This would seem to be an absolutely wanton slander, were not a
certain excuse to be found in the linguistic affinities of the word
'pragmatism,' and in certain offhand habits of speech of ours which
assumed too great a generosity on our reader's part. When we spoke of
the meaning of ideas consisting "in their 'practical' consequences",
or of the 'practical' differences which our beliefs make to us; when we
said that the truth of a belief consists in its 'working' value, etc.;
our language evidently was too careless, for by 'practical' we were
almost unanimously held to mean OPPOSED to theoretical or genuinely
cognitive, and the consequence was punctually drawn that a truth in our
eyes could have no relation to any independent reality, or to any other
truth, or to anything whatever but the acts which we might ground on it
or the satisfactions they might bring. The mere existence of the idea,
all by itself, if only its results were satisfactory, would give full
truth to it, it was charged, in our absurd pragmatist epistemology.
The solemn attribution of this rubbish to us was also encouraged by two
other circumstances. First, ideas ARE practically useful in the narrow
sense, false ideas sometimes, but most often ideas which we can verify
by the sum total of all their leadings, and the reality of whose objects
may thus be considered established beyond doubt. That these ideas should
be true in advance of and apart from their utility, that, in other
words, their objects should be really there, is the very condition of
their having that kind of utility,--the objects they connect us with are
so important that the ideas which serve as the objects' substitutes grow
important also. This manner of their practical working was the first
thing that made truths good in the eyes of primitive men; and
buried among all the other good workings by which true beliefs are
characterized, this kind of subsequential utility remains.
The second misleading circumstance was the emphasis laid by Schiller
and Dewey on the fact that, unless a truth be relevant to the mind's
momentary predicament, unless it be germane to the 'practical'
situation,--meaning by this the quite particular perplexity,--it is
no good to urge it. It doesn't meet our interests any better than a
falsehood would under the same circumstances. But why our predicaments
and perplexities might not be theoretical here as well as narrowly
practical, I wish that our critics would explain. They simply assume
that no pragmatist CAN admit a genuinely theoretic interest. Having used
the phrase 'cash-value' of an idea, I am implored by one correspondent
to alter it, 'for every one thinks you mean only pecuniary profit and
loss.' Having said that the true is 'the expedient in our thinking,' I
am rebuked in this wise by another learned correspondent:
'The word expedient has no other meaning than that of self-interest. The
pursuit of this has ended by landing a number of officers of national
banks in penitentiaries. A philosophy that leads to such results must be
unsound.'
But the word 'practical' is so habitually loosely used that more
indulgence might have been expected. When one says that a sick man has
now practically recovered, or that an enterprise has practically failed,
one usually means I just the opposite of practically in the literal
sense. One means that, altho untrue in strict practice, what one says
is true in theory, true virtually, certain to be true. Again, by the
practical one often means the distinctively concrete, the individual,
particular, and effective, as opposed to the abstract, general, and
inert. To speak for myself, whenever I have emphasized the practical
nature of truth, this is mainly what has been in my mind. 'Pragmata' are
things in their plurality; and in that early California address, when I
described pragmatism as holding that the meaning of any proposition
can always be brought down to some particular consequence in our future
practical experience, whether passive or active, expressly added these
qualifying words: the point lying rather in the fact that the experience
must be particular than in the fact that it must be active,--by 'active'
meaning here 'practical' in the narrow literal sense. [Footnote: The
ambiguity of the word 'practical' comes out well in these words of a
recent would-be reporter of our views: 'Pragmatism is an Anglo-Saxon
reaction against the intellectualism and rationalism of the Latin
mind.... Man, each individual man is the measure of things. He is able
to conceive one but relative truths, that is to say, illusions. What
these illusions are worth is revealed to him, not by general theory, but
by individual practice. Pragmatism, which consists in experiencing
these illusions of the mind and obeying them by acting them out, is a
PHILOSOPHY WITHOUT WORDS, a philosophy of GESTURES AND OF ACTS,
which abandons what is general and olds only to what is particular.'
(Bourdeau, in Journal des. debats, October 89, 1907.)] But particular
consequences can perfectly well be of a theoretic nature. Every remote
fact which we infer from an idea is a particular theoretic consequence
which our mind practically works towards. The loss of every old opinion
of ours which we see that we shall have to give up if a new opinion
be true, is a particular theoretic as well as a particular practical
consequence. After man's interest in breathing freely, the greatest of
all his interests (because it never fluctuates or remits, as most of his
physical interests do), is his interest in consistency, in feeling
that what he now thinks goes with what he thinks on other occasions.
We tirelessly compare truth with truth for this sole purpose. Is the
present candidate for belief perhaps contradicted by principle number
one? Is it compatible with fact number two? and so forth. The particular
operations here are the purely logical ones of analysis, deduction,
comparison, etc.; and altho general terms may be used ad libitum, the
satisfactory practical working of the candidate--idea consists in
the consciousness yielded by each successive theoretic consequence in
particular. It is therefore simply idiotic to repeat that pragmatism
takes no account of purely theoretic interests. All it insists on
is that verity in act means VERIFICATIONS, and that these are always
particulars. Even in exclusively theoretic matters, it insists that
vagueness and generality serve to verify nothing.