Russell's views. The ethical attitude doubtless has no _ethical_
ground, but that fact does not prevent it from having a _natural_
ground; and the observer of the animate creation need not have much
difficulty in seeing what that natural ground is. Mr. Russell,
however, refuses to look also in that direction. He insists, rightly
enough, that good is predicated categorically by the conscience; he
will not remember that all life is not moral bias merely, and that, in
the very act of recognising excellence and pursuing it, we may glance
back over our shoulder and perceive how our moral bias is conditioned,
and what basis it has in the physical order of things. This backward
look, when the hand is on the plough, may indeed confuse our ethical
self-expression, both in theory and in practice; and I am the last to
deny the need of insisting, in ethics, on ethical judgments in all
their purity and dogmatic sincerity. Such insistence, if we had heard
more of it in our youth, might have saved many of us from chronic
entanglements; and there is nothing, next to Plato, which ought to be
more recommended to the young philosopher than the teachings of
Messrs. Russell and Moore, if he wishes to be a moralist and a
logician, and not merely to seem one. Yet this salutary doctrine,
though correct, is inadequate. It is a monocular philosophy, seeing
outlines clear, but missing the solid bulk and perspective of things.
We need binocular vision to quicken the whole mind and yield a full
image of reality. Ethics should be controlled by a physics that
perceives the material ground and the relative status of whatever is
moral. Otherwise ethics itself tends to grow narrow, strident, and
fanatical; as may be observed in asceticism and puritanism, or, for
the matter of that, in Mr. Moore's uncivilised leaning towards the
doctrine of retributive punishment, or in Mr. Russell's intolerance
of selfishness and patriotism, and in his refusal to entertain any
pious reverence for the nature of things. The quality of wisdom, like
that of mercy, is not strained. To choose, to love and hate, to have a
moral life, is inevitable and legitimate in the part; but it is the
function of the part as part, and we must keep it in its place if we
wish to view the whole in its true proportions. Even to express justly
the aim of our own life we need to retain a constant sympathy with
what is animal and fundamental in it, else we shall give a false
place, and too loud an emphasis, to our definitions of the ideal.
However, it would be much worse not to reach the ideal at all, or to
confuse it for want of courage and sincerity in uttering our true
mind; and it is in uttering our true mind that Mr. Russell can help
us, even if our true mind should not always coincide with his.
In the following pages I do not attempt to cover all Mr. Russell's
doctrine (the deeper mathematical purls of it being beyond my
comprehension), and the reader will find some speculations of my own
interspersed in what I report of his. I merely traverse after him
three subjects that seem of imaginative interest, to indicate the
inspiration and the imprudence, as I think them, of this young
philosophy.
II. THE STUDY OF ESSENCE
"The solution of the difficulties which formerly surrounded the
mathematical infinite is probably," says Mr. Russell, "the greatest
achievement of which our own age has to boast.... It was assumed as
self-evident, until Cantor and Dedekind established the opposite,
that if, from any collection of things, some were taken away, the
number of things left must always be less than the original number of
things. This assumption, as a matter of fact, holds only of finite
collections; and the rejection of it, where the infinite is concerned,
has been shown to remove all the difficulties that hitherto baffled
human reason in this matter." And he adds in another place: "To
reconcile us, by the exhibition of its awful beauty, to the reign of
Fate ... is the task of tragedy. But mathematics takes us still
further from what is human, into the region of absolute necessity, to
which not only the actual world, but every possible world, must
conform; and even here it builds a habitation, or rather finds a
habitation eternally standing, where our ideals are fully satisfied
and our best hopes are not thwarted. It is only when we thoroughly
understand the entire independence of ourselves, which belongs to this
world that reason finds, that we can adequately realise the profound
importance of its beauty."
Mathematics seems to have a value for Mr. Russell akin to that of
religion. It affords a sanctuary to which to flee from the world, a
heaven suffused with a serene radiance and full of a peculiar
sweetness and consolation. "Real life," he writes, "is to most men a
long second-best, a perpetual compromise between the ideal and the
possible; but the world of pure reason knows no compromise, no
practical limitations, no barrier to the creative activity embodying
in splendid edifices the passionate aspiration after the perfect from
which all great work springs. Remote from human passions, remote even
from the pitiful laws of nature, the generations have gradually
created an ordered cosmos where pure thought can dwell as in its
natural home, and where one, at least, of our nobler impulses can
escape from the dreary exile of the actual world." This study is one
of "those elements in human life which merit a place in heaven." "The
true spirit of delight, the exaltation, the sense of being more than
man, which is the touchstone of the highest excellence, is to be found
in mathematics as surely as in poetry."
This enthusiastic language might have, I should think, an opposite
effect upon some readers to that which Mr. Russell desires. It might
make them suspect that the claim to know an absolute ideal necessity,
so satisfying to one of our passionate impulses, might be prompted by
the same conceit, and subject to the same illusion, as the claim to
know absolute truth in religion. Beauty, when attributed to necessary
relations between logical entities, casts a net of subjectivity over
them; and at this net the omnivorous empiricist might be tempted to
haul, until he fancied he had landed the whole miraculous draught of
fishes. The fish, however, would have slipped through the meshes; and
it would be only his own vital emotion, projected for a moment into
the mathematical world, that he would be able to draw back and hug to
his bosom. Eternal truth is as disconsolate as it is consoling, and as
dreary as it is interesting: these moral values are, in fact, values
which the activity of contemplating that sort of truth has for
different minds; and it is no congruous homage offered to ideal
necessity, but merely a private endearment, to call it beautiful or
good. The case is not such as if we were dealing with existence.
Existence is arbitrary; it is a questionable thing needing
justification; and we, at least, cannot justify it otherwise than by
taking note of some affinity which it may show to human aspirations.
Therefore our private endearments, when we call some existing thing
good or beautiful, are not impertinent; they assign to this chance
thing its only assignable excuse for being, namely, the service it may
chance to render to the spirit. But ideal necessity or, what is the
same thing, essential possibility has its excuse for being in itself,
since it is not contingent or questionable at all. The affinity which
the human mind may develop to certain provinces of essence is
adventitious to those essences, and hardly to be mentioned in their
presence. It is something the mind has acquired, and may lose. It is
an incident in the life of reason, and no inherent characteristic of
eternal necessity.
The realm of essence contains the infinite multitude of Leibnitz's
possible worlds, many of these worlds being very small and simple, and
consisting merely of what might be presented in some isolated moment
of feeling. If any such feeling, however, or its object, never in fact
occurs, the essence that it would have presented if it had occurred
remains possible merely; so that nothing can ever exist in nature or
for consciousness which has not a prior and independent locus in the
realm of essence. When a man lights upon a thought or is interested in
tracing a relation, he does not introduce those objects into the realm
of essence, but merely selects them from the plenitude of what lies
there eternally. The ground of this selection lies, of course, in his
human nature and circumstances; and the satisfaction he may find in
so exercising his mind will be a consequence of his mental disposition
and of the animal instincts beneath. Two and two would still make four
if I were incapable of counting, or if I found it extremely painful to
do so, or if I thought it naive and pre-Kantian of these numbers not
to combine in a more vital fashion, and make five. So also, if I
happen to enjoy counting, or to find the constancy of numbers sublime,
and the reversibility of the processes connecting them consoling, in
contrast to the irrevocable flux of living things, all this is due to
my idiosyncrasy. It is no part of the essence of numbers to be
congenial to me; but it has perhaps become a part of my genius to have
affinity to them.
And how, may I ask, has it become a part of my genius? Simply because
nature, of which I am a part, and to which all my ideas must refer if
they are to be relevant to my destiny, happens to have mathematical
form. Nature had to have some form or other, if it was to exist at
all; and whatever form it had happened to take would have had its
prior place in the realm of essence, and its essential and logical
relations there. That particular part of the realm of essence which
nature chances to exemplify or to suggest is the part that may be
revealed to me, and that is the predestined focus of all my
admirations. Essence as such has no power to reveal itself, or to take
on existence; and the human mind has no power or interest to trace all
essence. Even the few essences which it has come to know, it cannot
undertake to examine exhaustively; for there are many features
nestling in them, and many relations radiating from them, which no
one needs or cares to attend to. The implications which logicians and
mathematicians actually observe in the terms they use are a small
selection from all those that really obtain, even in their chosen
field; so that, for instance, as Mr. Russell was telling us, it was
only the other day that Cantor and Dedekind observed that although
time continually eats up the days and years, the possible future
always remains as long as it was before. This happens to be a fact
interesting to mankind. Apart from the mathematical puzzles it may
help to solve, it opens before existence a vista of perpetual youth,
and the vital stress in us leaps up in recognition of its inmost
ambition. Many other things are doubtless implied in infinity which,
if we noticed them, would leave us quite cold; and still others, no
doubt, are inapprehensible with our sort and degree of intellect.
There is of course nothing in essence which an intellect postulated
_ad hoc_ would not be able to apprehend; but the kind of intellect we
know of and possess is an expression of vital adjustments, and is
tethered to nature.
That a few eternal essences, then, with a few of their necessary
relations to one another, do actually appear to us, and do fascinate
our attention and excite our wonder, is nothing paradoxical. This is
merely what was bound to happen, if we became aware of anything at
all; for the essence embodied in anything is eternal and has necessary
relations to some other essences. The air of presumption which there
might seem to be in proclaiming that mathematics reveals what has to
be true always and everywhere, vanishes when we remember that
everything that is true of any essence is true of it always and
everywhere. The most trivial truths of logic are as necessary and
eternal as the most important; so that it is less of an achievement
than it sounds when we say we have grasped a truth that is eternal and
necessary.
This fact will be more clearly recognised, perhaps, if we remember
that the cogency of our ideal knowledge follows upon our intent in
fixing its object. It hangs on a virtual definition, and explicates
it. We cannot oblige anybody or anything to reproduce the idea which
we have chosen; but that idea will remain the idea it is whether
forgotten or remembered, exemplified or not exemplified in things. To
penetrate to the foundation of being is possible for us only because
the foundation of being is distinguishable quality; were there no set
of differing characteristics, one or more of which an existing thing
might appropriate, existence would be altogether impossible. The realm
of essence is merely the system or chaos of these fundamental
possibilities, the catalogue of all exemplifiable natures; so that any
experience whatsoever must tap the realm of essence, and throw the
light of attention on one of its constituent forms. This is, if you
will, a trivial achievement; what would be really a surprising feat,
and hardly to be credited, would be that the human mind should grasp
the _constitution of nature_; that is, should discover which is the
particular essence, or the particular system of essences, which actual
existence illustrates. In the matter of physics, truly, we are reduced
to skimming the surface, since we have to start from our casual
experiences, which form the most superficial stratum of nature, and
the most unstable. Yet these casual experiences, while they leave us
so much in the dark as to their natural basis and environment,
necessarily reveal each its ideal object, its specific essence; and we
need only arrest our attention upon it, and define it to ourselves,
for an eternal possibility, and some of its intrinsic characters, to
have been revealed to our thought.
Whatever, then, a man's mental and moral habit might be, it would
perforce have affinity to some essence or other; his life would
revolve about some congenial ideal object; he would find some sorts of
form, some types of relation, more visible, beautiful, and satisfying
than others. Mr. Russell happens to have a mathematical genius, and to
find comfort in laying up his treasures in the mathematical heaven. It
would be highly desirable that this temperament should be more common;
but even if it were universal it would not reduce mathematical essence
to a product of human attention, nor raise the "beauty" of mathematics
to part of its essence. I do not mean to suggest that Mr. Russell
attempts to do the latter; he speaks explicitly of the _value_ of
mathematical study, a point in ethics and not directly in logic; yet
his moral philosophy is itself so much assimilated to logic that the
distinction between the two becomes somewhat dubious; and as Mr.
Russell will never succeed in convincing us that moral values are
independent of life, he may, quite against his will, lead us to
question the independence of essence, with that blind gregarious drift
of all ideas, in this direction or in that, which is characteristic of
human philosophising.
III. THE CRITIQUE OF PRAGMATISM
The time has not yet come when a just and synthetic account of what is
called pragmatism can be expected of any man. The movement is still in
a nebulous state, a state from which, perhaps, it is never destined to
issue. The various tendencies that compose it may soon cease to appear
together; each may detach itself and be lost in the earlier system
with which it has most affinity. A good critic has enumerated
"Thirteen Pragmatisms;" and besides such distinguishable tenets, there
are in pragmatism echoes of various popular moral forces, like
democracy, impressionism, love of the concrete, respect for success,
trust in will and action, and the habit of relying on the future,
rather than on the past, to justify one's methods and opinions. Most
of these things are characteristically American; and Mr. Russell
touches on some of them with more wit than sympathy. Thus he writes:
"The influence of democracy in promoting pragmatism is visible in
almost every page of William James's writing. There is an impatience
of authority, an unwillingness to condemn widespread prejudices, a
tendency to decide philosophical questions by putting them to a vote,
which contrast curiously with the usual dictatorial tone of
philosophic writings.... A thing which simply is true, whether you
like it or not, is to him as hateful as a Russian autocracy; he feels
that he is escaping from a prison, made not by stone walls but by
'hard facts,' when he has humanised truth, and made it, like the
police force in a democracy, the servant of the people instead of
their master. The democratic temper pervades even the religion of the
pragmatists; they have the religion they have chosen, and the
traditional reverence is changed into satisfaction with their own
handiwork. 'The prince of darkness,' James says, 'may be a gentleman,
as we are told he is, but whatever the God of earth and heaven is, he
can surely be no gentleman,' He is rather, we should say, conceived by
pragmatists as an elected president, to whom we give a respect which
is really a tribute to the wisdom of our own choice. A government in
which we have no voice is repugnant to the democratic temper. William
James carries up to heaven the revolt of his New England ancestors:
the Power to which we can yield respect must be a George Washington
rather than a George III."
A point of fundamental importance, about which pragmatists have been
far from clear, and perhaps not in agreement with one another, is the
sense in which their psychology is to be taken. "The facts that fill
the imaginations of pragmatists," Mr. Russell writes, "are psychical
facts; where others might think of the starry heavens, pragmatists
think of the perception of the starry heavens; where others think of
God, pragmatists think of the belief in God, and so on. In discussing
the sciences, they never think, like scientific specialists, about the
facts upon which scientific theories are based; they think about the
theories themselves. Thus their initial question and their habitual
imaginative background are both psychological." This is so true that
unless we make the substitution into psychic terms instinctively, the
whole pragmatic view of things will seem paradoxical, if not actually
unthinkable. For instance, pragmatists might protest against the
accusation that "they never think about the facts upon which
scientific theories are based," for they lay a great emphasis on
facts. Facts are the cash which the credit of theories hangs upon. Yet
this protest, though sincere, would be inconclusive, and in the end it
would illustrate Mr. Russell's observation, rather than refute it. For
we should presently learn that these facts can be made by thinking,
that our faith in them may contribute to their reality, and may modify
their nature; in other words, these facts are our immediate
apprehensions of fact, which it is indeed conceivable that our
temperaments, expectations, and opinions should modify. Thus the
pragmatist's reliance on facts does not carry him beyond the psychic
sphere; his facts are only his personal experiences. Personal
experiences may well be the basis for no less personal myths; but the
effort of intelligence and of science is rather to find the basis of
the personal experiences themselves; and this non-psychic basis of
experience is what common sense calls the facts, and what practice is
concerned with. Yet these are not the _pragmata_ of the pragmatist,
for it is only the despicable intellectualist that can arrive at them;
and the bed-rock of facts that the pragmatist builds upon is avowedly
drifting sand. Hence the odd expressions, new to literature and even
to grammar, which bubble up continually in pragmatist writings. "For
illustration take the former fact that the earth is flat," says one,
quite innocently; and another observes that "two centuries later,
nominalism was evidently true, because it alone would legitimise the
local independence of cities." Lest we should suppose that the
historical sequence of these "truths" or illusions is, at least, fixed
and irreversible, we are soon informed that the past is always
changing, too; that is (if I may rationalise this mystical dictum),
that history is always being rewritten, and that the growing present
adds new relations to the past, which lead us to conceive or to
describe it in some new fashion. Even if the ultimate inference is not
drawn, and we are not told that this changing idea of the past is the
only past that exists--the real past being unattainable and therefore,
for personal idealism, non-existent--it is abundantly clear that the
effort to distinguish fact from theory cannot be successful, so long
as the psychological way of thinking prevails; for a theory,
psychologically considered, is a bare fact in the experience of the
theorist, and the other facts of his experience are so many other
momentary views, so many scant theories, to be immediately superseded
by other "truths in the plural." Sensations and ideas are really
distinguishable only by reference to what is assumed to lie without;
of which external reality experience is always an effect (and in that
capacity is called sensation) and often at the same time an
apprehension (and in that capacity is called idea).
It is a crucial question, then, in the interpretation of pragmatism,
whether the psychological point of view, undoubtedly prevalent in that
school, is the only or the ultimate point of view which it admits. The
habit of studying ideas rather than their objects might be simply a
matter of emphasis or predilection. It might merely indicate a special
interest in the life of reason, and be an effort, legitimate under
any system of philosophy, to recount the stages by which human
thought, developing in the bosom of nature, may have reached its
present degree of articulation. I myself, for instance, like to look
at things from this angle: not that I have ever doubted the reality of
the natural world, or been able to take very seriously any philosophy
that denied it, but precisely because, when we take the natural world
for granted, it becomes a possible and enlightening inquiry to ask how
the human animal has come to discover his real environment, in so far
as he has done so, and what dreams have intervened or supervened in
the course of his rational awakening. On the other hand, a
psychological point of view might be equivalent to the idealistic
doctrine that the articulation of human thought constitutes the only
structure of the universe, and its whole history. According to this
view, pragmatism would seem to be a revised version of the
transcendental logic, leaving logic still transcendental, that is,
still concerned with the evolution of the categories. The revision
would consist chiefly in this, that empirical verification, utility,
and survival would take the place of dialectical irony as the force
governing the evolution. It would still remain possible for other
methods of approach than this transcendental pragmatism, for instinct,
perhaps, or for revelation, to bring us into contact with
things-in-themselves. A junction might thus be effected with the
system of M. Bergson, which would lead to this curious result: that
pragmatic logic would be the method of intelligence, because
intelligence is merely a method, useful in practice, for the symbolic
and improper representation of reality; while another non-pragmatic
method--sympathy and dream--would alone be able to put us in
possession of direct knowledge and genuine truth. So that, after all,
the pragmatic "truth" of working ideas would turn out to be what it
has seemed hitherto to mankind, namely, no real truth, but rather a
convenient sort of fiction, which ceases to deceive when once its
merely pragmatic value is discounted by criticism. I remember once
putting a question on this subject to Professor James; and his answer
was one which I am glad to be able to record. In relation to his
having said that "as far as the past facts go, there is no difference
... be the atoms or be the God their cause,"[7] I asked whether, if
God had been the cause, apart from the value of the idea of him in our
calculations, his existence would not have made a difference to him,
as he would be presumably self-conscious. "Of course," said Professor
James, "but I wasn't considering that side of the matter; I was
thinking of our idea." The choice of the subjective point of view,
then, was deliberate here, and frankly arbitrary; it was not intended
to exclude the possibility or legitimacy of the objective attitude.
And the original reason for deliberately ignoring, in this way, the
realistic way of thinking, even while admitting that it represents the
real state of affairs, would have been, I suppose, that what could be
verified was always some further effect of the real objects, and never
those real objects themselves; so that for interpreting and predicting
our personal experience only the hypothesis of objects was pertinent,
while the objects themselves, except as so represented, were useless
and unattainable. The case, if I may adapt a comparison of Mr.
Russell's, was as if we possessed a catalogue of the library at
Alexandria, all the books being lost for ever; it would be only in the
catalogue that we could practically verify their existence or
character, though doubtless, by some idle flight of imagination, we
might continue to think of the books, as well as of those titles in
the catalogue which alone could appear to us in experience.
Pragmatism, approached from this side, would then seem to express an
acute critical conscience, a sort of will not to believe; not to
believe, I mean, more than is absolutely necessary for solipsistic
practice.
[Footnote 7: _Pragmatism_, p. 101.]