world into a work of mind, which mind might outflank, was traditional
in the radical Emersonian circles in which pragmatism sprang up. It is
one of the approaches to the movement; yet we may safely regard the
ancestral transcendentalism of the pragmatists as something which they
have turned their back upon, and mean to disown. It is destined to
play no part in the ultimate result of pragmatism. This ultimate
result promises to be, on the contrary, a direct materialistic sort of
realism. This alone is congruous with the scientific affinities of the
school and its young-American temper. Nor is the transformation very
hard to effect. The world of solipsistic practice, if you remove the
romantic self that was supposed to evoke it, becomes at once the
sensible world; and the problem is only to find a place in the mosaic
of objects of sensation for those cognitive and moral functions which
the soul was once supposed to exercise in the presence of an
independent reality. But this problem is precisely the one that
pragmatists boast they have already solved; for they have declared
that consciousness does not exist, and that objects of sensation
(which at first were called feelings, experiences, or "truths") know
or mean one another when they lead to one another, when they are
poles, so to speak, in the same vital circuit. The spiritual act which
was supposed to take things for its object is to be turned into
"objective spirit," that is, into dynamic relations between things.
The philosopher will deny that he has any other sort of mind himself,
lest he should be shut up in it again, like a sceptical and
disconsolate child; while if there threatens to be any covert or
superfluous reality in the self-consciousness of God, nothing will be
easier than to deny that God is self-conscious; for indeed, if there
is no consciousness on earth, why should we imagine that there is any
in heaven? The psychologism with which the pragmatists started seems
to be passing in this way, in the very effort to formulate it
pragmatically, into something which, whatever it may be, is certainly
not psychologism. But the bewildered public may well ask whether it is
pragmatism either.
There is another crucial point in pragmatism which the defenders of
the system are apt to pass over lightly, but which Mr. Russell regards
(justly, I think) as of decisive importance. Is, namely, the pragmatic
account of truth intended to cover all knowledge, or one kind of
knowledge only? Apparently the most authoritative pragmatists admit
that it covers one kind only; for there are two sorts of self-evidence
in which, they say, it is not concerned: first, the dialectical
relation between essences; and second, the known occurrence or
experience of facts. There are obvious reasons why these two kinds of
cognitions, so interesting to Mr. Russell, are not felt by pragmatists
to constitute exceptions worth considering. Dialectical relations,
they will say, are verbal only; that is, they define ideal objects,
and certainty in these cases does not coerce existence, or touch
contingent fact at all. On the other hand, such apprehension as seizes
on some matter of fact, as, for instance, "I feel pain," or "I
expected to feel this pain, and it is now verifying my expectation,"
though often true propositions, are not _theoretical_ truths; they are
not, it is supposed, questionable beliefs but rather immediate
observations. Yet many of these apprehensions of fact (or all,
perhaps, if we examine them scrupulously) involve the veracity of
memory, surely a highly questionable sort of truth; and, moreover,
verification, the pragmatic test of truth, would be obviously
impossible to apply, if the prophecy supposed to be verified were not
assumed to be truly remembered. How shall we know that our expectation
is fulfilled, if we do not know directly that we had such an
expectation? But if we know our past experience directly--not merely
knew it when present, but know now what it was, and how it has led
down to the present--this amounts to enough knowledge to make up a
tolerable system of the universe, without invoking pragmatic
verification or "truth" at all. I have never been able to discover
whether, by that perception of fact which is not "truth" but fact
itself, pragmatists meant each human apprehension taken singly, or the
whole series of these apprehensions. In the latter case, as in the
philosophy of M. Bergson, all past reality might constantly lie open
to retentive intuition, a form of knowledge soaring quite over the
head of any pragmatic method or pragmatic "truth." It looks, indeed,
as if the history of at least personal experience were commonly taken
for granted by pragmatists, as a basis on which to rear their method.
Their readiness to make so capital an assumption is a part of their
heritage from romantic idealism. To the romantic idealist science and
theology are tales which ought to be reduced to an empirical
equivalent in his personal experience; but the tale of his personal
experience itself is a sacred figment, the one precious conviction of
the romantic heart, which it would be heartless to question. Yet here
is a kind of assumed truth which cannot be reduced to its pragmatic
meaning, because it must be true literally in order that the pragmatic
meaning of other beliefs may be conceived or tested at all.
Now, if it be admitted that the pragmatic theory of truth does not
touch our knowledge either of matters of fact or of the necessary
implications of ideas, the question arises: What sort of knowledge
remains for pragmatic theory to apply to? Simply, Mr. Russell answers,
those "working hypotheses" to which "prudent people give only a low
degree of belief." For "we hold different beliefs with very different
degrees of conviction. Some--such as the belief that I am sitting in a
chair, or that 2+2=4--can be doubted by few except those who have had
a long training in philosophy. Such beliefs are held so firmly that
non-philosophers who deny them are put into lunatic asylums. Other
beliefs, such as the facts of history, are held rather less firmly....
Beliefs about the future, as that the sun will rise to-morrow and
that the trains will run approximately as in Bradshaw, may be held
with almost as great conviction as beliefs about the past. Scientific
laws are generally believed less firmly.... Philosophical beliefs,
finally, will, with most people, take a still lower place, since the
opposite beliefs of others can hardly fail to induce doubt. Belief,
therefore, is a matter of degree. To speak of belief, disbelief,
doubt, and suspense of judgment as the only possibilities is as if,
from the writing on the thermometer, we were to suppose that blood
heat, summer heat, temperate, and freezing were the only
temperatures." Beliefs which require to be confirmed by future
experience, or which actually refer to it, are evidently only
presumptions; it is merely the truth of presumptions that empirical
logic applies to, and only so long as they remain presumptions.
Presumptions may be held with very different degrees of assurance, and
yet be acted upon, in the absence of any strong counter-suggestion; as
the confidence of lovers or of religious enthusiasts may be at blood
heat at one moment and freezing at the next, without a change in
anything save in the will to believe. The truth of such presumptions,
whatever may be the ground of them, depends in fact on whether they
are to lead (or, rather, whether the general course of events is to
lead) to the further things presumed; for these things are what
presumptions refer to explicitly.
It sometimes happens, however, that presumptions (being based on
voluminous blind instinct rather than on distinct repeated
observations) are expressed in consciousness by some symbol or myth,
as when a man says he believes in his luck; the presumption really
regards particular future chances and throws of the dice, but the
emotional and verbal mist in which the presumption is wrapped, veils
the pragmatic burden of it; and a metaphysical entity arises, called
luck, in which a man may think he believes rather than in a particular
career that may be awaiting him. Now since this entity, luck, is a
mere word, confidence in it, to be justified at all, must be
transferred to the concrete facts it stands for. Faith in one's luck
must be pragmatic, but simply because faith in such an entity is not
needful nor philosophical at all. The case is the same with working
hypotheses, when that is all they are; for on this point there is some
confusion. Whether an idea is a working hypothesis merely or an
anticipation of matters open to eventual inspection may not always be
clear. Thus the atomic theory, in the sense in which most philosophers
entertain it to-day, seems to be a working hypothesis only; for they
do not seriously believe that there are atoms, but in their ignorance
of the precise composition of matter, they find it convenient to speak
of it as if it were composed of indestructible particles. But for
Democritus and for many modern men of science the atomic theory is not
a working hypothesis merely; they do not regard it as a provisional
makeshift; they regard it as a probable, if not a certain,
anticipation of what inspection would discover to be the fact, could
inspection be carried so far; in other words, they believe the atomic
theory is true. If they are right, the validity of this theory would
not be that of pragmatic "truth" but of pragmatic "fact"; for it would
be a view, such as memory or intuition or sensation might give us, of
experienced objects in their experienced relations; it would be the
communication to us, in a momentary dream, of what would be the
experience of a universal observer. It would be knowledge of reality
in M. Bergson's sense. Pragmatic "truth," on the contrary, is the
relative and provisional justification of fiction; and pragmatism is
not a theory of truth at all, but a theory of theory, when theory is
instrumental.
For theory too has more than one signification. It may mean such a
symbolic or foreshortened view, such a working hypothesis, as true and
full knowledge might supersede; or it may mean this true and full
knowledge itself, a synthetic survey of objects of experience in their
experimental character. Algebra and language are theoretical in the
first sense, as when a man believes in his luck; historical and
scientific imagination are theoretical in the second sense, when they
gather objects of experience together without distorting them. But it
is only to the first sort of theory that pragmatism can be reasonably
applied; to apply it also to the second would be to retire into that
extreme subjectivism which the leading pragmatists have so hotly
disclaimed. We find, accordingly, that it is only when a theory is
avowedly unreal, and does not ask to be believed, that the value of it
is pragmatic; since in that case belief passes consciously from the
symbols used to the eventual facts in which the symbolism terminates,
and for which it stands.
It may seem strange that a definition of truth should have been based
on the consideration of those ideas exclusively for which truth is not
claimed by any critical person, such ideas, namely, as religious myths
or the graphic and verbal machinery of science. Yet the fact is
patent, and if we considered the matter historically it might not
prove inexplicable. Theology has long applied the name truth
pre-eminently to fiction. When the conviction first dawned upon
pragmatists that there was no absolute or eternal truth, what they
evidently were thinking of was that it is folly, in this changing
world, to pledge oneself to any final and inflexible creed. The
pursuit of truth, since nothing better was possible, was to be
accepted instead of the possession of it. But it is characteristic of
Protestantism that, when it gives up anything, it transfers to what
remains the unction, and often the name, proper to what it has
abandoned. So, if truth was no longer to be claimed or even hoped for,
the value and the name of truth could be instinctively transferred to
what was to take its place--spontaneous, honest, variable conviction.
And the sanctions of this conviction were to be looked for, not in the
objective reality, since it was an idle illusion to fancy we could get
at that, but in the growth of this conviction itself, and in the
prosperous adventure of the whole soul, so courageous in its
self-trust, and so modest in its dogmas.
Science, too, has often been identified, not with the knowledge men of
science possess, but with the language they use. If science meant
knowledge, the science of Darwin, for instance, would lie in his
observations of plants and animals, and in his thoughts about the
probable ancestors of the human race--all knowledge of actual or
possible facts. It would not be knowledge of selection or of
spontaneous variation, terms which are mere verbal bridges over the
gaps in that knowledge, and mark the _lacunae_ and unsolved problems
of the science. Yet it is just such terms that seem to clothe
"Science" in its pontifical garb; the cowl is taken for the monk; and
when a penetrating critic, like M. Henri Poincaré, turned his subtle
irony upon them, the public cried that he had announced the
"bankruptcy of science," whereas it is merely the language of science
that he had reduced to its pragmatic value--to convenience and economy
in the registering of facts--and had by no means questioned that
positive and cumulative knowledge of facts which science is attaining.
It is an incident in the same general confusion that a critical
epistemology, like pragmatism, analysing these figments of scientific
or theological theory, should innocently suppose that it was analysing
truth; while the only view to which it really attributes truth is its
view of the system of facts open to possible experience, a system
which those figments presuppose and which they may help us in part to
divine, where it is accidentally hidden from human inspection.
IV. HYPOSTATIC ETHICS
If Mr. Russell, in his essay on "The Elements of Ethics," had wished
to propitiate the unregenerate naturalist, before trying to convert
him, he could not have chosen a more skilful procedure; for he begins
by telling us that "what is called good conduct is conduct which is a
means to other things which are good on their own account; and hence
... the study of what is good or bad on its own account must be
included in ethics." Two consequences are involved in this: first,
that ethics is concerned with the economy of all values, and not with
"moral" goods only, or with duty; and second, that values may and do
inhere in a great variety of things and relations, all of which it is
the part of wisdom to respect, and if possible to establish. In this
matter, according to our author, the general philosopher is prone to
one error and the professed moralist to another. "The philosopher,
bent on the construction of a system, is inclined to simplify the
facts unduly ... and to twist them into a form in which they can all
be deduced from one or two general principles. The moralist, on the
other hand, being primarily concerned with conduct, tends to become
absorbed in means, to value the actions men ought to perform more than
the ends which such actions serve.... Hence most of what they value in
this world would have to be omitted by many moralists from any
imagined heaven, because there such things as self-denial and effort
and courage and pity could find no place.... Kant has the bad eminence
of combining both errors in the highest possible degree, since he
holds that there is nothing good except the virtuous will--a view
which simplifies the good as much as any philosopher could wish, and
mistakes means for ends as completely as any moralist could enjoin."
Those of us who are what Mr. Russell would call ethical sceptics will
be delighted at this way of clearing the ground; it opens before us
the prospect of a moral philosophy that should estimate the various
values of things known and of things imaginable, showing what
combinations of goods are possible in any one rational system, and
(if fancy could stretch so far) what different rational systems would
be possible in places and times remote enough from one another not to
come into physical conflict. Such ethics, since it would express in
reflection the dumb but actual interests of men, might have both
influence and authority over them; two things which an alien and
dogmatic ethics necessarily lacks. The joy of the ethical sceptic in
Mr. Russell is destined, however, to be short-lived. Before proceeding
to the expression of concrete ideals, he thinks it necessary to ask a
preliminary and quite abstract question, to which his essay is chiefly
devoted; namely, what is the right definition of the predicate "good,"
which we hope to apply in the sequel to such a variety of things? And
he answers at once: The predicate "good" is indefinable. This answer
he shows to be unavoidable, and so evidently unavoidable that we might
perhaps have been absolved from asking the question; for, as he says,
the so-called definitions of "good"--that it is pleasure, the desired,
and so forth--are not definitions of the predicate "good," but
designations of the things to which this predicate is applied by
different persons. Pleasure, and its rivals, are not synonyms for the
abstract quality "good," but names for classes of concrete facts that
are supposed to possess that quality. From this correct, if somewhat
trifling, observation, however, Mr. Russell, like Mr. Moore before
him, evokes a portentous dogma. Not being able to define good, he
hypostasises it. "Good and bad," he says, "are qualities which belong
to objects independently of our opinions, just as much as round and
square do; and when two people differ as to whether a thing is good,
only one of them can be right, though it may be very hard to know
which is right." "We cannot maintain that for me a thing ought to
exist on its own account, while for you it ought not; that would
merely mean that one of us is mistaken, since in fact everything
either ought to exist, or ought not." Thus we are asked to believe
that good attaches to things for no reason or cause, and according to
no principles of distribution; that it must be found there by a sort
of receptive exploration in each separate case; in other words, that
it is an absolute, not a relative thing, a primary and not a secondary
quality.
That the quality "good" is indefinable is one assertion, and obvious;
but that the presence of this quality is unconditioned is another, and
astonishing. My logic, I am well aware, is not very accurate or
subtle; and I wish Mr. Russell had not left it to me to discover the
connection between these two propositions. Green is an indefinable
predicate, and the specific quality of it can be given only in
intuition; but it is a quality that things acquire under certain
conditions, so much so that the same bit of grass, at the same moment,
may have it from one point of view and not from another. Right and
left are indefinable; the difference could not be explained without
being invoked in the explanation; yet everything that is to the right
is not to the right on no condition, but obviously on the condition
that some one is looking in a certain direction; and if some one else
at the same time is looking in the opposite direction, what is truly
to the right will be truly to the left also. If Mr. Russell thinks
this is a contradiction, I understand why the universe does not
please him. The contradiction would be real, undoubtedly, if we
suggested that the idea of good was at any time or in any relation the
idea of evil, or the intuition of right that of left, or the quality
of green that of yellow; these disembodied essences are fixed by the
intent that selects them, and in that ideal realm they can never have
any relations except the dialectical ones implied in their nature, and
these relations they must always retain. But the contradiction
disappears when, instead of considering the qualities in themselves,
we consider the things of which those qualities are aspects; for the
qualities of things are not compacted by implication, but are
conjoined irrationally by nature, as she will; and the same thing may
be, and is, at once yellow and green, to the left and to the right,
good and evil, many and one, large and small; and whatever verbal
paradox there may be in this way of speaking (for from the point of
view of nature it is natural enough) had been thoroughly explained and
talked out by the time of Plato, who complained that people should
still raise a difficulty so trite and exploded.[8] Indeed, while
square is always square, and round round, a thing that is round may
actually be square also, if we allow it to have a little body, and to
be a cylinder.
[Footnote 8: Plato, _Philebus_, 14, D. The dialectical element in this
dialogue is evidently the basis of Mr. Russell's, as of Mr. Moore's,
ethics; but they have not adopted the other elements in it, I mean the
political and the theological. As to the political element, Plato
everywhere conceives the good as the eligible in life, and refers it
to human nature and to the pursuit of happiness--that happiness which
Mr. Russell, in a rash moment, says is but a name which some people
prefer to give to pleasure. Thus in the _Philebus_ (11, D) the good
looked for is declared to be "some state and disposition of the soul
which has the property of making all men happy"; and later (66, D) the
conclusion is that insight is better than pleasure "as an element in
human life." As to the theological element, Plato, in hypostasising
the good, does not hypostasise it as good, but as cause or power,
which is, it seems to me, the sole category that justifies hypostasis,
and logically involves it; for if things have a ground at all, that
ground must exist before them and beyond them. Hence the whole
Platonic and Christian scheme, in making the good independent of
private will and opinion, by no means makes it independent of the
direction of nature in general and of human nature in particular; for
all things have been created with an innate predisposition towards the
creative good, and are capable of finding happiness in nothing else.
Obligation, in this system, remains internal and vital. Plato
attributes a single vital direction and a single moral source to the
cosmos. This is what determines and narrows the scope of the true
good; for the true good is that relevant to nature. Plato would not
have been a dogmatic moralist, had he not been a theist.]
But perhaps what suggests this hypostasis of good is rather the fact
that what others find good, or what we ourselves have found good in
moods with which we retain no sympathy, is sometimes pronounced by us
to be bad; and far from inferring from this diversity of experience
that the present good, like the others, corresponds to a particular
attitude or interest of ours, and is dependent upon it, Mr. Russell
and Mr. Moore infer instead that the presence of the good must be
independent of all interests, attitudes, and opinions. They imagine
that the truth of a proposition attributing a certain relative quality
to an object contradicts the truth of another proposition, attributing
to the same object an opposite relative quality. Thus if a man here
and another man at the antipodes call opposite directions up, "only
one of them can be right, though it may be very hard to know which is
right."