face-to-face verification-those of past history, for example, as of Cain
and Abel. The stream of time can be remounted only verbally, or verified
indirectly by the present prolongations or effects of what the past
harbored. Yet if they agree with these verbalities and effects, we can
know that our ideas of the past are true. AS TRUE AS PAST TIME ITSELF
WAS, so true was Julius Caesar, so true were antediluvian monsters,
all in their proper dates and settings. That past time itself was, is
guaranteed by its coherence with everything that's present. True as the
present is, the past was also.
Agreement thus turns out to be essentially an affair of leading--leading
that is useful because it is into quarters that contain objects that are
important. True ideas lead us into useful verbal and conceptual
quarters as well as directly up to useful sensible termini. They lead
to consistency, stability and flowing human intercourse. They lead away
from excentricity and isolation, from foiled and barren thinking. The
untrammeled flowing of the leading-process, its general freedom from
clash and contradiction, passes for its indirect verification; but all
roads lead to Rome, and in the end and eventually, all true processes
must lead to the face of directly verifying sensible experiences
SOMEWHERE, which somebody's ideas have copied.
Such is the large loose way in which the pragmatist interprets the word
agreement. He treats it altogether practically. He lets it cover any
process of conduction from a present idea to a future terminus, provided
only it run prosperously. It is only thus that 'scientific' ideas,
flying as they do beyond common sense, can be said to agree with their
realities. It is, as I have already said, as if reality were made of
ether, atoms or electrons, but we mustn't think so literally. The term
'energy' doesn't even pretend to stand for anything 'objective.' It is
only a way of measuring the surface of phenomena so as to string their
changes on a simple formula.
Yet in the choice of these man-made formulas we cannot be capricious
with impunity any more than we can be capricious on the common-sense
practical level. We must find a theory that will WORK; and that means
something extremely difficult; for our theory must mediate between all
previous truths and certain new experiences. It must derange common
sense and previous belief as little as possible, and it must lead to
some sensible terminus or other that can be verified exactly. To 'work'
means both these things; and the squeeze is so tight that there is
little loose play for any hypothesis. Our theories are wedged and
controlled as nothing else is. Yet sometimes alternative theoretic
formulas are equally compatible with all the truths we know, and then we
choose between them for subjective reasons. We choose the kind of theory
to which we are already partial; we follow 'elegance' or 'economy.'
Clerk Maxwell somewhere says it would be "poor scientific taste" to
choose the more complicated of two equally well-evidenced conceptions;
and you will all agree with him. Truth in science is what gives us the
maximum possible sum of satisfactions, taste included, but consistency
both with previous truth and with novel fact is always the most
imperious claimant.
I have led you through a very sandy desert. But now, if I may be allowed
so vulgar an expression, we begin to taste the milk in the cocoanut. Our
rationalist critics here discharge their batteries upon us, and to reply
to them will take us out from all this dryness into full sight of a
momentous philosophical alternative.
Our account of truth is an account of truths in the plural, of processes
of leading, realized in rebus, and having only this quality in common,
that they PAY. They pay by guiding us into or towards some part of a
system that dips at numerous points into sense-percepts, which we may
copy mentally or not, but with which at any rate we are now in the kind
of commerce vaguely designated as verification. Truth for us is simply
a collective name for verification-processes, just as health, wealth,
strength, etc., are names for other processes connected with life, and
also pursued because it pays to pursue them. Truth is MADE, just as
health, wealth and strength are made, in the course of experience.
Here rationalism is instantaneously up in arms against us. I can imagine
a rationalist to talk as follows:
"Truth is not made," he will say; "it absolutely obtains, being a unique
relation that does not wait upon any process, but shoots straight over
the head of experience, and hits its reality every time. Our belief that
yon thing on the wall is a clock is true already, altho no one in
the whole history of the world should verify it. The bare quality of
standing in that transcendent relation is what makes any thought true
that possesses it, whether or not there be verification. You pragmatists
put the cart before the horse in making truth's being reside in
verification-processes. These are merely signs of its being, merely our
lame ways of ascertaining after the fact, which of our ideas already has
possessed the wondrous quality. The quality itself is timeless, like all
essences and natures. Thoughts partake of it directly, as they partake
of falsity or of irrelevancy. It can't be analyzed away into pragmatic
consequences."
The whole plausibility of this rationalist tirade is due to the fact
to which we have already paid so much attention. In our world,
namely, abounding as it does in things of similar kinds and similarly
associated, one verification serves for others of its kind, and one
great use of knowing things is to be led not so much to them as to their
associates, especially to human talk about them. The quality of truth,
obtaining ante rem, pragmatically means, then, the fact that in such a
world innumerable ideas work better by their indirect or possible than
by their direct and actual verification. Truth ante rem means only
verifiability, then; or else it is a case of the stock rationalist trick
of treating the NAME of a concrete phenomenal reality as an independent
prior entity, and placing it behind the reality as its explanation.
Professor Mach quotes somewhere an epigram of Lessing's:
Sagt Hanschen Schlau zu Vetter Fritz, "Wie kommt es, Vetter Fritzen,
Dass grad' die Reichsten in der Welt, Das meiste Geld besitzen?"
Hanschen Schlau here treats the principle 'wealth' as something distinct
from the facts denoted by the man's being rich. It antedates them; the
facts become only a sort of secondary coincidence with the rich man's
essential nature.
In the case of 'wealth' we all see the fallacy. We know that wealth is
but a name for concrete processes that certain men's lives play a
part in, and not a natural excellence found in Messrs. Rockefeller and
Carnegie, but not in the rest of us.
Like wealth, health also lives in rebus. It is a name for processes,
as digestion, circulation, sleep, etc., that go on happily, tho in this
instance we are more inclined to think of it as a principle and to say
the man digests and sleeps so well BECAUSE he is so healthy.
With 'strength' we are, I think, more rationalistic still, and decidedly
inclined to treat it as an excellence pre-existing in the man and
explanatory of the herculean performances of his muscles.
With 'truth' most people go over the border entirely, and treat the
rationalistic account as self-evident. But really all these words in TH
are exactly similar. Truth exists ante rem just as much and as little as
the other things do.
The scholastics, following Aristotle, made much of the distinction
between habit and act. Health in actu means, among other things, good
sleeping and digesting. But a healthy man need not always be sleeping,
or always digesting, any more than a wealthy man need be always handling
money, or a strong man always lifting weights. All such qualities sink
to the status of 'habits' between their times of exercise; and similarly
truth becomes a habit of certain of our ideas and beliefs in their
intervals of rest from their verifying activities. But those activities
are the root of the whole matter, and the condition of there being any
habit to exist in the intervals.
'The true,' to put it very briefly, is only the expedient in the way of
our thinking, just as 'the right' is only the expedient in the way of
our behaving. Expedient in almost any fashion; and expedient in the
long run and on the whole of course; for what meets expediently all
the experience in sight won't necessarily meet all farther experiences
equally satisfactorily. Experience, as we know, has ways of BOILING
OVER, and making us correct our present formulas.
The 'absolutely' true, meaning what no farther experience will ever
alter, is that ideal vanishing-point towards which we imagine that all
our temporary truths will some day converge. It runs on all fours with
the perfectly wise man, and with the absolutely complete experience;
and, if these ideals are ever realized, they will all be realized
together. Meanwhile we have to live to-day by what truth we can
get to-day, and be ready to-morrow to call it falsehood. Ptolemaic
astronomy, euclidean space, aristotelian logic, scholastic metaphysics,
were expedient for centuries, but human experience has boiled over
those limits, and we now call these things only relatively true, or true
within those borders of experience. 'Absolutely' they are false; for we
know that those limits were casual, and might have been transcended by
past theorists just as they are by present thinkers.
When new experiences lead to retrospective judgments, using the past
tense, what these judgments utter WAS true, even tho no past thinker
had been led there. We live forwards, a Danish thinker has said, but we
understand backwards. The present sheds a backward light on the world's
previous processes. They may have been truth-processes for the actors
in them. They are not so for one who knows the later revelations of the
story.
This regulative notion of a potential better truth to be established
later, possibly to be established some day absolutely, and having powers
of retroactive legislation, turns its face, like all pragmatist
notions, towards concreteness of fact, and towards the future. Like the
half-truths, the absolute truth will have to be MADE, made as a relation
incidental to the growth of a mass of verification-experience, to which
the half-true ideas are all along contributing their quota.
I have already insisted on the fact that truth is made largely out
of previous truths. Men's beliefs at any time are so much experience
funded. But the beliefs are themselves parts of the sum total of the
world's experience, and become matter, therefore, for the next day's
funding operations. So far as reality means experienceable reality,
both it and the truths men gain about it are everlastingly in process
of mutation-mutation towards a definite goal, it may be--but still
mutation.
Mathematicians can solve problems with two variables. On the Newtonian
theory, for instance, acceleration varies with distance, but distance
also varies with acceleration. In the realm of truth-processes facts
come independently and determine our beliefs provisionally. But these
beliefs make us act, and as fast as they do so, they bring into sight or
into existence new facts which re-determine the beliefs accordingly. So
the whole coil and ball of truth, as it rolls up, is the product of a
double influence. Truths emerge from facts; but they dip forward into
facts again and add to them; which facts again create or reveal new
truth (the word is indifferent) and so on indefinitely. The 'facts'
themselves meanwhile are not TRUE. They simply ARE. Truth is the
function of the beliefs that start and terminate among them.
The case is like a snowball's growth, due as it is to the distribution
of the snow on the one hand, and to the successive pushes of the boys on
the other, with these factors co-determining each other incessantly.
The most fateful point of difference between being a rationalist and
being a pragmatist is now fully in sight. Experience is in mutation,
and our psychological ascertainments of truth are in mutation--so much
rationalism will allow; but never that either reality itself or truth
itself is mutable. Reality stands complete and ready-made from all
eternity, rationalism insists, and the agreement of our ideas with it
is that unique unanalyzable virtue in them of which she has already told
us. As that intrinsic excellence, their truth has nothing to do with our
experiences. It adds nothing to the content of experience. It makes
no difference to reality itself; it is supervenient, inert, static, a
reflexion merely. It doesn't EXIST, it HOLDS or OBTAINS, it belongs to
another dimension from that of either facts or fact-relations, belongs,
in short, to the epistemological dimension--and with that big word
rationalism closes the discussion.
Thus, just as pragmatism faces forward to the future, so does
rationalism here again face backward to a past eternity. True to her
inveterate habit, rationalism reverts to 'principles,' and thinks that
when an abstraction once is named, we own an oracular solution.
The tremendous pregnancy in the way of consequences for life of this
radical difference of outlook will only become apparent in my later
lectures. I wish meanwhile to close this lecture by showing that
rationalism's sublimity does not save it from inanity.
When, namely, you ask rationalists, instead of accusing pragmatism
of desecrating the notion of truth, to define it themselves by saying
exactly what THEY understand by it, the only positive attempts I can
think of are these two:
1. "Truth is just the system of propositions which have an
un-conditional claim to be recognized as valid." [Footnote: A. E.
Taylor, Philosophical Review, vol. xiv, p. 288.]
2. Truth is a name for all those judgments which we find ourselves under
obligation to make by a kind of imperative duty. [Footnote: H.
Rickert, Der Gegenstand der Erkenntniss, chapter on 'Die
Urtheilsnothwendigkeit.']
The first thing that strikes one in such definitions is their
unutterable triviality. They are absolutely true, of course, but
absolutely insignificant until you handle them pragmatically. What do
you mean by 'claim' here, and what do you mean by 'duty'? As
summary names for the concrete reasons why thinking in true ways is
overwhelmingly expedient and good for mortal men, it is all right to
talk of claims on reality's part to be agreed with, and of obligations
on our part to agree. We feel both the claims and the obligations, and
we feel them for just those reasons.
But the rationalists who talk of claim and obligation EXPRESSLY SAY
THAT THEY HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH OUR PRACTICAL INTERESTS OR PERSONAL
REASONS. Our reasons for agreeing are psychological facts, they say,
relative to each thinker, and to the accidents of his life. They are his
evidence merely, they are no part of the life of truth itself. That
life transacts itself in a purely logical or epistemological, as
distinguished from a psychological, dimension, and its claims antedate
and exceed all personal motivations whatsoever. Tho neither man nor God
should ever ascertain truth, the word would still have to be defined as
that which OUGHT to be ascertained and recognized.
There never was a more exquisite example of an idea abstracted from the
concretes of experience and then used to oppose and negate what it was
abstracted from.
Philosophy and common life abound in similar instances. The
'sentimentalist fallacy' is to shed tears over abstract justice and
generosity, beauty, etc., and never to know these qualities when you
meet them in the street, because there the circumstances make them
vulgar. Thus I read in the privately printed biography of an eminently
rationalistic mind: "It was strange that with such admiration for beauty
in the abstract, my brother had no enthusiasm for fine architecture, for
beautiful painting, or for flowers." And in almost the last philosophic
work I have read, I find such passages as the following: "Justice
is ideal, solely ideal. Reason conceives that it ought to exist, but
experience shows that it can-not. ... Truth, which ought to be, cannot
be. ... Reason is deformed by experience. As soon as reason enters
experience, it becomes contrary to reason."
The rationalist's fallacy here is exactly like the sentimentalist's.
Both extract a quality from the muddy particulars of experience, and
find it so pure when extracted that they contrast it with each and all
its muddy instances as an opposite and higher nature. All the while it
is THEIR nature. It is the nature of truths to be validated, verified.
It pays for our ideas to be validated. Our obligation to seek truth is
part of our general obligation to do what pays. The payments true ideas
bring are the sole why of our duty to follow them.
Identical whys exist in the case of wealth and health. Truth makes no
other kind of claim and imposes no other kind of ought than health and
wealth do. All these claims are conditional; the concrete benefits we
gain are what we mean by calling the pursuit a duty. In the case of
truth, untrue beliefs work as perniciously in the long run as true
beliefs work beneficially. Talking abstractly, the quality 'true' may
thus be said to grow absolutely precious, and the quality 'untrue'
absolutely damnable: the one may be called good, the other bad,
unconditionally. We ought to think the true, we ought to shun the false,
imperatively.
But if we treat all this abstraction literally and oppose it to its
mother soil in experience, see what a preposterous position we work
ourselves into.
We cannot then take a step forward in our actual thinking. When shall
I acknowledge this truth and when that? Shall the acknowledgment be
loud?--or silent? If sometimes loud, sometimes silent, which NOW? When
may a truth go into cold-storage in the encyclopedia? and when shall it
come out for battle? Must I constantly be repeating the truth 'twice
two are four' because of its eternal claim on recognition? or is
it sometimes irrelevant? Must my thoughts dwell night and day on my
personal sins and blemishes, because I truly have them?--or may I sink
and ignore them in order to be a decent social unit, and not a mass of
morbid melancholy and apology?
It is quite evident that our obligation to acknowledge truth, so far
from being unconditional, is tremendously conditioned. Truth with a big
T, and in the singular, claims abstractly to be recognized, of course;
but concrete truths in the plural need be recognized only when their
recognition is expedient. A truth must always be preferred to a
falsehood when both relate to the situation; but when neither does,
truth is as little of a duty as falsehood. If you ask me what o'clock it
is and I tell you that I live at 95 Irving Street, my answer may indeed
be true, but you don't see why it is my duty to give it. A false address
would be as much to the purpose.
With this admission that there are conditions that limit the application
of the abstract imperative, THE PRAGMATISTIC TREATMENT OF TRUTH SWEEPS
BACK UPON US IN ITS FULNESS. Our duty to agree with reality is seen to
be grounded in a perfect jungle of concrete expediencies.
When Berkeley had explained what people meant by matter, people thought
that he denied matter's existence. When Messrs. Schiller and Dewey
now explain what people mean by truth, they are accused of denying ITS
existence. These pragmatists destroy all objective standards, critics
say, and put foolishness and wisdom on one level. A favorite formula for
describing Mr. Schiller's doctrines and mine is that we are persons who
think that by saying whatever you find it pleasant to say and calling it
truth you fulfil every pragmatistic requirement.
I leave it to you to judge whether this be not an impudent slander. Pent
in, as the pragmatist more than anyone else sees himself to be, between
the whole body of funded truths squeezed from the past and the coercions
of the world of sense about him, who so well as he feels the immense
pressure of objective control under which our minds perform their
operations? If anyone imagines that this law is lax, let him keep its
commandment one day, says Emerson. We have heard much of late of the
uses of the imagination in science. It is high time to urge the use of
a little imagination in philosophy. The unwillingness of some of our
critics to read any but the silliest of possible meanings into our
statements is as discreditable to their imaginations as anything I know
in recent philosophic history. Schiller says the true is that which
'works.' Thereupon he is treated as one who limits verification to
the lowest material utilities. Dewey says truth is what gives
'satisfaction.' He is treated as one who believes in calling everything
true which, if it were true, would be pleasant.
Our critics certainly need more imagination of realities. I have
honestly tried to stretch my own imagination and to read the best
possible meaning into the rationalist conception, but I have to confess
that it still completely baffles me. The notion of a reality calling on
us to 'agree' with it, and that for no reasons, but simply because
its claim is 'unconditional' or 'transcendent,' is one that I can make
neither head nor tail of. I try to imagine myself as the sole reality
in the world, and then to imagine what more I would 'claim' if I were
allowed to. If you suggest the possibility of my claiming that a mind
should come into being from out of the void inane and stand and COPY me,
I can indeed imagine what the copying might mean, but I can conjure up
no motive. What good it would do me to be copied, or what good it would
do that mind to copy me, if farther consequences are expressly and
in principle ruled out as motives for the claim (as they are by our
rationalist authorities) I cannot fathom. When the Irishman's admirers
ran him along to the place of banquet in a sedan chair with no bottom,
he said, "Faith, if it wasn't for the honor of the thing, I might as
well have come on foot." So here: but for the honor of the thing, I
might as well have remained uncopied. Copying is one genuine mode
of knowing (which for some strange reason our contemporary
transcendentalists seem to be tumbling over each other to repudiate);
but when we get beyond copying, and fall back on unnamed forms of
agreeing that are expressly denied to be either copyings or leadings or
fittings, or any other processes pragmatically definable, the WHAT of
the 'agreement' claimed becomes as unintelligible as the why of it.
Neither content nor motive can be imagined for it. It is an absolutely
meaningless abstraction. [Footnote: I am not forgetting that Professor
Rickert long ago gave up the whole notion of truth being founded on
agreement with reality. Reality, according to him, is whatever agrees
with truth, and truth is founded solely on our primal duty. This
fantastic flight, together with Mr. Joachim's candid confession of
failure in his book The Nature of Truth, seems to me to mark the
bankruptcy of rationalism when dealing with this subject. Rickert deals
with part of the pragmatistic position under the head of what he calls
'Relativismus.' I cannot discuss his text here. Suffice it to say
that his argumentation in that chapter is so feeble as to seem almost
incredible in so generally able a writer.]
Surely in this field of truth it is the pragmatists and not the
rationalists who are the more genuine defenders of the universe's
rationality.
Lecture VII
Pragmatism and Humanism