sketched in my last lecture is that typical idol of the tribe, the
notion of THE Truth, conceived as the one answer, determinate and
complete, to the one fixed enigma which the world is believed to
propound. For popular tradition, it is all the better if the answer
be oracular, so as itself to awaken wonder as an enigma of the second
order, veiling rather than revealing what its profundities are supposed
to contain. All the great single-word answers to the world's riddle,
such as God, the One, Reason, Law, Spirit, Matter, Nature, Polarity, the
Dialectic Process, the Idea, the Self, the Oversoul, draw the admiration
that men have lavished on them from this oracular role. By amateurs in
philosophy and professionals alike, the universe is represented as
a queer sort of petrified sphinx whose appeal to man consists in a
monotonous challenge to his divining powers. THE Truth: what a perfect
idol of the rationalistic mind! I read in an old letter--from a gifted
friend who died too young--these words: "In everything, in science, art,
morals and religion, there MUST be one system that is right and EVERY
other wrong." How characteristic of the enthusiasm of a certain stage of
youth! At twenty-one we rise to such a challenge and expect to find the
system. It never occurs to most of us even later that the question 'what
is THE truth?' is no real question (being irrelative to all conditions)
and that the whole notion of THE truth is an abstraction from the fact
of truths in the plural, a mere useful summarizing phrase like THE Latin
Language or THE Law.
Common-law judges sometimes talk about the law, and school-masters talk
about the latin tongue, in a way to make their hearers think they mean
entities pre-existent to the decisions or to the words and syntax,
determining them unequivocally and requiring them to obey. But the
slightest exercise of reflexion makes us see that, instead of being
principles of this kind, both law and latin are results. Distinctions
between the lawful and the unlawful in conduct, or between the
correct and incorrect in speech, have grown up incidentally among the
interactions of men's experiences in detail; and in no other way do
distinctions between the true and the false in belief ever grow up.
Truth grafts itself on previous truth, modifying it in the process, just
as idiom grafts itself on previous idiom, and law on previous law. Given
previous law and a novel case, and the judge will twist them into fresh
law. Previous idiom; new slang or metaphor or oddity that hits the
public taste:--and presto, a new idiom is made. Previous truth; fresh
facts:--and our mind finds a new truth.
All the while, however, we pretend that the eternal is unrolling, that
the one previous justice, grammar or truth is simply fulgurating, and
not being made. But imagine a youth in the courtroom trying cases with
his abstract notion of 'the' law, or a censor of speech let loose
among the theatres with his idea of 'the' mother-tongue, or a professor
setting up to lecture on the actual universe with his rationalistic
notion of 'the Truth' with a big T, and what progress do they make?
Truth, law, and language fairly boil away from them at the least touch
of novel fact. These things MAKE THEMSELVES as we go. Our rights,
wrongs, prohibitions, penalties, words, forms, idioms, beliefs, are so
many new creations that add themselves as fast as history proceeds.
Far from being antecedent principles that animate the process, law,
language, truth are but abstract names for its results.
Laws and languages at any rate are thus seen to be man-made: things.
Mr. Schiller applies the analogy to beliefs, and proposes the name of
'Humanism' for the doctrine that to an unascertainable extent our truths
are man-made products too. Human motives sharpen all our questions,
human satisfactions lurk in all our answers, all our formulas have a
human twist. This element is so inextricable in the products that Mr.
Schiller sometimes seems almost to leave it an open question whether
there be anything else. "The world," he says, "is essentially [u lambda
nu], it is what we make of it. It is fruitless to define it by what it
originally was or by what it is apart from us; it IS what is made of it.
Hence ... the world is PLASTIC." [Footnote: Personal Idealism, p. 60.]
He adds that we can learn the limits of the plasticity only by trying,
and that we ought to start as if it were wholly plastic, acting
methodically on that assumption, and stopping only when we are
decisively rebuked.
This is Mr. Schiller's butt-end-foremost statement of the humanist
position, and it has exposed him to severe attack. I mean to defend the
humanist position in this lecture, so I will insinuate a few remarks at
this point.
Mr. Schiller admits as emphatically as anyone the presence of resisting
factors in every actual experience of truth-making, of which the
new-made special truth must take account, and with which it has perforce
to 'agree.' All our truths are beliefs about 'Reality'; and in any
particular belief the reality acts as something independent, as a thing
FOUND, not manufactured. Let me here recall a bit of my last lecture.
'REALITY' IS IN GENERAL WHAT TRUTHS HAVE TO TAKE ACCOUNT OF; [Footnote:
Mr. Taylor in his Elements of Metaphysics uses this excellent pragmatic
definition.] and the FIRST part of reality from this point of view is
the flux of our sensations. Sensations are forced upon us, coming we
know not whence. Over their nature, order, and quantity we have as good
as no control. THEY are neither true nor false; they simply ARE. It is
only what we say about them, only the names we give them, our theories
of their source and nature and remote relations, that may be true or
not.
The SECOND part of reality, as something that our beliefs must also
obediently take account of, is the RELATIONS that obtain between our
sensations or between their copies in our minds. This part falls into
two sub-parts: 1) the relations that are mutable and accidental, as
those of date and place; and 2) those that are fixed and essential
because they are grounded on the inner natures of their terms--such as
likeness and unlikeness. Both sorts of relation are matters of immediate
perception. Both are 'facts.' But it is the latter kind of fact that
forms the more important sub-part of reality for our theories of
knowledge. Inner relations namely are 'eternal,' are perceived whenever
their sensible terms are compared; and of them our thought--mathematical
and logical thought, so-called--must eternally take account.
The THIRD part of reality, additional to these perceptions (tho largely
based upon them), is the PREVIOUS TRUTHS of which every new inquiry
takes account. This third part is a much less obdurately resisting
factor: it often ends by giving way. In speaking of these three portions
of reality as at all times controlling our belief's formation, I am only
reminding you of what we heard in our last hour.
Now however fixed these elements of reality may be, we still have a
certain freedom in our dealings with them. Take our sensations. THAT
they are is undoubtedly beyond our control; but WHICH we attend to,
note, and make emphatic in our conclusions depends on our own interests;
and, according as we lay the emphasis here or there, quite different
formulations of truth result. We read the same facts differently.
'Waterloo,' with the same fixed details, spells a 'victory' for an
englishman; for a frenchman it spells a 'defeat.' So, for an optimist
philosopher the universe spells victory, for a pessimist, defeat.
What we say about reality thus depends on the perspective into which we
throw it. The THAT of it is its own; but the WHAT depends on the WHICH;
and the which depends on US. Both the sensational and the relational
parts of reality are dumb: they say absolutely nothing about themselves.
We it is who have to speak for them. This dumbness of sensations has
led such intellectualists as T.H. Green and Edward Caird to shove them
almost beyond the pale of philosophic recognition, but pragmatists
refuse to go so far. A sensation is rather like a client who has given
his case to a lawyer and then has passively to listen in the courtroom
to whatever account of his affairs, pleasant or unpleasant, the lawyer
finds it most expedient to give.
Hence, even in the field of sensation, our minds exert a certain
arbitrary choice. By our inclusions and omissions we trace the field's
extent; by our emphasis we mark its foreground and its background; by
our order we read it in this direction or in that. We receive in short
the block of marble, but we carve the statue ourselves.
This applies to the 'eternal' parts of reality as well: we shuffle our
perceptions of intrinsic relation and arrange them just as freely. We
read them in one serial order or another, class them in this way or
in that, treat one or the other as more fundamental, until our beliefs
about them form those bodies of truth known as logics, geometries, or
arithmetics, in each and all of which the form and order in which the
whole is cast is flagrantly man-made.
Thus, to say nothing of the new FACTS which men add to the matter of
reality by the acts of their own lives, they have already impressed
their mental forms on that whole third of reality which I have called
'previous truths.' Every hour brings its new percepts, its own facts of
sensation and relation, to be truly taken account of; but the whole
of our PAST dealings with such facts is already funded in the previous
truths. It is therefore only the smallest and recentest fraction of the
first two parts of reality that comes to us without the human touch, and
that fraction has immediately to become humanized in the sense of being
squared, assimilated, or in some way adapted, to the humanized mass
already there. As a matter of fact we can hardly take in an impression
at all, in the absence of a pre-conception of what impressions there may
possibly be.
When we talk of reality 'independent' of human thinking, then, it seems
a thing very hard to find. It reduces to the notion of what is just
entering into experience, and yet to be named, or else to some imagined
aboriginal presence in experience, before any belief about the presence
had arisen, before any human conception had been applied. It is what is
absolutely dumb and evanescent, the merely ideal limit of our minds.
We may glimpse it, but we never grasp it; what we grasp is always some
substitute for it which previous human thinking has peptonized and
cooked for our consumption. If so vulgar an expression were allowed us,
we might say that wherever we find it, it has been already FAKED. This
is what Mr. Schiller has in mind when he calls independent reality a
mere unresisting [u lambda nu], which IS only to be made over by us.
That is Mr. Schiller's belief about the sensible core of reality.
We 'encounter' it (in Mr. Bradley's words) but don't possess it.
Superficially this sounds like Kant's view; but between categories
fulminated before nature began, and categories gradually forming
themselves in nature's presence, the whole chasm between rationalism and
empiricism yawns. To the genuine 'Kantianer' Schiller will always be to
Kant as a satyr to Hyperion.
Other pragmatists may reach more positive beliefs about the sensible
core of reality. They may think to get at it in its independent nature,
by peeling off the successive man-made wrappings. They may make theories
that tell us where it comes from and all about it; and if these theories
work satisfactorily they will be true. The transcendental idealists say
there is no core, the finally completed wrapping being reality and truth
in one. Scholasticism still teaches that the core is 'matter.' Professor
Bergson, Heymans, Strong, and others, believe in the core and bravely
try to define it. Messrs. Dewey and Schiller treat it as a 'limit.'
Which is the truer of all these diverse accounts, or of others
comparable with them, unless it be the one that finally proves the most
satisfactory? On the one hand there will stand reality, on the other
an account of it which proves impossible to better or to alter. If
the impossibility prove permanent, the truth of the account will be
absolute. Other content of truth than this I can find nowhere. If the
anti-pragmatists have any other meaning, let them for heaven's sake
reveal it, let them grant us access to it!
Not BEING reality, but only our belief ABOUT reality, it will contain
human elements, but these will KNOW the non-human element, in the only
sense in which there can be knowledge of anything. Does the river make
its banks, or do the banks make the river? Does a man walk with his
right leg or with his left leg more essentially? Just as impossible may
it be to separate the real from the human factors in the growth of our
cognitive experience.
Let this stand as a first brief indication of the humanistic position.
Does it seem paradoxical? If so, I will try to make it plausible by a
few illustrations, which will lead to a fuller acquaintance with the
subject.
In many familiar objects everyone will recognize the human element. We
conceive a given reality in this way or in that, to suit our purpose,
and the reality passively submits to the conception. You can take the
number 27 as the cube of 3, or as the product of 3 and 9, or as 26 PLUS
1, or 100 MINUS 73, or in countless other ways, of which one will be
just as true as another. You can take a chessboard as black squares on
a white ground, or as white squares on a black ground, and neither
conception is a false one. You can treat the adjoined figure [Figure of
a 'Star of David'] as a star, as two big triangles crossing each other,
as a hexagon with legs set up on its angles, as six equal triangles
hanging together by their tips, etc. All these treatments are true
treatments--the sensible THAT upon the paper resists no one of them. You
can say of a line that it runs east, or you can say that it runs west,
and the line per se accepts both descriptions without rebelling at the
inconsistency.
We carve out groups of stars in the heavens, and call them
constellations, and the stars patiently suffer us to do so--tho if they
knew what we were doing, some of them might feel much surprised at the
partners we had given them. We name the same constellation diversely, as
Charles's Wain, the Great Bear, or the Dipper. None of the names will be
false, and one will be as true as another, for all are applicable.
In all these cases we humanly make an addition to some sensible reality,
and that reality tolerates the addition. All the additions 'agree' with
the reality; they fit it, while they build it out. No one of them is
false. Which may be treated as the more true, depends altogether on
the human use of it. If the 27 is a number of dollars which I find in
a drawer where I had left 28, it is 28 minus 1. If it is the number of
inches in a shelf which I wish to insert into a cupboard 26 inches wide,
it is 26 plus 1. If I wish to ennoble the heavens by the constellations
I see there, 'Charles's Wain' would be more true than 'Dipper.' My
friend Frederick Myers was humorously indignant that that prodigious
star-group should remind us Americans of nothing but a culinary utensil.
What shall we call a THING anyhow? It seems quite arbitrary, for we
carve out everything, just as we carve out constellations, to suit our
human purposes. For me, this whole 'audience' is one thing, which grows
now restless, now attentive. I have no use at present for its individual
units, so I don't consider them. So of an 'army,' of a 'nation.' But
in your own eyes, ladies and gentlemen, to call you 'audience' is an
accidental way of taking you. The permanently real things for you are
your individual persons. To an anatomist, again, those persons are but
organisms, and the real things are the organs. Not the organs, so much
as their constituent cells, say the histologists; not the cells, but
their molecules, say in turn the chemists.
We break the flux of sensible reality into things, then, at our will. We
create the subjects of our true as well as of our false propositions.
We create the predicates also. Many of the predicates of things express
only the relations of the things to us and to our feelings. Such
predicates of course are human additions. Caesar crossed the Rubicon,
and was a menace to Rome's freedom. He is also an American school-room
pest, made into one by the reaction of our schoolboys on his writings.
The added predicate is as true of him as the earlier ones.
You see how naturally one comes to the humanistic principle: you can't
weed out the human contribution. Our nouns and adjectives are all
humanized heirlooms, and in the theories we build them into, the inner
order and arrangement is wholly dictated by human considerations,
intellectual consistency being one of them. Mathematics and logic
themselves are fermenting with human rearrangements; physics, astronomy
and biology follow massive cues of preference. We plunge forward into
the field of fresh experience with the beliefs our ancestors and we have
made already; these determine what we notice; what we notice determines
what we do; what we do again determines what we experience; so from
one thing to another, altho the stubborn fact remains that there IS a
sensible flux, what is true of it seems from first to last to be largely
a matter of our own creation.
We build the flux out inevitably. The great question is: does it,
with our additions, rise or fall in value? Are the additions WORTHY or
UNWORTHY? Suppose a universe composed of seven stars, and nothing else
but three human witnesses and their critic. One witness names the
stars 'Great Bear'; one calls them 'Charles's Wain'; one calls them the
'Dipper.' Which human addition has made the best universe of the given
stellar material? If Frederick Myers were the critic, he would have no
hesitation in 'turning-down' the American witness.
Lotze has in several places made a deep suggestion. We naively assume,
he says, a relation between reality and our minds which may be just the
opposite of the true one. Reality, we naturally think, stands ready-made
and complete, and our intellects supervene with the one simple duty
of describing it as it is already. But may not our descriptions, Lotze
asks, be themselves important additions to reality? And may not previous
reality itself be there, far less for the purpose of reappearing
unaltered in our knowledge, than for the very purpose of stimulating
our minds to such additions as shall enhance the universe's total value.
"Die erhohung des vorgefundenen daseins" is a phrase used by Professor
Eucken somewhere, which reminds one of this suggestion by the great
Lotze.
It is identically our pragmatistic conception. In our cognitive as well
as in our active life we are creative. We ADD, both to the subject and
to the predicate part of reality. The world stands really malleable,
waiting to receive its final touches at our hands. Like the kingdom of
heaven, it suffers human violence willingly. Man ENGENDERS truths upon
it.
No one can deny that such a role would add both to our dignity and to
our responsibility as thinkers. To some of us it proves a most inspiring
notion. Signer Papini, the leader of italian pragmatism, grows fairly
dithyrambic over the view that it opens, of man's divinely-creative
functions.
The import of the difference between pragmatism and rationalism is now
in sight throughout its whole extent. The essential contrast is that for
rationalism reality is ready-made and complete from all eternity,
while for pragmatism it is still in the making, and awaits part of its
complexion from the future. On the one side the universe is absolutely
secure, on the other it is still pursuing its adventures.
We have got into rather deep water with this humanistic view, and it is
no wonder that misunderstanding gathers round it. It is accused of being
a doctrine of caprice. Mr. Bradley, for example, says that a humanist,
if he understood his own doctrine, would have to "hold any end however
perverted to be rational if I insist on it personally, and any idea
however mad to be the truth if only some one is resolved that he will
have it so." The humanist view of 'reality,' as something resisting, yet
malleable, which controls our thinking as an energy that must be
taken 'account' of incessantly (tho not necessarily merely COPIED) is
evidently a difficult one to introduce to novices. The situation reminds
me of one that I have personally gone through. I once wrote an essay on
our right to believe, which I unluckily called the WILL to Believe.
All the critics, neglecting the essay, pounced upon the title.
Psychologically it was impossible, morally it was iniquitous. The
"will to deceive," the "will to make-believe," were wittily proposed as
substitutes for it.
THE ALTERNATIVE BETWEEN PRAGMATISM AND RATIONALISM, IN THE SHAPE IN
WHICH WE NOW HAVE IT BEFORE US, IS NO LONGER A QUESTION IN THE THEORY OF
KNOWLEDGE, IT CONCERNS THE STRUCTURE OF THE UNIVERSE ITSELF.
On the pragmatist side we have only one edition of the universe,
unfinished, growing in all sorts of places, especially in the places
where thinking beings are at work.
On the rationalist side we have a universe in many editions, one real
one, the infinite folio, or edition de luxe, eternally complete; and
then the various finite editions, full of false readings, distorted and
mutilated each in its own way.
So the rival metaphysical hypotheses of pluralism and monism here come
back upon us. I will develope their differences during the remainder of
our hour.
And first let me say that it is impossible not to see a temperamental
difference at work in the choice of sides. The rationalist mind,
radically taken, is of a doctrinaire and authoritative complexion: the
phrase 'must be' is ever on its lips. The belly-band of its
universe must be tight. A radical pragmatist on the other hand is a
happy-go-lucky anarchistic sort of creature. If he had to live in a tub
like Diogenes he wouldn't mind at all if the hoops were loose and the
staves let in the sun.
Now the idea of this loose universe affects your typical rationalists
in much the same way as 'freedom of the press' might affect a veteran
official in the russian bureau of censorship; or as 'simplified
spelling' might affect an elderly schoolmistress. It affects him as
the swarm of protestant sects affects a papist onlooker. It appears
as backboneless and devoid of principle as 'opportunism' in politics
appears to an old-fashioned french legitimist, or to a fanatical
believer in the divine right of the people.
For pluralistic pragmatism, truth grows up inside of all the finite
experiences. They lean on each other, but the whole of them, if such a
whole there be, leans on nothing. All 'homes' are in finite experience;
finite experience as such is homeless. Nothing outside of the flux
secures the issue of it. It can hope salvation only from its own
intrinsic promises and potencies.
To rationalists this describes a tramp and vagrant world, adrift in
space, with neither elephant nor tortoise to plant the sole of its foot
upon. It is a set of stars hurled into heaven without even a centre of
gravity to pull against. In other spheres of life it is true that we
have got used to living in a state of relative insecurity. The authority
of 'the State,' and that of an absolute 'moral law,' have resolved
themselves into expediencies, and holy church has resolved itself into
'meeting-houses.' Not so as yet within the philosophic class-rooms.
A universe with such as US contributing to create its truth, a world
delivered to OUR opportunisms and OUR private judgments! Home-rule for
Ireland would be a millennium in comparison. We're no more fit for such
a part than the Filipinos are 'fit for self-government.' Such a world
would not be RESPECTABLE, philosophically. It is a trunk without a tag,
a dog without a collar, in the eyes of most professors of philosophy.
What then would tighten this loose universe, according to the
professors?