obscure and unsatisfactory to most of you by reason of us brevity. I
shall make amends for that hereafter. In a lecture on 'common sense' I
shall try to show what I mean by truths grown petrified by antiquity. In
another lecture I shall expatiate on the idea that our thoughts become
true in proportion as they successfully exert their go-between function.
In a third I shall show how hard it is to discriminate subjective from
objective factors in Truth's development. You may not follow me wholly
in these lectures; and if you do, you may not wholly agree with me. But
you will, I know, regard me at least as serious, and treat my effort
with respectful consideration.
You will probably be surprised to learn, then, that Messrs. Schiller's
and Dewey's theories have suffered a hailstorm of contempt and ridicule.
All rationalism has risen against them. In influential quarters Mr.
Schiller, in particular, has been treated like an impudent schoolboy who
deserves a spanking. I should not mention this, but for the fact that it
throws so much sidelight upon that rationalistic temper to which I have
opposed the temper of pragmatism. Pragmatism is uncomfortable away from
facts. Rationalism is comfortable only in the presence of abstractions.
This pragmatist talk about truths in the plural, about their utility
and satisfactoriness, about the success with which they 'work,' etc.,
suggests to the typical intellectualist mind a sort of coarse lame
second-rate makeshift article of truth. Such truths are not real truth.
Such tests are merely subjective. As against this, objective truth must
be something non-utilitarian, haughty, refined, remote, august, exalted.
It must be an absolute correspondence of our thoughts with an equally
absolute reality. It must be what we OUGHT to think, unconditionally.
The conditioned ways in which we DO think are so much irrelevance and
matter for psychology. Down with psychology, up with logic, in all this
question!
See the exquisite contrast of the types of mind! The pragmatist clings
to facts and concreteness, observes truth at its work in particular
cases, and generalizes. Truth, for him, becomes a class-name for all
sorts of definite working-values in experience. For the rationalist it
remains a pure abstraction, to the bare name of which we must defer.
When the pragmatist undertakes to show in detail just WHY we must defer,
the rationalist is unable to recognize the concretes from which his own
abstraction is taken. He accuses us of DENYING truth; whereas we have
only sought to trace exactly why people follow it and always ought
to follow it. Your typical ultra-abstractionist fairly shudders at
concreteness: other things equal, he positively prefers the pale and
spectral. If the two universes were offered, he would always choose the
skinny outline rather than the rich thicket of reality. It is so much
purer, clearer, nobler.
I hope that as these lectures go on, the concreteness and closeness to
facts of the pragmatism which they advocate may be what approves itself
to you as its most satisfactory peculiarity. It only follows here the
example of the sister-sciences, interpreting the unobserved by the
observed. It brings old and new harmoniously together. It converts the
absolutely empty notion of a static relation of 'correspondence' (what
that may mean we must ask later) between our minds and reality, into
that of a rich and active commerce (that anyone may follow in detail and
understand) between particular thoughts of ours, and the great universe
of other experiences in which they play their parts and have their uses.
But enough of this at present? The justification of what I say must be
postponed. I wish now to add a word in further explanation of the claim
I made at our last meeting, that pragmatism may be a happy harmonizer
of empiricist ways of thinking, with the more religious demands of human
beings.
Men who are strongly of the fact-loving temperament, you may remember me
to have said, are liable to be kept at a distance by the small sympathy
with facts which that philosophy from the present-day fashion of
idealism offers them. It is far too intellectualistic. Old fashioned
theism was bad enough, with its notion of God as an exalted monarch,
made up of a lot of unintelligible or preposterous 'attributes'; but, so
long as it held strongly by the argument from design, it kept some touch
with concrete realities. Since, however, darwinism has once for all
displaced design from the minds of the 'scientific,' theism has lost
that foothold; and some kind of an immanent or pantheistic deity working
IN things rather than above them is, if any, the kind recommended to our
contemporary imagination. Aspirants to a philosophic religion turn, as a
rule, more hopefully nowadays towards idealistic pantheism than towards
the older dualistic theism, in spite of the fact that the latter still
counts able defenders.
But, as I said in my first lecture, the brand of pantheism offered is
hard for them to assimilate if they are lovers of facts, or empirically
minded. It is the absolutistic brand, spurning the dust and reared upon
pure logic. It keeps no connexion whatever with concreteness. Affirming
the Absolute Mind, which is its substitute for God, to be the rational
presupposition of all particulars of fact, whatever they may be, it
remains supremely indifferent to what the particular facts in our world
actually are. Be they what they may, the Absolute will father them. Like
the sick lion in Esop's fable, all footprints lead into his den,
but nulla vestigia retrorsum. You cannot redescend into the world of
particulars by the Absolute's aid, or deduce any necessary consequences
of detail important for your life from your idea of his nature. He gives
you indeed the assurance that all is well with Him, and for his eternal
way of thinking; but thereupon he leaves you to be finitely saved by
your own temporal devices.
Far be it from me to deny the majesty of this conception, or its
capacity to yield religious comfort to a most respectable class of
minds. But from the human point of view, no one can pretend that it
doesn't suffer from the faults of remoteness and abstractness. It is
eminently a product of what I have ventured to call the rationalistic
temper. It disdains empiricism's needs. It substitutes a pallid outline
for the real world's richness. It is dapper; it is noble in the bad
sense, in the sense in which to be noble is to be inapt for humble
service. In this real world of sweat and dirt, it seems to me that
when a view of things is 'noble,' that ought to count as a presumption
against its truth, and as a philosophic disqualification. The prince of
darkness may be a gentleman, as we are told he is, but whatever the
God of earth and heaven is, he can surely be no gentleman. His menial
services are needed in the dust of our human trials, even more than his
dignity is needed in the empyrean.
Now pragmatism, devoted tho she be to facts, has no such materialistic
bias as ordinary empiricism labors under. Moreover, she has no objection
whatever to the realizing of abstractions, so long as you get about
among particulars with their aid and they actually carry you somewhere.
Interested in no conclusions but those which our minds and our
experiences work out together, she has no a priori prejudices against
theology. IF THEOLOGICAL IDEAS PROVE TO HAVE A VALUE FOR CONCRETE LIFE,
THEY WILL BE TRUE, FOR PRAGMATISM, IN THE SENSE OF BEING GOOD FOR SO
MUCH. FOR HOW MUCH MORE THEY ARE TRUE, WILL DEPEND ENTIRELY ON THEIR
RELATIONS TO THE OTHER TRUTHS THAT ALSO HAVE TO BE ACKNOWLEDGED.
What I said just now about the Absolute of transcendental idealism is a
case in point. First, I called it majestic and said it yielded religious
comfort to a class of minds, and then I accused it of remoteness and
sterility. But so far as it affords such comfort, it surely is not
sterile; it has that amount of value; it performs a concrete function.
As a good pragmatist, I myself ought to call the Absolute true 'in so
far forth,' then; and I unhesitatingly now do so.
But what does TRUE IN SO FAR FORTH mean in this case? To answer, we need
only apply the pragmatic method. What do believers in the Absolute mean
by saying that their belief affords them comfort? They mean that since
in the Absolute finite evil is 'overruled' already, we may, therefore,
whenever we wish, treat the temporal as if it were potentially the
eternal, be sure that we can trust its outcome, and, without sin,
dismiss our fear and drop the worry of our finite responsibility. In
short, they mean that we have a right ever and anon to take a moral
holiday, to let the world wag in its own way, feeling that its issues
are in better hands than ours and are none of our business.
The universe is a system of which the individual members may relax their
anxieties occasionally, in which the don't-care mood is also right for
men, and moral holidays in order--that, if I mistake not, is part, at
least, of what the Absolute is 'known-as,' that is the great difference
in our particular experiences which his being true makes for us, that
is part of his cash-value when he is pragmatically interpreted. Farther
than that the ordinary lay-reader in philosophy who thinks favorably of
absolute idealism does not venture to sharpen his conceptions. He can
use the Absolute for so much, and so much is very precious. He is pained
at hearing you speak incredulously of the Absolute, therefore, and
disregards your criticisms because they deal with aspects of the
conception that he fails to follow.
If the Absolute means this, and means no more than this, who can
possibly deny the truth of it? To deny it would be to insist that men
should never relax, and that holidays are never in order. I am well
aware how odd it must seem to some of you to hear me say that an idea is
'true' so long as to believe it is profitable to our lives. That it is
GOOD, for as much as it profits, you will gladly admit. If what we do
by its aid is good, you will allow the idea itself to be good in so far
forth, for we are the better for possessing it. But is it not a strange
misuse of the word 'truth,' you will say, to call ideas also 'true' for
this reason?
To answer this difficulty fully is impossible at this stage of
my account. You touch here upon the very central point of Messrs.
Schiller's, Dewey's and my own doctrine of truth, which I cannot discuss
with detail until my sixth lecture. Let me now say only this, that truth
is ONE SPECIES OF GOOD, and not, as is usually supposed, a category
distinct from good, and co-ordinate with it. THE TRUE IS THE NAME OF
WHATEVER PROVES ITSELF TO BE GOOD IN THE WAY OF BELIEF, AND GOOD, TOO,
FOR DEFINITE, ASSIGNABLE REASONS. Surely you must admit this, that if
there were NO good for life in true ideas, or if the knowledge of them
were positively disadvantageous and false ideas the only useful ones,
then the current notion that truth is divine and precious, and its
pursuit a duty, could never have grown up or become a dogma. In a world
like that, our duty would be to SHUN truth, rather. But in this world,
just as certain foods are not only agreeable to our taste, but good for
our teeth, our stomach and our tissues; so certain ideas are not only
agreeable to think about, or agreeable as supporting other ideas that we
are fond of, but they are also helpful in life's practical struggles. If
there be any life that it is really better we should lead, and if there
be any idea which, if believed in, would help us to lead that life,
then it would be really BETTER FOR US to believe in that idea, UNLESS,
INDEED, BELIEF IN IT INCIDENTALLY CLASHED WITH OTHER GREATER VITAL
BENEFITS.
'What would be better for us to believe'! This sounds very like a
definition of truth. It comes very near to saying 'what we OUGHT to
believe': and in THAT definition none of you would find any oddity.
Ought we ever not to believe what it is BETTER FOR US to believe? And
can we then keep the notion of what is better for us, and what is true
for us, permanently apart?
Pragmatism says no, and I fully agree with her. Probably you also agree,
so far as the abstract statement goes, but with a suspicion that if
we practically did believe everything that made for good in our own
personal lives, we should be found indulging all kinds of fancies about
this world's affairs, and all kinds of sentimental superstitions about a
world hereafter. Your suspicion here is undoubtedly well founded, and it
is evident that something happens when you pass from the abstract to the
concrete, that complicates the situation.
I said just now that what is better for us to believe is true UNLESS THE
BELIEF INCIDENTALLY CLASHES WITH SOME OTHER VITAL BENEFIT. Now in real
life what vital benefits is any particular belief of ours most liable
to clash with? What indeed except the vital benefits yielded by OTHER
BELIEFS when these prove incompatible with the first ones? In other
words, the greatest enemy of any one of our truths may be the rest
of our truths. Truths have once for all this desperate instinct of
self-preservation and of desire to extinguish whatever contradicts them.
My belief in the Absolute, based on the good it does me, must run the
gauntlet of all my other beliefs. Grant that it may be true in giving me
a moral holiday. Nevertheless, as I conceive it,--and let me speak now
confidentially, as it were, and merely in my own private person,--it
clashes with other truths of mine whose benefits I hate to give up on
its account. It happens to be associated with a kind of logic of which I
am the enemy, I find that it entangles me in metaphysical paradoxes
that are inacceptable, etc., etc.. But as I have enough trouble in
life already without adding the trouble of carrying these intellectual
inconsistencies, I personally just give up the Absolute. I just TAKE my
moral holidays; or else as a professional philosopher, I try to justify
them by some other principle.
If I could restrict my notion of the Absolute to its bare holiday-giving
value, it wouldn't clash with my other truths. But we cannot easily thus
restrict our hypotheses. They carry supernumerary features, and these it
is that clash so. My disbelief in the Absolute means then disbelief
in those other supernumerary features, for I fully believe in the
legitimacy of taking moral holidays.
You see by this what I meant when I called pragmatism a mediator and
reconciler and said, borrowing the word from Papini, that he unstiffens
our theories. She has in fact no prejudices whatever, no obstructive
dogmas, no rigid canons of what shall count as proof. She is completely
genial. She will entertain any hypothesis, she will consider any
evidence. It follows that in the religious field she is at a great
advantage both over positivistic empiricism, with its anti-theological
bias, and over religious rationalism, with its exclusive interest in
the remote, the noble, the simple, and the abstract in the way of
conception.
In short, she widens the field of search for God. Rationalism sticks
to logic and the empyrean. Empiricism sticks to the external senses.
Pragmatism is willing to take anything, to follow either logic or the
senses, and to count the humblest and most personal experiences. She
will count mystical experiences if they have practical consequences.
She will take a God who lives in the very dirt of private fact-if that
should seem a likely place to find him.
Her only test of probable truth is what works best in the way of leading
us, what fits every part of life best and combines with the collectivity
of experience's demands, nothing being omitted. If theological ideas
should do this, if the notion of God, in particular, should prove to do
it, how could pragmatism possibly deny God's existence? She could see
no meaning in treating as 'not true' a notion that was pragmatically so
successful. What other kind of truth could there be, for her, than all
this agreement with concrete reality?
In my last lecture I shall return again to the relations of pragmatism
with religion. But you see already how democratic she is. Her manners
are as various and flexible, her resources as rich and endless, and her
conclusions as friendly as those of mother nature.
Lecture III
Some Metaphysical Problems Pragmatically Considered
I am now to make the pragmatic method more familiar by giving you some
illustrations of its application to particular problems. I will begin
with what is driest, and the first thing I shall take will be the
problem of Substance. Everyone uses the old distinction between
substance and attribute, enshrined as it is in the very structure
of human language, in the difference between grammatical subject and
predicate. Here is a bit of blackboard crayon. Its modes, attributes,
properties, accidents, or affections,--use which term you will,--are
whiteness, friability, cylindrical shape, insolubility in water,
etc., etc. But the bearer of these attributes is so much chalk,
which thereupon is called the substance in which they inhere. So the
attributes of this desk inhere in the substance 'wood,' those of my coat
in the substance 'wool,' and so forth. Chalk, wood and wool, show again,
in spite of their differences, common properties, and in so far forth
they are themselves counted as modes of a still more primal substance,
matter, the attributes of which are space occupancy and impenetrability.
Similarly our thoughts and feelings are affections or properties of our
several souls, which are substances, but again not wholly in their own
right, for they are modes of the still deeper substance 'spirit.'
Now it was very early seen that all we know of the chalk is
the whiteness, friability, etc., all WE KNOW of the wood is the
combustibility and fibrous structure. A group of attributes is what each
substance here is known-as, they form its sole cash-value for our actual
experience. The substance is in every case revealed through THEM; if we
were cut off from THEM we should never suspect its existence; and if
God should keep sending them to us in an unchanged order, miraculously
annihilating at a certain moment the substance that supported them, we
never could detect the moment, for our experiences themselves would be
unaltered. Nominalists accordingly adopt the opinion that substance is
a spurious idea due to our inveterate human trick of turning names
into things. Phenomena come in groups--the chalk-group, the wood-group,
etc.--and each group gets its name. The name we then treat as in a
way supporting the group of phenomena. The low thermometer to-day,
for instance, is supposed to come from something called the 'climate.'
Climate is really only the name for a certain group of days, but it is
treated as if it lay BEHIND the day, and in general we place the name,
as if it were a being, behind the facts it is the name of. But the
phenomenal properties of things, nominalists say, surely do not
really inhere in names, and if not in names then they do not inhere
in anything. They ADhere, or COhere, rather, WITH EACH OTHER, and the
notion of a substance inaccessible to us, which we think accounts
for such cohesion by supporting it, as cement might support pieces of
mosaic, must be abandoned. The fact of the bare cohesion itself is all
that the notion of the substance signifies. Behind that fact is nothing.
Scholasticism has taken the notion of substance from common sense and
made it very technical and articulate. Few things would seem to have
fewer pragmatic consequences for us than substances, cut off as we are
from every contact with them. Yet in one case scholasticism has proved
the importance of the substance-idea by treating it pragmatically. I
refer to certain disputes about the mystery of the Eucharist. Substance
here would appear to have momentous pragmatic value. Since the accidents
of the wafer don't change in the Lord's supper, and yet it has become
the very body of Christ, it must be that the change is in the substance
solely. The bread-substance must have been withdrawn, and the divine
substance substituted miraculously without altering the immediate
sensible properties. But tho these don't alter, a tremendous difference
has been made, no less a one than this, that we who take the sacrament,
now feed upon the very substance of divinity. The substance-notion
breaks into life, then, with tremendous effect, if once you allow that
substances can separate from their accidents, and exchange these latter.
This is the only pragmatic application of the substance-idea with
which I am acquainted; and it is obvious that it will only be treated
seriously by those who already believe in the 'real presence' on
independent grounds.
MATERIAL SUBSTANCE was criticized by Berkeley with such telling effect
that his name has reverberated through all subsequent philosophy.
Berkeley's treatment of the notion of matter is so well known as to need
hardly more than a mention. So far from denying the external world which
we know, Berkeley corroborated it. It was the scholastic notion of a
material substance unapproachable by us, BEHIND the external world,
deeper and more real than it, and needed to support it, which Berkeley
maintained to be the most effective of all reducers of the external
world to unreality. Abolish that substance, he said, believe that God,
whom you can understand and approach, sends you the sensible world
directly, and you confirm the latter and back it up by his divine
authority. Berkeley's criticism of 'matter' was consequently absolutely
pragmatistic. Matter is known as our sensations of colour, figure,
hardness and the like. They are the cash-value of the term. The
difference matter makes to us by truly being is that we then get such
sensations; by not being, is that we lack them. These sensations then
are its sole meaning. Berkeley doesn't deny matter, then; he simply
tells us what it consists of. It is a true name for just so much in the
way of sensations.
Locke, and later Hume, applied a similar pragmatic criticism to the
notion of SPIRITUAL SUBSTANCE. I will only mention Locke's treatment
of our 'personal identity.' He immediately reduces this notion to its
pragmatic value in terms of experience. It means, he says, so much
consciousness,' namely the fact that at one moment of life we remember
other moments, and feel them all as parts of one and the same personal
history. Rationalism had explained this practical continuity in our life
by the unity of our soul-substance. But Locke says: suppose that God
should take away the consciousness, should WE be any the better
for having still the soul-principle? Suppose he annexed the same
consciousness to different souls, | should we, as WE realize OURSELVES,
be any the worse for that fact? In Locke's day the soul was chiefly a
thing to be rewarded or punished. See how Locke, discussing it from this
point of view, keeps the question pragmatic:
Suppose, he says, one to think himself to be the same soul that once was
Nestor or Thersites. Can he think their actions his own any more than
the actions of any other man that ever existed? But | let him once find
himself CONSCIOUS of any of the actions of Nestor, he then finds himself
the same person with Nestor. ... In this personal identity is founded
all the right and justice of reward and punishment. It may be reasonable
to think, no one shall be made to answer for what he knows nothing of,
but shall receive his doom, his consciousness accusing or excusing.
Supposing a man punished now for what he had done in another life,
whereof he could be made to have no consciousness at all, what
difference is there between that punishment and being created miserable?