“shifting ground” when hard pressed? The intellectualist began, if I
remember correctly, with conceiving truth as a relation of thought
and existence; has he not, in your last objection, substituted for
this conception an identification of the bare existence or event with
truth? Which does he mean? How will he have it? The existence of the
Carboniferous age, the discovery of America by Columbus are not
truths; they are events. Some conviction, some belief, some judgment
with reference to them is necessary to introduce the category of truth
and falsity. And since the conviction, the judgment, is as matter of
fact subsequent to the event, how can its truth consist in the kind of
blank, wholesale relationship the intellectualist contends for? How
can the present belief jump out of its present skin, dive into the
past, and land upon just the one event (that _as_ past is gone forever)
which, by definition, constitutes its truth? I do not wonder the
intellectualist has much to say about “transcendence” when he comes to
dealing with the truth of judgments about the past; but why does he not
tell us how we manage to know when one thought lands straight on the
devoted head of something past and gone, while another thought comes
down on the wrong thing in the past?
_Pupil._ Well, of course, knowledge of the past is very mysterious, but
how is the pragmatist any better off?
_Teacher._ The reply to that may be inferred from what has already been
said. The past event has left effects, consequences, that are present
and that will continue in the future. Our belief about it, if genuine,
must also modify action in _some_ way and so have objective effects. If
these two sets of effects interlock harmoniously, then the judgment is
true. If perchance the past event had no discoverable consequences or
our thought of it can work out to no assignable difference anywhere,
then there is no possibility of genuine judgment.
_Pupil._ You have, perhaps, anticipated my next objection, which was
that upon the pragmatic theory (by which truth is constituted by future
consequences) there are no truths about what is past and gone, since
in respect to that ideas can make no difference. For, I suppose, you
would say that the difference made is in the effects that continue,
since ideas may work out to facilitate or to confuse our relations to
these effects. Nevertheless, I am not quite satisfied. For when I say
it is true that it rained yesterday, surely the object of my judgment
is something past, not future, while pragmatism makes all objects of
judgment future.
_Teacher: Reply._ You confuse the content of a judgment with
the _reference_ of that content. The content of any idea about
yesterday’s rain certainly involves past time, but the distinctive or
characteristic aim of judgment is none the less to give this content a
future reference and function.
_Pupil: Objection Five._ But your argument requires an absurd
identification of truth and verification. To verify ideas is to find
out that they were already true; or possessed of the truth relation
prior to its discovery in verification. But the pragmatist holds that
the act of finding out that ideas are true creates the thing that is
found. In short, you confuse the psychology of finding out with the
reality found out.
_Teacher: Reply._ Many intellectualists have now gone so far as
to admit that _verification_ is the testing of a judgment by the
consequence it imports, the difference it makes--its working. But
they still deny any organic connection between the “antecedent” truth
property of ideas and the verification (or “making true”) process.
Surely they admit either too much or too little. (i) If an idea
about a past event is already true because of some mysterious static
correspondence that it possesses to that past event, how in the world
can its truth be _proved_ by the _future consequences_ of that idea?
Why is it that the intellectualist has not produced any positive
theory about the relation of verification to his notion of truth?
(ii) Moreover, if verification consists in the experimental working
out of a belief, the intellectualist thereby admits that his _own_
theory of truth can be _known_ to be true only as it is verified by
its workings. But if the theory that truth is a ready-made static
property of judgments _is_ true, how in the world _can_ it be verified
by making any specific differences in the course of events? Everywhere
we have to proceed _as if_ the pragmatic theory were the right one.
(iii) If he admits that the pragmatic theory of verification is true,
what meaning remains to the statement that the idea had the truth
property in advance? Why, simply that it had the property of _ability
to work_--an ability revealed by its actual working. How can a given
fact be an objection to the pragmatic theory when that fact has a
definitely assignable meaning on the pragmatic theory, while upon
the anti-pragmatic theory it just has to be accepted as an ultimate,
unanalyzable fact?
As to your remark about verification being merely psychological, I have
something to say. Colleagues of mine are steadily at work in various
laboratories on various researches, forming hypotheses, experimenting,
testing, corroborating, refuting, modifying ideas. One of them, for
example, recently put an immense pendulum in place in order to repeat
and test Foucault’s experiment with reference to the earth’s rotation.
Do you regard such verification processes as merely psychological?
_Pupil._ I don’t know. Why do you ask?
_Teacher._ Because if the objector means that such experimental
provings are _merely_ psychological, he has of course relegated to the
merely psychological (wherever that may be) all the technique of all
the physical sciences--a rather high price to pay for the confutation
of the pragmatist. The intellectualist is thus in the dilemma either
of conceding to the pragmatist the whole sphere of concrete scientific
logic or else of himself regarding all science as merely subjective?
Which horn does he choose?
_Pupil: Objection Six._ I noticed a moment ago that you spoke of the
pragmatic theory of truth being true. Surely the pragmatist does not
live up to his reputation of having a sense of humor when he claims
assent to his theory on the ground that it is true. What is this but to
admit intellectualism?
_Teacher: Reply._ My son, we are evidently nearing the end. Naturally,
the pragmatist claims his theory to be true in the pragmatic sense of
truth: it works, it clears up difficulties, removes obscurities, puts
individuals into more experimental, less dogmatic, and less arbitrarily
sceptical relations to life; aligns philosophic with scientific
method; does away with self-made problems of epistemology; clarifies
and reorganizes logical theory, etc. He is quite content to have the
truth of his theory consist in its working in these various ways, and
to leave to the intellectualist the proud possession of a static,
unanalyzable, unverifiable, unworking property.
_Pupil: Objection Seven._ Nevertheless, the pragmatist is always
appealing to the judgments of others to corroborate his own judgment.
Surely this admits the principle of a judgment that is correct, true,
_in se_.
_Teacher: Reply._ The pragmatist says that judgment _is_ pragmatic,
_i.e._, originated under conditions of need for a survey and statement,
and tested by efficiency in meeting this need. And then you think
you have refuted him by saying that any appeal to judgment is
intellectualistic! Such begging of the question convinces me that the
radical difficulty of the intellectualist is that he conceives of the
pragmatist as beginning with a theory of truth, when in reality the
latter begins with a theory about judgments and meanings of which the
theory of truth is a corollary.
_Pupil: Objection Eight._ Nevertheless, you are endeavoring to convert
your opponent to a certain theory. Surely that is an intellectual
undertaking, and in theory (at least) the theoretical criterion, as Mr.
Bradley has well said, must be supreme.
_Teacher: Reply._ A little reflection will convince you that you are
going around in the same old circle. Since men have to act together,
since the individual subsists in social bonds and activities, to
convert another to a certain way of looking at things is to make social
ties and functions better adapted, more prosperous in their workings.
Only if the pragmatist held the _intellectualist’s_ position, would
he appeal to other than what is ultimately a practical need and a
practical criterion in endeavoring to convert others.
_Pupil: Objection Nine._ Still the pragmatic criterion, being
satisfactory working, is purely personal and subjective. Whatever works
so as to please me is true. Either this is your result (in which case
your reference to social relations only denotes at bottom a _number_ of
purely subjectivistic satisfactions) or else you unconsciously assume
an intellectual department of our nature that has to be satisfied; and
whose satisfaction is truth. Thereby you admit the intellectualistic
criterion.
_Teacher: Reply._ We seem to have got back to our starting-point, the
nature of satisfaction. The intellectualist seems to think that because
the pragmatist insists upon the factor of human want, purpose, and
realization in the making and testing of judgments, the impersonal
factor is therefore denied. But what the pragmatist does is to insist
that the human factor must work itself out in _co-operation_ with
the environmental factor, and that their co-adaptation _is_ both
“correspondence” and “satisfaction.” As long as the human factor
is ignored and denied, or is regarded as _merely_ psychological
(whatever, once more, that means), this human factor will assert
itself in irresponsible ways. So long as, particularly in philosophy,
a flagrantly unchastened pragmatism reigns, we shall find, as at
present, the most ambitious intellectualistic systems accepted simply
because of the personal comfort they yield those who contrive and
accept them. Once recognize the human factor, and pragmatism is at
hand to insist that the believer must accept the full consequences of
his beliefs, and that his beliefs must be tried out, through acting
upon them, to discover what is their meaning or consequence. Till so
tested, he insists that beliefs, no matter how noble and seemingly
edifying, are dogmas, not truths. Till the testing has been worked out
very completely and patiently, he holds his beliefs as but provisional,
as working hypotheses, as methods:--and he recognizes the probability
that, as additional modes of testing develop, more and more so-called
truths will be relegated to the category of working hypotheses--till
the dogmatic mind is crowded out and starved out. At present, the
ignoring by philosophers of the part played by personal education,
temperament, and preference in their philosophies is the chief source
of pretentiousness and insincerity in their systems, and is the ground
of the popular disregard for them.
_Pupil._ What you say calls to mind something of Chesterton’s that I
read recently: “I agree with the pragmatists that apparent objective
truth is not the whole matter; that there is an authoritative need to
believe the things that are necessary to the human mind. But I say
that one of those necessities precisely is a belief in objective truth.
Pragmatism is a matter of human needs and one of the first of human
needs is to be something more than a pragmatist.” You would say, if I
understand you aright, that to fall back upon a supposed necessity of
the “human mind” to believe in certain absolute truths, is to evade a
proper demand for testing the human mind and all its works.
_Teacher._ My son, I am glad to leave the last word with you. This
_enfant terrible_ of intellectualism has revealed that the chief
objection of absolutists to the pragmatic doctrine of the personal (or
“subjective”) factor in belief is that the pragmatist has spilled the
personal milk in the absolutist’s cocoanut.
BELIEFS AND EXISTENCES[26]
I
Beliefs look both ways, towards persons and toward things. They are
the original Mr. Facing-both-ways. They form or judge--justify or
condemn--the agents who entertain them and who insist upon them. They
are of things whose immediate meanings form their content. To believe
is to ascribe value, impute meaning, assign import. The collection and
interaction of these appraisals and assessments is the world of the
common man,--that is, of man as an individual and not as a professional
being or class specimen. Thus things are characters, not mere entities;
they behave and respond and provoke. In the behavior that exemplifies
and tests their character, they help and hinder; disturb and pacify;
resist and comply; are dismal and mirthful, orderly and deformed, queer
and commonplace; they agree and disagree; are better and worse.
Thus the human world, whether or no it have core and axis, has presence
and transfiguration. It means here and now, not in some transcendent
sphere. It moves, of itself, to varied incremental meaning, not to some
far off event, whether divine or diabolic. Such movement constitutes
conduct, for conduct is the working out of the commitments of belief.
That believed better is held to, asserted, affirmed, acted upon. The
moments of its crucial fulfilment are the natural “transcendentals”;
the decisive, the critical, standards of further estimation, selection,
and rejection. That believed worse is fled, resisted, transformed into
an instrument for the better. Characters, in being condensations of
belief, are thus at once the reminders and the prognostications of
weal and woe; they concrete and they regulate the terms of effective
apprehension and appropriation of things. This general regulative
function is what we mean in calling them characters, forms.
For beliefs, made in the course of existence, reciprocate by making
existence still farther, by developing it. Beliefs are not made
_by_ existence in a mechanical or logical or psychological sense.
“Reality” naturally instigates belief. It appraises itself and
through this self-appraisal manages its affairs. As things are
surcharged valuations, so “consciousness” means ways of believing and
disbelieving. It is interpretation; not merely existence aware of
itself as fact, but existence discerning, judging itself, approving and
disapproving.
This double outlook and connection of belief, its implication, on one
side, with beings who suffer and endeavor, and, its complication on
the other, with the meanings and worths of things, is its glory or
its unpardonable sin. We cannot keep connection on one side and throw
it away on the other. We cannot preserve significance and decline the
personal attitude in which it is inscribed and operative, any more than
we can succeed in making things “states” of a “consciousness” whose
business is to be an interpretation of things. Beliefs are personal
affairs, and personal affairs are adventures, and adventures are, if
you please, shady. But equally discredited, then, is the universe of
meanings. For the world has meaning as somebody’s, somebody’s at a
juncture, taken for better or worse, and you shall not have completed
your metaphysics till you have told whose world is meant and how and
what for--in what bias and to what effect. Here is a cake that is had
only by eating it, just as there is digestion only _for_ life as well
as _by_ life.
So far the standpoint of the common man. But the professional man,
the philosopher, has been largely occupied in a systematic effort
to discredit the standpoint of the common man, that is, to disable
belief as an ultimately valid principle. Philosophy is shocked at
the frank, almost brutal, evocation of beliefs by and in natural
existence, like witches out of a desert heath--at a mode of production
which is neither logical, nor physical, nor psychological, but just
natural, empirical. For modern philosophy is, as every college senior
recites, epistemology; and epistemology, as perhaps our books and
lectures sometimes forget to tell the senior, has absorbed Stoic dogma.
Passionless imperturbability, absolute detachment, complete subjection
to a ready-made and finished reality--physical it may be, mental it
may be, logical it may be--is its professed ideal. Forswearing the
reality of affection, and the gallantry of adventure, the genuineness
of the incomplete, the tentative, it has taken an oath of allegiance to
Reality, objective, universal, complete; made perhaps of atoms, perhaps
of sensations, perhaps of logical meanings. This ready-made reality,
already including everything, must of course swallow and absorb
belief, must produce it psychologically, mechanically, or logically,
according to its own nature; must in any case, instead of acquiring
aid and support from belief, resolve it into one of its own preordained
creatures, making a desert and calling it harmony, unity, totality.[27]
Philosophy has dreamed the dream of a knowledge which is other than
the propitious outgrowth of beliefs that shall develop aforetime their
ulterior implications in order to recast them, to rectify their errors,
cultivate their waste places, heal their diseases, fortify their
feeblenesses:--the dream of a knowledge that has to do with objects
having no nature save to be known.
Not that their philosophers have admitted the concrete realizability
of their scheme. On the contrary, the assertion of the absolute
“Reality” of what is empirically unrealizable is a part of the scheme;
the ideal of a universe of pure, cognitional objects, fixed elements
in fixed relations. Sensationalist and idealist, positivist and
transcendentalist, materialist and spiritualist, defining this object
in as many differing ways as they have different conceptions of the
ideal and method of knowledge, are at one in their devotion to an
identification of Reality with something that connects monopolistically
with passionless knowledge, belief purged of all personal reference,
origin, and outlook.[28]
What is to be said of this attempt to sever the cord which naturally
binds together personal attitudes and the meaning of things? This much
at least: the effort to extract meanings, values, from the beliefs that
ascribe them, and to give the former absolute metaphysical validity
while the latter are sent to wander as scapegoats in the wilderness
of mere phenomena, is an attempt, which, as long as “our interest’s
on the dangerous edge of things,” will attract an admiring, even if
suspicious, audience. Moreover, we may admit that the attempt to
catch the universe of immediate experience, of action and passion,
coming and going, to damn it in its present body in order expressly
to glorify its spirit to all eternity, to validate the meaning of
beliefs by discrediting their natural existence, to attribute absolute
worth to the intent of human convictions just because of the absolute
worthlessness of their content--that the performance of this feat
of virtuosity has developed philosophy to its present wondrous, if
formidable, technique.
But can we claim more than a _succès d’estime_? Consider again the
nature of the effort. The world of immediate meanings, of the world
empirically sustained in beliefs, is to be sorted out into two
portions, metaphysically discontinuous, one of which shall alone be
good and true “Reality,” the fit material of passionless, beliefless
knowledge; while the other part, that which is excluded, shall be
referred exclusively to belief and treated as mere appearance,
purely subjective, impressions or effects in consciousness, or as
that ludicrously abject modern discovery--an epiphenomenon. And this
division into the real and the unreal is accomplished by the very
individual whom his own “absolute” results reduce to phenomenality,
in terms of the very immediate experience which is infected with
worthlessness, and on the basis of preference, of selection that are
declared to be unreal! Can the thing be done?
Anyway, the snubbed and excluded factor may always reassert itself.
The very pushing it out of “Reality” may but add to its potential
energy, and invoke a more violent recoil. When affections and
aversions, with the beliefs in which they record themselves and the
efforts they exact, are reduced to epiphenomena, dancing an idle
attendance upon a reality complete without them, to which they vainly
strive to accommodate themselves by mirroring, then may the emotions
flagrantly burst forth with the claim that, as a friend of mine puts
it, reason is _only_ a fig leaf for _their_ nakedness. When one
man says that need, uncertainty, choice, novelty, and strife have
no place in Reality, which is made up wholly of established things
behaving by foregone rules, then may another man be provoked to reply
that all such fixities, whether named atoms or God, whether they be
fixtures of a sensational, a positivistic, or an idealistic system,
have existence and import only in the problems, needs, struggles, and
instrumentalities of conscious agents and patients. For home rule may
be found in the unwritten efficacious constitution of experience.
That contemporaneously we are in the presence of such a reaction is
apparent. Let us, in pursuit of our topic, inquire how it came about
and why it takes the form that it takes. This consideration may not
only occupy the hour, but may help diagram some future parallelogram
of forces. The account calls for some sketching (1) of the historical
tendencies which have shaped the situation in which a Stoic theory of
knowledge claims metaphysical monopoly, and (2) of the tendencies that
have furnished the despised principle of belief opportunity and means
of reassertion.
II
Imagination readily travels to a period when a gospel of intense,
and, one may say, deliberate passionate disturbance appeared to be
conquering the Stoic ideal of passionless reason; when the demand
for individual assertion by faith against the established, embodied
objective order was seemingly subduing the idea of the total
subordination of the individual to the universal. By what course
of events came about the dramatic reversal, in which an ethically
conquered Stoicism became the conqueror, epistemologically, of
Christianity?
How are our imaginations haunted by the idea of what might have
happened if Christianity had found ready to its hand intellectual
formulations corresponding to its practical proclamations!