returned from a solitary ramble to find everyone engaged in a ferocious
metaphysical dispute. The corpus of the dispute was a squirrel--a live
squirrel supposed to be clinging to one side of a tree-trunk; while over
against the tree's opposite side a human being was imagined to stand.
This human witness tries to get sight of the squirrel by moving rapidly
round the tree, but no matter how fast he goes, the squirrel moves
as fast in the opposite direction, and always keeps the tree between
himself and the man, so that never a glimpse of him is caught. The
resultant metaphysical problem now is this: DOES THE MAN GO ROUND THE
SQUIRREL OR NOT? He goes round the tree, sure enough, and the squirrel
is on the tree; but does he go round the squirrel? In the unlimited
leisure of the wilderness, discussion had been worn threadbare. Everyone
had taken sides, and was obstinate; and the numbers on both sides were
even. Each side, when I appeared, therefore appealed to me to make it
a majority. Mindful of the scholastic adage that whenever you meet a
contradiction you must make a distinction, I immediately sought and
found one, as follows: "Which party is right," I said, "depends on what
you PRACTICALLY MEAN by 'going round' the squirrel. If you mean passing
from the north of him to the east, then to the south, then to the west,
and then to the north of him again, obviously the man does go round him,
for he occupies these successive positions. But if on the contrary you
mean being first in front of him, then on the right of him, then behind
him, then on his left, and finally in front again, it is quite as
obvious that the man fails to go round him, for by the compensating
movements the squirrel makes, he keeps his belly turned towards the man
all the time, and his back turned away. Make the distinction, and there
is no occasion for any farther dispute. You are both right and both
wrong according as you conceive the verb 'to go round' in one practical
fashion or the other."
Altho one or two of the hotter disputants called my speech a shuffling
evasion, saying they wanted no quibbling or scholastic hair-splitting,
but meant just plain honest English 'round,' the majority seemed to
think that the distinction had assuaged the dispute.
I tell this trivial anecdote because it is a peculiarly simple example
of what I wish now to speak of as THE PRAGMATIC METHOD. The pragmatic
method is primarily a method of settling metaphysical disputes that
otherwise might be interminable. Is the world one or many?--fated or
free?--material or spiritual?--here are notions either of which may
or may not hold good of the world; and disputes over such notions are
unending. The pragmatic method in such cases is to try to interpret each
notion by tracing its respective practical consequences. What difference
would it practically make to anyone if this notion rather than that
notion were true? If no practical difference whatever can be traced,
then the alternatives mean practically the same thing, and all dispute
is idle. Whenever a dispute is serious, we ought to be able to show some
practical difference that must follow from one side or the other's being
right.
A glance at the history of the idea will show you still better what
pragmatism means. The term is derived from the same Greek word [pi rho
alpha gamma mu alpha], meaning action, from which our words 'practice'
and 'practical' come. It was first introduced into philosophy by Mr.
Charles Peirce in 1878. In an article entitled 'How to Make Our Ideas
Clear,' in the 'Popular Science Monthly' for January of that year
[Footnote: Translated in the Revue Philosophique for January, 1879 (vol.
vii).] Mr. Peirce, after pointing out that our beliefs are really rules
for action, said that to develope a thought's meaning, we need only
determine what conduct it is fitted to produce: that conduct is for
us its sole significance. And the tangible fact at the root of all our
thought-distinctions, however subtle, is that there is no one of them so
fine as to consist in anything but a possible difference of practice.
To attain perfect clearness in our thoughts of an object, then, we need
only consider what conceivable effects of a practical kind the object
may involve--what sensations we are to expect from it, and what
reactions we must prepare. Our conception of these effects, whether
immediate or remote, is then for us the whole of our conception of the
object, so far as that conception has positive significance at all.
This is the principle of Peirce, the principle of pragmatism. It lay
entirely unnoticed by anyone for twenty years, until I, in an address
before Professor Howison's philosophical union at the university of
California, brought it forward again and made a special application
of it to religion. By that date (1898) the times seemed ripe for its
reception. The word 'pragmatism' spread, and at present it fairly
spots the pages of the philosophic journals. On all hands we find the
'pragmatic movement' spoken of, sometimes with respect, sometimes with
contumely, seldom with clear understanding. It is evident that the term
applies itself conveniently to a number of tendencies that hitherto have
lacked a collective name, and that it has 'come to stay.'
To take in the importance of Peirce's principle, one must get accustomed
to applying it to concrete cases. I found a few years ago that Ostwald,
the illustrious Leipzig chemist, had been making perfectly distinct
use of the principle of pragmatism in his lectures on the philosophy of
science, tho he had not called it by that name.
"All realities influence our practice," he wrote me, "and that influence
is their meaning for us. I am accustomed to put questions to my classes
in this way: In what respects would the world be different if this
alternative or that were true? If I can find nothing that would become
different, then the alternative has no sense."
That is, the rival views mean practically the same thing, and meaning,
other than practical, there is for us none. Ostwald in a published
lecture gives this example of what he means. Chemists have long wrangled
over the inner constitution of certain bodies called 'tautomerous.'
Their properties seemed equally consistent with the notion that an
instable hydrogen atom oscillates inside of them, or that they are
instable mixtures of two bodies. Controversy raged; but never was
decided. "It would never have begun," says Ostwald, "if the combatants
had asked themselves what particular experimental fact could have been
made different by one or the other view being correct. For it would then
have appeared that no difference of fact could possibly ensue; and the
quarrel was as unreal as if, theorizing in primitive times about the
raising of dough by yeast, one party should have invoked a 'brownie,'
while another insisted on an 'elf' as the true cause of the phenomenon."
[Footnote: 'Theorie und Praxis,' Zeitsch. des Oesterreichischen
Ingenieur u. Architecten-Vereines, 1905, Nr. 4 u. 6. I find a still
more radical pragmatism than Ostwald's in an address by Professor W.
S. Franklin: "I think that the sickliest notion of physics, even if a
student gets it, is that it is 'the science of masses, molecules and the
ether.' And I think that the healthiest notion, even if a student does
not wholly get it, is that physics is the science of the ways of taking
hold of bodies and pushing them!" (Science, January 2, 1903.)]
It is astonishing to see how many philosophical disputes collapse
into insignificance the moment you subject them to this simple test of
tracing a concrete consequence. There can BE no difference any-where
that doesn't MAKE a difference elsewhere--no difference in abstract
truth that doesn't express itself in a difference in concrete fact and
in conduct consequent upon that fact, imposed on somebody, somehow,
somewhere and somewhen. The whole function of philosophy ought to be
to find out what definite difference it will make to you and me,
at definite instants of our life, if this world-formula or that
world-formula be the true one.
There is absolutely nothing new in the pragmatic method. Socrates was
an adept at it. Aristotle used it methodically. Locke, Berkeley and Hume
made momentous contributions to truth by its means. Shadworth Hodgson
keeps insisting that realities are only what they are 'known-as.'
But these forerunners of pragmatism used it in fragments: they were
preluders only. Not until in our time has it generalized itself, become
conscious of a universal mission, pretended to a conquering destiny. I
believe in that destiny, and I hope I may end by inspiring you with my
belief.
Pragmatism represents a perfectly familiar attitude in philosophy, the
empiricist attitude, but it represents it, as it seems to me, both in
a more radical and in a less objectionable form than it has ever yet
assumed. A pragmatist turns his back resolutely and once for all upon
a lot of inveterate habits dear to professional philosophers. He turns
away from abstraction and insufficiency, from verbal solutions, from bad
a priori reasons, from fixed principles, closed systems, and pretended
absolutes and origins. He turns towards concreteness and adequacy,
towards facts, towards action, and towards power. That means the
empiricist temper regnant, and the rationalist temper sincerely given
up. It means the open air and possibilities of nature, as against dogma,
artificiality and the pretence of finality in truth.
At the same time it does not stand for any special results. It is
a method only. But the general triumph of that method would mean an
enormous change in what I called in my last lecture the 'temperament'
of philosophy. Teachers of the ultra-rationalistic type would be frozen
out, much as the courtier type is frozen out in republics, as the
ultramontane type of priest is frozen out in protestant lands. Science
and metaphysics would come much nearer together, would in fact work
absolutely hand in hand.
Metaphysics has usually followed a very primitive kind of quest. You
know how men have always hankered after unlawful magic, and you know
what a great part, in magic, WORDS have always played. If you have his
name, or the formula of incantation that binds him, you can control the
spirit, genie, afrite, or whatever the power may be. Solomon knew the
names of all the spirits, and having their names, he held them subject
to his will. So the universe has always appeared to the natural mind as
a kind of enigma, of which the key must be sought in the shape of
some illuminating or power-bringing word or name. That word names the
universe's PRINCIPLE, and to possess it is, after a fashion, to
possess the universe itself. 'God,' 'Matter,' 'Reason,' 'the Absolute,'
'Energy,' are so many solving names. You can rest when you have them.
You are at the end of your metaphysical quest.
But if you follow the pragmatic method, you cannot look on any such word
as closing your quest. You must bring out of each word its practical
cash-value, set it at work within the stream of your experience. It
appears less as a solution, then, than as a program for more work,
and more particularly as an indication of the ways in which existing
realities may be CHANGED.
THEORIES THUS BECOME INSTRUMENTS, NOT ANSWERS TO ENIGMAS, IN WHICH
WE CAN REST. We don't lie back upon them, we move forward, and, on
occasion, make nature over again by their aid. Pragmatism unstiffens all
our theories, limbers them up and sets each one at work. Being nothing
essentially new, it harmonizes with many ancient philosophic tendencies.
It agrees with nominalism for instance, in always appealing to
particulars; with utilitarianism in emphasizing practical aspects; with
positivism in its disdain for verbal solutions, useless questions, and
metaphysical abstractions.
All these, you see, are ANTI-INTELLECTUALIST tendencies. Against
rationalism as a pretension and a method, pragmatism is fully armed
and militant. But, at the outset, at least, it stands for no particular
results. It has no dogmas, and no doctrines save its method. As the
young Italian pragmatist Papini has well said, it lies in the midst of
our theories, like a corridor in a hotel. Innumerable chambers open out
of it. In one you may find a man writing an atheistic volume; in the
next someone on his knees praying for faith and strength; in a third
a chemist investigating a body's properties. In a fourth a system
of idealistic metaphysics is being excogitated; in a fifth the
impossibility of metaphysics is being shown. But they all own the
corridor, and all must pass through it if they want a practicable way of
getting into or out of their respective rooms.
No particular results then, so far, but only an attitude of orientation,
is what the pragmatic method means. THE ATTITUDE OF LOOKING AWAY FROM
FIRST THINGS, PRINCIPLES, 'CATEGORIES,' SUPPOSED NECESSITIES; AND OF
LOOKING TOWARDS LAST THINGS, FRUITS, CONSEQUENCES, FACTS.
So much for the pragmatic method! You may say that I have been praising
it rather than explaining it to you, but I shall presently explain it
abundantly enough by showing how it works on some familiar problems.
Meanwhile the word pragmatism has come to be used in a still wider
sense, as meaning also a certain theory of TRUTH. I mean to give a whole
lecture to the statement of that theory, after first paving the way,
so I can be very brief now. But brevity is hard to follow, so I ask
for your redoubled attention for a quarter of an hour. If much remains
obscure, I hope to make it clearer in the later lectures.
One of the most successfully cultivated branches of philosophy in our
time is what is called inductive logic, the study of the conditions
under which our sciences have evolved. Writers on this subject have
begun to show a singular unanimity as to what the laws of nature and
elements of fact mean, when formulated by mathematicians, physicists and
chemists. When the first mathematical, logical and natural uniformities,
the first LAWS, were discovered, men were so carried away by the
clearness, beauty and simplification that resulted, that they believed
themselves to have deciphered authentically the eternal thoughts of the
Almighty. His mind also thundered and reverberated in syllogisms.
He also thought in conic sections, squares and roots and ratios, and
geometrized like Euclid. He made Kepler's laws for the planets to
follow; he made velocity increase proportionally to the time in falling
bodies; he made the law of the sines for light to obey when refracted;
he established the classes, orders, families and genera of plants and
animals, and fixed the distances between them. He thought the archetypes
of all things, and devised their variations; and when we rediscover any
one of these his wondrous institutions, we seize his mind in its very
literal intention.
But as the sciences have developed farther, the notion has gained ground
that most, perhaps all, of our laws are only approximations. The laws
themselves, moreover, have grown so numerous that there is no counting
them; and so many rival formulations are proposed in all the branches of
science that investigators have become accustomed to the notion that no
theory is absolutely a transcript of reality, but that any one of them
may from some point of view be useful. Their great use is to summarize
old facts and to lead to new ones. They are only a man-made language,
a conceptual shorthand, as someone calls them, in which we write our
reports of nature; and languages, as is well known, tolerate much choice
of expression and many dialects.
Thus human arbitrariness has driven divine necessity from scientific
logic. If I mention the names of Sigwart, Mach, Ostwald, Pearson,
Milhaud, Poincare, Duhem, Ruyssen, those of you who are students will
easily identify the tendency I speak of, and will think of additional
names.
Riding now on the front of this wave of scientific logic Messrs.
Schiller and Dewey appear with their pragmatistic account of what truth
everywhere signifies. Everywhere, these teachers say, 'truth' in our
ideas and beliefs means the same thing that it means in science. It
means, they say, nothing but this, THAT IDEAS (WHICH THEMSELVES ARE BUT
PARTS OF OUR EXPERIENCE) BECOME TRUE JUST IN SO FAR AS THEY HELP US TO
GET INTO SATISFACTORY RELATION WITH OTHER PARTS OF OUR EXPERIENCE, to
summarize them and get about among them by conceptual short-cuts instead
of following the interminable succession of particular phenomena. Any
idea upon which we can ride, so to speak; any idea that will carry us
prosperously from any one part of our experience to any other part,
linking things satisfactorily, working securely, simplifying,
saving labor; is true for just so much, true in so far forth, true
INSTRUMENTALLY. This is the 'instrumental' view of truth taught so
successfully at Chicago, the view that truth in our ideas means their
power to 'work,' promulgated so brilliantly at Oxford.
Messrs. Dewey, Schiller and their allies, in reaching this general
conception of all truth, have only followed the example of geologists,
biologists and philologists. In the establishment of these other
sciences, the successful stroke was always to take some simple process
actually observable in operation--as denudation by weather, say, or
variation from parental type, or change of dialect by incorporation of
new words and pronunciations--and then to generalize it, making it apply
to all times, and produce great results by summating its effects through
the ages.
The observable process which Schiller and Dewey particularly singled out
for generalization is the familiar one by which any individual settles
into NEW OPINIONS. The process here is always the same. The individual
has a stock of old opinions already, but he meets a new experience that
puts them to a strain. Somebody contradicts them; or in a reflective
moment he discovers that they contradict each other; or he hears of
facts with which they are incompatible; or desires arise in him which
they cease to satisfy. The result is an inward trouble to which his
mind till then had been a stranger, and from which he seeks to escape
by modifying his previous mass of opinions. He saves as much of it as he
can, for in this matter of belief we are all extreme conservatives. So
he tries to change first this opinion, and then that (for they resist
change very variously), until at last some new idea comes up which he
can graft upon the ancient stock with a minimum of disturbance of the
latter, some idea that mediates between the stock and the new experience
and runs them into one another most felicitously and expediently.
This new idea is then adopted as the true one. It preserves the older
stock of truths with a minimum of modification, stretching them just
enough to make them admit the novelty, but conceiving that in ways as
familiar as the case leaves possible. An outree explanation, violating
all our preconceptions, would never pass for a true account of a
novelty. We should scratch round industriously till we found something
less excentric. The most violent revolutions in an individual's beliefs
leave most of his old order standing. Time and space, cause and effect,
nature and history, and one's own biography remain untouched. New truth
is always a go-between, a smoother-over of transitions. It marries old
opinion to new fact so as ever to show a minimum of jolt, a maximum of
continuity. We hold a theory true just in proportion to its success in
solving this 'problem of maxima and minima.' But success in solving
this problem is eminently a matter of approximation. We say this theory
solves it on the whole more satisfactorily than that theory; but that
means more satisfactorily to ourselves, and individuals will emphasize
their points of satisfaction differently. To a certain degree,
therefore, everything here is plastic.
The point I now urge you to observe particularly is the part played by
the older truths. Failure to take account of it is the source of much
of the unjust criticism leveled against pragmatism. Their influence is
absolutely controlling. Loyalty to them is the first principle--in
most cases it is the only principle; for by far the most usual way
of handling phenomena so novel that they would make for a serious
rearrangement of our preconceptions is to ignore them altogether, or to
abuse those who bear witness for them.
You doubtless wish examples of this process of truth's growth, and the
only trouble is their superabundance. The simplest case of new truth is
of course the mere numerical addition of new kinds of facts, or of new
single facts of old kinds, to our experience--an addition that involves
no alteration in the old beliefs. Day follows day, and its contents are
simply added. The new contents themselves are not true, they simply COME
and ARE. Truth is what we say about them, and when we say that they have
come, truth is satisfied by the plain additive formula.
But often the day's contents oblige a rearrangement. If I should now
utter piercing shrieks and act like a maniac on this platform, it
would make many of you revise your ideas as to the probable worth of my
philosophy. 'Radium' came the other day as part of the day's content,
and seemed for a moment to contradict our ideas of the whole order of
nature, that order having come to be identified with what is called
the conservation of energy. The mere sight of radium paying heat away
indefinitely out of its own pocket seemed to violate that conservation.
What to think? If the radiations from it were nothing but an escape of
unsuspected 'potential' energy, pre-existent inside of the atoms, the
principle of conservation would be saved. The discovery of 'helium' as
the radiation's outcome, opened a way to this belief. So Ramsay's view
is generally held to be true, because, altho it extends our old ideas of
energy, it causes a minimum of alteration in their nature.
I need not multiply instances. A new opinion counts as 'true' just in
proportion as it gratifies the individual's desire to assimilate the
novel in his experience to his beliefs in stock. It must both lean on
old truth and grasp new fact; and its success (as I said a moment ago)
in doing this, is a matter for the individual's appreciation. When
old truth grows, then, by new truth's addition, it is for subjective
reasons. We are in the process and obey the reasons. That new idea is
truest which performs most felicitously its function of satisfying our
double urgency. It makes itself true, gets itself classed as true, by
the way it works; grafting itself then upon the ancient body of truth,
which thus grows much as a tree grows by the activity of a new layer of
cambium.
Now Dewey and Schiller proceed to generalize this observation and
to apply it to the most ancient parts of truth. They also once were
plastic. They also were called true for human reasons. They also
mediated between still earlier truths and what in those days were novel
observations. Purely objective truth, truth in whose establishment the
function of giving human satisfaction in marrying previous parts of
experience with newer parts played no role whatever, is nowhere to be
found. The reasons why we call things true is the reason why they ARE
true, for 'to be true' MEANS only to perform this marriage-function.
The trail of the human serpent is thus over everything. Truth
independent; truth that we FIND merely; truth no longer malleable to
human need; truth incorrigible, in a word; such truth exists indeed
superabundantly--or is supposed to exist by rationalistically minded
thinkers; but then it means only the dead heart of the living tree, and
its being there means only that truth also has its paleontology and its
'prescription,' and may grow stiff with years of veteran service and
petrified in men's regard by sheer antiquity. But how plastic even the
oldest truths nevertheless really are has been vividly shown in our
day by the transformation of logical and mathematical ideas, a
transformation which seems even to be invading physics. The ancient
formulas are reinterpreted as special expressions of much wider
principles, principles that our ancestors never got a glimpse of in
their present shape and formulation.
Mr. Schiller still gives to all this view of truth the name of
'Humanism,' but, for this doctrine too, the name of pragmatism seems
fairly to be in the ascendant, so I will treat it under the name of
pragmatism in these lectures.
Such then would be the scope of pragmatism--first, a method; and second,
a genetic theory of what is meant by truth. And these two things must be
our future topics.