly materialistic, and
their optimism is apt to be decidedly conditional and tremulous.
Rationalism is always monistic. It starts from wholes and universals,
and makes much of the unity of things. Empiricism starts from the parts,
and makes of the whole a collection-is not averse therefore to calling
itself pluralistic. Rationalism usually considers itself more religious
than empiricism, but there is much to say about this claim, so I merely
mention it. It is a true claim when the individual rationalist is what
is called a man of feeling, and when the individual empiricist prides
himself on being hard-headed. In that case the rationalist will usually
also be in favor of what is called free-will, and the empiricist will
be a fatalist--I use the terms most popularly current. The rationalist
finally will be of dogmatic temper in his affirmations, while the
empiricist may be more sceptical and open to discussion.
I will write these traits down in two columns. I think you will
practically recognize the two types of mental make-up that I mean if
I head the columns by the titles 'tender-minded' and 'tough-minded'
respectively.
THE TENDER-MINDED
Rationalistic (going by 'principles'), Intellectualistic, Idealistic,
Optimistic, Religious, Free-willist, Monistic, Dogmatical.
THE TOUGH-MINDED
Empiricist (going by 'facts'), Sensationalistic, Materialistic,
Pessimistic, Irreligious, Fatalistic, Pluralistic, Sceptical.
Pray postpone for a moment the question whether the two contrasted
mixtures which I have written down are each inwardly coherent and
self-consistent or not--I shall very soon have a good deal to say on
that point. It suffices for our immediate purpose that tender-minded and
tough-minded people, characterized as I have written them down, do both
exist. Each of you probably knows some well-marked example of each type,
and you know what each example thinks of the example on the other side
of the line. They have a low opinion of each other. Their antagonism,
whenever as individuals their temperaments have been intense, has formed
in all ages a part of the philosophic atmosphere of the time. It forms a
part of the philosophic atmosphere to-day. The tough think of the tender
as sentimentalists and soft-heads. The tender feel the tough to be
unrefined, callous, or brutal. Their mutual reaction is very much like
that that takes place when Bostonian tourists mingle with a population
like that of Cripple Creek. Each type believes the other to be inferior
to itself; but disdain in the one case is mingled with amusement, in the
other it has a dash of fear.
Now, as I have already insisted, few of us are tender-foot Bostonians
pure and simple, and few are typical Rocky Mountain toughs, in
philosophy. Most of us have a hankering for the good things on both
sides of the line. Facts are good, of course--give us lots of facts.
Principles are good--give us plenty of principles. The world is
indubitably one if you look at it in one way, but as indubitably is
it many, if you look at it in another. It is both one and many--let us
adopt a sort of pluralistic monism. Everything of course is necessarily
determined, and yet of course our wills are free: a sort of free-will
determinism is the true philosophy. The evil of the parts is undeniable;
but the whole can't be evil: so practical pessimism may be combined with
metaphysical optimism. And so forth--your ordinary philosophic layman
never being a radical, never straightening out his system, but living
vaguely in one plausible compartment of it or another to suit the
temptations of successive hours.
But some of us are more than mere laymen in philosophy. We are worthy
of the name of amateur athletes, and are vexed by too much inconsistency
and vacillation in our creed. We cannot preserve a good intellectual
conscience so long as we keep mixing incompatibles from opposite sides
of the line.
And now I come to the first positively important point which I wish to
make. Never were as many men of a decidedly empiricist proclivity in
existence as there are at the present day. Our children, one may say,
are almost born scientific. But our esteem for facts has not neutralized
in us all religiousness. It is itself almost religious. Our scientific
temper is devout. Now take a man of this type, and let him be also a
philosophic amateur, unwilling to mix a hodge-podge system after the
fashion of a common layman, and what does he find his situation to be,
in this blessed year of our Lord 1906? He wants facts; he wants
science; but he also wants a religion. And being an amateur and not an
independent originator in philosophy he naturally looks for guidance to
the experts and professionals whom he finds already in the field. A
very large number of you here present, possibly a majority of you, are
amateurs of just this sort.
Now what kinds of philosophy do you find actually offered to meet your
need? You find an empirical philosophy that is not religious enough, and
a religious philosophy that is not empirical enough for your purpose.
If you look to the quarter where facts are most considered you find
the whole tough-minded program in operation, and the 'conflict between
science and religion' in full blast. Either it is that Rocky Mountain
tough of a Haeckel with his materialistic monism, his ether-god and his
jest at your God as a 'gaseous vertebrate'; or it is Spencer treating
the world's history as a redistribution of matter and motion solely, and
bowing religion politely out at the front door:--she may indeed continue
to exist, but she must never show her face inside the temple. For a
hundred and fifty years past the progress of science has seemed to mean
the enlargement of the material universe and the diminution of man's
importance. The result is what one may call the growth of naturalistic
or positivistic feeling. Man is no law-giver to nature, he is an
absorber. She it is who stands firm; he it is who must accommodate
himself. Let him record truth, inhuman tho it be, and submit to it! The
romantic spontaneity and courage are gone, the vision is materialistic
and depressing. Ideals appear as inert by-products of physiology; what
is higher is explained by what is lower and treated forever as a case of
'nothing but'--nothing but something else of a quite inferior sort. You
get, in short, a materialistic universe, in which only the tough-minded
find themselves congenially at home.
If now, on the other hand, you turn to the religious quarter for
consolation, and take counsel of the tender-minded philosophies, what do
you find?
Religious philosophy in our day and generation is, among us
English-reading people, of two main types. One of these is more radical
and aggressive, the other has more the air of fighting a slow retreat.
By the more radical wing of religious philosophy I mean the so-called
transcendental idealism of the Anglo-Hegelian school, the philosophy of
such men as Green, the Cairds, Bosanquet, and Royce. This philosophy has
greatly influenced the more studious members of our protestant ministry.
It is pantheistic, and undoubtedly it has already blunted the edge of
the traditional theism in protestantism at large.
That theism remains, however. It is the lineal descendant, through one
stage of concession after another, of the dogmatic scholastic theism
still taught rigorously in the seminaries of the catholic church. For a
long time it used to be called among us the philosophy of the Scottish
school. It is what I meant by the philosophy that has the air of
fighting a slow retreat. Between the encroachments of the hegelians and
other philosophers of the 'Absolute,' on the one hand, and those of the
scientific evolutionists and agnostics, on the other, the men that
give us this kind of a philosophy, James Martineau, Professor Bowne,
Professor Ladd and others, must feel themselves rather tightly squeezed.
Fair-minded and candid as you like, this philosophy is not radical
in temper. It is eclectic, a thing of compromises, that seeks a modus
vivendi above all things. It accepts the facts of darwinism, the facts
of cerebral physiology, but it does nothing active or enthusiastic with
them. It lacks the victorious and aggressive note. It lacks prestige in
consequence; whereas absolutism has a certain prestige due to the more
radical style of it.
These two systems are what you have to choose between if you turn to the
tender-minded school. And if you are the lovers of facts I have
supposed you to be, you find the trail of the serpent of rationalism, of
intellectualism, over everything that lies on that side of the line. You
escape indeed the materialism that goes with the reigning empiricism;
but you pay for your escape by losing contact with the concrete parts
of life. The more absolutistic philosophers dwell on so high a level
of abstraction that they never even try to come down. The absolute mind
which they offer us, the mind that makes our universe by thinking it,
might, for aught they show us to the contrary, have made any one of a
million other universes just as well as this. You can deduce no single
actual particular from the notion of it. It is compatible with any state
of things whatever being true here below. And the theistic God is almost
as sterile a principle. You have to go to the world which he has created
to get any inkling of his actual character: he is the kind of god that
has once for all made that kind of a world. The God of the theistic
writers lives on as purely abstract heights as does the Absolute.
Absolutism has a certain sweep and dash about it, while the usual theism
is more insipid, but both are equally remote and vacuous. What you want
is a philosophy that will not only exercise your powers of intellectual
abstraction, but that will make some positive connexion with this actual
world of finite human lives.
You want a system that will combine both things, the scientific
loyalty to facts and willingness to take account of them, the spirit of
adaptation and accommodation, in short, but also the old confidence in
human values and the resultant spontaneity, whether of the religious or
of the romantic type. And this is then your dilemma: you find the two
parts of your quaesitum hopelessly separated. You find empiricism with
inhumanism and irreligion; or else you find a rationalistic philosophy
that indeed may call itself religious, but that keeps out of all
definite touch with concrete facts and joys and sorrows.
I am not sure how many of you live close enough to philosophy to realize
fully what I mean by this last reproach, so I will dwell a little longer
on that unreality in all rationalistic systems by which your serious
believer in facts is so apt to feel repelled.
I wish that I had saved the first couple of pages of a thesis which
a student handed me a year or two ago. They illustrated my point so
clearly that I am sorry I cannot read them to you now. This young man,
who was a graduate of some Western college, began by saying that he had
always taken for granted that when you entered a philosophic class-room
you had to open relations with a universe entirely distinct from the one
you left behind you in the street. The two were supposed, he said, to
have so little to do with each other, that you could not possibly occupy
your mind with them at the same time. The world of concrete personal
experiences to which the street belongs is multitudinous beyond
imagination, tangled, muddy, painful and perplexed. The world to which
your philosophy-professor introduces you is simple, clean and noble.
The contradictions of real life are absent from it. Its architecture is
classic. Principles of reason trace its outlines, logical necessities
cement its parts. Purity and dignity are what it most expresses. It is a
kind of marble temple shining on a hill.
In point of fact it is far less an account of this actual world than
a clear addition built upon it, a classic sanctuary in which the
rationalist fancy may take refuge from the intolerably confused and
gothic character which mere facts present. It is no EXPLANATION of our
concrete universe, it is another thing altogether, a substitute for it,
a remedy, a way of escape.
Its temperament, if I may use the word temperament here, is utterly
alien to the temperament of existence in the concrete. REFINEMENT is
what characterizes our intellectualist philosophies. They exquisitely
satisfy that craving for a refined object of contemplation which is so
powerful an appetite of the mind. But I ask you in all seriousness to
look abroad on this colossal universe of concrete facts, on their awful
bewilderments, their surprises and cruelties, on the wildness which
they show, and then to tell me whether 'refined' is the one inevitable
descriptive adjective that springs to your lips.
Refinement has its place in things, true enough. But a philosophy that
breathes out nothing but refinement will never satisfy the empiricist
temper of mind. It will seem rather a monument of artificiality. So we
find men of science preferring to turn their backs on metaphysics as on
something altogether cloistered and spectral, and practical men shaking
philosophy's dust off their feet and following the call of the wild.
Truly there is something a little ghastly in the satisfaction with which
a pure but unreal system will fill a rationalist mind. Leibnitz was
a rationalist mind, with infinitely more interest in facts than
most rationalist minds can show. Yet if you wish for superficiality
incarnate, you have only to read that charmingly written 'Theodicee' of
his, in which he sought to justify the ways of God to man, and to prove
that the world we live in is the best of possible worlds. Let me quote a
specimen of what I mean.
Among other obstacles to his optimistic philosophy, it falls to Leibnitz
to consider the number of the eternally damned. That it is infinitely
greater, in our human case, than that of those saved he assumes as a
premise from the theologians, and then proceeds to argue in this way.
Even then, he says:
"The evil will appear as almost nothing in comparison with the good, if
we once consider the real magnitude of the City of God. Coelius Secundus
Curio has written a little book, 'De Amplitudine Regni Coelestis,' which
was reprinted not long ago. But he failed to compass the extent of the
kingdom of the heavens. The ancients had small ideas of the works of
God. ... It seemed to them that only our earth had inhabitants, and even
the notion of our antipodes gave them pause. The rest of the world for
them consisted of some shining globes and a few crystalline spheres.
But to-day, whatever be the limits that we may grant or refuse to the
Universe we must recognize in it a countless number of globes, as big
as ours or bigger, which have just as much right as it has to support
rational inhabitants, tho it does not follow that these need all be men.
Our earth is only one among the six principal satellites of our sun. As
all the fixed stars are suns, one sees how small a place among visible
things our earth takes up, since it is only a satellite of one among
them. Now all these suns MAY be inhabited by none but happy creatures;
and nothing obliges us to believe that the number of damned persons is
very great; for a VERY FEW INSTANCES AND SAMPLES SUFFICE FOR THE UTILITY
WHICH GOOD DRAWS FROM EVIL. Moreover, since there is no reason to
suppose that there are stars everywhere, may there not be a great space
beyond the region of the stars? And this immense space, surrounding all
this region, ... may be replete with happiness and glory. ... What now
becomes of the consideration of our Earth and of its denizens? Does it
not dwindle to something incomparably less than a physical point, since
our Earth is but a point compared with the distance of the fixed stars.
Thus the part of the Universe which we know, being almost lost in
nothingness compared with that which is unknown to us, but which we
are yet obliged to admit; and all the evils that we know lying in this
almost-nothing; it follows that the evils may be almost-nothing in
comparison with the goods that the Universe contains."
Leibnitz continues elsewhere: "There is a kind of justice which aims
neither at the amendment of the criminal, nor at furnishing an example
to others, nor at the reparation of the injury. This justice is founded
in pure fitness, which finds a certain satisfaction in the expiation
of a wicked deed. The Socinians and Hobbes objected to this punitive
justice, which is properly vindictive justice and which God has reserved
for himself at many junctures. ... It is always founded in the fitness
of things, and satisfies not only the offended party, but all wise
lookers-on, even as beautiful music or a fine piece of architecture
satisfies a well-constituted mind. It is thus that the torments of the
damned continue, even tho they serve no longer to turn anyone away from
sin, and that the rewards of the blest continue, even tho they confirm
no one in good ways. The damned draw to themselves ever new penalties
by their continuing sins, and the blest attract ever fresh joys by their
unceasing progress in good. Both facts are founded on the principle of
fitness, ... for God has made all things harmonious in perfection as I
have already said."
Leibnitz's feeble grasp of reality is too obvious to need comment from
me. It is evident that no realistic image of the experience of a damned
soul had ever approached the portals of his mind. Nor had it occurred to
him that the smaller is the number of 'samples' of the genus 'lost-soul'
whom God throws as a sop to the eternal fitness, the more unequitably
grounded is the glory of the blest. What he gives us is a cold literary
exercise, whose cheerful substance even hell-fire does not warm.
And do not tell me that to show the shallowness of rationalist
philosophizing I have had to go back to a shallow wigpated age. The
optimism of present-day rationalism sounds just as shallow to the
fact-loving mind. The actual universe is a thing wide open, but
rationalism makes systems, and systems must be closed. For men in
practical life perfection is something far off and still in process of
achievement. This for rationalism is but the illusion of the finite
and relative: the absolute ground of things is a perfection eternally
complete.
I find a fine example of revolt against the airy and shallow optimism
of current religious philosophy in a publication of that valiant
anarchistic writer Morrison I. Swift. Mr. Swift's anarchism goes a
little farther than mine does, but I confess that I sympathize a
good deal, and some of you, I know, will sympathize heartily with his
dissatisfaction with the idealistic optimisms now in vogue. He begins
his pamphlet on 'Human Submission' with a series of city reporter's
items from newspapers (suicides, deaths from starvation and the like) as
specimens of our civilized regime. For instance:
"'After trudging through the snow from one end of the city to the other
in the vain hope of securing employment, and with his wife and six
children without food and ordered to leave their home in an upper east
side tenement house because of non-payment of rent, John Corcoran, a
clerk, to-day ended his life by drinking carbolic acid. Corcoran lost
his position three weeks ago through illness, and during the period of
idleness his scanty savings disappeared. Yesterday he obtained work with
a gang of city snow shovelers, but he was too weak from illness and was
forced to quit after an hour's trial with the shovel. Then the
weary task of looking for employment was again resumed. Thoroughly
discouraged, Corcoran returned to his home late last night to find his
wife and children without food and the notice of dispossession on the
door.' On the following morning he drank the poison.
"The records of many more such cases lie before me [Mr. Swift goes on];
an encyclopedia might easily be filled with their kind. These few I cite
as an interpretation of the universe. 'We are aware of the presence of
God in His world,' says a writer in a recent English Review. [The very
presence of ill in the temporal order is the condition of the perfection
of the eternal order, writes Professor Royce ('The World and the
Individual,' II, 385).] 'The Absolute is the richer for every discord,
and for all diversity which it embraces,' says F. H. Bradley (Appearance
and Reality, 204). He means that these slain men make the universe
richer, and that is Philosophy. But while Professors Royce and Bradley
and a whole host of guileless thoroughfed thinkers are unveiling
Reality and the Absolute and explaining away evil and pain, this is the
condition of the only beings known to us anywhere in the universe with
a developed consciousness of what the universe is. What these people
experience IS Reality. It gives us an absolute phase of the universe. It
is the personal experience of those most qualified in all our circle
of knowledge to HAVE experience, to tell us WHAT is. Now, what does
THINKING ABOUT the experience of these persons come to compared with
directly, personally feeling it, as they feel it? The philosophers are
dealing in shades, while those who live and feel know truth. And the
mind of mankind-not yet the mind of philosophers and of the proprietary
class-but of the great mass of the silently thinking and feeling men,
is coming to this view. They are judging the universe as they have
heretofore permitted the hierophants of religion and learning to judge
THEM. ...
"This Cleveland workingman, killing his children and himself [another
of the cited cases], is one of the elemental, stupendous facts of this
modern world and of this universe. It cannot be glozed over or minimized
away by all the treatises on God, and Love, and Being, helplessly
existing in their haughty monumental vacuity. This is one of the simple
irreducible elements of this world's life after millions of years of
divine opportunity and twenty centuries of Christ. It is in the moral
world like atoms or sub-atoms in the physical, primary, indestructible.
And what it blazons to man is the ... imposture of all philosophy
which does not see in such events the consummate factor of conscious
experience. These facts invincibly prove religion a nullity. Man will
not give religion two thousand centuries or twenty centuries more to try
itself and waste human time; its time is up, its probation is ended.
Its own record ends it. Mankind has not sons and eternities to spare for
trying out discredited systems...." [Footnote: Morrison I. Swift, Human
Submission, Part Second, Philadelphia, Liberty Press, 1905, pp. 4-10.]
Such is the reaction of an empiricist mind upon the rationalist bill of
fare. It is an absolute 'No, I thank you.' "Religion," says Mr. Swift,
"is like a sleep-walker to whom actual things are blank." And such,
tho possibly less tensely charged with feeling, is the verdict of
every seriously inquiring amateur in philosophy to-day who turns to the
philosophy-professors for the wherewithal to satisfy the fulness of his
nature's needs. Empiricist writers give him a materialism, rationalists
give him something religious, but to that religion "actual things are
blank." He becomes thus the judge of us philosophers. Tender or tough,
he finds us wanting. None of us may treat his verdicts disdainfully, for
after all, his is the typically perfect mind, the mind the sum of whose
demands is greatest, the mind whose criticisms and dissatisfactions are
fatal in the long run.
It is at this point that my own solution begins to appear. I offer the
oddly-named thing pragmatism as a philosophy that can satisfy both kinds
of demand. It can remain religious like the rationalisms, but at the
same time, like the empiricisms, it can preserve the richest intimacy
with facts. I hope I may be able to leave many of you with as favorable
an opinion of it as I preserve myself. Yet, as I am near the end of my
hour, I will not introduce pragmatism bodily now. I will begin with it
on the stroke of the clock next time. I prefer at the present moment to
return a little on what I have said.
If any of you here are professional philosophers, and some of you I know
to be such, you will doubtless have felt my discourse so far to have
been crude in an unpardonable, nay, in an almost incredible degree.
Tender-minded and tough-minded, what a barbaric disjunction! And, in
general, when philosophy is all compacted of delicate intellectualities
and subtleties and scrupulosities, and when every possible sort of
combination and transition obtains within its bounds, what a brutal
caricature and reduction of highest things to the lowest possible
expression is it to represent its field of conflict as a sort of
rough-and-tumble fight between two hostile temperaments! What a
childishly external view! And again, how stupid it is to treat the
abstractness of rationalist systems as a crime, and to damn them because
they offer themselves as sanctuaries and places of escape, rather than
as prolongations of the world of facts. Are not all our theories just
remedies and places of escape? And, if philosophy is to be religious,
how can she be anything else than a place of escape from the crassness
of reality's surface? What better thing can she do than raise us out of
our animal senses and show us another and a nobler home for our minds in
that great framework of ideal principles subtending all reality, which
the intellect divines? How can principles and general views ever be
anything but abstract outlines? Was Cologne cathedral built without an
architect's plan on paper? Is refinement in itself an abomination? Is
concrete rudeness the only thing that's true?
Believe me, I feel the full force of the indictment. The picture I
have given is indeed monstrously over-simplified and rude. But like all
abstractions, it will prove to have its use. If philosophers can treat
the life of the universe abstractly, they must not complain of an
abstract treatment of the life of philosophy itself. In point of fact
the picture I have given is, however coarse and sketchy, literally true.
Temperaments with their cravings and refusals do determine men in their
philosophies, and always will. The details of systems may be reasoned
out piecemeal, and when the student is working at a system, he may
often forget the forest for the single tree. But when the labor is
accomplished, the mind always performs its big summarizing act, and the
system forthwith stands over against one like a living thing, with that
strange simple note of individuality which haunts our memory, like the
wraith of the man, when a friend or enemy of ours is dead.
Not only Walt Whitman could write "who touches this book touches a man."
The books of all the great philosophers are like so many men. Our
sense of an essential personal flavor in each one of them, typical but
indescribable, is the finest fruit of our own accomplished philosophic
education. What the system pretends to be is a picture of the great
universe of God. What it is--and oh so flagrantly!--is the revelation of
how intensely odd the personal flavor of some fellow creature is. Once
reduced to these terms (and all our philosophies get reduced to them in
minds made critical by learning) our commerce with the systems reverts
to the informal, to the instinctive human reaction of satisfaction or
dislike. We grow as peremptory in our rejection or admission, as when a
person presents himself as a candidate for our favor; our verdicts are
couched in as simple adjectives of praise or dispraise. We measure the
total character of the universe as we feel it, against the flavor of the
philosophy proffered us, and one word is enough.
"Statt der lebendigen Natur," we say, "da Gott die Menschen schuf
hinein"--that nebulous concoction, that wooden, that straight-laced
thing, that crabbed artificiality, that musty schoolroom product, that
sick man's dream! Away with it. Away with all of them! Impossible!
Impossible!
Our work over the details of his system is indeed what gives us our
resultant impression of the philosopher, but it is on the resultant
impression itself that we react. Expertness in philosophy is measured
by the definiteness of our summarizing reactions, by the immediate
perceptive epithet with which the expert hits such complex objects
off. But great expertness is not necessary for the epithet to come. Few
people have definitely articulated philosophies of their own. But almost
everyone has his own peculiar sense of a certain total character in
the universe, and of the inadequacy fully to match it of the peculiar
systems that he knows. They don't just cover HIS world. One will be too
dapper, another too pedantic, a third too much of a job-lot of opinions,
a fourth too morbid, and a fifth too artificial, or what not. At any
rate he and we know offhand that such philosophies are out of plumb and
out of key and out of 'whack,' and have no business to speak up in the
universe's name. Plato, Locke, Spinoza, Mill, Caird, Hegel--I prudently
avoid names nearer home!--I am sure that to many of you, my hearers,
these names are little more than reminders of as many curious personal
ways of falling short. It would be an obvious absurdity if such ways of
taking the universe were actually true. We philosophers have to reckon
with such feelings on your part. In the last resort, I repeat, it will
be by them that all our philosophies shall ultimately be judged. The
finally victorious way of looking at things will be the most completely
IMPRESSIVE way to the normal run of minds.
One word more--namely about philosophies necessarily being abstract
outlines. There are outlines and outlines, outlines of buildings
that are FAT, conceived in the cube by their planner, and outlines of
buildings invented flat on paper, with the aid of ruler and compass.
These remain skinny and emaciated even when set up in stone and mortar,
and the outline already suggests that result. An outline in itself is
meagre, truly, but it does not necessarily suggest a meagre thing. It is
the essential meagreness of WHAT IS SUGGESTED by the usual rationalistic
philosophies that moves empiricists to their gesture of rejection. The
case of Herbert Spencer's system is much to the point here. Rationalists
feel his fearful array of insufficiencies. His dry schoolmaster
temperament, the hurdy-gurdy monotony of him, his preference for
cheap makeshifts in argument, his lack of education even in mechanical
principles, and in general the vagueness of all his fundamental ideas,
his whole system wooden, as if knocked together out of cracked hemlock
boards--and yet the half of England wants to bury him in Westminster
Abbey.
Why? Why does Spencer call out so much reverence in spite of his
weakness in rationalistic eyes? Why should so many educated men who
feel that weakness, you and I perhaps, wish to see him in the Abbey
notwithstanding?
Simply because we feel his heart to be IN THE RIGHT PLACE
philosophically. His principles may be all skin and bone, but at any
rate his books try to mould themselves upon the particular shape of
this, particular world's carcase. The noise of facts resounds through
all his chapters, the citations of fact never cease, he emphasizes
facts, turns his face towards their quarter; and that is enough. It
means the right kind of thing for the empiricist mind.
The pragmatistic philosophy of which I hope to begin talking in my
next lecture preserves as cordial a relation with facts, and, unlike
Spencer's philosophy, it neither begins nor ends by turning positive
religious constructions out of doors--it treats them cordially as well.
I hope I may lead you to find it just the mediating way of thinking that
you require.
Lecture II
What Pragmatism Means