it. Something unexposed to accident, something eternal and unalterable.
The mutable in experience must be founded on immutability. Behind our de
facto world, our world in act, there must be a de jure duplicate fixed
and previous, with all that can happen here already there in posse,
every drop of blood, every smallest item, appointed and provided,
stamped and branded, without chance of variation. The negatives that
haunt our ideals here below must be themselves negated in the absolutely
Real. This alone makes the universe solid. This is the resting deep.
We live upon the stormy surface; but with this our anchor holds, for it
grapples rocky bottom. This is Wordsworth's "central peace subsisting at
the heart of endless agitation." This is Vivekananda's mystical One of
which I read to you. This is Reality with the big R, reality that makes
the timeless claim, reality to which defeat can't happen. This is
what the men of principles, and in general all the men whom I called
tender-minded in my first lecture, think themselves obliged to
postulate.
And this, exactly this, is what the tough-minded of that lecture find
themselves moved to call a piece of perverse abstraction-worship. The
tough-minded are the men whose alpha and omega are FACTS. Behind the
bare phenomenal facts, as my tough-minded old friend Chauncey Wright,
the great Harvard empiricist of my youth, used to say, there is NOTHING.
When a rationalist insists that behind the facts there is the GROUND of
the facts, the POSSIBILITY of the facts, the tougher empiricists accuse
him of taking the mere name and nature of a fact and clapping it behind
the fact as a duplicate entity to make it possible. That such sham
grounds are often invoked is notorious. At a surgical operation I heard
a bystander ask a doctor why the patient breathed so deeply. "Because
ether is a respiratory stimulant," the doctor answered. "Ah!" said the
questioner, as if relieved by the explanation. But this is like saying
that cyanide of potassium kills because it is a 'poison,' or that it is
so cold to-night because it is 'winter,' or that we have five fingers
because we are 'pentadactyls.' These are but names for the facts,
taken from the facts, and then treated as previous and explanatory.
The tender-minded notion of an absolute reality is, according to the
radically tough-minded, framed on just this pattern. It is but our
summarizing name for the whole spread-out and strung-along mass of
phenomena, treated as if it were a different entity, both one and
previous.
You see how differently people take things. The world we live in exists
diffused and distributed, in the form of an indefinitely numerous lot of
eaches, coherent in all sorts of ways and degrees; and the tough-minded
are perfectly willing to keep them at that valuation. They can stand
that kind of world, their temper being well adapted to its insecurity.
Not so the tender-minded party. They must back the world we find
ourselves born into by "another and a better" world in which the eaches
form an All and the All a One that logically presupposes, co-implicates,
and secures each EACH without exception.
Must we as pragmatists be radically tough-minded? or can we treat
the absolute edition of the world as a legitimate hypothesis? It is
certainly legitimate, for it is thinkable, whether we take it in its
abstract or in its concrete shape.
By taking it abstractly I mean placing it behind our finite life as we
place the word 'winter' behind to-night's cold weather. 'Winter' is
only the name for a certain number of days which we find generally
characterized by cold weather, but it guarantees nothing in that line,
for our thermometer to-morrow may soar into the 70's. Nevertheless
the word is a useful one to plunge forward with into the stream of our
experience. It cuts off certain probabilities and sets up others: you
can put away your straw-hats; you can unpack your arctics. It is a
summary of things to look for. It names a part of nature's habits,
and gets you ready for their continuation. It is a definite instrument
abstracted from experience, a conceptual reality that you must take
account of, and which reflects you totally back into sensible
realities. The pragmatist is the last person to deny the reality of such
abstractions. They are so much past experience funded.
But taking the absolute edition of the world concretely means a
different hypothesis. Rationalists take it concretely and OPPOSE it to
the world's finite editions. They give it a particular nature. It is
perfect, finished. Everything known there is known along with everything
else; here, where ignorance reigns, far otherwise. If there is want
there, there also is the satisfaction provided. Here all is process;
that world is timeless. Possibilities obtain in our world; in the
absolute world, where all that is NOT is from eternity impossible,
and all that IS is necessary, the category of possibility has no
application. In this world crimes and horrors are regrettable. In that
totalized world regret obtains not, for "the existence of ill in the
temporal order is the very condition of the perfection of the eternal
order."
Once more, either hypothesis is legitimate in pragmatist eyes, for
either has its uses. Abstractly, or taken like the word winter, as a
memorandum of past experience that orients us towards the future, the
notion of the absolute world is indispensable. Concretely taken, it is
also indispensable, at least to certain minds, for it determines them
religiously, being often a thing to change their lives by, and by
changing their lives, to change whatever in the outer order depends on
them.
We cannot therefore methodically join the tough minds in their rejection
of the whole notion of a world beyond our finite experience. One
misunderstanding of pragmatism is to identify it with positivistic
tough-mindedness, to suppose that it scorns every rationalistic notion
as so much jabber and gesticulation, that it loves intellectual anarchy
as such and prefers a sort of wolf-world absolutely unpent and wild
and without a master or a collar to any philosophic class-room
product, whatsoever. I have said so much in these lectures against
the over-tender forms of rationalism, that I am prepared for some
misunderstanding here, but I confess that the amount of it that I have
found in this very audience surprises me, for I have simultaneously
defended rationalistic hypotheses so far as these re-direct you
fruitfully into experience.
For instance I receive this morning this question on a post-card: "Is a
pragmatist necessarily a complete materialist and agnostic?" One of my
oldest friends, who ought to know me better, writes me a letter that
accuses the pragmatism I am recommending, of shutting out all wider
metaphysical views and condemning us to the most terre-a-terre
naturalism. Let me read you some extracts from it.
"It seems to me," my friend writes, "that the pragmatic objection to
pragmatism lies in the fact that it might accentuate the narrowness of
narrow minds.
"Your call to the rejection of the namby-pamby and the wishy-washy is of
course inspiring. But although it is salutary and stimulating to be told
that one should be responsible for the immediate issues and bearings
of his words and thoughts, I decline to be deprived of the pleasure and
profit of dwelling also on remoter bearings and issues, and it is the
TENDENCY of pragmatism to refuse this privilege.
"In short, it seems to me that the limitations, or rather the dangers,
of the pragmatic tendency, are analogous to those which beset the unwary
followers of the 'natural sciences.' Chemistry and physics are eminently
pragmatic and many of their devotees, smugly content with the data that
their weights and measures furnish, feel an infinite pity and disdain
for all students of philosophy and meta-physics, whomsoever. And
of course everything can be expressed--after a fashion, and
'theoretically'--in terms of chemistry and physics, that is, EVERYTHING
EXCEPT THE VITAL PRINCIPLE OF THE WHOLE, and that, they say, there is no
pragmatic use in trying to express; it has no bearings--FOR THEM. I for
my part refuse to be persuaded that we cannot look beyond the obvious
pluralism of the naturalist and the pragmatist to a logical unity in
which they take no interest."
How is such a conception of the pragmatism I am advocating possible,
after my first and second lectures? I have all along been offering it
expressly as a mediator between tough-mindedness and tender-mindedness.
If the notion of a world ante rem, whether taken abstractly like the
word winter, or concretely as the hypothesis of an Absolute, can be
shown to have any consequences whatever for our life, it has a meaning.
If the meaning works, it will have SOME truth that ought to be held to
through all possible reformulations, for pragmatism.
The absolutistic hypothesis, that perfection is eternal, aboriginal, and
most real, has a perfectly definite meaning, and it works religiously.
To examine how, will be the subject of my next and final lecture.
Lecture VIII
Pragmatism and Religion
At the close of the last lecture I reminded you of the first one,
in which I had opposed tough-mindedness to tender-mindedness and
recommended pragmatism as their mediator. Tough-mindedness positively
rejects tender-mindedness's hypothesis of an eternal perfect edition of
the universe coexisting with our finite experience.
On pragmatic principles we cannot reject any hypothesis if consequences
useful to life flow from it. Universal conceptions, as things to take
account of, may be as real for pragmatism as particular sensations are.
They have indeed no meaning and no reality if they have no use. But if
they have any use they have that amount of meaning. And the meaning will
be true if the use squares well with life's other uses.
Well, the use of the Absolute is proved by the whole course of
men's religious history. The eternal arms are then beneath. Remember
Vivekananda's use of the Atman: it is indeed not a scientific use,
for we can make no particular deductions from it. It is emotional and
spiritual altogether.
It is always best to discuss things by the help of concrete examples.
Let me read therefore some of those verses entitled "To You" by Walt
Whitman--"You" of course meaning the reader or hearer of the poem
whosoever he or she may be.
Whoever you are, now I place my hand upon you, that you be my poem; I
whisper with my lips close to your ear, I have loved many women and men,
but I love none better than you.
O I have been dilatory and dumb; I should have made my way straight
to you long ago; I should have blabb'd nothing but you, I should have
chanted nothing but you.
I will leave all, and come and make the hymns of you; None have
understood you, but I understand you; None have done justice to you--you
have not done justice to yourself; None but have found you imperfect--I
only find no imperfection in you.
O I could sing such grandeurs and glories about you! You have not known
what you are--you have slumber'd upon yourself all your life; What you
have done returns already in mockeries.
But the mockeries are not you; Underneath them, and within them, I see
you lurk; I pursue you where none else has pursued you; Silence, the
desk, the flippant expression, the night, the accustom'd routine, if
these conceal you from others, or from yourself, they do not conceal you
from me; The shaved face, the unsteady eye, the impure complexion, if
these balk others, they do not balk me, The pert apparel, the deform'd
attitude, drunkenness, greed, premature death, all these I part aside.
There is no endowment in man or woman that is not tallied in you; There
is no virtue, no beauty, in man or woman, but as good is in you; No
pluck, no endurance in others, but as good is in you; No pleasure
waiting for others, but an equal pleasure waits for you.
Whoever you are! claim your own at any hazard! These shows of the
east and west are tame, compared to you; These immense meadows--these
interminable rivers--you are immense and interminable as they; You are
he or she who is master or mistress over them, Master or mistress in
your own right over Nature, elements, pain, passion, dissolution.
The hopples fall from your ankles--you find an unfailing sufficiency;
Old or young, male or female, rude, low, rejected by the rest, whatever
you are promulges itself; Through birth, life, death, burial, the means
are provided, nothing is scanted; Through angers, losses, ambition,
ignorance, ennui, what you are picks its way.
Verily a fine and moving poem, in any case, but there are two ways of
taking it, both useful.
One is the monistic way, the mystical way of pure cosmic emotion. The
glories and grandeurs, they are yours absolutely, even in the midst of
your defacements. Whatever may happen to you, whatever you may appear to
be, inwardly you are safe. Look back, LIE back, on your true principle
of being! This is the famous way of quietism, of indifferentism. Its
enemies compare it to a spiritual opium. Yet pragmatism must respect
this way, for it has massive historic vindication.
But pragmatism sees another way to be respected also, the pluralistic
way of interpreting the poem. The you so glorified, to which the hymn
is sung, may mean your better possibilities phenomenally taken, or the
specific redemptive effects even of your failures, upon yourself or
others. It may mean your loyalty to the possibilities of others whom you
admire and love so, that you are willing to accept your own poor life,
for it is that glory's partner. You can at least appreciate, applaud,
furnish the audience, of so brave a total world. Forget the low in
yourself, then, think only of the high. Identify your life therewith;
then, through angers, losses, ignorance, ennui, whatever you thus make
yourself, whatever you thus most deeply are, picks its way.
In either way of taking the poem, it encourages fidelity to ourselves.
Both ways satisfy; both sanctify the human flux. Both paint the portrait
of the YOU on a gold-background. But the background of the first way
is the static One, while in the second way it means possibles in the
plural, genuine possibles, and it has all the restlessness of that
conception.
Noble enough is either way of reading the poem; but plainly the
pluralistic way agrees with the pragmatic temper best, for it
immediately suggests an infinitely larger number of the details of
future experience to our mind. It sets definite activities in us at
work. Altho this second way seems prosaic and earthborn in comparison
with the first way, yet no one can accuse it of tough-mindedness in any
brutal sense of the term. Yet if, as pragmatists, you should positively
set up the second way AGAINST the first way, you would very likely be
misunderstood. You would be accused of denying nobler conceptions, and
of being an ally of tough-mindedness in the worst sense.
You remember the letter from a member of this audience from which I read
some extracts at our previous meeting. Let me read you an additional
extract now. It shows a vagueness in realizing the alternatives before
us which I think is very widespread.
"I believe," writes my friend and correspondent, "in pluralism; I
believe that in our search for truth we leap from one floating cake of
ice to another, on an infinite sea, and that by each of our acts we make
new truths possible and old ones impossible; I believe that each man is
responsible for making the universe better, and that if he does not do
this it will be in so far left undone.
"Yet at the same time I am willing to endure that my children should be
incurably sick and suffering (as they are not) and I myself stupid
and yet with brains enough to see my stupidity, only on one condition,
namely, that through the construction, in imagination and by reasoning,
of a RATIONAL UNITY OF ALL THINGS, I can conceive my acts and my
thoughts and my troubles as SUPPLEMENTED: BY ALL THE OTHER PHENOMENA
OF THE WORLD, AND AS FORMING--WHEN THUS SUPPLEMENTED--A SCHEME WHICH I
APPROVE AND ADOPT AS MY I OWN; and for my part I refuse to be persuaded
that we cannot look beyond the obvious pluralism of the naturalist and
pragmatist to a logical unity in which they take no interest or stock."
Such a fine expression of personal faith warms the heart of the hearer.
But how much does it clear his philosophic head? Does the writer
consistently favor the monistic, or the pluralistic, interpretation of
the world's poem? His troubles become atoned for WHEN THUS SUPPLEMENTED,
he says, supplemented, that is, by all the remedies that THE OTHER
PHENOMENA may supply. Obviously here the writer faces forward into
the particulars of experience, which he interprets in a
pluralistic-melioristic way.
But he believes himself to face backward. He speaks of what he calls
the rational UNITY of things, when all the while he really means their
possible empirical UNIFICATION. He supposes at the same time that the
pragmatist, because he criticizes rationalism's abstract One, is cut
off from the consolation of believing in the saving possibilities of
the concrete many. He fails in short to distinguish between taking the
world's perfection as a necessary principle, and taking it only as a
possible terminus ad quem.
I regard the writer of this letter as a genuine pragmatist, but as a
pragmatist sans le savoir. He appears to me as one of that numerous
class of philosophic amateurs whom I spoke of in my first lecture, as
wishing to have all the good things going, without being too careful
as to how they agree or disagree. "Rational unity of all things" is
so inspiring a formula, that he brandishes it offhand, and abstractly
accuses pluralism of conflicting with it (for the bare names do
conflict), altho concretely he means by it just the pragmatistically
unified and ameliorated world. Most of us remain in this essential
vagueness, and it is well that we should; but in the interest of
clear-headedness it is well that some of us should go farther, so I
will try now to focus a little more discriminatingly on this particular
religious point.
Is then this you of yous, this absolutely real world, this unity that
yields the moral inspiration and has the religious value, to be taken
monistically or pluralistically? Is it ante rem or in rebus? Is it a
principle or an end, an absolute or an ultimate, a first or a last? Does
it make you look forward or lie back? It is certainly worth while not to
clump the two things together, for if discriminated, they have decidedly
diverse meanings for life.
Please observe that the whole dilemma revolves pragmatically about the
notion of the world's possibilities. Intellectually, rationalism invokes
its absolute principle of unity as a ground of possibility for the
many facts. Emotionally, it sees it as a container and limiter of
possibilities, a guarantee that the upshot shall be good. Taken in this
way, the absolute makes all good things certain, and all bad things
impossible (in the eternal, namely), and may be said to transmute the
entire category of possibility into categories more secure. One sees at
this point that the great religious difference lies between the men who
insist that the world MUST AND SHALL BE, and those who are contented
with believing that the world MAY BE, saved. The whole clash of
rationalistic and empiricist religion is thus over the validity of
possibility. It is necessary therefore to begin by focusing upon that
word. What may the word 'possible' definitely mean?
To unreflecting men the possible means a sort of third estate of being,
less real than existence, more real than non-existence, a twilight
realm, a hybrid status, a limbo into which and out of which realities
ever and anon are made to pass. Such a conception is of course too
vague and nondescript to satisfy us. Here, as elsewhere, the only way to
extract a term's meaning is to use the pragmatic method on it. When you
say that a thing is possible, what difference does it make?
It makes at least this difference that if anyone calls it impossible you
can contradict him, if anyone calls it actual you can contradict HIM,
and if anyone calls it necessary you can contradict him too. But these
privileges of contradiction don't amount to much. When you say a thing
is possible, does not that make some farther difference in terms of
actual fact?
It makes at least this negative difference that if the statement be
true, it follows that there is nothing extant capable of preventing the
possible thing. The absence of real grounds of interference may thus be
said to make things not impossible, possible therefore in the bare or
abstract sense.
But most possibles are not bare, they are concretely grounded, or
well-grounded, as we say. What does this mean pragmatically? It means,
not only that there are no preventive conditions present, but that some
of the conditions of production of the possible thing actually are here.
Thus a concretely possible chicken means: (1) that the idea of chicken
contains no essential self-contradiction; (2) that no boys, skunks, or
other enemies are about; and (3) that at least an actual egg exists.
Possible chicken means actual egg--plus actual sitting hen, or
incubator, or what not. As the actual conditions approach completeness
the chicken becomes a better-and-better-grounded possibility. When the
conditions are entirely complete, it ceases to be a possibility, and
turns into an actual fact.
Let us apply this notion to the salvation of the world. What does it
pragmatically mean to say that this is possible? It means that some of
the conditions of the world's deliverance do actually exist. The more of
them there are existent, the fewer preventing conditions you can find,
the better-grounded is the salvation's possibility, the more PROBABLE
does the fact of the deliverance become.
So much for our preliminary look at possibility.
Now it would contradict the very spirit of life to say that our minds
must be indifferent and neutral in questions like that of the world's
salvation. Anyone who pretends to be neutral writes himself down here
as a fool and a sham. We all do wish to minimize the insecurity of the
universe; we are and ought to be unhappy when we regard it as exposed to
every enemy and open to every life-destroying draft. Nevertheless there
are unhappy men who think the salvation of the world impossible. Theirs
is the doctrine known as pessimism.
Optimism in turn would be the doctrine that thinks the world's salvation
inevitable.
Midway between the two there stands what may be called the doctrine of
meliorism, tho it has hitherto figured less as a doctrine than as an
attitude in human affairs. Optimism has always been the regnant DOCTRINE
in european philosophy. Pessimism was only recently introduced by
Schopenhauer and counts few systematic defenders as yet. Meliorism
treats salvation as neither inevitable nor impossible. It treats it as
a possibility, which becomes more and more of a probability the more
numerous the actual conditions of salvation become.
It is clear that pragmatism must incline towards meliorism. Some
conditions of the world's salvation are actually extant, and she cannot
possibly close her eyes to this fact: and should the residual conditions
come, salvation would become an accomplished reality. Naturally the
terms I use here are exceedingly summary. You may interpret the
word 'salvation' in any way you like, and make it as diffuse and
distributive, or as climacteric and integral a phenomenon as you please.
Take, for example, any one of us in this room with the ideals which
he cherishes, and is willing to live and work for. Every such ideal
realized will be one moment in the world's salvation. But these
particular ideals are not bare abstract possibilities. They are
grounded, they are LIVE possibilities, for we are their live champions
and pledges, and if the complementary conditions come and add
themselves, our ideals will become actual things. What now are the
complementary conditions? They are first such a mixture of things as
will in the fulness of time give us a chance, a gap that we can spring
into, and, finally, OUR ACT.
Does our act then CREATE the world's salvation so far as it makes room
for itself, so far as it leaps into the gap? Does it create, not the
whole world's salvation of course, but just so much of this as itself
covers of the world's extent?