'In so far as my action is free, what I have been, what I am, what I
have always done or striven to do, what I most earnestly wish or resolve
to do at the present moment--these things can have NO MORE TO DO WITH
ITS FUTURE REALIZATION THAN IF THEY HAD NO EXISTENCE.... The possibility
is a hideous one; and surely even the most ardent free-willist will,
when he contemplates it frankly, excuse me for hoping that if I am free
I am at least not very free, and that I may reasonably expect to find
SOME degree of consistency in my life and actions. ... Suppose that I
have given a dollar to a blind beggar. Can I, if it is really an act
of free-will, be properly said to have given the money? Was it given
because I was a man of tender heart, etc., etc.? ... What has all
this to do with acts of free-will? If they are free, they must not be
conditioned by antecedent circumstances of any sort, by the misery of
the beggar, by the pity in the heart of the passer-by. They must be
causeless, not determined. They must drop from a clear sky out of the
void, for just in so far as they can be accounted for, they are not
free.' [Footnote: Loc. cit., vol. lviii, pp. 189, 188.]
Heaven forbid that I should get entangled here in a controversy about
the rights and wrongs of the free-will question at large, for I am only
trying to illustrate vicious abstractionism by the conduct of some
of the doctrine's assailants. The moments of bifurcation, as the
indeterminist seems to himself to experience them, are moments both of
re-direction and of continuation. But because in the 'either--or' of the
re-direction we hesitate, the determinist abstracts this little element
of discontinuity from the superabundant continuities of the experience,
and cancels in its behalf all the connective characters with which the
latter is filled. Choice, for him, means henceforward DISconnection pure
and simple, something undetermined in advance IN ANY RESPECT WHATEVER,
and a life of choices must be a raving chaos, at no two moments of which
could we be treated as one and the same man. If Nero were 'free' at. the
moment of ordering his mother's murder, Mr. McTaggart [Footnote: Some
Dogmas of Religion, p. 179.] assures us that no one would have the
right at any other moment to call him a bad man, for he would then be an
absolutely other Nero.
A polemic author ought not merely to destroy his victim. He ought to try
a bit to make him feel his error--perhaps not enough to convert him,
but enough to give him a bad conscience and to weaken the energy of his
defence. These violent caricatures of men's beliefs arouse only contempt
for the incapacity of their authors to see the situations out of which
the problems grow. To treat the negative character of one abstracted
element as annulling all the positive features with which it coexists,
is no way to change any actual indeterminist's way of looking on the
matter, tho it may make the gallery applaud.
Turn now to some criticisms of the 'will to believe,' as another example
of the vicious way in which abstraction is currently employed. The right
to believe in things for the truth of which complete objective proof is
yet lacking is defended by those who apprehend certain human situations
in their concreteness. In those situations the mind has alternatives
before it so vast that the full evidence for either branch is missing,
and yet so significant that simply to wait for proof, and to doubt while
waiting, might often in practical respects be the same thing as weighing
down the negative side. Is life worth while at all? Is there any general
meaning in all this cosmic weather? Is anything being permanently bought
by all this suffering? Is there perhaps a transmundane experience in
Being, something corresponding to a 'fourth dimension,' which, if we had
access to it, might patch up some of this world's zerrissenheit and
make things look more rational than they at first appear? Is there a
superhuman consciousness of which our minds are parts, and from which
inspiration and help may come? Such are the questions in which the right
to take sides practically for yes or no is affirmed by some of us, while
others hold that this is methodologically inadmissible, and summon us to
die professing ignorance and proclaiming the duty of every one to refuse
to believe.
I say nothing of the personal inconsistency of some of these critics,
whose printed works furnish exquisite illustrations of the will to
believe, in spite of their denunciations of it as a phrase and as a
recommended thing. Mr. McTaggart, whom I will once more take as an
example, is sure that 'reality is rational and righteous' and 'destined
sub specie temporis to become perfectly good'; and his calling this
belief a result of necessary logic has surely never deceived any reader
as to its real genesis in the gifted author's mind. Mankind is made on
too uniform a pattern for any of us to escape successfully from acts of
faith. We have a lively vision of what a certain view of the universe
would mean for us. We kindle or we shudder at the thought, and our
feeling runs through our whole logical nature and animates its workings.
It CAN'T be that, we feel; it MUST be this. It must be what it OUGHT
to be, and OUGHT to be this; and then we seek for every reason, good
or bad, to make this which so deeply ought to be, seem objectively the
probable thing. We show the arguments against it to be insufficient, so
that it MAY be true; we represent its appeal to be to our whole nature's
loyalty and not to any emaciated faculty of syllogistic proof. We
reinforce it by remembering the enlargement of our world by music, by
thinking of the promises of sunsets and the impulses from vernal woods.
And the essence of the whole experience, when the individual swept
through it says finally 'I believe,' is the intense concreteness of
his vision, the individuality of the hypothesis before him, and the
complexity of the various concrete motives and perceptions that issue in
his final state.
But see now how the abstractionist treats this rich and intricate vision
that a certain state of things must be true. He accuses the believer of
reasoning by the following syllogism:--
All good desires must be fulfilled; The desire to believe this
proposition is a good desire;
Ergo, this proposition must be believed.
He substitutes this abstraction for the concrete state of mind of the
believer, pins the naked absurdity of it upon him, and easily proves
that any one who defends him must be the greatest fool on earth. As if
any real believer ever thought in this preposterous way, or as if any
defender of the legitimacy of men's concrete ways of concluding ever
used the abstract and general premise, 'All desires must be fulfilled'!
Nevertheless, Mr. McTaggart solemnly and laboriously refutes the
syllogism in sections 47 to 57 of the above-cited book. He shows that
there is no fixed link in the dictionary between the abstract concepts
'desire,' 'goodness' and 'reality'; and he ignores all the links which
in the single concrete case the believer feels and perceives to be
there! He adds:--
'When the reality of a thing is uncertain, the argument encourages us to
suppose that our approval of a thing can determine its reality. And when
this unhallowed link has once been established, retribution overtakes
us. For when the reality of the thing is independently certain, we
[then] have to admit that the reality of the thing should determine our
approval of that thing. I find it difficult to imagine a more degraded
position.'
One here feels tempted to quote ironically Hegel's famous equation of
the real with the rational to his english disciple, who ends his chapter
with the heroic words:--
'For those who do not pray, there remains the resolve that, so far as
their strength may permit, neither the pains of death nor the pains
of life shall drive them to any comfort in that which they hold to be
false, or drive them from any comfort [discomfort?] in that which they
hold to be true.'
How can so ingenious-minded a writer fail to see how far over the heads
of the enemy all his arrows pass? When Mr. McTaggart himself believes
that the universe is run by the dialectic energy of the absolute idea,
his insistent desire to have a world of that sort is felt by him to
be no chance example of desire in general, but an altogether peculiar
insight-giving passion to which, in this if in no other instance, he
would be stupid not to yield. He obeys its concrete singularity, not
the bare abstract feature in it of being a 'desire.' His situation is as
particular as that of an actress who resolves that it is best for her
to marry and leave the stage, of a priest who becomes secular, of a
politician who abandons public life. What sensible man would seek
to refute the concrete decisions of such persons by tracing them
to abstract premises, such as that 'all actresses must marry,' 'all
clergymen must be laymen,' 'all politicians should resign their posts'?
Yet this type of refutation, absolutely unavailing though it be for
purposes of conversion, is spread by Mr. McTaggart through many pages of
his book. For the aboundingness of our real reasons he substitutes
one narrow point. For men's real probabilities he gives a skeletonized
abstraction which no man was ever tempted to believe.
The abstraction in my next example is less simple, but is quite as
flimsy as a weapon of attack. Empiricists think that truth in general is
distilled from single men's beliefs; and the so-called pragmatists 'go
them one better' by trying to define what it consists in when it comes.
It consists, I have elsewhere said, in such a working on the part of the
beliefs as may bring the man into satisfactory relations with objects to
which these latter point. The working is of course a concrete working
in the actual experience of human beings, among their ideas, feelings,
perceptions, beliefs and acts, as well as among the physical things
of their environment, and the relations must be understood as being
possible as well as actual. In the chapter on truth of my book
Pragmatism I have taken pains to defend energetically this view. Strange
indeed have been the misconceptions of it by its enemies, and many have
these latter been. Among the most formidable-sounding onslaughts on the
attempt to introduce some concreteness into our notion of what the truth
of an idea may mean, is one that has been raised in many quarters to the
effect that to make truth grow in any way out of human opinion is but
to reproduce that protagorean doctrine that the individual man is
'the measure of all things,' which Plato in his immortal dialogue, the
Thaeatetus, is unanimously said to have laid away so comfortably in
its grave two thousand years ago. The two cleverest brandishers of this
objection to make truth concrete, Professors Rickert and Munsterberg,
write in German, [Footnote: Munsterberg's book has just appeared in an
English version: The Eternal Values, Boston, 1909.] and 'relativismus'
is the name they give to the heresy which they endeavor to uproot.
The first step in their campaign against 'relativismus' is entirely
in the air. They accuse relativists--and we pragmatists are typical
relativists--of being debarred by their self-adopted principles,
not only from the privilege which rationalist philosophers enjoy, of
believing that these principles of their own are truth impersonal and
absolute, but even of framing the abstract notion of such a truth, in
the pragmatic sense, of an ideal opinion in which all men might agree,
and which no man should ever wish to change. Both charges fall wide
of their mark. I myself, as a pragmatist, believe in my own account of
truth as firmly as any rationalist can possibly believe in his. And I
believe in it for the very reason that I have the idea of truth which
my learned adversaries contend that no pragmatist can frame. I expect,
namely, that the more fully men discuss and test my account, the more
they will agree that it fits, and the less will they desire a change.
I may of course be premature in this confidence, and the glory of
being truth final and absolute may fall upon some later revision and
correction of my scheme, which later will then be judged untrue in
just the measure in which it departs from that finally satisfactory
formulation. To admit, as we pragmatists do, that we are liable to
correction (even tho we may not expect it) involves the use on our
part of an ideal standard. Rationalists themselves are, as individuals,
sometimes sceptical enough to admit the abstract possibility of their
own present opinions being corrigible and revisable to some degree, so
the fact that the mere NOTION of an absolute standard should seem to
them so important a thing to claim for themselves and to deny to us is
not easy to explain. If, along with the notion of the standard, they
could also claim its exclusive warrant for their own fulminations now,
it would be important to them indeed. But absolutists like Rickert
freely admit the sterility of the notion, even in their own hands. Truth
is what we OUGHT to believe, they say, even tho no man ever did or shall
believe it, and even tho we have no way of getting at it save by the
usual empirical processes of testing our opinions by one another and
by facts. Pragmatically, then, this part of the dispute is idle. No
relativist who ever actually walked the earth [Footnote: Of course
the bugaboo creature called 'the sceptic' in the logic-books, who
dogmatically makes the statement that no statement, not even the one he
now makes, is true, is a mere mechanical toy--target for the rationalist
shooting-gallery--hit him and he turns a summersault--yet he is the only
sort of relativist whom my colleagues appear able to imagine to exist.]
has denied the regulative character in his own thinking of the notion of
absolute truth. What is challenged by relativists is the pretence on any
one's part to have found for certain at any given moment what the shape
of that truth is. Since the better absolutists agree in this, admitting
that the proposition 'There is absolute truth' is the only absolute
truth of which we can be sure, [Footnote: Compare Bickert's Gegenstand
der Erkentniss, pp. 187, 138. Munsterberg's version of this first truth
is that 'Es gibt eine Welt,'--see his Philosophie der Werte, pp. 38 and
74 And, after all, both these philosophers confess in the end that the
primal truth of which they consider our supposed denial so irrational
is not properly an insight at all, but a dogma adopted by the will which
any one who turns his back on duty may disregard! But if it all reverts
to 'the will to believe,' pragmatists have that privilege as well as
their critics.] further debate is practically unimportant, so we may
pass to their next charge.
It is in this charge that the vicious abstractionism becomes most
apparent. The antipragmatist, in postulating absolute truth, refuses
to give any account of what the words may mean. For him they form a
self-explanatory term. The pragmatist, on the contrary, articulately
defines their meaning. Truth absolute, he says, means an ideal set
of formulations towards which all opinions may in the long run of
experience be expected to converge. In this definition of absolute truth
he not only postulates that there is a tendency to such convergence
of opinions, to such ultimate consensus, but he postulates the other
factors of his definition equally, borrowing them by anticipation from
the true conclusions expected to be reached. He postulates the existence
of opinions, he postulates the experience that will sift them, and the
consistency which that experience will show. He justifies himself in
these assumptions by saying that they are not postulates in the strict
sense but simple inductions from the past extended to the future by
analogy; and he insists that human opinion has already reached a pretty
stable equilibrium regarding them, and that if its future development
fails to alter them, the definition itself, with all its terms included,
will be part of the very absolute truth which it defines. The hypothesis
will, in short, have worked successfully all round the circle and proved
self-corroborative, and the circle will be closed.
The anti-pragmatist, however, immediately falls foul of the word
'opinion' here, abstracts it from the universe of life, and uses it as
a bare dictionary-substantive, to deny the rest of the assumptions which
it coexists withal. The dictionary says that an opinion is 'what some
one thinks or believes.' This definition leaves every one's opinion free
to be autogenous, or unrelated either to what any one else may think or
to what the truth may be.
Therefore, continue our abstractionists, we must conceive it as
essentially thus unrelated, so that even were a billion men to sport the
same opinion, and only one man to differ, we could admit no collateral
circumstances which might presumptively make it more probable that he,
not they, should be wrong. Truth, they say, follows not the counting of
noses, nor is it only another name for a majority vote. It is a relation
that antedates experience, between our opinions and an independent
something which the pragmatist account ignores, a relation which, tho
the opinions of individuals should to all eternity deny it, would still
remain to qualify them as false. To talk of opinions without referring
to this independent something, the anti-pragmatist assures us, is to
play Hamlet with Hamlet's part left out.
But when the pragmatist speaks of opinions, does he mean any such
insulated and unmotived abstractions as are here supposed? Of course
not, he means men's opinions in the flesh, as they have really formed
themselves, opinions surrounded by their causes and the influences
they obey and exert, and along with the whole environment of social
communication of which they are a part and out of which they take
their rise. Moreover the 'experience' which the pragmatic definition
postulates is the independent something which the anti-pragmatist
accuses him of ignoring. Already have men grown unanimous in the opinion
that such experience is of an independent reality, the existence of
which all opinions must acknowledge, in order to be true. Already do
they agree that in the long run it is useless to resist experience's
pressure; that the more of it a man has, the better position he stands
in, in respect of truth; that some men, having had more experience, are
therefore better authorities than others; that some are also wiser by
nature and better able to interpret the experience they have had; that
it is one part of such wisdom to compare notes, discuss, and follow the
opinion of our betters; and that the more systematically and thoroughly
such comparison and weighing of opinions is pursued, the truer the
opinions that survive are likely to be. When the pragmatist talks
of opinions, it is opinions as they thus concretely and livingly and
interactingly and correlatively exist that he has in mind; and when the
anti-pragmatist tries to floor him because the word 'opinion' can also
be taken abstractly and as if it had no environment, he simply ignores
the soil out of which the whole discussion grows. His weapons cut
the air and strike no blow. No one gets wounded in the war against
caricatures of belief and skeletons of opinion of which the German
onslaughts upon 'relativismus' consists. Refuse to use the word
'opinion' abstractly, keep it in its real environment, and the withers
of pragmatism remain unwrung. That men do exist who are 'opinionated,'
in the sense that their opinions are self-willed, is unfortunately a
fact that must be admitted, no matter what one's notion of truth in
general may be. But that this fact should make it impossible for truth
to form itself authentically out of the life of opinion is what no
critic has yet proved. Truth may well consist of certain opinions, and
does indeed consist of nothing but opinions, tho not every opinion need
be true. No pragmatist needs to dogmatize about the consensus of opinion
in the future being right--he need only postulate that it will probably
contain more of truth than any one's opinion now.