UTILITY
We have seen in the last chapter that pragmatism is both a criticism
and a theory. It shows us that the {56} notion that truth is
correspondence involves the conception of an "impossible" knowledge,
and the notion that truth is coherence or consistency involves the
conception of a "useless" knowledge. The explanation pragmatism itself
offers is of the kind that is called in the technical language of
philosophy teleological. This means that to explain or to give a
meaning to truth all we can do is to point out the purpose on account
of which it exists. This is not scientific explanation. Physical
science explains a fact or an event by showing the conditions which
give rise to it or that determine its character. Pragmatism recognises
no conditions determining truth such as those which science embodies in
the conception of a natural law--that is, the idea of a connection of
natural events with one another which is not dependent on human
thoughts about them nor on human purposes in regard to them. Truth is
in intimate association with human practical activity; its meaning lies
wholly in its utility. We must therefore now examine somewhat closely
this notion of utility.
There appears to me to be a serious defect in the pragmatist conception
and application of the principle of utility; it is based on a
conception altogether too narrow. A theory that condemns any purely
logical process as resulting in "useless" knowledge can only justify
itself by insisting on an application of the principle of utility that
will be found to exclude not merely the Absolute of philosophy but most
if not all of the results of pure mathematics and physics, for these
sciences apply a method of pure logical deduction and induction
indistinguishable from that which pragmatism condemns. The
intellectual nature of man is an endowment which sharply distinguishes
him from other forms of living creatures. So supreme a position does
our intellect assign to us, so wide is the gap that separates {57} us
from other creatures little different from ourselves in respect of
perfection of material organisation and adaptation to environment, that
it seems almost natural to suppose that our intellect is that for which
we exist, and not merely a mode of controlling, directing, and
advancing our life. Now it is possible to hold--and this is the view
that I shall endeavour in what follows to develop--that the intellect
is subservient to life, and that we can show the manner and method of
its working and the purpose it serves. So far we may agree with the
pragmatist, but it is not the same thing to say that the intellect
serves a useful purpose and to say that truth, the ideal of the
intellect, the end which it strives for, is itself only a utility.
Were there no meaning in truth except that it is what works, were there
no meaning independent of and altogether distinct from the practical
consequences of belief, of what value to us would the intellect be? If
the meaning the intellect assigns to truth is itself not true, how can
the intellect serve us? The very essence of its service is reduced to
nought; for what else but the conception of an objective truth, a
logical reality independent of any and every psychological condition,
is the utility that the intellect puts us in possession of? It is this
conception alone that constitutes it an effective mode of activity.
Therefore, if we hold with the pragmatist that the intellect is
subservient to life, truth is indeed a utility, but it is a utility
just because it has a meaning distinct from usefulness. On the other
hand, to condemn any knowledge as "useless" is to deny utility to the
intellect.
Before I try to show that the logical method of the idealist
philosophy, which pragmatism condemns because it leads to "useless"
knowledge, is identical in every respect with the method employed in
pure mathematics and physics, I will give for comparison two
illustrations {58} that seem to me instances of a narrow and of a wide
use of the concept of utility.
A short time ago an orang-utang escaped from its cage in the Zoological
Gardens under somewhat singular and very interesting circumstances.
The cage was secured with meshed wire of great strength, judged
sufficient to resist the direct impact of the most powerful of the
carnivora; but the ape, by attention to the twisting of the plied wire,
had by constant trying succeeded in loosening and finally in unwinding
a large section. It escaped from its enclosure, and after doing
considerable damage in the corridor, including the tearing out of a
window frame, made its way into the grounds and took refuge in a tree,
twisting the branches into a platform said to be similar to the
constructions it makes in its native forests.
In taking this action as an illustration, I am not concerned with the
question of what may be the distinction between action that is
intelligent and action that is instinctive. If we take intelligence in
a wide and general meaning, we may compare the intelligence shown by
this ape with the intelligence shown by man in the highest processes of
the mind. Psychologists would, I think, be unanimous in holding that
in the mind of the ape there was no conception of freedom, no kind of
mental image of unrestricted life and of a distinct means of attaining
it, no clearly purposed end, the means of attaining which was what
prompted the undoing of the wire, such as we should certainly suppose
in the case of a man in a similar situation. It was the kind of
intelligent action that psychologists denote by the description "trial
and error." It seems to me, however, that this exactly fulfils the
conditions that the pragmatist doctrine of the meaning of truth
require. We see the intellect of the ape making true by finding out
what works. {59} We can suppose an entire absence of the idea of
objective truth to which reality must conform, of truth unaffected by
purpose. Here, then, we seem to have the pure type of truth in its
simplest conditions, a practical activity using intelligence to
discover what works. Is the difference between this practical activity
and the higher mental activities as we employ them in the abstract
sciences one of degree of complexity only, or is it different in kind?
Let us consider now, as an illustration of the method of the abstract
sciences, the well-known case of the discovery of the planet Neptune.
This planet was discovered by calculation and deduction, and was only
seen when its position had been so accurately determined that the
astronomers who searched for it knew exactly the point of the heavens
to which to direct their telescopes. The calculation was one of
extraordinary intricacy, and was made independently by two
mathematicians, Adams of Cambridge and Leverrier of Paris, between the
years 1843 and 1846. Each communicated his result independently--Adams
to the astronomer Challis, the Director of the Cambridge Observatory,
and Leverrier to Dr. Galle of the Berlin Observatory. Within six weeks
of one another and entirely unknown to one another, in August and
September 1846, each of these astronomers observed the planet where he
had been told to look for it. This is one of the romances of modern
science. It is not the discovery but the method that led to it which
may throw light on our problem of the nature of truth.
At first sight this seems exactly to accord with and even to illustrate
the pragmatist theory, that truth is what works. The investigation is
prompted by the discrepancies between the actual and the calculated
positions of Uranus, the outermost planet, as it was then supposed, of
the system. This revealed a need, and this {60} need was met by the
practical postulate of the existence of another planet as yet unseen.
The hypothesis was found to work even before the actual observation put
the final seal of actuality on the discovery. What else but the
practical consequences of the truth claim in the form of the hypothesis
of an undiscovered planet were ever in question? Yes, we reply, but
the actual method adopted, and the knowledge sought for by the method,
are precisely of the kind that pragmatism rejects as "useless"
knowledge. Why were not the observed movements of Uranus accepted as
what they were? Why was it felt that they must be other than they were
seen to be unless there was another planet? The need lay in the idea
of system. It was inconsistent with the system then believed complete,
and the need was to find the complete system in which it would
harmonise. The truth that was sought for was a harmonious individual
whole, and the method employed precisely that which the Absolutist
theory of reality employs. There is observed a discrepancy, an
inconsistency, a contradiction within the whole conceived as a system.
This negation is treated as a defect, is calculated and accurately
determined, and is then positively affirmed of the reality. Now, what
is distinctive in this method is that reality is conceived as a
complete system. If the felt defect in this system cannot be made good
by direct discovery, its place is supplied by a fiction, using the term
in its etymological meaning to express something made and not in its
derived meaning to express something found false. This intellectual
process of construction is purely logical; no psychological element in
the sense of the will to believe enters into it or colours it in any
way.
This is not an isolated instance, it illustrates the method of science
in all theorising. An even more {61} striking illustration than that
we have just given is the case of the hypothesis of the luminiferous
æther--a supposed existence, a fiction, that has served a useful, even
an indispensable service in the history of modern physics. To many
physicists, even to Lord Kelvin, the hypothesis seemed so surely
established that its nonexistence hardly seemed thinkable, yet all the
experiments designed to detect its presence have been uniformly
negative in result, and it now seems not even necessary as a
hypothesis, and likely to disappear. The æther was not only not
discovered, it was not even suspected to exist, as in the case of the
unknown planet Neptune--it was logically constructed. It was required
to support the theory of the undulatory nature of light and to fulfil
the possibility of light propagation in space. It was therefore a
postulate, called forth by a need--so far we may adopt the pragmatist
account. But what was the nature of the need, and what was the method
by which the postulate was called forth? It is in answering this
question that the pragmatist criterion fails. The need was
intellectual in the purely logical meaning of the term, and it was met
by a purely logical construction. The need was a practical human need
only in so far as the intellect working by logical process is a human
endowment but not in any personal sense such as is conveyed by the term
psychological. Willingness or unwillingness to believe, desire,
aversion, interest were all irrelevant. Given the intellect, the
logical necessity was the only need that called forth by logical
process the "truth-claiming" hypothesis of the æther. But even so, the
pragmatist will urge, is its truth anything else but its usefulness as
shown in the practical consequences of believing it? Was it not true
while it was useful, and is it not only now false, if it is false, if
it is actually discovered not to be useful? {62} The reply is that no
mathematician or physicist would recognise the possibility of working
with a conception of truth that simply identified truth with utility,
and for this reason that he can only conceive reality as a system whose
truth is symbolised in an equation. It is the system that determines
and characterises the postulate, and not the postulate advanced at a
venture, tried and verified, that constitutes the system. The
mathematician begins by placing symbols to represent the unknown
factors in his equation, and proceeds by means of his known factors to
determine their value. The æther is at first a pure fiction
constructed to supply an unknown existence recognised as a defect. Its
truth cannot mean that it works for it cannot but work, having been
constructed purely for that purpose. Its truth means that it
corresponds to some actual existence at present unknown. To prove its
truth the physicist does not appeal to its value as a hypothesis, but
devises experiments by which, if it does exist, its existence will be
demonstrated. In this actual case the experiments have had a uniformly
negative result, and therefore the truth of the hypothesis is made
doubtful or denied. The hypothesis continues to work as well as it
ever did, and physicists will probably long continue to use it, but it
has failed to establish its truth claim. The result is the modern
Principle of Relativity, which, as we have already said, has produced a
revolution in modern physics. The abolition of the æther would have
been impossible if the physicist had been content with the utility of
his hypothesis and had not experimented to prove its truth. The
relation between truth and utility is thus proved to be that it is
useful to know what is true.
These two illustrations of scientific method--namely, the discovery of
Neptune and the negative discovery {63} that the æther is
non-existent--make it evident that verification is the intellectual
process not of making true, but of finding true. We can, indeed,
distinguish quite clearly the two processes. The first process, that
of making true, is the constructing of the fiction by which we complete
an incomplete system, and the second is the testing of that fiction to
see if it corresponds to anything actually existing. No kind of
intellectual activity will make an idea true, and conversely we may say
that were truth only a utility, then knowledge instead of being
systematic would be chaotic. Existence has its roots in reality, not
in knowledge. Reality does not depend on truth. Truth is the
intellectual apprehension of reality.
If the pragmatist objects that in this argument I have throughout
supposed him to be urging the narrow meaning of utility, namely, that
it is usefulness in the strictly practical sense, whereas he intends it
in the widest possible meaning--a meaning that includes theoretical
usefulness--then the trouble is a different one; it is to know how and
where the pragmatist stops short of the coherence theory of truth, and
wherein his method differs from that of the idealist.
This brings me to the consideration of another theory in which the
concept of utility plays a large, indeed a predominant part. This is
the theory of the relation of knowledge to life that is given to us in
the philosophy of Bergson. I have in one of the volumes of this series
given an account of this philosophy; I am here only dealing with its
relation to this special problem of the nature of truth. It has been
claimed that this philosophy is only a form of pragmatism, but it is
not a theory of truth, and it has this essential difference from
pragmatism that it is the intellect and not truth that is a utility.
Before we consider the question that it gives {64} rise to in regard to
truth, let us first examine the theory of the intellect, and the nature
of its utility. The intellect is a mode of activity, an endowment
acquired in the course of evolution, and which has been retained and
perfected because of its utility. This does not mean that the
intellect directs us to what is useful and inhibits us from courses
fatal to life, neither does it mean that it gives us any power to make
true what is not already true, it means that the power to acquire
knowledge is useful. There is a contrast in our own existence between
our life and our intellect.
To understand the way in which the intellect serves the living creature
endowed with it, we need only regard it from the standpoint of ordinary
experience. We know in ourselves that our life is wider than our
intellect, and that our intellect serves the activity of our life. The
common expressions we employ, such as using our wits, taking an
intelligent interest, trying to think, all imply a utility distinct
from the intellect. So viewed, our life appears as an active principle
within us, maintaining our organism in its relations, active and
passive, and reactive to the reality outside and independent of it.
Our intellect also seems both active and passive. It receives the
influences that stream in upon us from the reality around us, it
apprehends and interprets them, and works out the lines of our possible
action in regard to them. The influences that flow in upon us from the
outside world are already selected before our intellect apprehends
them, for they flow in by the avenues of our senses, and the senses are
natural instruments of selection. If we picture these influences as
vibrations, then we may say that a certain group of vibrations of a
very rapid frequency are selected by the eye and give rise to vision,
that another group of very much lower frequency are selected by the ear
and {65} give the sensation of sound, and other groups are selected by
taste, smell, and touch. Many groups are known indirectly by means of
artificial instruments, and all the infinite series that unite these
groups of the actually experienced vibrations escape our apprehension
altogether--we have no means of selecting them. But all these sense
data, as we may call them, come to us without exertion or activity on
our part; it is the intellect which gives them meaning, which
interprets them, which makes them the apprehension or awareness of
objects or things. And the active part that the intellect plays is
also a process of selection. This is evident if we reflect upon the
universal form which our intellectual activity takes, namely,
attention. It is in the act of attention that we are conscious of
mental activity, and attention is essentially selection--the selection
of an interest. Besides the natural selection that is effected by our
senses and the conscious selection that is manifest in attention, there
is also a more or less arbitrary selection that our intellect performs
in marking out the lines of our practical interest and possible action.
In this work of selection the intellect makes the world conform to the
necessities of our action.
So far we have looked at our intellectual endowment from the standpoint
of ordinary common-sense experience. Let us now consider the
philosophical theory based on this view, which explains the nature of
knowledge by showing its purpose. The intellect not only selects, but
in selecting transforms the reality. It presents us with knowledge
that indeed corresponds with reality, for it is essentially a view of
reality, but also in selecting it marks out divisions, and gives to
reality a form that is determined by practical interest. The same
reality is different to different individuals and to different species
according to their practical interests. {66} The practical end which
the human intellect serves is to present us with a field for our life
activity. This is the real world for us, as we know it, real objects
in a real space. Had we no other way of knowing but that of our
intellect we should not know the life which is active within us as it
is really lived, we should be as those who, standing outside, watch a
movement, and not as those who are carried along in the movement and
experience it from within. In life and intellect we have the
counterpart of reality and appearance. Life is not something that
changes; it is the change of which the something is the appearance.
Life is the reality of which all things, as we understand them, are the
appearances, and on account of which they appear. The solid things in
space and time are not in reality what they appear; they are views of
the reality. The intellect guided by our practical interest presents
reality under this form of solid spatial things. Clearly, then, if
this view be true, the whole world, as it is presented to us and
thought of by us, is an illusion. Our science is not unreal, but it is
a transformed reality. The illusions may be useful, may, indeed, be
necessary and indispensable, but nevertheless it is illusion.
But here there arises a new difficulty in regard to truth. If the
usefulness of the intellect consists in the active production of an
illusion, can we say that the intellect leads us to truth? Is it not
only if we can turn away from the intellect and obtain a
non-intellectual intuition that we can know truth?
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