SOME FUNDAMENTAL CHARACTERISTICS
We shall now attempt a somewhat detailed treatment of a few of the more
characteristic tendencies of Pragmatism. The following have already
been mentioned in our general sketch of its development and of the
appearance of the pragmatist philosophy in Europe and America: (1) the
attempted modification by Pragmatism of the extremes of Rationalism,
and its dissatisfaction with the rationalism of both science and
philosophy; (2) its progress from the stage of a mere practical and
experimental theory of truth to a broad humanism in which philosophy
itself becomes (like art, say) merely an important “dynamic” element
in human culture; (3) its preference in the matter of first principles
for “faith” and “experience” and a trust in our instinctive “beliefs”;
(4) its readiness to affiliate itself with the various liberal and
humanistic tendencies in human thought, such as the philosophy of
“freedom,” and the “hypothetical method” of science, modern ethical
and social idealism, the religious reaction of recent years, the
voluntaristic trend in German post-Kantian philosophy, and so on. Our
subject in this chapter, however, is rather that of the three or four
more or less characteristic assumptions and contentions upon which all
these and the many other pragmatist tendencies may be said to rest.
The first and foremost of these assumptions is the position that all
truth is “made” truth, “human” truth, truth related to human attitudes
and purposes, and that there is no “objective” or “independent”
truth, no truth “in whose establishment the function of giving human
satisfaction, in marrying previous parts of experience with newer
parts, has played no rôle.” Truths were “nothing,” as it were,
before they were “discovered,” and the most ancient truths were once
“plastic,” or merely susceptible of proof or disproof. Truth is “made”
just like “health,” or “wealth,” or “value,” and so on. Insistence, we
might say, upon this one note, along with the entire line of reflection
that it awakens in him, is really, as Dewey reminds us, the main
burden of James’s book upon _Pragmatism_. Equally characteristic is
it too of Dewey himself who is for ever reverting to his doctrine of
the factitious character of truth. There is no “fixed distinction,”
he tells us, “between the empirical values of the unreflective life
and the most abstract process of rational thought.” And to Schiller,
again, this same thought is the beginning of everything in philosophy,
for with an outspoken acceptance of this doctrine of the “formation”
of all truth, Pragmatism, he thinks, can do at least two things that
Rationalism is for ever debarred from doing: (1) distinguish adequately
“truth” from “fact,” and (2) distinguish adequately truth from error.
Whether these two things be, or be not, the consequences of the
doctrine in question [and we shall return[110] to the point] we may
perhaps accept it as, on the whole, harmonious with the teaching of
psychology about the nature of our ideas as mental habits, or about
thinking as a restrained, or a guided, activity. It is in harmony,
too, with the palpable truism that all “truth” must be truth that
some beings or other who have once “sought” truth (for some reasons
or other) have at last come to regard as satisfying their search and
their purposes. And this truism, it would seem, must remain such in
spite of, or even along with, any meaning that there may be in the idea
of what we call “God’s truth.” By this expression men understand, it
would seem, merely God’s knowledge of truths or facts of which we as
men may happen to be ignorant. But then there can have been no time in
which God can be imagined to have been ignorant of these or any other
matters. It is therefore not for Him truth as opposed to falsehood.
And then, again, this pragmatist position about all truth being “made”
truth would seem to be valid in view of the difficulty (Plato[111]
spoke of it) of reconciling God’s supposed absolute knowledge of
reality with our finite and limited apprehension of the same.[112]
The main interest, however, of pragmatists in their somewhat tiresome
insistence upon the truism that all truth is made truth is their
hostility (Locke had it in his day) to the supposed rationalist
position that there is an “_a priori_” and “objective” truth
independent altogether of human activities and human purposes.[113]
The particular object of their aversion is what Dewey[114] talks of
as “that dishonesty, that insincerity, characteristic of philosophical
discussion, that is manifested in speaking and writing as if certain
ultimate abstractions or concepts could be more real than human
purposes and human beings, and as if there could be any contradiction
between truth and purpose.” As we shall reflect at a later stage[115]
upon the rationalist theory of truth, we may, meantime, pass over this
hostility with the remark that it is, after all, only owing to certain
peculiar circumstances (those, say, of its conflict with religion and
science and custom) in the development of philosophy that its first
principles have been regarded by its votaries as the most real of
all realities. These devotees tend to forget in their zeal that the
pragmatist way of looking upon all supposed first principles--that of
the consideration of their utility in and necessity as explanations of
our common experience and its realities--is the only way of explaining
their reality, even as conceptions.
It requires to be added--so much may, indeed, have already been
inferred from the preceding chapter--that, apart from their hint about
the highest truth being necessarily inclusive of the highest human
purposes, it is by no means easy to find out from the pragmatists
what they mean by truth, or how they would define it. When the matter
is pressed home, they generally confess that their attitude is in
the main “psychological” rather than philosophical, that it is the
“making” of truth rather than its “nature” or its “contents” or its
systematic character that interests them. It is the “dynamical” point
of view, as they put it, that is essential to them. And out of the
sphere and the associations of this contention they do not really
travel. They will tell you what it means to hit upon this particular
way of looking upon truth, and how stimulating it is to attempt to do
so. And they will give you many more or less artificial and tentative,
external, descriptions of their philosophy by saying that ideas are
“made for man,” and “not man for ideas,” and so on. But, although they
deny both the common-sense view that truth is a “correspondence” with
external reality, and the rationalist view that truth is a “coherent
system” on its own account, they never define truth any more than
do their opponents the rationalists. It is a “commerce” and not a
“correspondence,” they contend, a commerce[116] between certain parts
of our experience and certain other parts, or a commerce between our
ideas and our purposes, but not a commerce with reality, for the
making of truth is itself, in their eyes, the making of reality.
Secondly, it is another familiar characteristic of Pragmatism that,
although it fails to give a satisfying account either of truth
or reality, the one thing of which it is for ever talking of, as
fundamental to our entire life as men, is _belief_.[117] This is the
one thing upon which it makes everything else to hang--all knowledge
and all action and all theory. And it is, of course, its manifest
acceptance of belief as a fundamental principle of our human life,
and as a true measure of reality, that has given to Pragmatism its
religious atmosphere.[118] It is this that has made it such a welcome
and such a credible creed to so many disillusioned and free-thinking
people to-day, as well as to so many of the faithful and the orthodox.
“For, in principle, Pragmatism overcomes the old antithesis of Faith
and Reason. It shows, on the one hand, that faith must underlie all
reason and pervade it, nay, that at bottom rationality itself is the
supremest postulate of Faith.”[119] “Truth,” again, as James reminds
us, “lives in fact for the most part on a credit system. Our thoughts
and beliefs [how literally true this is!] pass so long as nobody
challenges them, just as bank-notes pass so long as nobody refuses
them.”[120]
Now it requires but the reflection of a moment to see that the various
facts and considerations upon which the two last quotations, and the
general devotion of Pragmatism to “belief,” both repose, are all
distinctly in favour of the acceptability of Pragmatism at the present
time. There is nothing in which people in general are more interested
at the beginning of this twentieth century than in belief. It is
this, for example, that explains such a thing as the great success
to-day in our English-speaking world of such an enterprise as the
_Hibbert Journal of Philosophy and Religion_, or the still greater
phenomenon of the world-wide interest of the hour in the subject of
comparative religion. Most modern men, the writer is inclined to think,
believe[121] a great deal more than they know, the chief difficulty
about this fact being that there is no recognized way of expressing
it in our science or in our philosophy, or of acting upon it in our
behaviour in society. It is, however, only the undue prominence of
mathematical and physical science since the time of Descartes[122]
that has made evidence and demonstration the main consideration of
philosophy instead of belief, man’s true and fundamental estimate of
reality.
We have already[123] pointed out that one of the main results of
Pragmatism is the acceptance on the part of its leading upholders
of our fundamental beliefs about the ultimately real and about the
realization of our most deeply cherished purposes. In fact, reality in
general is for them, we may say--in the absence from their writings of
any better description,--simply that which we can “will,” or “believe
in,” as the basis for action and for conscious “creative” effort, or
constructive effort. As James himself puts it in his book on _The
Meaning of Truth_: “Since the only realities we can talk about are
objects believed in, the pragmatist, whenever he says ‘reality,’
means in the first instance what may count for the man himself as
a reality, what he believes at the moment to be such. Sometimes
the reality is a concrete sensible presence.... Or his idea may be
that of an abstract relation, say of that between the sides and the
hypotenuse of a triangle.... Each reality verifies and validates its
own idea exclusively; and in each case the verification consists in the
satisfactorily-ending consequences, mental or physical, which the idea
was to set up.”
We shall later have to refer to the absence from Pragmatism of
a criterion for achievement and for “consequences.” And, as far
as philosophical theories are concerned, these are all, to the
pragmatists, true or false simply in so far as they are practically
credible or not. James is quite explicit, for example, about Pragmatism
itself in this regard. “No pragmatist,” he holds, “can warrant the
objective truth of what he says about the universe; he can only
believe it.”[124] There is faith, in short, for the pragmatist, in
every act, in every phase of thought, the faith that is implied in
the realization of the purposes that underlie our attempted acts and
thoughts. They eagerly accept, for example, the important doctrine of
the modern logician, and the modern psychologist, as to the presence of
volition in all “affirmation” and “judgment,” seeing that in every case
of affirmation there is a more or less active readjustment of our minds
(or our bodies) to what either stimulates or impedes our activity.
A third outstanding characteristic of Pragmatism is the “deeper” view
of human nature upon which, in contrast to Rationalism, it supposes
itself to rest, and which it seeks to vindicate. It is this supposedly
deeper view of human nature for which it is confessedly pleading when
it insists, as it is fond of doing, upon the connexion of philosophy
with the various theoretical and practical pursuits of mankind, with
sciences like biology and psychology, and with social reform,[125]
and so on. We have, it may be remembered, already intimated that even
in practical America men have had their doubts about the depth of a
philosophy that looks upon man as made in the main for action and
achievement instead of, let us say, the realization of his higher
nature. Still, few of the readers of James can have altogether
failed to appreciate the significance of some of the many eloquent
and suggestive paragraphs he has written upon the limitations of the
rationalistic “temperament” and of its unblushing sacrifice of the
entire wealth of human nature and of the various pulsating interests of
men to the imaginary exigencies of abstract logic and “system.”[126]
To him and to his colleagues (as to Socrates, for that part of it)
man is firstly a being who has habits and purposes, and who can,
to some extent, control the various forces of his nature through
_true knowledge_, and in this very discrepancy between the real and
the ideal does there lie for the pragmatists the entire problem of
philosophy--the problem of Plato, that of the attainment of true virtue
through true knowledge.
Deferring, however, the question of the success of the pragmatists in
this matter of the unfolding of the true relation between philosophy
and human nature, let us think of a few of the teachings of experience
upon this truly important and inevitable relation, which no philosophy
indeed can for one moment afford to neglect. Insistence upon these
facts or teachings and upon the reflections and criticisms to which
they naturally give rise is certainly a deeply marked characteristic of
Pragmatism.
Man, as has often been pointed out, is endowed with the power of
reflection, not so much to enable him to understand the world either
as a whole or in its detailed workings as to assist him in the further
evolution of his life. His beliefs and choices and his spiritual
culture are all, as it were, forces and influences in this direction.
Indeed, it is always the soul or the life principle that is the
important thing in any individual or any people, so far as a place in
the world (or in “history”) is concerned.
Philosophers, as well as other men, often exchange (in the words of
Lecky) the “love of truth” as such for the love of “_the_ truth,” that
is to say, for the love of the system and the social arrangements that
best suit their interests as thinkers. And they too are just as eager
as other men for discipleship and influence and honour. Knowledge with
them, in other words, means, as Bacon put it, “control”; and even with
them it does not, and cannot, remain at the stage of mere cognition. It
becomes in the end a conviction or a belief. And thus the philosopher
with his system (even a Plato, or a Hegel) is after all but a part of
the universe, to be judged as such, along with other lives and other
systems--a circumstance hit off early in the nineteenth century by
German students when they used to talk of one’s being able (in Berlin)
to see the _Welt-Geist_ (Hegel) “taking a walk” in the _Thiergarten_.
Reality again, so far as either life or science is concerned, means for
every man that in which he is most fundamentally interested--ions and
radium to the physicist of the hour, life to the biologist, God to the
theologian, progress to the philanthropist, and so on.
Further, mankind in general is not likely to abandon its habit of
estimating all systems of thought and philosophy from the point of view
of their value as keys, or aids, to the problem of the meaning and the
development of life as a whole. There is no abstract “truth” or “good”
or “beauty” apart from the lives of beings who contemplate, and who
seek to create, such things as truth and goodness and beauty.
To understand knowledge and intellect, again, we must indeed look at
them in their actual development in connexion with the total vital or
personal activity either of the average or even of the exceptional
individual. And instead of regarding the affections and the emotions as
inimical to knowledge, or as secondary and inferior to it, we ought to
remember that they rest in general upon a broader and deeper attitude
to reality than does either the perception of the senses[127] or the
critical analysis of the understanding. In both of these cases is the
knowledge that we attain to limited in the main either to what is
before us under the conditions of time and space, or to particular
aspects of things that we mark off, or separate, from the totality of
things. As Bergson reminds us, we “desire” and “will” with the “whole”
of our past, but “think” only with “part” of it. Small wonder then that
James seeks to connect such a broad phenomenon as religion with many of
the unconscious factors (they are not all merely “biological”) in the
depth of our personality. Some of the instincts and the phenomena that
we encounter there are things that transcend altogether the world that
is within the scope of our senses or the reasoning faculties.
Truth, too, grows from age to age, and is simply the formulated
knowledge humanity has of itself and its environment. And errors
disappear, not so much in consequence of their logical refutation, as
in consequence of their inutility and of their inability to control the
life and thought of the free man. Readers of Schopenhauer will remember
his frequent insistence upon this point of the gradual dissidence and
disappearance of error, in place of its summary refutation.
Our “reactions” upon reality are certainly part of what we mean by
“reality,” and our philosophy is only too truly “the history of our
heart and life” as well as that of our intellectual activity. The
historian of philosophy invariably acts upon a recognition of the
personal and the national and the epochal influence in the evolution of
every philosophical system. And even the new, or the fuller conception
of life to which a given genius may attain at some stage or other of
human civilization will still inevitably, in its turn, give place to a
newer or a more perfect system.
Now Pragmatism is doubtless at fault in seeking to create the
impression that Rationalism would seek to deny any, or all, of those
characteristic facts of human nature. Still, it is to some extent
justified in insisting upon their importance in view of the sharp
conflict (we shall later refer to it) that is often supposed to exist
between the theoretical and the practical interests of mankind,
and that Rationalism sometimes seems to accept with comparative
equanimity.[128] What Pragmatism is itself most of all seeking after is
a view of human nature, and of things generally, in which the fullest
justice is done to the facts upon which this very real conflict[129] of
modern times may be said to rest.
A fourth characteristic of Pragmatism is its notorious
“anti-intellectualism,”[130] its hostility to the merely dialectical
use of terms and concepts and categories,[131] to argumentation that
is unduly detached from the facts and the needs of our concrete human
experience. This anti-intellectualism we prefer meantime to consider
not so much in itself and on its own account (if this be possible
with a negative creed) as in the light of the results it has had upon
philosophy. There is, for example, the general clearing of the ground
that has undoubtedly taken place as to the actual or the possible
meaning of many terms or conceptions that have long been current
with the transcendentalists, such as “pure thought,” the “Absolute,”
“truth” in and for itself, philosophy as the “completely rational”
interpretation of experience, and so on. And along with this clearing
of the ground there are (and also in consequence of the pragmatist
movement) a great many recent, striking concessions of Rationalism
to practical, and to common-sense, ways of looking at things, the
very existence of which cannot but have an important effect upon the
philosophy of the near future. Among some of the more typical of these
are the following:
From Mr. F. H. Bradley we have the emphatic declarations that
the principle of dialectical opposition or the principle of
“Non-Contradiction” (formerly, to himself and his followers, the “rule
of the game” in philosophy) “does not settle anything about the nature
of reality”; that “truth” is an “hypothesis,” and that “except as a
means to a foreign end it is useless and impossible”; and “when we
judge truth by its own standard it is defective because it fails to
include all the facts,”[132] and because its contents “cannot be made
intelligible throughout and entirely”; that “no truth is idle,” and
that “all truth” has “practical” and æsthetic “consequences”; that
there is “no such existing thing as pure thought”;[133] that we cannot
separate truth and practice; that “absolute certainty is not requisite
for working purposes”; that it is a “superstition[134] to think that
the intellect is the highest part of us,” and that it is well to
attack a one-sided “intellectualism”; that both “intellectualism”
and “voluntarism” are “one-sided,” and that he has no “objection to
identifying reality with goodness or satisfaction, so long as this
does not mean merely practical satisfaction.”[135] Then from this same
author comes the following familiar statement about philosophy as a
whole: “Philosophy always will be hard, and what it promises in the
end is no clear vision nor any complete understanding or vision, but
its certain reward is a continual and a heightened appreciation [this
is the result of science as well as of philosophy] of the ineffable
mystery of life, of life in all its complexities and all its unity and
all its worth.”[136]
Equally typical and equally important is the following concession from
Professor Taylor, although, of course, to many people it would seem no
concession at all, but rather the mere statement of a fact, which our
Neo-Hegelians have only made themselves ridiculous by seeming to have
so long overlooked: “Mere truth for the intellect can never be quite
the same as ultimate reality. For in mere truth we get reality only in
its intellectual aspect, as that which affords a higher satisfaction to
thought’s demand for consistency and systematic unity in its object.
And as we have seen, this demand can never be quite satisfied by
thought itself.[137] For thought, to remain thought, must always be
something less than the whole reality which it knows.”[138]
And we may add also from Professor Taylor the following declaration
in respect of the notorious inability of Neo-Hegelian Rationalism
to furnish the average man with a theory of reality in the
contemplation of which he can find at least an adequate motive to
conscious effort and achievement: “Quite apart from the facts, due
to personal shortcomings and confusions, it is inherent in the
nature of metaphysical study that it can make no positive addition
to our information, and can itself supply no motive for practical
endeavour.”[139]
Many of those findings are obviously so harmonious with some of the
more familiar formulas of the pragmatists that there would seem
to be ample warrant for associating them with the results of the
pragmatist movement. This is particularly the case, it would seem,
with the concession of Mr. Bradley with respect of the “practical”
or “hypothetical” conception that we ought to entertain of “truth”
and “thinking,” and also with the strictures passed by him upon “mere
truth” and “mere intellectualism,” and with Professor Taylor’s position
in respect of the inadequacy of the rationalist theory of reality, as
in no sense a “dynamic” or an “incentive” for action. And we might well
regard Professor Taylor’s finding in respect of mere systematic truth
or the “Absolute” (for they are the same thing to him) as confirmatory
of Dr. Schiller’s important contention that “in Absolutism” the two
“poles” of the “moral” and the “intellectual” character of the Deity
“fall apart.” This means, we will remember, that the truth of abstract
intellectualism is not the truth for action,[140] that absolutism
is not able to effect or harmonize between the truth of systematic
knowledge and moral truth--if, indeed, there be any such thing as moral
truth on the basis of a pure Rationalism.
To be sure, both the extent and even the reality of all this supposed
cession of ground in philosophy to the pragmatists has been doubted
and denied by the representatives of Rationalism. They would be
questioned, too, by many sober thinkers and scholars who have long
regarded Hegelian intellectualism and pragmatist “voluntarism” as
extremes in philosophy, as inimical, both of them, to the interests
of a true and catholic conception of philosophy. The latter, as we
know from Aristotle, should be inclusive of the realities both of the
intellectual and the practical life.
Pragmatist criticisms of Rationalism, again, may fairly be claimed to
have been to a large extent anticipated by the independent findings
of living idealist thinkers like Professors Pringle-Pattison,
Baillie, Jones, and others, in respect of the supposed extreme claims
of Hegelianism, as well as by similar findings and independent
constructive efforts on the part of the recent group of the Oxford
Personal Idealists.[141] That there is still a place for pragmatist
anti-intellectualism is evidently the conclusion to be drawn from such
things as the present wide acceptance of the philosophy of Bergson, or
the recent declarations of Mr. Bradley that we are justified “in the
intelligent refusal to accept as final an theoretical criterion which
actually so far exists,” and that the “action of narrow consistency
must be definitely given up.”
The reflection ought, moreover, to be inserted here that even if
Pragmatism has been of some possible service in bringing forth from
rationalists some of their many recent confessions of the limitations
of an abstract intellectualism, it is not at all unlikely that
Rationalism in its turn may succeed in convicting Pragmatism of an
undue emphasis[142] upon volition and action and upon merely practical
truth.
We shall now terminate the foregoing characterization of Pragmatism
by a reference to two or three other specific things for which it
may, with more or less justice, be supposed to stand in philosophy.
These are (1) the repudiation of the “correspondence view”[143] of
the relation of truth to reality, (2) the rejection of the idea of
there being any ultimate or rigid distinction between “appearance” and
“reality,” and (3) the reaffirmation of the “teleological” point of
view as characteristic of philosophy in distinction from science.
As for (1) it has already been pointed out that this idea of the
misleading character of the ordinary “correspondence notion” of truth
is claimed by pragmatists as an important result of their proposal
to test truth by the standard of the consequences involved in its
acceptance.[144] The ordinary reader may not, to be sure, be aware
of the many difficulties that are apt to arise in philosophy from an
apparent acceptance of the common-sense notion of truth as somehow
simply a duplicate or a “copy” of external reality. There is the
difficulty, say, of our ever being able to prove such a correspondence
without being (or “going”) somehow beyond both the truth and the
reality in question, so as to be able to detect either coincidence or
discrepancy. Or, we might again require some bridge between the ideas
in our minds and the supposed reality outside them--“sensations” say,
or “experiences,” something, in other words, that would be accepted
as “given” and indubitable both by idealists and realists. And there
would be the difficulty, too, of saying whether we have to begin for
the purposes of all reflective study with what is within consciousness
or with what is outside it--in matter say, or in things. And if the
former, how we can ever get to the latter, and _vice versa_. And
so on with the many kindred subtleties that have divided thinkers
into idealists and realists and conceptualists, monists, dualists,
parallelists, and so on.
Now Pragmatism certainly does well in proposing to steer clear of all
such difficulties and pitfalls of the ordinary “correspondence notion.”
And as we shall immediately refer to its own working philosophy in the
matter, we shall meantime pass over this mere point of its rejection
of the “correspondence notion” with one or two remarks of a critical
nature, (1) Unfortunately for the pragmatists the rejection of the
correspondence notion is just as important a feature of Idealism[145]
as it is of Pragmatism. The latter system therefore can lay no claim
to any uniqueness or superiority in this connexion. (2) Pragmatism, as
we may perhaps see, cannot maintain its position that the distinction
between “idea” and “object” is one “within experience itself” (rather
than a distinction between experience and something supposedly outside
it) without travelling further in the direction of Idealism[146] than
it has hitherto been prepared to do. By such a travelling in the
direction of Idealism we mean a far more thorough-going recognition
of the part played in the making of reality by the “personal” factor,
than it has as yet contemplated either in its “instrumentalism” or in
its “radical empiricism.” (3) There is, after all, an element of truth
in the correspondence notion to which Pragmatism fails to do justice.
We shall refer to this failure in a subsequent chapter[147] when again
looking into its theory of truth and reality.
Despite these objections there is, however, at least one particular
respect in regard to which Pragmatism may legitimately claim some
credit for its rejection of the correspondence notion. This is its
insistence that the truth is not (as it must be on the correspondence
theory) a “datum” or a “presentation,” not something given to us by
the various objects and things without us, or by their supposed effects
upon our senses and our memory and our understanding. It rather, on the
contrary, maintains Pragmatism, a “construction” on the part of the
mind, an attitude of our “expectant” (or “believing”) consciousness,
into which our own reactions upon things enter at least as much as do
their supposed effects and impressions upon us. Of course the many
difficulties of this thorny subject are by no means cleared up by this
mere indication of the attitude of Pragmatism, and we shall return in
a later chapter[148] to this idea of truth as a construction of the
mind instead of a datum, taking care at the same time, however, to
refer to the failure of which we have spoken on the part of Pragmatism
to recognize the element of truth that is still contained in the
correspondence notion.
(2) The rejection of the idea of any rigid, or ultimate distinction
between “appearance” and “reality.” This is a still broader rejection
than the one to which we have just referred, and may, therefore, be
thought of as another more or less fundamental reason for the rejection
either of the copy or of the correspondence theory of truth. The
reality of things, as Pragmatism conceives it, is not something already
“fixed” and “determined,” but rather, something that is “plastic” and
“modifiable,” something that is, in fact, undergoing a continuous
process of modification, or development, of one kind or another. It
must always, therefore, the pragmatist would hold, be defined in terms
of the experiences and the activities through which it is known and
revealed and through which it is, to some extent, even modified.[149]
Pragmatism, as we may remember, has been called by James “immediate”
or “radical” empiricism, although in one of his last books he seeks to
give an independent development to these two doctrines. The cardinal
principle of this philosophy is that “things are what they are
experienced as being, or that to give a just account of anything is
to tell what that thing is experienced to be.”[150] And it is perhaps
this aspect of the new philosophy of Pragmatism that is most amply and
most attractively exhibited in the books of James. It is presented,
too, with much freshness and skill in Professor Bawden’s[151] book upon
Pragmatism, which is an attempt, he says, “to set forth the necessary
assumptions of a philosophy in which experience becomes self-conscious
as a method.”[152]
“The new philosophy,” proceeds Bawden,[153] “is a pragmatic idealism.
Its method is at once intrinsic and immanent and organic or functional.
By saying that its method is functional, we mean that its experience
must be interpreted from within. We cannot jump out of our skins ...
we cannot pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps. We find ourselves
in mid-stream of the Niagara of experience, and may define what it
is by working back and forth within the current.” “We do not know
where we are going, but we are on the way” [the contradiction is
surely apparent]. Then, like James, Bawden goes on to interpret
Pragmatism by showing what things like self-consciousness, experience,
science, social consciousness, space, time, and causation _are_ by
showing how they “appear,” and how they “function”--“experience”
itself being simply, to him and to his friends, a “dynamic system,”
“self-sustaining,” a “whole leaning on nothing.”
The extremes of this “immediate” or “radical” philosophy appear to
non-pragmatists to be reached when we read words like those just quoted
about the Niagara stream of our experience, and about our life as
simply movement and acceleration, or about the celebrated “I think” of
Descartes as equally well [!] set forth under the form “It thinks,”
or “thinking is going on,” or about the “being” of the individual
person as consisting simply in a “doing.” “All this we hold,” says
Bawden, “_to be not materialism but simply energism_.” “There is no
‘truth,’ only ‘truths’--this is another way of putting it--and the only
criterion of truth is the changing one of the image or the idea which
comes out of our impulses or of the conflict of our habits.” The end of
all this modern flowing philosophy is, of course, the “Pluralism” of
James, the universe as a society of functioning selves in which reality
“may exist in a distributive form, or in the shape, not of an All, but
of a set of eaches.” “The essence of life,” as he puts it in his famous
essay on Bergson,[154] “is its continually changing character,” and we
only call it a “confusion” sometimes because we have grown accustomed
in our sciences and philosophies to isolate “elements” and “differents”
which in reality are “all dissolved in one another.”[155] “Relations of
every sort, of time, space, difference, likeness, change, rate, cause,
or what not, are just as integral members of the sensational flux as
terms are.” “Pluralism lets things really exist in the each form, or
distributively. Its type of union ... is different from the monistic
type of all-_einheit_. It is what I call the strung-along type, the
type of continuity, contiguity, or concatenation.” And so on.
(3) The reaffirmation of the teleological point of view. After the
many illustrations and references that have already been given in
respect of the tendencies of Pragmatism, it is perhaps hardly necessary
to point out that an insistence upon the necessity to philosophy of the
“teleological” point of view, of the consideration of both thoughts
and things from the point of view of their purpose or utility, is a
deeply-marked characteristic of Pragmatism. In itself this demand can
hardly be thought of as altogether new, for the idea of considering
the nature of anything in the light of its final purpose or end is
really as old in our European thought as the philosophy of Aristotle
or Anaxagoras. Almost equally familiar is the kindred idea upon which
Pragmatism is inclined to felicitate itself, of finding the roots
of metaphysic “in ethics,” in the facts of conduct, in the facts
of the “ideal” or the “personal” order which we tend[156] in human
civilization to impose upon what is otherwise thought of by science
as the natural order. The form, however, of the teleological argument
to which Pragmatism may legitimately be thought to have directed our
attention is that of the possible place in the world of reality, and
in the world of thought, of the effort and the free initiative of the
individual. This place, unfortunately (the case is quite different with
Bergson[157]), Pragmatism has been able, up to the present time, to
define, in the main, only negatively--by means of its polemic against
the completed and the self-completing “Absolute” of the Neo-Hegelian
Rationalists. What this polemic is we can best indicate by quoting from
Hegel himself a passage or a line of the reflection against which it
is seeking to enter an emphatic and a reasoned protest, and then after
this a passage or two from some of our Anglo-Hegelians in the same
connexion.
“The consummation,” says Hegel, in a familiar and often-quoted passage,
“of the Infinite aim (_i.e._ of the purpose of God as omniscient and
almighty) consists merely in removing the illusion which makes it seem
unaccomplished.”[158] Now although there is a sense in which this great
saying must for ever be maintained to contain an element of profound
truth,[159] the attitude of Pragmatism in regard to it would be,
firstly, that of a rooted objection to its outspoken intellectualism.
How can the chief work of the Almighty be conceived to be merely that
of getting rid somehow from our minds, or from his, of _our_ mental
confusions? And then, secondly, an equally rooted objection is taken
to the implication that the individual human being should allow
himself to entertain, as possibly true, a view of the general trend
of things that renders any notion of his playing an appreciable part
therein a theoretical and a practical absurdity.[160] This notion
(or “conceit,” if you will) he can surrender only by ceasing to
think of his own consciousness of “effort” and of the part played by
“effort”[161] and “invention” in the entire animal and human world, and
also of his consciousness of duty and of the ideal in general. This
latter consciousness of itself bids him to realize certain “norms”
or regulative prescripts simply because they are consonant with that
higher will which is to him the very truth of his own nature. He
cannot, in other words, believe that he is consciously obliged to work
and to realize his higher nature for nothing. The accomplishment of
ends and of the right must, in other words, be rationally believed
by him to be part of the nature of things. It is this conviction, we
feel sure, that animates Pragmatism in the opposition it shares both
with common sense and with the radical thought of our time against the
meaninglessness to Hegelianism, or to Absolutism,[162] many of the
hopes and many of the convictions that we feel to be so necessary and
so real in the life of mankind generally.
And there are other lines of reflection among Neo-Hegelians against
which Pragmatism is equally determined to make a more or less definite
protest, in the interest, as before, of our practical and of our moral
activity. We may recall, to begin with, the memorable words of Mr.
Bradley, in his would-be refutation of the charge that the ideals of
Absolutism “to some people” fail to “satisfy our nature’s demands.”
“Am I,” he indignantly asks, “to understand that we are to have all we
want, and have it just as we want it?” adding (almost in the next line)
that he “understands,” of course, that the “views” of Absolutism, or
those of any other philosophy, are to be compared “only with views”
that aim at “theoretical consistency” and not with mere practical
beliefs.[163] Now, speaking for the moment for Pragmatism, can it be
truly philosophical to contemplate with equanimity the idea of any
such ultimate conflict as is implied in these words between the demands
of the intellect[164] and the demands of emotion--to use the term
most definitely expressive of a personal, as distinct from a merely
intellectual satisfaction?
Then again there is, for example, the dictum of Dr. McTaggart, that
there is “no reason to trust God’s goodness without a demonstration
which removes the matter from the sphere of faith.”[165] May there not,
we would ask, be a view of things according to the truth of which the
confidence of the dying Socrates in the reasonableness and the goodness
of God are at least as reasonable as his confession, at the same time,
of his ignorance of the precise, or the particular, fate both of the
just and of the unjust? And is not, too, such a position as that
expressed in these words of Dr. McTaggart’s about a logically complete
reason for believing in the essential righteousness of things now ruled
out of court by some of the concessions of his brother rationalists to
Pragmatism, to which reference has already been made? It is so ruled
out, for example, even by Mr. Bradley’s condemnation as a “pernicious
prejudice” of the idea that “what is wanted for working purpose is the
last theoretical certainty about things.”[166]