Our illustrations have now prepared the way for a general review of
the relations between our reason and our will. We are ready at length
to ask whether any insight of reason, whether any general view of the
nature and of the unity of the world or of life, {136} could possibly
be a merely theoretical insight. And if we rightly answer this
question, we shall be prepared to reply to the objection that,
according to the doctrine of the last lecture, the divine insight
which overarches our ignorance, and which has all reality for its
object, is a lifeless, or an unpractical, or a merely remote type of
pure knowledge.
Our attempt to deal with this new question can best be made by taking
a direct advantage of what some of you may suppose to be the most
formidable of all objections to the whole argument of the last
lecture. In my sketch of a philosophy of the reason, I have so far
deliberately avoided mentioning what many of you will have had in mind
as you have listened to me, namely, that doctrine about our knowledge,
and about truth, and about our mode of access to truth, which to-day
goes by the name of Pragmatism. Here we have to do, once more, with
some of the favourite theses of James's later years. We have also to
do with a view with which my present audience is likely to be
familiar, at least so far as concerns both the name pragmatism and the
best-known fundamental theses of the pragmatist. For I speak in the
immediate neighbourhood of one of the most famous strongholds of the
recent pragmatic movement. I can give but a comparatively small
portion of our limited time to the task of explaining to you how I
view those aspects of pragmatism which here concern our enterprise.
Yet this summary discussion will go far, I hope, to show how {137} I
view the relations between the reason and the will, and in how far our
will also seems to me to be a source of religious insight.
That human knowledge is confined to the range furnished by human
experience, and cannot be used to transcend that experience, is an
opinion widely represented in all modern discussion, and especially in
the most recent times. My own account of the insight which I refer to
the reason depends not upon simply ignoring this general doctrine
about the limitations of our human knowledge, but upon an effort to
get a rational view of what it is that we mean by human experience. My
result, as I have stated it, may have seemed paradoxical; and I am far
from supposing that my brief sketch could remove this paradoxical
seeming, or could answer all objections. My thesis is essentially
this, that you cannot rationally conceive what human experience is,
and means, except by regarding it as the fragment of an experience
that is infinitely richer than ours, and that possesses a
world-embracing unity and completeness of constitution. My argument
for this thesis has been dependent on an assertion about the sense in
which any opinion whatever can be either true or false, and upon a
doctrine regarding that insight to which we appeal whenever we make
any significant assertion.
Now this argument will seem to some of you to have been wholly set
aside by that account of the nature of judgments, of assertions, and
of their truth or falsity, which pragmatism has recently {138}
maintained. A new definition of truth, you will say--or, an old
definition revived and revised; a new clearness also as to the ancient
issues of philosophy; an equally novel recent assimilation of
philosophical methods to those that have long been prominent in
natural science--these things have combined, at the present moment, to
render the Platonic tradition in philosophy and the laborious
deductions of Kant, as well as the speculations of the post-Kantian
idealists, no longer interesting. I ought, you may insist, to have
taken note of this fact before presenting my now antiquated version of
the idealistic doctrine of the reason. I ought to have considered
fairly the pragmatist's theory of truth. I should then have seen that
our human experience may safely be left and must rationally be left,
to fight its own way to salvation without any aid from the idea of an
universal or all-embracing or divine insight.
How does pragmatism view the very problem about the truth and error of
our human opinions which has led me to such far-reaching consequences?
For the first, it is the boast of pragmatists that they deal, by
preference, with what they call "concrete situations," and our
"concrete situation" as human beings dealing with reality is, as they
maintain, something much more readily comprehensible than is the
idealistic theory of a divine insight. Truth and error are characters
that belong to our assertions for reasons which need no overarching
heavenly insight to make them clear. In brief, as the {139}
pragmatists tell us, the story of the nature of truth and of error is
this:
An assertion, a judgment, is always an active attitude of a man,
whereby, at the moment when he makes this assertion he directs the
course of his further activities. To say "My best way out of the woods
lies in that direction" is, for a wanderer lost in the forest, simply
to point out a rule or plan of action and to expect certain results
from following out that plan. This illustration of the man in the
woods is due to James. An analogous principle, according to
pragmatism, holds for any assertion. To judge is to expect some
concrete consequence to follow from some form of activity. An
assertion has meaning only in so far as it refers to some object that
can be defined in empirical terms and that can be subjected to further
direct or indirect tests, whereby its relations to our own activities
can become determinate. Thus, then, a judgment, an opinion, if it
means anything concrete, is always an appeal to more or less
accessible human experience--and is not, as I have been asserting, an
appeal to an overarching higher insight. When you make any significant
assertion, you appeal to whatever concrete human observations,
experiments, or other findings of data, actual or possible, can
furnish the test that the opinion calls for. If I assert: "It will
rain to-morrow," the assertion is to be verified or refuted by the
experience of men just as they live, from moment to moment.
{140}
It remains to define, a little more precisely, wherein consists this
empirical verification or refutation for which a human opinion calls.
An opinion is a definite one, as has just been said, because it guides
the will of the person who holds the opinion to some definite course
of action. An opinion then, if sincere and significant, has
_consequences,_ leads to deeds, modifies conduct, and is thus the
source of the experiences which one gets as a result of holding that
opinion and of acting upon it. In brief, an opinion has what the
pragmatists love to call its _"workings."_ Now when the workings of a
given opinion, the empirical results to which, through our actions, it
leads, agree with the expectations of the one who holds the opinion,
the opinion is to be called true. Or, in the now well-known phrase,
"An idea (or opinion) is true if it works." To use the repeated
example of Professor Moore, an opinion that a certain toothache is due
to a condition present in a given tooth is true, when an operation
performed upon that tooth, and performed as a consequence of that
opinion, and with the expectation of curing the toothache works as
expected. For the operation is itself one of the workings of the
opinion in question.
To assert an opinion, then, is not to appeal to an essentially
superior insight, but is to appeal to the workings that follow from
this opinion when you act upon it in concrete life. No other sort of
truth is knowable.
{141}
A consequence of these views, often insisted upon by pragmatists, is
that truth is relative to the various "concrete situations" which
arise; so that absolute or final truth is indefinable by us mortals.
Hence an opinion may be true for a given purpose, or in one situation
(because in that situation its workings prove to be as expected),
although it is relatively false when applied to some other situation,
or to some wider range of experience. Absolute truth is as
unobservable by us in our experience as is absolute position or
absolute motion in the physical world. Every truth is definable with
reference to somebody's intentions, actions, and successes or
failures. These things change from person to person, from time to
time, from plan to plan. What is true from the point of view of my
plans need not be so from your point of view. The workings of an
opinion vary in their significance with the expectations of those
concerned. Truth absolute is at best a mere ideal, which for us throws
no light upon the nature of the real world.
Thus, at a stroke, pragmatism, as understood by its chief
representatives at the present time, is supposed to make naught of the
subtle, and, as the pragmatists say, airy and fantastic considerations
upon which my sketch of a philosophical idealism at the last lecture
depended. Truth, they insist, is a perfectly human and for us mortals
not in the least a supernatural affair. We test it as we can, by
following the experienced workings to which our {142} ideas lead. If
these workings are what we meant them to be, our opinions are just in
so far proven true. If no human and empirical tests of the workings of
an opinion are accessible to us, the opinion remains in so far
meaningless. If concrete tests lead to workings that disappoint our
human expectations, our opinions are in so far false. Moreover (and
upon this all the pragmatists lay great stress), truth is for us a
temporal affair. It changes, it flows, it grows, it decays. It can be
made eternal only by tying ourselves, for a given purpose, to abstract
ideas which we arbitrarily require to remain, like mathematical
definitions, unchanged. Even such ideas have no sense apart from the
uses to which they can be put. Concrete truth grows or diminishes as
our successes in controlling our experience, through acting upon our
beliefs, wax or wane. Truth is subject to all the processes of the
evolution of our concrete lives. The eternal is nothing that can be
for us a live presence. What we deal with is, like ourselves, fluent,
subject to growth and decay, dynamic, and never static. The pragmatist
recoils with a certain mixture of horror and amusement from the
conception of an all-inclusive divine insight. That, he says, would be
something static. Its world of absolute reality would be a "block
universe" and itself merely an aspect of a part, or perhaps the whole,
of just this block. Its supposed truth would be static like itself,
and therefore dead.
{143}
But does pragmatism forbid us to have religious insight? No; James, in
ways which you have repeatedly heard me mention, insists that
pragmatism leaves open ample room for what he thinks to be the best
sort of religion, namely, for a religion suited to what he calls the
"dramatic temper" of mind. Truth, so far as we men can attain to it,
has indeed to be human enough. But nothing forbids us to entertain the
belief that there are superhuman and supernatural realities, forms of
being, living and spiritual personalities, or superpersonalities, as
various and lofty as you please, provided only that they be such as to
make whatever evidence of their being is accessible to us capable of
definition in a human and empirical way. The truth, namely, of our
belief about such beings, has to be tested by us in terms of our own
concrete religious experience. Such beliefs, like others, must "work"
in order to be true. That is, these beliefs, however they arise, must
lead to conduct; and the results of this conduct must tend to our
religious comfort, to our unity of feeling, to our peace, or power, or
saintliness, or other form of spiritual perfection. The fruits of the
spirit are the empirical tests of a religious doctrine; and, apart
from those uprushes of faith from the subconscious whereof we have
spoken in previous lectures, there are for James no other tests of the
truth of religious convictions than these. The truth of religion
consists in its successful "workings."
Hence, however, religion depends upon an {144} ever-renewed testing of
its opinions through a carrying of them out in life. Insight would be
barren were it not quickened and applied through our will. To James,
as we already know, reason, as such, seems to be of little use in
religion. But action, resolute living, testing of your faith through
your works and through its own workings, this is religion--an
endlessly restless and dramatic process, never an union with any
absolute attainment of the goal.
V
Now in what way can I hope, you may ask, to answer these impressive
and to many recent writers decisive considerations of the pragmatists?
My answer, like my foregoing statement of my own form of idealism,
depends upon extremely simple considerations. Their interest for our
discussion lies in the fact that they have to do with the relation
between reason and action, and between the real world and the human
will. As a fact, the will as well as the reason is a source of
religious insight. No truth is a saving truth--yes, no truth is a
truth at all unless it guides and directs life. Therein I heartily
agree with current pragmatism and with James himself. On the other
hand, the will is a collection of restless caprices unless it is
unified by a rational ideal. And no truth can have any workings at
all, without even thereby showing itself to be, just in so far as it
actually works, an eternal {145} truth. And, furthermore, what I have
asserted about the insight which the reason gives us is so far from
being opposed to the pragmatist's facts, that every rational
consideration of the type of truth which they define leads us back to
the consideration of absolute truth and to the assertion of an
all-inclusive insight. Only, when we view this all-inclusive insight
from the point of view which the pragmatists now emphasise (and which
I myself have emphasised from a period long antedating the recent
pragmatist movement), such a fair estimate of the insight of reason
transforms our first and superficial opinion of its nature and of its
meaning. It becomes the insight of a rational will, whose expression
is the world, and whose life is that in which we too live and move and
have our being.
Let me briefly dwell on each of the considerations which I here have
in mind. To me, as a philosophical student, they are not new; for, as
I repeat, I insisted upon them years ago, before the modern
pragmatistic controversy began.
First, then, there are certain respects in which I fully agree with
recent pragmatism. I agree that every opinion expresses an attitude of
the will, a preparedness for action, a determination to guide a plan
of action in accordance with an idea. Whoever asserts anything about
the way out of the woods, or about the cause and possible cure of a
toothache, defines a course of action in accordance with some purpose,
and amongst other things predicts the {146} possible outcome of that
course of action. The outcome that he predicts is defined in terms of
experience, and, so far as that is possible, in terms of human
experience. And now this is true, not only of assertions or opinions
about toothaches. It is true also of assertions about all objects in
heaven or earth. There is no such thing as a purely intellectual form
of assertion which has no element of action about it. An opinion is a
deed. It is a deed intended to guide other deeds. It proposes to have
what the pragmatists call "workings." That is, it undertakes to guide
the life of the one who asserts the opinion. In that sense, all truth
is practical. If you assert a proposition in mathematics, you propose
to guide the computations, or other synthetic processes, of whoever is
interested in certain mathematical objects. If you say "There is a
God," and know what you mean by the term "God," you lay down some sort
of rule for such forms of action as involve a fitting acknowledgment
of God's being and significance. So far, then, I wholly side with the
pragmatists. There is no pure intellect. There is no genuine insight
which does not also exist as a guide to some sort of action.
Furthermore, the proper "workings" of an assertion, the rational
results of the application of this opinion to life, must, if the
assertion is true, agree with the expectations of the one who defines
the assertion. And these "workings" belong, indeed, to the realm of
actual and concrete experience, be this {147} experience wholly human,
or be it, in some respect, an experience which is higher and richer
than any merely human experience. Opinions are active appeals to real
life--a life to which we are always seeking to adjust ourselves, and
in which we are always looking to find our place. The quest for
salvation itself is such an effort to adjust our own life to the
world's life. And if the world's life finds our efforts to define our
relation to the world's actual and perfectly concrete experience
inadequate, then our assertions are in just so far false; they lead in
that case to blundering actions. We fail. And in such cases our
opinions, indeed, "do not work."
All this I myself insist upon. But next I ask you to note that the
very significance of our human life depends upon the fact that we are
always undertaking to adjust ourselves to a life, and to a type of
experience, which, concrete and real though it is, is never reducible
to the terms of any purely human experience. Were this not the case;
were not every significant assertion concerned with a type and form of
life and of experience which no man ever gets; were not all our
actions guided by ideas and ideals that can never be adequately
expressed in simply human terms; were all this, I say, not the case,
then--neither science nor religion, neither worldly prudence nor
ideal morality, neither natural common-sense nor the loftiest forms of
spirituality would be possible. Here I can only repeat, but now with
explicit reference to the active aspect of our opinions {148} and of
our experience, the comments that I made in my former lecture. Man as
he is experiences from moment to moment. What is here and now, not
future "workings," not past expectations, but the present--this is
what he more immediately gets and verifies. These momentary
experiences of his, these pains and these data of perception, are what
he can personally verify for himself. And to this life in each instant
he is confined, so far as his own personal and individual experience
is concerned. But man _means_, he _intends_, he _estimates_, he
_judges_ life, not as it appears to him at any one instant, but as "in
the long run," or "for the common-sense of mankind," or as "from a
rational point of view" he holds that it ought to be judged. Now I
again insist--there is not one of us who ever directly observes in his
own person what it is which even the so-called common-sense of mankind
is said to verify and find to be true. The experience which "mankind"
is said to possess is not merely the mere collection of your momentary
feelings or perceptions, or mine. It is a conceived integral
experience which no individual man ever gets before him. When we
conceive it, we first treat it as something impersonal. If it is
personal, the person who gets it before him is greater than any man.
Yet unless some such integral experience is as concrete and genuine a
fact, as real a life, as any life that you and I from moment to moment
lead, then all so-called "common-sense" is meaningless. But if such an
integral experience {149} is real, then that by which the pragmatic
"workings" of our private and personal opinions are to be tested and
are tested is a certain integral whole of life in which we all live
and move and have our being, but which is no more the mere heap and
collection of our moments of fragmentary experience, and of our
vicissitudes of shifting moods, than a symphony is a mere collection
of notes on paper, or of scraped strings and quivering tubes, or of
air waves, or even of the deeds of separate musicians.
The life, then, the experience, the concrete whole, wherein our
assertions have their workings, with which our active ideas are
labouring to agree, to which our will endlessly strives to adjust
itself, in which we are saved or lost, is a life whose touch with our
efforts is as close as its superiority to our merely human narrowness
is concretely and actively triumphant whenever our pettiness gets
moulded to a higher reasonableness. And unless such a life above our
individual level is real, our human efforts have no sense whatever,
and chaos drowns out the meaning of the pragmatists and of the
idealists alike. _If one asks, however, by what workings our
significant assertions propose to be judged, I answer, by their
workings as experienced and estimated from the point of view of such a
larger life, as conforming to its will, or falling short thereof, as
leading toward or away from our salvation._ For it is just such a
larger life by which we all propose and intend to be judged, whenever
we make our active appeal to life take the {150} form of any serious
assertion whatever. If a man proposes to let his ideas be tested not
by his momentary caprice, and not by any momentary datum of
experience, but by "what proves to be their workings in the long run,"
then already he is appealing to an essentially superhuman type of
empirical test and estimate. For no man taken as this individual ever
personally experiences "the long run," that is, the integral course
and meaning, the right estimate and working of a long series of
experiences and deeds. For a man individually observes now this moment
and now that--never their presupposed integration, never their union
in a single whole of significant life.
If a man says that the workings of his ideas are to be tested by
"scientific experience," then again he appeals not to the verdict of
any human observer, but to the integrated and universalised and
relatively impersonal and superpersonal synthesis of the results of
countless observers.
And so, whatever you regard as a genuine test of the workings of your
ideas is some living whole of experience above the level of any one of
our individual human lives. To this whole you indeed actively appeal.
The appeal is an act of will. And in turn you regard that to which you
appeal as an experience which is just as live and concrete as your
own, and which carries out its own will in that it snubs or welcomes
your efforts with a will as hearty as is your own. For what estimates
your deeds, {151} and gives them their meaning, is a life as genuine
as yours and an activity as real as yours. Pragmatism is perfectly
justified in regarding the whole process as no mere contemplation, no
merely restful or static conformity of passive idea to motionless
insight, but, on the contrary, as a significant interaction of life
with life and of will with will. But the more vital the process, the
more pragmatic the test of our active opinions through the conformity
or non-conformity of their purposes to the life wherein we dwell and
have our being, the more vital becomes the fact that, whether we are
saved or lost, we belong to the world's life, and are part thereof,
while, unless this life is more than merely human in its rational
wealth of concrete meaning, we mortals have no meaning whatever, and
the assertions of common-sense as well as of religion lapse into
absurdity.