[69] William James, _Pragmatism. A New Name for Some Old Ways of
Thinking._ (Popular Lectures on Philosophy.) New York: Longmans,
Green, & Co., 1907. Pp. xiii[+]309.
[70] Certain aspects of the doctrine are here purposely omitted, and
will meet us later.
[71] Vol. IV, p. 547.
[72] Only those who have already lost in the idealistic confusion of
existence and meaning will take this to mean that the object is those
changes in our reactions.
[73] I assume that the reader is sufficiently familiar with Mr.
James's book not to be misled by the text into thinking that Mr. James
himself discriminates as I have done these three types of problems
from one another. He does not; but, none the less, the three formulae
for the three situations are there.
[74] The idea of immortality, or the traditional theistic idea of God,
for example, may produce its good consequences, not in virtue of the
idea as idea, but from the character of the person who entertains the
belief; or it may be the idea of the supreme value of ideal
considerations, rather than that of their temporal duration, which
works.
[75] "Eternal truth" is one of the most ambiguous phrases that
philosophers trip over. It may mean eternally in existence; or that a
statement which is ever true is always true (if it is true a fly is
buzzing, it is eternally true that just now a fly buzzed); or it may
mean that some truths, _in so far as wholly conceptual_, are
irrelevant to any particular time determination, since they are
non-existential in import--e.g., the truth of geometry dialectically
taken--that is, without asking whether any particular existence
exemplifies them.
[76] Such statements, it ought in fairness to be said, generally come
when Mr. James is speaking of a doctrine which he does not himself
believe, and arise, I think, in that fairness and frankness of Mr.
James, so unusual in philosophers, which cause him to lean over
backward--unpragmatically, it seems to me. As to the claim of his own
doctrine, he consistently sticks to his statement: "Pent in, as the
pragmatist, more than any one, sees himself to be, between the whole
body of funded truths squeezed from the past and the coercions of the
world of sense about him, who, so well as he, feels the immense
pressure of objective control under which our minds perform their
operations? If anyone imagines that this law is lax, let him keep its
commandments one day, says Emerson" (p. 233).
[77] Of course, Mr. James holds that this "in so far" goes a very
small way. See pp. 77-79. But even the slightest concession is, I
think, non-pragmatic unless the satisfaction is relevant to the idea
as intent. Now the satisfaction in question comes not from the idea as
_idea_, but from its acceptance as _true_. Can a satisfaction
dependent on an assumption that an idea is already true be relevant to
testing the truth of an idea? And can an idea, like that of the
absolute, which, if true, "absolutely" precludes any appeal to
consequences as test of truth, be confirmed by use of the pragmatic
test without sheer self-contradiction? In other words, we have a
confusion of the test of an idea as idea, with that of the value of a
belief as belief. On the other hand, it is quite possible that all Mr.
James intends by truth here is true (i.e., genuine) meaning at stake
in the issue--true not as distinct from false, but from meaningless or
verbal.