PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF BERGSON[386]
The pragmatist elements in the philosophy of Bergson of which
it is, perhaps, legitimate for us to speak here are (1) his
“Anti-Intellectualism,” and (2) his “Activism” or “Actionism.” The
latter culminates in his freedom-philosophy and his spiritualism. I
shall comment shortly upon these two things, and then suggest one or
two general criticisms of his philosophy as a whole.
Bergson’s anti-intellectualism rests ultimately upon his contention
that the human intellect is related in the main to the needs of action,
that the brain is an organ of action rather than an organ of thought,
that our intelligence is at home only in the realm of the physical and
the mathematical sciences,[387] that contrivance and invention and the
practical comprehension of the “material” are its proper activities,
and that for these latter purposes it splits up the world of the senses
and the understanding into a discontinuous aggregate of physical units,
which it then proceeds to reconstruct in a spatial and temporal order.
We perceive in Nature, he holds, what interests[388] us in the way of
our vital needs; our intellect is adapted, not for the understanding
or the purely rational (“abstract”) comprehension of “causality” and
the “life of things,” but for the maintenance and furtherance of our
own lives, and for the creation of the instruments and agencies (signs,
language, tools, imagined sequences and laws, essences, causes, the
“descriptions” of science, the special senses, the convolutions of the
brain, etc.) that minister to this. Science is to-day still penetrated
through and through with primitive metaphysics, with the metaphysics of
animism, with a belief in separate things like forces, atoms, elements,
or what not--indicative all of them of its attempt to “divide up” the
real that it may command it for theoretical and practical purposes. We
can see this in the “structural psychology”[389] of the day and its
analysis of our mental life into “elements,” in respect of the number
and character of which there are lasting differences of opinion among
the masters of the science--into “impressions,” and “affections,” and
sensations, images, memories, ideas, and so on. And we can see it, too,
in the erroneous attempts sometimes made by psychologists to treat
these entities as if they had clearly defined temporal and spatial
characteristics or qualities.
The supreme mistake of philosophy, according to Bergson, has been to
import into the domain of speculation a method of thinking that was
originally destined for action. It has forgotten that nearly all the
leading conceptions of common sense and of science and of “analysis”
have been invented, not for final and general, but for relative and
particular purposes. And it has fallen too readily under the influence
of a certain traditional view of the relations between metaphysics
and science--the view, namely, that philosophy should just take
the findings of science and of common-sense about the world as its
initial material, subjecting them, of course, to a certain preliminary
reinterpretation, but finally reconstructing them, almost as they
were, into a system.[390] The one thing, in short, that philosophy
has failed to understand is the life and the movement and the process
of the world, as an infinitely more important fact than the endless
terms and conceptions and entities (“will,” “reason,” “Ideas,” etc.)
into which it has been analysed. We might sum up the whole by saying
that Bergson’s anti-intellectualism is simply a protest, not against
the use, but only against the “systematic misuse”[391] of general
conceptions that have been current in science and philosophy “since the
time of Socrates,” a protest, however, that in his case is not merely
general and negative, but particularised and positive.[392]
Like any and all anti-intellectualism, Bergson’s anti-intellectualism
is liable to serious misinterpretation, and it is currently
misinterpreted and misrepresented as “irrationalism.” His intention,
however, is not to destroy and to condemn philosophy and reasoning, and
to exalt mere intuition and faith, but rather to “liberate”[393] our
human consciousness of ourselves and of the world from the dogmatism
of what he regards to be the utilitarian intellect, from the many
hopeless contradictions and antinomies and puzzles of the mere analytic
understanding. Philosophy, in particular, he would free from the last
traces and symptoms of scientific rationalism, although fully aware of
the fact that our modern philosophy had its very departure from the
rationalism of the great founders of modern science like Kepler and
Galileo and the rest.
He would strike at the roots of all this confident rationalism or
scientific philosophy by opening up a broader and a deeper view of
truth than that afforded to the merely piece-meal and utilitarian view.
As for the Actionism and the action philosophy of Bergson, this is
perhaps more in line than any other tendency of the day with the
new life and the new thought of the twentieth century, although
(like Pragmatism) it stands in need of correction or revision by the
principles of a sound ethical philosophy, by the Idealism that is not,
and cannot be, the mere creation of to-day or yesterday. In essence it
is, to begin with, but an extension to the mind as a whole and to all
its so-called special faculties (“sensation,” “perception,” “memory,”
“ideation,” “judgment,” “thinking,” “emotion,” and the rest) of the
“dynamic,”[394] instead of the older, static point of view that the
recent science of our time has applied to matter and to life, and that
Pragmatism and the “hypothetical method” have sought to apply to all
the ordinary conceptions and constructions that exist in the different
domains of the different sciences.[395] It is also, from our point of
view, as we may see, an attempt at the expression, in the terms of
a comparatively simple philosophy, of many of the considerations in
respect of knowledge and conduct that have been brought forward in the
preceding pages of this book. We have already dwelt in different ways,
for example, upon the fact that there is no perception or sensation
without an organic reaction on the part of the percipient or the
sentient being, that an idea is in a sense a motor attitude (a way
of comprehending particulars or particular facts in relation to our
purposes and our ends), that a logical judgment represents a “division”
of the real, or of the processes of Nature, for some purpose or other,
that our whole mental life is purposive, that there is no “pure”
cognition without attendant emotion and[396] volition, that it is in
action that desire and thought come together, that our whole knowledge
of the world is necessarily a knowledge of it in terms of our purposes
and our highest attitudes, and so on. All of this is, as it were, an
indication of the psychological and the logical considerations upon
which Bergson bases his positive,[397] activistic, philosophy of mind.
It is to be remembered in Bergson’s interest that when we speak of his
Actionism[398] we do not mean a narrowing down[399] on his part of
the activities of the soul to physical labour and to mere utilitarian
effort, but its capacity, also, for that creative activity which he
takes to be the very keynote of personal life and the evolutionary
process.
As for the freedom-philosophy with which Bergson’s Actionism is to be
associated, this is worked out by him, firstly, in the most perfect
correspondence with what he believes to be the facts of life and
mind; and, secondly, in terms of that anti-rationalism (or hostility
to the merely scientific intellect) which is his working theory of
knowledge. His views upon this subject have also been depreciated and
misunderstood by some of his opponents who attack what they call his
“intuitional” treatment of the freedom-question--his insistence upon
the direct intuition of our life that we have when we act consciously,
and when we are “most ourselves”--when we act out “freely” our own
nature. To him the primary fact for any human being is the life-impulse
that is both instinctive and reflective, that is certainly far more
of a fundamental reality than any of those entities or concepts
(“cells,” “atoms,” “forces,” “laws,” or what not) which, with Kant, he
clearly sees to be the creation of the intellect for its descriptive
and practical purposes. This life is “free” in the sense that we are
not “determined” by any or all of those forces and laws to which our
intellect subjects everything else, but which it cannot apply to the
life that is more than mere matter, that is a real becoming and a real
process, a real creation and development.
The “spiritualism,” again, of his interpretation of this life and
activity rests, to begin with, upon his opinion that the very inception
of the activity, and the adjustment, and the selection in which the
simplest life-effort, and the simplest perception of a living being
consist, indicate the presence and the operation of a controlling
agency,[400] or mind, or principle of spiritual “choice” that is not,
and cannot be, explained on the principles of a mechanical science
or philosophy. This principle is, in a word, the life-force, or the
creative activity, the _élan vital_ of which we read so much in his
books, that has “seized upon matter,” vitalizing it into force and
energy, into the “play” upon each other of all the varied activities
and grades and forms of the will to live, and into the various forms of
socialized and co-operative living on the part of animals and men. We
shall immediately remark upon the matter of the apparent limitations
of this spiritual philosophy of life, or reality, that is here but
indicated or stated.
One of its essential features, so far as we are at present concerned,
is his claim that his introduction of a spiritual principle into the
life-force, or the creative activity that has expressed itself in the
various grades and forms of life, both animal and human, is not a
phase of the old philosophy[401] or theology of “final causes” or of a
predetermined[402] “teleology.” To this old finalism or teleology[403]
the life of organic nature (the “organs” and “cells,” the “instinctive”
actions, and the “adjustments” of animals, and so on) were all due to
the work of a pre-existing, calculating intelligence operating upon
matter; whereas to him they are but different expressions or creations
of the life-force that is as little predetermined in organic evolution,
as it is in the realm of the activities interpreted for us (in part)
by the newer physics and the newer chemistry--in the processes, for
example, that are exemplified in the generation of a star out of a
nebula. This entire treatment, however, of the notion of purpose in
nature is a matter of great difficulty in the philosophy of Bergson,
and his own thought (as I shall presently state) is apt to strike us
as just as hypothetical as some of the views he attempts to combat.
It raises, too, the question of the valuation of his philosophy as a
whole, and of its relation to the great thinker who still stands in the
very centre of the entire modern movement from Copernicus to Comte and
Darwin--Immanuel Kant.[404]
We shall best get at the matter of the fuller developments of the
philosophy of Bergson that are of interest to us at present, by
indicating some of the results that would accrue from it to the
constructive philosophy in which we are interested as the outcome of
Pragmatism and Idealism. Among these would be, firstly, a new and a
fresh, and yet a perfectly rational apprehension of the fact of the
necessarily abstract and hypothetical[405] character of the analyses
to which our world is subjected by the science and by the technic and
the supposed “economy” of our present culture.[406] Then an equally
new and equally rational (or “rationally grounded”) conviction of
the inadequacy of the physical and the scientific categories to the
comprehension and the explanation of life and of the life of the
spirit. Thirdly, a confirmation of many of the tendencies to which
the Pragmatism and the Voluntarism and the Humanism of the last
century have given a more or less one-sided and imperfect formulation.
Among such confirmed tendencies are (α) the attempt they have all
made to attain to a deeper[407] view of human nature than the view
hitherto taken by rationalism and intellectualism, (β) their emphasis
upon the freedom and the initiative[408] of the individual and
upon the necessity, on the part of philosophy, of a “dynamic” or
“motive-awakening”[409] theory of reality, (γ) their insistence[410]
similarly upon the necessity to our thought of a _direct contact_ with
reality, and upon the impossibility of our beginning in philosophy
without assumptions of one kind or another, (δ) their refusal to make
any ultimate separation[411] between the intellect and the will,
between the highest thought and the highest emotion, (ε) their tendency
to regard belief[412] rather than knowledge as our fundamental
estimate of truth and reality.
A fourth constructive result, however, of the philosophy of Bergson
would be not the mere confirmation of any number of pragmatist and
humanist tendencies, but their integration, and their transformation
into the evidences and the manifestation of a new spiritual philosophy
of life and of the universe generally. It is this possible _quasi_
integration and transformation of so many of the tendencies of
Pragmatism and Voluntarism and of the Philosophy of Science of the day,
that makes Bergson the greatest of all the pragmatists--although the
term hardly occurs in his main writings, and although he breathes from
first to last the air of an idealism[413] and a spiritualism that is
above and beyond all the mere instrumentalism, and the mere empiricism
and the ethical opportunism of Pragmatism.
* * * * *
The following are some of the difficulties and counter-considerations
that stand in the way of the intelligibility and the supposed
novelty of the philosophy of Bergson. (1) It is in some respects
but a biological philosophy after all, a would-be philosophical
interpretation of the “evolutionary process” which takes many things
for granted and ignores many difficulties. Some of these things are
the life-force itself, the _élan de vie_, the vital aspects that he
sees in the forces of nature, the “eternal movement” of which he
is always speaking as the only reality and as the very life of the
universe, the whole “adaptation” philosophy that characterises his own
teleology despite his attacks on “mechanism” and on “finalism,” and
so on. One is tempted, indeed, to think that in much of all this he
forgets his own doctrine of the hypothetical character of science and
philosophy, and that, in his very anxiety to escape from mechanism and
from rationalism, and Paleyism, he credits Nature with a contingency
and a “freedom”[414] that corresponds in their way to the chaos, of
which the Greeks thought as a necessary background to the cosmos. He
seems, in other words, to deify into a kind of eternal “becoming” and a
_quasi_ free and creative “duration,” his own (necessary) inability to
grasp the system of things.
Then, secondly, there is a veritable crop of difficulties that arise
out of his contention that our intellect is adapted “only to matter.”
What, for example, of the various non-utilitarian[415] intuitions
of art and morality and religion, that are as undoubtedly facts of
our conscious experience as is our comprehension and utilisation of
“matter” for the various purposes of civilisation?[416] If it be
literally true that our understanding is “incapacitated” for the
comprehension of life and of the creative activities of the soul, a
new set of categories and a higher form of intelligence (than the
merely material) must be elaborated for this special purpose. And if
this higher form of intelligence be the “intuition” of which Bergson
undoubtedly makes so much, then he must be more careful than he often
is in suggesting that intuition and a philosophy of our intuitions
“must go _counter to the intellect_.”[417] His theory of art reduces
itself, for example, in the main to the negative contention that
spiritual perception is always simply “anti-mechanical,”[418] simply
the power of seeing things in another way than that of the engineer or
the craftsman, the _homo faber_.
Thirdly, there are many dualisms or oppositions in his doctrine or
expressed teaching, reducible all of them to the one great Cartesian
dualism between the mind and the matter that are said by him to
intersect in memory, and in perception, and in the life of the
spirit generally--the opposition, for example, between instinct and
intelligence, that between intelligence and intuition,[419] between the
“mechanical” and the “organic,” between the “upward” and the “downward”
movements that he attributes to the life-force. And there is a striking
inconsistency between his apparent acceptance of the teaching of Kant
in respect of the limitations of the physical and the temporal way of
looking at things (ourselves included and our actions) and his belief
in an eternal “duration,”[420] or movement, or process of which he
is always speaking as the very life and texture of everything. This
“real” or “pure” “duration” is a thing that troubles all students of
his philosophy; it seems to make Bergson believe in what James talked
of as a “strung-along” universe. And there is an inconsistency between
the supremacy that he seems willing to accord to mind and spirit in the
case of the new individuals who are always being born into the world,
and the absence of a similar supremacy (or determining rôle) in the
case of the mind or spirit without whose existence and operation the
universe is unthinkable.[421]
As for the latter contradiction, we may note in his favour that he
talks, at least once or twice, of “God” as “unceasing life”[422] and
“active freedom,” and I am inclined to take this master thought as
possibly a kind of foundation for his rich and suggestive philosophy
of life and reality. But there is in his writings nothing like the
thorough-going attempt that we find in the philosophy of Aristotle[423]
to ground the motion and the life of the world in God as its final
cause and its ultimate explanation. Equally little is there in Bergson
a thorough-going attempt to work out the Idealism[424] upon which his
whole system reposes--his initial conception of objects as “images,”
or “ideas” for a consciousness, or for the life-force, or for the
different “centres of activity” with which he peoples the worlds.
Fourthly, there is the drawback from the point of view of social
philosophy about the thought of Bergson to which we have already made
reference--that it lacks somehow the ethical and the social idealism
that would warrant us in thinking of it as a worthy rival or substitute
for the philosophy of history of the great idealists of the past and
the present. It is necessary to speak here with the utmost caution if
we would avoid doing injustice[425] to Bergson. We cannot mean, for
example, that he does not do justice[426] to the social factor in human
development of which we have heard so much, perhaps too much, from the
sociologists.[427] We might mean, however, and we do in a sense mean
that he has not made as much as he might have done of this factor,
by developing for the thought of to-day the reality of that world of
“spiritual communion” and “inter-subjective intercourse” of which we
have spoken more than once.
Then we might also contend that Bergson has not as yet, in his
philosophy of human life, taken much cognizance of the deeper[428]
experiences of life, of the specifically ethical and religious feelings
and thoughts of men. With the pragmatists he is unduly optimistic
about the free expansive development of the individual. Against this
objection it may be replied, that he has so thoroughly assimilated
into the very texture of his thought and feeling some of the finest
things in the spiritualism and the idealism of the reflective thought
of France[429] that we would not, if we could, wish the germinal or
fructifying elements in his system to be different from what they are.
His “social” message is perhaps after all the best thing that it can
be--the need of the inward spiritualization of the life and thought of
the individual.
Lastly, in addition to the fine traditional spiritualism and
libertarianism of French philosophy, we may think of the voluntarism
of Kant and Schopenhauer as also militating somewhat against the idea
of Bergson’s originality[430] in philosophy. Despite this it is still
possible to regard him as one of important, modern, exponents of just
that development of the Kantian philosophy that became imperative after
Darwinism. He has indeed inaugurated for us that reading of the “theory
of knowledge” in terms of the “theory of life”[431] which is his true
and real continuation of the critical work of Kant. Hypothetical
although it may be in many respects, it moves (owing to his thorough
absorption in the many facts and theories of the biology of recent
years) in an atmosphere that is altogether above the confines of the
physical and the mathematical[432] sciences with which alone Kant was
(in the main) directly acquainted. It is time that, with the help he
affords in his free handling of the facts of life and of the supposed
facts and theories of science, we should transform the exiguous
“epistemology”[433] of the past generation into the more perfect hold
upon “criticism” and upon the life of things that is represented in his
thought.
CONCLUDING REMARKS
Enough has now been said in the foregoing pages about Pragmatism and
the philosophy of Actionism in relation to Rationalism, and to the
Personalism and the Humanism that they would substitute for it and for
Absolutism. Indications have been given too of the shortcomings and
the defects of this very Personalism or Humanism, and of some of the
different lines along which it would require to be reconsidered and
developed to constitute a satisfactory philosophy. In addition to some
of the greater names in the history of philosophy, I have referred--in
the footnotes and elsewhere--to the thoughts and the works of living
writers who might be profitably studied by the reader in this connexion.
Pragmatism is in some respects but a sociological or an anthropological
doctrine significant of the rediscovery by our age of the doctrine
of man, and of its desire to accord to this doctrine the importance
that is its due. It represented, to begin with (in its Instrumentalism
chiefly), the discontent of a dying century with the weight of its own
creations in the realm of science and theory along with a newer and
fresher consciousness of the fact that there can be no rigid separation
of philosophy from the general thought and practice of mankind. And
even if we accept this idea of the supremacy of the doctrine of man
over both philosophy and science, this does not mean that we exalt the
worker and the prophet over all knowledge, but simply that philosophy
must have a theory of reality that provides for their existence and
function alongside of those of the thinker or the student as such. The
true philosophy is in fact the true doctrine of man.
Another lesson that we may learn from Pragmatism and Humanism is
the truth of the contention that there can be no philosophy without
assumptions of one kind or another, without facts and intuitions and
immediate experiences. A philosophy itself is an act or a creation,
representative of the attention of the thinker to certain aspects of
his experience and of the experience of the world which he shares with
other thinkers and with other agents. And, as Bergson has reminded
us, it is often the great intuition underlying the attention and the
thought of a philosopher that is of more worth to the world than the
dialectic, or the logic, through the aid of which it is set forth and
elaborated. This latter he may frequently have inherited or absorbed
from the schools of his time.
The reason why the idealists and the dialecticians of our time have
so often fought shy of beginning with the immediate or the “given,”
is partly that they are not yet in their thoughts perfectly free of
some taint or tincture of the supposed realism or dualism of the
common-sense philosophy or the correspondence view of truth. They
seem to have the fear that if they admit a given element of fact
in speculation they will unconsciously be admitting that there is
something outside thought and immediate experience in the true sense
of these terms. In this fear they are forgetful of the great lesson of
Idealism that there is nothing “outside” thought and consciousness,
no “object” without a “subject,” that the world is “phenomenal” of a
great experience, which they and other men are engaged in interpreting,
and of which we may all become directly conscious. And while to God
the end of all experiences and processes is known from the beginning,
or apart from the mere time and space limitations that affect us as
finite beings, it is still true that for us as men and as thinkers the
reality of things is not “given” apart from the contribution to it that
we ourselves make in our responsive and in our creative activity. In
contending, therefore, for the reality, in every philosophy, of this
assumption of ourselves and of the working value of our thought and
of our activity, Pragmatism has been contending in its own fashion
for the great doctrine of the sovereignty of the spirit which (when
properly interpreted) is the one thing that can indeed recall the
modern mind out of its endless dispersion and distraction, and out of
its reputed present indifference. It is in the placing of this great
reality before the world, or, rather, of the view of human nature that
makes it a possibility, and in intelligibility, that (in my opinion)
the significance of Pragmatism consists, along with that of the various
doctrines with which it may be naturally associated. There are many
indications in the best thought and practice of our time that humanity
is again awakening to a creative and a self-determinative view of
itself, of its experience, and of its powers. Of the presuppositions
and the conditions under which this idea may be regarded as true and
intelligible I have already spoken. Its proper interpretation, however,
along with the exposition of the metaphysic upon which it must be
made to repose, is at least part of the work of the philosophy of the
future--if philosophy is true to its task of leading and guiding the
thought of mankind.
FOOTNOTES
[1] See, for example, the concessions and the fresh statements of the
problem of philosophy, and the “clearing of the ground,” etc., referred
to on p. 76 and p. 74. Also p. 27 in reference to the stir and the
activity that have been excited by the pragmatist controversy. See also
p. 230, in the eighth chapter, in reference to some things in such a
typical intellectualist as Professor Bosanquet that may be construed as
a concession to Pragmatism and Humanism.
[2] Dr. Edward Caird affirmed in his memoir of his brother (Principal
John Caird) that idealists admit some pragmatist charges.
[3] Professor Stein, a contemporary European authority, to whom we
shall again refer below, says, for example, in his well-known articles
in the _Archiv für Philosophie_ (1908), in reference to Pragmatism,
that we have had nothing like it [as a ‘movement’] “since Nietzsche”
(“Der Pragmatismus,” p. 9).
[4] See Chapter VIII., where I discuss the natural theology that bases
itself upon these supposed principles of a “whole of truth” and the
“Absolute.”
[5] This statement I think would be warranted by the fact of the
tendency of the newer physical science of the day to substitute an
electrical, for the old material, or corpuscular, conception of matter,
or by the admission, for example, of a contemporary biologist of
importance (Verworn, _General Physiology_, p. 39) that “all attempts
to explain the psychical by the physical must fail. The actual problem
is ... not in explaining psychical by physical phenomena but rather in
reducing to its psychical elements physical, like all other psychical
phenomena.”
[6] See p. 81, and p. 150.
[7] See Chapter V. pp. 136, 138, where we examine, or reflect upon, the
ethics of Pragmatism.
[8] The importance of these volumes in the matter of the development,
in the minds of thinking people everywhere, of a dynamic and an organic
(instead of the older rationalistic and intellectualistic) conception
of religion and of the religious life cannot possibly be overestimated.
Of course it is only right to add here that such a dynamic and organic
view of religion is the property not only of Professor James and his
associates, but also of the army of workers of to-day in the realms of
comparative religion and anthropology.
[9] _Pragmatism_, p. 300.
[10] Or an admission like the following in the _Meaning of Truth_
(p. 243): “It may be that the truest of all beliefs shall be that in
transsubjective realities.”
[11] _Meaning of Truth_, p. 124, 5.
[12] See p. 40 and p. 149.
[13] _Pragmatism_, pp. 244–245.
[14] _A Pluralistic Universe_, p. 34.
[15] In respect of James’ later doctrine of “radical empiricism” we
may quote, for the sake of intelligibility, from Professor Perry
(his friend and literary executor) the following: “James’ empiricism
means, then, first, that ideas are to be tested by direct knowledge,
and, second, that knowledge is limited to what can be presented.
There is, however, a third consideration which is an application of
these, and the means of avoiding a difficulty which is supposed to
be fatal to them. This is what James calls ‘radical empiricism,’ the
discovery that ‘the relations between things, conjunctive as well as
disjunctive, are just as much matters of direct particular experience,
neither more nor less so, than the things themselves.’ ‘Adjacent
minima of experience’ are united by the ‘persistent identity of
certain units, or emphases, or points, or objects, or members ... of
the experience-continuum.’ Owing to the fact that the connexions of
things are thus found along with them, it is unnecessary to introduce
any substance below them, or any subject above them, to hold things
together” (_Present Philosophical Tendencies_, p. 365). In regard to
this radical empiricism, I am obliged, as a Kantian, to say that, to my
mind, it represents the reduction of all Pragmatism and Empiricism to
an impossibility--to the fatuous attempt (exploded for ever by Hume) to
attempt to explain knowledge and experience _without first principles_
of some kind or another. It is a “new Humism,” a thing which no one
who has penetrated into the meaning of Hume’s _Treatise_ can possibly
advocate. A philosophy without first principles, or a philosophy that
reduces the relations between experiences to mere “bits” of experience,
is indeed no philosophy at all.
[16] See p. 82 and p. 154.
[17] The Preface, pp. xv., xix.
[18] See p. 159 and p. 212.
[19] As for Dr. Schiller’s charge that Absolutism is essentially
“irreligious” in spite of the fact of its having been (in England)
religious at the outset, the best way of meeting this is to insist that
it is mainly in its form, rather than its content, that Absolutism is
(or was) irreligious in both Germany and England.
[20] British students of philosophy are quite well aware that it was
the religious and the spiritual motive that seemed to weigh most
with Hutchison Stirling and John Caird and Green in their attempts
(thirty years ago) to introduce German transcendental philosophy to
their fellow-countrymen. Stirling was impressed with the idea of a
working correspondence between Hegelianism and Calvinism. John Caird’s
animus was against the agnosticism of Herbert Spencer and of Mansel,
and he found inspiration in this connexion in Hegel’s treatment of
Kant’s theory of the limitations of the understanding. And to Green
the attractive thing about Kant was his vindication of a “spiritual
principle” in “nature,” and in “knowledge,” and in “conduct,” a
principle which rendered absurd the naturalism of the evolutionary
philosophy. Friends of this spiritualistic interpretation of German
Critical Rationalism find its richest and fullest expression in
the books of Edward Caird upon the _Evolution of Religion_ and the
_Evolution of Theology in the Greek Philosophers_.
[21] The idea of a left wing is generally associated in the minds of
British students with the destructive criticism of Mr. Bradley in
_Appearance and Reality_, in which many, or most, of our ordinary
ways of regarding reality (our beliefs in “primary” and “secondary”
qualities of matter, in “space” and “time,” in “causation,” “activity,”
a “self,” in “things in themselves,” etc.) are convicted of “fatal
inconsistencies.” See, however, Professor Pringle-Pattison’s
instructive account of his book in _Man’s Place in the Cosmos_,
bringing out the positive side. The “left” is represented too, now, in
Dr. Bosanquet’s _Individuality and Value_, which we examine below as
the last striking output of British transcendentalism or absolutism.
See in this entire connexion Professor James Seth’s recent account of
the “Idealist Answers to Hume” in his _English Philosophy and Schools
of Philosophy_.
[22] See p. 244. I find a confirmation of this idea in what a biologist
like Professor Needham treats of as the “autogenetic nature of
responses” (_General Biology_, p. 474) in animals.
[23] See the _Studies in Humanism_ for all the positions referred to,
or quoted, or paraphrased, in these two paragraphs.
[24] This is an important essay. It reminds the modern reader, for one
thing, of the importance of the natural theology of Aristotle. It is
an anticipation, too, in its way, of the tendency of modern physics to
substitute a dynamic for a static conception of matter, or atoms, or
substance. In it Dr. Schiller points out how Aristotle’s doctrine of
a perfect and self-perfecting Activity [an ἐνέργεια that is not mere
change or motion, but a perfect “life” involving the disappearance of
“time” and imperfection] is in a sense the solution of the old [Greek]
and the modern demand for the substance or essence of things. We shall
take occasion (in speaking of the importance to Philosophy of the
concept of activity, and in speaking of the Philosophy of Bergson) to
use the same idea, to which Dr. Schiller has given an expression in
this essay, of God as the eternal or the perfect life of the world.
[25] For a favourable estimate of the services of Dr. Schiller in
regard to Pragmatism and Humanism the reader may consult the articles
of Captain Knox in the _Quarterly Review_, 1909.
[26] _Studies in Humanism_, p. 19. The remarks made in this paragraph
will have to be modified, to some extent, in view of the recent
(1911) appearance of the third edition of Dr. Schiller’s _Riddles of
the Sphinx_. This noteworthy book contains, to say the very least,
a great deal in the way of a positive ontology, or theory of being,
and also many quite different rulings in respect of the nature of
metaphysic and of the matter of its relation to science and to common
sense. It rests, in the main, upon the idea of a perfect society of
perfected individuals as at once the true reality and the end of the
world-process--an idea which exists also, at least in germ, in the
pluralistic philosophy of Professor James; and we shall indeed return
to this practical, or sociological, philosophy as the outcome, not only
of Pragmatism, but also of Idealism, as conceived by representative
living thinkers. Despite, however, these many positive and constructive
merits of this work of Dr. Schiller’s, it is for many reasons not
altogether unfair to its spirit to contend that his philosophy is
still, in the main, that of a humanistic pragmatism in which both
“theory” and “practice” are conceived as experimentally and as
hypothetically as they are by Professor Dewey.
[27] See p. 106.
[28] See Professor Bawden’s book upon Pragmatism.
[29] _Pragmatism_, p. 58.
[30] _Ibid._ 76.
[31] _Studies in Logical Theory_, p. 2.
[32] I endeavour to indicate what this Humanism and Personalism may be
in my sixth chapter.
[33] _Journ. of Phil. Psychol._, 1906, p. 338.
[34] From vol. ii. (p. 322) of Baldwin’s _Dictionary of Philosophy_.
Dr. C. S. Peirce, formerly a teacher of mathematics and philosophy at
Johns Hopkins University, was made by James into the father or patron
saint of Pragmatism. James confesses to have been stimulated into
Pragmatism by the teachings of Peirce.
[35] _Journ. of Phil. Psy._, 1906, p. 340.
[36] See pp. 78, 148; and in reference to the last striking
presentation of Absolutism, p. 230.
[37] See Bourdeau, _Pragmatisme et Modernisme_, and W. Riley in the
_Journ. of Phil. Psy._, April and May 1911; the James article, _Journ.
of Phil._, 1906; _Journ. of Phil._, 1907, pp. 26–37, on Papini’s
“Introduction to Pragmatism”; _The Nation_ (N.Y.), November 1907, on
“Papini’s view of the ‘daily tragedy’ of life.”
[38] Reported to have been inaugurated by a Franco-Italian poet,
Martinetti. Of the question of any possible connexion between this
“Futurism” with the present Art movement bearing the same name I know
nothing definite.
[39] I refer to the recent volume dedicated by some of his old pupils
to Professor Garman--a celebrated teacher of philosophy in one of the
older colleges of the United States.
[40] The two large volumes on the _Psychology of Adolescence_.
[41] The _Psychology of Religion_.
[42] Even such a book--and it is no doubt in its way a genuine and a
noteworthy book--as Harold H. Begbie’s _Twice-born Men_ is pointed to
by this wing as another instance of the truth of pragmatist principles
in the sphere of experimental religion. Schopenhauer, by the way,
was inclined to estimate the efficacy of a religion by its power
of affecting the will, of converting men so that they were able to
overcome the selfish will to live. See my _Schopenhauer’s System in its
Philosophical Significance_.
[43] See, for example, the declaration of James and Schiller (in the
prefaces to their books and elsewhere) in respect of their attitudes
to the work of men like Renouvier, Poincaré, Milhaud, Wilbois, Le
Roy, Blondel, Pradines, the valuable reports of M. Lalande to the
_Philosophical Review_ (1906–7–8), the articles of Woodbridge Riley
in the _Journal of Philosophy_ (1911) upon the continental critics
of Pragmatism, the books of Bourdeau, Hebert, Rey, Tonquedoc, Armand
Sabatier, Schinz, Picard, Berthelot, those of Poincaré, Renouvier,
Pradines, and the rest, the older books upon nineteenth-century French
philosophy by men like Fouillée, Levy-Bruhl, etc. There are also
valuable references upon the French pragmatists in Father Walker’s
_Theories of Knowledge_ (in the Stoneyhurst Series), and in Professor
Inge’s valuable little book upon _Faith and its Psychology_.
[44] The outstanding representative in France during the entire second
half of the nineteenth century of “Neo-Criticism” or “Neo-Kantianism,”
a remarkable and comprehensive thinker, to whose influence, for
example, James attributed a part of his mental development. His review,
the _Critique Philosophique_, was a worthy (idealist) rival of the
more positivistically inclined, and merely psychological, review of
Ribot, the _Revue Philosophique_. French Neo-Kantianism, holding, as
Renouvier does, that Kant’s ethics is the keystone of his system,
is not in general inclined to the “positivism” or the “scientific”
philosophy of some of the German Neo-Kantians. The critical work of
Renouvier proposes some very ingenious and systematic rearrangements
of Kant’s philosophy of the categories, and his freedom-philosophy
must certainly have done a good deal (along with the work of others)
to create the atmosphere in which Bergson lives and moves to-day.
With Renouvier, Neo-Kantianism merges itself too in the newer
philosophy of “Personalism,” and he wrote, indeed, an important book
upon this very subject (_Le Personnalisme_, 1902). In this work, we
find a criticism of rationalism that anticipates Pragmatism, the
author explicitly contending for a substitution of the principle of
“rational belief” instead of the “false principle” of demonstrable or
_a priori_ “evidence.” Consciousness, he teaches, is the foundation
of existence, and “personality” the first “causal principle” of the
world (although admitting “creation” to be beyond our comprehension).
He examines critically, too, the notions of the “Absolute” and of the
“Unconditioned,” holding that they should not be substantiated into
entities. “Belief” is involved in “every act,” he teaches--also another
pragmatist doctrine. And like his great predecessor Malebranche,
and like our English Berkeley, he teaches that God is our “natural
object,” the true “other” of our life. The philosophy of Personalism,
the foundations of which are laid in this work, is further developed
by Renouvier in a comprehensive work which he published in 1899,
in conjunction with M. Prat, on _The New Monadology_ (_La Nouvelle
Monadologie_). This is one of the most complete presentations of a
philosophy of “Pluralism” that is at the same time a “Theism”--to be
associated, in my opinion, say, with the recent work of Dr. James Ward
upon the _Realm of Ends_, referred to on p. 162.
[45] _Philos. Rev._ (1906), article by Lalande.
[46] H. Poincaré (talked of in recent scientific circles as one of the
greatest mathematicians of history) is (he died about a year ago),
so far as our present purpose is concerned, one of the important
scientific writers of the day upon the subject of the “logic of
hypotheses,” and of the “hypothetical method” in science--the method
which the pragmatists are so anxious to apply to philosophy. He seems
(see his _La Science et l’Hypothèse_, as well as the later book, _La
Valeur de la Science_, referred to by Lalande in his professional
reports to the _Philosophical Review_) to accept to some extent the
idea of the “hypothetical” character of the constructions of both the
mathematical and the physical sciences, believing, however, at the same
time that we must not be “unduly sceptical” about their conclusions,
revealing as they do something of the “nature of reality.” He discusses
among other topics the theory of “energetics” of which we speak below
in the case of Ostwald. He insists, too, upon the idea that the real
is known only by “experience,” and that this “experience” includes the
comparison of the thoughts of many minds. And yet he believes to some
extent in the Kantian theory of the _a priori_ element in knowledge
(see _La Science_, etc., p. 64). It is, however, quite unnecessary for
me to presume to enter into the large subject of the precise nature of
“hypotheses” in the mathematical and the physical sciences.
[47] A professor of mathematics in Paris and an ardent Bergsonian, and
along with Laberthonnière one of the prominent Catholic defenders of
Pragmatism and Modernism, author of a book on _Dogmatism and Criticism_
(_Dogme et Critique_). Not having had the time to examine this book, as
somewhat removed from my immediate subject, I append for the benefit
of the reader the following statements and quotations from the useful
book _Faith and its Psychology_, by Professor Inge of Cambridge. It
is easy to see that the positions represented therein would give rise
to controversy as to the historicity or fact of Christianity. “Le Roy
gives us some examples of this Catholic Pragmatism. When we say ‘God is
personal,’ we mean ‘behave in our relations with God as you do in your
relations with a human person.’ When we say, ‘Jesus is risen from the
dead,’ we mean ‘treat him as if he were your contemporary.’... His main
theses may be summed up in his own words. ‘The current intellectualist
conception renders insoluble most of the objections which are now
raised against the idea of dogma. A doctrine of the primacy of action,
on the contrary, permits us to solve the problem without abandoning
anything of the rights of thought or of the exigencies of dogma.’” Le
Roy, by the way, has published a book upon the philosophy of Bergson,
which is said to be the best book upon the subject. It has been
translated into English.
[48] M. Abel Rey, author of a work on the _Theory of Physical Science
in the hands of Contemporary Scientists_ (_La Théorie de la physique
chez les physiciens contemporains_). In this book (I have not had the
time to examine it carefully) M. Rey examines the theories and methods
of Newton, and also of modern thinkers like Mach and Ostwald, reaching
the conclusion that the philosophy with which physical science is most
compatible is a “modified form of Positivism,” which bears a striking
resemblance to “Pragmatism” and the “philosophy of experience.” The
English reader will find many useful references to Rey in the pages of
Father Leslie J. Walker’s _Theories of Knowledge_, in the “Stoneyhurst
Philosophical Series.”
[49] _Ibidem._
[50] It was impossible to procure a copy of this work of M. Blondel. I
have tried to do so twice in Paris.
[51] M. Lalande in the _Philosophical Review_ (1906), p. 246.
[52] _Ibid._ pp. 245–246.
[53] I am inclined to attach a great importance to this idea (Kant
obviously had it) of “consulting moral experience directly,” provided
only that the “moral” in our experience is not too rigidly separated
from the intellectual. And it would so far, therefore, be only to the
credit of Pragmatism if we could associate it with a rational effort
to do justice to our moral experience, as indeed possibly presupposing
a “reality” that transcends the limits of our mere individuality, a
reality that transcends, too, the subjective idealism that figures but
too prominently in modern philosophy. See my eighth chapter, p. 223,
where I criticize Dr. Bosanquet for not consulting moral experience
directly.
[54] _Phil. Rev._, 1906, p. 243.
[55] See p. 160.
[56] See p. 200 _et. ff._
[57] See p. 64.
[58] For a later statement upon the philosophy of religion in France
see a report for the _Phil. Rev._ (vol. xvi. p. 304), by Le Roy.
This whole matter is, of course, a subject in itself of the greatest
theoretical and practical importance. It is enough for our purpose
to have indicated the different ways in which Pragmatism and the
“Will-to-Believe” philosophy have been received in France, and the
different issues raised by this reception. The reader who would
care to look at a constructive, philosophical view (by the _doyen_
of French philosophy professors) of the whole issue between the
pragmatist or “voluntarist” point of view in religion and the older
“intellectual” view, cannot do better than consult _Science and
Religion in Contemporary Philosophy_, by E. Boutroux, a book that is
apparently studied everywhere at present in France. Its spirit and
substance may be indicated by the following quotations, which follow
after some pages in which M. Boutroux exposes the error of “the radical
distinction between theory and practice.” “The starting point of
science is an abstraction, _i.e._ an element extracted from the given
fact and considered separately. We cannot expect man to be satisfied
with the abstract when the concrete is at his disposal. That would be
‘something like offering a printed bill of fare as the equivalent for a
solid meal.’ _Man uses science but he lives religion._ The part cannot
replace the whole; the symbol cannot suppress reality.”... “Not only
is science unable to replace religion, but she cannot dispense with
the subjective reality upon which the latter is grounded. It is pure
Scholastic realism to imagine that the objective and the impersonal
suffice apart from the subjective in our experience. Between the
subjective and the objective no demarcation is given which justifies
from the philosophical standpoint the divisions which science imagines
for her own convenience.” (p. 329).
[59] Since writing these words, I have made (thanks firstly to Dr.
Schiller’s review in _Mind_, July 1911) the acquaintance of the
important work of M. Pradines upon the _Conditions of Action_. In
the central conception of this work, that action is “all-including”
and that all knowledge is a form of action, I find an important
development of much that the pragmatists have long been endeavouring
to express, and also in particular a development of the celebrated
action philosophy of M. Blondel. I am inclined, with Dr. Schiller,
to regard the volumes of M. Pradines as apparently the high-water
mark of French pragmatist philosophy in the general sense of the
term, although I cannot but at the same time hail with approval their
occasional sharp criticism of Pragmatism as to some extent “scepticism
and irrationalism.” I am inclined to think, too, that the ethical
philosophy of M. Pradines has some of the same defects that I shall
venture to discuss later in dealing with the application (mainly by
Dewey) of Pragmatism to moral theory. Of course his _Conditions of
Action_ is by no means as original a production as Blondel’s book upon
_Action_.
[60] Fouillée speaks in his book upon the _Idealist Movement and the
Reaction against Positive Science_ of the year 1851, as the time of the
triumph of “force,” of “Naturalism” (Zola, Goncourt, etc.), and of the
revival of Idealism by Lachelier, Renouvier, and Boutroux.
[61] See the celebrated work of A. Fouillée, _La Psychologie des
idées-forces_ (Paris, 1890). I confess to having been greatly impressed
by this book when I first made its acquaintance. In particular, I can
think of an idea in Fouillée’s book that anticipates even Bergson,
namely the fact that every idea or sensation is an effort that is
furthered or impeded. But Fouillée’s works out in this book the active
of the volitional side of nearly every mental power and of the mental
life itself, refusing to separate “mind” and “bodily activity.” It
really anticipates a great deal of the whole French philosophy and
psychology of action, including the work of Blondel and Bergson.
[62] M. Paul Desjardins (at present a professor of “letters” at Sévres)
was influential in Paris about 1892–93 as the founder of a _Union pour
l’Action morale_, which published a monthly bulletin. This society
still exists, but under the name (and the change is indeed highly
significant of what Pragmatism in general really needs) _L’Union pour
la vérité morale et sociale_. I append a few words from one of the
bulletins I received from M. Desjardins. They are indicative of the
spiritualizations of thought and action for which the old society
stood. “Il ne s’agit de rien moins que de renverser entièrement
l’échelle de nos jugements, de nos attaches, de mettre en haut ce
qui était en bas, et en bas ce qui était en haut. Il s’agit d’une
conversion totale, en somme....” “La règle commune c’est la médiocrité
d’âme, ou même ce qu’on pourrait appeler _l’athéisme pratique_. En
effet, Dieu étant, par rapport à notre conscience, la Volonté que le
bien se réalise, ou la Règle vivante, on devient pratiquement, athée,
fût-on d’ailleurs très persuadé par les preuves philosophiques de
l’existence de Dieu, lorsqu’on perd la notion de cette Volonté immuable
avec laquelle la nôtre se confond activement _dès qu’elle mérite le nom
de volonté libre_, etc.” In this last sentence there is a distinctly
pragmatist note in the sense of the action philosophy of Blondel and
Bergson and the rest.
[63] See also the recent book by Flournoy on the _Philosophy of James_
(Paris, 1911), in which this interesting special subject is discussed
as well as the important difference between James and Bergson.
[64] Rey in his _Philosophie Moderne_, 1908, speaks of the “gleaning of
the practical factors of rationalistic systems” as the “new line” in
French philosophy (_Journ. of Phil._, 1911, p. 226).
[65] From the Lalande article already mentioned.
[66] This can be seen, for example, in the Preface to _Die Philosophie
des Als Ob_, the quasi-Pragmatist book recently edited by Vaihinger,
the famous commentator on Kant. “We must distinguish in Pragmatism,” it
is there stated, “what is valuable from the uncritical exaggerations.
Uncritical Pragmatism is an epistemological Utilitarianism of the
worst sort; what helps us to make life tolerable is true, etc.... Thus
Philosophy becomes again an _ancilla theologiae_; nay, the state of
matters is even worse than this; it becomes a _meretrix theologorum_.”
This, by the way, is a strange and a striking book, and is perhaps the
last conspicuous instance from Germany of the vitality, and of the
depths of the roots of some of the principles of the pragmatists. The
very appearance of the name of Vaihinger in connexion with it (as the
editor) must be a considerable shock to rationalists and to Kantians,
who have long looked upon Vaihinger as one of the authoritative
names in German Transcendentalism. Here, however, he seems to agree
with those who treat Kant’s ethical philosophy of postulates as the
real Kant, making him out, further, as the author of a far-reaching
philosophy of the “hypotheses” and the “fictions” that we must use in
the interpretation of the universe. With Dr. Schiller, who reviews this
work in _Mind_ (1912), I am inclined to think that it travels too far
in the direction of an entirely hypothetical conception of knowledge,
out-pragmatising the pragmatists apparently. The student who reads
German will find it a veritable magazine of information about nearly
all the thinkers of the time who have pragmatist or quasi-pragmatist
leanings. All the names, for example, of the German and French writers
to whom I refer in this second chapter are mentioned there [I had,
of course, written my book before I saw Vaihinger], along with many
others. It is as serious an arraignment of abstract rationalism as is
to be found in contemporary literature, and edited, as I say, by the
Nestor of the Kant students of our time.
[67] Especially in the open-minded and learned articles in the _Archiv
für Philosophie_, 1907, Band xiv., Professor Stein (of Bern) is known
as one of the most enthusiastic and voluminous writers upon Social
Philosophy in Germany. His best-known work is an encyclopedic book upon
the social question in the light of philosophy (_Die soziale Frage im
Lichte der Philosophie_, 1903). His tendency here is realistic and
naturalistic and evolutionistic, and he thinks (for a philosopher) far
too much of men like Herbert Spencer and Mach and Ostwald. What one
misses in Stein is a discussion of the social question in relation to
some of the deeper problems of philosophy, such as we find in men of
our own country like Mackenzie and Bosanquet, and Ritchie, and Jones,
and others. His work, however (it has been translated into Russian
and French), is a complete literary presentation of the subject, and
a valuable source of information. See my review notices of it in the
_Phil. Rev._ vol. xiv.
[68] Mach and Ostwald both represent (for the purposes of our study)
the association that undoubtedly exists between Pragmatism and the
tendency of all the physical and natural sciences to form “hypotheses”
or conceptions, that are to them the best means of “describing” or
“explaining” (for any purpose) either facts, or the connexions between
facts. Mach (professor of the history and theory of the sciences in
Vienna) is a “phenomenalist” and “methodologist” who attacks all _a
priorism_, treating the matter of the arrangement of the “material”
of a science under the idea of the “most economic expenditure” of our
“mental energy.” One of the best known of his books is his _Analysis
of the Sensations_ (translated, along with his _Popular Science
Lectures_, in the “Open Court Library” of Chicago). In this work he
carries out the idea of his theory of knowledge as a question of the
proper relation of “facts” to “symbols.” “Thing, body, matter,” he says
(p. 6), “are all nothing apart from their so-called attributes.” “Man
possesses in its highest form the power of consciously and arbitrarily
determining his point of view.” In his _Introduction_, he attempts to
show how “the ego and the relation of bodies to the ego give rise” to
“problems” in the relations simply of “certain complexes” of “sensation
to each other.” While it is undoubtedly to the credit of Mach that he
sees the “subjective,” or the “mental,” factor in facts and things and
objects, it must be said that he ignores altogether the philosophical
problems of the ego, or the “self,” as something more than a mere
object among objects.
Ostwald is one of the founders of the theory of “Energetics,” the
theory of the school that believes in substituting a dynamical
philosophy, for the older, atomic, or mechanical philosophy of matter
and motion. He put this philosophy forward in 1895 as the last gift of
the nineteenth to the twentieth century. He suggests how this idea of
energetics may be applied also to psychical processes, in so far as
these may be understood by conceptions that have proved to be useful in
our interpretation of the physical world. Our “consciousness would thus
come to be looked upon as a property of a peculiar kind of energy of
the nerves.” The whole idea is a piece of phenomenalistic positivism,
and although Ostwald makes an attempt (somewhat in the manner of
Herbert Spencer) to explain the “forms,” or the categories, of
experience as simply “norms” or “rules” that have been handed on from
one generation to another, he does not occupy himself with ultimate
philosophical questions about the nature either of matter or of energy.
His _Natural Philosophy_ has recently been translated into English
(Holt & Co., 1910). Its Pragmatism lies in the fact of his looking
upon concepts and classification as “not questions” of the so-called
“essence” of the thing, “but rather as pertaining to purely practical
arrangements for an easier and more successful mastery of scientific
problems” (p. 67). He also takes a pragmatist, or “functional,”
conception of the mental life towards the close of this book. Professor
Ostwald lectured some years ago in the United States, and his lectures
were attended by students of philosophy and students of science.
Professor (now President) Hibben has written an interesting account of
his theory in its philosophical bearings in the _Philosophical Review_,
vol. xii.
[69] The philosophy of Avenarius (born in Paris, but died as Professor
of Inductive Philosophy in Zurich) is called “Empirical Criticism,”
which differs from Idealism by taking a more realistic attitude to
ordinary human experience. There is an excellent elementary account
of Avenarius in _Mind_ for 1897 by Carstanjen of Zurich. Avenarius
goes back in some respects to the teaching of Comte as to the need of
interpreting all philosophical theories in the terms of the social
environment out of which they come.
[70] _Logic_, vol. ii. p. 17. English translation by Miss Dendy.
In this same section of his work, Lotze talks of the demands of
our thought as “postulates” whose claims rest in the end upon our
will--_auf unserm Wollen_.
[71] To be traced to Fichte’s well-known initial interpretation of Kant
from the standpoint of the Practical Reason of the second “Critique,”
and to Schelling’s late “positive” philosophy, and to Schopenhauer, the
will philosopher _par excellence_. See my _Schopenhauer’s System in its
Philosophical Significance_.
[72] As an illustration of this “conceptual shorthand,” I take the
following lines from Professor Needham’s book upon _General Biology_
(p. 222) in respect of “classification” and its relative and changing
character. “Whatever our views of relationship, the series in which we
arrange organisms are based upon the likenesses and differences we find
to exist among them. This is classification. We associate organisms
together under group names because, being so numerous and so diverse,
it is only thus that our minds can deal with them. Classification
furnishes the handles by which we move all our intellectual luggage.
We base our groupings on what we know of the organisms. Our system of
classification is therefore liable to change with every advance of
knowledge.”
[73] Professor Jerusalem (the translator of James’s _Pragmatism_ into
German) is known as one of the German discoverers of Pragmatism.
His _Introduction to Philosophy_ (translated by Professor Sanders,
Macmillan & Co., N.Y., 1910) is an admirable, easy, and instructive
introduction to philosophy from a pragmatist point of view. It has
gone through four editions in Germany. It is quite free from any taint
of irrationalism and has sections upon the “theory of knowledge” and
the “theory of being.” Its spirit may be inferred from the following
quotations. “My philosophy is characterized by the empirical view
point, the genetic method, and the biological and the social methods
of interpreting the human mind” (the Preface). “Philosophy is the
intellectual effort which is undertaken with a view to combining
the common experiences of life and the results of scientific
investigation into a harmonious and consistent world theory; a world
theory, moreover, which is adapted to satisfy the requirements of the
understanding and the demands of the heart. There was a time when
men believed that such a theory could be constructed from the pure
forms of thought, without much concern for the results of detailed
investigation. But that time is for ever past” (pp. 1 and 2).
[74] Author of a work on _Philosophy and Social Economy_ (_Philosophie
und Wirthschaft_), in which the fundamental idea is that philosophy is
essentially nothing more or less than a “conception of life” or a view
of the world in general, and that the older rationalistic philosophy
will therefore have to be modified in view of modern discoveries and
modern ways of looking at things. It has, of course, the limitations
of such a point of view, in so far as its author seems to forget
that philosophy must _lead_ human life and not merely _follow_ it.
My present point is merely to mention of the existence and work of
this man as one of the continental thinkers who have anticipated the
essentially social conception of philosophy taken by the pragmatists.
[75] It is easy to see the influence of Fichte’s will philosophy and
practical idealism in Schellwien’s books (_Philosophie und Leben_,
_Wille und Erkenntniss_, _Der Geist der neuern Philosophie_). He
speaks of the primacy of the will (in point of time only, of course),
or of the “unconscious” in the life of man, allowing, however, that
man gradually transforms this natural life in the life of “creative
activity” that is his proper life. He states (in the _Spirit of the New
Philosophy_) the pragmatist idea that “belief” (p. 32) or the “feeling”
that we have of the ultimate “unity” of “subject and object,” precedes
(also in point of “time”) knowledge, pointing out, however, in the
same place the limitations of belief. These latter, he supposes, to be
overcome in the higher knowledge that we have in creative activity--an
idea which, I think, may be associated to some extent with the position
of Blondel.
[76] In the _Phil. Rev._ (xvi. p. 250) Dr. Ewald speaks of this work
of this psychologizing school as existing alongside of the renewed
interest in Fichte and Schelling and Hegel. It is an attempt to revive
the teaching of Fries, a Kantian (at Jena) who attempted to establish
the Critique of Pure Reason upon a psychological basis, believing
that psychology, “based on internal experience,” must form the basis
of all philosophy. It stands squarely upon the fact that all logical
laws and “categories,” even the highest and most abstract, in order to
“come to consciousness in man,” must be given to him as “psychological
processes”--a position which is certainly true as far as it goes, and
which supports, say, the genetic psychological attitude of Professor
Dewey. Its attitude has been sharply criticized in some of his books
by Dr. Ernst Cassirer of Berlin, a well-known upholder of a more
rationalistic form of Neo-Kantianism.
[77] Dr. Simmel of Berlin (like Stein) is a prominent representative
of this school (even in a recent striking book that he wrote upon the
philosophy of Kant). He has written, for example, a most erudite work
upon the _Philosophy of Money_, and this at the same time with all his
university work as a fascinating and learned lecturer upon both ancient
and modern philosophy.
[78] Without attempting to enter upon the matter of Harnack’s
philosophy as a Neo-Kantian of the school of Ritschl, I am thinking
simply of things like the following from his book on the _Essence of
Christianity_. “It is to man that religion pertains, to man, as one
who in the midst of all change and progress himself never changes” (p.
8). “The point of view of the philosophical theorists in the strict
sense of the word will find no place in these lectures. Had they been
delivered sixty years ago it would have been our endeavour to try to
arrive by speculative reasoning at some general conception of religion,
and then to define the Christian religion accordingly. But we have
rightly become sceptical about the value of this procedure. _Latet
dolus in generalibus._ We know to-day that life cannot be spanned by
general conceptions” (p. 9). See also his protest (on p. 220) against
the substitution of a “Hellenistic” view of religion for religion
itself--a protest that is, according to Pfleiderer in his _Development
of Theology_ (p. 298), a marked characteristic of Harnack’s whole
_History of Dogma_.
[79] I am thinking of Ritschl’s sharp distinction between “theoretical
knowledge” and “religious faith” (which rises to judgments of value
about the world that transcend even moral values), and of his idea that
the “truth” of faith is practical, and must be “lived.” Pfleiderer says
(in his _Development of Theology_, p. 184) that Ritschl’s “conception
of religion is occupied with judgments of value [_Werturtheile_],
_i.e._ with conceptions of our relation to the world which are of
moment solely according to their value in awakening feelings of
pleasure and pain, as our dominion over the world is furthered or
checked.” His “acceptance of the idea of God as [with Kant] a practical
‘belief,’ and not an act of speculative cognition,” is also to some
extent a pragmatist idea in the sense in which, in this book, I reject
pragmatist ideas. Ritschl seems to have in the main only a strongly
practical interest in dogmatics holding that “only the things vital
are to be made vital in the actual service of the church.” He goes the
length of holding that “a merely philosophical view of the world has
no place in Christian theology,” holding that “metaphysical inquiry”
applied to “nature” and to “spirit,” as “things to be analysed, for
the purpose of finding _out what they are in themselves_, can from the
nature of the case have no great value for Christian theology.” Of
course he is right in holding that the “proofs for the existence of
God, conducted by the purely metaphysical method, do not lead to the
forces whose representation is given in Christianity, but merely to
conceptions of a world-unity, which conceptions are neutral as regards
all religion” (_The Theology of Albrecht Ritschl_, Swing. Longmans,
Green & Co., 1901). I think this last quotation from Ritschl may be
used as an expression of the idea of the pragmatists, that a true and
complete philosophy must serve as a “dynamic” to human endeavour and to
human motive.
[80] See the reference to Windelband in the footnote upon p. 150.
[81] I am thinking of Münsterberg’s contention in his _Grundzüge_
and his other books, that the life of actual persons can never be
adequately described by the objective sciences, by psycho-physics, and
so on, and of his apparent acceptance of the distinction of Rickert
between the “descriptive” and the “normative” sciences (logic, ethics,
aesthetics, and so on).
[82] The leaders of this school are the two influential thinkers and
teachers Cohen and Natorp, the former the author of a well-known book
upon Kant’s _Theory of Experience_ (1871), formerly much used by
English and American students, and the latter the author of an equally
famous book upon Plato’s _Theory of Ideas_, which makes an interesting
attempt to connect Plato’s “Ideas” with the modern notion of the law of
a phenomenon. Cohen has given forth recently an important development
of the Kantian philosophy in his two remarkable books upon the _Logic
of Pure Knowledge_ and the _Ethic of the Pure Will_. These works
exercise a great influence upon the entire liberal (Protestant and
Jewish) thought of the time in Germany. They teach a lofty spiritualism
and idealism in the realm of ethics, which transcends altogether
anything as yet attempted in this direction by Pragmatism.
[83] See the instructive reports to the _Philosophical Review_ by
Dr. Ewald of Vienna upon Contemporary Philosophy in Germany. In the
1907 volume he speaks of this renewed interest, “on a new basis,” in
the work of the great founders of transcendentalism as an “important
movement partly within and partly outside of Neo-Kantianism,” as
“a movement heralded by some and derided by others as a reaction,”
as the “fulfilment of a prophecy by von Hartmann that after Kant
we should have Fichte, and after Fichte, Schelling and Hegel.” The
renewed interest in Schelling, and with it the revival of an interest
in university courses in the subject of the Philosophy of Nature
(see the recent work of Driesch upon the _Science and Philosophy of
the Organism_) is all part of the recent reaction in Germany against
Positivism.
[84] We may associate, I suppose, the new German journal _Logos_, an
international periodical for the “Philosophie der Kultur,” with the
same movement.
[85] See Chapter VII. upon “Pragmatism as Americanism.”
[86] See an article in the _Critical Review_ (edited by the late
Professor Salmond, of Aberdeen), by the author upon “Recent Tendencies
in American Philosophy.” The year, I think, was either 1904 or 1905.
[87] See p. 180.
[88] Without pretending to anything like a representative or an
exhaustive statement in the case of this magazine literature, I may
mention the following: Professor Perry of Harvard, in his valuable
articles for the _Journal of Philosophy and Psychology_, 1907, vol.
iv., upon “A Review of Pragmatism as a Philosophical Generalization,”
and a “Review of Pragmatism as a Theory of Knowledge”; Professor
Armstrong in vol. v. of the same journal upon the “Evolution of
Pragmatism”; and Professor Lovejoy in the 1908 vol. upon the “Thirteen
Pragmatisms.” These are but a few out of the many that might be
mentioned. The reader who is interested in looking for more such must
simply consult for himself the _Philosophical Review_, and _Mind_,
and the _Journal of Philosophy and Psychology_, for some years after,
say, 1903. There is a good list of such articles in a German Doctor
Thesis by Professor MacEachran of the University of Alberta, entitled
_Pragmatismus eine neue Richtung der Philosophie_, Leipzig, 1910. There
is also a history of pragmatist articles in the 1907 (January) number
of the _Revue des Sciences, Philosophiques et Theologiques._
[89] That this has really taken place can be clearly seen, I think, if
we inspect the official programmes of the Proceedings of the American
Philosophical Association for the last year or two.
[90] P. 144.
[91] See p. 149.
[92] See Chapter VI., p. 149, upon the doctrine and the fact of
“Meaning.”
[93] Professor Pratt, _What is Pragmatism?_ (Macmillan & Co.,
1909); H. H. Bawden, _The Principles of Pragmatism, a Philosophical
Interpretation of Experience_, Boston, 1910 (a useful book presenting
what may be called a “phenomenological” account of Pragmatism); Moore,
_Pragmatism and Its Critics_.
[94] _In Pragmatism and Its Critics_ (Univ. of Chicago Press).
[95] The manifesto has now become a book. _The New Realism_
(Macmillan). For a useful account of the New Realism and the Old see
Professor Perry, _Present Philosophical Tendencies_, Part V.
[96] The following are my reasons for saying that the “New Realism” was
already to some extent lurking in the “radical empiricism” of James.
(1) Although teaching unmistakably the “activity” of mind, James seemed
to think this activity “selective” rather than “creative” (falling in
this idea behind his much-admired Bergson). (2) Despite this belief in
the activity of the mind, he had the way of regarding consciousness
as (to some extent) the mind’s “content”--an attitude common to all
empirical psychologists since Hume and the English associationists.
And from this position (legitimate so far from the psychological point
of view) he went on to the idea (expressed in a troublesome form in
the article, “Does Consciousness exist?”) that consciousness is _not
an entity or substance_--of course it is not in the ordinary sense of
“entity.” (3) Then from this he seemed to develop the idea that the
various “elements” that enter into consciousness to be transformed
into various “relationships” do not suffer any substantial change in
this quasi-subjective “activity.” Therefore, as Professor Perry puts
it (_Present Tendencies_, p. 353), “the elements or terms which enter
into consciousness and become its content may now be regarded as _the
same elements which, in so far as otherwise related, compose physical
nature_ [italics mine]. The elements themselves, the ‘_materia prima_,’
or stuff of pure experience, are neither psychical nor physical.” It
is in this last absurd sentence [simply a piece of quasi-scientific
analysis, the error of which Critical Idealism would expose in a
moment] that the roots, I think, of “new realism” are to be found--a
doctrine whose unmitigated externalism is the negation of all
philosophy.
[97] See p. 164 and p. 230.
[98] I refer to his Aberdeen “Gifford Lectures” on “The World and The
Individual,” and to a well-known address of his upon “The Eternal
and the Practical” in the _Proceedings of the American Philosophical
Association_. In this latter pamphlet he shows that Pragmatism and the
philosophy of Consequences are impossible without “the Eternal” and
without Idealism.
[99] The criticisms of which I am thinking are (to select but a few
from memory) Green’s well-known admission in respect of Hegelianism,
that it would have “to be done all over again”; Mr. Bradley’s admission
that he is “not a Hegelian” and (recently) that he has “seen too much
of metaphysics” to place any serious weight upon its reasonings;
Jowett’s complaint (in the “life” by Campbell) that the Oxford
Hegelianism of his day was teaching students to place an undue reliance
upon “words” and “concepts” in the place of facts and things; Dr.
Bosanquet’s admission (many years ago) that, of course, “gods and men”
were more than “bloodless categories”; Professor Pringle Pattison’s
criticism of Hegel in his _Hegelianism and Personality_; Professor
Baillie’s criticisms at the end of his _Logic of Hegel_; Mr. Sturt’s
criticism of Neo-Hegelianism in his _Idola Theatri_, etc.
[100] See the following, for example, from Professor Stout: “Every
agreeable or disagreeable sensation has a conative or quasi-conative
aspect” (_Manual of Psychology_, p. 233). Also: “Perception is never
merely cognitive” (_ibid._ p. 242); it has a “conative character and a
feeling tone,” etc.
[101] A. Sidgwick’s “Applied Axioms” (_Mind_, N.S. xiv. p. 42). This is
extremely useful, connecting the recent pragmatist movement with the
work of the English logicians. See in the same connexion the articles
of Captain Knox in the _Quarterly Review_ (April 1909) on “Pragmatism.”
[102] During the last ten years _Mind_ has contained articles on
the pragmatist controversy by nearly all our prominent academic
authorities: Dr. Bradley, Dr. McTaggart, Professor Taylor, Professor
Hoernle, Dr. Schiller, Dr. Mellone, Dr. Boyce-Gibson, Mr. Hobhouse, and
so on.
[103] Particularly in his valuable book on _Truth_ in which the
weakness of the Hegelian conception of truth is set forth along with
that of other views.
[104] In _Idealism as a Practical Creed_, in his _Browning as a
Religious and Philosophical Teacher_, and elsewhere.
[105] In his _Elements of Metaphysic_, and in many of his recent
reviews; in his review, for example, of Professor Bosanquet’s
_Individuality and Value_, in the _Review of Theology and Philosophy_,
and in his Mind (July 1912) review of Professor Ward’s _Realm of Ends_.
[106] In his book upon the _Philosophy of Eucken_, in _God With Us_,
and elsewhere.
[107] In _Idola Theatri_ (an important criticism of Neo-Hegelian
writers), and elsewhere.
[108] In _Essays in Philosophical Construction_, and in his book upon
Logic.
[109] In his _Introduction to Logic_.
[110] See p. 154.
[111] “If God has this perfect authority and perfect knowledge, His
authority cannot rule us, nor His knowledge know us, or any human
thing; just as our authority does not extend to the gods, nor our
knowledge know anything which is divine; so by parity of reason they,
being gods, are not our masters, neither do they know the things of
men” (_Parmenides_, 134, Jowett’s _Plato_, vol. iv.).
[112] This is, of course, a very old difficulty, involved in the
problem of the supposed pre-knowledge of God. Bradley deals with
it in the _Mind_ (July 1911) article upon “Some Aspects of Truth.”
His solution (as Professor Dawes Hicks notices in the _Hibbert
Journal_, January 1912) is the familiar Neo-Hegelian finding, that as
a “particular judgment” with a “unique context” my truth is “new,”
but “as an element in an eternal reality” it was “waiting for me.”
Readers of Green’s _Prolegomena_ are quite ready for this finding.
Pragmatists, of course, while insisting on the man-made character
of truth, have not as yet come in sight of the difficulties of the
divine foreknowledge--in relation to the free purposes and the free
discoveries of mortals.
[113] There is, it seems to me, a suggestion of this rationalist
position in the fact, for example, that Mr. Bertrana Russell begins his
recent booklet upon _The Problems of Philosophy_ with the following
inquiry about knowledge: “Is there any knowledge in the world which
is so certain that no reasonable man could doubt it?” I mean that
the initial and paramount importance attached here to this question
conveys the impression that the supreme reality for philosophy is still
some independently certain piece of knowledge. I prefer, with the
pragmatists and the humanists, to think of knowledge as concerned with
the purposes of persons as intelligent beings, or with the realities
revealed in the knowing process. Although there are passages in his
book that show Mr. Russell to be aware of the selves and the psychical
elements and processes that enter into knowing, they do not affect his
prevailingly rationalistic and impersonal conception of knowledge and
philosophy.
[114] In his sympathetic and characteristic review of James’s
“Pragmatism” in the _Journ. of Philos._, 1908.
[115] See p. 203 (the _note_), and p. 263, where I suggest that no
philosophy can exist, or can possibly begin, without some direct
contact with reality, without the experience of some person or persons,
without assumptions of one kind or another.
[116] See p. 162.
[117] In this attitude Pragmatism is manifestly in a state of rebellion
against “Platonism,” if we allow ourselves to think of Pragmatism
as capable of confronting Plato. Plato, as we know, definitely
subordinates “belief” to “knowledge” and “truth.” “As being is to
becoming,” he says, “so is truth to belief” (_Timaeus_, Jowett’s
translation). To Plato belief is a conjectural, or imaginative,
estimate of reality; it deals rather with “appearance” or “becoming”
than with “reality.” “True being” he thinks of as revealed in
the Ideas, or the rational entities that are his development and
transformation of the “definition” of Socrates. Against all this
rationalism Pragmatism (it is enough meantime merely to indicate the
fact) would have us return to the common-sense, or the religious,
position that it is invariably what we believe in that determines our
notion of reality.
[118] Cf. p. 159.
[119] From Dr. Schiller’s _Humanism_.
[120] _Pragmatism_, p. 207.
[121] It is this dissatisfaction at once with the abstractions of
science and of rationalism and with the contradictions that seem to
exist between them all and the facts of life and experience as we feel
them that constitutes _the great dualism_, or _the great opposition of
modern times_. I do not wish to emphasize this dualism, nor do I wish
to set forth faith or belief in opposition to reason when I extract
from both Pragmatism and Idealism the position that it is belief
rather than knowledge that is our fundamental estimate of reality. I
do not believe, as I indicate in the text above, that this dualism is
ultimate. It has come about only from an unfortunate setting of some
parts of our nature, or of our experience in opposition to the whole
of our nature, or the whole of our experience. That the opposition,
however, between reason and faith still exists in many quarters, and
that it is and has been _the_ opposition of modern times, and that
the great want of our times is a rational faith that shall recall the
world of to-day out of its endless “distraction” (the word is Dr.
Bosanquet’s), I am certainly inclined to maintain. In proof of this
statement it is enough to recall things like the words of Goethe about
the conflict of belief and unbelief as the unique theme of the history
of the world, or the “ethical headache which was literally a splitting
headache,” that Mr. Chesterton finds in the minds of many of our great
Victorian writers. I shall take leave of it here with three references
to its existence taken from the words or the work of living writers.
The first shall be the opposition which Mr. Bertrand Russell finds in
his _Philosophical Essays_ (in the “Free Man’s Worship”) between the
“world which science presents for our belief” and the “lofty thoughts
that ennoble his little day.” The second shall be the inconsistency
that exists in Mr. Hugh S. R. Elliot’s book upon _Modern Science and
the Illusions of Professor Bergson_, between his initial acceptance of
the mechanical, evolutionary system of modern science and his closing
acceptance of feeling and poetry and love as the “deepest forms of
happiness.” The third shall be the declaration of Professor Sir Henry
Jones of Glasgow (in the _Hibbert Journal_, 1903) that “one of the
characteristics of our time is the contradiction that exists between
its practical faith in morality and its theoretical distrust of the
conceptions on which they rest.”
[122] See p. 203 (note).
[123] See p. 7.
[124] From _Pragmatism and its Misunderstanders_.
[125] See p. 173.
[126] “You will be surprised to learn, then, that Messrs. Schiller’s
and Dewey’s theories have suffered a hailstorm of contempt and
ridicule. All rationalism has risen up against them. In influential
quarters, Mr. Schiller in particular has been treated like an impudent
school-boy who deserves a spanking. I should not mention this but for
the fact that it throws so much light upon _that rationalist temper
to which I have opposed the temper of pragmatism. Pragmatism is
uncomfortable away from facts. Rationalism is comfortable only in the
presence of abstractions._ This pragmatist talk about truths in the
plural, about their utility and satisfactoriness, about the success
with which they ‘work,’ etc., suggests to the typical intellectualist
mind a sort of coarse, lame, second-rate makeshift article of truth”
(James, _Pragmatism_, pp. 66–67; italics mine). The words about
Rationalism being comfortable only in the world of abstractions are
substantiated by the procedure of Bosanquet, to whom I refer in Chapter
VIII., or by the procedure of Mr. Bertrand Russell, referred to on p.
169.
[127] See p. 235 in the Bergson chapter where it is suggested that
perception is limited to what interests us for vital or for practical
purposes.
[128] Cf. p. 92.
[129] See p. 65.
[130] See p. 234 upon the “anti-intellectualism” in the philosophy of
Bergson.
[131] See p. 4 and p. 237.
[132] From “Truth and Copying,” _Mind_, No. 62.
[133] From “Truth and Practice,” in _Mind_. Cf. “This denial of
transcendence, this insistence that all ideas, and more especially
such ideas as those of God, are true and real just so far as they
work, is to myself most welcome” (Bradley, in _Mind_, 1908, p. 227,
“Ambiguity of Pragmatism”). Mr. Bradley has of recent years made so
many such concessions, and has philosophized with such an admirable
degree of independence, and has (also admirably) attached so much
weight to his own _experience_ of “metaphysics,” and of other things
besides, that many thinkers like Knox and Dewey and Schiller have been
discussing whether he can any longer be regarded as a rationalist. One
could certainly study, profitably, the whole evolution of philosophy
in England during the last forty years by studying Mr. Bradley’s
development. He never was, of course, a Hegelian in the complete sense
(who ever was?), and he has now certainly abandoned an abstract,
formalistic Rationalism.
By way of an additional quotation or two from Mr. Bradley, typical of
his advance in the direction of the practical philosophy for which
Pragmatism stands, we may append the following: “I long ago pointed
out that theory takes its origin from practical collision [the main
contention of Professor Dewey and his associates]. _If Pragmatism
means this, I am a pragmatist_” (from an article in _Mind_ on the
“Ambiguity of Pragmatism”--italics mine). “We may reject the limitation
of knowledge to the mere world of events which happen, and may deny
the claim of this world to be taken as an ultimate foundation. Reality
or the Good will be the satisfaction of all the wants of our nature,
and _theoretical truth will be the perception of ideas which directly
satisfy one of those wants, and so invariably make part of the general
satisfaction_. This is a doctrine which, to my mind, commends itself as
true, though it naturally would call for a great deal of explanation”
(from _Mind_, July 1904, p. 325). And, as typical of the kind of final
philosophy to which the philosophical reconstruction of the future
must somehow attain out of the present quarrel between Pragmatism and
Rationalism, the following: “If there were no force in the world but
the vested love of God, if the wills in the past were one in effort and
in substance with the one Will, if in that Will they are living still
and still are so loving, and if again by faith, suffering, and love my
will is made really one with theirs, here indeed we should have found
at once our answer and our refuge. But with this we should pass surely
beyond the limits of any personal individualism” (from _Mind_, July
1904, p. 316). Dr. Schiller, by the way, has a list of such concessions
to Pragmatism on the part of Mr. Bradley in _Mind_, 1910, p. 35.
[134] Cf. the saying of Herbert Spencer (_Autobiography_, i. 253) that
a “belief in the unqualified supremacy of reason [is] the superstition
of philosophers.”
[135] See p. 147.
[136] “Truth and Practice,” _Mind_, No. 51.
[137] It would be easy to quote to the same effect from other Hegelian
students, or, for that part of it, from Hegel himself.
[138] _Elements of Metaphysics_, p. 411.
[139] _Ibid._ p. 414.
[140] Cf. p. 14.
[141] See the well-known volume _Personal Idealism_, edited by Mr.
Sturt.
[142] Cf. pp. 147 and 193.
[143] By this notion is meant the common-sense idea that truth in all
cases “corresponds” to fact, my perception of the sunset to the real
sunset, my “idea” of a “true” friend to a real person whose outward
acts “correspond to” or “faithfully reflect” his inner feelings. See
the first chapter of Mr. Joachim’s book upon _The Nature of Truth_,
where this notion is examined and found wanting. It is probably
the oldest notion of truth, and yet one that takes us readily into
philosophy from whatever point of view we examine it. It was held by
nearly all the Greek philosophers before the time of the Sophists,
who first began to teach that truth is what it “appears to be”--the
“relativity” position that is upheld, for example, by Goethe, who said
that “When I know my relation to myself and to the outer world I call
this truth. And thus every man can have his own truth, and yet truth is
always the same.” The common-sense view was held also by St. Augustine
in the words, “That is true what is really what it seems to be (_verum
est quod ita est, ut videtur_),” by Thomas Aquinas as the “adequacy
of the intellect to the thing,” in so far as the intellect says that
that is which really is, or that that is not which is not (_adaequatio
intellectus et rei_), by Suarez, by Goclen, who made it a conformity
of the judgment with the thing. Its technical difficulties begin to
appear, say in Hobbes, who held that truth consists in the fact of the
subject and the predicate being a name of the same thing, or even in
Locke, who says: “Truth then seems to me in the proper import of the
word to signify nothing but the joining or separating of signs, as the
things signified by them, do agree, or disagree, one with another”
(_Essay_, iv. 5. 2). How can _things_ “agree” or “disagree” with one
another? And an “idea” of course is, anyhow, not a “thing” with a shape
and with dimensions that “correspond” to “things,” any more than is a
“judgment” a relation of two “ideas” “corresponding” to the “relations”
of two “things.”
[144] “The mind is not a ‘mirror’ which passively reflects what it
chances to come upon. It initiates and tries; and its correspondence
with the ‘outer world’ means that its effort successfully meets the
environment in behalf of the organic interest from which it sprang.
The mind, like an antenna, feels the way for the organism. It gropes
about, advances and recoils, making many random efforts and many
failures; but it is always urged into taking the _initiative_ by the
pressure of interest, and doomed to success or failure in some hour
of trial when it meets and engages the environment. Such is mind, and
such, according to James, _are all its operations_” (Perry, _Present
Philosophical Tendencies_, p. 351). Or the following: “I hope that,”
said James in the “lectures” embodied in _Pragmatism_ (New York, 1908)
... “the concreteness and closeness to facts of pragmatism ... may be
what approves itself to you as its most satisfactory peculiarity. It
only follows here the example of the sister sciences, interpreting
the unobserved by the observed. It brings old and new harmoniously
together. _It converts the absolutely empty notion of a static relation
of ‘correspondence’ between our minds and reality, into that of a rich
and active commerce_ (that any one may follow in detail and understand)
_between particular thoughts of ours and the great universe of other
experiences in which they play their parts and have their uses_” (p.
68; italics mine).
[145] “On any view like mine to speak of truth as in the end copying
reality, would be senseless” (Bradley in _Mind_, July 1911, “On some
Aspects of Truth”).
[146] See p. 143 and p. 265.
[147] See p. 127 and p. 133.
[148] See pp. 148–9.
[149] See p. 162.
[150] _What is Pragmatism?_ (Pratt), p. 21.
[151] _Principles of Pragmatism_, Houghton Mifflin, 1910.
[152] _Ibid._, Preface. This last sentence, by the way, may be
taken as one of the many illustrations that may be given of the
crudities and difficulties of some of the literature of Pragmatism.
It shows that Pragmatism may sometimes be as guilty of abstractionism
as is Rationalism itself. It is not “experience” that becomes
“self-conscious,” but only “persons.” And, similarly, it is only
“persons” who pursue “ends” and “satisfy” desires, and who may be
said to have a “method.” Professor Bawden, of course, means that it
is to the credit of Pragmatism that it approaches experience just as
it finds it, and that its chief method is the interpretation of the
same experience--an easy thing, doubtless, to profess, but somewhat
difficult to carry out.
[153] _Principles of Pragmatism_, Houghton Mifflin, 1910, pp. 44–45.
[154] P. 253.
[155] P. 256.
[156] See p. 146.
[157] See p. 240 _et ff._
[158] Wallace’s _Logic of Hegel_, p. 304.
[159] There is a sentence in one of Hawthorne’s stories to the effect
that man’s work is always illusory to some extent, while God is the
only worker of realities. I would not go as far as this, believing,
as I do, with the pragmatists, that man is at least a fellow-worker
with God. But I do find Pragmatism lacking, as 1 indicate elsewhere,
in any adequate recognition of the work of God, or the Absolute in the
universe.
[160] I am thinking of such considerations as are suggested in the
following sentences from Maeterlinck: “As we advance through life, it
is more and more brought home to us that nothing takes place that is
not in accord with some curious, preconceived design; and of this we
never breathe a word, we scarcely let our minds dwell upon it, but of
its existence, somewhere above our heads, we are absolutely convinced”
(_The Treasure of the Humble_, p. 17). “But this much at least is
abundantly proved to us, that in the work-a-day lives of the very
humblest of men spiritual phenomena manifest themselves--mysterious,
direct workings, that bring soul nearer to soul” (_ibid._ 33). “Is it
to-day or to-morrow that moulds us? Do we not all spend the greater
part of our lives under the shadow of an event that has not yet come
to pass?” (_ibid._ 51). I do not of course for one moment imply that
the facts of experience referred to in such sentences as these should
be received at any higher value than their face value, for there are
indeed many considerations to be thought of in connexion with this
matter of the realization of our plans and our destiny as individuals.
But I do mean that the beliefs to which men cling in this respect are
just as much part of the subject-matter of philosophy as other beliefs,
say the belief in truth as a whole, or the beliefs investigated by the
Society for Psychical Research. And there may conceivably be a view of
human nature upon which the beliefs in question are both natural and
rational.
[161] See p. 101.
[162] See p. 198 on Dr. Bosanquet’s dismissal of the problem of
teleology from the sphere of reasoned philosophy.
[163] _Appearance and Reality_, p. 561.
[164] See p. 155.
[165] I think that I have taken this phrase from _Some Dogmas of
Religion_.
[166] From “Truth and Copying,” _Mind_, No. 62.
[167] By action in this chapter and elsewhere in this book, I do not
mean the mere exhibition or expenditure of physical energy. I mean
human activity in general, inclusive of the highest manifestations of
this activity, such as the search for truth, contemplation, belief,
creative activity of one kind or another, and so on. There is no belief
and no contemplation that is not practical as well as theoretical,
no truth that fails to shape and to mould the life of the person who
entertains it. I quite agree with Maeterlinck, and with Bergson and
others, that the soul is to some extent limited by the demands of
action and speech, and by the duties and the conventions of social
life, but I still believe in the action test for contemplations and
thoughts and beliefs and ideas, however lofty. It is only the thoughts
that we can act out, that we can consciously act upon in our present
human life, and that we can persuade others to act upon, that are
valuable to ourselves and to humanity. It is to their discredit that so
many men and so many thinkers entertain, and give expression to, views
about the universe which renders their activities as agents and as
thinkers and as seekers quite inexplicable.
[168] There are, of course, no heavens in the old mediaeval and
Aristotelian sense after the work of Copernicus and Galileo in the
physical sciences, and of Kant in the realm of mind.
[169] Professor Moore well points out (_Pragmatism and its Critics_,
p. 13) that the “challenge” of the idea that our thinking has “two
foundations: one, as the method of purposing--its ‘practical’ function;
the other as merely the expression of the specific and independent
instinct to know--its ‘intellectual’ function,” marks the “beginnings
of the pragmatic movement.” The idea of two kinds of thought goes
back to Aristotle and is one of the most famous distinctions of
thought. It dominated the entire Middle Ages, and it is still at the
root of the false idea that “culture” can be separated from work and
service for the common good. I am glad, as I indicate in the text, a
few lines further on, that the idealists are doing their share with
the pragmatists in breaking it up. In America there is no practical
distinction between culture and work. See my chapter on Pragmatism as
Americanism.
[170] The importance of this consideration about the “attention” that
is (as a matter of fact and a matter of necessity) involved in all
“perception,” cannot possibly be exaggerated. We perceive in childhood
and throughout life in the main what interests us, and what affects
our total and organic activity. It is, that is to say, our motor
activity, and its direction, that determine what we see and perceive
and experience. And in the higher reaches of our life, on the levels of
art and religion and philosophy, this determining power becomes what we
call our reason and our will and our selective attention. Perception,
in other words, is a kind of selective activity, involving what we
call impulse and effort and will. Modern philosophy has forgotten this
in its treatment of our supposed perception of the world, taking this
to be something _given_ instead of something that is _constructed_ by
our activity. Hence its long struggle to overcome both the apparent
materialism of the world of the senses, and the gap, or hiatus, that
has been created by Rationalism between the world as we think it, and
the world as it really is.
[171] _E.g._ Professor Bosanquet, in his 1908 inaugural lecture at
St. Andrews upon _The Practical Value of Moral Philosophy_. “Theory
does indeed belong to Practice. _It is a form of conation_” (p. 9). It
“should no doubt be understood as Theoria, or _the entire unimpeded
life of the soul_” (p. 11; italics mine).
[172] This is surely the teaching of the new physics in respect of the
radio-active view of matter. I take up this point again in the Bergson
chapter.
[173] See p. 238.
[174] See p. 143 or p. 229 (note).
[175] See p. 34 in Chapter II. in reference to the idea of M. Blondel.
[176] See p. 147 and p. 265.
[177] See p. 65, note 3.
[178] See p. 192, note 3.
[179] Needham, _General Biology_, 1911. For the mention of this book
as a reliable recent manual I am indebted to my colleague, Professor
Willey of McGill University.
[180] Marett, _Anthropology_, p. 155.
[181] Cf. _supra_, p. 101.
[182] So much may, I suppose, be inferred from the contentions
(explicit and implicit) of all biologists and evolutionists. Human
life they all seem to regard as a kind of continuity or development of
the life of universal nature, whether their theory of the origin of
life be that of (1) “spontaneous generation,” (2) “cosmozoa” (germs
capable of life scattered throughout space), (3) “Preyer’s theory
of the continuity of life,” (4) “Pflüger’s theory of the chemical
characteristics of proteid,” or (5) the conclusion of Verworn himself,
“that existing organisms are derived in uninterrupted descent from
the first living substance that originated from lifeless substance”
(_General Physiology_, p. 315).
[183] _Creative Evolution_, pp. 245–5.
[184] It is, I think, an important reflection that it is precisely
in this very reality of “action” that science and philosophy come
together. That all the sciences meet in the concept, or the fact, of
action is, of course, quite evident from the new knowledge of the new
physics. Professor M’Dougall has recently brought psychology into line
with the natural sciences by defining its subject-matter as the actions
or the “behaviour” of human beings and animals. And it is surely not
difficult to see that--as I try to indicate--it is in human behaviour
that philosophy and science come together. Another consideration in
respect of the philosophy of action that has long impressed me is
this. If there is one realm in which, more than anywhere else, our
traditional rationalism and our traditional empiricism really came
together in England, it is the realm of social philosophy, the realm
of human activity. It was the breaking down of the entire philosophy
of sensations in the matter of the proof of utilitarianism that caused
John Stuart Mill to take up the “social philosophy” in respect to which
the followers of positivism joined hands with the idealists.
[185] See p. 185.
[186] See p. 27.
[187] See Chapter VII. p. 179.
[188] I am thinking of Pyrrho and Arcesilaus and some of the Greek
sceptics and of their ἐποχή and ἀταραξία.
[189] See p. 26.
[190] _Man’s Place in the Cosmos_, a book consisting of essays and
reviews published by the author during the last four or five years.
They all advocate “humanism in opposition to naturalism,” or “ethicism
in opposition to a too narrow intellectualism.”
[191] _The Will to Believe_, 1897.
[192] “Progress in Philosophy,” art. _Mind_, 15, p. 213.
[193] _Practical Ethics_; Essays.
[194] _Mental Development--Social and Ethical Interpretations_ (a work
crowned by the Royal Academy of Denmark). We can see in this book how
a psychologist has been led into a far-reaching study of social and
ethical development in order to gain an understanding of the growth of
even the individual mind. We may indeed say that the individualistic
intellectualism of the older psychology is now no more. It was too
“abstract” a way of looking at mind. Professor Royce, it is well known,
has given, from the stand-point of a professed metaphysician, a cordial
welcome to the work of Professor Baldwin. In an important review of
Mr. Stout’s two admirable volumes on _Analytic Psychology_ (_Mind_,
July, 1897), Professor Royce has insisted strongly upon the need of
supplementing introspection by the “interpretation of the reports and
the conduct of other people” if we would know much about “dynamic”
psychology. It is this “dynamic” psychology--the “dynamics” of the
will and of the “feelings”--that I think constitutes such an important
advance upon the traditional “intellectual” and “individualistic”
psychology.
[195] _The Psychology of the Moral Self._ Macmillan, 1897. I have
tried, in a short notice of this book in the _Philosophical Review_
(March, 1898), to indicate the importance of some of its chief
contentions.
[196] _Philosophical Lectures and Remains_, edited by Professor Bradley.
[197] Editor of _La Science Sociale_. His recent work on the
_Superiority of the Anglo-Saxons_ (_À quoi tient la supériorité des
Anglo-Saxons?_)--a chapter in the study of the conditions of race
survival--ran through seventeen editions in a few months, and set the
whole press of France and Germany (other countries following suit) into
commotion, as well as calling forth _pronunciamientos_ from most of the
prominent editors and critics of France,--men like Jules Lemaître, Paul
Bourget, Marcel Prevost, François Coppée, Édouard Rod, G. Valbert, etc.
[198] Now Professor A. Seth Pringle-Pattison.
[199] In different ways by all of the following English writers:
Professor A. Seth (“It is not in knowledge, then, as such, but in
feeling and action that reality is given,” _Man’s Place_, etc., p. 122,
etc. etc.), by Mr. Bradley (_Appearance and Reality_), by Mr. Balfour
(in his _Foundations of Belief_), and by Professor James. Professor
Eucken, of Jena, in his different books, also insists strongly upon the
idea that it is not in knowledge as such, but in the totality of our
psychical experience that the principles of philosophy must be sought.
Paulsen, in his _Einleitung in die Philosophie_, and Weber, in his
_History of Philosophy_ (books in general use to-day), both advocate
a kind of philosophy of the will, the idea that the world is to be
regarded as a striving on the part of wills after a partly unconscious
ideal. Simmel, in an important article in the _Revue de Métaphysique
et de Morale_, IV. 2, expresses the idea (which it would be well to
recognize generally at the present time) that truth is not something
objectively apart from us, but rather the name we give to conceptions
that have proved to be the guides to useful actions, and so become part
of the psychical heritage of human beings. Professor Ribot, of Paris,
has written more extensively upon the will and the feelings than upon
the intellect,--a fact in keeping with the scientific demands of our
day.
[200] See, _e.g._, an article by Fouillée in the _Revue Philosophique_,
XXI. 5, with the very title “Nécessité d’une interprétation
psychologique et sociologique du monde.” Fouillée finds there, as he
does elsewhere, that will is the principle that enables us to unify the
physical with the psychical world,--an illustration of the fact that
the two characteristics I am referring to are really one. A present
instance of the introduction of the element of will (the will of man,
even) is to be seen in the contention of such a book as M. Lucien
Arréat’s _Les Croyances de Demain_ (1898). According to _Mind_, M.
Arréat proposes to substitute the idea that man can by his efforts
bring about the supremacy of justice for the traditional idea that
justice reigns in the universe.
[201] _Manual of Ethics_, according to Mr. Stout, _International
Journal of Ethics_, October 1894. There are many similar sentences and
ideas in the book.
[202] _Elements of Ethics_, p. 232.
[203] Now Professor of Logic in St. Andrews.
[204] _International Journal of Ethics_, October 1894, p. 119.
[205] I think that I must here have meant Professor Watson’s
_Christianity and Idealism_.
[206] And apart from the idealism and the ethical philosophy of which
I speak, in the next chapter, as necessary to convert Pragmatism
into the Humanism it would like to become, Pragmatism is really a
kind of romanticism, the reaction of a personal enthusiasm against
the abstractions of a classical rationalism in philosophy. There is
an element of this romanticism in James’s heroic philosophy of life,
although I would prefer to be the last man in the world to talk against
this heroic romanticism in any one. It is the great want of our time,
and it is the thing that is prized most in some of the men whom this
ephemeral age of ours still delights to honour. It was exhibited
both in Browning and in George Meredith, for example. Of the former
Mr. Chesterton writes in his trenchant, clean-sweeping little book
on _The Victorian Age in Literature_, p. 175: “What he really was
was a romantic. He offered the cosmos as an adventure rather than a
scheme.” The same thing could be said about James’s “Will to Believe”
Philosophy. Meredith, although far less of an idealist than Browning,
was also an optimist by temperament rather than by knowledge or by
conviction--hence the elevation of his tone and style in spite of his
belated naturalism.
[207] In _Un Romantisme utilitaire_ (Paris, Alcan, 1911), chiefly a
study of the Pragmatism of Nietzsche and Poincaré.
[208] I am indebted for this saying of one of my old teachers to Mr.
C. F. G. Masterman, in his essay upon Sidgwick in that judicious
and interesting book upon the transition from the nineteenth to the
twentieth century, _In Peril of Change_.
[209] Stoicism and Epicureanism, as the matter is generally put,
both substitute the practical good of man as an individual for the
wisdom or the theoretical perfection that were contemplated by Plato
and Aristotle as the highest objects of human pursuit. For Cicero,
too, the chief problems of philosophy were in the main practical, the
question whether virtue alone is sufficient for happiness, the problem
of practical certainty as opposed to scepticism, the general belief in
Providence and in immortality, and so on. And Lucretius thinks of the
main service of philosophy as consisting in its power of emancipating
the human mind from superstition. All this is quite typical of the
essentially practical nature of the Roman character, of its conception
of education as in the main discipline and duty, of its distrust of
Greek intellectualism, and of its preoccupation with the necessities of
the struggle for existence and for government, of its lack of leisure,
and so on. I do not think that the very first thing about Pragmatism
is its desire to return to a practical conception of life, although a
tendency in this direction doubtless exists in it.
[210] The idea that our “demonstrable knowledge is very short, if
indeed we have any at all, although our certainty is as great as our
happiness, beyond which we have no concernment to know or to be”
(_Essay_, iv. 2–14); or Locke’s words: “I have always thought the
actions of men the best interpreters of their thoughts.”
[211] Schopenhauer, for example, used to be fond of repeating that his
own philosophy (which took will to be the fundamental reality) was on
its very face necessarily more of an ethic than a system like that of
Spinoza, for example, which could only be called an ethic by a sort of
_lucus a non lucendo_.
[212] The Practical Reason to Aristotle is the reason that has to do
with the pursuit of aims and ends, in distinction from the reason
that has to do with knowledge, and the “universal” and science. This
twofold distinction has given many problems to his students and to his
commentators, and to succeeding generations. It is responsible for the
entire mediæval and Renaissance separation of the intellectual life
and the intellectual virtues from the practical life and the practical
virtues.
[213] It might be added here that Logic has always recognized the
validity, to some extent, of the argument “from consequences” of which
Pragmatism makes so much. The form of argumentation that it calls the
Dilemma is a proof of this statement. A chain of reasoning that leads
to impossible consequences, or that leads to consequences inconsistent
with previously admitted truths, is necessarily unsound. That this test
of tenable or untenable consequences has often been used in philosophy
in the large sense of the term must be known only too well to the
well-informed reader. As Sidgwick says in his _Method of Ethics_:
“The truth of a philosopher’s premises will always be tested by the
acceptability of his conclusions; if in any important point he is found
in flagrant conflict with common opinion, his method will be declared
invalid.” Reid used the argument from consequences in his examination
of the sceptical philosophy of Hume. It is used with effect in Mr.
Arthur Balfour’s _Foundations of Belief_ in regard to the supposed
naturalism of physical science. Edmund Burke applied it to some extent
to political theories, or to the abstract philosophical theories upon
which some of them were supposedly based.
[214] Pragmatism has been called by some critics a “new-Humism” on the
ground of its tendency to do this very thing that is mentioned here in
respect of Hume. But the justice or the injustice of this appellation
is a very large question, into which it is needless for us to enter
here.
[215] Cf. “Intelligence is the aptitude to modify conduct in conformity
to the circumstances of each case” (_The Positive Philosophy_,
Martineau, i. 465).
[216] _Principles of Philosophy_, Part II. iii. It is also an eminently
pragmatist idea on the part of Descartes to hold that “I should find
much more truth in the reasoning of each individual with reference to
the affairs in which he is personally interested, and the issue of
which must presently punish him if he has judged amiss, than in those
conducted by a man of letters in his study, regarding speculative
matters that are of no practical moment” (_Method_, Veitch’s edition,
p. 10).
[217] _Principles of Philosophy_, Part II. iii. p. 233.
[218] See _Principles of Psychology_, ch. ii., “Assumption of
Metaphysicians,” and also elsewhere in his Essays.
[219] “Any power of doing or suffering in a degree however slight
was held by us to be the definition of existence” (Sophist, Jowett’s
_Plato_, iv. p. 465).
[220] _The Theory of Knowledge_, Preface, p. ix.
[221] “The independence of the doctrines of any science from the social
life, the prevalent thought of the generation in which they arise, is
indeed a fiction, a superstition of the scientist which we would fain
shatter beyond all repair; but the science becomes all the sounder for
recognizing its origins and its resources, its present limitations and
its need of fresh light from other minds, from different social moulds”
(pp. 215–216).
[222] See p. 81.
[223] Cf. p. 13.
[224] _The New Knowledge_, p. 255.
[225] It would indeed be easy to quote from popular writers of the day,
like Mr. Chesterton or Mr. A. C. Benson or Mr. H. G. Wells, to show
that a knowledge of the existence of Pragmatism as a newer experimental
or “sociological” philosophy is now a commonplace of the day. Take
the following, for example, from Mr. Wells’s _Marriage_ (p. 521):
“It was to be a pragmatist essay, a sustained attempt to undermine
the confidence of all that scholastic logic-chopping which still
lingers like the _sequelae_ of a disease in our University philosophy
... a huge criticism and cleaning up of the existing methods of
formulation as a preliminary to the wider and freer discussion of those
religious and social issues our generation still shrinks from.” “It is
grotesque,” he said, “and utterly true that the sanity and happiness of
all the world lies in its habits of generalization.”
[226] I cannot meantime trace, or place, this quotation, although I
remember copying it out of something by Karl Pearson.
[227] In the _Literary Digest_ for 1911.
[228] See p. 234.
[229] From a letter to Mrs. Humphry Ward, quoted in A. C. Benson’s
_Walter Pater_, p. 200.
[230] Lecture I. towards the beginning.
[231] See p. 62 and p. 197. It should be remembered that our reasoned
opinions rest upon our working beliefs.
[232] Vol. ii. p. 86.
[233] See the reference in Chapter II. p. 26 to the opportunistic ethic
of Prezzolini.
[234] In _What is Pragmatism?_ Macmillan & Co.
[235] Cf. p. 81.
[236] Professor Pratt makes an attempt in his book on _What is
Pragmatism?_ (pp. 75–6–7) to show that the true meaning of the
“correspondence theory” is not inconsistent with Pragmatism or that
Pragmatism is not inconsistent with this truth.
[237] Cf. _supra_, p. 64.
[238] See the Note on p. 21.
[239] Cf. _supra_, p. 67.
[240] Papini, in fact (in 1907), went the length of saying that you
cannot even _define_ Pragmatism, admitting that it appeals only to
certain kinds of persons.
[241] For a serviceable account, in English, of the differences between
the pragmatist philosophy of hypotheses and the more fully developed
philosophy of science of the day, see Father Walker’s _Theories of
Knowledge_, chapter xiii., upon “Pragmatism and Physical Science.”
[242] Cf. _supra_, p. 10 and p. 15. And this failure to systematize
becomes, it should be remembered, all the more exasperating, in view of
the prominence given by the pragmatists to the supreme principles of
“end” and “consequences.”
[243] In the “Axioms as Postulates” essay in _Personal Idealism_.
[244] Bourdeau makes the same charge, saying that all pragmatists have
the illusion that “reality is unstable.” Professor Stout has something
similar in view in referring to Dr. Schiller’s “primary reality” in
the _Mind_ review of _Studies in Humanism_. It is only the reality
with which we have to do (reality πρὸς ἡμᾶς as an Aristotelian might
say) that is “in the making”: for God there can be no such distinction
between process and product. But it is quite evident that Pragmatism
does not go far enough to solve, or even to see, such difficulties. It
confines itself in the main to the contention that man must think of
himself as a maker of reality to some extent--a contention that I hold
to be both true and useful, as far as it goes.
[245] _Pragmatism_, p. 264.
[246] “Pragmatism,” October 1900.
[247] The same line of reflection will be found in James’s
_Pragmatism_, p. 96.
[248] Professor Moore has a chapter in his book (_Pragmatism and its
Critics_) devoted to the purpose of showing the necessary failure of
Absolutism (or of an Intellectualism of the absolutist order) in the
realm of ethics, finding in the experimentalism and the quasi-Darwinism
of Pragmatism an atmosphere that is, to say the least, more favourable
to the realities of our moral experience. While I cannot find so much
as he does in the hit-and-miss ethical philosophy of Pragmatism, I
quite sympathize with him in his rejection of Absolutism or Rationalism
as a basis for ethics. The following are some of his reasons for this
rejection: (1) The “purpose” that is involved in the ethical life must,
according to Absolutism, be an all-inclusive and a fixed purpose,
allowing of no “advance” and no “retreat”---things that are imperative
to the idea of the _reality_ of our efforts. (2) Absolutism does not
provide for human responsibility; to it all actions and purposes are
those of the Absolute. (3) The ethical ideal of Absolutism is too
“static.” (4) Absolutism does not provide any material for “new goals
and new ideals.” See pp. 218–225 in my eighth chapter, where I censure,
in the interest of Pragmatism and Humanism, the ethical philosophy of
Professor Bosanquet.
[249] See p. 224, where I arrive at the conclusion that the same thing
may be said of the Absolutism of Dr. Bosanquet.
[250] Students of that important nineteenth-century book upon Ethics,
the _Methods of Ethics_, by Henry Sidgwick, will remember that Sidgwick
expressly states it as a grave argument against Utilitarianism that it
is by no means confirmed by the study of the actual origin of moral
distinctions. As we go back in history we do not find that moral
prescriptions have merely a utilitarian value.
[251] What I understand by the “normative idea of ethical science”
will become more apparent as I proceed. I may as well state, however,
that I look upon the distinction between the “descriptive” ideals of
science and the “normative” character of the ideals of the ethical and
the socio-political sciences as both fundamental and far-reaching.
There are _two_ things, as it were, that constitute what we might
call the subject-matter of philosophy---“facts” and “ideals”; or,
rather, it is the synthesis and reconciliation of these two orders of
reality that constitute the supreme problem of philosophy. It is with
the description of facts and of the laws of the sequences of things
that the “methodology” of science and of Pragmatism is in the main
concerned. And it is because Pragmatism has hitherto shown itself
unable to rise above the descriptive and hypothetical science of the
day to the ideals of the normative sciences (ethics, aesthetics, etc.)
that it is an imperfect philosophy of reality as we know it, or of the
different orders of reality.
[252] Cf. Professor Ward in _Naturalism and Agnosticism_ (vol. ii. p.
155): “What each one immediately deals with in his own experience is, I
repeat, objective reality in the most fundamental sense.”
[253] _Introduction to Science_, p. 137.