carries no consequences, it does no execution. What sort of design? and
what sort of a designer? are the only serious questions, and the study
of facts is the only way of getting even approximate answers. Meanwhile,
pending the slow answer from facts, anyone who insists that there is a
designer and who is sure he is a divine one, gets a certain pragmatic
benefit from the term--the same, in fact which we saw that the terms
God, Spirit, or the Absolute, yield us 'Design,' worthless tho it be
as a mere rationalistic principle set above or behind things for our
admiration, becomes, if our faith concretes it into something theistic,
a term of PROMISE. Returning with it into experience, we gain a more
confiding outlook on the future. If not a blind force but a seeing
force runs things, we may reasonably expect better issues. This vague
confidence in the future is the sole pragmatic meaning at present
discernible in the terms design and designer. But if cosmic confidence
is right not wrong, better not worse, that is a most important meaning.
That much at least of possible 'truth' the terms will then have in them.
Let me take up another well-worn controversy, THE FREE-WILL PROBLEM.
Most persons who believe in what is called their free-will do so after
the rationalistic fashion. It is a principle, a positive faculty or
virtue added to man, by which his dignity is enigmatically augmented. He
ought to believe it for this reason. Determinists, who deny it, who say
that individual men originate nothing, but merely transmit to the
future the whole push of the past cosmos of which they are so small
an expression, diminish man. He is less admirable, stripped of this
creative principle. I imagine that more than half of you share our
instinctive belief in free-will, and that admiration of it as a
principle of dignity has much to do with your fidelity.
But free-will has also been discussed pragmatically, and, strangely
enough, the same pragmatic interpretation has been put upon it by both
disputants. You know how large a part questions of ACCOUNTABILITY have
played in ethical controversy. To hear some persons, one would suppose
that all that ethics aims at is a code of merits and demerits. Thus does
the old legal and theological leaven, the interest in crime and sin and
punishment abide with us. 'Who's to blame? whom can we punish? whom
will God punish?'--these preoccupations hang like a bad dream over man's
religious history.
So both free-will and determinism have been inveighed against and called
absurd, because each, in the eyes of its enemies, has seemed to prevent
the 'imputability' of good or bad deeds to their authors. Queer antinomy
this! Free-will means novelty, the grafting on to the past of something
not involved therein. If our acts were predetermined, if we merely
transmitted the push of the whole past, the free-willists say, how could
we be praised or blamed for anything? We should be 'agents' only, not
'principals,' and where then would be our precious imputability and
responsibility?
But where would it be if we HAD free-will? rejoin the determinists. If a
'free' act be a sheer novelty, that comes not FROM me, the previous
me, but ex nihilo, and simply tacks itself on to me, how can _I_, the
previous I, be responsible? How can I have any permanent CHARACTER that
will stand still long enough for praise or blame to be awarded? The
chaplet of my days tumbles into a cast of disconnected beads as soon
as the thread of inner necessity is drawn out by the preposterous
indeterminist doctrine. Messrs. Fullerton and McTaggart have recently
laid about them doughtily with this argument.
It may be good ad hominem, but otherwise it is pitiful. For I ask you,
quite apart from other reasons, whether any man, woman or child, with a
sense for realities, ought not to be ashamed to plead such principles
as either dignity or imputability. Instinct and utility between them
can safely be trusted to carry on the social business of punishment and
praise. If a man does good acts we shall praise him, if he does bad acts
we shall punish him--anyhow, and quite apart from theories as to whether
the acts result from what was previous in him or are novelties in a
strict sense. To make our human ethics revolve about the question of
'merit' is a piteous unreality--God alone can know our merits, if we
have any. The real ground for supposing free-will is indeed pragmatic,
but it has nothing to do with this contemptible right to punish which
had made such a noise in past discussions of the subject.
Free-will pragmatically means NOVELTIES IN THE WORLD, the right to
expect that in its deepest elements as well as in its surface phenomena,
the future may not identically repeat and imitate the past. That
imitation en masse is there, who can deny? The general 'uniformity
of nature' is presupposed by every lesser law. But nature may be only
approximately uniform; and persons in whom knowledge of the world's past
has bred pessimism (or doubts as to the world's good character, which
become certainties if that character be supposed eternally fixed) may
naturally welcome free-will as a MELIORISTIC doctrine. It holds up
improvement as at least possible; whereas determinism assures us that
our whole notion of possibility is born of human ignorance, and that
necessity and impossibility between them rule the destinies of the
world.
Free-will is thus a general cosmological theory of PROMISE, just like
the Absolute, God, Spirit or Design. Taken abstractly, no one of these
terms has any inner content, none of them gives us any picture, and
no one of them would retain the least pragmatic value in a world
whose character was obviously perfect from the start. Elation at mere
existence, pure cosmic emotion and delight, would, it seems to me,
quench all interest in those speculations, if the world were nothing but
a lubberland of happiness already. Our interest in religious metaphysics
arises in the fact that our empirical future feels to us unsafe, and
needs some higher guarantee. If the past and present were purely good,
who could wish that the future might possibly not resemble them? Who
could desire free-will? Who would not say, with Huxley, "let me be wound
up every day like a watch, to go right fatally, and I ask no better
freedom." 'Freedom' in a world already perfect could only mean
freedom to BE WORSE, and who could be so insane as to wish that? To be
necessarily what it is, to be impossibly aught else, would put the
last touch of perfection upon optimism's universe. Surely the only
POSSIBILITY that one can rationally claim is the possibility that things
may be BETTER. That possibility, I need hardly say, is one that, as the
actual world goes, we have ample grounds for desiderating.
Free-will thus has no meaning unless it be a doctrine of RELIEF. As
such, it takes its place with other religious doctrines. Between them,
they build up the old wastes and repair the former desolations. Our
spirit, shut within this courtyard of sense-experience, is always saying
to the intellect upon the tower: 'Watchman, tell us of the night, if it
aught of promise bear,' and the intellect gives it then these terms of
promise.
Other than this practical significance, the words God, free-will,
design, etc., have none. Yet dark tho they be in themselves, or
intellectualistically taken, when we bear them into life's thicket with
us the darkness THERE grows light about us. If you stop, in dealing with
such words, with their definition, thinking that to be an intellectual
finality, where are you? Stupidly staring at a pretentious sham! "Deus
est Ens, a se, extra et supra omne genus, necessarium, unum, infinite
perfectum, simplex, immutabile, immensum, aeternum, intelligens,"
etc.,--wherein is such a definition really instructive? It means less,
than nothing, in its pompous robe of adjectives. Pragmatism alone can
read a positive meaning into it, and for that she turns her back upon
the intellectualist point of view altogether. 'God's in his heaven;
all's right with the world!'--THAT'S the heart of your theology, and for
that you need no rationalist definitions.
Why shouldn't we all of us, rationalists as well as pragmatists, confess
this? Pragmatism, so far from keeping her eyes bent on the immediate
practical foreground, as she is accused of doing, dwells just as much
upon the world's remotest perspectives.
See then how all these ultimate questions turn, as it were, up
their hinges; and from looking backwards upon principles, upon an
erkenntnisstheoretische Ich, a God, a Kausalitaetsprinzip, a Design, a
Free-will, taken in themselves, as something august and exalted above
facts,--see, I say, how pragmatism shifts the emphasis and looks forward
into facts themselves. The really vital question for us all is, What is
this world going to be? What is life eventually to make of itself? The
centre of gravity of philosophy must therefore alter its place. The
earth of things, long thrown into shadow by the glories of the upper
ether, must resume its rights. To shift the emphasis in this way means
that philosophic questions will fall to be treated by minds of a
less abstractionist type than heretofore, minds more scientific and
individualistic in their tone yet not irreligious either. It will be
an alteration in 'the seat of authority' that reminds one almost of the
protestant reformation. And as, to papal minds, protestantism has
often seemed a mere mess of anarchy and confusion, such, no doubt, will
pragmatism often seem to ultra-rationalist minds in philosophy. It will
seem so much sheer trash, philosophically. But life wags on, all the
same, and compasses its ends, in protestant countries. I venture to
think that philosophic protestantism will compass a not dissimilar
prosperity.
Lecture IV
The One and the Many
We saw in the last lecture that the pragmatic method, in its dealings
with certain concepts, instead of ending with admiring contemplation,
plunges forward into the river of experience with them and prolongs the
perspective by their means. Design, free-will, the absolute mind, spirit
instead of matter, have for their sole meaning a better promise as to
this world's outcome. Be they false or be they true, the meaning of them
is this meliorism. I have sometimes thought of the phenomenon called
'total reflexion' in optics as a good symbol of the relation between
abstract ideas and concrete realities, as pragmatism conceives it. Hold
a tumbler of water a little above your eyes and look up through the
water at its surface--or better still look similarly through the flat
wall of an aquarium. You will then see an extraordinarily brilliant
reflected image say of a candle-flame, or any other clear object,
situated on the opposite side of the vessel. No candle-ray, under these
circumstances gets beyond the water's surface: every ray is totally
reflected back into the depths again. Now let the water represent the
world of sensible facts, and let the air above it represent the world of
abstract ideas. Both worlds are real, of course, and interact; but they
interact only at their boundary, and the locus of everything that lives,
and happens to us, so far as full experience goes, is the water. We are
like fishes swimming in the sea of sense, bounded above by the superior
element, but unable to breathe it pure or penetrate it. We get our
oxygen from it, however, we touch it incessantly, now in this part, now
in that, and every time we touch it we are reflected back into the water
with our course re-determined and re-energized. The abstract ideas of
which the air consists, indispensable for life, but irrespirable by
themselves, as it were, and only active in their re-directing function.
All similes are halting but this one rather takes my fancy. It shows
how something, not sufficient for life in itself, may nevertheless be an
effective determinant of life elsewhere.
In this present hour I wish to illustrate the pragmatic method by one
more application. I wish to turn its light upon the ancient problem
of 'the one and the many.' I suspect that in but few of you has this
problem occasioned sleepless nights, and I should not be astonished if
some of you told me it had never vexed you. I myself have come, by long
brooding over it, to consider it the most central of all philosophic
problems, central because so pregnant. I mean by this that if you know
whether a man is a decided monist or a decided pluralist, you perhaps
know more about the rest of his opinions than if you give him any other
name ending in IST. To believe in the one or in the many, that is the
classification with the maximum number of consequences. So bear with
me for an hour while I try to inspire you with my own interest in the
problem.
Philosophy has often been defined as the quest or the vision of the
world's unity. We never hear this definition challenged, and it is true
as far as it goes, for philosophy has indeed manifested above all things
its interest in unity. But how about the VARIETY in things? Is that such
an irrelevant matter? If instead of using the term philosophy, we talk
in general of our intellect and its needs we quickly see that unity
is only one of these. Acquaintance with the details of fact is always
reckoned, along with their reduction to system, as an indispensable
mark of mental greatness. Your 'scholarly' mind, of encyclopedic,
philological type, your man essentially of learning, has never lacked
for praise along with your philosopher. What our intellect really aims
at is neither variety nor unity taken singly but totality.[Footnote:
Compare A. Bellanger: Les concepts de Cause, et l'activite intentionelle
de l'Esprit. Paris, Alcan, 1905, p. 79 ff.] In this, acquaintance with
reality's diversities is as important as understanding their connexion.
The human passion of curiosity runs on all fours with the systematizing
passion.
In spite of this obvious fact the unity of things has always been
considered more illustrious, as it were, than their variety. When a
young man first conceives the notion that the whole world forms
one great fact, with all its parts moving abreast, as it were, and
interlocked, he feels as if he were enjoying a great insight, and looks
superciliously on all who still fall short of this sublime conception.
Taken thus abstractly as it first comes to one, the monistic insight is
so vague as hardly to seem worth defending intellectually. Yet probably
everyone in this audience in some way cherishes it. A certain abstract
monism, a certain emotional response to the character of oneness, as
if it were a feature of the world not coordinate with its manyness, but
vastly more excellent and eminent, is so prevalent in educated circles
that we might almost call it a part of philosophic common sense. Of
COURSE the world is one, we say. How else could it be a world at all?
Empiricists as a rule, are as stout monists of this abstract kind as
rationalists are.
The difference is that the empiricists are less dazzled. Unity doesn't
blind them to everything else, doesn't quench their curiosity for
special facts, whereas there is a kind of rationalist who is sure to
interpret abstract unity mystically and to forget everything else, to
treat it as a principle; to admire and worship it; and thereupon to come
to a full stop intellectually.
'The world is One!'--the formula may become a sort of number-worship.
'Three' and 'seven' have, it is true, been reckoned sacred numbers; but,
abstractly taken, why is 'one' more excellent than 'forty-three,'
or than 'two million and ten'? In this first vague conviction of the
world's unity, there is so little to take hold of that we hardly know
what we mean by it.
The only way to get forward with our notion is to treat it
pragmatically. Granting the oneness to exist, what facts will be
different in consequence? What will the unity be known-as? The world is
one--yes, but HOW one? What is the practical value of the oneness for
US?
Asking such questions, we pass from the vague to the definite, from the
abstract to the concrete. Many distinct ways in which oneness predicated
of the universe might make a difference, come to view. I will note
successively the more obvious of these ways.
1. First, the world is at least ONE SUBJECT OF DISCOURSE. If its
manyness were so irremediable as to permit NO union whatever of it
parts, not even our minds could 'mean' the whole of it at once: the
would be like eyes trying to look in opposite directions. But in point
of fact we mean to cover the whole of it by our abstract term 'world' or
'universe,' which expressly intends that no part shall be left out. Such
unity of discourse carries obviously no farther monistic specifications.
A 'chaos,' once so named, has as much unity of discourse as a cosmos.
It is an odd fact that many monists consider a great victory scored for
their side when pluralists say 'the universe is many.' "'The universe'!"
they chuckle--"his speech bewrayeth him. He stands confessed of monism
out of his own mouth." Well, let things be one in that sense! You can
then fling such a word as universe at the whole collection of them, but
what matters it? It still remains to be ascertained whether they are one
in any other sense that is more valuable.
2. Are they, for example, CONTINUOUS? Can you pass from one to another,
keeping always in your one universe without any danger of falling out?
In other words, do the parts of our universe HANG together, instead of
being like detached grains of sand?
Even grains of sand hang together through the space in which they are
embedded, and if you can in any way move through such space, you can
pass continuously from number one of them to number two. Space and
time are thus vehicles of continuity, by which the world's parts hang
together. The practical difference to us, resultant from these forms of
union, is immense. Our whole motor life is based upon them.
3. There are innumerable other paths of practical continuity among
things. Lines of INFLUENCE can be traced by which they together.
Following any such line you pass from one thing to another till you
may have covered a good part of the universe's extent. Gravity and
heat-conduction are such all-uniting influences, so far as the physical
world goes. Electric, luminous and chemical influences follow similar
lines of influence. But opaque and inert bodies interrupt the continuity
here, so that you have to step round them, or change your mode of
progress if you wish to get farther on that day. Practically, you have
then lost your universe's unity, SO FAR AS IT WAS CONSTITUTED BY THOSE
FIRST LINES OF INFLUENCE. There are innumerable kinds of connexion that
special things have with other special things; and the ENSEMBLE of any
one of these connexions forms one sort of system by which things are
conjoined. Thus men are conjoined in a vast network of ACQUAINTANCESHIP.
Brown knows Jones, Jones knows Robinson, etc.; and BY CHOOSING YOUR
FARTHER INTERMEDIARIES RIGHTLY you may carry a message from Jones to the
Empress of China, or the Chief of the African Pigmies, or to anyone
else in the inhabited world. But you are stopped short, as by a
non-conductor, when you choose one man wrong in this experiment. What
may be called love-systems are grafted on the acquaintance-system. A
loves (or hates) B; B loves (or hates) C, etc. But these systems are
smaller than the great acquaintance-system that they presuppose.
Human efforts are daily unifying the world more and more in definite
systematic ways. We found colonial, postal, consular, commercial
systems, all the parts of which obey definite influences that propagate
themselves within the system but not to facts outside of it. The result
is innumerable little hangings-together of the world's parts within the
larger hangings-together, little worlds, not only of discourse but of
operation, within the wider universe. Each system exemplifies one type
or grade of union, its parts being strung on that peculiar kind of
relation, and the same part may figure in many different systems, as
a man may hold several offices and belong to various clubs. From this
'systematic' point of view, therefore, the pragmatic value of the
world's unity is that all these definite networks actually and
practically exist. Some are more enveloping and extensive, some less so;
they are superposed upon each other; and between them all they let no
individual elementary part of the universe escape. Enormous as is the
amount of disconnexion among things (for these systematic influences and
conjunctions follow rigidly exclusive paths), everything that exists is
influenced in SOME way by something else, if you can only pick the way
out rightly Loosely speaking, and in general, it may be said that all
things cohere and adhere to each other SOMEHOW, and that the universe
exists practically in reticulated or concatenated forms which make of
it a continuous or 'integrated' affair. Any kind of influence whatever
helps to make the world one, so far as you can follow it from next
to next. You may then say that 'the world IS One'--meaning in these
respects, namely, and just so far as they obtain. But just as definitely
is it NOT one, so far as they do not obtain; and there is no species of
connexion which will not fail, if, instead of choosing conductors for
it, you choose non-conductors. You are then arrested at your very
first step and have to write the world down as a pure MANY from that
particular point of view. If our intellect had been as much interested
in disjunctive as it is in conjunctive relations, philosophy would have
equally successfully celebrated the world's DISUNION.
The great point is to notice that the oneness and the manyness are
absolutely co-ordinate here. Neither is primordial or more essential or
excellent than the other. Just as with space, whose separating of things
seems exactly on a par with its uniting of them, but sometimes one
function and sometimes the other is what come home to us most, so,
in our general dealings with the world of influences, we now need
conductors and now need non-conductors, and wisdom lies in knowing which
is which at the appropriate moment.
4. All these systems of influence or non-influence may be listed under
the general problem of the world's CAUSAL UNITY. If the minor causal
influences among things should converge towards one common causal origin
of them in the past, one great first cause for all that is, one might
then speak of the absolute causal unity of the world. God's fiat on
creation's day has figured in traditional philosophy as such an absolute
cause and origin. Transcendental Idealism, translating 'creation' into
'thinking' (or 'willing to' think') calls the divine act 'eternal'
rather than 'first'; but the union of the many here is absolute, just
the same--the many would not BE, save for the One. Against this notion
of the unity of origin of all there has always stood the pluralistic
notion of an eternal self-existing many in the shape of atoms or even of
spiritual units of some sort. The alternative has doubtless a pragmatic
meaning, but perhaps, as far as these lectures go, we had better leave
the question of unity of origin unsettled.
5. The most important sort of union that obtains among things,
pragmatically speaking, is their GENERIC UNITY. Things exist in kinds,
there are many specimens in each kind, and what the 'kind' implies for
one specimen, it implies also for every other specimen of that kind. We
can easily conceive that every fact in the world might be singular,
that is, unlike any other fact and sole of its kind. In such a world of
singulars our logic would be useless, for logic works by predicating
of the single instance what is true of all its kind. With no two
things alike in the world, we should be unable to reason from our past
experiences to our future ones. The existence of so much generic unity
in things is thus perhaps the most momentous pragmatic specification of
what it may mean to say 'the world is One.' ABSOLUTE generic unity would
obtain if there were one summum genus under which all things without
exception could be eventually subsumed. 'Beings,' 'thinkables,'
'experiences,' would be candidates for this position. Whether the
alternatives expressed by such words have any pragmatic significance or
not, is another question which I prefer to leave unsettled just now.