I have already said something about this misconception under the third
and fourth heads, above, but a little more may be helpful. The objection
is apt to clothe itself in words like these: 'You make truth to consist
in every value except the cognitive value proper; you always leave your
knower at many removes (or, at the uttermost, at one remove) from his
real object; the best you do is to let his ideas carry him towards it;
it remains forever outside of him,' etc.
I think that the leaven working here is the rooted intellectualist
persuasion that, to know a reality, an idea must in some inscrutable
fashion possess or be it. [Footnote: Sensations may, indeed, possess
their objects or coalesce with them, as common sense supposes that they
do; and intuited differences between concepts may coalesce with the
'eternal' objective differences; but to simplify our discussion. here
we can afford to abstract from these very special cases of knowing.]
For pragmatism this kind of coalescence is inessential. As a rule our
cognitions are only processes of mind off their balance and in motion
towards real termini; and the reality of the termini, believed in by the
states of mind in question, can be guaranteed only by some wider knower
[Footnote: The transcendental idealist thinks that, in some inexplicable
way, the finite states of mind are identical with the transfinite
all-knower which he finds himself obliged to postulate in order to
supply a fundamentum far the relation of knowing, as he apprehends it.
Pragmatists can leave the question of identity open; but they cannot do
without the wider knower any more than they can do without the reality,
if they want to prove a case of knowing. They themselves play the part
of the absolute knower for the universe of discourse which serves them
as material for epistemologizing. They warrant the reality there,
and the subject's true knowledge, there, of it. But whether what they
themselves say about that whole universe is objectively true, i.e.,
whether the pragmatic theory of truth is true really, they cannot
warrant,--they can only believe it To their hearers they can only
propose it, as I propose it to my readers, as something to be verified
ambulando, or by the way is which its consequences may confirm it]. But
if there is no reason extant in the universe why they should be doubted,
the beliefs are true in the only sense in which anything can be true
anyhow: they are practically and concretely true, namely. True in the
mystical mongrel sense of an Identitatsphilosophie they need not be; nor
is there any intelligible reason why they ever need be true otherwise
than verifiably and practically. It is reality's part to possess its
own existence; it is thought's part to get into 'touch' with it by
innumerable paths of verification.
I fear that the 'humanistic' developments of pragmatism may cause a
certain difficulty here. We get at one truth only through the rest of
truth; and the reality, everlastingly postulated as that which all our
truth must keep in touch with, may never be given to us save in the
form of truth other than that which we are now testing. But since Dr.
Schiller has shown that all our truths, even the most elemental, are
affected by race-inheritance with a human coefficient, reality per se
thus may appear only as a sort of limit; it may be held to shrivel to
the mere PLACE for an object, and what is known may be held to be only
matter of our psyche that we fill the place with. It must be confessed
that pragmatism, worked in this humanistic way, is COMPATIBLE with
solipsism. It joins friendly hands with the agnostic part of kantism,
with contemporary agnosticism, and with idealism generally. But worked
thus, it is a metaphysical theory about the matter of reality, and flies
far beyond pragmatism's own modest analysis of the nature of the knowing
function, which analysis may just as harmoniously be combined with less
humanistic accounts of reality. One of pragmatism's merits is that it
is so purely epistemological. It must assume realities; but it prejudges
nothing as to their constitution, and the most diverse metaphysics can
use it as their foundation. It certainly has no special affinity with
solipsism.
As I look back over what I have written, much of it gives me a queer
impression, as if the obvious were set forth so condescendingly that
readers might well laugh at my pomposity. It may be, however, that
concreteness as radical as ours is not so obvious. The whole originality
of pragmatism, the whole point in it, is its use of the concrete way of
seeing. It begins with concreteness, and returns and ends with it. Dr.
Schiller, with his two 'practical' aspects of truth, (1) relevancy to
situation, and (2) subsequential utility, is only filling the cup of
concreteness to the brim for us. Once seize that cup, and you cannot
misunderstand pragmatism. It seems as if the power of imagining the
world concretely MIGHT have been common enough to let our readers
apprehend us better, as if they might have read between our lines, and,
in spite of all our infelicities of expression, guessed a little
more correctly what our thought was. But alas! this was not on fate's
programme, so we can only think, with the German ditty:--
"Es waer' zu schoen gewesen, Es hat nicht sollen sein."