CRITICAL
Enough has perhaps now been said by way of an indication of some of the
main characteristics of Pragmatism, and of the matter of its relations
to ordinary and to philosophical thinking. Its complexity and some of
its confusions and some of its difficulties have also been referred to.
As for the affiliations and the associations of Pragmatism, it would
seem that it rests not so much upon its own mere instrumentalism and
practicalism as upon some of the many broader and deeper tendencies in
ancient and modern thought that have aimed at a dynamic, instead of a
static, interpretation of reality.
We have suggested, too, that there are evidently things in traditional
philosophy and in Rationalism of which it fails to take cognizance,
although it has evidently many things to give to Rationalism in the way
of a constructive philosophy of human life.
Now it would be easily possible to continue our study of Pragmatism
along some or all of those different lines and points of view. In
the matter, for example, of the affiliations and associations
of Pragmatism, we could show that, in addition to such things
as the “nominalism” and the utilitarianism, and the positivism,
and the “voluntarism” and the philosophy of hypotheses, and the
“anti-intellectualism” already referred to, Pragmatism has an affinity
with things as far apart and as different as the Scottish Philosophy
of Common-sense, the sociological philosophy of Comte and his
followers, the philosophy of Fichte with its great idea of the world
as the “sensualized sphere” of our duty, the “experience” philosophy
of Bacon and of the entire modern era, and so on. There is even a
“romantic” element in Pragmatism, and it has, in fact, been called
“romantic utilitarianism.”[206] We can understand this if we think of
M. Berthelot’s[207] association of it not only with Poincaré, but with
Nietzsche, or of Dr. Schiller’s famous declaration that the genius of a
man’s logical method should be loved and reverenced by him as is “his
bride.”
And there is always in it, to be sure, the important element of
sympathy with the religious instincts of mankind. And this is the case,
too, whether these instincts are contemplated in some of the forms to
which reference has already been made, or in the form, say, expressed
by such a typical modern thinker as the late Henry Sidgwick, in his
conviction that “Humanity will not, and cannot, acquiesce in a Godless
world.”[208]
Then again we might take up the point of the relations of Pragmatism
to doctrines new and old in the history of philosophy, to the main
points of departure of different schools of thought, or to fundamental
and important positions in many of the great philosophers. The writer
finds that he has noticed in this connexion the doctrines of Stoicism
and Epicureanism,[209] the “probability” philosophy of Locke[210] and
Butler, and Pascal, the ethics and the natural theology of Cicero,
the “voluntarism” of Schopenhauer,[211] Aristotle’s philosophy of the
Practical Reason,[212] Kant’s philosophy of the same, the religious
philosophy of theologians like Tertullian, Augustine, Duns Scotus, and
so on--to take only a few instances.[213] The view of man and his
nature represented by all these names is, in the main, an essentially
practical, a concrete, and a moral view as opposed to an abstract and
a rationalistic view. And of course even to Plato knowledge was only
an element in the total spiritual philosophy of man, while his master,
Socrates, never really seemed to make any separation between moral and
intellectual inquiries.
And as for positions in the great philosophers between which and
some of the tendencies of Pragmatism there is more than a merely
superficial agreement, we might instance, for example, the tendency of
Hume[214] to reduce many of the leading categories of our thought to
mere habits of mind, to be explained on an instinctive rather than a
rationalistic basis; or Comte’s idea of the error of separating reason
from instinct;[215] or the idea of de Maistre and Bain, and many others
that “will” is implied in the notion of “exteriority”; or the idea of
Descartes[216] that the senses teach us not so much “what is in reality
in things,” as “what is beneficial[217] or hurtful to the composite
whole of mind and body”; or the declaration of Kant that the chief end
of metaphysic is God and immortality; or the idea of Spencer[218] that
the belief in the unqualified supremacy of reason is a superstition of
philosophers; or the idea of Plato in the Sophist[219] that reality is
the capacity for acting or of being acted upon; and so on.
As for such further confirmation of pragmatist teaching as is to be
found in typical modern thinking and scholars, thought of almost at
random, it would be easy to quote in this connexion from writers as
diverse as Höffding, Fouillée, Simmel, Wundt, Mach, Huxley, Hobhouse,
and many others. It might be called a typically pragmatist idea,
for example, on the part of Mr. L. T. Hobhouse to hold that “The
higher conceptions by which idealism has so firmly held are not to be
‘scientifically’ treated in the sense of being explained away. What
is genuinely higher we have ... good reason to think must also be
truest,” and we “cannot permanently acquiesce in a way of thinking what
would resolve it into what is lowest.”[220] These last words represent
almost a commonplace of the thought of the day. It is held, for
example, by men as different and as far apart in their work, and yet as
typical of phases of our modern life, as Robert Browning and Sir Oliver
Lodge. The close dependence again of the doctrines of any science upon
the social life and the prevalent thought of the generation is also
essentially a pragmatist idea. Its truth is recognized and insisted
upon in the most explicit manner in the recent serviceable manifesto of
Professors Geddes and Thomson upon “Evolution,”[221] and it obviously
affects their whole philosophy of life and mind. It figures too
quite prominently in the valuable short _Introduction to Science_ by
Professor Thomson in the same series of manuals.
Another typical book of to-day, again (that of Professor Duncan on the
_New Knowledge_ of the new physical science), definitely gives up, for
example, the “correspondence”[222] notion of truth, holding that it is
meaningless to think of reality as something outside our thought and
our experience of which our ideas might be a possible duplicate. This
again we readily recognize as an essentially pragmatist contention.
So also is the same writer’s rejection of the notion of “absolute
truth,”[223] and his confession of the “faith” that is always involved
in the thought of completeness or system in our scientific knowledge.
“We believe purely as an act of faith and not at all of logic,” he
says, “that the universe is essentially determinable thousands of years
hence, into some one system which will account for everything and which
will be the truth.”[224]
Nor would it be at all difficult to find confirmation for the
pragmatist philosophy of ideas and thoughts in what we may well think
of as the general reflective literature of our time, outside the
sphere, as it were, of strictly rational or academic philosophy--in
writers like F. D. Maurice, W. Pater, A. W. Benn (who otherwise
depreciates what he calls “_ophelism_”), J. H. Newman, Karl Pearson,
Carlyle, and others.[225] Take the following, for example, quoted with
approval from Herschel by Karl Pearson: “The grand and indeed the only
character of truth is its capability of enduring the test of universal
experience, and coming unchanged out of every possible form of fair
discussion.”[226] The idea again, for example, recently expressed in
a public article by such a widely read and cleverly perverse writer
as Mr. Bernard Shaw,[227] that “the will that moves us is dogmatic:
our brain is only the very imperfect instrument by which we devise
practical means for satisfying the will,” might only too naturally
be associated with the pragmatist-like anti-intellectualism[228] of
Bergson, or, for that part of it, with the deeper “voluntarism” of
Schopenhauer. The following quotation taken from Mr. Pater reveals
how great may be correspondence between the independent findings of
a finely sensitive mind like his, and the positions to which the
pragmatists are inclined in respect of the psychology of religious
belief. “The supposed facts on which Christianity rests, utterly
incapable as they have become of any ordinary test, seem to me matter
of very much the same sort of assent as we give to any assumption in
the strict and ultimate sense, moral. The question whether these facts
were real will, I think, always continue to be what I should call one
of those _natural_ questions of the human mind.”[229] Readers of
Carlyle will easily recognize what we might call a more generalized
statement of this same truth of Pater’s in the often-quoted words from
_Heroes and Hero-Worship_:[230] “By religion I do not mean the church
creed which a man professes, the articles of faith which.... But the
thing a man does practically believe (and this often enough _without_
asserting it even to himself, much less to others); the thing a man
does practically lay to heart and know for certain concerning his
vital relations to the mysterious universe, and his duty and destiny
there.” It has long seemed to the writer that a similar thing to this
might be written (and James has certainly written it) about a man’s
“philosophy” as necessarily inclusive of his working beliefs as well
as of his mere reasoned opinions, although it is the latter that are
generally (by what right?) taken to be properly the subject-matter of
philosophy.[231] And it is this phase of the pragmatist philosophy that
could, I am inclined to think, be most readily illustrated from the
opinions of various living and dead writers upon the general working
philosophy of human nature as we find this revealed in human history.
We are told, for example, by Mr. Hobhouse, in his monumental work upon
_Morals in Evolution_, that in “Taoism the supreme principle of things
may be left undefined as something that we experience in ourselves
if we throw ourselves upon it, but which we know rather by following
or living it than by any process of ratiocination.”[232] And “this
mystical interpretation,” he adds, “is not confined to Taoism, but in
one form or another lies near to hand to all spiritual religions, and
expresses one mode of religious consciousness, its aspiration to reach
the heart of things and the confidence that it has done so, and found
rest there.”
We are reminded, of course, by all such considerations of the
philosophy of Bergson, and of its brilliant attempt to make a synthesis
of intuition or instinct with reflection or thought, and indeed it may
well be that the past difficulties of philosophy with intuition and
instinct are due to the fact of its error in unduly separating the
intellect from the “will to live,” and from the “creative” evolution
that have been such integral factors in the evolution of the life of
humanity.
This entire matter, however, of the comparison of pragmatist doctrines
to typical tendencies in the thought of the past and the present must
be treated by us as subordinate to our main purpose, that of the
estimation of the place of Pragmatism in the constructive thought of
the present time. With a view to this it will be necessary to revert to
the criticism of Pragmatism.
The criticism that has already been made is that in the main
Pragmatism is unsystematic and complex and confusing, that it has no
adequate theory of “reality,” and no unified theory of philosophy, that
it has no satisfactory criterion of the “consequences” by which it
proposes to test truth, and that it has not worked out its philosophy
of the contribution of the individual with his “activity” and his
“purposes” to “reality” generally, and that it is in danger of being a
failure in the realm of ethics.[233]
To all this we shall now seek to add a few words more upon (1)
the pragmatist criterion of truth, (2) the weakness of Pragmatism
in the realms of logic and theory of knowledge, (3) its failure
to give consistent account of the nature of reality, and (4) its
unsatisfactoriness in the realm of ethics.
(1) We have already expressed our agreement with the finding of
Professor Pratt[234] that the pragmatist theory of truth amounts to
no more than the harmless doctrine that the meaning of any conception
expresses itself in the past, present, or future conduct or experiences
of actual, or possible, sentient creatures. Taken literally, however,
the doctrine that truth should be tested by consequences is not only
harmless but also useless, seeing that Omniscience alone could bring
together in thought or in imagination all the consequences of an
assertion. Again, it is literally _false_ for the reason that the
proof of truth is not in the first instance any kind of “consequences,”
not even the “verification” of which pragmatists are so fond. If
the truth of which we may happen to be thinking is truth of “fact,”
its proof lies in its correspondence (despite the difficulties[235]
of the idea) with the results of observation or perception.[236]
And if it be inferential truth, its proof is that of its deduction
from previously established truths, or facts, upon a certain plane
of knowledge or experience. In short, Pragmatists forget altogether
the logical doctrine of the existence (in the world of our human
experience, of course) of different established planes of reality, or
planes of ascertained knowledge in which all propositions that are
not nonsensical or trivial, are, from their very inception, regarded
as necessarily true or false. The existence of these various planes
of experience or of thought is in fact implied in the pragmatist
doctrine of the fundamental character of belief.[237] According to
this perfectly correct doctrine, the objectivity of truth (_i.e._
its reality or non-reality in the world of fact or in the world of
rational discourse) is the essential thing about it, while the idea of
its “consequences” is not. A truth is a proposition whose validity has
already been established by evidence or by demonstration. It has then
afterwards the immediate “utility” of expressing in an intelligible
and convenient manner the fact of certain connexions among things or
events. And its ultimate utility to mankind is also at the same time
assured, humanity being by its very nature a society of persons who
must act, and who act, upon what they believe to be the truth or the
reality of things. But a proposition is by no means true because it
is useful. Constantine believed eminently in the concord-producing
utility of certain confessions enunciated at the Council of Nice, but
his belief in this does not prove their truth or reality outside the
convictions of the faithful. Nor does the pragmatist or utilitarian
character of certain portions of the writings of the Old Testament or
of the Koran prove the matter of their literal and factual truth in the
ordinary sense of these terms. As Hume said, “When any opinion leads
us into absurdities ’tis certainly false, but ’tis not certain that an
opinion is false because it has dangerous consequences.”
And then, apart from this conspicuous absence of logic in the views
of pragmatists upon “truth,” the expression of their doctrine is so
confusing that it is almost impossible to extract any consistent
meaning out of it. They are continually confounding conceptions and
ideas and propositions, forgetful of the fact that truth resides not
in concepts and ideas but only in propositions. While it may be indeed
true, as against Rationalism, that all human conceptions whatsoever
[and it is only in connexion with “conceptions” that Pragmatism is
defined even in such an official place as Baldwin’s _Dictionary of
Philosophy_[238]] have, and must have, reference to actual or possible
human experience or consequences, it is by no means true that the test
of a proposition is anything other than the evidence of which we have
already spoken.
Then the pragmatists have never adequately defined terms that are so
essential to their purposes as “practical,” “truth,” “fact,” “reality,”
“consequences,” and they confound, too, “theories” with “truths” and
“concepts” just as they confound concepts and propositions.
(2) That logic and the theory of proof is thus one of the weak spots of
Pragmatism has perhaps then been sufficiently indicated. We have seen,
in fact, the readiness of Pragmatism to confess its inability[239] to
prove its own philosophy--that is, to prove it in the ordinary sense of
the term.[240] That it should have made this confession is, of course,
only in keeping with the fact that its interest in logic is confined to
such subordinate topics as the framing and verification of hypotheses,
the development of concepts and judgments in the “thought-process,” and
so on. Of complete proof, as involving both deduction and induction,
it takes but the scantiest recognition. And it has made almost no
effort to connect its discoveries in “genetic logic” and in the theory
of hypotheses with the traditional body of logical doctrine.[241] Nor,
as may perhaps be inferred from the preceding paragraph, has it made
any serious attempt to consider the question of the discovery of new
truth in relation to the more or less perfectly formulated systems and
schemes of truth already in the possession of mankind.
The case is similar in regard to the “theory of knowledge” of the
pragmatists. While they have made many important suggestions regarding
the relation of all the main categories and principles of our human
thought to the theoretical and practical needs of mankind, there is in
their teachings little that is satisfactory and explicit in the matter
of the systematization of first principles,[242] and little too that is
satisfactory in respect of the relation of knowledge to reality. They
sometimes admit (with James) the importance of general points of view
like the “causal,” the “temporal,” “end,” and “purpose,” and so on. At
other times they confess with Schiller that questions about ultimate
truth and ultimate reality cannot be allowed to weigh upon our
spirits, seeing that “actual knowing” always starts from the “existing
situation.”
Now of course actual knowing certainly does start from the particular
case of the existing situation, but, as all thinkers from Aristotle to
Hume have seen, it is by no means explained by this existing situation.
In real knowledge this is always made intelligible by references to
points of view and to experiences that altogether transcend it. The
true theory of knowledge, in short, involves the familiar Kantian
distinction between the “origin” and the “validity” of knowledge--a
thing that the pragmatists seem continually and deliberately to ignore.
Schiller, to be sure, reminds us with justice that we must endeavour
to “connect,” rather than invariably “contrast,” the two terms of
this distinction. But this again is by no means what the pragmatists
themselves have done. They fail, in fact, to connect their hints about
the practical or experimental origin of most of our points of view
about reality with the problem of the validity of first principles
generally.
There is a suggestion here and there in their writings that, as
Schiller[243] puts it, there can be no coherent system of postulates
except as rooted in personality, and that there are postulates at every
stage of our development. What this statement means is that there are
“points of view” about reality that are incidental to the stage of our
natural life (as beings among other beings), others to the stage of
conscious sensations and feelings, still others to that of our desires
and thoughts, to our aesthetic appreciation, to our moral life, and so
on. But, as I have already said, there is little attempt on the part
of the pragmatists to distinguish these different stages or planes of
experience adequately from one another.
(3) References have already been made to the failures of our
Anglo-American pragmatists to attain to any intelligible and consistent
kind of reality, whether they conceive of this latter as the sum-total
of the efforts of aspiring and achieving human beings, or with Schiller
as an “original, plastic sub-stratum,” or as the reality (whatever it
is) that is gradually being brought into being by the creative efforts
of ourselves and of beings higher or lower than ourselves in the scale
of existence. Their deepest thought in the matter seems to be that
the universe (our universe?) is essentially “incomplete,” and that
the truth of God, as James puts it, “has to run the gauntlet of other
truths.” One student of this topic, Professor Leighton, has arrived
at the conclusion that pragmatism is essentially “acosmistic,”[244]
meaning, no doubt, and with good reason, that Pragmatism has no place
of any kind for objective order or system. Now it is just this palpable
lack of an “objective,” or rational, order that renders the whole
pragmatist philosophy liable to the charges of (1) “subjectivism,”
and (2) irrationality. There are in it, as we have tried to point
out, abundant hints of what reality must be construed to be on the
principles of any workable or credible philosophy, namely something
that stimulates both our thought and our endeavour. And there is in
it the great truth that in action we are not only in contact with
reality as such, but with a reality, moreover, that transcends the
imperfect reality of our lives as finite individuals and the imperfect
character of our limited effort and struggle. But beyond the vague
hints that our efforts must somehow count in the final tale of reality,
and that what the world of experience seems to be, it must somehow be
conceived ultimately to be, there is no standing-ground in the entire
pragmatist philosophy for want of what, in plain English, must be
termed an intelligible theory of reality. “You see,” says James, “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 take them at that valuation. They can stand the
world, their temper being well adapted to its insecurity.”[245]
The present writer, some years ago, in an article in _Mind_,[246]
ventured to point out the absurdity of expecting the public to believe
in a philosophy which sometimes speaks as if we could now, to-day, by
our efforts begin to make the world something different from what it
is or what it has been. “As far as the past facts go,” so James put it
in 1899, “there is indeed _no difference_. These facts are _bagged_
(is not the phraseology too recklessly sporting?), are captured, and
the good that’s in them is gained, be the atoms, be the God their
cause.” And again, “Theism and materialism, so indifferent when taken
retrospectively [?], point, when we take them prospectively, to wholly
different, practical consequences, to opposite outlooks of experience.”
And again, “But I say that such an alternation of feelings, reasonable
enough in a consciousness that is _prospective_, as ours now is, and
whose world is partly yet to come, _would be absolutely senseless_
(!) and irrational in a purely retrospective consciousness summing up
a world _already past_.” Now on what theory of things is it that the
future of the world and our future may be affected by ideal elements
and factors (God, Freedom, Recompense, Justice) without having been so
affected or determined in the past?[247]
(4) The unsatisfactoriness of Pragmatism in the realm of ethics.
Crucial and hopeless as is the failure of Pragmatism in the realm of
ethics, a word or two had better be said of the right of the critic to
judge of it in this connexion. In the first place, the thinking public
has already expressed its distrust of a doctrine that scruples not to
avow its affinity with utilitarianism, with the idea of testing truth
and value by mere consequences and by the idea of the useful. “The word
‘expedient,’” wrote a correspondent to Professor James, “has no other
meaning than that of self-interest. The pursuit of this has ended by
landing a number of officers of national banks in penitentiaries. A
philosophy that leads to such results must be unsound.”
Then again, Professor Dewey (now doubtless the foremost living
pragmatist) is the joint author of a book upon ethics, the most
prominent feature of which is the application of pragmatist-like
methods and principles to moral philosophy. This book sums up, too, a
great many previous illuminating discussions of his own upon ethical
and educational problems, for all of which, and for its general
application of the principles of Humanism to the realm of morals he has
deservedly won the praise of Professor James himself. So we have thus
the warrant both of the public and of Dewey and James for seeking to
judge Pragmatism from the point of view of moral philosophy.
Another justification for seeking to judge of Pragmatism from the point
of view of moral philosophy is that the whole weight of its “humanism”
and of its “valuation” philosophy must inevitably fall upon its view
of the moral judgment. Dr. Schiller, we have seen, is quite explicit
in his opinion that for Humanism the roots of metaphysics “lie, and
must lie,” in ethics. And this is all the more the case, as it were,
on account of the proclamation[248] by Pragmatism of the inability of
Intellectualism to understand morality, and also on account of its
recurring contention in respect of the merely hypothetical character of
all intellectual truth.
Now, unfortunately for Pragmatism, the one thing that the otherwise
illuminating book of Dewey and Tufts almost completely fails to do, as
the writer has already sought to indicate, is to _provide a theory of
the ordinary distinction between right and wrong_.[249] The only theme
that is really successfully pursued in this typically American book is
the “constant discovery, formation, and re-formation of the ‘self’ in
the ‘ends’ which an individual is called upon to sustain and develop in
virtue of his membership of a ‘social whole.’” But this is obviously a
study in “genetic psychology,” or in the psychology of ethics, but by
no means a study in the theory of ethics. “The controlling principle,”
it characteristically tells us, “of the deliberation which renders
possible the formation of a voluntary or socialized self out of our
original instinctive impulses is the love of the objects which make
this transformation possible.” But what is it, we wish to know, that
distinguished the objects that make this transformation possible from
the objects that do not do so? The only answer that we can see in the
book is that anything is “moral” which makes possible a “transition
from individualism to efficient social personality”---obviously again
a purely sociological point of view, leaving the question of the
standard of efficiency quite open. The whole tendency, in short, of
the pragmatist treatment of ethical principles is to the effect that
standards and theories of conduct are valuable only in so far as they
are, to a certain extent, “fruitful” in giving us a certain “surveying
power” in the perplexities and uncertainties of “direct personal
behaviour.” They are all, in other words, merely relative or useful,
and none of them is absolute and authoritative. It is this last thing,
however, that is the real desideratum of ethical theory. And so far
as practice is concerned, all that this Pragmatism or “Relativism” in
morals inevitably leads to is the conclusion that whatever brings about
a change, or a result, or a “new formation,” or a new “development”
of the moral situation, is necessarily moral, that “growth” and
“liberation” and “fruitfulness,” and “experimentation” are everything,
and moral scruples and conscience simply nothing. In the celebrated
phrase of Nietzsche, “Everything is permissible and nothing is true or
binding.”
Is not, then, this would-be ethical phase of Pragmatism just too
modernistic, too merely practical, too merely illuminative and
enlightening? And would it not be better for the youth of America (for
Dewey’s book is in the _American Science Series_) and other countries
to learn that _not_ everything “practical” and “formative” and
“liberative” and “socializing” is _moral_ in the strict sense of the
term?[250] In saying this I am, of course, giving but a very imperfect
idea of the contents of a book which is, in many respects, both
epoch-marking and epoch-making. It is, however, unfortunately, in some
respects, only too much in touch with “present facts and tendencies,”
with the regrettable tendency of the hour, for example, to justify as
right any conduct that momentarily “improves the situation,” or that
“liberates the activities” of the parties concerned in it. It is not
enough, in other words (and this is all, I am inclined to think, that
Pragmatism can do in morals), to set up a somewhat suggestive picture
of the “life of the moral man in our present transitional” and would-be
“constructive” age. A moral man does not merely, in common parlance,
“keep up with the procession,” going in for its endless “formations”
and “re-formations.” He seeks to “lead” it, and this _leading_ of men,
this setting up of a standard of the legitimacy or of the illegitimacy
of certain social experiments is just what Pragmatism cannot do in
morals.
It is otherwise, doubtless, with a true humanism, or with the humanism
that Pragmatism is endeavouring to become.