Pragmatism and idealism

by William Caldwell

A NOTE ON THE MEANING OF “PRAGMATISM”

(1) “The opinion that metaphysics is to be largely cleared up by the application of the following maxim for obtaining clearness of apprehension: ‘Consider what effects that might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object’” (Baldwin’s Philosophical Dictionary, vol. ii. p. 321). [We can see from this citation that the application of its formulæ about “consequences” to metaphysics, or philosophy generally, must be considered as a part, or aspect, of the pragmatist philosophy.]

(2) “The doctrine that the whole meaning of a conception expresses itself in practical consequences; consequences either in the shape of conduct to be recommended, or in that of experiences to be expected, if the conception be true; which consequences would be different, if it were untrue, and must be different from the consequences by which the meaning of other conceptions is in turn expressed. If a second conception should not appear to have other consequence, then it must be really only the first conception under a different name. In methodology, it is certain that to trace and compare their respective consequences is an admirable way of establishing the different meanings of different conceptions” (ibid., from Professor James).

(3) “A widely current opinion during the last quarter of a century has been that ‘reasonableness’ is not a good in itself, but only for the sake of something. Whether it be so or not seems to be a synthetical question [i.e. a question that is not merely a verbal question, a question of words], not to be settled by an appeal to the Principle of Contradiction [the principle hitherto relied upon by Rationalism or Intellectualism].... Almost everybody will now agree that the ultimate good lies in the evolutionary process in some way. If so, it is not in individual reactions in their segregation, but in something general or continuous. Synechism is founded on the notion that the coalescence, the becoming continuous, the becoming governed by laws, the becoming instinct with general ideas, are but phases of one and the same process of the growth of reasonableness” (ibid. p. 322. From Dr. Peirce, the bracket clauses being the author’s).

(4) “It is the belief that ideas invariably strive after practical expression, and that our whole life is teleological. Putting the matter logically, logic formulates theoretically what is of regulative importance for life—for our ‘experience’ in view of practical ends. Its philosophical meaning is the conviction that all facts of nature, physically and spiritually, find their expressions in ‘will’; will and energy are identical. This tendency is in agreement with the practical tendencies of American thought and American life in so far as they both set a definite end before Idealism” (Ueberweg-Heinze, Geschichte der Philosophie, vol. iv., written and contributed by Professor Matoon Monroe Curtis, Professor of Philosophy in Western Reserve University, Cleveland, U.S.A.).

(5) See also an article in Mind for October 1900, vol. ix. N.S., upon “Pragmatism” by the author of this book on Pragmatism and Idealism, referred to as one of the early sources in Baldwin’s Philosophical Dictionary (New York and London) and in Ueberweg-Heinze’s Geschichte, Vierter Teil (Berlin, 1906).

The conclusion that I am inclined to draw from the foregoing official statements (and also, say, from another official article like that of M. Lalande in the Revue Philosophique, 1906, on “Pragmatisme et Pragmaticisme”) is that the term “Pragmatism” is not of itself a matter of great importance, and that there is no separate, intelligible, independent, self-consistent system of philosophy that may be called Pragmatism. It is a general name for the Practicalism or Voluntarism or Humanism or the Philosophy of the Practical Reason, or the Activism, or the Instrumentalism, or the Philosophy of Hypotheses, or the Dynamic Philosophy of life and things that is discussed in different ways in this book upon Pragmatism and Idealism. And it is not and cannot be independent of the traditional body of philosophical truth in relation to which it can alone be defined.

CHAPTER II
PRAGMATISM AND THE PRAGMATIST MOVEMENT

In considering some of the results of pragmatist and voluntarist doctrines in the case of European writers, to whom the American-English triumvirate used to look somewhat sympathetically, we may begin with Italy, which boasted, according to Dr. Schiller (writing in 1907), of a youthful band of avowed pragmatists with a militant organ, the Leonardo. “Fundamentally,” declares Papini,[33] the leader of this movement, “Pragmatism means an unstiffening of all our theories and beliefs, by attending to their instrumental value. It incorporates and harmonizes various ancient tendencies, such as Nominalism, with its protest against the use of general terms, Utilitarianism, with its emphasis upon particular aspects and problems, Positivism, with its disdain of verbal and useless questions, Kantism, with its doctrine of the primacy of practical reason, Voluntarism, with its treatment of the intellect as the tool of the will, and Freedom, and a positive attitude towards religious questions. It is the tendency of taking all these, and other theories, for what they are worth, being chiefly a corridor-theory, with doors and avenues into various theories, and a central rallying-ground for them all.” These words are valuable as one of the many confessions of the affiliations of Pragmatism to several other more or less experiential, or practical, views of philosophy. It is perfectly obvious from them that Pragmatism stands, in the main, for the apprehension of all truth as subservient to practice, as but a device for the “economy” of thought, for the grasping of the multiplicity and the complexity of phenomena. It looks upon man as made, in the main, for action, and not for speculation—a doctrine which even Mr. Peirce, by the way, now speaks of as “a stoical maxim which to me, at the age of sixty, does not recommend itself so forcibly as it did at thirty.”[34]

“The various ideal worlds are here,” continues Papini, according to the version of James,[35] “because the real world fails to satisfy us. All our ideal instruments are certainly imperfect. But philosophy can be regenerated ... it can become pragmatic in the general sense of the word, a general theory of human action ... so that philosophic thought will resolve itself into a comparative discussion of all the possible programmes for man’s life, when man is once for all regarded as a creative being.... As such, man becomes a kind of god, and where are we to draw the limits?” In an article called “From Man to God,” Papini, in the Leonardo, lets his imagination work in stretching the limits of this way of thinking.

These prophetic, or Promethean, utterances—and we must never forget that even to the Greeks philosophy was always something of a religion or a life—may be paralleled by some of the more enthusiastic and unguarded, early utterances of Dr. Schiller about “voluntarism” or “metaphysical personalism” as the one “courageous,” and the only potent, philosophy; or about the “storming of the Jericho of rationalism” by the “jeers” and the “trumpetings” of the confident humanists and their pragmatic confrères. The underlying element of truth in them, and, for that part of it, in many of the similar utterances of many of our modern humanists, from Rabelais to Voltaire and from Shelley to Marx and Nietzsche, is, as we may see, that a true metaphysic must serve, not only as a rational system for the intellect, but as a “dynamic”[36] or motive for action and achievement, for the conscious activity of rational, self-conscious beings.

As for the matter of any further developments[37] of the free, creative religion hinted by Papini, we had, in 1903, the solemn declaration of Professor James that “the programme of the man-god is one of the great type programmes of philosophy,” and that he himself had been “slow” in coming to a perception of the full inwardness of the idea. Then it led evidently in Italy itself to a new doctrine which was trumpeted there a year or two ago in the public press as “Futurism,”[38] in which “courage, audacity and rebellion” were the essential elements, and which could not “abide” the mere mention of such things as “priests” and “ideals” and “professors” and “moralism.” The extravagances of Prezzolini, who thinks of man as a “sentimental gorilla,” were apparently the latest outcome of this anarchical individualism and practicalism. Pragmatism was converted by him into a sophisticated opportunism and a modern Machiavellism, a method of attaining contentment in one’s life and of dominating one’s fellow-creatures by playing upon their fancies and prejudices as does the religious charlatan or the quack doctor or the rhetorician.

The reader who may care to contemplate all this radical, pragmatist enthusiasm for the New Reformation in a more accessible, and a less exaggerated, form had better perhaps consult the recent work of Mr. Sturt of Oxford on the Idea of a Free Church. In this work the principles of Pragmatism are applied, first, critically and in the main negatively, to the moral dogmas of traditional Christianity, and then positively to the new conception of religion he would substitute for all this—the development of personality in accordance with the claims of family and of national life. A fair-minded criticism of this book would, I think, lead to the conclusion that the changes contemplated by Mr. Sturt are already part and parcel of the programme of liberal Christianity, whether we study this in the form of the many more or less philosophical presentations of the same in modern German theology, or in the form of the free, moral and social efforts of the voluntary religion of America and England. In America many of the younger thinkers in theology and philosophy are already writing in a more or less popular manner upon Pragmatism as a philosophy that bids fair to harmonize “traditional” and “radical” conceptions of religion. One of these writers, for example, in a recent important commemorative volume,[39] tries to show how this may be done by interpreting the “supernatural,” not as the “trans-experimental,” but as the “ethical” in experience, and by turning “dogmatic” into “historical theology.” And it would not be difficult to find many books and addresses in which the same idea is expressed. The more practical wing of this same party endeavours to connect Pragmatism with the whole philosophy and psychology of religious conversion, as this has been worked over by recent investigators like Stanley Hall,[40] Starbuck,[41] and others, and, above all, by James in his striking volume The Varieties of Religious Experience.[42]

The fact, of course—and I shall immediately refer to it—that Pragmatism has been hailed in France as a salutary doctrine, not merely by Liberals and Evangelicals, but by devout Catholics and Anti-modernists, is perhaps enough to give us some pause in the matter of its application in the sphere of theoretical and practical religion. It is useful, it would seem, sometimes to “liberate” the spirit of man, and useful, too, at other times to connect the strivings of the individual with the more or less organized experiences of past ages.

Turning, then, to France, it is, judging from the claims of the pragmatists, and from some of the literature bearing upon this entire subject,[43] fairly evident that there has been a kind of association or relationship between Pragmatism and the following tendencies in recent French philosophy: (1) the “freedom” and “indeterminism” philosophy of Renouvier[44] and other members of the Neo-Critical school, and of Boutroux and Bergson, who, “although differing from each other in many important respects,” all “belong to the same movement of thought, the reaction against Hegelianism and the cult of science which has dominated France since the decline of the metaphysics of the school of Cousin”;[45] (2) the philosophy of science and scientific hypotheses represented by writers like Poincaré,[46] Brunschvicg, Le Roy,[47] Milhaud, Abel Rey,[48] and others; (3) the religious philosophy and the fideism of the followers of the spiritualistic metaphysic of Bergson, many of whom go further than he does, and “make every effort to bring him to the confessional faith”;[49] and (4) the French philosophy of to-day that definitely bears the name of Pragmatism, that of M. Blondel,[50] who in 1893 wrote a suggestive work entitled L’Action, and who claims to have coined the word Pragmatism, after much careful consideration and discrimination, as early as 1888—many years before the California pamphlet of James.

The first of these points of correspondence or relationship we can pass over with the remark that we shall have a good deal to say about the advantage enjoyed by Pragmatism over Rationalism in the treatment of “freedom” and the “volitional” side of human nature, and also about the general pragmatist reaction against Rationalism.

And as for the philosophy of science, it has been shown that our English-speaking pragmatists cannot exactly pride themselves in the somewhat indiscriminate manner of James and Schiller upon the supposed support for their “hypothetical” conception of science and philosophy to be found in the work of their French associates upon the logic of science. “The men of great learning who were named as sponsors of this new philosophy have more and more testified what reservations they make, and how greatly their conclusions differ from those which are currently attributed to them.”[51] Both Brunschvicg and Poincaré, in fact, take the greatest pains in their books to dissociate themselves from anything like the appearance of an acceptance of the doctrine of the relativity of knowledge, from the signs of any lack of faith in the idea that science, as far as it goes, gives us a true revelation of the nature of reality.

Then in regard to (3) the French pragmatist philosophy or religion we have only to read the reports and the quotations of M. Lalande to see in this philosophy the operation of an uncritical dogmatism or a blind “fideism” to which very few other philosophers, either in France or in any other country, would care to subscribe. “La Revue de Philosophie, which is directed by ecclesiastics, recently extolled pragmatism as a means of proving orthodox beliefs.” ... “This system solves a great many difficulties in philosophy; it explains the necessity of principles marvellously.” ... “The existence of God, Providence and Immortality are demonstrated by their happy effects upon our terrestrial life.” ... “If we can consider the matter carefully, it will be seen that the Good is the useful; for not to be good in anything is synonymous with being bad, and everywhere the true is the useful. It is in this assertion that Pragmatism consists.”[52]

And as to the fourth tendency, there is, at its outset, according to M. Lalande, a more rational or ethical basis for the fideism of M. Blondel’s book upon action, which starts off with a criticism of philosophic dilettantism quite analogous with that which Mr. Peirce follows in How to Make Our Ideas Clear. But M. Blondel “does not continue in the same manner, and his conclusion is very different. Rejecting all philosophical formalism, he puts his trust in moral experience, and consults it directly. He thinks that moral experience shows that action is not wholly self-contained, but that it presupposes a reality which transcends the world in which we participate.”[53]

Finally, maintains M. Blondel, “we are unable, as Pascal already said, either to live, or to understand ourselves, by ourselves alone. So that, unless we mutilate our nature by renouncing all earnestness of life, we are necessarily led to recognize in ourselves the presence of God. Our problem, therefore, can only be solved by an act of absolute faith in a positive religion [Catholicism in his case]. This completes the series of acts of faith, without which no action, not even our daily acts, could be accomplished, and without which we should fall into absolute barrenness, both practical and intellectual.”[54]

Now again these words about our being unable to understand ourselves “by ourselves alone” contain an element of truth which we may associate with the pragmatist tendency to believe in a socialized (as distinguished from an individualistic) interpretation[55] of our common moral life, to believe, that is to say, in a society of persons as the truth (or the reality) of the universe, rather than in an interpretation of the universe as the thinking experience of a single absolute intelligence. This, however, is also a point which we are obliged to defer[56] until we take up the general subject of the relations between Pragmatism and Rationalism. The other words of the paragraph, in respect of our absolute need of faith in some positive religion, are, of course, expressive again of the uncritical fideism to which reference has already been made. As an offset or alternative to the “free” religion of Papini and James and to the experimental or practical religion of different Protestant bodies, it is enough of itself to give us pause in estimating the real drift[57] of Pragmatism in regard to religious faith and the philosophy of religion.[58]

We shall meantime take leave of French Pragmatism[59] with the reflection that it is thus obviously as complex and as confusing and confused a thing as is the Pragmatism of other countries. It is now almost a generation since we began to hear of a renascence of spiritualism[60] and idealism in France in connexion not merely with the work of philosophers like Renouvier and Lachelier and Fouillée[61] and Boutroux, but with men of letters like De Vogué, Lavisse, Faguet, Desjardins[62] and the rest, and some of the French Pragmatism of to-day is but one of the more specialized phases of the broader movement.

And as for the special question of the influence of James and his philosophy upon Bergson, and of that of the possible return influence of Bergson upon James,[63] the evidence produced by Lalande from Bergson himself is certainly all to the effect that both men have worked very largely independently of each other, although perfectly cognisant now and then of each other’s publications. Both men, along with their followers (and this is all that needs interest us), have obviously been under the influence of ideas that have long been in the air about the need of a philosophy that is “more truly empirical”[64] than the traditional philosophy, and more truly inclined to “discover what is involved in our actions in the ultimate recess, when, unconsciously and in spite of ourselves, we support existence and cling to it whether we completely understand it or not.”[65]

As for Pragmatism and pragmatist achievements in Germany, there is, as might well be supposed, little need of saying much. The genius of the country is against both; and if there is any Pragmatism in Germany, it must have contrived somehow to have been “born again” of the “spirit” before obtaining official recognition.[66] So much even might be inferred from the otherwise generous recognition accorded to the work of James by scholars and thinkers like Eucken and Stein[67] and the rest. Those men cannot see Pragmatism save in the broad light of the “humanism” that has always characterised philosophy, when properly appreciated, and understood in the light of its true genesis. Pragmatism has in fact been long known in Germany under the older names of “Voluntarism” and “Humanism,” although it may doubtless be associated there with some of the more pronounced tendencies of the hour, such as the recent insistence of the “Göttingen Fries School” upon the importance of the “genetic” and the “descriptive” point of view in regard even to the matter of the supposed first principles of knowledge, the hypothetical and methodological conception of philosophy taken by philosophical scientists like Mach and Ostwald[68] and their followers, the “empiricism” and “realism” of thinkers like the late Dr. Avenarius[69] of Zurich.

Then the so-called “teleological,” or “practical,” character of our human thinking has also been recognized in modern German thought long before the days of Peirce and Dewey, even by such strictly academic thinkers as Lotze and Sigwart. The work of the latter thinker upon Logic, by the way, was translated into English under distinctly Neo-Hegelian influences. In the second portion of this work the universal presuppositions of knowledge are considered, not merely as a priori truths, but as akin in some important respects “to the ethical principles by which we are wont to determine and guide our free conscious activity.”[70] But even apart from this matter of the natural association of Pragmatism with the Voluntarism that has long existed in German philosophy,[71] we may undoubtedly pass to the following things in contemporary and recent German thought as sympathetic, in the main, to the pragmatist tendencies of James and Dewey and Schiller: (1) the practical conception of science and philosophy, as both of them a kind of “economy of the attention,” a sort of “conceptual shorthand”[72] (for the purposes of the “description” of our environment) that we have referred to in the case of Mach and Ostwald; (2) the close association between the “metaphysical” and the “cultural” in books like those of Jerusalem[73] and Eleutheropulos;[74] (3) the sharp criticism of the Rationalism of the Critical Idealism by the two last-mentioned thinkers, and by some of the members of the new Fichte[75] School like Schellwien; and last but not least, (4) the tendency to take a psychological[76] and a sociological[77] (instead of a merely logical) view of the functions of thought and philosophy, that is just as accentuated in Germany at the present time as it is elsewhere.

James and Schiller have both been fond of referring to the work of many of these last-mentioned men as favourable to a conception of philosophy less as a “theory of knowledge” (or a “theory of being”) in the old sense than as a Weltanschauungslehre (a view of the world as whole), a “discussion of the various possible programmes for man’s life” to which reference has already been made in the case of Papini and others. And we might associate with their predilections and persuasions in this regard the apparent Pragmatism also of a great scholar like Harnack[78] in reference to the subordination of religious dogma to the realities of the religious life, or the Pragmatism of Ritschl[79] himself, in regard to the subordinate place in living religion of mere intellectual theory, or even some of the tendencies of the celebrated value-philosophy of Rickert and Windelband[80] and Münsterberg[81] and the rest. But again the main trouble about all this quasi-German support for the pragmatists is that most of these contemporary thinkers have taken pains to trace the roots of their teaching back into the great systems of the past. The pragmatists, on the other hand, have been notoriously careless about the matter of the various affiliations of their “corridor-like” and eclectic theory.

There are many reasons, however, against regarding even the philosophical expression of many of the practical and scientific tendencies of Germany as at all favourable to the acceptance of Pragmatism as a satisfactory philosophy from the German point of view. Among these reasons are: (1) The fact that it is naturally impossible to find any real support in past or present German philosophy for the impossible breach that exists in Pragmatism between the “theoretical” and the “practical,” and (2) the fact that Germany has only recently passed through a period of sharp conflict between the psychological (or the “genetic”) and the logical point of view regarding knowledge, resulting in a confessed victory for the latter. And then again (3) even if there is a partial correspondence between Pragmatism and the quasi economic (or “practical”) conception taken of philosophy by some of the younger men in Germany who have not altogether outlived their reaction against Rationalism, there are other tendencies there that are far more characteristic of the spirit and of the traditions of the country. Among these are the New Idealism generally, the strong Neo-Kantian movement of the Marburg school[82] and their followers in different places, the revived interest in Hegel[83] and in Schelling, the Neo-Romanticism of Jena, with its booklets upon such topics as The Culture of the Soul, Life with Nature, German Idealism, and so on.[84] And then (4) there are just as many difficulties in the way of regarding the psychological and sociological philosophy of men like Jerusalem and Eleutheropulos as anything like a final philosophy of knowledge, as there is in attempting to do the same thing with the merely preliminary and tentative philosophy of James and his associates.

Returning now to America and England, although Pragmatism is eminently an American[85] doctrine, it would, of course, be absurd to imagine that Pragmatism has carried the entire thought of the United States with it.[86] It encountered there, even at the outset, at least something of the contempt and the incredulity and the hostility that it met with elsewhere, and also much of the American shrewd indifference to a much-advertised new article. The message of James as a philosopher, too, was doubtless discounted (at least by the well-informed) in the light of his previous brilliant work as a descriptive psychologist, and also, perhaps, in the light of his wonderfully suggestive personality.[87]

What actually happened in America in respect of the pragmatist movement was, first of all, the sudden emergence of a magazine literature[88] in connexion with the Will-to-Believe philosophy of James and the California address, and in connexion (according to the generous testimony of James) with Deweyism or “Instrumentalism.” Much of this tiresome and hair-splitting magazine discussion of “ideas as instruments of thought,” and of the “consequences” (“theoretical” or “practical” or what not) by which ideas were to be “tested,” was pronounced by James, in 1906, to be largely crude and superficial. It had the indirect merit, however, of yielding one or two valuable estimates of the many inconsistencies in Pragmatism, and of the many different kinds of Pragmatism or instrumentalism that there seemed to be, and of the value of Pragmatism as a “theory of knowledge,” and as a “philosophical generalization.” The upshot of the whole preliminary discussion was (1) the discovery that, Pragmatism having arisen (as Dewey himself put it) out of a multitude of conflicting tendencies in regard to what we might call the “approach” to philosophy, would probably soon “dissolve itself” back again into some of the streams out of which it had arisen,[89] and (2) the discovery that all that this early “methodological” pragmatism amounted to was the harmless doctrine that the meaning of any conception expressed itself in the past or future conduct or experience of actual, or possible, sentient creatures.

We shall again take occasion[90] to refer to this comparative failure of Pragmatism to give any systematic or unified account of the consequences by which it would seek to test the truth of propositions. Its failure, however, in this connexion is a matter of secondary importance in comparison with the great lesson[91] to be drawn from its idea that there can be for man no objective truth about the universe, apart from the idea of its meaning[92] or significance to his experience and to his conscious activity.

What is now taking place in America in this second decade [i.e. in the years after 1908] of the pragmatist movement is apparently (1) the sharpest kind of official rationalist condemnation of Pragmatism as an imperfectly proved and a merely “subjective” and a highly unsystematic philosophy; (2) the appearance of a number of instructive booklets[93] upon Pragmatism and the pragmatist movement, some of them expository and critical, some of them in the main sympathetic, some of them condemnatory and even contemptuous, and some of them attempts at further constructive work along pragmatist lines; (3) indications here and there of the acceptance and the promulgation of older and newer doctrines antithetic and hostile to Pragmatism—some of them possibly as typically American as Pragmatism itself.

As a single illustration of the partly constructive work that is being attempted in the name and the spirit of pragmatism, we may instance the line of reflection entered upon by Professor Moore[94] in consequence of his claim that to Pragmatism the fundamental thing in any judgment or proposition is not so much its consequences, but its “value.” This claim may, no doubt, be supported by the many declarations of James and Schiller that the “true,” like the “good” and the “beautiful,” is simply a “valuation,” and not the fetish that the rationalists make it out to be. It is doubtful, however, as we may try to indicate, whether this “value” interpretation of Pragmatism can be carried out independently of the more systematic attempts at a general philosophy of value that are being made to-day in Germany and America and elsewhere. And then it would be a matter of no ordinary difficulty to clear up the inconsistency that doubtless exists between Pragmatism as a value philosophy and Pragmatism as a mere philosophy of “consequences.” It is “immediate,” and “verifiable,” and “definitely appreciated” consequences, rather than the higher values of our experience that (up to the present time) seem to have bulked largely in the argumentations of the pragmatists.

And as an illustration of a doctrine that is both American and hostile to pragmatism, we may instance the New Realism[95] that was recently launched in a collective manifesto in The Journal of Philosophy and Scientific Methods. This realism is, to be sure, hostile to every form of “subjectivism” or personalism, and may in a certain sense be regarded as the emergence into full daylight of the realism or dualism that we found to be lurking[96] in James’s “radical empiricism.” It is, therefore, as it were, one of the signs that Pragmatism is perhaps breaking up in America into some of the more elemental tendencies out of which it developed—in this case the American desire for operative (or effective) realism and for a “direct”[97] contact with reality instead of the indirect contact of so many metaphysical systems.

It is only necessary to add here that it is to the credit of American rationalism of the Neo-Hegelian type that it has shown itself, notably in the writings of Professor Royce,[98] capable, not only of criticising Pragmatism, but of seeking to incorporate, in a constructive philosophy of the present, some of the features of the pragmatist emphasis upon “will” and “achievement” and “purpose.” It is, therefore, in this respect at least in line with some of the best tendencies in contemporary European philosophy.

Lastly, there are certain tendencies of recent English philosophy with which Pragmatism has special affinities. Among these may be mentioned: (1) the various general and specific criticisms[99] that have been made there for at least two generations on the more or less formal and abstract character of the metaphysic of our Neo-Kantians and our Neo-Hegelians; (2) the concessions that have recently been made by prominent rationalists to the undoubtedly purposive, or “teleological,” character of our human thinking, and to the connexion of our mental life with our entire practical and spiritual activity. Many of these concessions are now regarded as the merest commonplaces of speculation, and we shall probably refer to them in our next chapter. Then there is (3) the well-known insistence of some of our foremost psychologists, like Ward and Stout,[100] upon the reality of activity and “purpose” in mental process, and upon the part played by them in the evolution of our intellectual life, and of our adjustment to the world in which we find ourselves. And (4) the ethical and social idealism of such well-known members of our Neo-Hegelian school as Professors Jones, Mackenzie, and Muirhead. These scholars and thinkers are just as insistent as the pragmatists upon the idea that philosophy and thought are, and should be, a practical social “dynamic”—that is to say, “forces” and “motives” making for the perfection of the common life. (5) A great deal of the philosophy of science and of the philosophy of axioms and postulates to be found in British writers, from Mill and Jevons to Karl Pearson and Mr. A. Sidgwick[101] and many others.

Apart from all this, however, or rather, in addition to it, it may be truly said that one of the striking things about recent British philosophical literature[102] is the stir and the activity that have been excited in the rationalist camp by the writings of the pragmatists and the “personal idealists,” and by the critics of these newer modes of thought. All this has led to many such re-statements of the problems of philosophy as are to be found in the books of men like Joachim,[103] Henry Jones,[104] A. E. Taylor,[105] Boyce-Gibson,[106] Henry H. Sturt,[107] S. H. Mellone,[108] J. H. B. Joseph,[109] and others, and even, say, in such a representative book as that of Professor Stewart upon the classical theme of Plato’s Theory of Ideas. In this work an attempt is made to interpret Plato’s “Ideas” in the light of pragmatist considerations as but “categories” or “points of view” which we find it convenient to use in dealing with our sense experience.

CHAPTER III
SOME FUNDAMENTAL CHARACTERISTICS

We shall now attempt a somewhat detailed treatment of a few of the more characteristic tendencies of Pragmatism. The following have already been mentioned in our general sketch of its development and of the appearance of the pragmatist philosophy in Europe and America: (1) the attempted modification by Pragmatism of the extremes of Rationalism, and its dissatisfaction with the rationalism of both science and philosophy; (2) its progress from the stage of a mere practical and experimental theory of truth to a broad humanism in which philosophy itself becomes (like art, say) merely an important “dynamic” element in human culture; (3) its preference in the matter of first principles for “faith” and “experience” and a trust in our instinctive “beliefs”; (4) its readiness to affiliate itself with the various liberal and humanistic tendencies in human thought, such as the philosophy of “freedom,” and the “hypothetical method” of science, modern ethical and social idealism, the religious reaction of recent years, the voluntaristic trend in German post-Kantian philosophy, and so on. Our subject in this chapter, however, is rather that of the three or four more or less characteristic assumptions and contentions upon which all these and the many other pragmatist tendencies may be said to rest.

The first and foremost of these assumptions is the position that all truth is “made” truth, “human” truth, truth related to human attitudes and purposes, and that there is no “objective” or “independent” truth, no truth “in whose establishment the function of giving human satisfaction, in marrying previous parts of experience with newer parts, has played no rôle.” Truths were “nothing,” as it were, before they were “discovered,” and the most ancient truths were once “plastic,” or merely susceptible of proof or disproof. Truth is “made” just like “health,” or “wealth,” or “value,” and so on. Insistence, we might say, upon this one note, along with the entire line of reflection that it awakens in him, is really, as Dewey reminds us, the main burden of James’s book upon Pragmatism. Equally characteristic is it too of Dewey himself who is for ever reverting to his doctrine of the factitious character of truth. There is no “fixed distinction,” he tells us, “between the empirical values of the unreflective life and the most abstract process of rational thought.” And to Schiller, again, this same thought is the beginning of everything in philosophy, for with an outspoken acceptance of this doctrine of the “formation” of all truth, Pragmatism, he thinks, can do at least two things that Rationalism is for ever debarred from doing: (1) distinguish adequately “truth” from “fact,” and (2) distinguish adequately truth from error. Whether these two things be, or be not, the consequences of the doctrine in question [and we shall return[110] to the point] we may perhaps accept it as, on the whole, harmonious with the teaching of psychology about the nature of our ideas as mental habits, or about thinking as a restrained, or a guided, activity. It is in harmony, too, with the palpable truism that all “truth” must be truth that some beings or other who have once “sought” truth (for some reasons or other) have at last come to regard as satisfying their search and their purposes. And this truism, it would seem, must remain such in spite of, or even along with, any meaning that there may be in the idea of what we call “God’s truth.” By this expression men understand, it would seem, merely God’s knowledge of truths or facts of which we as men may happen to be ignorant. But then there can have been no time in which God can be imagined to have been ignorant of these or any other matters. It is therefore not for Him truth as opposed to falsehood.

And then, again, this pragmatist position about all truth being “made” truth would seem to be valid in view of the difficulty (Plato[111] spoke of it) of reconciling God’s supposed absolute knowledge of reality with our finite and limited apprehension of the same.[112]

The main interest, however, of pragmatists in their somewhat tiresome insistence upon the truism that all truth is made truth is their hostility (Locke had it in his day) to the supposed rationalist position that there is an “a priori” and “objective” truth independent altogether of human activities and human purposes.[113] The particular object of their aversion is what Dewey[114] talks of as “that dishonesty, that insincerity, characteristic of philosophical discussion, that is manifested in speaking and writing as if certain ultimate abstractions or concepts could be more real than human purposes and human beings, and as if there could be any contradiction between truth and purpose.” As we shall reflect at a later stage[115] upon the rationalist theory of truth, we may, meantime, pass over this hostility with the remark that it is, after all, only owing to certain peculiar circumstances (those, say, of its conflict with religion and science and custom) in the development of philosophy that its first principles have been regarded by its votaries as the most real of all realities. These devotees tend to forget in their zeal that the pragmatist way of looking upon all supposed first principles—that of the consideration of their utility in and necessity as explanations of our common experience and its realities—is the only way of explaining their reality, even as conceptions.

It requires to be added—so much may, indeed, have already been inferred from the preceding chapter—that, apart from their hint about the highest truth being necessarily inclusive of the highest human purposes, it is by no means easy to find out from the pragmatists what they mean by truth, or how they would define it. When the matter is pressed home, they generally confess that their attitude is in the main “psychological” rather than philosophical, that it is the “making” of truth rather than its “nature” or its “contents” or its systematic character that interests them. It is the “dynamical” point of view, as they put it, that is essential to them. And out of the sphere and the associations of this contention they do not really travel. They will tell you what it means to hit upon this particular way of looking upon truth, and how stimulating it is to attempt to do so. And they will give you many more or less artificial and tentative, external, descriptions of their philosophy by saying that ideas are “made for man,” and “not man for ideas,” and so on. But, although they deny both the common-sense view that truth is a “correspondence” with external reality, and the rationalist view that truth is a “coherent system” on its own account, they never define truth any more than do their opponents the rationalists. It is a “commerce” and not a “correspondence,” they contend, a commerce[116] between certain parts of our experience and certain other parts, or a commerce between our ideas and our purposes, but not a commerce with reality, for the making of truth is itself, in their eyes, the making of reality.

Secondly, it is another familiar characteristic of Pragmatism that, although it fails to give a satisfying account either of truth or reality, the one thing of which it is for ever talking of, as fundamental to our entire life as men, is belief.[117] This is the one thing upon which it makes everything else to hang—all knowledge and all action and all theory. And it is, of course, its manifest acceptance of belief as a fundamental principle of our human life, and as a true measure of reality, that has given to Pragmatism its religious atmosphere.[118] It is this that has made it such a welcome and such a credible creed to so many disillusioned and free-thinking people to-day, as well as to so many of the faithful and the orthodox. “For, in principle, Pragmatism overcomes the old antithesis of Faith and Reason. It shows, on the one hand, that faith must underlie all reason and pervade it, nay, that at bottom rationality itself is the supremest postulate of Faith.”[119] “Truth,” again, as James reminds us, “lives in fact for the most part on a credit system. Our thoughts and beliefs [how literally true this is!] pass so long as nobody challenges them, just as bank-notes pass so long as nobody refuses them.”[120]

Now it requires but the reflection of a moment to see that the various facts and considerations upon which the two last quotations, and the general devotion of Pragmatism to “belief,” both repose, are all distinctly in favour of the acceptability of Pragmatism at the present time. There is nothing in which people in general are more interested at the beginning of this twentieth century than in belief. It is this, for example, that explains such a thing as the great success to-day in our English-speaking world of such an enterprise as the Hibbert Journal of Philosophy and Religion, or the still greater phenomenon of the world-wide interest of the hour in the subject of comparative religion. Most modern men, the writer is inclined to think, believe[121] a great deal more than they know, the chief difficulty about this fact being that there is no recognized way of expressing it in our science or in our philosophy, or of acting upon it in our behaviour in society. It is, however, only the undue prominence of mathematical and physical science since the time of Descartes[122] that has made evidence and demonstration the main consideration of philosophy instead of belief, man’s true and fundamental estimate of reality.

We have already[123] pointed out that one of the main results of Pragmatism is the acceptance on the part of its leading upholders of our fundamental beliefs about the ultimately real and about the realization of our most deeply cherished purposes. In fact, reality in general is for them, we may say—in the absence from their writings of any better description,—simply that which we can “will,” or “believe in,” as the basis for action and for conscious “creative” effort, or constructive effort. As James himself puts it in his book on The Meaning of Truth: “Since the only realities we can talk about are objects believed in, the pragmatist, whenever he says ‘reality,’ means in the first instance what may count for the man himself as a reality, what he believes at the moment to be such. Sometimes the reality is a concrete sensible presence.... Or his idea may be that of an abstract relation, say of that between the sides and the hypotenuse of a triangle.... Each reality verifies and validates its own idea exclusively; and in each case the verification consists in the satisfactorily-ending consequences, mental or physical, which the idea was to set up.”

We shall later have to refer to the absence from Pragmatism of a criterion for achievement and for “consequences.” And, as far as philosophical theories are concerned, these are all, to the pragmatists, true or false simply in so far as they are practically credible or not. James is quite explicit, for example, about Pragmatism itself in this regard. “No pragmatist,” he holds, “can warrant the objective truth of what he says about the universe; he can only believe it.”[124] There is faith, in short, for the pragmatist, in every act, in every phase of thought, the faith that is implied in the realization of the purposes that underlie our attempted acts and thoughts. They eagerly accept, for example, the important doctrine of the modern logician, and the modern psychologist, as to the presence of volition in all “affirmation” and “judgment,” seeing that in every case of affirmation there is a more or less active readjustment of our minds (or our bodies) to what either stimulates or impedes our activity.

A third outstanding characteristic of Pragmatism is the “deeper” view of human nature upon which, in contrast to Rationalism, it supposes itself to rest, and which it seeks to vindicate. It is this supposedly deeper view of human nature for which it is confessedly pleading when it insists, as it is fond of doing, upon the connexion of philosophy with the various theoretical and practical pursuits of mankind, with sciences like biology and psychology, and with social reform,[125] and so on. We have, it may be remembered, already intimated that even in practical America men have had their doubts about the depth of a philosophy that looks upon man as made in the main for action and achievement instead of, let us say, the realization of his higher nature. Still, few of the readers of James can have altogether failed to appreciate the significance of some of the many eloquent and suggestive paragraphs he has written upon the limitations of the rationalistic “temperament” and of its unblushing sacrifice of the entire wealth of human nature and of the various pulsating interests of men to the imaginary exigencies of abstract logic and “system.”[126] To him and to his colleagues (as to Socrates, for that part of it) man is firstly a being who has habits and purposes, and who can, to some extent, control the various forces of his nature through true knowledge, and in this very discrepancy between the real and the ideal does there lie for the pragmatists the entire problem of philosophy—the problem of Plato, that of the attainment of true virtue through true knowledge.

Deferring, however, the question of the success of the pragmatists in this matter of the unfolding of the true relation between philosophy and human nature, let us think of a few of the teachings of experience upon this truly important and inevitable relation, which no philosophy indeed can for one moment afford to neglect. Insistence upon these facts or teachings and upon the reflections and criticisms to which they naturally give rise is certainly a deeply marked characteristic of Pragmatism.

Man, as has often been pointed out, is endowed with the power of reflection, not so much to enable him to understand the world either as a whole or in its detailed workings as to assist him in the further evolution of his life. His beliefs and choices and his spiritual culture are all, as it were, forces and influences in this direction. Indeed, it is always the soul or the life principle that is the important thing in any individual or any people, so far as a place in the world (or in “history”) is concerned.

Philosophers, as well as other men, often exchange (in the words of Lecky) the “love of truth” as such for the love of “the truth,” that is to say, for the love of the system and the social arrangements that best suit their interests as thinkers. And they too are just as eager as other men for discipleship and influence and honour. Knowledge with them, in other words, means, as Bacon put it, “control”; and even with them it does not, and cannot, remain at the stage of mere cognition. It becomes in the end a conviction or a belief. And thus the philosopher with his system (even a Plato, or a Hegel) is after all but a part of the universe, to be judged as such, along with other lives and other systems—a circumstance hit off early in the nineteenth century by German students when they used to talk of one’s being able (in Berlin) to see the Welt-Geist (Hegel) “taking a walk” in the Thiergarten.

Reality again, so far as either life or science is concerned, means for every man that in which he is most fundamentally interested—ions and radium to the physicist of the hour, life to the biologist, God to the theologian, progress to the philanthropist, and so on.

Further, mankind in general is not likely to abandon its habit of estimating all systems of thought and philosophy from the point of view of their value as keys, or aids, to the problem of the meaning and the development of life as a whole. There is no abstract “truth” or “good” or “beauty” apart from the lives of beings who contemplate, and who seek to create, such things as truth and goodness and beauty.

To understand knowledge and intellect, again, we must indeed look at them in their actual development in connexion with the total vital or personal activity either of the average or even of the exceptional individual. And instead of regarding the affections and the emotions as inimical to knowledge, or as secondary and inferior to it, we ought to remember that they rest in general upon a broader and deeper attitude to reality than does either the perception of the senses[127] or the critical analysis of the understanding. In both of these cases is the knowledge that we attain to limited in the main either to what is before us under the conditions of time and space, or to particular aspects of things that we mark off, or separate, from the totality of things. As Bergson reminds us, we “desire” and “will” with the “whole” of our past, but “think” only with “part” of it. Small wonder then that James seeks to connect such a broad phenomenon as religion with many of the unconscious factors (they are not all merely “biological”) in the depth of our personality. Some of the instincts and the phenomena that we encounter there are things that transcend altogether the world that is within the scope of our senses or the reasoning faculties.

Truth, too, grows from age to age, and is simply the formulated knowledge humanity has of itself and its environment. And errors disappear, not so much in consequence of their logical refutation, as in consequence of their inutility and of their inability to control the life and thought of the free man. Readers of Schopenhauer will remember his frequent insistence upon this point of the gradual dissidence and disappearance of error, in place of its summary refutation.

Our “reactions” upon reality are certainly part of what we mean by “reality,” and our philosophy is only too truly “the history of our heart and life” as well as that of our intellectual activity. The historian of philosophy invariably acts upon a recognition of the personal and the national and the epochal influence in the evolution of every philosophical system. And even the new, or the fuller conception of life to which a given genius may attain at some stage or other of human civilization will still inevitably, in its turn, give place to a newer or a more perfect system.

Now Pragmatism is doubtless at fault in seeking to create the impression that Rationalism would seek to deny any, or all, of those characteristic facts of human nature. Still, it is to some extent justified in insisting upon their importance in view of the sharp conflict (we shall later refer to it) that is often supposed to exist between the theoretical and the practical interests of mankind, and that Rationalism sometimes seems to accept with comparative equanimity.[128] What Pragmatism is itself most of all seeking after is a view of human nature, and of things generally, in which the fullest justice is done to the facts upon which this very real conflict[129] of modern times may be said to rest.

A fourth characteristic of Pragmatism is its notorious “anti-intellectualism,”[130] its hostility to the merely dialectical use of terms and concepts and categories,[131] to argumentation that is unduly detached from the facts and the needs of our concrete human experience. This anti-intellectualism we prefer meantime to consider not so much in itself and on its own account (if this be possible with a negative creed) as in the light of the results it has had upon philosophy. There is, for example, the general clearing of the ground that has undoubtedly taken place as to the actual or the possible meaning of many terms or conceptions that have long been current with the transcendentalists, such as “pure thought,” the “Absolute,” “truth” in and for itself, philosophy as the “completely rational” interpretation of experience, and so on. And along with this clearing of the ground there are (and also in consequence of the pragmatist movement) a great many recent, striking concessions of Rationalism to practical, and to common-sense, ways of looking at things, the very existence of which cannot but have an important effect upon the philosophy of the near future. Among some of the more typical of these are the following:

From Mr. F. H. Bradley we have the emphatic declarations that the principle of dialectical opposition or the principle of “Non-Contradiction” (formerly, to himself and his followers, the “rule of the game” in philosophy) “does not settle anything about the nature of reality”; that “truth” is an “hypothesis,” and that “except as a means to a foreign end it is useless and impossible”; and “when we judge truth by its own standard it is defective because it fails to include all the facts,”[132] and because its contents “cannot be made intelligible throughout and entirely”; that “no truth is idle,” and that “all truth” has “practical” and æsthetic “consequences”; that there is “no such existing thing as pure thought”;[133] that we cannot separate truth and practice; that “absolute certainty is not requisite for working purposes”; that it is a “superstition[134] to think that the intellect is the highest part of us,” and that it is well to attack a one-sided “intellectualism”; that both “intellectualism” and “voluntarism” are “one-sided,” and that he has no “objection to identifying reality with goodness or satisfaction, so long as this does not mean merely practical satisfaction.”[135] Then from this same author comes the following familiar statement about philosophy as a whole: “Philosophy always will be hard, and what it promises in the end is no clear vision nor any complete understanding or vision, but its certain reward is a continual and a heightened appreciation [this is the result of science as well as of philosophy] of the ineffable mystery of life, of life in all its complexities and all its unity and all its worth.”[136]

Equally typical and equally important is the following concession from Professor Taylor, although, of course, to many people it would seem no concession at all, but rather the mere statement of a fact, which our Neo-Hegelians have only made themselves ridiculous by seeming to have so long overlooked: “Mere truth for the intellect can never be quite the same as ultimate reality. For in mere truth we get reality only in its intellectual aspect, as that which affords a higher satisfaction to thought’s demand for consistency and systematic unity in its object. And as we have seen, this demand can never be quite satisfied by thought itself.[137] For thought, to remain thought, must always be something less than the whole reality which it knows.”[138]

And we may add also from Professor Taylor the following declaration in respect of the notorious inability of Neo-Hegelian Rationalism to furnish the average man with a theory of reality in the contemplation of which he can find at least an adequate motive to conscious effort and achievement: “Quite apart from the facts, due to personal shortcomings and confusions, it is inherent in the nature of metaphysical study that it can make no positive addition to our information, and can itself supply no motive for practical endeavour.”[139]

Many of those findings are obviously so harmonious with some of the more familiar formulas of the pragmatists that there would seem to be ample warrant for associating them with the results of the pragmatist movement. This is particularly the case, it would seem, with the concession of Mr. Bradley with respect of the “practical” or “hypothetical” conception that we ought to entertain of “truth” and “thinking,” and also with the strictures passed by him upon “mere truth” and “mere intellectualism,” and with Professor Taylor’s position in respect of the inadequacy of the rationalist theory of reality, as in no sense a “dynamic” or an “incentive” for action. And we might well regard Professor Taylor’s finding in respect of mere systematic truth or the “Absolute” (for they are the same thing to him) as confirmatory of Dr. Schiller’s important contention that “in Absolutism” the two “poles” of the “moral” and the “intellectual” character of the Deity “fall apart.” This means, we will remember, that the truth of abstract intellectualism is not the truth for action,[140] that absolutism is not able to effect or harmonize between the truth of systematic knowledge and moral truth—if, indeed, there be any such thing as moral truth on the basis of a pure Rationalism.

To be sure, both the extent and even the reality of all this supposed cession of ground in philosophy to the pragmatists has been doubted and denied by the representatives of Rationalism. They would be questioned, too, by many sober thinkers and scholars who have long regarded Hegelian intellectualism and pragmatist “voluntarism” as extremes in philosophy, as inimical, both of them, to the interests of a true and catholic conception of philosophy. The latter, as we know from Aristotle, should be inclusive of the realities both of the intellectual and the practical life.

Pragmatist criticisms of Rationalism, again, may fairly be claimed to have been to a large extent anticipated by the independent findings of living idealist thinkers like Professors Pringle-Pattison, Baillie, Jones, and others, in respect of the supposed extreme claims of Hegelianism, as well as by similar findings and independent constructive efforts on the part of the recent group of the Oxford Personal Idealists.[141] That there is still a place for pragmatist anti-intellectualism is evidently the conclusion to be drawn from such things as the present wide acceptance of the philosophy of Bergson, or the recent declarations of Mr. Bradley that we are justified “in the intelligent refusal to accept as final an theoretical criterion which actually so far exists,” and that the “action of narrow consistency must be definitely given up.”

The reflection ought, moreover, to be inserted here that even if Pragmatism has been of some possible service in bringing forth from rationalists some of their many recent confessions of the limitations of an abstract intellectualism, it is not at all unlikely that Rationalism in its turn may succeed in convicting Pragmatism of an undue emphasis[142] upon volition and action and upon merely practical truth.

We shall now terminate the foregoing characterization of Pragmatism by a reference to two or three other specific things for which it may, with more or less justice, be supposed to stand in philosophy. These are (1) the repudiation of the “correspondence view”[143] of the relation of truth to reality, (2) the rejection of the idea of there being any ultimate or rigid distinction between “appearance” and “reality,” and (3) the reaffirmation of the “teleological” point of view as characteristic of philosophy in distinction from science.

As for (1) it has already been pointed out that this idea of the misleading character of the ordinary “correspondence notion” of truth is claimed by pragmatists as an important result of their proposal to test truth by the standard of the consequences involved in its acceptance.[144] The ordinary reader may not, to be sure, be aware of the many difficulties that are apt to arise in philosophy from an apparent acceptance of the common-sense notion of truth as somehow simply a duplicate or a “copy” of external reality. There is the difficulty, say, of our ever being able to prove such a correspondence without being (or “going”) somehow beyond both the truth and the reality in question, so as to be able to detect either coincidence or discrepancy. Or, we might again require some bridge between the ideas in our minds and the supposed reality outside them—“sensations” say, or “experiences,” something, in other words, that would be accepted as “given” and indubitable both by idealists and realists. And there would be the difficulty, too, of saying whether we have to begin for the purposes of all reflective study with what is within consciousness or with what is outside it—in matter say, or in things. And if the former, how we can ever get to the latter, and vice versa. And so on with the many kindred subtleties that have divided thinkers into idealists and realists and conceptualists, monists, dualists, parallelists, and so on.

Now Pragmatism certainly does well in proposing to steer clear of all such difficulties and pitfalls of the ordinary “correspondence notion.” And as we shall immediately refer to its own working philosophy in the matter, we shall meantime pass over this mere point of its rejection of the “correspondence notion” with one or two remarks of a critical nature, (1) Unfortunately for the pragmatists the rejection of the correspondence notion is just as important a feature of Idealism[145] as it is of Pragmatism. The latter system therefore can lay no claim to any uniqueness or superiority in this connexion. (2) Pragmatism, as we may perhaps see, cannot maintain its position that the distinction between “idea” and “object” is one “within experience itself” (rather than a distinction between experience and something supposedly outside it) without travelling further in the direction of Idealism[146] than it has hitherto been prepared to do. By such a travelling in the direction of Idealism we mean a far more thorough-going recognition of the part played in the making of reality by the “personal” factor, than it has as yet contemplated either in its “instrumentalism” or in its “radical empiricism.” (3) There is, after all, an element of truth in the correspondence notion to which Pragmatism fails to do justice. We shall refer to this failure in a subsequent chapter[147] when again looking into its theory of truth and reality.

Despite these objections there is, however, at least one particular respect in regard to which Pragmatism may legitimately claim some credit for its rejection of the correspondence notion. This is its insistence that the truth is not (as it must be on the correspondence theory) a “datum” or a “presentation,” not something given to us by the various objects and things without us, or by their supposed effects upon our senses and our memory and our understanding. It rather, on the contrary, maintains Pragmatism, a “construction” on the part of the mind, an attitude of our “expectant” (or “believing”) consciousness, into which our own reactions upon things enter at least as much as do their supposed effects and impressions upon us. Of course the many difficulties of this thorny subject are by no means cleared up by this mere indication of the attitude of Pragmatism, and we shall return in a later chapter[148] to this idea of truth as a construction of the mind instead of a datum, taking care at the same time, however, to refer to the failure of which we have spoken on the part of Pragmatism to recognize the element of truth that is still contained in the correspondence notion.

(2) The rejection of the idea of any rigid, or ultimate distinction between “appearance” and “reality.” This is a still broader rejection than the one to which we have just referred, and may, therefore, be thought of as another more or less fundamental reason for the rejection either of the copy or of the correspondence theory of truth. The reality of things, as Pragmatism conceives it, is not something already “fixed” and “determined,” but rather, something that is “plastic” and “modifiable,” something that is, in fact, undergoing a continuous process of modification, or development, of one kind or another. It must always, therefore, the pragmatist would hold, be defined in terms of the experiences and the activities through which it is known and revealed and through which it is, to some extent, even modified.[149]

Pragmatism, as we may remember, has been called by James “immediate” or “radical” empiricism, although in one of his last books he seeks to give an independent development to these two doctrines. The cardinal principle of this philosophy is that “things are what they are experienced as being, or that to give a just account of anything is to tell what that thing is experienced to be.”[150] And it is perhaps this aspect of the new philosophy of Pragmatism that is most amply and most attractively exhibited in the books of James. It is presented, too, with much freshness and skill in Professor Bawden’s[151] book upon Pragmatism, which is an attempt, he says, “to set forth the necessary assumptions of a philosophy in which experience becomes self-conscious as a method.”[152]

“The new philosophy,” proceeds Bawden,[153] “is a pragmatic idealism. Its method is at once intrinsic and immanent and organic or functional. By saying that its method is functional, we mean that its experience must be interpreted from within. We cannot jump out of our skins ... we cannot pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps. We find ourselves in mid-stream of the Niagara of experience, and may define what it is by working back and forth within the current.” “We do not know where we are going, but we are on the way” [the contradiction is surely apparent]. Then, like James, Bawden goes on to interpret Pragmatism by showing what things like self-consciousness, experience, science, social consciousness, space, time, and causation are by showing how they “appear,” and how they “function”—“experience” itself being simply, to him and to his friends, a “dynamic system,” “self-sustaining,” a “whole leaning on nothing.”

The extremes of this “immediate” or “radical” philosophy appear to non-pragmatists to be reached when we read words like those just quoted about the Niagara stream of our experience, and about our life as simply movement and acceleration, or about the celebrated “I think” of Descartes as equally well [!] set forth under the form “It thinks,” or “thinking is going on,” or about the “being” of the individual person as consisting simply in a “doing.” “All this we hold,” says Bawden, “to be not materialism but simply energism.” “There is no ‘truth,’ only ‘truths’—this is another way of putting it—and the only criterion of truth is the changing one of the image or the idea which comes out of our impulses or of the conflict of our habits.” The end of all this modern flowing philosophy is, of course, the “Pluralism” of James, the universe as a society of functioning selves in which reality “may exist in a distributive form, or in the shape, not of an All, but of a set of eaches.” “The essence of life,” as he puts it in his famous essay on Bergson,[154] “is its continually changing character,” and we only call it a “confusion” sometimes because we have grown accustomed in our sciences and philosophies to isolate “elements” and “differents” which in reality are “all dissolved in one another.”[155] “Relations of every sort, of time, space, difference, likeness, change, rate, cause, or what not, are just as integral members of the sensational flux as terms are.” “Pluralism lets things really exist in the each form, or distributively. Its type of union ... is different from the monistic type of all-einheit. It is what I call the strung-along type, the type of continuity, contiguity, or concatenation.” And so on.

(3) The reaffirmation of the teleological point of view. After the many illustrations and references that have already been given in respect of the tendencies of Pragmatism, it is perhaps hardly necessary to point out that an insistence upon the necessity to philosophy of the “teleological” point of view, of the consideration of both thoughts and things from the point of view of their purpose or utility, is a deeply-marked characteristic of Pragmatism. In itself this demand can hardly be thought of as altogether new, for the idea of considering the nature of anything in the light of its final purpose or end is really as old in our European thought as the philosophy of Aristotle or Anaxagoras. Almost equally familiar is the kindred idea upon which Pragmatism is inclined to felicitate itself, of finding the roots of metaphysic “in ethics,” in the facts of conduct, in the facts of the “ideal” or the “personal” order which we tend[156] in human civilization to impose upon what is otherwise thought of by science as the natural order. The form, however, of the teleological argument to which Pragmatism may legitimately be thought to have directed our attention is that of the possible place in the world of reality, and in the world of thought, of the effort and the free initiative of the individual. This place, unfortunately (the case is quite different with Bergson[157]), Pragmatism has been able, up to the present time, to define, in the main, only negatively—by means of its polemic against the completed and the self-completing “Absolute” of the Neo-Hegelian Rationalists. What this polemic is we can best indicate by quoting from Hegel himself a passage or a line of the reflection against which it is seeking to enter an emphatic and a reasoned protest, and then after this a passage or two from some of our Anglo-Hegelians in the same connexion.

“The consummation,” says Hegel, in a familiar and often-quoted passage, “of the Infinite aim (i.e. of the purpose of God as omniscient and almighty) consists merely in removing the illusion which makes it seem unaccomplished.”[158] Now although there is a sense in which this great saying must for ever be maintained to contain an element of profound truth,[159] the attitude of Pragmatism in regard to it would be, firstly, that of a rooted objection to its outspoken intellectualism. How can the chief work of the Almighty be conceived to be merely that of getting rid somehow from our minds, or from his, of our mental confusions? And then, secondly, an equally rooted objection is taken to the implication that the individual human being should allow himself to entertain, as possibly true, a view of the general trend of things that renders any notion of his playing an appreciable part therein a theoretical and a practical absurdity.[160] This notion (or “conceit,” if you will) he can surrender only by ceasing to think of his own consciousness of “effort” and of the part played by “effort”[161] and “invention” in the entire animal and human world, and also of his consciousness of duty and of the ideal in general. This latter consciousness of itself bids him to realize certain “norms” or regulative prescripts simply because they are consonant with that higher will which is to him the very truth of his own nature. He cannot, in other words, believe that he is consciously obliged to work and to realize his higher nature for nothing. The accomplishment of ends and of the right must, in other words, be rationally believed by him to be part of the nature of things. It is this conviction, we feel sure, that animates Pragmatism in the opposition it shares both with common sense and with the radical thought of our time against the meaninglessness to Hegelianism, or to Absolutism,[162] many of the hopes and many of the convictions that we feel to be so necessary and so real in the life of mankind generally.

And there are other lines of reflection among Neo-Hegelians against which Pragmatism is equally determined to make a more or less definite protest, in the interest, as before, of our practical and of our moral activity. We may recall, to begin with, the memorable words of Mr. Bradley, in his would-be refutation of the charge that the ideals of Absolutism “to some people” fail to “satisfy our nature’s demands.” “Am I,” he indignantly asks, “to understand that we are to have all we want, and have it just as we want it?” adding (almost in the next line) that he “understands,” of course, that the “views” of Absolutism, or those of any other philosophy, are to be compared “only with views” that aim at “theoretical consistency” and not with mere practical beliefs.[163] Now, speaking for the moment for Pragmatism, can it be truly philosophical to contemplate with equanimity the idea of any such ultimate conflict as is implied in these words between the demands of the intellect[164] and the demands of emotion—to use the term most definitely expressive of a personal, as distinct from a merely intellectual satisfaction?

Then again there is, for example, the dictum of Dr. McTaggart, that there is “no reason to trust God’s goodness without a demonstration which removes the matter from the sphere of faith.”[165] May there not, we would ask, be a view of things according to the truth of which the confidence of the dying Socrates in the reasonableness and the goodness of God are at least as reasonable as his confession, at the same time, of his ignorance of the precise, or the particular, fate both of the just and of the unjust? And is not, too, such a position as that expressed in these words of Dr. McTaggart’s about a logically complete reason for believing in the essential righteousness of things now ruled out of court by some of the concessions of his brother rationalists to Pragmatism, to which reference has already been made? It is so ruled out, for example, even by Mr. Bradley’s condemnation as a “pernicious prejudice” of the idea that “what is wanted for working purpose is the last theoretical certainty about things.”[166]

CHAPTER IV
PRAGMATISM AND HUMAN ACTIVITY

It requires now but a slight degree of penetration to see that beneath this entire matter of an apparent opposition between our “theoretical” and our “practical” satisfaction, and beneath much of the pragmatist insistence upon the “consequences” of ideas and of systems of thought, there is the great question of the simple fact of human action and of its significance for philosophy. And it might truly be said that the raising of this question is not merely another of the more or less definitely marked features of Pragmatism, but in some respects it is one outstanding characteristic.

For some reason or other, or for some strange combination of reasons, the phenomenon that we call “action”[167] (the activity of man as an agent) and the apparently simple facts of the reality and the intelligibility of action have long been regarded as matters of altogether secondary or subordinate importance by the rationalism of philosophy and by the mechanical philosophy of science. This Rationalism and this ostensibly certain and demonstrable mechanical philosophy of science suppose that the one problem of human thought is simply that of the nature of truth or of the nature of reality (the reality of the “physical” world) as if either (or each) of these things were an entity on its own account, an absolutely final finding or consideration. That this has really been the case so far as philosophy is concerned is proved by the fact even of the existence of the many characteristic deliverances and concessions of Rationalism in respect of Pragmatism to which reference has already been made in the preceding chapter. And that it has also been the case so far as science is concerned is proved by the existence of the many dogmatic attempts of many natural philosophers from Holbach to Haeckel to apply the “iron laws” of matter and motion to the reality of everything else under heaven,[168] and of everything in the heavens in spite of the frequent confessions of their own colleagues with regard to the actual and the necessary limits and limitations of science and of the scientific outlook.

Only slowly and gradually, as it were, has the consideration come into the very forefront of our speculative horizon that there is for man as a thinking being no rigid separation between theory and practice, between intellect and volition, between action and thought, between fact and act, between truth and reality.[169] There is clearly volition or aim, for example, in the search after truth. And there is certainly purpose in the attention[170] that is involved even in the simplest piece of perception, the selection of what interests and affects us out of the total field of vision or experience. And it is equally certain that there is thought in action—so long, that is to say, as action is regarded as action and not as impulse. Again, the man who wills the truth submits himself to an imperative just as surely as does the man who explicitly obeys the law of duty. It is thus impossible, as it were, even in the so-called intellectual life, to distinguish absolutely between theoretical and practical considerations—“truth” meaning invariably the relations obtaining in some “sphere,” or order, of fact which we separate off for some purpose or other from the infinite whole of reality. Equally impossible is it to distinguish absolutely between the theoretical and the practical in the case of the highest theoretical activity, in the case, say, of the “contemplation” that Aristotle talks of as the most “godlike” activity of man. This very contemplation, as our Neo-Hegelian[171] friends are always reminding us, is an activity that is just as much a characteristic of man, as is his power of setting his limbs in motion.

We have referred to the desire of the pragmatists to represent, and to discover, a supposedly deeper or more comprehensive view of human nature than that implicitly acted upon by Intellectualism—a view that should provide, as they think, for the organic unity of our active and our so-called reflective tendencies. This desire is surely eminently typical of what we would like to think of as the rediscovery by Pragmatism for philosophy, of the active, or the volitional, aspects of the conscious life of man, and along with this important side of our human nature, the reality also of the activities and the purposes that are revealed in what we sometimes speak of as unconscious nature. The world we know, it would hold, in the spirit and almost in the letter of Bergson, lives and grows by experiment,[172] and by activities and processes and adjustments. Pragmatism has doubtless, as we pointed out, been prone to think of itself as the only philosophy that can bake bread, that can speak to man in terms of the actual life of effort and struggle that he seems called upon to live in the environment in which he finds himself. And, as we have just been insisting, the main ground of its hostility to Rationalism is the apparent tendency of the latter to treat the various concepts and hypotheses that have been devised to explain the world, and to render it intelligible, as if they were themselves of more importance than the real persons and the real happenings that constitute the world of our experience.[173]

If it were at all desirable to recapitulate to any extent those phenomena connected with Pragmatism that seem to indicate its rediscovery of the fact of action, and of the fact of its meaning for philosophy, as its one outstanding characteristic, we may point to such considerations as the following: (1) The fact of its having sought to advance from the stage of a mere “instrumentalist” view of human thought to that of an outspoken “humanism” or a socialized utilitarianism. (2) The fact of its seeking to leave us (as the outcome of philosophy) with all our more important “beliefs,” with a general “working” view of the world in which such things as religion and ideals and enthusiasm are adequately recognized. Pragmatism is really, as we have put it, more interested in belief than in knowledge, the former being to it the characteristic, the conquering attitude of man to the world in which he finds himself. (3) Its main object is to establish a dynamical view of reality, as that which is “everywhere in the making,” as that which signifies to every person firstly that aspect of the life of things in which he is for the time being most vitally interested.[174] (4) In the spirit of the empirical philosophy generally its main anxiety is to do the fullest justice to all the aspects of our so-called human experience, looking upon theories and systems as but points of view for the interpretation of this experience, and of the great universal life that transcends it. And proceeding upon the theory that a true metaphysic must become a true “dynamic” or a true incentive to human motive, it seeks the relationships and affiliations that have been pointed out with all the different liberating and progressive tendencies in the history of human thought. (5) It would “consult moral experience directly,” finding in the world of our ordinary moral and social effort a spiritual reality[175] that raises the individual out of and above and beyond himself. And it bears testimony in its own more or less imperfect manner to the autonomous element[176] in our human personality that, in the moral life, and in such things as religious aspiration and creative effort and social service, transcends the merely theoretical descriptions of the world with which we are familiar in the generalizations of science and of history.

Without attempting meanwhile to probe at all deeply into this pragmatist glorification of “action” and its importance to philosophy, let us think of a few of the considerations that may be urged in support of this idea from sources outside those of the mere practical tendencies and the affiliations of Pragmatism itself.

There is first of all the consideration that it is the fact of action that unites or brings together what we call “desire” and what we call “thought,” the world of our desires and emotions and the world of our thoughts and our knowledge. This is really a consideration of the utmost importance to us when we think of what we have allowed ourselves to call the characteristic dualism[177] of modern times, the discrepancy that seems to exist between the world of our desires and the impersonal world of science—which latter world educated people are apt to think of as the world before which everything else must bend and break, or at least bow. Our point here is not merely that of the humiliating truth of the wisdom of the wiseacres who used to tell us in our youth that we will anyhow have to act in spite of all our unanswered questions about things, but the plain statement of the fact that (say or think what we will) it is in conscious action that our desires and our thoughts do come together, and that it is there that they are both seen to be but partial expressions of the one reality—the life that is in things and in ourselves, and that engenders in us both emotions and thoughts, even if the latter do sometimes seem to lie “too deep for tears.” It is with this life and with the objects and aims and ends and realities that develop and sustain it that all our thoughts, as well as all our desires, are concerned. If action, therefore, could only be properly understood, if it can somehow be seen in its universal or its cosmic significance, there would be no discrepancy and no gap between the world of our ideals and the world of our thoughts. We would know what we want,[178] and we would want and desire what we know we can get—the complete development of our personality.

Again there is the evidence that exists in the sciences of biology and anthropology in support of the important role played in both animal and human evolution by effort and choice and volition and experimentation. “Already in the contractibility of protoplasm and in the activities of typical protozoons do we find ‘activities’ that imply[179] volition of some sort or degree, for there appears to be some selection of food and some spontaneity of movement: changes of direction, the taking of a circuitous course in avoidance of an obstruction, etc., indicate this.” Then again, “there are such things as the diversities in secondary sexual characters (the ‘after-thoughts of reproduction’ as they are called), the endless shift of parasites, the power of animals to alter their coloration to suit environment, and the complex ‘internal stimuli’ of the higher animals in their breeding periods and activities, which make us see only too clearly what the so-called struggle for life has been in the animal world.”...

Coming up to man let us think of what scientists point out as the effects of man’s disturbing influence in nature, and then pass from these on to the facts of anthropology in respect of the conquest of environment by what we call invention and inheritance and free initiative. “In placing invention,” says a writer of to-day in a recent brilliant book, “at the bottom of the scale of conditions [i.e. of the conditions of social development], I definitely break with the opinion that human evolution is throughout a purely natural process.... It is pre-eminently an artificial construction.”[180] Now it requires but the reflection of a moment or two upon considerations such as the foregoing, and upon the attested facts of history as to the breaking up of the tyranny of habit and custom by the force of reflection and free action and free initiative, to grasp how really great should be the significance to philosophy of the active and the volitional nature of man that is thus demonstrably at the root not only of our progress, but of civilization itself.

If it be objected that while there cannot, indeed, from the point of view of the general culture and civilization of mankind, be any question of the importance to philosophy of the active effort and of the active thought that underlie this stupendous achievement, the case is perhaps somewhat different when we try to think of the pragmatist glorification of our human action from the point of view of the (physical?) universe as a whole.[181] To this reflection it is possible here to say but one or two things. Firstly, there is apparently at present no warrant in science for seeking to separate off this human life of ours from the evolution of animal life in general.[182] Equally little is there any warrant for separating the evolution of living matter from the evolution of what we call inanimate matter, not to speak of the initial difficulty of accounting for things like energy and radio-active matter, and the evolution and the devolution that are calmly claimed by science to be involved in the various “systems” within the universe—apart from an ordering and intelligent mind and will. There is therefore, so far, no necessary presumption against the idea of regarding human evolution as at least in some sense a continuation or development of the life that seems to pervade the universe in general. And then, secondly, there is the familiar reflection that nearly all that we think we know about the universe as a whole is but an interpretation of it in terms of the life and the energy that we experience in ourselves and in terms of some of the apparent conditions of this life and this energy. For as Bergson reminds us, “As thinking beings we may apply the laws of our physics to our world, and extend them to each of the worlds taken separately, but nothing tells us that they apply to the entire universe nor even that such affirmation has any meaning; for the universe is not made but is being made continually. It is growing perhaps indefinitely by the addition of new worlds.”[183]

On the ground, then, both of science and of philosophy[184] may it be definitely said that this human action of ours, as apparently the highest outcome of the forces of nature, becomes only too naturally and only too inevitably the highest object of our reflective consideration. As Schopenhauer put it long ago, the human body is the only object in nature that we know “on the inside.” And do or think what we will, it is this human life of ours and this mind of ours that have peopled the world of science and the world of philosophy with all the categories and all the distinctions that obtain there, with concepts like the “(Platonic) Ideas,” “form,” “matter,” “energy,” “ether,” “atom,” “substance,” “the individual,” “the universal,” “empty space,” “eternity,” “the Absolute,” “value,” “final end,” and so on.

There is much doubtless in this action philosophy, and much too in the matter of the reasons that may be brought forward in its support, that can become credible and intelligible only as we proceed. But it must all count, it would seem, in support of the idea of the pragmatist rediscovery, for philosophy, of the importance of our creative action and of our creative thought. And then there are one or two additional general considerations of which we may well think in the same connexion.

Pragmatism boasts, as we know, of being a highly democratic[185] doctrine, of contending for the emancipation of the individual and his interests from the tyranny of all kinds of absolutism, and all kinds of dogmatism (whether philosophical, or scientific, or social). No system either of thought or of practice, no supposed “world-view” of things, no body of scientific laws or abstract truths shall, as long as it holds the field of our attention, entirely crush out of existence the concrete interests and the free self-development of the individual human being.

A tendency in this direction exists, it must be admitted, in the “determinism” both of natural science and of Hegelianism, and of the social philosophy that has emanated from the one or from the other. Pragmatism, on the contrary, in all matters of the supposed determination, or the attempted limitation, of the individual by what has been accomplished either in Nature or in human history, would incline to what we generally speak of to-day as a “modernistic,” or a “liberalistic,” or even a “revolutionary,” attitude. It would reinterpret and reconstruct, in the light of the present and its needs, not only the concepts and the methods of science and philosophy, but also the various institutions and the various social practices of mankind.[186]

Similarily Pragmatism would protest, as does the newer education and the newer sociology, against any merely doctrinaire (or “intellectualistic”) conception of education and culture, substituting in its place the “efficiency” or the “social service”[187] conception. And even if we must admit that this more or less practical ideal of education has been over-emphasized in our time, it is still true, as with Goethe, that it is only the “actively-free” man, the man who can work out in service and true accomplishment the ideal of human life, whose production should be regarded as the aim of a sound educational or social policy.

We shall later attempt to assign some definite reasons for the failure of Pragmatism to make the most of all this apparently justifiable insistence upon action and upon the creative activity of the individual, along with all this sympathy that it seems to evince for a progressive and a liberationist view of human policy.

Meantime, in view of all these considerations, we cannot avoid making the reflection that it is surely something of an anomaly in philosophy that a thinker’s “study” doubts about his actions and about some of the main instinctive beliefs of mankind (in which he himself shares) should have come to be regarded—as they have been by Rationalism—as considerations of a greater importance than the actions, and the beliefs, and the realities, of which they are the expression. Far be it from the writer to suggest that the suspension of judgment and the refraining from activity,[188] in the absence of adequate reason and motive, are not, and have not been of the greatest value to mankind in the matter of the development of the higher faculties and the higher ideals of the mind. There may well be, however, for Pragmatism, or for any philosophy that can work it out satisfactorily, in the free, creative, activity of man, in the duty that lies upon us all of carrying on our lives to the highest expression, a reason and a truth that must be estimated at their logical worth along with the many other reasons and truths of which we are pleased to think as the truth of things.

Short, however, of a more genuine attempt on the part of Pragmatism than anything it has as yet given us in this connexion to justify this higher reason and truth that are embodied in our consciousness of ourselves as persons, as rational agents, all its mere “practicalism” and all its “instrumentalism” are but the workaday and the utilitarian philosophy of which we have already complained in its earlier and cruder professions.[189]

After some attention, then, to the matter of the outstanding critical defects of Pragmatism, in its preliminary and cruder forms, we shall again return to our topic of the relatively new subject-matter it has been endeavouring to place before philosophy in its insistence upon the importance of action, and upon the need of a “dynamic,” instead of an intellectualistic and “spectator-like” theory of human personality.

APPENDIX TO CHAPTER IV
PHILOSOPHY AND THE ACTIVITY-EXPERIENCE

[In an article upon the above title in the International Journal of Ethics, p. 1898, I attempted to deal with some aspects of the problem that I have just raised in the preceding chapter. I venture to append here some of the statements that I made then upon the importance of action and the “activity-experience” to the philosophy of to-day. I am inclined to regard them (although I have not looked at them until the present moment of passing this book through the press) as a kind of anticipation and confirmation of many of my present pages. Part of my excuse, however, for inserting them here is a hope that these references and suggestions may possibly be of service to the general reader. The extracts follow as they were printed.]

I. It requires no very profound acquaintance with the trend of the literature of general and specialized philosophy of the last twenty-five years to detect a decidedly practical turn in the recent speculative tendencies of philosophy and philosophers. The older conception of philosophy or metaphysics as an attempt to state (more or less systematically) the value of the world for thought is being slowly modified, if not altogether disappearing, into the attempt to explain or to grasp the significance of the world from the stand-point of the moral and social activity of man. The philosophical student must be to some extent conscious of the difference in respect of both tone and subject-matter between such books as Stirling’s Secret of Hegel, E. Caird’s Critical Philosophy of Kant (the first editions of both works), Green’s Prolegomena to Ethics, and the most recent essays and books of Professors A. Seth[190] and James[191] and Ward[192] and Sidgwick[193] and Baldwin,[194] and of Mr. Bosanquet[195] and the late Mr. Nettleship,[196] and between—to turn to Germany—the writings of Erdmann and Kuno Fischer and Zeller and F. A. Lange, and those of Gizycki, Paulsen, Windelband, Eucken, Hartmann, Deussen, Simmel, and—in France—between the writings of Renouvier and Pillon and Ravaisson, the “Neo-Kantianism” of the Critique Philosophique (1872–1877), and those of Fouillée, Weber (of Strassburg), Séailles, Dunan, and others, and of general writers like de Vogüé, Desjardins, and Brunetière, and of social philosophers like Bouglé, Tarde, Izoulet, and so on. The change of venue in these writers alone, not to speak of the change of the interest of the educated world from such books as Huxley’s Hume and Renan’s L’Avenir de la Science and Du Bois Reymond’s Die Sieben Welträthsel, and Tyndall’s Belfast Address, to the writings of Herbert Spencer (the Sociology and the general essays on social evolution), Kidd, Nordau, Nietzsche, Mr. Crozier (his important History of Civilization), and Demolins,[197] and the predominance of investigations into general biology and comparative psychology and sociology over merely logical and conceptual philosophy seem to afford us some warrant for trying to think of what might be called a newer or ethical idealism, an idealism of the will, an idealism of life, in contradistinction to the older or intellectual (epistemological, Neo-Kantian) idealism, the idealism of the intellect. Professor A. Seth,[198] in his recent volume on Man’s Place in the Cosmos, suggests that Mr. Bradley’s treatise on Appearance and Reality has closed the period of the absorption or assimilation of Kanto-Hegelian principles by the English mind. And there is ample evidence in contemporary philosophical literature to show that even the very men who have, with the help of Stirling and Green and Caird and Bradley and Wallace, “absorbed and assimilated” the principles of critical idealism are now bent upon applying these principles to the solution of concrete problems of art and life and conduct. Two things alone would constitute a difference between the philosophy of the last few years and that of the preceding generation: An attempt (strongly[199] accentuated at the present moment) to include elements of feeling and will in our final consciousness of reality, and a tendency (inevitable since Comte and Hegel’s Philosophy of History) to extend the philosophical synthesis of the merely “external,” or physical, universe so as to make it include the world of man’s action and the world that is now glibly called the “social organism.”[200] A good deal of the epistemological and metaphysical philosophy of this century has been merely cosmological, and at best psychological and individualistic. The philosophy of the present is, necessarily, to a large extent, sociological and collectivistic and historical. Renan once prophesied that this would be so. And many other men perceived the same fact and acted upon their perception of it—Goethe and Victor Hugo and Carlyle, for example.

To be sure, any attempt to draw lines of novel and absolute separation between writers of to-day and their immediate predecessors would be absurd and impossible, just as would be the attempt to force men who are still living and thinking and developing, into Procrustean beds of system and nomenclature. The history of the philosophy of the last half of this century constitutes a development as continuous and as logical as the philosophy of any similar period of years wherein men have thought persistently and truly upon the problems of life and mind. There were in the ’sixties men like Ulrici and Lotze (Renouvier, too, to some extent) who divined the limitations of a merely intellectual philosophy, and who saw clearly that the only way to effect a reconciliation between philosophy and science would be to apply philosophy itself to the problems of the life and thought of the time, just as we find, in 1893, Dr. Edward Caird writing, in his Essays on Literature and Philosophy, that “philosophy, in face of the increasing complexity of modern life, has a harder task laid upon it than ever was laid upon it before. It must emerge from the region of abstract principles and show itself able to deal with the manifold results of empirical science, giving to each of them its proper place and value.” Professor Campbell Fraser, while welcoming and sympathetically referring to (in his books upon Berkeley and Locke) the elements of positive value in English and German idealism, has throughout his life contended for the idea (expressed with greatest definiteness in his Gifford Lectures on The Philosophy of Theism) that “in man, as a self-conscious and self-determining agent,” is to be found the “best key we possess to the solution of the ultimate problem of the universe”; while Professor Sidgwick, by virtue of his captivating and ingenious pertinacity in confining philosophical speculation to the lines of the traditional English empiricism, and in keeping it free from the ensnaring subtleties of system and methodology, has exercised a healthful and corrective influence against the extremes alike of transcendentalism and naturalism. And it would be rash to maintain that all the younger men in philosophy show an intention to act upon the idea (expressed by Wundt, for instance, in his Ethik) that a metaphysic should build upon the facts of the moral life of man; although we find a “Neo-Hegelian” like Professor Mackenzie[201] saying that “even the wealth of our inner life depends rather on the width of our objective interests than on the intensity of our self-contemplation”; and an expounder of the ethics of dialectic evolution like Professor Muirhead quoting[202] with approval the thought expressed by George Eliot in the words, “The great world-struggle of developing thought is continually foreshadowed in the struggle of the affections seeking a justification for love and hope”; and a careful psychologist like Mr. Stout[203] deliberately penning the words,[204] “Our existence as conscious beings is essentially an activity, and activity is a process which, by its very nature, is directed towards an end, and can neither exist nor be conceived apart from this end.” There are, doubtless, many philosophers of to-day who are convinced that philosophy is purely an intellectual matter, and can never be anything else than an attempt to analyze the world for thought—an attempt to state its value in the terms of thought. Against all these and many similar considerations it would be idle to set up a hard and fast codification or characterization of the work of the philosophy or philosophers of to-day. Still, the world will accord the name of philosopher to any man—Renan, for example, or Spencer or Huxley or Nordau or Nietzsche—who comes before it with views upon the universe and humanity that may, for any conceivable reason, be regarded as fundamental. And on this showing of things, as well as from many indications in the work of those who are philosophers by profession, it may be said that the predominating note of the newer philosophy is its openness to the facts of the volitional and emotional and moral and social aspects of man’s life, as things that take us further along the path of truth than the mere categories of thought and their manipulation by metaphysic and epistemology.

II. The Newer Idealism does not dream of questioning the positive work of the Kantian and Neo-Kantian and Neo-Hegelian idealists. It knows only too well that even scientific men like Helmholtz and Du Bois Reymond, that “positive” philosophers like Riehl and Laas and Feuerbach and others have, through the influence of the Kantian philosophy, learned and accepted the fact of there being “ideal” or psychical or “mind-supplied” factors in so-called external reality. There are among the educated men of to-day very few Dr. Johnsons who ridicule the psycho-physical, or the metaphysical, analysis of external reality, who believe in a crass and crude and self-sufficient “matter” utterly devoid of psychical attributes or characteristics. True, Herbert Spencer has written words to the effect that “If the Idealist (Berkeley) is right, then the doctrine of Evolution is a dream”; but then everything in Spencer’s philosophy about an “actuality lying behind appearances” and about our being compelled “to regard every phenomenon as a manifestation of some Power by which we are acted upon,” is against the possibility of our believing that, according to that philosophy, an unconscious and non-spiritual “matter” could evolve itself into conscious life and moral experience. The philosophers of to-day have indeed rejoiced to see Kant’s lesson popularized by such various phases and movements of human thought as psychophysical research, art and æsthetic theory, the interest in Buddhism (with its idealistic theory of the knowledge of the senses), and the speculative biology of Weismann and others. That people generally should see that matter is, for many reasons, something more than mere matter, is to the student of Kant a piece of fulfilled prophecy. And by a plea for a return to reality and life and sociability from conceptualism and criticism and speculative individualism no philosophical scholar for one moment contemplates, as even conceivable, an overlooking of the idealistic interpretation of the data of the senses supplied by Locke and Berkeley and Hume, or of the idealistic interpretation of the data of science and understanding supplied by Kant’s “Copernican” discovery. Any real view of the universe must now presuppose the melting down of crass external reality into the phenomena of sense and experience and the transformation of inorganic and organic nature into so many planes or grades of being expressive of the different forms (gravitation, cohesion, vital force, psychic force) in which cosmic energy manifests itself.

Equally little does the Newer Idealism question the legitimacy or the actual positive service of the “dialectic” of Hegel (as Archimedean a leverage to humanity as was the “concept” of Socrates or the “apperception” of Kant) that has shown the world to be a system in which everything is related to everything else, and shown, too, that all ways of looking at reality that stop short of the truths of personality and moral relationship are untrue and inadequate. To use the words of Professor Howison, of California, in the preface to the first edition of Professor Watson’s[205] latest volume (a book that connects the idealism of Glasgow and Oxford with the convictions of the youth of the “Pacific Coast”), the “dominant tone” of the militant and representative philosophy of to-day, is “affirmative and idealistic. The decided majority ... are animated by the conviction that human thought is able to solve the riddle of life positively; to solve it in accord with the ideal hopes and interests of human nature.”

CHAPTER V
CRITICAL

Enough has perhaps now been said by way of an indication of some of the main characteristics of Pragmatism, and of the matter of its relations to ordinary and to philosophical thinking. Its complexity and some of its confusions and some of its difficulties have also been referred to.

As for the affiliations and the associations of Pragmatism, it would seem that it rests not so much upon its own mere instrumentalism and practicalism as upon some of the many broader and deeper tendencies in ancient and modern thought that have aimed at a dynamic, instead of a static, interpretation of reality.

We have suggested, too, that there are evidently things in traditional philosophy and in Rationalism of which it fails to take cognizance, although it has evidently many things to give to Rationalism in the way of a constructive philosophy of human life.

Now it would be easily possible to continue our study of Pragmatism along some or all of those different lines and points of view. In the matter, for example, of the affiliations and associations of Pragmatism, we could show that, in addition to such things as the “nominalism” and the utilitarianism, and the positivism, and the “voluntarism” and the philosophy of hypotheses, and the “anti-intellectualism” already referred to, Pragmatism has an affinity with things as far apart and as different as the Scottish Philosophy of Common-sense, the sociological philosophy of Comte and his followers, the philosophy of Fichte with its great idea of the world as the “sensualized sphere” of our duty, the “experience” philosophy of Bacon and of the entire modern era, and so on. There is even a “romantic” element in Pragmatism, and it has, in fact, been called “romantic utilitarianism.”[206] We can understand this if we think of M. Berthelot’s[207] association of it not only with Poincaré, but with Nietzsche, or of Dr. Schiller’s famous declaration that the genius of a man’s logical method should be loved and reverenced by him as is “his bride.”

And there is always in it, to be sure, the important element of sympathy with the religious instincts of mankind. And this is the case, too, whether these instincts are contemplated in some of the forms to which reference has already been made, or in the form, say, expressed by such a typical modern thinker as the late Henry Sidgwick, in his conviction that “Humanity will not, and cannot, acquiesce in a Godless world.”[208]

Then again we might take up the point of the relations of Pragmatism to doctrines new and old in the history of philosophy, to the main points of departure of different schools of thought, or to fundamental and important positions in many of the great philosophers. The writer finds that he has noticed in this connexion the doctrines of Stoicism and Epicureanism,[209] the “probability” philosophy of Locke[210] and Butler, and Pascal, the ethics and the natural theology of Cicero, the “voluntarism” of Schopenhauer,[211] Aristotle’s philosophy of the Practical Reason,[212] Kant’s philosophy of the same, the religious philosophy of theologians like Tertullian, Augustine, Duns Scotus, and so on—to take only a few instances.[213] The view of man and his nature represented by all these names is, in the main, an essentially practical, a concrete, and a moral view as opposed to an abstract and a rationalistic view. And of course even to Plato knowledge was only an element in the total spiritual philosophy of man, while his master, Socrates, never really seemed to make any separation between moral and intellectual inquiries.

And as for positions in the great philosophers between which and some of the tendencies of Pragmatism there is more than a merely superficial agreement, we might instance, for example, the tendency of Hume[214] to reduce many of the leading categories of our thought to mere habits of mind, to be explained on an instinctive rather than a rationalistic basis; or Comte’s idea of the error of separating reason from instinct;[215] or the idea of de Maistre and Bain, and many others that “will” is implied in the notion of “exteriority”; or the idea of Descartes[216] that the senses teach us not so much “what is in reality in things,” as “what is beneficial[217] or hurtful to the composite whole of mind and body”; or the declaration of Kant that the chief end of metaphysic is God and immortality; or the idea of Spencer[218] that the belief in the unqualified supremacy of reason is a superstition of philosophers; or the idea of Plato in the Sophist[219] that reality is the capacity for acting or of being acted upon; and so on.

As for such further confirmation of pragmatist teaching as is to be found in typical modern thinking and scholars, thought of almost at random, it would be easy to quote in this connexion from writers as diverse as Höffding, Fouillée, Simmel, Wundt, Mach, Huxley, Hobhouse, and many others. It might be called a typically pragmatist idea, for example, on the part of Mr. L. T. Hobhouse to hold that “The higher conceptions by which idealism has so firmly held are not to be ‘scientifically’ treated in the sense of being explained away. What is genuinely higher we have ... good reason to think must also be truest,” and we “cannot permanently acquiesce in a way of thinking what would resolve it into what is lowest.”[220] These last words represent almost a commonplace of the thought of the day. It is held, for example, by men as different and as far apart in their work, and yet as typical of phases of our modern life, as Robert Browning and Sir Oliver Lodge. The close dependence again of the doctrines of any science upon the social life and the prevalent thought of the generation is also essentially a pragmatist idea. Its truth is recognized and insisted upon in the most explicit manner in the recent serviceable manifesto of Professors Geddes and Thomson upon “Evolution,”[221] and it obviously affects their whole philosophy of life and mind. It figures too quite prominently in the valuable short Introduction to Science by Professor Thomson in the same series of manuals.

Another typical book of to-day, again (that of Professor Duncan on the New Knowledge of the new physical science), definitely gives up, for example, the “correspondence”[222] notion of truth, holding that it is meaningless to think of reality as something outside our thought and our experience of which our ideas might be a possible duplicate. This again we readily recognize as an essentially pragmatist contention. So also is the same writer’s rejection of the notion of “absolute truth,”[223] and his confession of the “faith” that is always involved in the thought of completeness or system in our scientific knowledge. “We believe purely as an act of faith and not at all of logic,” he says, “that the universe is essentially determinable thousands of years hence, into some one system which will account for everything and which will be the truth.”[224]

Nor would it be at all difficult to find confirmation for the pragmatist philosophy of ideas and thoughts in what we may well think of as the general reflective literature of our time, outside the sphere, as it were, of strictly rational or academic philosophy—in writers like F. D. Maurice, W. Pater, A. W. Benn (who otherwise depreciates what he calls “ophelism”), J. H. Newman, Karl Pearson, Carlyle, and others.[225] Take the following, for example, quoted with approval from Herschel by Karl Pearson: “The grand and indeed the only character of truth is its capability of enduring the test of universal experience, and coming unchanged out of every possible form of fair discussion.”[226] The idea again, for example, recently expressed in a public article by such a widely read and cleverly perverse writer as Mr. Bernard Shaw,[227] that “the will that moves us is dogmatic: our brain is only the very imperfect instrument by which we devise practical means for satisfying the will,” might only too naturally be associated with the pragmatist-like anti-intellectualism[228] of Bergson, or, for that part of it, with the deeper “voluntarism” of Schopenhauer. The following quotation taken from Mr. Pater reveals how great may be correspondence between the independent findings of a finely sensitive mind like his, and the positions to which the pragmatists are inclined in respect of the psychology of religious belief. “The supposed facts on which Christianity rests, utterly incapable as they have become of any ordinary test, seem to me matter of very much the same sort of assent as we give to any assumption in the strict and ultimate sense, moral. The question whether these facts were real will, I think, always continue to be what I should call one of those natural questions of the human mind.”[229] Readers of Carlyle will easily recognize what we might call a more generalized statement of this same truth of Pater’s in the often-quoted words from Heroes and Hero-Worship:[230] “By religion I do not mean the church creed which a man professes, the articles of faith which.... But the thing a man does practically believe (and this often enough without asserting it even to himself, much less to others); the thing a man does practically lay to heart and know for certain concerning his vital relations to the mysterious universe, and his duty and destiny there.” It has long seemed to the writer that a similar thing to this might be written (and James has certainly written it) about a man’s “philosophy” as necessarily inclusive of his working beliefs as well as of his mere reasoned opinions, although it is the latter that are generally (by what right?) taken to be properly the subject-matter of philosophy.[231] And it is this phase of the pragmatist philosophy that could, I am inclined to think, be most readily illustrated from the opinions of various living and dead writers upon the general working philosophy of human nature as we find this revealed in human history. We are told, for example, by Mr. Hobhouse, in his monumental work upon Morals in Evolution, that in “Taoism the supreme principle of things may be left undefined as something that we experience in ourselves if we throw ourselves upon it, but which we know rather by following or living it than by any process of ratiocination.”[232] And “this mystical interpretation,” he adds, “is not confined to Taoism, but in one form or another lies near to hand to all spiritual religions, and expresses one mode of religious consciousness, its aspiration to reach the heart of things and the confidence that it has done so, and found rest there.”

We are reminded, of course, by all such considerations of the philosophy of Bergson, and of its brilliant attempt to make a synthesis of intuition or instinct with reflection or thought, and indeed it may well be that the past difficulties of philosophy with intuition and instinct are due to the fact of its error in unduly separating the intellect from the “will to live,” and from the “creative” evolution that have been such integral factors in the evolution of the life of humanity.

This entire matter, however, of the comparison of pragmatist doctrines to typical tendencies in the thought of the past and the present must be treated by us as subordinate to our main purpose, that of the estimation of the place of Pragmatism in the constructive thought of the present time. With a view to this it will be necessary to revert to the criticism of Pragmatism.

The criticism that has already been made is that in the main Pragmatism is unsystematic and complex and confusing, that it has no adequate theory of “reality,” and no unified theory of philosophy, that it has no satisfactory criterion of the “consequences” by which it proposes to test truth, and that it has not worked out its philosophy of the contribution of the individual with his “activity” and his “purposes” to “reality” generally, and that it is in danger of being a failure in the realm of ethics.[233]

To all this we shall now seek to add a few words more upon (1) the pragmatist criterion of truth, (2) the weakness of Pragmatism in the realms of logic and theory of knowledge, (3) its failure to give consistent account of the nature of reality, and (4) its unsatisfactoriness in the realm of ethics.

(1) We have already expressed our agreement with the finding of Professor Pratt[234] that the pragmatist theory of truth amounts to no more than the harmless doctrine that the meaning of any conception expresses itself in the past, present, or future conduct or experiences of actual, or possible, sentient creatures. Taken literally, however, the doctrine that truth should be tested by consequences is not only harmless but also useless, seeing that Omniscience alone could bring together in thought or in imagination all the consequences of an assertion. Again, it is literally false for the reason that the proof of truth is not in the first instance any kind of “consequences,” not even the “verification” of which pragmatists are so fond. If the truth of which we may happen to be thinking is truth of “fact,” its proof lies in its correspondence (despite the difficulties[235] of the idea) with the results of observation or perception.[236] And if it be inferential truth, its proof is that of its deduction from previously established truths, or facts, upon a certain plane of knowledge or experience. In short, Pragmatists forget altogether the logical doctrine of the existence (in the world of our human experience, of course) of different established planes of reality, or planes of ascertained knowledge in which all propositions that are not nonsensical or trivial, are, from their very inception, regarded as necessarily true or false. The existence of these various planes of experience or of thought is in fact implied in the pragmatist doctrine of the fundamental character of belief.[237] According to this perfectly correct doctrine, the objectivity of truth (i.e. its reality or non-reality in the world of fact or in the world of rational discourse) is the essential thing about it, while the idea of its “consequences” is not. A truth is a proposition whose validity has already been established by evidence or by demonstration. It has then afterwards the immediate “utility” of expressing in an intelligible and convenient manner the fact of certain connexions among things or events. And its ultimate utility to mankind is also at the same time assured, humanity being by its very nature a society of persons who must act, and who act, upon what they believe to be the truth or the reality of things. But a proposition is by no means true because it is useful. Constantine believed eminently in the concord-producing utility of certain confessions enunciated at the Council of Nice, but his belief in this does not prove their truth or reality outside the convictions of the faithful. Nor does the pragmatist or utilitarian character of certain portions of the writings of the Old Testament or of the Koran prove the matter of their literal and factual truth in the ordinary sense of these terms. As Hume said, “When any opinion leads us into absurdities ’tis certainly false, but ’tis not certain that an opinion is false because it has dangerous consequences.”

And then, apart from this conspicuous absence of logic in the views of pragmatists upon “truth,” the expression of their doctrine is so confusing that it is almost impossible to extract any consistent meaning out of it. They are continually confounding conceptions and ideas and propositions, forgetful of the fact that truth resides not in concepts and ideas but only in propositions. While it may be indeed true, as against Rationalism, that all human conceptions whatsoever [and it is only in connexion with “conceptions” that Pragmatism is defined even in such an official place as Baldwin’s Dictionary of Philosophy[238]] have, and must have, reference to actual or possible human experience or consequences, it is by no means true that the test of a proposition is anything other than the evidence of which we have already spoken.

Then the pragmatists have never adequately defined terms that are so essential to their purposes as “practical,” “truth,” “fact,” “reality,” “consequences,” and they confound, too, “theories” with “truths” and “concepts” just as they confound concepts and propositions.

(2) That logic and the theory of proof is thus one of the weak spots of Pragmatism has perhaps then been sufficiently indicated. We have seen, in fact, the readiness of Pragmatism to confess its inability[239] to prove its own philosophy—that is, to prove it in the ordinary sense of the term.[240] That it should have made this confession is, of course, only in keeping with the fact that its interest in logic is confined to such subordinate topics as the framing and verification of hypotheses, the development of concepts and judgments in the “thought-process,” and so on. Of complete proof, as involving both deduction and induction, it takes but the scantiest recognition. And it has made almost no effort to connect its discoveries in “genetic logic” and in the theory of hypotheses with the traditional body of logical doctrine.[241] Nor, as may perhaps be inferred from the preceding paragraph, has it made any serious attempt to consider the question of the discovery of new truth in relation to the more or less perfectly formulated systems and schemes of truth already in the possession of mankind.

The case is similar in regard to the “theory of knowledge” of the pragmatists. While they have made many important suggestions regarding the relation of all the main categories and principles of our human thought to the theoretical and practical needs of mankind, there is in their teachings little that is satisfactory and explicit in the matter of the systematization of first principles,[242] and little too that is satisfactory in respect of the relation of knowledge to reality. They sometimes admit (with James) the importance of general points of view like the “causal,” the “temporal,” “end,” and “purpose,” and so on. At other times they confess with Schiller that questions about ultimate truth and ultimate reality cannot be allowed to weigh upon our spirits, seeing that “actual knowing” always starts from the “existing situation.”

Now of course actual knowing certainly does start from the particular case of the existing situation, but, as all thinkers from Aristotle to Hume have seen, it is by no means explained by this existing situation. In real knowledge this is always made intelligible by references to points of view and to experiences that altogether transcend it. The true theory of knowledge, in short, involves the familiar Kantian distinction between the “origin” and the “validity” of knowledge—a thing that the pragmatists seem continually and deliberately to ignore. Schiller, to be sure, reminds us with justice that we must endeavour to “connect,” rather than invariably “contrast,” the two terms of this distinction. But this again is by no means what the pragmatists themselves have done. They fail, in fact, to connect their hints about the practical or experimental origin of most of our points of view about reality with the problem of the validity of first principles generally.

There is a suggestion here and there in their writings that, as Schiller[243] puts it, there can be no coherent system of postulates except as rooted in personality, and that there are postulates at every stage of our development. What this statement means is that there are “points of view” about reality that are incidental to the stage of our natural life (as beings among other beings), others to the stage of conscious sensations and feelings, still others to that of our desires and thoughts, to our aesthetic appreciation, to our moral life, and so on. But, as I have already said, there is little attempt on the part of the pragmatists to distinguish these different stages or planes of experience adequately from one another.

(3) References have already been made to the failures of our Anglo-American pragmatists to attain to any intelligible and consistent kind of reality, whether they conceive of this latter as the sum-total of the efforts of aspiring and achieving human beings, or with Schiller as an “original, plastic sub-stratum,” or as the reality (whatever it is) that is gradually being brought into being by the creative efforts of ourselves and of beings higher or lower than ourselves in the scale of existence. Their deepest thought in the matter seems to be that the universe (our universe?) is essentially “incomplete,” and that the truth of God, as James puts it, “has to run the gauntlet of other truths.” One student of this topic, Professor Leighton, has arrived at the conclusion that pragmatism is essentially “acosmistic,”[244] meaning, no doubt, and with good reason, that Pragmatism has no place of any kind for objective order or system. Now it is just this palpable lack of an “objective,” or rational, order that renders the whole pragmatist philosophy liable to the charges of (1) “subjectivism,” and (2) irrationality. There are in it, as we have tried to point out, abundant hints of what reality must be construed to be on the principles of any workable or credible philosophy, namely something that stimulates both our thought and our endeavour. And there is in it the great truth that in action we are not only in contact with reality as such, but with a reality, moreover, that transcends the imperfect reality of our lives as finite individuals and the imperfect character of our limited effort and struggle. But beyond the vague hints that our efforts must somehow count in the final tale of reality, and that what the world of experience seems to be, it must somehow be conceived ultimately to be, there is no standing-ground in the entire pragmatist philosophy for want of what, in plain English, must be termed an intelligible theory of reality. “You see,” says James, “how differently people take things. The world we live in exists diffused and distributed in the form of an indefinitely numerous lot of eaches, coherent in all sorts of ways and degrees; and the tough-minded are perfectly willing to take them at that valuation. They can stand the world, their temper being well adapted to its insecurity.”[245]

The present writer, some years ago, in an article in Mind,[246] ventured to point out the absurdity of expecting the public to believe in a philosophy which sometimes speaks as if we could now, to-day, by our efforts begin to make the world something different from what it is or what it has been. “As far as the past facts go,” so James put it in 1899, “there is indeed no difference. These facts are bagged (is not the phraseology too recklessly sporting?), are captured, and the good that’s in them is gained, be the atoms, be the God their cause.” And again, “Theism and materialism, so indifferent when taken retrospectively [?], point, when we take them prospectively, to wholly different, practical consequences, to opposite outlooks of experience.” And again, “But I say that such an alternation of feelings, reasonable enough in a consciousness that is prospective, as ours now is, and whose world is partly yet to come, would be absolutely senseless (!) and irrational in a purely retrospective consciousness summing up a world already past.” Now on what theory of things is it that the future of the world and our future may be affected by ideal elements and factors (God, Freedom, Recompense, Justice) without having been so affected or determined in the past?[247]

(4) The unsatisfactoriness of Pragmatism in the realm of ethics. Crucial and hopeless as is the failure of Pragmatism in the realm of ethics, a word or two had better be said of the right of the critic to judge of it in this connexion. In the first place, the thinking public has already expressed its distrust of a doctrine that scruples not to avow its affinity with utilitarianism, with the idea of testing truth and value by mere consequences and by the idea of the useful. “The word ‘expedient,’” wrote a correspondent to Professor James, “has no other meaning than that of self-interest. The pursuit of this has ended by landing a number of officers of national banks in penitentiaries. A philosophy that leads to such results must be unsound.”

Then again, Professor Dewey (now doubtless the foremost living pragmatist) is the joint author of a book upon ethics, the most prominent feature of which is the application of pragmatist-like methods and principles to moral philosophy. This book sums up, too, a great many previous illuminating discussions of his own upon ethical and educational problems, for all of which, and for its general application of the principles of Humanism to the realm of morals he has deservedly won the praise of Professor James himself. So we have thus the warrant both of the public and of Dewey and James for seeking to judge Pragmatism from the point of view of moral philosophy.

Another justification for seeking to judge of Pragmatism from the point of view of moral philosophy is that the whole weight of its “humanism” and of its “valuation” philosophy must inevitably fall upon its view of the moral judgment. Dr. Schiller, we have seen, is quite explicit in his opinion that for Humanism the roots of metaphysics “lie, and must lie,” in ethics. And this is all the more the case, as it were, on account of the proclamation[248] by Pragmatism of the inability of Intellectualism to understand morality, and also on account of its recurring contention in respect of the merely hypothetical character of all intellectual truth.

Now, unfortunately for Pragmatism, the one thing that the otherwise illuminating book of Dewey and Tufts almost completely fails to do, as the writer has already sought to indicate, is to provide a theory of the ordinary distinction between right and wrong.[249] The only theme that is really successfully pursued in this typically American book is the “constant discovery, formation, and re-formation of the ‘self’ in the ‘ends’ which an individual is called upon to sustain and develop in virtue of his membership of a ‘social whole.’” But this is obviously a study in “genetic psychology,” or in the psychology of ethics, but by no means a study in the theory of ethics. “The controlling principle,” it characteristically tells us, “of the deliberation which renders possible the formation of a voluntary or socialized self out of our original instinctive impulses is the love of the objects which make this transformation possible.” But what is it, we wish to know, that distinguished the objects that make this transformation possible from the objects that do not do so? The only answer that we can see in the book is that anything is “moral” which makes possible a “transition from individualism to efficient social personality”—-obviously again a purely sociological point of view, leaving the question of the standard of efficiency quite open. The whole tendency, in short, of the pragmatist treatment of ethical principles is to the effect that standards and theories of conduct are valuable only in so far as they are, to a certain extent, “fruitful” in giving us a certain “surveying power” in the perplexities and uncertainties of “direct personal behaviour.” They are all, in other words, merely relative or useful, and none of them is absolute and authoritative. It is this last thing, however, that is the real desideratum of ethical theory. And so far as practice is concerned, all that this Pragmatism or “Relativism” in morals inevitably leads to is the conclusion that whatever brings about a change, or a result, or a “new formation,” or a new “development” of the moral situation, is necessarily moral, that “growth” and “liberation” and “fruitfulness,” and “experimentation” are everything, and moral scruples and conscience simply nothing. In the celebrated phrase of Nietzsche, “Everything is permissible and nothing is true or binding.”

Is not, then, this would-be ethical phase of Pragmatism just too modernistic, too merely practical, too merely illuminative and enlightening? And would it not be better for the youth of America (for Dewey’s book is in the American Science Series) and other countries to learn that not everything “practical” and “formative” and “liberative” and “socializing” is moral in the strict sense of the term?[250] In saying this I am, of course, giving but a very imperfect idea of the contents of a book which is, in many respects, both epoch-marking and epoch-making. It is, however, unfortunately, in some respects, only too much in touch with “present facts and tendencies,” with the regrettable tendency of the hour, for example, to justify as right any conduct that momentarily “improves the situation,” or that “liberates the activities” of the parties concerned in it. It is not enough, in other words (and this is all, I am inclined to think, that Pragmatism can do in morals), to set up a somewhat suggestive picture of the “life of the moral man in our present transitional” and would-be “constructive” age. A moral man does not merely, in common parlance, “keep up with the procession,” going in for its endless “formations” and “re-formations.” He seeks to “lead” it, and this leading of men, this setting up of a standard of the legitimacy or of the illegitimacy of certain social experiments is just what Pragmatism cannot do in morals.

It is otherwise, doubtless, with a true humanism, or with the humanism that Pragmatism is endeavouring to become.

CHAPTER VI
PRAGMATISM AS HUMANISM

In spite of the objections that have been brought in the preceding chapters against Pragmatism as Instrumentalism and Practicalism, the great thing about Pragmatism as the Humanism that it is tending to become is the position that it virtually occupies in respect of the ethical and the personal factors that enter into all our notions about final truth. To Pragmatism the importance of these factors in this connexion is apparent from the outset, it being to it the merest truism that by final truth we cannot mean “truth” existing on its own account, but rather the truth of the world as inclusive of man and his purposes. For so much it stands by its very letter as well as by its spirit. And if we can find any confirmation for this attitude in some of the concessions of the rationalists that have been previously mentioned, so much the better, as it were, for Pragmatism.

Now it might well seem as if Pragmatism by the denial of an absolute or impersonal truth is so far simply another version of modern agnosticism, or of the older doctrine of the “relativity” of human knowledge. There is a great difference, however, between these two things and Pragmatism. A mere agnostical, or relativity, philosophy generally carries with it the belief that the inmost reality of things is both unknowable and out of all relation alike to human purpose and to human knowledge. Pragmatism, on the contrary, would like to maintain—-if it could do so logically—-that in human volition, we do know something about the inward meaning of things, that the “developmental” view of things is, when properly interpreted, the real view, that reality is at least what it comes to be in our “purposes” and in our ideals, and not something different from this.

The main reason, however, of the inability of Pragmatism to do what it would like to do in this connexion is what we have already complained of as its failure either to recognize, or to use, the help that could be afforded to it by (1) Idealism, and by (2) the “normative”[251] view of ethical science.

In respect of the first point, we have already suggested, for example, that Pragmatism is inclined in various ways to make much of its “radical empiricism,” its contention that reality must, to begin with, be construed to be what it seems to be in our actual dealings with it and in our actual experience of it.[252] To the biologist, as we put it in our fourth chapter, reality is life; to the physicist it is energy; to the theologian it is the unfolding of the dealings of God with His creatures; to the sociologist it is the sphere of the evolution of the social life of humanity; to the lover of truth it is a “partly intelligible system.” The only rational basis, however, for all this constructive interpretation of reality is the familiar idealist position of the necessary implication of the “subject” in the “object,” the fact that “things” or “existences” are invariably thought of as the elements or component parts in some working system or sphere of reality that is contemplated by some being or beings in reference to some purpose or end. On its so-called lowest plane, indeed, reality is conceived as the play of all the particles of matter, or of all the elemental forces of nature, upon each other. And on this construction of things the susceptibility of everything to the influence of everything else is no less certainly assumed than in the case of the world of life itself. But, as the idealist realizes in a moment, there is no possibility of separating, either in thought or experimentally, this supposed physical world from the so-called experiences and relations and laws through which it is interpreted and described, even as a world of objects or of forces. This is what Parmenides saw ages ago when he said that “thought” and “being” are the same thing, that “being” belongs to “thought,” that “being” is the true object of thought, and that being is the “rational” and the “thinkable” and not something outside thought. It is what a scientist, an expounder of science, like Professor J. A. Thompson means and partly states when he says, speaking of the work of many of his fellow-scientists of the day, “The matter of physical science is an abstraction, whereas the matter of our direct experience is in certain conditions the physical basis of life and the home of the soul.”[253]

To the objector who again retorts that this line of reflection seems to rest upon a very large assumption as to the nature of the apparently illimitable physical universe, the idealist can but reply, firstly, that we know nothing of the so-called natural world save through the so-called spiritual or psychical world,[254] and secondly, that even the most complete description of the world from the point of view of science would, of course, still leave the world of our mental experiences entirely unexplained. It is surely, therefore, so far, much more logical to use this last world as at least the partial explanation of the former rather than vice versa.

And as for the “normative” view of ethics and the help it affords to Pragmatism in its contention in respect of final truth, it may be said, to begin with, that it is in the ethical life that what we call the truth of things becomes the basis of an ideal of personal achievement. It is not merely of man’s well-known transformation and utilization of the forces of nature that we are at present thinking, but of the fact that in the moral life man “superposes,” as has been said, an order of his own upon the so-called natural order of things, transforming it into a spiritual order. This superposition, if we will, this transformation, is revealed unmistakably in the history of the facts of conduct.

In the recent elaborate researches in sociological ethics of Hobhouse and Westermarck[255] we read, for example, of facts like the gradual “blunting of the edges of barbarian ideas,” and the recognition of the “principal moral obligations” in the early oriental civilizations, the existence of the “doctrine of forgiveness,” and of “disinterested retributive kindly emotion,” the acceptance and redistribution by Confucius of the traditional standards of Chinese ethics, the “transformation” by the Hebrew prophets of the “law of a barbarous people into the spiritual worship of one God,” of a God of “social justice,” of “mercy,” and finally of “love.” Both these writers, in view of such facts and of other facts of a kindred nature, arrive at the conclusion that the supreme authority assigned to the moral law is not altogether an illusion, that there is after all the “great permanent fact of the moral consciousness persisting through all stages of development, that whether we believe or disbelieve in God, or religion, or nature, or what not, there remain for all of us certain things to do which affect us with a greater or less degree of mental discomfort.”

Now as we think of it, there is something that Pragmatism fails to see in respect of this undoubted transformation of the merely physical basis of our life that takes place, or that has taken place, in the moral life of humanity. While firmly holding in its moral philosophy (we can see this in the typical work of Dewey and Tufts[256]) to its far-reaching principle that our entire intellectual life has been worked out in the closest kind of relation to our practical needs, Pragmatism has nevertheless failed to see that in the highest reaches of our active life the controlling ideas (“justice,” “humanity,” “courage,” and so on) have a value independently of any consequences other than those of their realization in the purposes and in the dispositions of men. Or, more definitely, it is just because moral ideas, like any ideas, cannot fail to work themselves out into our actions and into our very dispositions and character, that it becomes of the utmost importance to conceive of the truth they embody as having a value above all consequences and above all ordinary utility. If sought ever and always for its own sake, the highest kind of truth and insight, the truth that we apprehend in our highest intuitions and in our highest efforts, will inevitably tend to the creation of a realm of “value,” a realm of personal worth and activity that we cannot but regard as the highest reality,[257] or the highest plane of experience of which we are conscious. In this thought, then, in the thought of the reality of the life and work of human beings who have given all for truth and goodness and love, there is surely at least a partial clue to the value of the great idea after which Pragmatism is blindly groping in its contention of the importance even to metaphysics of the notion of our human, “purposive” activity.

Indeed, when we think of the matter carefully it is doubtful whether the human mind would ever even have attained to the notion of ideal truth, with the correlative thought of the shortcomings or the limits of our ordinary knowledge, if it had not been for the moral life and the serious problem it sets before us as men—that of the complete satisfaction or the complete assertion of our human personality. We seek truth in the first instance because we wish to act upon certainty or upon adequate certainty, and because we feel that we must be determined by what appeals to our own convictions and motives, by what has become part of our own life and consciousness. It is only in fact because we will it, and because we want it, that the “ideal” exists—the ideal of anything, more certain knowledge about something, for example, or gratified curiosity, or satisfied desire, and so on. In every case, say, of the pursuit of an ideal we desire something or some state of things that does not yet exist. The actual, if indeed (which is doubtful) we can think of the actual merely as such, does not engender the notion of the ideal, although there is possibly a suggestion of the “ideal” in the “meaning” that we cannot, even in sense perception,[258] attach to the actual.

Even science, as we call it, is very far from being a mere description of the actual, it is an ideal “construction” or “interpretation” of the same in the interest, not of mere utility, but of the wonder and the curiosity and the intellectual and aesthetical satisfaction of our entire personality, of our disinterested love of the highest truth.[259]

A striking example of the part played by moral and personal factors in the evolution of truth may easily be found, as has already been suggested, in some of the circumstances connected with the evolution of the Platonic philosophy in the mind of its creator. Plato’s constant use of the dialogue form of exposition is of itself an expression of the fact that philosophy was always to him a living and a personal thing, the outcome of an intellectual emotion of the soul in its efforts after true knowledge and spiritual perfection. It speaks also of Plato’s essentially social conception of philosophy, as a creation arising out of the contact of mind with mind, in the search after wisdom and virtue and justice. And there is little doubt that his own discontent with the social conditions of his time and with the false wisdom of the sophists was a powerful impulse in his mind in the development of that body of intellectual and ethical truth for all time that is to be found in his works. The determining consideration, again, in the arguments for immortality in the Phaedo is not so much the imperfect physical and theoretical philosophy on which they are partly made to repose as the tremendous conviction of Plato of the supreme importance of right conduct, of his belief in the principle of the “best.”

Plato has a way, too, of talking of truth as a kind of “addition”[260] to being and science, as a “being” that “shares” somehow in the “idea of the Good”—a tendency that, despite the imperfect hold of the Greek mind upon the fact and the conception of personality, we may also look upon as a confirmation of the pragmatist notion of the necessity of ethical and personal factors in a complete theory of truth.

A still more important instance of the importance of moral and practical factors to a final philosophy of things is to be found in the lasting influence of the great Hebrew teachers upon both the ancient and the modern world, although the mere mention of this topic is apt to give offence to some of our Neo-Hellenists[261] and to thinkers like Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. The remarkable thing about the Hebrew seers is their intuition of God as “the living source of their life and strength and joy,” not as a mere first principle of thought, not as the substance of things, not as the mere “end of patient search and striving,” but as the “first principle of life and feeling.”[262] And their work for the world lay in the bringing to an end of the entire mythology and cosmology of the age of fable and fancy, and the substitution for all this of the worship of one God, as something distinct and different from all the cults of polytheism, as a great social and ethical achievement, as a true religion that loved justice and social order because it loved God. “In Hebrew poetry,”[263] says a recent authority upon this subject, “all things appear in action. The verb is the predominating element in the sentence. And though the shades of time distinctions are blurred, the richness of the language throws the precise complexion of the act into clear, strong light.” If this be so, there is, of course, no wonder that this people elaborated for mankind a living and practical, a “pragmatist” (if we will) view of the world, which is so rich by way of its very contrast both to Greek and to modern scientific conceptions. With the enumeration of two specific instances from this same writer of the Hebrew perception of the importance of practical and personal factors to a true grasp of certain fundamental ideas, we may safely leave this great source of some of the leading ideas of our western world to take care of itself. “The Hebrew counterpart to the Greek ideal of ὁ καλὸς κἀγαθός, ‘the finely-polished gentleman,’ is hāsîd, the adjective derived from hesed, that is ‘the man of love.’ As God is love, the good man is likewise a lover both of God and of his fellow-men. His love is indeed the pure reflection of God’s—tender and true and active as His is. For in no other ancient religion are the fear and love of God so indissolubly wedded to moral conduct.”[264] And secondly, speaking of immortality, Professor Gordon says, “The glad hope of immortality rests, not on speculative arguments from the nature of the soul, but on the sure ground of religious experience. Immortality is, in fact, a necessary implicate of personal religion. The man that lives with God is immortal as He is.”[265]

If the reader be inclined to interject here that all that this pragmatist talk about the importance of action obviously amounts to is simply the position that the highest truth must somehow take recognition of our beliefs as well as of our knowledge, we can but reply that he is literally so far in the right. Our point, however, for Pragmatism would here be that belief rests not merely upon the intellect, but upon the intellect in conjunction with the active and the ethical nature of man. It is mainly because we feel ourselves to be active and legislative and creative, mainly because we partly are and partly hope to be, as the phrase has it, that we believe as well as seek continually to know. Hence the rightness and the soundness of Pragmatism in its contention; the truth is not so much a datum (something given) as a construction,[266] or a thing that is made and invented by way of an approximation to an ideal.

That it is this almost in the literal sense of these words is evident from the fact of the slow and gradual accumulation of truth and knowledge about themselves and their environment by the fleeting generations of men. And even to-day the truth is not something that exists in nature or in history or in some privileged institution, or in the teaching of some guild of masters, but rather only in the attitude of mind and heart of the human beings who continue to seek it and to will it and to live it when and where they may. Truth includes, too, the truth of the social order, of civilization[267]—this last costly work being just as much the creation of the mind and the behaviour of men as is knowledge itself. And there can, it would seem, be but slight objection to an admission of the fact that it is only in so far as the truth has been conceived as inclusive of the truth of human life as well as of that of the world of things that humanity as a whole seems to have any abiding interest in its existence, even where, as in Omar Khayyàm and in other writings, the idea of its discovery is given up as impossible. Only, in other words, as the working out of the implications of desire does thought live, and the completest thought is at bottom but the working out of the deepest desire.[268]

These two elements of our life, thought and desire, have had indeed a parallel development in the life of mankind. What we call the predicate of thought bespeaks invariably an underlying (or personal) reaction or attitude towards the so-called object of thought.[269] When desire ceases, as it does sometimes in the case of a disappointed man, or the pessimist, or the agnostic, or the mystic, thought too ceases. Even the philosophical mood, as likewise the expression of a desire, is as such comparable to other motives or desires, such as the scientific or the practical or the emotional, and subject, too, like them, to the various “conflicts” of personality.[270] The free speculative thought or activity that, with the Greeks, we sometimes think of as the highest attribute of our human nature, is itself but the highest phase of that free creative[271] activity which we have found to underlie the moral life and all the various constructions of mankind, inclusive of the work of civilization itself.

Lastly, there is, as we know, ample warrant in the past and the present reflections of men of science upon the apparent limits[272] and limitations of our knowledge of our environment to justify the correctness of the pragmatist insistence upon the ethical and the personal factors that enter into truth. Reference having already been made to these limits, there is perhaps little need of pursuing this topic any further, either so far as the facts themselves are concerned or so far as their admission by scientists and others is concerned. How any supposed mere physical order can ever come to know itself as such, either in the minds of men or in the minds of beings other than men, is of course the crowning difficulty of what we call a physical philosophy—a difficulty that transcends altogether the many familiar and universally admitted difficulties in respect of topics like the origin of motion and the origin of life, and the infinite number of adjustments and adaptations involved in the development of the world of things and men with which we are acquainted. Obviously, to say the very least, only when some explanation of consciousness and feeling and thought is added on to our knowledge of Nature (fragmentary as is the latter at best) will the demands of thought and of desire for unity in our knowledge be satisfied or set at rest. Now, of course, to religious thought all this costly explanation, all this completion and systematization of our knowledge are revealed, in the main, only to a faith in God and to a consequent faith in the final “perfection” of our human life as the gradual evolution of a divine kingdom. And while Pragmatism cannot, especially in its cruder or more popular form, be credited with anything like a rational justification of the religious point of view about reality and of the vision it opens up, it may, nevertheless, in virtue of its insistence upon such things as (1) the rationality of the belief that accompanies all knowledge, (2) the supposedly deeper phenomena of the science of human nature to which reference has already been made, and (3) the great spiritual reality that is present to the individual in the moral life, and that lifts him “out of himself,” and that makes it impossible for him to “understand himself by himself alone,”[273] justifiably lay claim to the possession of a thorough working sympathy with the religious view of the world.

With the direction of the attention of the reader to two important corollaries or consequences of the “pluralism” and the “dynamic idealism” of Pragmatism this chapter may well be brought to a termination.

One of the most obvious corollaries of nearly everything that has been put forward by us in the foregoing chapters as pragmatist doctrine or pragmatist tendency, is the marked distance at which[274] it all seems to stand from the various entanglements of the false philosophy of “subjective,” or “solipsistic” idealism. In other words, while we have ventured to censure Pragmatism for its inability to recognize the elemental truth[275] in Idealism, we must now record it as a merit of Pragmatism that it does not, like so much modern philosophy, take its start with the “contents” of the consciousness of the individual as the one indubitable beginning, the one inconcussum quid for all speculation. This starting-point has often, as we know, been taken (even by students of philosophy) to be the very essence of Idealism, but it is not so. Although there is indeed no “object” without a “subject,” no “matter” without “mind,” neither mind nor matter is limited to my experience of the same.[276] It is impossible for me to interpret, or even to express, to myself the contents of my experience without using the terms and the conceptions that have been invented by minds and by personalities other than my own without whom I could not, and do not, grow up into what I call my “self-consciousness.”[277] We have all talked of ourselves (as we know from experience and from psychology) in the third person as objects for a common social experience long before we learn to use the first personal pronoun. And as for the adult, his “ego” or self has a meaning and a reality only in relation to, and in comparison with, the other selves of whom he thinks as his associates. An “ego” implies invariably also an “alter” an “other,” and thus our deepest thought about the universe is always, actually and necessarily, both personal and social. Even in art, and in religion, and in philosophy, it is the communion of mind with mind, of soul with soul, that is at once our deepest experience and our deepest desire.

I do not suggest for one moment that Pragmatism is the only philosophy (if indeed we may call it a philosophy at all) that is necessarily committed to Pluralism,[278] nor am I, of course, blind to the difficulties that Pluralism, as over against Monism, presents to many thinking minds. But I do here say that if Pragmatism be true, as it is in the main (at least as an “approach” to philosophy), it follows that the reality with which we are in contact in all our thoughts and in all our theorizing is not any or all of the “contents” of the consciousness of the individual thinker, but rather the common, personal life of activity and experience and knowledge and emotion that we as individuals share with other individuals. This life is that of an entire “world of intersubjective intercourse,”[279] of a communion of thought, and feeling, and effort in which, as persons, we share the common life of persons, and are members one of another.[280]

Truth itself, in fact, as may be seen, of course, from the very connexion of the word truth with other words like “try”[281] and “utter” (and in its root with words like “ware” and “verihood”), is a social possession, implying both seekers and finders, listeners and verifiers as well as speakers and thinkers. Its existence implies a universe of discourse, as the logicians put it, in which thoughts and conceptions are elaborated and corrected, not merely by a kind of self-analysis[282] and internal development, but by the test of the action to which they lead and of the “responses” they awaken in the lives and thoughts of other persons. And it is this very sociological[283] and “pluralistic” character of Pragmatism that, along with its tendency to “affirmation” in the matter of the reality of the religious life, has helped to render it (as far as it goes) such a living and such a credible philosophy to-day.

Another consequence of the dynamic idealism and the “radical empiricism” of Pragmatism is the “immediacy” of our contact with reality, for which it is naturally inclined to stand in the matter of what we may call the philosophy of perception. What this new “immediacy” and this new directness of our contact with reality would mean to philosophical and scientific thought can be fully appreciated only by those who have made the effort of years to live in a “thought world,” in which the first reality is what the logicians term “mediation”[284] or inference, a world of thoughts without the reality of a really effective thinker, or the reality of a world of real action—a world from which it is somehow impossible to escape either honestly or logically. It would be a return, of course, on the part of the thinker to the direct sense of life with which we are familiar in instinct and in all true living and in all real thought,[285] in all honest effort and accomplishment, and yet not a “return” in any of the impossible senses in which men have often (and with a tragic earnestness) sought to return to Nature[286] and to the uncorrupted reality of things. And we have not indeed done justice to the “instrumentalism” and the “hypothetical” treatment of ideas and of systems of thought for which Pragmatism and Humanism both stand until we see that so far from its being (almost in any sense) the duty of the thinker to justify, to his philosophy, this direct contact with the infinite life of the world, that has been the common possession of countless mortals who have lived their life, it is, on the contrary, his duty to justify (to himself and to his public) the various thought-systems of metaphysic, by setting forth the various points of departure and the various points of contact they have in the reality of the life of things.[287]

We spoke at the close of our fourth chapter of the strange irony that may be discovered in the fate of philosophers who have come to attach a greater importance to their own speculations and theories than to the great reality (whatever it may be, or whatever it may prove itself to be) of which all philosophy is but an imperfect (although a necessary) explanation. And the reader has doubtless come across the cynical French definition of metaphysics as the “art of losing one’s way systematically”[288] (l’art de s’égarer avec méthode). In view of all this, and in view of all the inevitable pain and difficulty of the solitary thinkers of all time, it is indeed not the least part of the service of Pragmatism and Humanism, and of the “vitalistic” and “voluntaristic” philosophy with which it may be naturally associated to-day, to have compelled even metaphysicians to feel that it is the living reality of the world that we know and that we experience, that is first, last, and foremost the real subject-matter of philosophy.

With the real sceptic, then, with David Hume, we may indeed be “diffident” of our “doubts” and at the same time absolutely “free” and unprejudiced in our hold upon, and in our treatment of, metaphysical systems as, all of them, but so many more or less successful attempts to state and explain, in terms appreciable by the understanding and the reason, the character and the reality of the infinite life with which we are in contact in our acts and in our thoughts and in our aspirations. Of the reality of that life we can never be sceptical, for it is the life that we know in that “world of inter-subjective” intercourse that, according to Pragmatism and Humanism, is implied even in sense-perception and in our daily experience.

CHAPTER VII
PRAGMATISM AS AMERICANISM

In adopting the title he has chosen for the heading of this chapter the writer feels that he has laid himself open to criticism from several different points of view. What has philosophy as the universal science to do with nationalism or with any form of national characteristics? Then even if Pragmatism be discovered to be to some extent “Americanism” in the realm of thought, is this finding, or criticism, a piece of appreciation or a piece of depreciation? And again, is it possible for any individual to grasp, and to understand, and to describe such a living and such a far-reaching force as the Americanism of to-day?

The following things may be said by way of a partial answer to these reflections: (1) There are American characteristics in Pragmatism, and some of them may profitably be studied by way of an attempt to get all the light we can upon its essential nature. Their presence therein has been detected and recognized by critics, both American and foreign, and reference has already been made to some of them in this book. (2) There is no universal reason in philosophy apart from its manifestation in the thoughts and the activities of peoples who have made or who are making their mark upon human history. It may well be that the common reason of mankind has as much to learn from Americanism in the department of theory as it has already been obliged to learn from this same quarter in the realm of practice. (3) One of the most important phases of our entire subject is precisely this very matter of the application of philosophy to “practice,” of the inseparability, to put it directly, of “theory” and “practice.” It would surely, therefore, be the strangest kind of conceit (although signs of it still exist here and there)[289] to debar philosophy from the study of such a practical thing as the Americanism of to-day. To connect the two with any degree of success would certainly not be to depreciate Pragmatism, but to strengthen it by relating it to a spirit that is affecting the entire life and thought of mankind.

One or two other important considerations should also be borne in mind. It goes without saying that there are in the United States and elsewhere any number of Americans who see beyond both contemporary Pragmatism and contemporary Americanism, and to whom it would be, therefore, but a partial estimate of Pragmatism to characterize it as “Americanism.” So much, to be sure, might be inferred from some things that have already been said in respect of the reception and the fate of Pragmatism in its own country. Again, it is one of the errors of the day to think of Americanism as in the main merely a belief in “practicality” and “efficiency.” To those who know it, Americanism is practical idealism, and its aims, instead of being merely materialistic and mechanical, are idealistic to the point of being Utopian. The American belief in work is not really a belief in work for its own sake, but rather a faith in the endless possibilities open to intelligent energy with resources at its command. Lastly, it will here certainly not be necessary either to think or to speak (even if it were possible to do so) of all American characteristics.[290]

Among the American-like characteristics in Pragmatism that have already made themselves apparent in the foregoing chapters are its insistence upon “action” and upon the free creative effort of the individual, its insistence upon the man-made (or the merely human) character of most of our vaunted truths, its instrumentalism, its radicalism,[291] its empiricism (that is to say, its endless faith in experience), its democratic character, and its insistence upon the necessity to philosophy of a broad, tolerant, all-inclusive view of human nature. So, too, are its insistence upon the basal character of belief,[292] and upon the importance of a creed or a philosophy that really “works” in the lives of intelligent men, its feeling of the inadequacy of a merely scholastic or dialectical philosophy, and even its quasi “practical” interpretation of itself in the realms of philosophy and religion and ethics—its confession of itself as a “corridor-theory,” as a point of approach to all the different systems in the history of thought. In addition to these characteristics we shall attempt now to speak, in the most tentative spirit, firstly, of some of the characteristics of American university life of which Pragmatism may perhaps be regarded as a partial expression or reflex, and then after this, of such broadly-marked and such well-known American characteristics as the love of the concrete (in preference to the abstract), the love of experiment and experimentation, an intolerance of doctrinairism and of mere book-learning, the general democratic outlook on life and thought, the composite or amalgam-like character of the present culture of the United States, the sociological interest that characterizes its people, and so on. All these things are clearly to be seen in Pragmatism as a would-be philosophical system, or as a preliminary step in the evolution of such a system.

Owing very largely to the “elective” system that still prevails in the universities of the United States, Philosophy is there (to an extent somewhat inconceivable to the student of the European continent) in the most active competition with other studies, and the success of a professor of philosophy is dependent on the success of his method of presenting his subject to students who all elect studies believed by them to be useful or interesting or practically important. It has long seemed to the writer that there is abundant evidence in the writings of the pragmatists of this inevitable attempt to make philosophy a “live” subject in competition, say, with the other two most popular subjects in American colleges, viz. economics and biology. The importance to the thought of to-day of biological and economic considerations is one of the things most emphatically insisted upon by Professor Dewey in nearly all his recent writings.[293] And both he and James—the fact is only too evident—have always written under the pressure of the economic and sociological interest of the American continent. And even Schiller’s Humanism has become, as we have seen, very largely the metaphysics of the “evolutionary process,” a characterization which we make below[294] as a kind of criticism of the philosophy of Bergson. Our present point, however, is merely that, owing to the generally competitive character of the intellectual life there, this biological influence is felt more acutely in America than elsewhere.

The one outstanding characteristic again of every approved academic teacher in the United States is his method of handling his subject, just as the one thing that is claimed for Pragmatism by its upholders is that it is particularly a “methodology” of thought rather than a complete philosophy. To the university constituency of the United States a professor without an approved and successful method is as good as dead, for no one would listen to him. The most manifest sign, to be sure, of the possession of such an effective method on the part of the university lecturer is the demonstration of skill in the treatment of his subject, in the “approach” that he makes to it for the beginner, in his power of setting the advanced student to work upon fruitful problems, and of giving him a complete “orientation” in the entire field under consideration. And then in addition to this he must be able to indicate the practical and the educational value of what he is teaching.

In his review of James’s classical work upon Pragmatism, Dewey, while indicating a number of debatable points in the pragmatist philosophy, declares emphatically his belief in that philosophy as a method of “orientation.” The title again of Peirce’s famous pamphlet was How to make Ideas Clear—a phrase of itself suggestive enough of the inquiring mind of the young student when oppressed by apparently conflicting and competing points of view. “We are acquainted with a thing,” says James, “as soon as we have learned how to behave towards it, or how to meet the behaviour we accept from it.” In one of his books he talks about physics, for example, as giving us not so much a theory about things as a “practical acquaintance” with bodies; “the power to take hold of them and handle them,” indicating at the same time his opinion that this way of regarding knowledge should be extended to philosophy itself. All of this will serve as a proof or illustration of the essentially “practical” and “methodological” conception of philosophy taken by the pragmatists. Papini refers, we remember, to the pragmatist philosophy as a power of “commanding our material,” of “manipulating” for practical purposes the different “thought-constructions” of the history of philosophy. And those who have any familiarity with the early pragmatist magazine literature know that the pragmatists used to be fond of asking themselves such preliminary and “laboratory-like” inquiries as the following: “What is truth known as?” “What is philosophy known as?” “What are the different ‘thought-levels’ upon which we seem to move in our ordinary experience?” They never exactly seem to “define” philosophy for you, preferring to indicate what it can do for you, and so on.

Turning now to the matter of American characteristics that are broader and deeper than the merely academic, we may find an illustration, for example, of the American practicality and the love of the concrete (instead of the abstract or the merely general) in the following declaration of Professor James that “the whole originality of Pragmatism, the whole point in it, is its use of the concrete way of seeing. It begins with concreteness and returns and ends with it.” Of the American love of novelty and of interest we may find an illustration in the determination of Pragmatism “never to discuss a question that has absolutely no interest and no meaning to any one.” Of Pragmatism as an exemplification of the American love of experiment, and of experimentation, with a view to definite and appreciable “returns,” we may give the following: “If you fully believe the pragmatic method you cannot look on any such word, i.e. ‘God,’ ‘Matter,’ ‘Reason,’ ‘The Absolute,’ ‘Energy,’ and such ‘solving’ names, as closing your quest. You must bring out in each word its practical cash value, set it at work within the stream of your experience. It appears less as a solution then than as a programme for more work and more particularly as an indication of the ways in which existing realities may be changed.” Of the American intolerance for mere scholarship and book-learning, and of the American inability to leave any discovery or any finished product alone without some attempt to “improve” upon it or to put it to some new use, we may cite the following: “When may a truth go into cold storage in the encyclopaedias, and when shall it come out for battle?”

Another very strongly marked characteristic of American life is the thoroughly eclectic and composite character of its general culture and of the general tone of its public life. American daily life has become, as it were, a kind of social solvent, a huge melting-pot for the culture and the habits and the customs of peoples from all over the earth. This also may be thought of as reflected in the confessedly complex and amalgam-like character of Pragmatism, in its boast and profession of being a synthesis and a fusion of so many different tendencies of human thought. As a juxtaposition, or kind of compound solution, of such a variety of things as the affirmations of religion, the hypothetical method of science, realism, romanticism, idealism, utilitarianism, and so on, it reminds us only too forcibly of the endless number of social groups and traditions, the endless number of interests and activities and projects to be seen and felt in any large American city.

Still another general characteristic of American life of which we may well think in connexion with Pragmatism is the sociological interest of the country, the pressure of which upon the pragmatists and their writings has already been referred to. The social problem in America has now become[295] the one problem that is present with everybody, and present most of all, perhaps, with the European immigrant, who has for various reasons hoped that he had left this problem behind him. The effect of this upon Pragmatism is to be seen, not merely in the very living hold that it is inclined to take of philosophy and philosophical problems,[296] but in the fact of its boast of being a “way of living” as well as a “way of thinking.” We have examined this idea in our remarks upon the ethics of Pragmatism.

Of course the outstanding temperamental American characteristic that is most clearly seen in Pragmatism is the great fact of the inevitable bent of the American mind to action and to accomplishment,—its positive inability to entertain any idea, or any set of ideas upon any subject whatsoever, without experiencing at the same time the inclination to use these ideas for invention and contrivance,[297] for organization and exploitation. Any one who has lived in the United States must in fact have become so habituated and so accustomed to think of his thought and his knowledge and his capacities in terms of their possible social utility, that he simply cannot refrain from judging of any scheme of thought or of any set of ideas in the same light. Anywhere, to be sure, in the United States will they allow a man to think all he pleases about anything whatsoever—even pre-Socratic philosophy, say, or esoteric Buddhism. And there is nothing indeed of which the country is said, by those who know it best, to stand so much in need as the most persistent and the most profound thought about all important matters. But such thought, it is always added, must prove to be constructive and positive in character, to be directed not merely to the solution of useless questions or of questions which have long ago been settled by others.

We shall now endeavour to think of the value[298] to philosophy and to the thought and practice of the world (the two things are inseparable) of some or all of these general and special characteristics which we have sought to illustrate in Pragmatism.

We might begin by suggesting the importance to the world of the production and development of a man of genius like James,[299] whose fresh and living presentation of the problems of philosophy (as seen by a psychologist) has brought the sense of a lasting and far-reaching obligation upon his fellow-students everywhere. In no more favourable soil could James have grown up into the range and plenitude of his influence than in that of America and of Harvard University,[300] that great nursing-ground of the finest kind of American imperialism. The great thing, of course, about James was his invasion, through the activities of his own personality,[301] of the realm of philosophical rationalism by the fact and the principle of active personality. His whole general activity was a living embodiment of the principle of all humanism, that personality and the various phases of personal experience are of more importance to philosophy in the way of theory than any number of supposedly self-coherent, rational or abstract systems, than any amount of reasoning that is determined solely by the ideal of conceptual consistency.

Then again, it might be held that the entire academic world of to-day has a great deal to learn from the conditions under which all subjects (philosophy included) are taught and investigated in the typical American university of the day. We have referred to the fact that the American professor or investigator faces the work of instruction and research in an environment replete with all modern facilities and conveniences.[302] The very existence of this environment along with the presence throughout his country of university men and workers from all over the world with all their obvious merits and defects as “social types” prevent him in a hundred ways from that slavery to some one school of thought, to some one method of research that is so often a characteristic of the scholar of the old world. The entire information and scholarship in any one science (say, philosophy) is worth to him what he can make of it, here and now, for himself and for his age and for his immediate environment. He simply cannot think of any idea or any line of reflection, in his own or in any other field, without thinking at the same time of its “consequences,” immediate, secondary, and remote. This inability is an instance of the working of the pragmatist element in scholarship and in thought with all its advantages and disadvantages.[303]

And it is true too, it might be held, even upon the principles of Idealism that the mere facts of knowledge (for they are as endless in number as are the different points of view from which we may perceive and analyse phenomena) are “worth”[304] to-day very largely only what they have meant and what they may yet mean to human life, to human thought, to civilization. While there is certainly no useless truth and no utterly unimportant fact, it is quite possible to burden and hamper the mind of youth with supposed truths and facts that have little or no relevancy to any coherent or any real point of view about human knowledge and human interests either of the past or the present. It is merely, for example, in the light of the effects that they have had upon the life and thought of humanity[305] that the great philosophical systems of the past ought (after the necessary period of preliminary study on the part of the pupil) to be presented to students in university lectures. A teacher who cannot set them forth in this spirit is really not a teacher at all—a man who can make his subject live again in the thought of the present.[306]

If the limits of our space and our subject permitted of the attempt, we might easily continue the study of the pragmatist element in American scholarship from the point of view of the whole general economy of a university as a social institution, and from that of the benefit that has accrued to the modern world from the many successful attempts at the organization of knowledge from an international point of view, that have come into being under American initiative.[307]

Lastly it is surely impossible to exaggerate the value to philosophy of the so-called “democratic,”[308] open-minded attitude of Pragmatism that is seen in its unprejudiced recognition of such things as the ordinary facts of life, the struggle that constitutes the life of the average man, the fragmentary and partial[309] character of most of our knowledge, and so on. All this contrasts in the most favourable way with the scholastic and the Procrustean attitude to facts that has so long characterized philosophical rationalism from Leibniz and Wolff to the Kantians and to the Neo-Kantians and the Neo-Hegelians of our own time. Thanks partly to this direct and democratic attitude of mind on the part of the pragmatists and humanists, and thanks too to the entire psychological and sociological movement of modern times, the points of view of the different leading thinkers of different countries are beginning to receive their fitting recognition in the general economy of human thought to be compared with each other, and with still other possible points of view.

No one, it seems to me, can read the books of James without feeling that philosophy can again, as the universal science indeed, “begin anywhere” in a far less restricted sense than that in which Hegel interpreted this ingenious saying of his in respect of the freedom of human thinking.[310]

As for the inevitable drawbacks and limitations of the very Americanism which we have been endeavouring to discover in Pragmatism, it cannot, to begin with, be entirely without an element of risk to philosophy, and to the real welfare of a country, that the highest kind of insight should be brought too ruthlessly into competition with the various specialized studies, and the various utilitarian[311] pursuits of modern times, and with popular tendencies generally. The public, for many reasons, should not be too readily encouraged to think of philosophy as merely “a” study like other studies and pursuits, to be baited with the idea of its utility and its profitable consequences. Philosophy, on the contrary, is the universal study that gives to all other studies and pursuits their relative place and value. If left too much to be a mere matter of choice on the part of the young and the unthinking, it will soon find itself in the neglected position of the wisdom that utters her voice at the street corners. It must be secured an integral, and even a necessary place in the world of instruction—a condition that is still the case, it is to be remembered, in Catholic[312] as distinguished from many so-called “liberal” and “Protestant” seats of learning.

It is possible indeed, as we have already suggested, that the recognition of an aristocratic or a Catholic element in learning would, in some respects, be of more true use in the schools of America than a mere pragmatist philosophy of life and education. And it is therefore not to be wondered at that Americans themselves should already have expressed something of a distrust for a philosophy and an educational policy that are too akin to the practical commercialism of the hour.[313]

Then again, despite the large element of truth that there is in the idea of philosophy “discovering” (rather than itself “being”) the true “dynamic” or “motive-awakening” view of the system of things in which we live, philosophy itself was never intended to bear the entire weight and strain that are put upon it by the pragmatists. In their enthusiasm they would make out of it, as we have seen, a religion (and a new one at that!) and a social philosophy, as well as the theory of knowledge and the “approach” to reality that we are accustomed to look for in a system of philosophy.

It is only in periods of transition and reconstruction, like the present age, when men have become acutely sensible of the limitations of traditional views of things, that they are inclined in their disappointment to look to scientific and professional thinkers for creeds that shall take the place of what they seem for the moment to be losing. It is in such times chiefly that philosophy flourishes, and that it is apt to acquire an undue importance by being called upon to do things that of itself it cannot do. Among the latter impossibilities is to be placed, for example, the idea of its being able to offer (almost in any sense) a substitute for the direct experience[314] of the common life, or for the realities of our affections and our emotions, or for the ideals engendered by the common life.

Owing partly to the limitations of the Intellectualism that has hitherto characterized so much of the culture and the educational policy of the last century there are still everywhere scores of people under the illusion that the truth of life will be revealed to them in the theory of some book, in the new views or the new gospel of some emancipated and original thinker. In this vain hope of theirs they are obviously forgetful of even the pragmatist truth that all theories are but a kind of transformation, or abstract expression, of the experiences of real life and of real living. And part of the trouble with the pragmatists is that they themselves have unwittingly ministered to this mistaken attitude of mind by creating the impression that their theory of taking the kingdom of Heaven by storm, by the violence of their postulations and of their plea for a “working view” of things, is indeed the new gospel of which men have long been in search. The race, however, is not always to the swift and the eager, nor the kingdom to those who are loudest in their cryings of “Lord, Lord.” And as a friend of mine aptly applied it as against all practicalism and Pragmatism, “there remaineth a rest to the people of God.”[315] The ordinary man, it should be borne in mind, does not in a certain sense really need philosophy. Its audience is with the few, and it is to do it but scant service to think of making it attractive to the many by the obliteration of most of its distinctive characteristics and difficulties, and by the failure to point out its inherent limitations. It is not by any means, as we have been indicating, a substitute either for life, or for positive religion. Nor can it ever have much of a message, even for the few, if they imagine themselves, on account of their wisdom, to be elevated above the needs of the ordinary discipline of life.

Then again, there is surely an element of considerable danger in the American-like depreciation of doctrine and theory which we have noticed in two or three different connexions on the part of Pragmatism. In the busy, necessitous life of the United States this depreciation[316] is sometimes said to be visible in the great sacrifice of life[317] and energy that is continually taking place there owing to an unduly literal acceptance on the part of every one of the idea that each individual has a sort of divine right to seek and to interpret his experience for himself. In Pragmatism it might be said to be illustrated in the comparative weakness in the essentials of logic and ethics to which we have already referred, in the matter of a sound theory of first principles. And also in its failure to take any really critical recognition[318] of the question of its theoretical and practical affiliations to tendencies new and old, many or most of which have long ago been estimated at their true worth and value. Then there is its comparatively superficial interpretation[319] of what is known in the thought of the day as “Darwinism” and “Evolutionism” and the endless belief of the unthinking in “progress,” and its failure to see that its very Americanism[320] and its very popularity are things that are deserving of the most careful study and criticism. What have the pragmatists left in their hands of their theory, if its mere “methodology” and its “efficiency-philosophy” and its would-be enthusiasm were eliminated from it?

Like Americanism in general (which began, of course, as a revolutionary and a “liberationist” policy), Pragmatism is inclined in some ways to make too much of peoples’ rights and interests, and too little of their duties and privileges and of their real needs and their fundamental, human instincts. It is in the understanding alone of these latter things that true wisdom and true satisfaction[321] are to be found. And like the American demand for pleasure and for a good time generally, Pragmatism is in many respects too much a mere philosophy of “postulations” and “demands,” too much a mere formulation of the eager and impetuous demands of the emancipated man and woman of the time—-as forgetful as they of many of the deeper[322] facts of life and of the economy of our human civilization. In demanding that the “consequences” of all pursuits (even those of study and philosophy) shall be “satisfying,” and that philosophy shall satisfy our active nature, it forgets the sense of disillusionment that comes to all rash and mistaken effort. It certainly does not follow that a man is going to get certain things from the world and from philosophy merely because he demands them any more than does the discovery and the possession of happiness follow from the “right”[323] of the individual to seek it in his own best way. Nor is it even true that man is called upon to “act” to anything like the extent contemplated by an unduly enthusiastic Americanism and an unduly enthusiastic Pragmatism. The writer is glad to be able to append in this connexion a quotation taken by an American critic of Pragmatism from Forberg in his criticism of the action-philosophy of Fichte: “Action, action, is the vocation of man! Strictly speaking, this principle is false. Man is not called upon to act, but to act justly. If he cannot act without acting unjustly he had better remain inactive.”

It would not be difficult to match this quotation, or perhaps to surpass it, with something from Carlyle in respect of the littleness of man’s claims, not merely for enjoyment, but even for existence; but we will pass on.

Pragmatism, as we have suggested, certainly falls too readily into line with the tendency of the age to demand means and instruments and utilities and working satisfactions, instead of ends and purposes and values, to demand pleasure and enjoyment instead of happiness and blessedness. Instead of allowing itself to do this it should have undertaken a criticism both of the so-called “wants” of the age, and of the soundness of its own views in respect of the truth and the happiness that are proper to man as man. There is a fine epigram of Goethe’s in respect of the limitations of the revolutionary and the liberationist attitude of those who would seek to “free” men without first trying to understand them, and to help them to their true inward development.

Aile Freiheits-Apostel, sie waren mir immer zuwider.
Willkur suchte doch nur jeder am Ende für sich.
Willst du viele befrein, so wag’ es vielen zu dienen.
Wie gefährlich das sey, willst du es wissen?
Versuch’s.[324]

Until Pragmatism then makes it clear that it is the free rational activity, and the higher spiritual nature of man that is to it the norm of all our thought, and all our activity, and the true test of all “consequences,” it has not risen to the height of the distinctive message that it is capable of giving to the thought of the present time. Unqualified by some of the ideal considerations to which we have attempted, in its name, and in its interest, to give an expression, it would not be, for example, a philosophy that could be looked upon by the great East as the last word of our Western wisdom or our Western experience. It will be well, however, to say nothing more in this connexion until we have looked at the considerations that follow (in our next chapter) upon the lofty, but impersonal, idealisation of the life and thought of man attempted by our Anglo-Hegelian Rationalism, and until we have reflected, too, upon the more feasible form of Idealism attempted in the remarkable philosophy of Bergson,[325] the greatest of all the pragmatists.

CHAPTER VIII
PRAGMATISM AND ANGLO-HEGELIAN RATIONALISM

The form of Anglo-German Rationalism or Intellectualism which I shall venture to select for the purposes of consideration from the point of view of Pragmatism and Humanism is the first volume of the recent Gifford Lectures of Dr. Bernard Bosanquet, who has long been regarded by the philosophical public of Great Britain as one of the most characteristic members of a certain section of our Neo-Hegelian school. I shall first give the barest outline of the argument and contentions of “The Principle of Individuality and Value,” and then venture upon some paragraphs of what shall seem to me to be relevant criticism.

Dr. Bosanquet’s initial position is a conception of philosophy, and its task which is for him and his book final and all-determining. To him Philosophy is (as it is to some extent to Hegel) “logic” or “the spirit of totality.” It is “essentially of the concrete and the whole,” as Science is of the “abstract and the part.” Although the best thing in life is not necessarily “philosophy,” philosophy in this sense of “logic” is the clue to “reality and value and freedom,” the key to everything, in short, that we can, or that we should, or that we actually do desire and need. It [philosophy] is “a rendering in coherent thought of what lies at the heart of actual life and love.” His next step is to indicate “the sort of things,” or the sort of “experiences,” or the sort of “facts” that philosophy needs as its material, if it would accomplish its task as “universal logic.” This he does (1) negatively, by the rejection of any form of “immediateness,” or “simple apprehension,” such as the “solid fact,” the “sense of being,” or the “unshareable self” of which we sometimes seem to hear, or such as the “naïve ideas” of “compensating justice,”[326] “ethics[327] which treats the individual as isolated” and “teleology”[328] as “guidance by finite minds,” as the data (or as part of the data) of philosophy; and (2) positively, by declaring that his subject-matter throughout will be “the principle of ‘individuality,’ of ‘self-completeness,’ as the clue to reality.” This “individuality” or “self-completeness” is then set forth in a quasi-Platonic manner as the “universal,” the real “universal” being (he insists) the “concrete universal,” the “whole,” that is to say, “the logical system of connected members,” that is to him the “ideal of all thought.” We must think of this “individuality,” therefore, either as “a living world, complete and acting out of itself, a positive, self-moulding cosmos,” or “as a definite striving of the universe”[!][329]

The next question (so far as our partial purposes are concerned) that Dr. Bosanquet asks is, “What help do we get from the notion of a ‘mind’ which ‘purposes’ or ‘desires’ things in appreciating the work of factors in the universe, or of the universe as [ex-hypothesi] self-directing and self-experiencing whole?” The answer is spread over several chapters, and is practically this, that although there is undoubtedly a “teleology” in the universe (in the shape of the “conjunctions and results of the co-operation of men,” or of “the harmony of geological and biological evolution”), and although “minds such as ours play a part in the work of direction, we cannot judge of this work in question in any human manner.” The real test of teleology or value is “wholeness,” “completeness,” “individuality” [the topic of the book], and it is made quite clear that it is the “Absolute” who is “real” and “individual” and not we. We are, indeed, in our lives “carried to the Absolute without a break,”[330] and our nature “is only in process of being communicated to us.”[331] “We should not think of ourselves after the pattern of separate things or personalities in the legal sense, nor even as selves in the sense of isolation and exclusion of others.” “Individuality” being this “logical self-completeness,” there can be only one “Individual,” and this one Individual is the one criterion of “value,” or “reality,” or “existence,” “importance” and “reality [!]” being sides of the one “characteristic” [i.e. “thinkableness” as a whole]. Dr. Bosanquet confesses in his seventh chapter that this idea of his of “individuality,” or “reality,” is essentially the Greek idea that it is only the “whole nature” of things that gives them their reality or value.

We are then assured, towards the close of this remarkable book, that “freedom” (the one thing that we mortals value as the greatest of all “goods”) is “the inherent effort of mind considered as a [!] world, and that the ”Absolute“ [the ”universal” of logic, Plato’s “Idea”] is the “high-water mark of our effort,” and that each “self” is “more like a rising and a falling tide than an isolated pillar with a fixed circumference.” The great fact of the book, the fact upon which its accomplished author rests when he talks in his Preface of his belief, “that in the main the work [of philosophy] has been done,” is the daily “transmutation of experience according to the level of the mind’s energy and self-completeness,” the continued and the continuous “self-interpretation [of ‘experience’] through the fundamental principle of individuality.”

Now it is quite obvious that according to many of the considerations that have been put forward as true in the foregoing chapters, this philosophy of Dr. Bosanquet’s which treats the “concept,” or the “universal” as an end in itself (as the one answer to all possible demands for a “teleology”) and as an “individual,” “a perfected and self-perfecting [!] individual,” can be regarded as but another instance of the abstract Rationalism against which Pragmatism and Humanism have entered their protests. It is untrue, therefore, to the real facts of knowledge and the real facts of human nature. It will be sufficient to state that the considerations of which we are thinking are (in the main) the positions that have been taken in respect of such things as: (1) the claim that a true metaphysic must serve not merely as an intellectual “system” but as a “dynamic,” and as a “motive” for action and achievement; (2) the fact of the “instrumental” character of thought and of ideas, and of all systems (of science or of philosophy or of politics) that fail to include as part of their data the various ideals of mankind; (3) the idea that all truth and all thought imply a belief in the existence of objects and persons independent of the mere mental states or activities of the thinking individual, and that belief rather than knowledge is, and always has been, man’s fundamental and working estimate of reality; (4) the fact that our human actions and re-actions upon reality are a part of what we mean by “reality,” and that these actions and re-actions of ours are real and not imaginary; (5) the attitude in general of Pragmatism to Rationalism; (6) the various concessions that have been made by representative rationalists to the pragmatist movement.

Dr. Bosanquet’s theory of reality has already impressed some of his most competent critics as utterly inadequate as a motive or an incentive to the efforts and endeavours of men as we know them in history and in actual life, and we shall immediately return to this topic. And although there are many signs in his Lectures that he is himself quite aware of the probability of such an impression, his book proceeds upon the even tenor of its way, following wherever his argument may lead him, irrespective entirely of the truth contained in the facts and the positions we have just recounted and reaffirmed. It lends itself, therefore, only too naturally to our present use of it as a highly instructive presentation of many, or most, of the tendencies of Rationalism and Intellectualism, against which Pragmatism and Humanism would fain protest. At the same time there is in it, as we hope to show, a fundamental element[332] of truth and of fact without which there could be no Pragmatism and no Humanism, and indeed no philosophy at all.

A broad, pervading inconsistency[333] in “Individuality and Value” which militates somewhat seriously against the idea of its being regarded as a tenable philosophy, is the obvious one between the position (1) that true reality is necessarily individual, and the position (2) that reality is to be found in the “universal” (or the “concept”) of logic.[334] It would, however, perhaps be unfair to expect Dr. Bosanquet to effect a harmony between these two positions that Aristotle (who held them both) was himself very largely unable to do. There is, in other words, a standing and a lasting contradiction between any and all philosophy which holds that it is reason [or logic] alone that attains to truth and reality, and the apparently natural and inevitable tendency of the human mind [it is represented in Dr. Bosanquet’s own procedure] to seek after “reality” in the “individual” thing, or person, or being, and in the perfecting of “individuality” in God (or in a kingdom of perfected individuals).

The positive errors, however, which we would venture to refer to as even more fatal to Dr. Bosanquet’s book than any of its incidental inconsistencies are those connected with the following pieces of procedure on his part: (1) his manifest tendency to treat the “universal” as if it were an entity on its own account with a sort of development and “value” and “culmination” of its own;[335] (2) his tendency to talk and think as if a “characteristic” or a “predicate” (i.e. the “characteristic” or “quality” that some experiencing being or some thinker attributes to reality) could be treated as anything at all apart from the action and the reaction of this “experient” (or “thinker”) conceived as an agent; (3) the tendency to talk of “minds”[336] rather than persons, as “purposing” and “desiring” things; (4) his tendency to talk as if “teleology” were “wholeness”; (5) his tendency to regard (somewhat in the manner of Spinoza) “selves” and “persons” as like “rising and falling tides,” and of the self as a “world of content”[337] engaged in certain “transformations”; and (6) his tendency to think and speak as if demonstration [“mediation” is perhaps his favourite way of thinking of the logical process] were an end in itself, as if we lived to think, instead of thinking to live.

In opposition to all this it may be affirmed firstly that every “conception” of the human mind is but the more or less clear consciousness of a disposition to activity, and is representative, not so much of the “features” of objects which might appear to be their “characteristics” from a purely theoretical point of view, as of the different ways in which objects have seemed to men to subserve the needs of their souls and bodies. The study of the development of the “concept” in connexion with the facts of memory and with the slow evolution of language, and with the “socialized percepts” of daily life will all tend to confirm this position. The phenomena of religion, for example, and all the main concepts of all the religions are to be studied not merely as intellectual phenomena, as solutions of some of the many difficulties of modern Agnosticism, or of modern Rationalism, or of modern Criticism, but as an expressive of the modes of behaviour of human beings (with all their needs and all their ideals) towards the universe in which they find themselves, and towards the various beings, seen and unseen, which this universe symbolises to them. These phenomena and these conceptions are unintelligible, in short, apart from the various activities and cults and social practices and social experiences and what not, with which they have dealt from first to last.

Then it is literally impossible to separate in the manner of Dr. Bosanquet the “predicate” of thought from the active relations sustained by things towards each other, or towards the human beings who seek to interpret these active relations for any or for all “purposes,” Dr. Bosanquet’s idea, however, of the relation of “mind” to “matter,” to use these symbols for the nonce (for they are but such), is in the main purely “representational”[338] or intellectualistic.[339] To him “mind” seems to reflect either a “bodily content” or some other kind of “content”[340] that seems to exist for a “spectator” of the world, or for the “Absolute,” rather than for the man himself as an agent, who of course uses his memories of himself, or his “ideal” of himself, for renewed effort and activity. One of the most important consequences of this unduly intellectualistic view of mind is that Dr. Bosanquet seems (both theoretically and practically) unable to see the place of “mind,” as “purpose,” in ordinary life,[341] or of the place of mind in evolution,[342] giving us in his difficult but important chapter on the “relation of mind and body” a version of things that approaches only too perilously close to Parallelism or Dualism, or even to Materialism.[343] And along with this quasi-“representational” or “copy-like” theory of mind there are to be associated his representational and intellectualistic views of the “self”[344] and the “universal”[345] and “spirit.”[346]

There are, doubtless, hints in Dr. Bosanquet’s pages of a more “dynamic” view of mind or of a deeper view[347] than this merely “representational” view, but they are not developed or worked into the main portion of his argument, which they would doubtless very largely transform. This is greatly to be regretted, for we remember that even Hegel seemed to notice the splitting-up of the real for our human purposes which takes place in the ordinary judgment. And of course, as we have noticed, all “purpose” is practical and theoretical at one and the same time.

Then, thirdly, it is persons, and not “minds,” who desire and purpose things, “mind” being a concept invented by the spectator of activity in a person other than himself, which (from the analogy of his own conscious activity and experience) he believes to be purposive.[348] Dr. Bosanquet’s use, too, of the expression “mind” invariably leaves out of the range of consideration the phenomena of desire and volition—intelligible, both of them, only by reference to an end that is to be understood from within, and not from outside of the personality, from the point of view of the mere spectator. The phenomena of desire and volition are just as integral ingredients of our lives as persons as are our cognitive states.

Fourthly, it is doubtful whether the treatment of teleology as “wholeness” (or its sublimation in “Individuality and Value” into “wholeness”) is much of an explanation of this difficult topic, or indeed whether it is any explanation at all. Dr. Bosanquet, in fact, confesses that teleology is a conception which “loses its distinctive meaning as we deepen its philosophical interpretation, and that it has very little meaning when applied to the universe as a whole” which is the universe[!] as a workman of limited resources, aiming at some things and obliged to accept others as means to these.” And it is equally impossible, he holds, to apply “to the universe” the distinction of “what is purpose for its own sake and what is not so.” In fact, Dr. Bosanquet’s treatment of teleology is thus mainly negative, as including not only this rejection[349] of the notion in reference to the “universe as a whole,” but its rejection, too, in reference to the purposes of our human life;[350] although he admits (as of course he must) that the conception of end or purpose is drawn from some of the features (“the simplest features,” he says) of our “finite life,” or “finite consciousness.” If the notion were “to be retained at all,” he says, “it could only be a name for some principle which would help to tell us what has value quite independent of being or not being, the purpose of some mind.”[351] Now, of course, according to the Pragmatism and Humanism that we have been considering in this book, no intelligent person could take any conceivable interest in such a useless fancy as a teleology of this kind. Thus teleology is really blotted out altogether of existence in this volume, and with its disappearance there must go also the notion of any value that might be intelligibly associated with the idea of the attainment of purposes or ends by the human beings with whom we are acquainted in our ordinary daily life.

We shall below[352] refer to the fact that this rejection of teleology and value is one that must be regarded as fatal to ethics or to Absolutism in the realm of ethics. It requires, too, to be added here that even the most unprejudiced reading of Dr. Bosanquet’s work must create in the mind of the reader the conviction that its author is altogether unfair to the views of those who believe in the existence of definite manifestations of purpose in human life.[353] He talks as if those who uphold this idea or this fact are committed either to the absurd notion that man is “the end of the universe,” or to the equally absurd notion that “art, thought, society, history, in which mind begins to transcend its finiteness should be ascribed to the directive abilities of units in a plurality, precisely apart from the world content and the underlying solidarity of spirits, the medium through which all great things are done.”

With a view of bringing our discussion of these striking Gifford Lectures within the scope of the general subject of this book the following might be regarded as their leading, fundamental characteristics to which the most serious kind of exception might well be taken: (1) its “abstractionism”[354] and its general injustice to fact due to its initial and persistent “conviction”[355] [strange to say, this is the very word used by Bosanquet] that the real movement in things is a “logical” movement; (2) its fallacious conception of the task of philosophy as mainly the obligation to think the world “without contradiction”; (3) its obvious tendency in the direction of the “subjective idealism”[356] that has been the bane of so much modern philosophy and that is discarded altogether[357] by Pragmatism and Humanism; (4) its retention of many of the characteristic polemical[358] faults of Neo-Hegelianism and its manifestation of a similar spirit of polemical unfairness[359] on the part of their accomplished author; (5) its implication in several really hopeless contradictions in addition to the broad contradiction already referred to; (6) its failure

As for the first of these charges, the “abstractionism” of “Individuality and Value,” coming as it does on the top of the general perversity of the book, is really a very disastrous thing for philosophy. While we may pardon an enthusiastic literary Frenchman[360] for saying that, “The fact is, you see, that a fine book is the end for which the world was made,” there is hardly any excuse for a philosopher like Dr. Bosanquet coming before the world with the appearance of believing that the richly differentiated universe that we know only in part, exists for the benefit of the science that he represents, for the dialectic of the metaphysician, to enable the “universal” to “become more differentiated” and “more individualized,” to become “more representative” of the “whole.”[361] We might compare, says Dr. Bosanquet, in a striking and an enthralling[362] passage, “the Absolute to Dante’s mind as uttered in the Divine Comedy ... as including in a single, whole poetic experience a world of space and persons, ... things that, to any ordinary mind, fall apart.” Now even apart from the highly interesting question of the manifestly great and far-reaching influence of Dante over Dr. Bosanquet, and apart, too, from the notable modesty of Dr. Bosanquet’s confession as to the “imperfect” character of the simile just reproduced, no one to-day can think of attaching any ultimate importance to “Dante’s mind” without thinking of the extent to which this truly great man[363] was under the influence, not only of his own passions and of the general “problem” of his own life, but of such specialized influences as, for example (1) the mediaeval dualism between the City of God and the Empire of the World, (2) Aristotle’s unfortunate separation of the “intellectual” and the “practical” virtues, (3) the evil as well as the good of the dogmatic theology of the fathers of the Church. Goethe is of infinitely more value to us men of the twentieth century than Dante. And one of the very things Goethe is most calculated to teach us is precisely this very matter of the limitations of the cultural ideal of the Middle Ages and of the entire Renaissance period that succeeded it.[364] We should never, therefore, think for a moment of taking Dr. Bosanquet’s intellectual abstractionism about the “universal” literally without thinking at the same time of its limitations, and of its sources in Plato and in Hegel and in Neo-Hegelian rationalism, and of remembering with Hegel himself, “after all, the movement of the notion is a sort of illusion.”

Then, secondly, to attempt to think in philosophy or any other science merely in accordance with the Principle of “Non-Contradiction” will never[365] take us beyond the few initial positions of fact or of principle (God, “substance,” pure being, matter, identity, final cause, freedom, force, the will, the idea a perfect being, or what not) with which we happen for one reason or another to start in our reflections. Nor will this procedure account, of course, for these initial assumptions or facts.

Thirdly, in virtue of its implication in the “solipsism” and the “representationalism” of Subjective Idealism, Dr. Bosanquet’s “Absolute” is inferior (both so far as fact and theory are concerned) to the Pluralism and the possible Theism of Pragmatism and Humanism to which we have already made partial references.[366]

Fourthly, it is only natural that, on account of these, its many polemical mannerisms, “Individuality and Value” has already made upon some of its critics the impression of being a book that refuses to see things as they are—in the interests of their forced adaptation to the purposes of a preconceived philosophical theory.

Fifthly, there is certainly a sufficient number of contradictions in “Individuality and Value” to prevent it from being regarded as a consistent and a workable (i.e. really explanatory) account of our experience as we actually know it. Of these contradictions we think the following may well be enumerated here: (1) That between Dr. Bosanquet’s professed principle of accepting as real only that which is “mediated” or established by proof, and the arbitrariness he displays in announcing convictions like the following: “That what really matters is not the preservation of separate minds as such, but the qualities and achievement which, as trustees of the universe, they elicit from the resources assigned them.” (2) The contradiction between his belief in the conservation of “values” without the conservation of the existence of the individuals who “elicit” these “values,” or who are, as he puts it, the “trustees” for the “universe.” (3) That between what he logically wants (his “concrete individual”) and what he gives us (an impersonal “system”). (4) The contradiction between the completed personal life in God (or in a perfected society of individuals) that most of us (judging from the great religions of the world) want as human beings, and the impersonal “conceptual” experience of his book. (5) The contradiction that exists between his intellectualism and his commendable belief in “great convictions” and “really satisfying emotions and experiences.” (6) The standing contradiction between his “solipsistic” view of reality (his reduction of the universe to the conceptual experience of a single self-perfecting individual), and the facts of history in support of the idea of the “new,” or the “creative” character of the contributions of countless individuals and groups of individuals, to the evolution of the life of the world, or the life of the infinite number of worlds that make up what we think of as the universe. (7) The remarkable contradiction between Dr. Bosanquet’s calm rejection in his argumentation of all “naïve ideas” and his own naïve or Greek-like faith in reason, in the substantial existence of the concept or the idea over and above the phenomena and the phenomenal experiences which it is used to intepret.

Lastly, as for the matter of the non-moralism or the essentially anti-ethical character of “Individuality and Value,” this is a characteristic of the book that should, as such, be partly apparent from what has already been said, in respect of its main argument and its main contentions, and in respect of the apparent contributions of Pragmatism and Humanism to philosophy generally. The abstractionism of the book, and the absence in it of any real provision for the realities of purpose and of accomplishment (and even of “movement” and “process” in any real sense of these words), are all obviously against the interests of ethics and of conduct, as purposive, human action. So, too, are the findings of the critics that Dr. Bosanquet’s “Absolute” is not a reality (for, with Professor Taylor and others, man must[367] have an Absolute, or a God, in whom he can believe as real) that inspires to action and to motive on the part of ordinary human beings. And it is also fatal to the ethical interests of his book that he does not see with the pragmatists that our human actions and reactions must be regarded as part of what we mean by “reality.” And so on.

Apart, however, from these and other hostile pre-suppositions the following would seem to be the chief reasons for pronouncing, as unsatisfactory, the merely incidental treatment that is accorded in “Individuality and Value” to ethics and to the ethical life.

(1) It is not “conduct” or the normative[368] voluntary actions of human beings (in a world or society of real human beings) requiring “justice” and “guidance” and “help” that is discussed in these Lectures, but abstractions like “desire,” or “ordinary desire,” or “the selective conations of finite minds,” or “the active form of a totality of striving” or [worst of all] the “self as it happens to be,” that are discussed there.

(2) Even if conduct, as of course an “organic totality” in its way, be faced for the nonce in “Individuality and Value,” it is invariably branded and thought of by Dr. Bosanquet as “naïve morality,”[369] and it is forthwith promptly transformed and transmuted, in the most open and unabashed manner in the interests and exigencies of (1) logical theory, (2) aesthetics and aesthetic products [perhaps Dr. Bosanquet’s deepest or most emotional interest], and (3) metaphysical theory of a highly abstract character.

(3) The conception of ethics as a “normative science” and of conduct as free and autonomous,[370] and as the voluntary affirmation of a norm or standard or type or ideal, is conspicuous by its absence.

(4) There is really no place either in Dr. Bosanquet’s “concrete universal” or in his fugitive pages upon ethics for the reality of the distinction between good and evil (as “willed” in actions or as present in dispositions and tendencies). Good and evil[371] are for him, “contents” either for himself as a spectator of man’s actions, or for the “concrete universal,” or the “whole,” or the completed “individual” of his too consummate book.

(5) Like nearly all forms of Absolutism (Hegelianism, Neo-Hegelianism, Spinozism, Hobbism) Dr. Bosanquet’s ethics (or the vestigial ethics with which he leaves us) comes perilously near to what is known as Determinism[372] or Fatalism or even Materialism.

As for the first of the preceding five points, it is perfectly evident that any discussion of the various psychological phenomena that are doubtless involved in conduct can be regarded as but a preliminary step to the discussion of the real problems of ethics—that of the actions and habits and standards of persons who are the subjects of rights and duties and who affirm certain actions to be right, and certain other actions to be wrong. The point, however, about Dr. Bosanquet’s psychological abstractionism, especially when it rises to the height of writing as if the “self” as the “active form of a totality of striving,” or the “self as it happens to be,” were the same thing as the “personal self” with which we alone are mainly concerned in ethics, is that it is but another instance of the old “spectator”[373] fallacy that we have already found to underlie his whole treatment of the “self” and of “purpose” and of “striving.” Such a philosophy, or point of view, is quite foreign to ethics, because it is only in the ethical life that we think of ourselves as “persons,” as beings playing a part, as actors or players upon the great stage of life. By not facing the ethical life directly, from within, instead of from without, Dr. Bosanquet has entirely failed to understand it. And if he had attempted this internal consideration of “personality,” his whole metaphysic of “individuality” and of the great society of beings who inhabit (or who may be thought of as inhabiting) this universe, would have been very different from what it is.

Then as for the second and third points, it is surely evident from the footnotes that have been appended in connexion with the matter of his transformation of the facts of ethics in the interests of other things like logic, and aesthetics, and metaphysics, that there is indeed, in Bosanquet, no recognition of what must be called the genuine, or independent reality of the moral life, or of the moral ideal as a force in human nature. And as for the fourth point, students of modern ethics are naturally by this time perfectly familiar with the tendency of Rationalism to make evil action and the “evil self” simply the affirmation of a “logically incoherent” point of view. It exists in an English writer like Wollaston[374] as well as in a German philosopher like Hegel. This tendency is indeed a piece of sophistry and illusion because the distinction between good and evil, and the distinction between right and wrong (perhaps the better and the more crucial formulation of the two—for us moderns at least) is unintelligible apart from the fact or the idea of the existence of moral agents, who make (in their volition, and in the judgments that accompany or precede their volitions) a “norm,” or rule, or line between the ethically permissible and the ethically unpermissible. The rationalism that makes these distinctions merely a matter of “logic,” overlooks the fact that in actual life men must be warded off from wrong-doing (and they are in many cases actually so warded off by their consciences and by other things, like the love of home, or the love of honour, or the love of God) by something stronger than the mere idea of a possible theoretical mistake.

As for the fifth point of the Determinism or the Necessitarianism that hangs like a sword of Damocles over the entire ethic of Dr. Bosanquet, the nature of this should be perfectly apparent from many of the statements and considerations that have been brought forward as typical of his entire line of thought. He teaches a “passivism”[375] and an “intellectualism” that are just as pronounced and just as essential to his thought as they are to the great system of his master, Hegel, in whose ambitious philosophy of spirit man’s whole destiny is unfolded without the possibility of his playing himself any appreciable part in the impersonal, dialectic movement in which it is made to consist.

It is now necessary to speak definitely and outspokenly of the element of supreme truth and value in Dr. Bosanquet’s unique book, of the positive contribution it makes to philosophy and to natural theology.[376] This is, in a word, its tribute to the permanent element of truth and reality in the idealistic philosophy. And he testifies to this in his “belief” that in the main the work of philosophy has been done, and “that what is now needed is to recall and concentrate the modern mind from its distraction rather than to invent wholly new theoretic conceptions.” This declaration is of itself a position of considerable importance, however widely one is obliged to differ from its author as to what exactly it is that has already been demonstrated and accomplished “in philosophy.” If there has really been “nothing done” in philosophy since the time of Socrates, if philosophy is to-day no true antithesis of, and corrective to science, then there is possible neither Pragmatism, nor Humanism, nor any other, possibly more fundamental, philosophy. There can, as Dr. Bosanquet puts it, “indeed be no progress if no definite ground is ever to be recognized as gained.” This then is the first thing of transcendent importance in “Individuality and Value,” its insistance upon the fundamentally different estimate of reality given by philosophy in distinction from science and its merely hypothetical treatment of reality. This “difference” is, of course, but natural, seeing that to philosophy there are no things or phenomena without minds, or persons or beings to whom they appear as things and phenomena.

The second great thing of “Individuality and Value” is its insistence upon the need to all philosophy of a recognized grasp of the principle of “Meaning.”[377] What this instance implies to Dr. Bosanquet is, that “at no point in our lives [either] as [agents or] thinkers are we to accept any supposed element of fact or circumstance as having any significance” apart from the great “whole” or the great “reality,” with which we believe ourselves to be in contact in our daily experience, when interpreted in the light of our consciousness of ourselves as persons. In the letter of the book his interpretation of the great “whole,” or the great reality, of life is by no means as broad and as deep as the one at which we have just hinted in attempting to describe his position. But overriding altogether the mere intellectualism of Dr. Bosanquet’s interpretation, is the fact of the dynamic idealism for which he virtually stands,[378] in virtue of the great and the simple effort of his lectures[379] to find “value” in “our daily experience with its huge obstinate plurality of independent facts.” He would start, as we mentioned (at the beginning of this chapter), with what he believes to be “the daily transformation of our experience as verified within what we uncritically take as our private consciousness, so far as its weakness may permit,” and “as verified on a larger scale when we think of such splendid creations as the State and fine art and religion,” and when we think, too, of “the mode of our participation in them.” Now again nothing could indeed be more nobly true (in idea) of the great work of the philosopher than the proper theory and description of this “daily transformation” of our lives, out of the life of “sense” and the life of selfishness, into the spiritual communion[380] that is the essence of all right thinking and all right living.

But we may go further than all this and signalize one or two things in Dr. Bosanquet that we venture to construe as a kind of unconscious testimony, on his part, to the very humanism for which we have been contending throughout.

The things to which we refer are, firstly, his use of the word “belief”[381] in speaking of his opinion that the work of philosophy has in the main been accomplished, and, second, his fine and really praiseworthy[382] confession that his lectures, whatever they may have done or may not have done, at least “contain the record of a very strong conviction.” Dr. Bosanquet’s departure, in the letter of his argumentation, from the spirit of these declarations only accentuates what we regard as the regrettable failure and abstractionism of his whole official (or professed) philosophy.

His use of the word belief[383] shows that it is, after all his professional homage to “mediation” and to the necessary abstractions of logic and system, belief and not knowledge that is to him the final and “working” estimate of truth and of reality. And the same conclusion follows from the second matter of the confession of which we have spoken, that his entire argumentation is but the expression of a strong conviction.[384] It is again, therefore, we would insist a spiritual conviction, and not a conceptual system that is actually and necessarily the moving force of his entire intellectual activity. And, we would add to his own face, it is a conviction moreover that “works,” and not a “logical whole” or a mere conceptual ideal, that he must (as a philosopher) engender in the mind of his average reader about reality. His “logical whole” and his “individuality as logical completeness,” “work” with him [Professor Bosanquet] for the reason that he is primarily an intellectual worker, a worker in the realm of mind. But reality (as the whole world of human work and human effort is there to tell us) is more than an intellectual system. And what is a conviction to him is not necessarily a conviction that works with the ordinary man, who knows reality better than he does, or who knows it (like himself) in his desires and in his beliefs rather than in the terms and conceptions that are the mere tools of the intellect and the specialist. For, taking his book as a whole, we may say about it that the dissolution of reality into a conceptual system that is effected there is at best but another convincing proof of the truth of the words of the great David Hume,[385] that the understanding, “when it acts alone, and according to its most general principles, entirely subverts itself, and leaves not the slightest degree of evidence in any proposition, either in philosophy or common life.”