FOOTNOTES
[1] See, for example, the concessions and the fresh statements of the problem of philosophy, and the “clearing of the ground,” etc., referred to on [p. 76] and [p. 74]. Also [p. 27] in reference to the stir and the activity that have been excited by the pragmatist controversy. See also [p. 230], in the eighth chapter, in reference to some things in such a typical intellectualist as Professor Bosanquet that may be construed as a concession to Pragmatism and Humanism.
[2] Dr. Edward Caird affirmed in his memoir of his brother (Principal John Caird) that idealists admit some pragmatist charges.
[3] Professor Stein, a contemporary European authority, to whom we shall again refer below, says, for example, in his well-known articles in the Archiv für Philosophie (1908), in reference to Pragmatism, that we have had nothing like it [as a ‘movement’] “since Nietzsche” (“Der Pragmatismus,” p. 9).
[4] See [Chapter VIII.], where I discuss the natural theology that bases itself upon these supposed principles of a “whole of truth” and the “Absolute.”
[5] This statement I think would be warranted by the fact of the tendency of the newer physical science of the day to substitute an electrical, for the old material, or corpuscular, conception of matter, or by the admission, for example, of a contemporary biologist of importance (Verworn, General Physiology, p. 39) that “all attempts to explain the psychical by the physical must fail. The actual problem is ... not in explaining psychical by physical phenomena but rather in reducing to its psychical elements physical, like all other psychical phenomena.”
[6] See [p. 81], and [p. 150].
[7] See [Chapter V.] [pp. 136], [138], where we examine, or reflect upon, the ethics of Pragmatism.
[8] The importance of these volumes in the matter of the development, in the minds of thinking people everywhere, of a dynamic and an organic (instead of the older rationalistic and intellectualistic) conception of religion and of the religious life cannot possibly be overestimated. Of course it is only right to add here that such a dynamic and organic view of religion is the property not only of Professor James and his associates, but also of the army of workers of to-day in the realms of comparative religion and anthropology.
[9] Pragmatism, p. 300.
[10] Or an admission like the following in the Meaning of Truth (p. 243): “It may be that the truest of all beliefs shall be that in transsubjective realities.”
[11] Meaning of Truth, p. 124, 5.
[12] See [p. 40] and [p. 149].
[13] Pragmatism, pp. 244–245.
[14] A Pluralistic Universe, p. 34.
[15] In respect of James’ later doctrine of “radical empiricism” we may quote, for the sake of intelligibility, from Professor Perry (his friend and literary executor) the following: “James’ empiricism means, then, first, that ideas are to be tested by direct knowledge, and, second, that knowledge is limited to what can be presented. There is, however, a third consideration which is an application of these, and the means of avoiding a difficulty which is supposed to be fatal to them. This is what James calls ‘radical empiricism,’ the discovery that ‘the relations between things, conjunctive as well as disjunctive, are just as much matters of direct particular experience, neither more nor less so, than the things themselves.’ ‘Adjacent minima of experience’ are united by the ‘persistent identity of certain units, or emphases, or points, or objects, or members ... of the experience-continuum.’ Owing to the fact that the connexions of things are thus found along with them, it is unnecessary to introduce any substance below them, or any subject above them, to hold things together” (Present Philosophical Tendencies, p. 365). In regard to this radical empiricism, I am obliged, as a Kantian, to say that, to my mind, it represents the reduction of all Pragmatism and Empiricism to an impossibility—to the fatuous attempt (exploded for ever by Hume) to attempt to explain knowledge and experience without first principles of some kind or another. It is a “new Humism,” a thing which no one who has penetrated into the meaning of Hume’s Treatise can possibly advocate. A philosophy without first principles, or a philosophy that reduces the relations between experiences to mere “bits” of experience, is indeed no philosophy at all.
[16] See [p. 82] and [p. 154].
[17] The Preface, pp. xv., xix.
[18] See [p. 159] and [p. 212].
[19] As for Dr. Schiller’s charge that Absolutism is essentially “irreligious” in spite of the fact of its having been (in England) religious at the outset, the best way of meeting this is to insist that it is mainly in its form, rather than its content, that Absolutism is (or was) irreligious in both Germany and England.
[20] British students of philosophy are quite well aware that it was the religious and the spiritual motive that seemed to weigh most with Hutchison Stirling and John Caird and Green in their attempts (thirty years ago) to introduce German transcendental philosophy to their fellow-countrymen. Stirling was impressed with the idea of a working correspondence between Hegelianism and Calvinism. John Caird’s animus was against the agnosticism of Herbert Spencer and of Mansel, and he found inspiration in this connexion in Hegel’s treatment of Kant’s theory of the limitations of the understanding. And to Green the attractive thing about Kant was his vindication of a “spiritual principle” in “nature,” and in “knowledge,” and in “conduct,” a principle which rendered absurd the naturalism of the evolutionary philosophy. Friends of this spiritualistic interpretation of German Critical Rationalism find its richest and fullest expression in the books of Edward Caird upon the Evolution of Religion and the Evolution of Theology in the Greek Philosophers.
[21] The idea of a left wing is generally associated in the minds of British students with the destructive criticism of Mr. Bradley in Appearance and Reality, in which many, or most, of our ordinary ways of regarding reality (our beliefs in “primary” and “secondary” qualities of matter, in “space” and “time,” in “causation,” “activity,” a “self,” in “things in themselves,” etc.) are convicted of “fatal inconsistencies.” See, however, Professor Pringle-Pattison’s instructive account of his book in Man’s Place in the Cosmos, bringing out the positive side. The “left” is represented too, now, in Dr. Bosanquet’s Individuality and Value, which we examine below as the last striking output of British transcendentalism or absolutism. See in this entire connexion Professor James Seth’s recent account of the “Idealist Answers to Hume” in his English Philosophy and Schools of Philosophy.
[22] See [p. 244]. I find a confirmation of this idea in what a biologist like Professor Needham treats of as the “autogenetic nature of responses” (General Biology, p. 474) in animals.
[23] See the Studies in Humanism for all the positions referred to, or quoted, or paraphrased, in these two paragraphs.
[24] This is an important essay. It reminds the modern reader, for one thing, of the importance of the natural theology of Aristotle. It is an anticipation, too, in its way, of the tendency of modern physics to substitute a dynamic for a static conception of matter, or atoms, or substance. In it Dr. Schiller points out how Aristotle’s doctrine of a perfect and self-perfecting Activity [an ἐνέργεια that is not mere change or motion, but a perfect “life” involving the disappearance of “time” and imperfection] is in a sense the solution of the old [Greek] and the modern demand for the substance or essence of things. We shall take occasion (in speaking of the importance to Philosophy of the concept of activity, and in speaking of the Philosophy of Bergson) to use the same idea, to which Dr. Schiller has given an expression in this essay, of God as the eternal or the perfect life of the world.
[25] For a favourable estimate of the services of Dr. Schiller in regard to Pragmatism and Humanism the reader may consult the articles of Captain Knox in the Quarterly Review, 1909.
[26] Studies in Humanism, p. 19. The remarks made in this paragraph will have to be modified, to some extent, in view of the recent (1911) appearance of the third edition of Dr. Schiller’s Riddles of the Sphinx. This noteworthy book contains, to say the very least, a great deal in the way of a positive ontology, or theory of being, and also many quite different rulings in respect of the nature of metaphysic and of the matter of its relation to science and to common sense. It rests, in the main, upon the idea of a perfect society of perfected individuals as at once the true reality and the end of the world-process—an idea which exists also, at least in germ, in the pluralistic philosophy of Professor James; and we shall indeed return to this practical, or sociological, philosophy as the outcome, not only of Pragmatism, but also of Idealism, as conceived by representative living thinkers. Despite, however, these many positive and constructive merits of this work of Dr. Schiller’s, it is for many reasons not altogether unfair to its spirit to contend that his philosophy is still, in the main, that of a humanistic pragmatism in which both “theory” and “practice” are conceived as experimentally and as hypothetically as they are by Professor Dewey.
[28] See Professor Bawden’s book upon Pragmatism.
[29] Pragmatism, p. 58.
[30] Ibid. 76.
[31] Studies in Logical Theory, p. 2.
[32] I endeavour to indicate what this Humanism and Personalism may be in my sixth chapter.
[33] Journ. of Phil. Psychol., 1906, p. 338.
[34] From vol. ii. (p. 322) of Baldwin’s Dictionary of Philosophy. Dr. C. S. Peirce, formerly a teacher of mathematics and philosophy at Johns Hopkins University, was made by James into the father or patron saint of Pragmatism. James confesses to have been stimulated into Pragmatism by the teachings of Peirce.
[35] Journ. of Phil. Psy., 1906, p. 340.
[36] See [pp. 78], [148]; and in reference to the last striking presentation of Absolutism, p. 230.
[37] See Bourdeau, Pragmatisme et Modernisme, and W. Riley in the Journ. of Phil. Psy., April and May 1911; the James article, Journ. of Phil., 1906; Journ. of Phil., 1907, pp. 26–37, on Papini’s “Introduction to Pragmatism”; The Nation (N.Y.), November 1907, on “Papini’s view of the ‘daily tragedy’ of life.”
[38] Reported to have been inaugurated by a Franco-Italian poet, Martinetti. Of the question of any possible connexion between this “Futurism” with the present Art movement bearing the same name I know nothing definite.
[39] I refer to the recent volume dedicated by some of his old pupils to Professor Garman—a celebrated teacher of philosophy in one of the older colleges of the United States.
[40] The two large volumes on the Psychology of Adolescence.
[41] The Psychology of Religion.
[42] Even such a book—and it is no doubt in its way a genuine and a noteworthy book—as Harold H. Begbie’s Twice-born Men is pointed to by this wing as another instance of the truth of pragmatist principles in the sphere of experimental religion. Schopenhauer, by the way, was inclined to estimate the efficacy of a religion by its power of affecting the will, of converting men so that they were able to overcome the selfish will to live. See my Schopenhauer’s System in its Philosophical Significance.
[43] See, for example, the declaration of James and Schiller (in the prefaces to their books and elsewhere) in respect of their attitudes to the work of men like Renouvier, Poincaré, Milhaud, Wilbois, Le Roy, Blondel, Pradines, the valuable reports of M. Lalande to the Philosophical Review (1906–7–8), the articles of Woodbridge Riley in the Journal of Philosophy (1911) upon the continental critics of Pragmatism, the books of Bourdeau, Hebert, Rey, Tonquedoc, Armand Sabatier, Schinz, Picard, Berthelot, those of Poincaré, Renouvier, Pradines, and the rest, the older books upon nineteenth-century French philosophy by men like Fouillée, Levy-Bruhl, etc. There are also valuable references upon the French pragmatists in Father Walker’s Theories of Knowledge (in the Stoneyhurst Series), and in Professor Inge’s valuable little book upon Faith and its Psychology.
[44] The outstanding representative in France during the entire second half of the nineteenth century of “Neo-Criticism” or “Neo-Kantianism,” a remarkable and comprehensive thinker, to whose influence, for example, James attributed a part of his mental development. His review, the Critique Philosophique, was a worthy (idealist) rival of the more positivistically inclined, and merely psychological, review of Ribot, the Revue Philosophique. French Neo-Kantianism, holding, as Renouvier does, that Kant’s ethics is the keystone of his system, is not in general inclined to the “positivism” or the “scientific” philosophy of some of the German Neo-Kantians. The critical work of Renouvier proposes some very ingenious and systematic rearrangements of Kant’s philosophy of the categories, and his freedom-philosophy must certainly have done a good deal (along with the work of others) to create the atmosphere in which Bergson lives and moves to-day. With Renouvier, Neo-Kantianism merges itself too in the newer philosophy of “Personalism,” and he wrote, indeed, an important book upon this very subject (Le Personnalisme, 1902). In this work, we find a criticism of rationalism that anticipates Pragmatism, the author explicitly contending for a substitution of the principle of “rational belief” instead of the “false principle” of demonstrable or a priori “evidence.” Consciousness, he teaches, is the foundation of existence, and “personality” the first “causal principle” of the world (although admitting “creation” to be beyond our comprehension). He examines critically, too, the notions of the “Absolute” and of the “Unconditioned,” holding that they should not be substantiated into entities. “Belief” is involved in “every act,” he teaches—also another pragmatist doctrine. And like his great predecessor Malebranche, and like our English Berkeley, he teaches that God is our “natural object,” the true “other” of our life. The philosophy of Personalism, the foundations of which are laid in this work, is further developed by Renouvier in a comprehensive work which he published in 1899, in conjunction with M. Prat, on The New Monadology (La Nouvelle Monadologie). This is one of the most complete presentations of a philosophy of “Pluralism” that is at the same time a “Theism”—to be associated, in my opinion, say, with the recent work of Dr. James Ward upon the Realm of Ends, referred to on p. 162.
[45] Philos. Rev. (1906), article by Lalande.
[46] H. Poincaré (talked of in recent scientific circles as one of the greatest mathematicians of history) is (he died about a year ago), so far as our present purpose is concerned, one of the important scientific writers of the day upon the subject of the “logic of hypotheses,” and of the “hypothetical method” in science—the method which the pragmatists are so anxious to apply to philosophy. He seems (see his La Science et l’Hypothèse, as well as the later book, La Valeur de la Science, referred to by Lalande in his professional reports to the Philosophical Review) to accept to some extent the idea of the “hypothetical” character of the constructions of both the mathematical and the physical sciences, believing, however, at the same time that we must not be “unduly sceptical” about their conclusions, revealing as they do something of the “nature of reality.” He discusses among other topics the theory of “energetics” of which we speak below in the case of Ostwald. He insists, too, upon the idea that the real is known only by “experience,” and that this “experience” includes the comparison of the thoughts of many minds. And yet he believes to some extent in the Kantian theory of the a priori element in knowledge (see La Science, etc., p. 64). It is, however, quite unnecessary for me to presume to enter into the large subject of the precise nature of “hypotheses” in the mathematical and the physical sciences.
[47] A professor of mathematics in Paris and an ardent Bergsonian, and along with Laberthonnière one of the prominent Catholic defenders of Pragmatism and Modernism, author of a book on Dogmatism and Criticism (Dogme et Critique). Not having had the time to examine this book, as somewhat removed from my immediate subject, I append for the benefit of the reader the following statements and quotations from the useful book Faith and its Psychology, by Professor Inge of Cambridge. It is easy to see that the positions represented therein would give rise to controversy as to the historicity or fact of Christianity. “Le Roy gives us some examples of this Catholic Pragmatism. When we say ‘God is personal,’ we mean ‘behave in our relations with God as you do in your relations with a human person.’ When we say, ‘Jesus is risen from the dead,’ we mean ‘treat him as if he were your contemporary.’... His main theses may be summed up in his own words. ‘The current intellectualist conception renders insoluble most of the objections which are now raised against the idea of dogma. A doctrine of the primacy of action, on the contrary, permits us to solve the problem without abandoning anything of the rights of thought or of the exigencies of dogma.’” Le Roy, by the way, has published a book upon the philosophy of Bergson, which is said to be the best book upon the subject. It has been translated into English.
[48] M. Abel Rey, author of a work on the Theory of Physical Science in the hands of Contemporary Scientists (La Théorie de la physique chez les physiciens contemporains). In this book (I have not had the time to examine it carefully) M. Rey examines the theories and methods of Newton, and also of modern thinkers like Mach and Ostwald, reaching the conclusion that the philosophy with which physical science is most compatible is a “modified form of Positivism,” which bears a striking resemblance to “Pragmatism” and the “philosophy of experience.” The English reader will find many useful references to Rey in the pages of Father Leslie J. Walker’s Theories of Knowledge, in the “Stoneyhurst Philosophical Series.”
[49] Ibidem.
[50] It was impossible to procure a copy of this work of M. Blondel. I have tried to do so twice in Paris.
[51] M. Lalande in the Philosophical Review (1906), p. 246.
[52] Ibid. pp. 245–246.
[53] I am inclined to attach a great importance to this idea (Kant obviously had it) of “consulting moral experience directly,” provided only that the “moral” in our experience is not too rigidly separated from the intellectual. And it would so far, therefore, be only to the credit of Pragmatism if we could associate it with a rational effort to do justice to our moral experience, as indeed possibly presupposing a “reality” that transcends the limits of our mere individuality, a reality that transcends, too, the subjective idealism that figures but too prominently in modern philosophy. See my eighth chapter, [p. 223], where I criticize Dr. Bosanquet for not consulting moral experience directly.
[54] Phil. Rev., 1906, p. 243.
[58] For a later statement upon the philosophy of religion in France see a report for the Phil. Rev. (vol. xvi. p. 304), by Le Roy. This whole matter is, of course, a subject in itself of the greatest theoretical and practical importance. It is enough for our purpose to have indicated the different ways in which Pragmatism and the “Will-to-Believe” philosophy have been received in France, and the different issues raised by this reception. The reader who would care to look at a constructive, philosophical view (by the doyen of French philosophy professors) of the whole issue between the pragmatist or “voluntarist” point of view in religion and the older “intellectual” view, cannot do better than consult Science and Religion in Contemporary Philosophy, by E. Boutroux, a book that is apparently studied everywhere at present in France. Its spirit and substance may be indicated by the following quotations, which follow after some pages in which M. Boutroux exposes the error of “the radical distinction between theory and practice.” “The starting point of science is an abstraction, i.e. an element extracted from the given fact and considered separately. We cannot expect man to be satisfied with the abstract when the concrete is at his disposal. That would be ‘something like offering a printed bill of fare as the equivalent for a solid meal.’ Man uses science but he lives religion. The part cannot replace the whole; the symbol cannot suppress reality.”... “Not only is science unable to replace religion, but she cannot dispense with the subjective reality upon which the latter is grounded. It is pure Scholastic realism to imagine that the objective and the impersonal suffice apart from the subjective in our experience. Between the subjective and the objective no demarcation is given which justifies from the philosophical standpoint the divisions which science imagines for her own convenience.” (p. 329).
[59] Since writing these words, I have made (thanks firstly to Dr. Schiller’s review in Mind, July 1911) the acquaintance of the important work of M. Pradines upon the Conditions of Action. In the central conception of this work, that action is “all-including” and that all knowledge is a form of action, I find an important development of much that the pragmatists have long been endeavouring to express, and also in particular a development of the celebrated action philosophy of M. Blondel. I am inclined, with Dr. Schiller, to regard the volumes of M. Pradines as apparently the high-water mark of French pragmatist philosophy in the general sense of the term, although I cannot but at the same time hail with approval their occasional sharp criticism of Pragmatism as to some extent “scepticism and irrationalism.” I am inclined to think, too, that the ethical philosophy of M. Pradines has some of the same defects that I shall venture to discuss later in dealing with the application (mainly by Dewey) of Pragmatism to moral theory. Of course his Conditions of Action is by no means as original a production as Blondel’s book upon Action.
[60] Fouillée speaks in his book upon the Idealist Movement and the Reaction against Positive Science of the year 1851, as the time of the triumph of “force,” of “Naturalism” (Zola, Goncourt, etc.), and of the revival of Idealism by Lachelier, Renouvier, and Boutroux.
[61] See the celebrated work of A. Fouillée, La Psychologie des idées-forces (Paris, 1890). I confess to having been greatly impressed by this book when I first made its acquaintance. In particular, I can think of an idea in Fouillée’s book that anticipates even Bergson, namely the fact that every idea or sensation is an effort that is furthered or impeded. But Fouillée’s works out in this book the active of the volitional side of nearly every mental power and of the mental life itself, refusing to separate “mind” and “bodily activity.” It really anticipates a great deal of the whole French philosophy and psychology of action, including the work of Blondel and Bergson.
[62] M. Paul Desjardins (at present a professor of “letters” at Sévres) was influential in Paris about 1892–93 as the founder of a Union pour l’Action morale, which published a monthly bulletin. This society still exists, but under the name (and the change is indeed highly significant of what Pragmatism in general really needs) L’Union pour la vérité morale et sociale. I append a few words from one of the bulletins I received from M. Desjardins. They are indicative of the spiritualizations of thought and action for which the old society stood. “Il ne s’agit de rien moins que de renverser entièrement l’échelle de nos jugements, de nos attaches, de mettre en haut ce qui était en bas, et en bas ce qui était en haut. Il s’agit d’une conversion totale, en somme....” “La règle commune c’est la médiocrité d’âme, ou même ce qu’on pourrait appeler l’athéisme pratique. En effet, Dieu étant, par rapport à notre conscience, la Volonté que le bien se réalise, ou la Règle vivante, on devient pratiquement, athée, fût-on d’ailleurs très persuadé par les preuves philosophiques de l’existence de Dieu, lorsqu’on perd la notion de cette Volonté immuable avec laquelle la nôtre se confond activement dès qu’elle mérite le nom de volonté libre, etc.” In this last sentence there is a distinctly pragmatist note in the sense of the action philosophy of Blondel and Bergson and the rest.
[63] See also the recent book by Flournoy on the Philosophy of James (Paris, 1911), in which this interesting special subject is discussed as well as the important difference between James and Bergson.
[64] Rey in his Philosophie Moderne, 1908, speaks of the “gleaning of the practical factors of rationalistic systems” as the “new line” in French philosophy (Journ. of Phil., 1911, p. 226).
[65] From the Lalande article already mentioned.
[66] This can be seen, for example, in the Preface to Die Philosophie des Als Ob, the quasi-Pragmatist book recently edited by Vaihinger, the famous commentator on Kant. “We must distinguish in Pragmatism,” it is there stated, “what is valuable from the uncritical exaggerations. Uncritical Pragmatism is an epistemological Utilitarianism of the worst sort; what helps us to make life tolerable is true, etc.... Thus Philosophy becomes again an ancilla theologiae; nay, the state of matters is even worse than this; it becomes a meretrix theologorum.” This, by the way, is a strange and a striking book, and is perhaps the last conspicuous instance from Germany of the vitality, and of the depths of the roots of some of the principles of the pragmatists. The very appearance of the name of Vaihinger in connexion with it (as the editor) must be a considerable shock to rationalists and to Kantians, who have long looked upon Vaihinger as one of the authoritative names in German Transcendentalism. Here, however, he seems to agree with those who treat Kant’s ethical philosophy of postulates as the real Kant, making him out, further, as the author of a far-reaching philosophy of the “hypotheses” and the “fictions” that we must use in the interpretation of the universe. With Dr. Schiller, who reviews this work in Mind (1912), I am inclined to think that it travels too far in the direction of an entirely hypothetical conception of knowledge, out-pragmatising the pragmatists apparently. The student who reads German will find it a veritable magazine of information about nearly all the thinkers of the time who have pragmatist or quasi-pragmatist leanings. All the names, for example, of the German and French writers to whom I refer in this second chapter are mentioned there [I had, of course, written my book before I saw Vaihinger], along with many others. It is as serious an arraignment of abstract rationalism as is to be found in contemporary literature, and edited, as I say, by the Nestor of the Kant students of our time.
[67] Especially in the open-minded and learned articles in the Archiv für Philosophie, 1907, Band xiv., Professor Stein (of Bern) is known as one of the most enthusiastic and voluminous writers upon Social Philosophy in Germany. His best-known work is an encyclopedic book upon the social question in the light of philosophy (Die soziale Frage im Lichte der Philosophie, 1903). His tendency here is realistic and naturalistic and evolutionistic, and he thinks (for a philosopher) far too much of men like Herbert Spencer and Mach and Ostwald. What one misses in Stein is a discussion of the social question in relation to some of the deeper problems of philosophy, such as we find in men of our own country like Mackenzie and Bosanquet, and Ritchie, and Jones, and others. His work, however (it has been translated into Russian and French), is a complete literary presentation of the subject, and a valuable source of information. See my review notices of it in the Phil. Rev. vol. xiv.
[68] Mach and Ostwald both represent (for the purposes of our study) the association that undoubtedly exists between Pragmatism and the tendency of all the physical and natural sciences to form “hypotheses” or conceptions, that are to them the best means of “describing” or “explaining” (for any purpose) either facts, or the connexions between facts. Mach (professor of the history and theory of the sciences in Vienna) is a “phenomenalist” and “methodologist” who attacks all a priorism, treating the matter of the arrangement of the “material” of a science under the idea of the “most economic expenditure” of our “mental energy.” One of the best known of his books is his Analysis of the Sensations (translated, along with his Popular Science Lectures, in the “Open Court Library” of Chicago). In this work he carries out the idea of his theory of knowledge as a question of the proper relation of “facts” to “symbols.” “Thing, body, matter,” he says (p. 6), “are all nothing apart from their so-called attributes.” “Man possesses in its highest form the power of consciously and arbitrarily determining his point of view.” In his Introduction, he attempts to show how “the ego and the relation of bodies to the ego give rise” to “problems” in the relations simply of “certain complexes” of “sensation to each other.” While it is undoubtedly to the credit of Mach that he sees the “subjective,” or the “mental,” factor in facts and things and objects, it must be said that he ignores altogether the philosophical problems of the ego, or the “self,” as something more than a mere object among objects.
Ostwald is one of the founders of the theory of “Energetics,” the theory of the school that believes in substituting a dynamical philosophy, for the older, atomic, or mechanical philosophy of matter and motion. He put this philosophy forward in 1895 as the last gift of the nineteenth to the twentieth century. He suggests how this idea of energetics may be applied also to psychical processes, in so far as these may be understood by conceptions that have proved to be useful in our interpretation of the physical world. Our “consciousness would thus come to be looked upon as a property of a peculiar kind of energy of the nerves.” The whole idea is a piece of phenomenalistic positivism, and although Ostwald makes an attempt (somewhat in the manner of Herbert Spencer) to explain the “forms,” or the categories, of experience as simply “norms” or “rules” that have been handed on from one generation to another, he does not occupy himself with ultimate philosophical questions about the nature either of matter or of energy. His Natural Philosophy has recently been translated into English (Holt & Co., 1910). Its Pragmatism lies in the fact of his looking upon concepts and classification as “not questions” of the so-called “essence” of the thing, “but rather as pertaining to purely practical arrangements for an easier and more successful mastery of scientific problems” (p. 67). He also takes a pragmatist, or “functional,” conception of the mental life towards the close of this book. Professor Ostwald lectured some years ago in the United States, and his lectures were attended by students of philosophy and students of science. Professor (now President) Hibben has written an interesting account of his theory in its philosophical bearings in the Philosophical Review, vol. xii.
[69] The philosophy of Avenarius (born in Paris, but died as Professor of Inductive Philosophy in Zurich) is called “Empirical Criticism,” which differs from Idealism by taking a more realistic attitude to ordinary human experience. There is an excellent elementary account of Avenarius in Mind for 1897 by Carstanjen of Zurich. Avenarius goes back in some respects to the teaching of Comte as to the need of interpreting all philosophical theories in the terms of the social environment out of which they come.
[70] Logic, vol. ii. p. 17. English translation by Miss Dendy. In this same section of his work, Lotze talks of the demands of our thought as “postulates” whose claims rest in the end upon our will—auf unserm Wollen.
[71] To be traced to Fichte’s well-known initial interpretation of Kant from the standpoint of the Practical Reason of the second “Critique,” and to Schelling’s late “positive” philosophy, and to Schopenhauer, the will philosopher par excellence. See my Schopenhauer’s System in its Philosophical Significance.
[72] As an illustration of this “conceptual shorthand,” I take the following lines from Professor Needham’s book upon General Biology (p. 222) in respect of “classification” and its relative and changing character. “Whatever our views of relationship, the series in which we arrange organisms are based upon the likenesses and differences we find to exist among them. This is classification. We associate organisms together under group names because, being so numerous and so diverse, it is only thus that our minds can deal with them. Classification furnishes the handles by which we move all our intellectual luggage. We base our groupings on what we know of the organisms. Our system of classification is therefore liable to change with every advance of knowledge.”
[73] Professor Jerusalem (the translator of James’s Pragmatism into German) is known as one of the German discoverers of Pragmatism. His Introduction to Philosophy (translated by Professor Sanders, Macmillan & Co., N.Y., 1910) is an admirable, easy, and instructive introduction to philosophy from a pragmatist point of view. It has gone through four editions in Germany. It is quite free from any taint of irrationalism and has sections upon the “theory of knowledge” and the “theory of being.” Its spirit may be inferred from the following quotations. “My philosophy is characterized by the empirical view point, the genetic method, and the biological and the social methods of interpreting the human mind” (the Preface). “Philosophy is the intellectual effort which is undertaken with a view to combining the common experiences of life and the results of scientific investigation into a harmonious and consistent world theory; a world theory, moreover, which is adapted to satisfy the requirements of the understanding and the demands of the heart. There was a time when men believed that such a theory could be constructed from the pure forms of thought, without much concern for the results of detailed investigation. But that time is for ever past” (pp. 1 and 2).
[74] Author of a work on Philosophy and Social Economy (Philosophie und Wirthschaft), in which the fundamental idea is that philosophy is essentially nothing more or less than a “conception of life” or a view of the world in general, and that the older rationalistic philosophy will therefore have to be modified in view of modern discoveries and modern ways of looking at things. It has, of course, the limitations of such a point of view, in so far as its author seems to forget that philosophy must lead human life and not merely follow it. My present point is merely to mention of the existence and work of this man as one of the continental thinkers who have anticipated the essentially social conception of philosophy taken by the pragmatists.
[75] It is easy to see the influence of Fichte’s will philosophy and practical idealism in Schellwien’s books (Philosophie und Leben, Wille und Erkenntniss, Der Geist der neuern Philosophie). He speaks of the primacy of the will (in point of time only, of course), or of the “unconscious” in the life of man, allowing, however, that man gradually transforms this natural life in the life of “creative activity” that is his proper life. He states (in the Spirit of the New Philosophy) the pragmatist idea that “belief” (p. 32) or the “feeling” that we have of the ultimate “unity” of “subject and object,” precedes (also in point of “time”) knowledge, pointing out, however, in the same place the limitations of belief. These latter, he supposes, to be overcome in the higher knowledge that we have in creative activity—an idea which, I think, may be associated to some extent with the position of Blondel.
[76] In the Phil. Rev. (xvi. p. 250) Dr. Ewald speaks of this work of this psychologizing school as existing alongside of the renewed interest in Fichte and Schelling and Hegel. It is an attempt to revive the teaching of Fries, a Kantian (at Jena) who attempted to establish the Critique of Pure Reason upon a psychological basis, believing that psychology, “based on internal experience,” must form the basis of all philosophy. It stands squarely upon the fact that all logical laws and “categories,” even the highest and most abstract, in order to “come to consciousness in man,” must be given to him as “psychological processes”—a position which is certainly true as far as it goes, and which supports, say, the genetic psychological attitude of Professor Dewey. Its attitude has been sharply criticized in some of his books by Dr. Ernst Cassirer of Berlin, a well-known upholder of a more rationalistic form of Neo-Kantianism.
[77] Dr. Simmel of Berlin (like Stein) is a prominent representative of this school (even in a recent striking book that he wrote upon the philosophy of Kant). He has written, for example, a most erudite work upon the Philosophy of Money, and this at the same time with all his university work as a fascinating and learned lecturer upon both ancient and modern philosophy.
[78] Without attempting to enter upon the matter of Harnack’s philosophy as a Neo-Kantian of the school of Ritschl, I am thinking simply of things like the following from his book on the Essence of Christianity. “It is to man that religion pertains, to man, as one who in the midst of all change and progress himself never changes” (p. 8). “The point of view of the philosophical theorists in the strict sense of the word will find no place in these lectures. Had they been delivered sixty years ago it would have been our endeavour to try to arrive by speculative reasoning at some general conception of religion, and then to define the Christian religion accordingly. But we have rightly become sceptical about the value of this procedure. Latet dolus in generalibus. We know to-day that life cannot be spanned by general conceptions” (p. 9). See also his protest (on p. 220) against the substitution of a “Hellenistic” view of religion for religion itself—a protest that is, according to Pfleiderer in his Development of Theology (p. 298), a marked characteristic of Harnack’s whole History of Dogma.
[79] I am thinking of Ritschl’s sharp distinction between “theoretical knowledge” and “religious faith” (which rises to judgments of value about the world that transcend even moral values), and of his idea that the “truth” of faith is practical, and must be “lived.” Pfleiderer says (in his Development of Theology, p. 184) that Ritschl’s “conception of religion is occupied with judgments of value [Werturtheile], i.e. with conceptions of our relation to the world which are of moment solely according to their value in awakening feelings of pleasure and pain, as our dominion over the world is furthered or checked.” His “acceptance of the idea of God as [with Kant] a practical ‘belief,’ and not an act of speculative cognition,” is also to some extent a pragmatist idea in the sense in which, in this book, I reject pragmatist ideas. Ritschl seems to have in the main only a strongly practical interest in dogmatics holding that “only the things vital are to be made vital in the actual service of the church.” He goes the length of holding that “a merely philosophical view of the world has no place in Christian theology,” holding that “metaphysical inquiry” applied to “nature” and to “spirit,” as “things to be analysed, for the purpose of finding out what they are in themselves, can from the nature of the case have no great value for Christian theology.” Of course he is right in holding that the “proofs for the existence of God, conducted by the purely metaphysical method, do not lead to the forces whose representation is given in Christianity, but merely to conceptions of a world-unity, which conceptions are neutral as regards all religion” (The Theology of Albrecht Ritschl, Swing. Longmans, Green & Co., 1901). I think this last quotation from Ritschl may be used as an expression of the idea of the pragmatists, that a true and complete philosophy must serve as a “dynamic” to human endeavour and to human motive.
[80] See the reference to Windelband in the footnote upon p. 150.
[81] I am thinking of Münsterberg’s contention in his Grundzüge and his other books, that the life of actual persons can never be adequately described by the objective sciences, by psycho-physics, and so on, and of his apparent acceptance of the distinction of Rickert between the “descriptive” and the “normative” sciences (logic, ethics, aesthetics, and so on).
[82] The leaders of this school are the two influential thinkers and teachers Cohen and Natorp, the former the author of a well-known book upon Kant’s Theory of Experience (1871), formerly much used by English and American students, and the latter the author of an equally famous book upon Plato’s Theory of Ideas, which makes an interesting attempt to connect Plato’s “Ideas” with the modern notion of the law of a phenomenon. Cohen has given forth recently an important development of the Kantian philosophy in his two remarkable books upon the Logic of Pure Knowledge and the Ethic of the Pure Will. These works exercise a great influence upon the entire liberal (Protestant and Jewish) thought of the time in Germany. They teach a lofty spiritualism and idealism in the realm of ethics, which transcends altogether anything as yet attempted in this direction by Pragmatism.
[83] See the instructive reports to the Philosophical Review by Dr. Ewald of Vienna upon Contemporary Philosophy in Germany. In the 1907 volume he speaks of this renewed interest, “on a new basis,” in the work of the great founders of transcendentalism as an “important movement partly within and partly outside of Neo-Kantianism,” as “a movement heralded by some and derided by others as a reaction,” as the “fulfilment of a prophecy by von Hartmann that after Kant we should have Fichte, and after Fichte, Schelling and Hegel.” The renewed interest in Schelling, and with it the revival of an interest in university courses in the subject of the Philosophy of Nature (see the recent work of Driesch upon the Science and Philosophy of the Organism) is all part of the recent reaction in Germany against Positivism.
[84] We may associate, I suppose, the new German journal Logos, an international periodical for the “Philosophie der Kultur,” with the same movement.
[85] See [Chapter VII.] upon “Pragmatism as Americanism.”
[86] See an article in the Critical Review (edited by the late Professor Salmond, of Aberdeen), by the author upon “Recent Tendencies in American Philosophy.” The year, I think, was either 1904 or 1905.
[88] Without pretending to anything like a representative or an exhaustive statement in the case of this magazine literature, I may mention the following: Professor Perry of Harvard, in his valuable articles for the Journal of Philosophy and Psychology, 1907, vol. iv., upon “A Review of Pragmatism as a Philosophical Generalization,” and a “Review of Pragmatism as a Theory of Knowledge”; Professor Armstrong in vol. v. of the same journal upon the “Evolution of Pragmatism”; and Professor Lovejoy in the 1908 vol. upon the “Thirteen Pragmatisms.” These are but a few out of the many that might be mentioned. The reader who is interested in looking for more such must simply consult for himself the Philosophical Review, and Mind, and the Journal of Philosophy and Psychology, for some years after, say, 1903. There is a good list of such articles in a German Doctor Thesis by Professor MacEachran of the University of Alberta, entitled Pragmatismus eine neue Richtung der Philosophie, Leipzig, 1910. There is also a history of pragmatist articles in the 1907 (January) number of the Revue des Sciences, Philosophiques et Theologiques.
[89] That this has really taken place can be clearly seen, I think, if we inspect the official programmes of the Proceedings of the American Philosophical Association for the last year or two.
[90] P. 144.
[92] See [Chapter VI.], p. 149, upon the doctrine and the fact of “Meaning.”
[93] Professor Pratt, What is Pragmatism? (Macmillan & Co., 1909); H. H. Bawden, The Principles of Pragmatism, a Philosophical Interpretation of Experience, Boston, 1910 (a useful book presenting what may be called a “phenomenological” account of Pragmatism); Moore, Pragmatism and Its Critics.
[94] In Pragmatism and Its Critics (Univ. of Chicago Press).
[95] The manifesto has now become a book. The New Realism (Macmillan). For a useful account of the New Realism and the Old see Professor Perry, Present Philosophical Tendencies, Part V.
[96] The following are my reasons for saying that the “New Realism” was already to some extent lurking in the “radical empiricism” of James. (1) Although teaching unmistakably the “activity” of mind, James seemed to think this activity “selective” rather than “creative” (falling in this idea behind his much-admired Bergson). (2) Despite this belief in the activity of the mind, he had the way of regarding consciousness as (to some extent) the mind’s “content”—an attitude common to all empirical psychologists since Hume and the English associationists. And from this position (legitimate so far from the psychological point of view) he went on to the idea (expressed in a troublesome form in the article, “Does Consciousness exist?”) that consciousness is not an entity or substance—of course it is not in the ordinary sense of “entity.” (3) Then from this he seemed to develop the idea that the various “elements” that enter into consciousness to be transformed into various “relationships” do not suffer any substantial change in this quasi-subjective “activity.” Therefore, as Professor Perry puts it (Present Tendencies, p. 353), “the elements or terms which enter into consciousness and become its content may now be regarded as the same elements which, in so far as otherwise related, compose physical nature [italics mine]. The elements themselves, the ‘materia prima,’ or stuff of pure experience, are neither psychical nor physical.” It is in this last absurd sentence [simply a piece of quasi-scientific analysis, the error of which Critical Idealism would expose in a moment] that the roots, I think, of “new realism” are to be found—a doctrine whose unmitigated externalism is the negation of all philosophy.
[97] See [p. 164] and [p. 230].
[98] I refer to his Aberdeen “Gifford Lectures” on “The World and The Individual,” and to a well-known address of his upon “The Eternal and the Practical” in the Proceedings of the American Philosophical Association. In this latter pamphlet he shows that Pragmatism and the philosophy of Consequences are impossible without “the Eternal” and without Idealism.
[99] The criticisms of which I am thinking are (to select but a few from memory) Green’s well-known admission in respect of Hegelianism, that it would have “to be done all over again”; Mr. Bradley’s admission that he is “not a Hegelian” and (recently) that he has “seen too much of metaphysics” to place any serious weight upon its reasonings; Jowett’s complaint (in the “life” by Campbell) that the Oxford Hegelianism of his day was teaching students to place an undue reliance upon “words” and “concepts” in the place of facts and things; Dr. Bosanquet’s admission (many years ago) that, of course, “gods and men” were more than “bloodless categories”; Professor Pringle Pattison’s criticism of Hegel in his Hegelianism and Personality; Professor Baillie’s criticisms at the end of his Logic of Hegel; Mr. Sturt’s criticism of Neo-Hegelianism in his Idola Theatri, etc.
[100] See the following, for example, from Professor Stout: “Every agreeable or disagreeable sensation has a conative or quasi-conative aspect” (Manual of Psychology, p. 233). Also: “Perception is never merely cognitive” (ibid. p. 242); it has a “conative character and a feeling tone,” etc.
[101] A. Sidgwick’s “Applied Axioms” (Mind, N.S. xiv. p. 42). This is extremely useful, connecting the recent pragmatist movement with the work of the English logicians. See in the same connexion the articles of Captain Knox in the Quarterly Review (April 1909) on “Pragmatism.”
[102] During the last ten years Mind has contained articles on the pragmatist controversy by nearly all our prominent academic authorities: Dr. Bradley, Dr. McTaggart, Professor Taylor, Professor Hoernle, Dr. Schiller, Dr. Mellone, Dr. Boyce-Gibson, Mr. Hobhouse, and so on.
[103] Particularly in his valuable book on Truth in which the weakness of the Hegelian conception of truth is set forth along with that of other views.
[104] In Idealism as a Practical Creed, in his Browning as a Religious and Philosophical Teacher, and elsewhere.
[105] In his Elements of Metaphysic, and in many of his recent reviews; in his review, for example, of Professor Bosanquet’s Individuality and Value, in the Review of Theology and Philosophy, and in his Mind (July 1912) review of Professor Ward’s Realm of Ends.
[106] In his book upon the Philosophy of Eucken, in God With Us, and elsewhere.
[107] In Idola Theatri (an important criticism of Neo-Hegelian writers), and elsewhere.
[108] In Essays in Philosophical Construction, and in his book upon Logic.
[109] In his Introduction to Logic.
[111] “If God has this perfect authority and perfect knowledge, His authority cannot rule us, nor His knowledge know us, or any human thing; just as our authority does not extend to the gods, nor our knowledge know anything which is divine; so by parity of reason they, being gods, are not our masters, neither do they know the things of men” (Parmenides, 134, Jowett’s Plato, vol. iv.).
[112] This is, of course, a very old difficulty, involved in the problem of the supposed pre-knowledge of God. Bradley deals with it in the Mind (July 1911) article upon “Some Aspects of Truth.” His solution (as Professor Dawes Hicks notices in the Hibbert Journal, January 1912) is the familiar Neo-Hegelian finding, that as a “particular judgment” with a “unique context” my truth is “new,” but “as an element in an eternal reality” it was “waiting for me.” Readers of Green’s Prolegomena are quite ready for this finding. Pragmatists, of course, while insisting on the man-made character of truth, have not as yet come in sight of the difficulties of the divine foreknowledge—in relation to the free purposes and the free discoveries of mortals.
[113] There is, it seems to me, a suggestion of this rationalist position in the fact, for example, that Mr. Bertrana Russell begins his recent booklet upon The Problems of Philosophy with the following inquiry about knowledge: “Is there any knowledge in the world which is so certain that no reasonable man could doubt it?” I mean that the initial and paramount importance attached here to this question conveys the impression that the supreme reality for philosophy is still some independently certain piece of knowledge. I prefer, with the pragmatists and the humanists, to think of knowledge as concerned with the purposes of persons as intelligent beings, or with the realities revealed in the knowing process. Although there are passages in his book that show Mr. Russell to be aware of the selves and the psychical elements and processes that enter into knowing, they do not affect his prevailingly rationalistic and impersonal conception of knowledge and philosophy.
[114] In his sympathetic and characteristic review of James’s “Pragmatism” in the Journ. of Philos., 1908.
[115] See [p. 203] (the note), and [p. 263], where I suggest that no philosophy can exist, or can possibly begin, without some direct contact with reality, without the experience of some person or persons, without assumptions of one kind or another.
[117] In this attitude Pragmatism is manifestly in a state of rebellion against “Platonism,” if we allow ourselves to think of Pragmatism as capable of confronting Plato. Plato, as we know, definitely subordinates “belief” to “knowledge” and “truth.” “As being is to becoming,” he says, “so is truth to belief” (Timaeus, Jowett’s translation). To Plato belief is a conjectural, or imaginative, estimate of reality; it deals rather with “appearance” or “becoming” than with “reality.” “True being” he thinks of as revealed in the Ideas, or the rational entities that are his development and transformation of the “definition” of Socrates. Against all this rationalism Pragmatism (it is enough meantime merely to indicate the fact) would have us return to the common-sense, or the religious, position that it is invariably what we believe in that determines our notion of reality.
[118] Cf. p. 159.
[119] From Dr. Schiller’s Humanism.
[120] Pragmatism, p. 207.
[121] It is this dissatisfaction at once with the abstractions of science and of rationalism and with the contradictions that seem to exist between them all and the facts of life and experience as we feel them that constitutes the great dualism, or the great opposition of modern times. I do not wish to emphasize this dualism, nor do I wish to set forth faith or belief in opposition to reason when I extract from both Pragmatism and Idealism the position that it is belief rather than knowledge that is our fundamental estimate of reality. I do not believe, as I indicate in the text above, that this dualism is ultimate. It has come about only from an unfortunate setting of some parts of our nature, or of our experience in opposition to the whole of our nature, or the whole of our experience. That the opposition, however, between reason and faith still exists in many quarters, and that it is and has been the opposition of modern times, and that the great want of our times is a rational faith that shall recall the world of to-day out of its endless “distraction” (the word is Dr. Bosanquet’s), I am certainly inclined to maintain. In proof of this statement it is enough to recall things like the words of Goethe about the conflict of belief and unbelief as the unique theme of the history of the world, or the “ethical headache which was literally a splitting headache,” that Mr. Chesterton finds in the minds of many of our great Victorian writers. I shall take leave of it here with three references to its existence taken from the words or the work of living writers. The first shall be the opposition which Mr. Bertrand Russell finds in his Philosophical Essays (in the “Free Man’s Worship”) between the “world which science presents for our belief” and the “lofty thoughts that ennoble his little day.” The second shall be the inconsistency that exists in Mr. Hugh S. R. Elliot’s book upon Modern Science and the Illusions of Professor Bergson, between his initial acceptance of the mechanical, evolutionary system of modern science and his closing acceptance of feeling and poetry and love as the “deepest forms of happiness.” The third shall be the declaration of Professor Sir Henry Jones of Glasgow (in the Hibbert Journal, 1903) that “one of the characteristics of our time is the contradiction that exists between its practical faith in morality and its theoretical distrust of the conceptions on which they rest.”
[124] From Pragmatism and its Misunderstanders.
[126] “You will be surprised to learn, then, that Messrs. Schiller’s and Dewey’s theories have suffered a hailstorm of contempt and ridicule. All rationalism has risen up against them. In influential quarters, Mr. Schiller in particular has been treated like an impudent school-boy who deserves a spanking. I should not mention this but for the fact that it throws so much light upon that rationalist temper to which I have opposed the temper of pragmatism. Pragmatism is uncomfortable away from facts. Rationalism is comfortable only in the presence of abstractions. This pragmatist talk about truths in the plural, about their utility and satisfactoriness, about the success with which they ‘work,’ etc., suggests to the typical intellectualist mind a sort of coarse, lame, second-rate makeshift article of truth” (James, Pragmatism, pp. 66–67; italics mine). The words about Rationalism being comfortable only in the world of abstractions are substantiated by the procedure of Bosanquet, to whom I refer in Chapter VIII., or by the procedure of Mr. Bertrand Russell, referred to on p. 169.
[127] See [p. 235] in the Bergson chapter where it is suggested that perception is limited to what interests us for vital or for practical purposes.
[128] Cf. p. 92.
[130] See [p. 234] upon the “anti-intellectualism” in the philosophy of Bergson.
[131] See [p. 4] and [p. 237].
[132] From “Truth and Copying,” Mind, No. 62.
[133] From “Truth and Practice,” in Mind. Cf. “This denial of transcendence, this insistence that all ideas, and more especially such ideas as those of God, are true and real just so far as they work, is to myself most welcome” (Bradley, in Mind, 1908, p. 227, “Ambiguity of Pragmatism”). Mr. Bradley has of recent years made so many such concessions, and has philosophized with such an admirable degree of independence, and has (also admirably) attached so much weight to his own experience of “metaphysics,” and of other things besides, that many thinkers like Knox and Dewey and Schiller have been discussing whether he can any longer be regarded as a rationalist. One could certainly study, profitably, the whole evolution of philosophy in England during the last forty years by studying Mr. Bradley’s development. He never was, of course, a Hegelian in the complete sense (who ever was?), and he has now certainly abandoned an abstract, formalistic Rationalism.
By way of an additional quotation or two from Mr. Bradley, typical of his advance in the direction of the practical philosophy for which Pragmatism stands, we may append the following: “I long ago pointed out that theory takes its origin from practical collision [the main contention of Professor Dewey and his associates]. If Pragmatism means this, I am a pragmatist” (from an article in Mind on the “Ambiguity of Pragmatism”—italics mine). “We may reject the limitation of knowledge to the mere world of events which happen, and may deny the claim of this world to be taken as an ultimate foundation. Reality or the Good will be the satisfaction of all the wants of our nature, and theoretical truth will be the perception of ideas which directly satisfy one of those wants, and so invariably make part of the general satisfaction. This is a doctrine which, to my mind, commends itself as true, though it naturally would call for a great deal of explanation” (from Mind, July 1904, p. 325). And, as typical of the kind of final philosophy to which the philosophical reconstruction of the future must somehow attain out of the present quarrel between Pragmatism and Rationalism, the following: “If there were no force in the world but the vested love of God, if the wills in the past were one in effort and in substance with the one Will, if in that Will they are living still and still are so loving, and if again by faith, suffering, and love my will is made really one with theirs, here indeed we should have found at once our answer and our refuge. But with this we should pass surely beyond the limits of any personal individualism” (from Mind, July 1904, p. 316). Dr. Schiller, by the way, has a list of such concessions to Pragmatism on the part of Mr. Bradley in Mind, 1910, p. 35.
[134] Cf. the saying of Herbert Spencer (Autobiography, i. 253) that a “belief in the unqualified supremacy of reason [is] the superstition of philosophers.”
[136] “Truth and Practice,” Mind, No. 51.
[137] It would be easy to quote to the same effect from other Hegelian students, or, for that part of it, from Hegel himself.
[138] Elements of Metaphysics, p. 411.
[139] Ibid. p. 414.
[140] Cf. p. 14.
[141] See the well-known volume Personal Idealism, edited by Mr. Sturt.
[142] Cf. pp. 147 and 193.
[143] By this notion is meant the common-sense idea that truth in all cases “corresponds” to fact, my perception of the sunset to the real sunset, my “idea” of a “true” friend to a real person whose outward acts “correspond to” or “faithfully reflect” his inner feelings. See the first chapter of Mr. Joachim’s book upon The Nature of Truth, where this notion is examined and found wanting. It is probably the oldest notion of truth, and yet one that takes us readily into philosophy from whatever point of view we examine it. It was held by nearly all the Greek philosophers before the time of the Sophists, who first began to teach that truth is what it “appears to be”—the “relativity” position that is upheld, for example, by Goethe, who said that “When I know my relation to myself and to the outer world I call this truth. And thus every man can have his own truth, and yet truth is always the same.” The common-sense view was held also by St. Augustine in the words, “That is true what is really what it seems to be (verum est quod ita est, ut videtur),” by Thomas Aquinas as the “adequacy of the intellect to the thing,” in so far as the intellect says that that is which really is, or that that is not which is not (adaequatio intellectus et rei), by Suarez, by Goclen, who made it a conformity of the judgment with the thing. Its technical difficulties begin to appear, say in Hobbes, who held that truth consists in the fact of the subject and the predicate being a name of the same thing, or even in Locke, who says: “Truth then seems to me in the proper import of the word to signify nothing but the joining or separating of signs, as the things signified by them, do agree, or disagree, one with another” (Essay, iv. 5. 2). How can things “agree” or “disagree” with one another? And an “idea” of course is, anyhow, not a “thing” with a shape and with dimensions that “correspond” to “things,” any more than is a “judgment” a relation of two “ideas” “corresponding” to the “relations” of two “things.”
[144] “The mind is not a ‘mirror’ which passively reflects what it chances to come upon. It initiates and tries; and its correspondence with the ‘outer world’ means that its effort successfully meets the environment in behalf of the organic interest from which it sprang. The mind, like an antenna, feels the way for the organism. It gropes about, advances and recoils, making many random efforts and many failures; but it is always urged into taking the initiative by the pressure of interest, and doomed to success or failure in some hour of trial when it meets and engages the environment. Such is mind, and such, according to James, are all its operations” (Perry, Present Philosophical Tendencies, p. 351). Or the following: “I hope that,” said James in the “lectures” embodied in Pragmatism (New York, 1908) ... “the concreteness and closeness to facts of pragmatism ... may be what approves itself to you as its most satisfactory peculiarity. It only follows here the example of the sister sciences, interpreting the unobserved by the observed. It brings old and new harmoniously together. It converts the absolutely empty notion of a static relation of ‘correspondence’ between our minds and reality, into that of a rich and active commerce (that any one may follow in detail and understand) between particular thoughts of ours and the great universe of other experiences in which they play their parts and have their uses” (p. 68; italics mine).
[145] “On any view like mine to speak of truth as in the end copying reality, would be senseless” (Bradley in Mind, July 1911, “On some Aspects of Truth”).
[146] See [p. 143] and [p. 265].
[147] See [p. 127] and [p. 133].
[148] See [pp. 148–9].
[150] What is Pragmatism? (Pratt), p. 21.
[151] Principles of Pragmatism, Houghton Mifflin, 1910.
[152] Ibid., Preface. This last sentence, by the way, may be taken as one of the many illustrations that may be given of the crudities and difficulties of some of the literature of Pragmatism. It shows that Pragmatism may sometimes be as guilty of abstractionism as is Rationalism itself. It is not “experience” that becomes “self-conscious,” but only “persons.” And, similarly, it is only “persons” who pursue “ends” and “satisfy” desires, and who may be said to have a “method.” Professor Bawden, of course, means that it is to the credit of Pragmatism that it approaches experience just as it finds it, and that its chief method is the interpretation of the same experience—an easy thing, doubtless, to profess, but somewhat difficult to carry out.
[153] Principles of Pragmatism, Houghton Mifflin, 1910, pp. 44–45.
[154] P. 253.
[155] P. 256.
[158] Wallace’s Logic of Hegel, p. 304.
[159] There is a sentence in one of Hawthorne’s stories to the effect that man’s work is always illusory to some extent, while God is the only worker of realities. I would not go as far as this, believing, as I do, with the pragmatists, that man is at least a fellow-worker with God. But I do find Pragmatism lacking, as 1 indicate elsewhere, in any adequate recognition of the work of God, or the Absolute in the universe.
[160] I am thinking of such considerations as are suggested in the following sentences from Maeterlinck: “As we advance through life, it is more and more brought home to us that nothing takes place that is not in accord with some curious, preconceived design; and of this we never breathe a word, we scarcely let our minds dwell upon it, but of its existence, somewhere above our heads, we are absolutely convinced” (The Treasure of the Humble, p. 17). “But this much at least is abundantly proved to us, that in the work-a-day lives of the very humblest of men spiritual phenomena manifest themselves—mysterious, direct workings, that bring soul nearer to soul” (ibid. 33). “Is it to-day or to-morrow that moulds us? Do we not all spend the greater part of our lives under the shadow of an event that has not yet come to pass?” (ibid. 51). I do not of course for one moment imply that the facts of experience referred to in such sentences as these should be received at any higher value than their face value, for there are indeed many considerations to be thought of in connexion with this matter of the realization of our plans and our destiny as individuals. But I do mean that the beliefs to which men cling in this respect are just as much part of the subject-matter of philosophy as other beliefs, say the belief in truth as a whole, or the beliefs investigated by the Society for Psychical Research. And there may conceivably be a view of human nature upon which the beliefs in question are both natural and rational.
[162] See [p. 198] on Dr. Bosanquet’s dismissal of the problem of teleology from the sphere of reasoned philosophy.
[163] Appearance and Reality, p. 561.
[165] I think that I have taken this phrase from Some Dogmas of Religion.
[166] From “Truth and Copying,” Mind, No. 62.
[167] By action in this chapter and elsewhere in this book, I do not mean the mere exhibition or expenditure of physical energy. I mean human activity in general, inclusive of the highest manifestations of this activity, such as the search for truth, contemplation, belief, creative activity of one kind or another, and so on. There is no belief and no contemplation that is not practical as well as theoretical, no truth that fails to shape and to mould the life of the person who entertains it. I quite agree with Maeterlinck, and with Bergson and others, that the soul is to some extent limited by the demands of action and speech, and by the duties and the conventions of social life, but I still believe in the action test for contemplations and thoughts and beliefs and ideas, however lofty. It is only the thoughts that we can act out, that we can consciously act upon in our present human life, and that we can persuade others to act upon, that are valuable to ourselves and to humanity. It is to their discredit that so many men and so many thinkers entertain, and give expression to, views about the universe which renders their activities as agents and as thinkers and as seekers quite inexplicable.
[168] There are, of course, no heavens in the old mediaeval and Aristotelian sense after the work of Copernicus and Galileo in the physical sciences, and of Kant in the realm of mind.
[169] Professor Moore well points out (Pragmatism and its Critics, p. 13) that the “challenge” of the idea that our thinking has “two foundations: one, as the method of purposing—its ‘practical’ function; the other as merely the expression of the specific and independent instinct to know—its ‘intellectual’ function,” marks the “beginnings of the pragmatic movement.” The idea of two kinds of thought goes back to Aristotle and is one of the most famous distinctions of thought. It dominated the entire Middle Ages, and it is still at the root of the false idea that “culture” can be separated from work and service for the common good. I am glad, as I indicate in the text, a few lines further on, that the idealists are doing their share with the pragmatists in breaking it up. In America there is no practical distinction between culture and work. See my chapter on Pragmatism as Americanism.
[170] The importance of this consideration about the “attention” that is (as a matter of fact and a matter of necessity) involved in all “perception,” cannot possibly be exaggerated. We perceive in childhood and throughout life in the main what interests us, and what affects our total and organic activity. It is, that is to say, our motor activity, and its direction, that determine what we see and perceive and experience. And in the higher reaches of our life, on the levels of art and religion and philosophy, this determining power becomes what we call our reason and our will and our selective attention. Perception, in other words, is a kind of selective activity, involving what we call impulse and effort and will. Modern philosophy has forgotten this in its treatment of our supposed perception of the world, taking this to be something given instead of something that is constructed by our activity. Hence its long struggle to overcome both the apparent materialism of the world of the senses, and the gap, or hiatus, that has been created by Rationalism between the world as we think it, and the world as it really is.
[171] E.g. Professor Bosanquet, in his 1908 inaugural lecture at St. Andrews upon The Practical Value of Moral Philosophy. “Theory does indeed belong to Practice. It is a form of conation” (p. 9). It “should no doubt be understood as Theoria, or the entire unimpeded life of the soul” (p. 11; italics mine).
[172] This is surely the teaching of the new physics in respect of the radio-active view of matter. I take up this point again in the Bergson chapter.
[174] See [p. 143] or p. 229 (note).
[175] See [p. 34] in Chapter II. in reference to the idea of M. Blondel.
[176] See [p. 147] and [p. 265].
[179] Needham, General Biology, 1911. For the mention of this book as a reliable recent manual I am indebted to my colleague, Professor Willey of McGill University.
[180] Marett, Anthropology, p. 155.
[181] Cf. supra, p. 101.
[182] So much may, I suppose, be inferred from the contentions (explicit and implicit) of all biologists and evolutionists. Human life they all seem to regard as a kind of continuity or development of the life of universal nature, whether their theory of the origin of life be that of (1) “spontaneous generation,” (2) “cosmozoa” (germs capable of life scattered throughout space), (3) “Preyer’s theory of the continuity of life,” (4) “Pflüger’s theory of the chemical characteristics of proteid,” or (5) the conclusion of Verworn himself, “that existing organisms are derived in uninterrupted descent from the first living substance that originated from lifeless substance” (General Physiology, p. 315).
[183] Creative Evolution, pp. 245–5.
[184] It is, I think, an important reflection that it is precisely in this very reality of “action” that science and philosophy come together. That all the sciences meet in the concept, or the fact, of action is, of course, quite evident from the new knowledge of the new physics. Professor M’Dougall has recently brought psychology into line with the natural sciences by defining its subject-matter as the actions or the “behaviour” of human beings and animals. And it is surely not difficult to see that—as I try to indicate—it is in human behaviour that philosophy and science come together. Another consideration in respect of the philosophy of action that has long impressed me is this. If there is one realm in which, more than anywhere else, our traditional rationalism and our traditional empiricism really came together in England, it is the realm of social philosophy, the realm of human activity. It was the breaking down of the entire philosophy of sensations in the matter of the proof of utilitarianism that caused John Stuart Mill to take up the “social philosophy” in respect to which the followers of positivism joined hands with the idealists.
[187] See [Chapter VII.] p. 179.
[188] I am thinking of Pyrrho and Arcesilaus and some of the Greek sceptics and of their ἐποχή and ἀταραξία.
[190] Man’s Place in the Cosmos, a book consisting of essays and reviews published by the author during the last four or five years. They all advocate “humanism in opposition to naturalism,” or “ethicism in opposition to a too narrow intellectualism.”
[191] The Will to Believe, 1897.
[192] “Progress in Philosophy,” art. Mind, 15, p. 213.
[193] Practical Ethics; Essays.
[194] Mental Development—Social and Ethical Interpretations (a work crowned by the Royal Academy of Denmark). We can see in this book how a psychologist has been led into a far-reaching study of social and ethical development in order to gain an understanding of the growth of even the individual mind. We may indeed say that the individualistic intellectualism of the older psychology is now no more. It was too “abstract” a way of looking at mind. Professor Royce, it is well known, has given, from the stand-point of a professed metaphysician, a cordial welcome to the work of Professor Baldwin. In an important review of Mr. Stout’s two admirable volumes on Analytic Psychology (Mind, July, 1897), Professor Royce has insisted strongly upon the need of supplementing introspection by the “interpretation of the reports and the conduct of other people” if we would know much about “dynamic” psychology. It is this “dynamic” psychology—the “dynamics” of the will and of the “feelings”—that I think constitutes such an important advance upon the traditional “intellectual” and “individualistic” psychology.
[195] The Psychology of the Moral Self. Macmillan, 1897. I have tried, in a short notice of this book in the Philosophical Review (March, 1898), to indicate the importance of some of its chief contentions.
[196] Philosophical Lectures and Remains, edited by Professor Bradley.
[197] Editor of La Science Sociale. His recent work on the Superiority of the Anglo-Saxons (À quoi tient la supériorité des Anglo-Saxons?)—a chapter in the study of the conditions of race survival—ran through seventeen editions in a few months, and set the whole press of France and Germany (other countries following suit) into commotion, as well as calling forth pronunciamientos from most of the prominent editors and critics of France,—men like Jules Lemaître, Paul Bourget, Marcel Prevost, François Coppée, Édouard Rod, G. Valbert, etc.
[198] Now Professor A. Seth Pringle-Pattison.
[199] In different ways by all of the following English writers: Professor A. Seth (“It is not in knowledge, then, as such, but in feeling and action that reality is given,” Man’s Place, etc., p. 122, etc. etc.), by Mr. Bradley (Appearance and Reality), by Mr. Balfour (in his Foundations of Belief), and by Professor James. Professor Eucken, of Jena, in his different books, also insists strongly upon the idea that it is not in knowledge as such, but in the totality of our psychical experience that the principles of philosophy must be sought. Paulsen, in his Einleitung in die Philosophie, and Weber, in his History of Philosophy (books in general use to-day), both advocate a kind of philosophy of the will, the idea that the world is to be regarded as a striving on the part of wills after a partly unconscious ideal. Simmel, in an important article in the Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale, IV. 2, expresses the idea (which it would be well to recognize generally at the present time) that truth is not something objectively apart from us, but rather the name we give to conceptions that have proved to be the guides to useful actions, and so become part of the psychical heritage of human beings. Professor Ribot, of Paris, has written more extensively upon the will and the feelings than upon the intellect,—a fact in keeping with the scientific demands of our day.
[200] See, e.g., an article by Fouillée in the Revue Philosophique, XXI. 5, with the very title “Nécessité d’une interprétation psychologique et sociologique du monde.” Fouillée finds there, as he does elsewhere, that will is the principle that enables us to unify the physical with the psychical world,—an illustration of the fact that the two characteristics I am referring to are really one. A present instance of the introduction of the element of will (the will of man, even) is to be seen in the contention of such a book as M. Lucien Arréat’s Les Croyances de Demain (1898). According to Mind, M. Arréat proposes to substitute the idea that man can by his efforts bring about the supremacy of justice for the traditional idea that justice reigns in the universe.
[201] Manual of Ethics, according to Mr. Stout, International Journal of Ethics, October 1894. There are many similar sentences and ideas in the book.
[202] Elements of Ethics, p. 232.
[203] Now Professor of Logic in St. Andrews.
[204] International Journal of Ethics, October 1894, p. 119.
[205] I think that I must here have meant Professor Watson’s Christianity and Idealism.
[206] And apart from the idealism and the ethical philosophy of which I speak, in the next chapter, as necessary to convert Pragmatism into the Humanism it would like to become, Pragmatism is really a kind of romanticism, the reaction of a personal enthusiasm against the abstractions of a classical rationalism in philosophy. There is an element of this romanticism in James’s heroic philosophy of life, although I would prefer to be the last man in the world to talk against this heroic romanticism in any one. It is the great want of our time, and it is the thing that is prized most in some of the men whom this ephemeral age of ours still delights to honour. It was exhibited both in Browning and in George Meredith, for example. Of the former Mr. Chesterton writes in his trenchant, clean-sweeping little book on The Victorian Age in Literature, p. 175: “What he really was was a romantic. He offered the cosmos as an adventure rather than a scheme.” The same thing could be said about James’s “Will to Believe” Philosophy. Meredith, although far less of an idealist than Browning, was also an optimist by temperament rather than by knowledge or by conviction—hence the elevation of his tone and style in spite of his belated naturalism.
[207] In Un Romantisme utilitaire (Paris, Alcan, 1911), chiefly a study of the Pragmatism of Nietzsche and Poincaré.
[208] I am indebted for this saying of one of my old teachers to Mr. C. F. G. Masterman, in his essay upon Sidgwick in that judicious and interesting book upon the transition from the nineteenth to the twentieth century, In Peril of Change.
[209] Stoicism and Epicureanism, as the matter is generally put, both substitute the practical good of man as an individual for the wisdom or the theoretical perfection that were contemplated by Plato and Aristotle as the highest objects of human pursuit. For Cicero, too, the chief problems of philosophy were in the main practical, the question whether virtue alone is sufficient for happiness, the problem of practical certainty as opposed to scepticism, the general belief in Providence and in immortality, and so on. And Lucretius thinks of the main service of philosophy as consisting in its power of emancipating the human mind from superstition. All this is quite typical of the essentially practical nature of the Roman character, of its conception of education as in the main discipline and duty, of its distrust of Greek intellectualism, and of its preoccupation with the necessities of the struggle for existence and for government, of its lack of leisure, and so on. I do not think that the very first thing about Pragmatism is its desire to return to a practical conception of life, although a tendency in this direction doubtless exists in it.
[210] The idea that our “demonstrable knowledge is very short, if indeed we have any at all, although our certainty is as great as our happiness, beyond which we have no concernment to know or to be” (Essay, iv. 2–14); or Locke’s words: “I have always thought the actions of men the best interpreters of their thoughts.”
[211] Schopenhauer, for example, used to be fond of repeating that his own philosophy (which took will to be the fundamental reality) was on its very face necessarily more of an ethic than a system like that of Spinoza, for example, which could only be called an ethic by a sort of lucus a non lucendo.
[212] The Practical Reason to Aristotle is the reason that has to do with the pursuit of aims and ends, in distinction from the reason that has to do with knowledge, and the “universal” and science. This twofold distinction has given many problems to his students and to his commentators, and to succeeding generations. It is responsible for the entire mediæval and Renaissance separation of the intellectual life and the intellectual virtues from the practical life and the practical virtues.
[213] It might be added here that Logic has always recognized the validity, to some extent, of the argument “from consequences” of which Pragmatism makes so much. The form of argumentation that it calls the Dilemma is a proof of this statement. A chain of reasoning that leads to impossible consequences, or that leads to consequences inconsistent with previously admitted truths, is necessarily unsound. That this test of tenable or untenable consequences has often been used in philosophy in the large sense of the term must be known only too well to the well-informed reader. As Sidgwick says in his Method of Ethics: “The truth of a philosopher’s premises will always be tested by the acceptability of his conclusions; if in any important point he is found in flagrant conflict with common opinion, his method will be declared invalid.” Reid used the argument from consequences in his examination of the sceptical philosophy of Hume. It is used with effect in Mr. Arthur Balfour’s Foundations of Belief in regard to the supposed naturalism of physical science. Edmund Burke applied it to some extent to political theories, or to the abstract philosophical theories upon which some of them were supposedly based.
[214] Pragmatism has been called by some critics a “new-Humism” on the ground of its tendency to do this very thing that is mentioned here in respect of Hume. But the justice or the injustice of this appellation is a very large question, into which it is needless for us to enter here.
[215] Cf. “Intelligence is the aptitude to modify conduct in conformity to the circumstances of each case” (The Positive Philosophy, Martineau, i. 465).
[216] Principles of Philosophy, Part II. iii. It is also an eminently pragmatist idea on the part of Descartes to hold that “I should find much more truth in the reasoning of each individual with reference to the affairs in which he is personally interested, and the issue of which must presently punish him if he has judged amiss, than in those conducted by a man of letters in his study, regarding speculative matters that are of no practical moment” (Method, Veitch’s edition, p. 10).
[217] Principles of Philosophy, Part II. iii. p. 233.
[218] See Principles of Psychology, ch. ii., “Assumption of Metaphysicians,” and also elsewhere in his Essays.
[219] “Any power of doing or suffering in a degree however slight was held by us to be the definition of existence” (Sophist, Jowett’s Plato, iv. p. 465).
[220] The Theory of Knowledge, Preface, p. ix.
[221] “The independence of the doctrines of any science from the social life, the prevalent thought of the generation in which they arise, is indeed a fiction, a superstition of the scientist which we would fain shatter beyond all repair; but the science becomes all the sounder for recognizing its origins and its resources, its present limitations and its need of fresh light from other minds, from different social moulds” (pp. 215–216).
[223] Cf. p. 13.
[224] The New Knowledge, p. 255.
[225] It would indeed be easy to quote from popular writers of the day, like Mr. Chesterton or Mr. A. C. Benson or Mr. H. G. Wells, to show that a knowledge of the existence of Pragmatism as a newer experimental or “sociological” philosophy is now a commonplace of the day. Take the following, for example, from Mr. Wells’s Marriage (p. 521): “It was to be a pragmatist essay, a sustained attempt to undermine the confidence of all that scholastic logic-chopping which still lingers like the sequelae of a disease in our University philosophy ... a huge criticism and cleaning up of the existing methods of formulation as a preliminary to the wider and freer discussion of those religious and social issues our generation still shrinks from.” “It is grotesque,” he said, “and utterly true that the sanity and happiness of all the world lies in its habits of generalization.”
[226] I cannot meantime trace, or place, this quotation, although I remember copying it out of something by Karl Pearson.
[227] In the Literary Digest for 1911.
[229] From a letter to Mrs. Humphry Ward, quoted in A. C. Benson’s Walter Pater, p. 200.
[230] Lecture I. towards the beginning.
[231] See [p. 62] and [p. 197]. It should be remembered that our reasoned opinions rest upon our working beliefs.
[232] Vol. ii. p. 86.
[233] See the reference in Chapter II. p. 26 to the opportunistic ethic of Prezzolini.
[234] In What is Pragmatism? Macmillan & Co.
[235] Cf. p. 81.
[236] Professor Pratt makes an attempt in his book on What is Pragmatism? (pp. 75–6–7) to show that the true meaning of the “correspondence theory” is not inconsistent with Pragmatism or that Pragmatism is not inconsistent with this truth.
[237] Cf. supra, p. 64.
[238] See the Note on p. 21.
[239] Cf. supra, p. 67.
[240] Papini, in fact (in 1907), went the length of saying that you cannot even define Pragmatism, admitting that it appeals only to certain kinds of persons.
[241] For a serviceable account, in English, of the differences between the pragmatist philosophy of hypotheses and the more fully developed philosophy of science of the day, see Father Walker’s Theories of Knowledge, chapter xiii., upon “Pragmatism and Physical Science.”
[242] Cf. supra, p. 10 and [p. 15]. And this failure to systematize becomes, it should be remembered, all the more exasperating, in view of the prominence given by the pragmatists to the supreme principles of “end” and “consequences.”
[243] In the “Axioms as Postulates” essay in Personal Idealism.
[244] Bourdeau makes the same charge, saying that all pragmatists have the illusion that “reality is unstable.” Professor Stout has something similar in view in referring to Dr. Schiller’s “primary reality” in the Mind review of Studies in Humanism. It is only the reality with which we have to do (reality πρὸς ἡμᾶς as an Aristotelian might say) that is “in the making”: for God there can be no such distinction between process and product. But it is quite evident that Pragmatism does not go far enough to solve, or even to see, such difficulties. It confines itself in the main to the contention that man must think of himself as a maker of reality to some extent—a contention that I hold to be both true and useful, as far as it goes.
[245] Pragmatism, p. 264.
[246] “Pragmatism,” October 1900.
[247] The same line of reflection will be found in James’s Pragmatism, p. 96.
[248] Professor Moore has a chapter in his book (Pragmatism and its Critics) devoted to the purpose of showing the necessary failure of Absolutism (or of an Intellectualism of the absolutist order) in the realm of ethics, finding in the experimentalism and the quasi-Darwinism of Pragmatism an atmosphere that is, to say the least, more favourable to the realities of our moral experience. While I cannot find so much as he does in the hit-and-miss ethical philosophy of Pragmatism, I quite sympathize with him in his rejection of Absolutism or Rationalism as a basis for ethics. The following are some of his reasons for this rejection: (1) The “purpose” that is involved in the ethical life must, according to Absolutism, be an all-inclusive and a fixed purpose, allowing of no “advance” and no “retreat”—-things that are imperative to the idea of the reality of our efforts. (2) Absolutism does not provide for human responsibility; to it all actions and purposes are those of the Absolute. (3) The ethical ideal of Absolutism is too “static.” (4) Absolutism does not provide any material for “new goals and new ideals.” See pp. [218–225] in my eighth chapter, where I censure, in the interest of Pragmatism and Humanism, the ethical philosophy of Professor Bosanquet.
[249] See [p. 224], where I arrive at the conclusion that the same thing may be said of the Absolutism of Dr. Bosanquet.
[250] Students of that important nineteenth-century book upon Ethics, the Methods of Ethics, by Henry Sidgwick, will remember that Sidgwick expressly states it as a grave argument against Utilitarianism that it is by no means confirmed by the study of the actual origin of moral distinctions. As we go back in history we do not find that moral prescriptions have merely a utilitarian value.
[251] What I understand by the “normative idea of ethical science” will become more apparent as I proceed. I may as well state, however, that I look upon the distinction between the “descriptive” ideals of science and the “normative” character of the ideals of the ethical and the socio-political sciences as both fundamental and far-reaching. There are two things, as it were, that constitute what we might call the subject-matter of philosophy—-“facts” and “ideals”; or, rather, it is the synthesis and reconciliation of these two orders of reality that constitute the supreme problem of philosophy. It is with the description of facts and of the laws of the sequences of things that the “methodology” of science and of Pragmatism is in the main concerned. And it is because Pragmatism has hitherto shown itself unable to rise above the descriptive and hypothetical science of the day to the ideals of the normative sciences (ethics, aesthetics, etc.) that it is an imperfect philosophy of reality as we know it, or of the different orders of reality.
[252] Cf. Professor Ward in Naturalism and Agnosticism (vol. ii. p. 155): “What each one immediately deals with in his own experience is, I repeat, objective reality in the most fundamental sense.”
[253] Introduction to Science, p. 137.
[254] “But if the primitive Amoebae gave rise ‘in the natural course of events’ to higher organisms and these to higher, until there emerged the supreme Mammal, who by and by had a theory of it all, then the primitive Amoebae which had in them the promise and the potency of all this were very wonderful Amoebae indeed. There must have been more in them than met the eye! We must stock them, with initiatives at least. We are taking a good deal as ‘given.’” [Italics mine.]—J. H. Thomson, Introduction to Science, p. 137.
[255] See Westermarck, vol. i. pp. 74, 93, 117, and chapter iii. generally. The sentence further down in respect of the permanent fact of the moral consciousness is from Hobhouse, vol. ii. p. 54. As instances of the latter, Hobhouse talks of things like the “purity of the home, truthfulness, hospitality, help”, etc., in Iran, of the doctrine of Non-Resistance in Lao Tsze, of the high conception of personal righteousness revealed in the Book of the Dead, of the contributions of monotheism to ethics, etc. etc.
[256] Cf. p. 167.
[257] It may, I suppose, be possible to exaggerate here and to fall to some extent into what Mr. Bradley and Nietzsche and others have thought of as the “radical vice of all goodness”—its tendency to forget that other things, like beauty and truth, may also be thought of as absolute “values,” as revelations of the divine. What I am thinking of here is simply the realm of fact that is implied, say, in the idea of Horace, when he speaks of the upright man being undismayed even by the fall of the heavens (impavidum ferient ruinae) or by the idea of the Stoic sage that the virtuous man was as necessary to Jupiter as Jupiter could be to him, or by the idea (attributed to Socrates) that if the rulers of the universe do not prefer the just man to the unjust it is better to die than to live. If against all this sort of thing one is reminded by realism of the “splendid immoralism” of Nature, of its apparent indifference to all good and ill desert, I can but reply, as I have done elsewhere in this book, that the Nature of which physical science speaks is an “abstraction” and an unreality, and that it matters, therefore, very little whether such a Nature is, or is not, indifferent to morality. We know, however, of no Nature apart from life, and mind, and consciousness, and thought, and will. It is God, and not Nature, who makes the sun to shine on the just and the unjust.
[258] By this “meaning” is to be understood firstly the effects upon our appetitive and conative tendencies of the various specific items (whether sensation, or affections, or emotions, or what not) of our experience, the significance, that is to say, to our total general activity of all the particular happenings and incidents of our experience. Psychologists all tell us of the vast system of “dispositions” with which our psychophysical organism is equipped at birth, and through the help of which we interpret the sensations and occurrences of our experience. And in addition to these dispositions we have, in the case of the adult, the coming into play of the many associations and memories that are acquired during the experiences of a single lifetime. It is these various associations that interpret to us the present and give it meaning. In a higher sense we might interpret “meaning” as expressive of the higher predicates, like the good and the beautiful and the true, that we apply to some things in the world of our socialized experience. And in the highest sense we might interpret it as the significance that we attach to human history as distinguished from the mere course of events—the significance upon which the philosophy of history reposes. See Eucken in the article upon the Philosophy of History in the “systematic” volume of Hinneberg’s Kultur der Gegenwart.
[259] See our second chapter upon the different continental and British representatives of the hypothetical treatment of scientific laws and conceptions that is such a well-marked tendency of the present time. By no one perhaps was this theory put more emphatically than by Windelband (of Strassburg) in his Präludien (1884) and in his Geschichte und Naturwissenschaft (1894). In the latter he contrasts the real individuals and personalities with which the historians deal with the impersonal abstractions of natural science. I fully subscribe to this distinction, and think that it underlies a great deal of the thought of recent times.
[260] See “truth and real existence” in the Republic, 508 D—Jowett’s rendering of ἀλήθειά τε καὶ τὸ ὄν (“over which truth and real existence are shining”). Also further in the same place, “The cause of science and of truth,” αἰτίαν δ’ ἐπιστήμης οὖσαν καὶ ἀληθείας. In 389 E we read that a “high value must be set on truth.” Of course to Plato “truth” is also, and perhaps even primarily, real existence, as when he says (Rep. 585), “that which has less of truth will also have less of essence.” But in any case truth always means more for him than “mere being,” or existence, or “appearance,” it is the highest form of being, the object of “science,” the great discovery of the higher reason.
[261] To Professor Bosanquet, for example; see below, p. 213, note 2.
[262] The Poetry of the Old Testament, Professor A. R. Gordon.
[263] Ibid. p. 4.
[264] The Poetry of the Old Testament, p. 160.
[265] Ibid. pp. 183–184.
[266] It is this false conception of truth as a “datum” or “content” that wrecks the whole of Mr. Bradley’s argument in Appearance and Reality. See on the contrary the following quotation from Professor Boyce Gibson (Eucken’s Philosophy of Life, p. 109) in respect of the attitude of Eucken towards the idea of truth as a personal ideal. “The ultimate criterion of truth is not the clearness and the distinctness of our thinking, nor its correspondence with a reality external to it, nor any other intellectualistic principle. It is spiritual fruitfulness as invariably realized by the personal experient, invariably realized as springing freshly and freely from the inexhaustible resources which our freedom gains from its dependence upon God.”
[267] It is part of the greatness of Hegel, I think, to have sought to include the truth of history and of the social order in the truth of philosophy, or in spiritual truth generally. His error consists in not allowing for the fresh revelations of truth that have come to the world through the insight of individuals and through the actions and the creations of original men.
[268] There is a sentence in the Metaphysics of which I cannot but think at this point, and which so far at least as the rationalist-pragmatist issue is concerned is really one of the deepest and most instructive ideas in the whole history of philosophy. It is one of Aristotle’s troublesome additional statements in reference to something that he has just been discussing—in this case the “object of desire” and the “object of thought.” And what he adds in the present instance is this (Bk. xii. 7): “The primary objects of these two things are the same”—τούτων τὰ πρῶτα τὰ αὐτά—rendered by Smith and Ross “the primary objects of thought and desire are the same.” The translation, of course, is a matter of some slight difficulty, turning upon the proper interpretation of τὰ πρῶτα, “the first things,” although, of course, the student soon becomes familiar with what Aristotle means by “first things,” and “first philosophy,” and “first in nature,” and “first for us,” and so on. Themistius in his commentary on this passage (Commentaria in Aristotelem Graeca, vol. v. i-vi; Themistius in Metaphysica, 1072 and 17–30) puts it that “in the case of immaterial existences the desirable and the intelligible are the same—in primis vero principiis materiae non immixtis idem est desiderabile atque intelligibile.” I am inclined to use this great idea of the identity of the desirable and the intelligible—for conscious, intelligent beings as the fundamental principle of the true Humanism of which Pragmatism is in search. It is evidently in this identity that Professor Bosanquet also believes in when he says: “I am persuaded that if we critically understand what we really want and need, we shall find it established by a straightforward argument” (Preface to Individuality and Value. See the eighth chapter of this book). It is certainly true that the constructive philosophy of which we are in search to-day must leave no gap between thought and desire.
[269] I find an illustration or a confirmation of this thought in the following piece of insight of Mr. Chesterton in regard to the “good,” which is no doubt a “predicate” of our total thought and feeling and volition. “Or, in other words, man cannot escape from God, because good is God in man; and insists on omniscience” (Victorian Age in Literature, p. 246—italics mine). A belief in goodness is certainly a belief in an active goodness greater than our own; and it does raise a desire for a comprehension of things.
[270] The reader will find a good deal in Professor Baldwin’s Social and Ethical Interpretations of Mental Development upon the relation of truth and thought to desire, and also upon the social, or the pragmatist or the experimental test of beliefs.
[271] See [Chapter IX.], in reference to Bergson’s “creative activity.”
[272] The reader who is anxious to obtain a working idea of the limits of knowledge from a scientific point of view had better consult such pieces of literature as Sir Oliver Lodge’s recent examination of Haeckel’s Riddle of the Universe, Professor Ward’s Naturalism and Agnosticism, Merz’s History of European Thought during the Nineteenth Century, or Verworn’s General Physiology (with its interesting account of the different theories of the origin of life, and its admission that after all we know matter only through mind and sensation). Perusal of the most recent accessible literature upon this whole subject will reveal the fact that these old questions about the origin of life and motion, and about the nature of evolution, are still as unsettled as they were in the last half of the last century. It is not merely, however, of the actual limits of science at any one time that we are obliged, as human beings, to think, but of the limits of science in view of the fact that our knowledge comes to us in part, under the conditions of space and time, and under the conditions of the limits of our senses and of our understanding. Knowledge is certainly limited in the light of what beings other than ourselves may know, and in the light of what we would like to know about the universe of life and mind.
I do not think that this whole question of the limits of our knowledge is such a burning question to-day as it was some years ago, there being several reasons for this. One is that we live in an age of specialization and discursiveness and “technic.” It is quite difficult to meet with people who think that they may know, some day, everything, from even some single point of view. And then the wide acceptance of the hypothetical or the pragmatist conception of knowledge has caused us to look upon the matter of the limits of science and knowledge as a relative one, as always related to, and conditioned by, certain points of view and certain assumptions. We are not even warranted, for example, in thinking of mind and matter as separate in the old way, nor can we separate the life of the individual from the life of the race, nor the world from God, nor man from God, and so on. See an article by the writer (in 1898 in the Psy. Rev.) upon “Professor Titchener’s View of the Self,” dealing with the actual, and the necessary limits, of the point of view of Structural Psychology in regard to the “self.” Also Professor Titchener’s reply to this article in a subsequent number of the same review, and my own rejoinder.
[273] See [Chapter II.] p. 35.
[274] Despite what we spoke of in Chapter V. as its “subjectivism,” p. 134.
[275] That is to say, the simple truth that there is no “object” without a “subject,” no “physical” world without a world of “psychical” experiences on the part of some beings or some being. If our earth existed before animated beings appeared upon it, it was only as a part of some other “system” which we must think of as the object of some mind or intelligence.
[276] See [p. 235], note 2, in the Bergson chapter, where it is suggested that to Bergson human perceptions do not, of course, exhaust matter.
[277] Among the many other good things in Mr. Marett’s admirable Anthropology (one of the freshest works upon the subject, suggestive of the need, evidently felt in Oxford as well as elsewhere, of studying philosophy and letters, and nearly everything else in the mental and moral sciences, from the point of view of social anthropology) are the clearness and the relevancy of illustration in his insistence upon the importance of the “social factor” over all our thoughts of ourselves as agents and students in the universe of things.” Payne shows us (p. 146) “reason for believing that the collective ‘we’ precedes ‘I’ in the order of linguistic evolution. To begin with, in America and elsewhere, ‘we’ may be inclusive and mean ‘all of us,’ or selective, meaning ‘some of us only.’ Hence a missionary must be very careful, and if he is preaching, must use the inclusive ‘we’ in saying ‘we have sinned,’ whereas, in praying, he must use the selective ‘we,’ or God would be included in the list of sinners. Similarly ‘I’ has a collective form amongst some American languages; and this is ordinarily employed, whereas the corresponding selective form is used only in special cases. Thus, if the question be ‘Who will help?’ the Apache will reply, ‘I-amongst-others,’ ‘I-for-one’; but if he were recounting his personal exploits, he says sheedah, ‘I-by-myself,’ to show they were wholly his own. Here we seem to have group-consciousness holding its own against individual self-consciousness, as being for primitive folk on the whole the more normal attitude of mind.” It is indeed to be hoped that, in the future, philosophy, by discarding its abstractionism and its (closely allied) solipsism, will do its share in making this “group consciousness,” this consciousness of our being indeed “fellow-workers” with all men, once again a property of our minds and our thoughts.
[278] One of Professor James’s last books is called A Pluralistic Universe, and both he and Professor Dewey have always written under the pressure of the sociological interest of modern times. In short, it is obvious that the “reality” underlying the entire pragmatist polemic against the hypothetical character of the reading of the world afforded us by the sciences, is the social and personal life that is the deepest thing in our experience.
[279] This idea of a “world of inter-subjective intercourse,” although now a commonplace of sociology, was first expressed for the writer in the first series of the Gifford Lectures of Professor James Ward upon “Naturalism and Agnosticism,” in chapters xv. and xvi. The first of these chapters deals with “Experience and Life,” and the second with the “inter-subjective intercourse” that is really presupposed in the so-called individual experience of which the old psychology used to make so much. The reader who wishes to follow out a development of this idea of a “world of inter-subjective intercourse” cannot do better than follow the argument of Professor Ward’s second series of Gifford Lectures (“The Realm of Ends,” or “Pluralism and Theism”), in which he will find a Humanism and Theism that is at least akin to the theodicy, or the natural theology, of which we might suppose Pragmatism to be enamoured. The double series of these Lectures might well be referred to as an instance of the kind of classical English work in philosophy of which we have spoken as not falling into the extremes either of Pragmatism or of Rationalism. The strong point of the “Realm of Ends,” from the point of view of this book upon Pragmatism and Idealism, is that it moves from first to last in the reality of that world to which the science and the philosophy of the day both seem to point the way. In opposition to “subjectivism” it teaches a Humanism and a Pluralism that we recognise as an expression of the realities of the world of our common life and our common efforts, and from this Humanism it proceeds to a Theism which its author seeks to defend from many of the familiar difficulties of Naturalism. Were the writer concerned with the matter of the development and the elaboration of the philosophy that seems to have precipitated itself into his mind after some years of reflection on the issues between the realists and the idealists, between the rationalists and the pragmatists, he would have to begin by saying that its outlines are at least represented for him in the theistic and pluralistic philosophy of Professor Ward.
[280] According to Professor Dawes Hicks in the Hibbert Journal for April 1913, there is a great deal in the articles of Professor Alexander on “Collective Willing and Truth” that supports some of the positions I am here attempting to indicate, as part of the outcome of the pragmatist-rationalist controversy. “Both goodness and truth depend, in the first place, on the recognition by one man of consciousness in others, and, secondly, upon intersubjective intercourse” (p. 658).
[281] I owe this reference (which I have attempted to verify) to a suggestive and ingenious book (The New Word, by Mr. Allen Upward) lent to me by a Montreal friend. Skeat, in his Dictionary, gives as the meaning of truth, “firm, established, certain, honest, faithful,” connecting it with A.S. tréou, tryw (“preservation of a compact”), Teut. trewa, saying that the “root” is “unknown.” I suppose that similar things might be said about the Greek word ἐτεόν in its different forms, which Liddel and Scott connect with “Sans., satyas (verus), O. Nor. Sannr, A.S. sóth (sooth).” All this seems to justify the idea of the social confirmation of truth for which I am inclined to stand, and the connexion of intellectual truth with ethical truth, with the truth of human life. I agree with Lotze that truths do not float above, or over, or between, things, but that they exist only in the thought of a thinker, in so far as he thinks, or in the action of a living being in the moment of his action—the Microcosmos as quoted in Eisler, article “Wahrheit” in the Wörterbuch. The Truth for man would be the coherence of his knowledge and his beliefs, and there is no abstract truth, or truth in and for itself, no impersonal “whole” of truth.
[282] As in the Hegelian dialectic.
[283] There is another important thing to think of in connexion with this sociological character of Pragmatism. It is a characteristic that may be used to overcome what we have elsewhere talked of as its “subjectivism” and its “individualism,” and its revolutionary tendencies. It is, we might urge, a social and a collective standard of truth that Pragmatism has in view when it thinks of “consequences” and of the test of truth. Lalande takes up this idea in an article in the Revue Philosophique (1906) on “Pragmatisme et Pragmaticisme,” pointing out that Dr. Peirce would apparently tend to base his pragmatism on the subordination of individual to collective thought. Dr. Schiller too, I think, contemplates this social test of truth in his would-be revival of the philosophy of Protagoras—that man is the measure of reality—for man.
[284] See below, p. 197, where we speak of this “mediation” as the first fact for Professor Bosanquet as a prominent “Neo-Hegelian” rationalist.
[285] I have been asked by a friendly critic if I would include “inference” in this “real thought.” I certainly would, because in all real inference we are, or ought to be, concerned with a real subject-matter, a set of relations among realities of one kind or another. Possibly all students in all subjects (especially in philosophy) have lost time in following out a set of inferences in and for themselves. But such a procedure is justified by the increased power that we get over the real subject-matter of our thought. When thought cannot be thus checked by the idea of such increased power, it is idle thought.
[286] I am thinking, of course, of the entire revolutionary and radical social philosophy that harks back (in theory at least) to the “Social Contract” and to the State of Nature philosophy of Rousseau and his associates and predecessors.
[287] See [p. 184] of Chapter VII., where I speak of the ability to do this as the invariable possession of the successful American teacher of philosophy.
[288] An equivalent of it, of course, exists in many sayings, in many countries, in the conception of the task of the metaphysician as that of “a blind man in a dark room hunting for a black cat which—is not there,” reproduced by Sir Ray Lankester in the recent book of H. S. R. Eliot, Modern Science and the Illusions of Bergson. There is generally an error or a fallacy in such descriptions of philosophy—in this Lankester story the error that the secret of the world is a kind of “thing in itself” out of all relation to everything we know and experience—the very error against which the pragmatists are protesting.
[289] Mr. Bertrand Russell, for example, seems to me to have the prejudice that philosophy is at its best only when occupied with studies which (like the mathematics of his affections) are as remote as possible from human life. “Real life is,” he says, “to most men a long second-best, a perpetual compromise between the ideal and the possible; but the world of pure reason knows no compromise, no practical limitations, no barrier to the creative activity embodying in splendid edifices the passionate aspiration after the perfect form from which all great work springs. Remote from human passions, remote even from the pitiful facts of nature, the generations have gradually created an ordered cosmos where pure thought can dwell as in its natural home, and where one, at least, of our nobler impulses can escape from the dreary exile of the actual world.” I cannot—as I have indicated elsewhere in regard to Mr. Russell—see for one moment how there is any justification for looking upon this “ordered cosmos” of mathematical physics as anything other than an abstraction from the real world with which we are acquainted. It is the creation of only one of our many human interests. And I cannot see that the thought that occupies itself with this world is any nobler than the thought that occupies itself with the more complex worlds of life, and of birth and death, and of knowledge and feeling and conduct. Mr. Russell might remember, for one thing, that there have been men (Spinoza among them) who have attempted to treat of human passions under the light of ascertainable laws, and that it is (to say the very least) as legitimate for philosophy to seek for reason and law in human life, and in the evolution of human history, as in the abstract world of physical and mathematical science. Can, too, a mathematical philosophy afford any final haven for the spirit of man, without an examination of the mind of the mathematician and of the nature of the concepts and symbols that he uses in his researches? There is a whole world of dispute and discussion about all these things.
[290] I have in view in fact only (or mainly) such American characteristics as may be thought of in connexion with the newer intellectual and social atmosphere of the present time, the atmosphere that impresses the visitor and the resident from the old world, the atmosphere to the creation of which he himself and his fellow-immigrants have contributed, as well as the native-born American of two generations ago—to go no further back. I mean that anything like a far-reaching analysis or consideration of the great qualities that go to make up the “soul” of the United States is, of course, altogether beyond the sphere of my attention for the present. I fully subscribe, in short, to the truth of the following words of Professor Santayana, one of the most scholarly and competent American students (both of philosophy and of life) of the passing generation: “America is not simply a young country with an old mentality; it is a country with two mentalities, one a survival of the beliefs and standards of the fathers, the other an expression of the instincts, practice, and discoveries of the younger generation. In all the higher things of the mind—in religion, literature, in the moral emotions, it is the hereditary spirit that still prevails, so much so, that Mr. Bernard Shaw finds that America is a hundred years behind the times.”—“The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy,” in Winds of Doctrine (p. 187).
[291] A contemporary American authority, Professor Bliss Perry, in his book upon The American Mind naturally singles out radicalism as one of the well-marked characteristics of Americans. Among the other characteristics of which he speaks are those of the “love of exaggeration,” “idealism,” “optimism,” “individualism,” “public spirit.” I refer, I think, to nearly all these things in my pages, although of course I had not the benefit of Professor Perry’s book in writing the present chapter.
[292] I am certainly one of those who insist that we must think of America as (despite some appearances to the contrary—appearances to be seen also, for example, in the West of Canada) fundamentally a religious country. It was founded upon certain great religious ideas that were a highly important counterpart to some of the eighteenth-century fallacies about liberty and equality that exercised their influence upon the fathers of the republic.
[293] He has recently published a volume dealing especially with the contributions of Biology and Darwinism to philosophy.
[295] The crucial characteristics of the Presidential campaign of 1912 clearly showed this.
[296] We can see this in the many valuable studies and addresses of Professor Dewey upon educational and social problems.
[297] It is this fact, or the body of fact and tendency upon which it rests, that causes Americans and all who know them or observe them, to think and speak of the apparently purely “economic” or “business-like” character of the greater part of their activities. Let me quote Professor Bliss Perry here ... “the overwhelming preponderance of the unmitigated business-man face [italics mine], the consummate monotonous commonness of the pushing male crowd” (p. 158). “There exists, in other words, in all classes of American society to-day, just as there existed during the Revolution, during the ‘transcendental’ movement, in the Civil War, an immense mass of unspiritualised, unvitalised American manhood and womanhood” (p. 160).
[298] And this despite of what I have called elsewhere the comparative failure of Pragmatism to give a rational, and tenable account of “personality” and of the “self.”
[299] At the moment of his death (scribens est mortuus) James was undoubtedly throughout the world the most talked-about English-speaking philosopher, and nowhere more so than in Germany, the home of the transcendentalism that he so doughtily and brilliantly attacked. Stein says, for example, in his article upon “Pragmatism” (Archiv für Philosophie, 14, 1907, II. Ab.), that we “have had nothing like it since Schopenhauer.” I have often thought that James and his work, along with the life and work of other notable American thinkers (and along with the “lead” that America now certainly has over at least England in some departments of study, like political and economic science, experimental psychology, and so on), are part of the debt America owed, some decades ago, to the Old World in the matter of the training of many of her best professors—a debt she has long since cancelled and overpaid. Readers, by the way, who desire more authentic information about James and his work than the present writer is either capable, or desirous, of giving in this book, may peruse either the recent work of Professor Perry of Harvard upon Present Philosophical Tendencies, or the work of M. Flournoy already spoken of. Boutroux has a fine appreciation of the value of James’s philosophical work in the work to which I have already referred. And there was naturally a crop of invaluable articles upon James in the American reviews shortly after his death.
[300] Think alone, for example, of what James says he learnt there from a teacher like Agassiz: “The hours I spent with Agassiz so taught me the difference between all possible abstractionists and all livers in the light of the world’s concrete fulness that I have never been able to forget it.”—From an article upon James in the Journal of Philosophy, ix. p. 527.
[301] While this book was passing through the press my eye fell upon the following words of Professor Santayana in respect of this very personality of James: “It was his personal spontaneity, similar to that of Emerson, and his personal vitality similar to that of nobody else. Conviction and ideas came to him, so to speak, from the subsoil. He had a prophetic sympathy with the dawning sentiments of the age, with the moods of the dumb majority. His way of thinking and feeling represents the true America, and represented in a measure the whole ultra-modern radical world” (Winds of Doctrine, p. 205).
[302] Including, say, the facilities of a completely indexed and authenticated estimate of the work that has been done in different countries upon his particular subject. It is easy to see that the habit and the possibility of work in an environment such as this [and again and again its system and its facilities simply stagger the European] is a thing of the greatest value to the American professor so far as the idea of his own best possible contribution to his age is concerned. Should he merely do over again what others have done? Or shall he try to work in a really new field? Or shall he give himself to the work of real teaching, to the training of competent men, or to the “organization” of his subject with his public? It must be admitted, I think, that the average American professor is a better teacher and guide in his subject than his average colleague in many places in Europe. Hence the justifiable discontent of many American students with what they occasionally find abroad in the way of academic facilities for investigation and advanced study.
[303] The latter (it is perhaps needless to state) have long been perfectly evident to all American teachers of the first rank in the shape, say, of the worthless “research” that is often represented in theses and studies handed in for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, or for other purposes. Anything that seems to be “work done,” anything that has attained to some “consequences” or other, has often been published as studies and researches, and this despite the valuable things that are to be associated with the idea of the pragmatist element in American scholarship. The faults, too, of the undue specialization that still obtains in many American institutions is also, as I have indicated, becoming more and more apparent to American authorities.
[304] I cannot see why idealists should have been so slow to accord to Pragmatism the element of truth in this idea, and to admit that it connects the pragmatist philosophy of “consequences” with the idealist “value-philosophy.”
[305] The greater part, for example, of our British teaching and writing about Kant and Hegel has taken little or no recognition of the peculiar intellectual and social atmosphere under which Criticism and Transcendentalism became intelligible and influential in Germany and elsewhere, or of the equally important matter of the very different ways in which the Kantian and the Hegelian philosophies were interpreted by different schools and different tendencies of thought. A similar thing might, I think, too, be said of the unduly “intellectualistic” manner in which the teachings of Plato and Aristotle have often been presented to our British students—under the influence partly of Hegelianism and partly of the doctrinairism and the intellectualism of our academic Humanism since the time of the Renaissance. Hence the great importance in Greek philosophy of such a recent work as that of F. M. Cornford upon the relation of Religion to Philosophy (From Religion to Philosophy, Arnold, 1912), or of Professor Burnet’s well-known Early Greek Philosophy.
[306] As suggestive of the scant respect for authorities felt by the active-minded American student, I may refer to the boast of Papini that Pragmatism appeals to the virile and the proud-spirited who do not wish to accept their thought from the past.
[307] I am thinking of such events as the “World’s Parliament of Religions” (in Chicago in 1893), the recent international conferences upon “ethical instruction in different countries,” upon “racial problems,” upon “missions,” etc. It would be idle to think that such attempts at the organisation of the knowledge and the effort of the thinking people in the world are quite devoid of philosophical importance. One has only to study, say, von Hartmann, or modern social reform, to be convinced of the contrary.
[308] I trust I may be pardoned if I venture to suggest that in opposition to the democratic attitude of Pragmatism to the ordinary facts of life, and to the ordinary (but often heroic) life of ordinary men, the view of man and the universe that is taken in such an important idealistic book as Dr. Bosanquet’s Individuality and Value is doubtless unduly aristocratic or intellectualistic. It speaks rather of the Greek view of life than of the modern democratic view. As an expression of the quasi democratic attitude of James even in philosophy, we may cite the following: “In this real world of sweat and dirt, it seems to me that when a view of things is noble, that ought to count as a presumption its truth, as a philosophical disqualification. The Prince of Darkness may be a gentleman, as we are told he is, but whatever the God of earth and heaven is, he can surely be no gentleman. His menial services are needed in the dust of our human trials.” [Having rewritten this quotation two or three times, I have lost the reference to its place in James’s writings. It is one of the three books upon Pragmatism and Pluralism.]
[309] We may quote, I think, the following passage from Professor Perry to show that the open-mindedness of James was not merely a temperamental and an American characteristic in his case, but a quality or attitude that rested upon an intellectual conviction in respect of the function of ideas. “Since it is their office [i.e. the office of ideas] to pave the way for direct knowledge, or to be temporarily substituted for it, then efficiency is conditioned by their unobtrusiveness, by the readiness with which they subordinate themselves. The commonest case of an idea in James’s sense is the word, and the most notable example of his pragmatic or empirical method is his own scrupulous avoidance of verbalism. It follows that since ideas are in and of themselves of no cognitive value, since they are essentially instrumental, they are always on trial, and ‘liable to modification in the course of future experience.’”—Present Philosophical Tendencies, p. 364 (italics mine).
[310] It is known to all students that some of the more important writings of this prince of thinkers cannot be intelligibly approached without a long preliminary study of the peculiar “dressing up,” or transformation, to which he subjects the various facts of life and existence. And the same thing is true (to a more modified extent) of the writings of Kant.
[311] See the wise remark, in this very connexion, of the possible service of philosophy to-day, of Dr. Bosanquet, reproduced upon p. 226. And then, again, we must remember that an unduly pragmatist view of life would tend to make people impervious to ideas that transcend the range and the level of their ordinary interests and activities.
[312] Cf. the following from Professor Pace’s Preface to Introduction to Philosophy, by Charles A. Dubray. “In Catholic colleges, importance has always been attached to the study of philosophy both as a means of culture and as a source of information regarding the great truths which are influential in supporting Christian belief and in shaping character.” Of course these same words might be used as descriptive of what Professor Santayana calls the “older tradition” in all American colleges. It is interesting, by the way, to note also the pragmatist touch in the same Preface to this Catholic manual. “But if this training is to be successful, philosophy must be presented, not as a complex of abstruse speculations on far-off inaccessible topics, but as a system of truths that enter with vital consequence into our ordinary thinking and our everyday conduct.”
[314] See above, p. 34 and [p. 165].
[315] It is not, however, “rest” that the pragmatists want, even in heaven, but renewed opportunities for achievement. “‘There shall be news,’ W. James was fond of saying with rapture, quoting from the unpublished poem of a new friend, ‘there shall be news in heaven.’”—Professor Santayana in Winds of Doctrine, p. 209.
[316] In using this expression I am acutely conscious of its limitations and of its misleading character. There is nothing in which Americans so thoroughly believe as knowledge and instruction and information. A belief in education is in fact the one prevailing religion of the country—the one thing in which all classes, without any exception, unfeignedly believe, and for which the entire country makes enormous sacrifices.
[317] In using this expression I am not blind to such outstanding characteristics of American life as (1) the enormous amount of preventive philanthropy that exists in the United States; (2) the well-known system of checks in the governmental machinery of the country; (3) the readiness with which Americans fly to legislation for the cure of evils; (4) the American sensitiveness to pain and their hesitation about the infliction of suffering or punishment, etc. Nor do I forget the sacrifice of life entailed by modern necessities and modern inventions in countries other than America. I simply mean that owing to the constant stream of immigration, and to the spirit of youthfulness that pervades the country, the willingness of people to make experiments with themselves and their lives is one of the many remarkable things about the United States.
[319] And this despite the enormous amount of work that has been done by American biologists upon the “factors” of evolution, and upon a true interpretation of Darwinism and of Weismannism and of the evolutionary theory generally.
[320] Even Professor James, for example, dismissed (far too readily, in my opinion) as a “sociological romance” a well-known book (published both in French and in English) by Professor Schinz entitled Anti-Pragmatism. Although in some respects a superficial and exaggerated piece of work, this book did discover certain important things about Pragmatism and about its relation to American life.
[321] It is probably a perception of this truth that has led Dr. Bosanquet to express the opinion that the whole pragmatist issue may be settled by an examination of the notion of “satisfaction.” He must mean, I think, that satisfaction is impossible to man without a recognition of many of the ideal factors that are almost entirely neglected by the pragmatists—except by Bergson, if it be fair to call him a pragmatist.
[322] Bourdeau, for example, has suggested that its God is not really God, but merely an old domestic servant destined to do us personal services—-help us to carry our trunk and our cross in the midst of sweat and dirt. He is not a gentleman even. “No wonder,” he adds, “it was condemned at Rome.” See his Pragmatisme et Modernisme, p. 82.
[323] I am thinking here of the words in the Constitution of the State of California (they are printed in Mr. Bryce’s American Commonwealth—at least in the earlier editions) to the effect that it is the natural right of all men to seek and to “obtain [!]” happiness.
[324] “Epigramme,” Venice, 1790. [“I could never abide any of those freedom-gospellers. All that they ever wanted was to get things running so as to suit themselves. If you are anxious to set people free, just make a beginning by trying to serve them. The simplest attempt will teach you how dangerous this effort may be.”]
[325] See [Chapter IX.]
[326] On what grounds does Professor Bosanquet think of “compensating justice” as a naïve idea? It is on the contrary one of the highest and deepest, and one of the most comprehensive to which the human mind has ever attained—giving rise to the various theogonies and theodicies and religious systems of mankind. It is at the bottom, for example, of the theodicy and the philosophy of Leibniz, the founder of the Rationalism of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Europe.
[327] Could any system of ethics which took such an impossible and such a belated conception of the individual be regarded as ethics at all?
[328] I do not think that this is a fair preliminary description of the problem of teleology. A person who believes in the realization of purpose in some experiences with which he thinks himself to be acquainted does not plead for the guidance of the universe by finite minds, but simply for a view of it that shall include the truth of human purposes. And of course there may be in the universe beings other than ourselves who also realize purposes.
[329] Italics and exclamation mine.
[330] Italics mine. There is a large element of truth in this great idea of Professor Bosanquet’s, connecting [for our purposes] his philosophy with the theism and the personalism for which we are contending as the only true and real basis for Humanism.
[331] Readers who remember Green’s Prolegomena to Ethics will remember that it is one of the difficulties of that remarkable, but one-sided, production (exposed, I think, with many other defects in Professor Taylor’s brilliant, but unduly intellectualistic Problem of Conduct) that it also seems to teach a kind of “Determinism” in ethics, in what our nature is unduly communicated to us by the Absolute, or the “Eternal Consciousness.” This whole way of looking at things must largely be abandoned to-day.
[332] See below, p. 226.
[333] It is, I am inclined to think, the existence of this contradiction in Dr. Bosanquet’s Lectures that will cause the average intelligent person to turn away from them as not affording an adequate account of the reality of the world of persons and things with which he knows himself to be directly and indirectly acquainted. Another way of stating the same thing would be to say that Absolutism fails to take any adequate recognition of that most serious contradiction (or “defect”) in our experience of which we have already spoken as the great dualism of modern times, the opposition between reason and faith an opposition that is not relieved either by the greatest of the continually increasing discoveries of science, or by any, or all, of the systems of all the thinkers. Hegelianism in general assures us that from the point of view of a “higher synthesis” this opposition does not exist or that it is somehow “transcended.” And its method of effecting this synthesis is to convert the opposition between faith and reason into the opposition between what it calls “Understanding” and what it calls “Reason” [an opposition that is to some extent a fictitious one, “reason” being, to begin with, but another name for our power of framing general conceptions or notions, and not therefore different from “understanding”]. It removes, that is to say, the opposition between two different phases or aspects of our experience by denying the existence of one of them altogether. It changes the opposition between knowledge and faith into an opposition between an alleged lower and an alleged higher way of knowing. This alleged higher way of knowing, however, is, when we look into it, but the old ideal of the perfect demonstration of all the supposed contents of our knowledge (principles and facts alike) that has haunted modern philosophy from the time of Descartes. It is an unattainable ideal because no philosophy in the world can begin without some assumption (either of “fact” or of principle), and because our knowledge of the world comes to us in a piecemeal fashion—under the conditions of time and space. A fact prior to all the issues of the demand of Rationalism for a supposedly perfect demonstration is the existence of the conscious beings (Dr. Bosanquet himself, for example) who seek this supposed certainty in order that they may act better—in ignorance of the fact that complete initial certainty on our part as to all the issues and aspects of our actions would tend to destroy the personal character of our choice as moral agents, as beings who may occasionally act beyond the given and the calculable, and set up precedents and ideals for ourselves and for others—for humanity. It is this underlying faith then in the reality of our moral and spiritual nature that we would alone oppose (and only in a relative sense) to the supposed certainties of a completely rational, or a priori, demonstration, the whole contention of humanism being that it is in the interests of the former reality that the latter certainties exist. The apparent opposition between faith and reason would be surmounted by a philosophy that should make consciousness of ourselves as persons the primal certainty, and all other forms of consciousness or of knowledge secondary and tributary, as it were, to this.
[334] I am aware that there is a difference between the “universal” of ordinary formal logic and Dr. Bosanquet’s (or Hegel’s) “concrete universal,” but it is needless for me to think of it here. Dr. Bosanquet uses in his Lectures the phrase “logical universal” for his “concrete universal” or his principle of positive coherence. It is always logical coherence that he has in view.
[335] “For everywhere it is creative Logic, the nature of the whole working in the detail, which constitutes experience, and is appreciable in so far as experience has value.” Now Logic of itself does not thus “work” or “do” anything. It is men or persons who do things by the help of logic and reasoning and other things—realities and forces, etc.
[336] Cf. p. 31. “We are minds,” he says, “i.e. living microcosms, not with hard and fast limits, but determined by our range and powers which fluctuate very greatly.” My point simply is that this is too intellectualistic a conception of man’s personality. We have minds, but we are not minds.
[337] See p. 192. “But as the self is essentially a world of content engaged in certain transformations”; and p. 193, “a conscious being ... is a world ... in which the Absolute begins to reveal its proper nature.” How can a “world of content” [that is to say, the “sphere of discourse” of what some person is thinking for some purpose or other] be “engaged” in certain transformations? It is the person, or the thinker, who is transforming the various data of his experience for his purposes as a man among men. It is time that philosophy ceased to make itself ridiculous by calmly writing down such abstractions as if they were facts.
[338] Cf. “Mind as the significance and interpretation of reality,” p. 27.
[339] “Mind has nothing of its own but the active form of totality, everything positive it draws from Nature.”
[340] This again is an abstraction, and how on earth can it be said that “mind” and conscious life “reflect” merely certain abstractions (or creations) of their own? They have invented such terms as “content” for certain purposes, and their own being and nature is therefore more than these terms. Mind is not a “content”; it makes all other things “contents” for itself.
[341] It has even there, according to Dr. Bosanquet, only its purely theoretic function of working after its own perfection in the way of attaining to a logical “universal.” “The peculiarity of mind for us, is to be a world of experience working itself out towards harmony and completeness.” This is simply not true.
[342] “Finite consciousness, whether animal or human, did not make its body.”
[343] “Thus there is nothing in mind which the physical counterpart cannot represent.” (Italics mine.)
[344] “What we call the individual, then, is not a fixed essence, but a living world of content representing a certain range of externality.” P. 289.
[345] “The system of the universe, as was said in an earlier Lecture, might be described as a representative system. Nature, or externality[!] lives in the lives of conscious beings. (Italics mine.)
[346] “Spirit is a light, a focus, a significance[!] which can only be by contact with a ‘nature’ an external world.”
[347] “For, on the other hand, it has been urged and we feel, that it is thought which constructs and sustains the fabric of experience, and that it is thought-determinations which invest even sense-experience with its value and its meaning. . . . The ultimate tendency of thought, we have seen, is not to generalise, but to constitute a world,” p. 55. Again, “the true office of thought, we begin to see, is to build up, to inspire with meaning, to intensify, to vivify. The object which thought, in the true sense, has worked upon, is not a relic of decaying sense, but is a living world, analogous to a perception of the beautiful, in which every thought-determination adds fresh point and deeper bearing to every element of the whole,” p. 58. And on p. 178 he says that he sees no objection to an idealist recognising the “use made of” “laws” and “dispositions” in recent psychology. [How one wishes that Dr. Bosanquet had really worked into his philosophy the idea that every mental “element” is in a sense a “disposition” to activity!] Some of these statements of Dr. Bosanquet’s have almost a pragmatist ring about them, a suggestion of a living and dynamic (rather than a merely intellectualistic) conception of thought. They may therefore be associated by the reader with the concessions to Pragmatism by other rationalists of which we spoke in an early chapter (see [p. 74]).
[348] See [Chapter III.] p. 90.
[349] I must say that apart from any questions in detail about this rejection of teleology by Dr. Bosanquet, there is something inexplicable about it to me. He cannot retain his own great notion of “wholeness” without the idea of “end,” because “wholeness” is a demand of thought that is guided by some idea of purpose or end.
[351] Italics mine.
[352] P. 225.
[354] Having already given instances of this abstractionism in the case of such things as the “self” and the “universal” and “spirit,” it will suffice to point out here in addition (1) its tendency to talk of “experience” and “experiences” as if there could be such things apart from the prior real existence of the experients or the experiencing persons with whom we are acquainted in our daily life, and (2) its tendency to talk of getting at “the heart of actual life and love” in a “system” which leaves no place for the real existence of either gods or men who live and love. And then I trust that it may not be regarded as an impertinence to allege as another puzzling piece of abstractionism on the part of Dr. Bosanquet, that he has allowed himself to speak and think in his book as if his theory of the “concrete universal” were practically a new thing in the thought of our time—apart altogether, that is to say, from the important work in this same direction of other Neo-Hegelian writers, and apart, too, from the unique work of Hegel in the same connexion.
[355] See below, p. 230.
[356] This is revealed in the main in its exposition of the world as the logical system of a single complete individual experience—a tendency that students of philosophy know to exist in Neo-Hegelianism generally from Green to Bradley. I admit that this tendency is literally a different thing from solipsism in the ordinary sense, as the inability of a particular finite person to prove to himself that any person or thing exists except himself. It is still, however, it seems to me, possible to regard as solipsistic the tendency to set forth the universe as the experience, or the thought, of a single experient or a single thinker, even although the impersonalism of Dr. Bosanquet’s logical “whole” conflicts somewhat with the individuality of his Absolute.
[357] Cf. p. 160.
[358] The well-known inability of Mr. Bradley, for example, to be content with the reality of any portion or any phase of reality that falls short of what he regards as absolute reality, and with the merely relative meaning that he attaches to any category of the “finite.” Also the well-known Neo-Hegelian tendency to make an opponent forge the weapon by which he is to be dislodged from any particular point of view. In the case of Dr. Bosanquet this tendency takes the form of making out any one who holds to a belief in the real existence of finite conscious persons to hold the absurd position of believing in “an impervious and isolated self,” a thing, of course, that no one who knows anything about biology or ethics, or social psychology, really does.
[359] As another instance of Dr. Bosanquet’s unintentional unfairness to his opponents, I would note his positive injustice to Theism as such. What many of us think of (however imperfectly) and believe in as God is invariably to him “a theistic Demiurge in his blankness and isolation.” I do not believe in such an abstract Demiurge any more than I believe in the separate, isolated self that he conjures up to his mind when he thinks of personality. The problem of the twentieth century may well be what Dr. Ward has signalised as the relation of God to the “Absolute” of the Hegelian metaphysicians, but this suggestion simply means to me the discovery on the part of philosophers of terms and concepts more adequate to the Supreme Being than either the Absolute, or the external deity rejected by Dr. Bosanquet.
[360] Stéphane Mallarmé, according to Nordau in Degeneration, p. 103.
[361] And the general reader must remember that the “whole” is always (with all due respect to his high dialectic ability and his high temper of mind and his scholarship) a kind of ignis fatuus in Dr. Bosanquet’s book, a kind of shadow thrown by the lamps and the tools of his own choosing in his Quixotic search. The “whole” is the “perfected individuality” of the individual who sets out to find truth in this great world of ours with all its real possibilities of gain and loss. It is the completion of the “system” of truth to which the truth-seeker would fain reduce the entire universe, that becomes for him (for the time being) the mere “subject-matter” of his thought. It is, that is to say, in both cases, a purely formal conception—an abstraction, although to Dr. Bosanquet it is the reality implied in the very existence and activity of the individual thinker. But the latter is the case to him only because he looks upon man as existing to think instead of as thinking to exist.
[362] That is to say, for the scholar and the lover of Dante and Dante’s world.
[363] For he was not merely a “mind,” reflecting “Italy” and “minds” and “experiences.”
[364] And that, we might add, is still kept alive by some of our humanists and educators of to-day as the ideal for both primary and secondary education.
[365] This is a thing that the beginner is taught in lectures introductory to the study of the philosophy of Kant—in regard to Kant’s relation to the barren, dogmatic formalism of Wolff—a one-sided interpreter of the philosophy of Leibniz. I am quite aware that Dr. Bosanquet does not merely use the Principle of Non-Contradiction in the aggressive, or polemical, manner of Mr. Bradley in Appearance and Reality. The principle of positive coherence at which he aims, begins, to some extent, where Mr. Bradley stopped. But it is still the idea of consistency or inconsistency, with certain presuppositions of his own, that rules his thinking; it determines, from the very outset of his Lectures, what he accepts and what he rejects.
[366] See [p. 152] and [p. 156], note 2.
[367] I use this word “must” in a logical as well as in an ethical sense, seeing that all judgment implies a belief in the reality of a world of persons independent of the mere fact of “judgment” as a piece of mental process.
[369] On p. 345 the words are: “When we consider the naïve or elementary life of morality and religion”; and on p. 346: “The naïve, or simple self of every-day morality and religion,” and the marginal heading of the page upon which these words occur is “The naïve good self compared to grasp of a fundamental principle alone.” Could anything more clearly indicate what the Kantians call a confusion of categories [in the case in point the categories of “goodness” and the categories of “truth”] or what Aristotle calls a μετάβασις εἰς ἄλλο γένος, the unconscious treatment of one order of facts by the terms and conceptions of another order of facts. To Dr. Bosanquet as the Neo-Hellenist that he is in his professed creed, badness is practically stupidity, and “lack of unification of life,” and “failure of theoretical grasp.” This confusion between goodness and wisdom is again indicated on p. 347 in the words: “A man is good in so far as his being is ‘unified at’ all in any sphere of wisdom or activity.” [This is simply not true, and its falsity is a more unforgivable thing in the case of Dr. Bosanquet than it is in the case of the pragmatists who also tend to make the ‘moral’ a kind of ‘unification’ or ‘effectiveness’ in ‘purpose.’] As a proof of Dr. Bosanquet’s transformation of the facts of the ethical life in the interest of logical theory, we can point to p. 334: “Our actions and ideas issue from our world as a conclusion from its premises, or as a poem from its author’s spirit,” or to p. 53, where it is definitely stated that the “self, as it happens to be,” cannot, in any of its “three aspects,” “serve as a test of reality.” To do the latter, it must, in his opinion, follow the law of the “universal,” i.e. become a logical conception. Now of course (1) it is not the self “as it happens to be” that is chiefly dealt with in ethics, but rather the self as it ought to be. And (2) the ethical self, or the “person,” does not follow the “law of the universal” goodness in the wider or (‘shall we say’) in the narrower sense.” Now the distinction between ethics and aesthetics is not one of degree, but one of kind.
And as another illustration of his tendency to transform ethical facts in the light of a metaphysical, or a logical, theory [they are the same thing to him] we may quote the emphatic declaration on p. 356: “Our effort has been to bring the conception of moral and individual initiative nearer to the idea of logical determination,” or the equally outspoken declaration on p. 353: “But metaphysical theory, viewing the self in its essential basis of moral solidarity with the natural and social world ... cannot admit that the independence of the self, though a fact, is more than a partial fact.” Or the words at the top of this same page: “The primary principle that should govern the whole discussion is this, that the attitude of moral judgment and responsibility for decisions is only one among other attitudes and spheres of experience.” These last words alone would prove definitely the non-ethical character of “Individuality and Value.” The ethical life is to its author only a “quatenus consideratur,” only a possible point of view, only an aspect of reality, only an aspect, therefore, of a “logical system.” Now if the ethical life of the world is to count for anything at all, it may be said that the ethical life is no mere aspect of the life of the self, and no mere aspect of the life of the world, seeing that “nature” in the sense of mere “physical nature” does not come into the sphere of morality at all. It is rather the activity of the “whole self,” or the “normative” reflection of the self as a whole upon all the merely partial or subordinate aspects of its activity, upon bodily life, economic life, intellectual activity, and so on that constitutes the world of morality.
[370] See [p. 147], and [p. 244].
[371] Good and evil to Dr. Bosanquet are two quasi-rational systems in active antagonism as claiming to attach different “principles and predicates” to identical data. The essence of their antagonism to Dr. Bosanquet is not, however, that evil is contemplated, as it must be sooner or later, in repentance for example as wrong, but rather that the “evil” is an imperfect “logical striving (p. 351) of the self after unity” which is in “contradiction with a fuller and sounder striving” after the same. The evil self is to him merely the vehicle of a logical contradiction in the self.
[372] This is seen in his admission (on p. 351) that the “bad will” no less than the “good will” is a logical necessity, when taken along with his doctrine about mind and body, his doctrine of the “dependence” (p. 318) of the finite individual upon the external mechanical world. Dr. Bosanquet, of course, thinks that even in this apparent Determinism he is justifiably supplementing the ordinary ideas about the “self” as “creative” and “originative” (p. 354), by the wider recognition that I am more or less completely doing the work of the “universe” as a “member” in a “greater self.” And he adds in the same sentence the words that “I am in a large measure continuous with the greater (p. 355) self,” and “dyed with its colours”—a further step in Determinism, as it were, and a step which, with the preceding one to which we have just referred, no critic can fail to connect with the Determinism that we have already found to be implicated in his doctrine of the “self,” and in his general doctrine that the “external” must be frankly accepted as a factor in the universe.
[373] By the “spectator” fallacy we mean his tendency to talk and think of the self as it is for a spectator or student, looking at matters from the outside, and not as the self is for the man himself.
[374] Wollaston is the English ethical philosopher who, according to Leslie Stephen’s account, thought, after thirty years of meditation, that the only reason he had for not breaking his wife’s head with a stick was, that this would be tantamount to a denial that his wife was his wife.
[375] See Idola Theatri by Henry Sturt (the editor of the well-known “Personal Idealism” volume) of Oxford—a book that enumerates and examines many of the fallacies of the Neo-Hegelian school. Mr. Sturt’s first chapter is entitled the “Passive Fallacy,” which he calls, with some degree of justice, the prime mistake of the idealistic philosophy, meaning by this the “ignoring” of the “kinetic” and the “dynamic” character of our experience.
[376] It is Natural Theology that is the subject proper of the Gifford Lectures.
[377] See [p. 149] of Chapter VI.
[378] With, we might almost say, the pragmatists and the humanists.
[379] This is really their main distinguishing characteristic and merit.
[381] “Indeed, I do not conceal my belief that in the main the work has been done.”—Preface.
[382] I think that the confession is a praiseworthy one in view of the fact of the prejudice of Rationalism, that philosophy has nothing to do with convictions but only with knowledge.
[383] By belief I have understood throughout this book simply man’s working sense for reality, and I am inclined to think that this is almost the best definition that could be given of it—our working sense for reality. It is at least, despite its apparent evasiveness, most in harmony with the pragmatist-humanist inclusion of will elements and feeling elements in our knowledge and in our apprehension of reality. It is also in harmony with the conception of reality which may, in my opinion, be extracted from both Pragmatism and Idealism—that reality is what it proves itself to be in the daily transformation of our experience. By the retention of the term “working” in this attempted definition I express my agreement with the idea that action, and the willingness to act, is an essential element in belief. The outstanding positions in the definitions of belief that are generally given in philosophical dictionaries are, firstly, that belief is a conviction or subjective apprehension of truth or reality in distinction from demonstrable knowledge or direct evidence; and, secondly, that feeling elements and action elements enter into it. I am inclined to think that the sharp antithesis between belief and knowledge, or the tendency of philosophical books to emphasise the difference between belief and knowledge, is a characteristic, or consequence, of our modern way of looking at things, of our break with the unfortunate, medieval conception of faith and of the higher reason. The study of the facts either of the history of religion or of the history of science, will convince us, I think, that it is always belief, and that it still is belief (as the working sense for reality), that is man’s measure of reality, our knowledge about the universe being at all times but a more or less perfect working out of our beliefs and of their implications—of our sense of the different ways in which the world affects us, and of the ways in which we are affected towards it. Nor do I think, as I have indicated in different places, that “reality” can be defined apart from belief, reality being that in which we believe for all purposes, theoretical and practical and emotional. In the conception of reality as a world of intersubjective intercourse in which beings, or persons at different stages of development, share in a common spiritual life, we have attained so far (and only so far) to the truth that is common to an idealism of the type of Dr. Bosanquet’s, and to pragmatist-humanism when properly developed and interpreted. There are, I find, upon thinking of the matter, any number of philosophers and thinkers who interpret belief, in the larger sense of the term, as our complete and final estimate of reality, and as therefore not exclusive of, but inclusive of knowledge in the ordinary sense of the term.
[384] He even says in the Abstract of his first lecture upon the “Central Experiences,” that Lord Gifford’s desire that his lecturers should “try to communicate” a “grave experience” is the demand that “introduces us to the double task of philosophy. It [philosophy] needs the best of logic, but also the best of life, and neither can be had in philosophy without the other.”
[385] Treatise upon Human Nature, sect. vii. (Green and Grose, i. 547).
[386] I had originally the idea of calling this chapter by the more modest title of a note upon “pragmatist elements” in the teaching of Bergson. I have allowed myself to call it a chapter partly for the sake of symmetry, and partly because the footnotes and the criticism (of his Idealism) have carried it beyond the limits of a note. I find, too, (as I have partly indicated in my preface) in the teaching of Bergson so many things that make up almost the very body of truth and fact upon which Pragmatism, and Humanism, and Idealism all repose (or ought to repose) that I quote them directly in my footnotes. They indicate to me the scope and the territory of my entire subject. And they are a confirmation to me of much that I had myself arrived at before I read a line of Bergson.
[387] “Our intelligence, as it leaves the hands of nature, has for its chief object the unorganised solid” (Creative Evolution, p. 162); “of immobility alone does the intellect form a clear idea” (ibid. 164). “The aspect of life that is accessible to the intellect—as indeed to our senses, of which our intellect is the extension—is that which offers a hold to action” (ibid. 170). “We see that the intellect, so skilful in dealing with the inert, is awkward the moment it touches the living. Whether it wants to treat the life of the body or the life of the mind, it proceeds with the rigour, the stiffness, and the brutality of the instrument not designed for such use. The history of hygiene or of pedagogy teaches us much in this matter. When we think of the cardinal, urgent, and constant need we have to preserve our bodies and to raise our souls, of the special facilities given to each of us in this field to experiment continually on ourselves and on others, of the palpable injury by which the wrongness of a medical or a pedagogical practice is made manifest and punished at once, we are amazed at the stupidity and especially at the persistence of errors. We may easily find their origin in the natural obstinacy with which we treat the living like the lifeless, and think all reality, however fluid, under the form of the sharply-defined solid. We are at ease only in the discontinuous, in the immobile, in the dead. The intellect is characterised by a natural inability to comprehend life” (Creative Evolution, p. 174). (Italics mine.)
[388] “I look and I think I see, I listen and I think I hear, I examine myself and I think I am reading the very depths of my heart. But what I see and hear of the outer world is purely and simply a selection made by my senses to serve as a light to my conduct; what I know of myself is what comes to the surface, what participates in my actions. My senses and my consciousness, therefore, give me no more than a practical simplification of reality in the vision they furnish me of myself and of things, the differences that are useless to man are obliterated, the resemblances that are useful to him are emphasised; ways are traced out for me in advance along which my activity is to travel. These ways are the ways which all mankind has trod before me. Things have been classified with a view to the use I can derive from them” (Laughter, p. 151). “Life implies the acceptance of the utilitarian side of things in order to respond to them by appropriate reactions; all other impressions must be dimmed or else reach us vague and blurred” (ibid. p. 131). These last words give us a glimpse of a very important part of Bergson’s teaching—his idea, namely (Voltaire has it in his Micromégas), that “matter” is greater than our perceptions, that our perceptions reveal to us only those aspects of the physical universe with which we are practically concerned.
[389] Some years ago psychologists began to distinguish a “structural” from a “functional” psychology, meaning by the former what is otherwise called Psycho-Physics or (to some extent) Experimental Psychology.
[390] Cf. “At first sight it may seem prudent to leave the consideration of facts to positive science, to let physics and chemistry busy themselves with matter, the biological and psychological sciences with life. The task of the philosopher is then clearly defined. He takes facts and laws from the scientist’s hand, and whether he tries to go beyond them in order to reach their deeper causes, or whether he thinks it impossible to go further, and even proves it by the analysis of scientific knowledge, in both cases he has for the facts and relations, handed over by science, the sort of respect that is due to a final verdict. To this knowledge he adds a critique of the faculty of knowing, and also, if he thinks proper, a metaphysic; but the matter of knowledge he regards as the affair of science, and not of philosophy” (Creative Evolution, pp. 204–5). [All this represents only too faithfully what even some of our Neo-Kantians have been saying, and teaching, although there is an error in their whole procedure here.]
[391] Schopenhauer’s phrase. See my book upon Schopenhauer’s System.
[392] It is chiefly in Matter and Memory (in which, by the way, there are pages and pages of criticism of the rationalism of philosophy that are as valuable as anything we have in philosophy since the time of Descartes—Kant not excepted) that we are to look for the detailed philosophy of sensation and of perception, and the detailed philosophy of science upon which this protest of Bergson’s against the excesses of “conceptualism” rests. I indicate, too, at different places in this chapter some of the other special considerations upon which it rests. The gist of the whole is to be found, perhaps, in his contention that our science and our philosophy of the past centuries have both regarded “perception” as teaching us (somehow) what things are independently of their effect upon us, and of their place in the moving equilibrium of things—the truth being on the contrary (with Pragmatism and Humanism) that our knowledge has throughout a necessary relation to ourselves and to our place in the universe, and to our liberation from matter in the life of the spirit.
[393] He expresses this idea in the following way in the Introduction to Matter and Memory: “Psychology has for its object the study of the human mind for practical utility,” whereas in “metaphysics” we see “this same mind striving (the idea, as we say elsewhere, is not free from difficulty) to transcend the conditions of useful action and to come back to itself as to a pure creative energy.” Or in the following sentences from his Creative Evolution: “We must remember that philosophy, as we define it, has not yet become completely conscious of itself. Physics understands its role when it pushes matter into the direction of spatiality; but has metaphysics understood its role when it has simply trodden the steps of physics, in the chimerical hope of going farther in the same direction? Should not its own task be, on the contrary, to remount the incline that physics descends, to bring matters back to its origins, and to build up progressively a cosmology which would be, so to speak, a reversed psychology. All that which seems positive to the physicist and to the geometrician would become, from this new point of view, an interruption or inversion of the true positivity which would have to be defined in psychological terms” (pp. 219–20, italics mine).
[394] As an indication of what the acceptance of the dynamic instead of the static view of matter on the part of Bergson means, I cite the phrase (or the conception) on p. 82 of Matter and Memory, the effect that “matter is here as elsewhere the vehicle of an action,” or the even more emphatic declaration on p. 261 of Creative Evolution, “There are no things, there are only actions.” It is impossible, of course, that these mere extracts can convey to the mind of the casual reader the same significance that they obtain in their setting in the pages of Bergson, although it is surely almost a matter of common knowledge about his teaching, that one of the first things it does is to begin with the same activistic or “actionistic” view of nature and matter that seems to be the stock in trade of the physics of our time since the discoveries pertaining to radio-activity, etc. Being only a layman in such matters, I may be excused for quoting from a recent booklet (whose very presence in the series in which it appears is to people like myself a guarantee of its scientific reliability) in which I find this same activistic view of matter that I find in Bergson. “What are the processes by which the primary rock material is shifted? There is the wind that, etc. etc.... There are the streams and rivers that, etc.... There is the sea constantly wearing away, etc.... Then there are ‘subtle’ physical and ‘chemical’ forces. And the action of plants.... Hence by various mechanical, organic, and chemical processes the materials originally scattered through the rocks of the earth’s crust, and floating in the air or water, are collected into layers and form beds of sand, clay, limestone, salt, and the various mineral fuels, including peat and coal” (The Making of the Earth, by Professor Gregory, F.R.S., of Glasgow University: Williams and Norgate).
It is only right to state here, or to remind the reader in this matter of a “dynamic” view of matter, that Bergson not only dissipates matter into force or energy or activity (as do the physicists of to-day), but also actually credits the world of matter and life with a kind of consciousness (and why not be courageous about it?) in which what I have already called the “susceptibility of everything to everything else,” or the action of everything upon everything else, becomes credible and intelligible. “No doubt, also, the material universe itself, defined as the totality of images, is a kind of consciousness in which everything compensates and neutralises everything else, a consciousness of which all the potential parts, balancing each other by a reaction which is always equal to the action, reciprocally hinder each from standing out” (Matter and Memory, p. 313).
[395] See [Chapter III.], and also the references to Mach, Ostwald, Poincaré, and others, in the second chapter and elsewhere.
[396] “There is no intelligence in which some traces of instinct are not to be discovered, more, no instinct that is not surrounded with a fringe of intelligence” (Creative Evolution, p. 143).
[397] “We will not dwell here upon a point we have dealt with in former works. Let us merely recall that a theory [the theory of contemporary physiological psychology] such as that according to which consciousness is attached to certain neurons, and is thrown off from their work like a phosphorescence, may be accepted by the scientist for the detail of analysis; it is a convenient mode of expression. But it is nothing else. In reality, a living being is a centre of action. It represents a certain sum of contingency entering into the world, that is to say, a certain quantity of possible action—a quantity variable with individuals and especially with species. The nervous system of an animal marks out the flexible lines on which its action will run (although the potential energy is accumulated in the muscles rather than in the nervous system itself); its nervous centres indicate, by their development and their configuration, the more or less extended choice it will have among more or less numerous and complicated actions. Now, since the awakening of consciousness in a living creature is the more complete, the greater the latitude of choice allowed to it and the larger the amount of action bestowed upon it, it is clear that the development of consciousness will appear to be dependent on that of the nervous centres. On the other hand, every state of consciousness being, in one aspect of it, a question put to the motor activity and even the beginning of a reply, there is no psychical event that does not imply the entry into play of the cortical mechanisms. Everything seems, therefore, to happen as if consciousness sprang from the brain, and as if the detail of conscious activity were modelled on that of the cerebral activity. In reality consciousness does not spring from the brain, but brain and consciousness correspond because equally they measure ... the quantity of choice that the living being has at its disposal” (Creative Evolution, pp. 266–7).
[398] “Instead of starting from affection [or ‘sensation’ in the old sense of the haphazard sensation] of which we can say nothing, since there is no reason why it should be what it is rather than anything else, we start from action, that is to say, from our power of effecting changes in things, a faculty attested by consciousness, and towards which all the powers of the organised body are seen to converge. So we place ourselves at once in the midst of extended images [to Bergson as an idealist things are at the same time images or ideas for a consciousness in other things, or in us, or in beings other than ourselves], and in this material universe we perceive centres of indetermination characteristic of life” (Matter and Memory, p. 67).
[399] Cf. the words in the Preface to Matter and Memory: “The whole personality, which, normally narrowed down by action, expands with the unscrewing of the vice in which it has allowed itself to be squeezed,” or the words in the same place about the task of metaphysics being the attempt of the “mind striving to transcend the conditions of useful action.”
[400] We refer elsewhere in this chapter to Bergson’s idea that living beings are “centres of indetermination,” that is to say, creatures who hold their place in nature and that of their species by “persisting in their own being” (the language of Spinoza) by acting and reacting upon some of the many forces of nature that act upon them, and by avoiding the action of other forces and other animals. “They allow to pass through them,” he says, “so to speak, those external influences which are indifferent to them; the others isolated become ‘perceptions’ by their very isolation” (Matter and Memory, pp. 28, 29). We also refer to Bergson’s idea that the life-force has expressed itself along different grades of being (mineral, animal, and so on). Both these ideas are a partial explanation of what we mean by the presence of a spiritual activity in both inanimate and animate nature. So also is Bergson’s idea that the purely mechanical explanation either of nature or of life is but a device of the intellect for the purposes of description. More specifically it is expressed, too, in his idea that “Our representation of matter is the measure of our possible action upon bodies; it results from the discarding of what has no interest for our needs, or more generally for our functions” (Matter and Memory, p. 30), or that “Consciousness” is just this choice of “attaining to” or attending to “certain parts and certain aspects of those parts” of the “material universe” (ibid. p. 31), or that “sense-perception” is an “elementary question to my motor activity.” “The truth is that my nervous system, interposed between the objects which affect my body and those which I can influence, is a mere conductor, transmitting, sending back, or inhibiting movement. This conductor is composed of an enormous number of threads which stretch from the periphery to the centre, and from the centre to the periphery. As many threads pass from the periphery to the centre, so many points of space are there able to make an appeal to my will, and to put, so to speak, an elementary question to my motor activity. Every such question is what is termed a perception” (ibid. 40, 41; italics mine). Or, as he puts it, on p. 313, “No doubt the choice of perception from among images in general is the effect of a discernment which foreshadows spirit.... But to touch the reality of spirit we must place ourselves at the point where an individual consciousness, continuing and retaining the past in a present enriched by it, thus escapes the law of necessity, the law which ordains that the past shall ever follow itself in a present which merely repeats it in another form, and that all things shall ever be flowing away. When we pass from pure perception to memory, we definitely abandon matter for spirit.”
[401] Bergson is always able to detect the relapses even of “mechanism” and of the mechanical philosophy of science into “finalism,” as when he says on p. 72 of his Creative Evolution, “To sum up, if the accidental variations that bring about evolution are insensible variations, some good genius must be appealed to—the genius of the future species—in order to preserve and accumulate these variations, for “selection” will not look after this. If, on the other hand, the accidental variations are sudden, then, for the previous function to go on, or for a new function to take its place, all the changes that have happened together must be complementary. So we have to fall back on the good genius again to obtain the convergence of simultaneous changes, as before to be assured of the continuity of direction of successive variations.”
[402] We must remember that to Bergson evolution has taken place along different lines—those of Automatism (in plant-life), Instinct (in animal life), and Intelligence (in human life and the higher animals), and that along none of those lines are we to fall into the errors either of materialism, or of “Darwinism” (the belief in “accidental variations”), or of the “design-philosophy,” or even of theories like “neo-Lamarckianism” or neo-vitalism. To him all these philosophies are but imperfect and hypothetical attempts to grasp “movement” and “life” which both “transcend finality, if we understand by finality the realisation of an idea conceived or conceivable in advance” (Creative Evolution, p. 236).
[403] “Paleyism” or “Miltonism” are still good names for the thing, I have read in some competent book upon Evolution.
[404] See below, p. 261.
[405] To Bergson concepts are just as hypothetical in the realm of science, as they are to thinkers like Mach and Poincaré, and Professor Ward of Cambridge. See the following, for example, from Matter and Memory (p. 263): “We shall never explain by means of particles, whatever these may be, the simple properties of matter; at most we can thus follow out into corpuscles as artificial as the corpus, the body itself—the actions and reactions of this body with regard to all the others. This is precisely the object of chemistry. It studies bodies rather than matter; and so we understand why it stops at the atom, which is still endowed with the general properties of matter. But the materiality of the atom dissolves more and more under the eyes of the physicist. We have no reason, for instance, for representing the atom to ourselves as a solid, rather than as a liquid or gaseous, nor for picturing the reciprocal action of atoms by shocks rather than in any other way.” Or, the following characteristic passage from the same book (p. 280) in respect of the hypothetical character of the concepts of “pure time” and “pure space”: “Homogeneous space and homogeneous time are then neither properties of things nor essential conditions of our faculty of knowing them; they express, in an abstract form, the double work of solidification and of division, which we effect on the moving continuity of the real in order to obtain there a fulcrum for our action, in order to fix within it starting-points for our operation, in short, to introduce into it real changes. They are the diagrammatic designs of our eventual action upon matter.”
[406] Like his celebrated contemporary Eucken, and like many other thinkers of their time, Bergson is profoundly convinced of the one-sidedness of the so-called scientific culture of our day, and of the error of any and all conceptions of education and of social policy that are based upon it. Although I refer below to the limitations of his view that the intellect is adapted only to matter and to mechanical construction, I append the following quotation as symptomatic of his value as a spiritual teacher in our scientific age: “As regards human intelligence (Creative Evolution, pp. 145–6) it has not been sufficiently noted that mechanical invention has been from the first its essential feature, that even to-day our social life gravitates around the manufacture and use of artificial instruments.... This we hardly realise, because it takes longer to change ourselves than to change our tools.... In thousands of years, when seen from the distance, only the broad lines of our present age will be visible, our wars and our revolutions will count for little, even supposing they are remembered at all, but the steam-engine, and the procession of inventions of every kind that accompanied it, will perhaps be spoken of as we speak of the bronze or of the chipped stone of prehistoric times; it will serve to define an age.”
[407] I find this in Bergson’s whole attribution of much of our “perceptual” and “scientific” knowledge of things to the “needs of action,” and in the detailed reasons that we attempt on [pp. 236–238] to indicate for his polemic against rationalism.
[408] This confirmation I find in Bergson’s whole philosophy of perception and sensation referred to on p. 236, and in his idea of a living being as a “centre of action” or “a centre of indetermination.” In fact it is obvious that he is one of the very greatest of the upholders of the “freedom” of the life of the individual, and of the fact that each new individual contributes something new of its own to the sum-total of existence, to the life of its species, and to the life of the world. Of course there is no more an explanation in his teaching of the causes of “variation” or the differences at birth between the off-spring of men and of animals, than there is in the philosophy of Darwin.
[409] The idea of this necessity is confirmed in Bergson’s whole philosophy of man’s life as a life of action, as a constant surmounting of obstacles, as a life that reacts in its own way upon the life of nature, upon the life of the human species as such, upon the infinite life and energy and “love” of God—if we may soar to this great thought. See, for example, what he writes in explanation of the “discordance” of which he speaks thus: “Our freedom, in the very movements by which it is affirmed, creates the growing habits that will stifle it if it fails to renew itself by a constant effort: it is dogged by automatism. The letter kills the spirit. And our most ardent enthusiasm, as soon as it is externalised into action, is so naturally congealed into the cold calculation of interest or vanity, the one takes so easily the shape of the other, that we might confuse them together, doubt our sincerity, deny goodness and love.” The explanatory words are the following. [They are quite typical of the kind of philosophy of life that Bergson thinks of as alone worthy of the name of a philosophy of the living. And the reference to “love,” as the highest “dynamic” force in this world of ours, occurs at their close.] “The profound cause of this discordance lies in an irremediable difference of rhythm. Life is general, is mobility itself; particular manifestations of life accept this mobility reluctantly, and constantly lag behind. It is always going ahead; they want to mark time. Evolution in general would fain go on in a straight line; each special evolution is a kind of circle. Like eddies of dust raised by the wind as it passes, the living turn on themselves, borne up by the great blast of life. They are therefore relatively stable, and counterfeit immobility so well that we treat each of them as a thing rather than as a progress, forgetting that the very permanence of their form is only the outline of a movement. At times, however, in a fleeting vision, the invisible breath that bears them is materialised before our eyes. We have this sudden illumination before certain forms of maternal love, so striking and in most animals so touching, observable even in the solicitude of the plant for its seed. This love, in which some have seen the great mystery of life, may possibly deliver us life’s secret. It shows us each generation leaning over the generation that shall follow. It allows us a glimpse of the fact that the living being is above all a thoroughfare, and that the essence of life is in the movement by which life is transmitted” (Creative Evolution, pp. 134–5; italics mine). It is surely needless to point out how much truer to human nature, truer therefore to an important part of reality, this life-philosophy is than the abstractionism of Professor Bosanquet in the preceding chapter.
[410] This insistence is, I think, amply confirmed by the very fact of the immediate contact with life and reality indicated in the quotation that is given in the preceding note upon the “motive-awakening,” or the “dynamic” character of the philosophy of Bergson. It is also confirmed in his manifest insistence upon the one fact that all philosophy must assume (and has for ever assumed) the fact of life, the fact of the life and thought of God that underlies all our life and all our thought.
[411] This position of the pragmatists is certainly confirmed by Bergson’s entire doctrine of the brain and of the intellect—that their main service is, in the first instance, to interpret the “life” of things, its relation to our own will and to our practical activity. I have suggested, too, in this chapter that it is obviously a characteristic, or a consequence, of the philosophy of Bergson that our highest thought about ourselves and about the world should be relative to, and provocative, of our highest emotion.
[412] It is only with some degree of care and reservation that I wish to refer to any apparent confirmation of this idea by Bergson. And, as always, I object to the idea of any ultimate separation or “dualism” between faith and knowledge—faith being implied in all “knowledge.” There is no opposition in Bergson, or in the principles of his philosophy, between faith and knowledge; it is rather his idea that “the faculty of seeing should be made one with the act of willing” (Creative Evolution, 250; his italics), and that “philosophy” should “proceed, with the powers of conceptual thought alone, to the ideal reconstruction of all things, even of life” (C.E. xi.; italics mine). My reasons for finding in his writings a confirmation of the idea that it is indeed our rational and spiritual faith, rather than our demonstrable knowledge, that is to us the measure of truth and reality, are such considerations as the following (in addition to those of the clauses just quoted), his close association between the intellectual and the “volitional,” his general faith in “creative evolution,” in the idea that our “consciousness” means for us “new choices” and (real) “new possibilities,” his faith in the higher intuitions of the mind, in the spiritual nature of man, his belief that the building up of the true philosophy of the future will involve “the collective and progressive effort of many thinkers, of many observers also, completing, correcting, and improving one another” (C.E. xiv.), etc. etc.
[413] See below, p. 257, note 1.
[414] See [p. 14] in reference to Dr. Schiller’s suggestion that “freedom” may “pervade the universe.”
[415] “From time to time, however, in a fit of absent-mindedness, nature raises up souls that are more detached from life.... Were this detachment complete, did the soul no longer cleave to action by any of its perceptions, it would be the soul of an artist such as the world has never yet seen” (Laughter, p. 154).
[416] Cf. p. 235.
[417] Cf. “We must break with scientific habits which are adapted to the fundamental requirements of thought, we must do violence to the mind, go counter to the natural bent of the intellect. But that is just the function of philosophy” (Creative Evolution, p. 31).
[418] “So art, whether it be painting or sculpture, poetry or music, has no other object than to brush aside the utilitarian symbols, the conventional and socially accepted generalities, in short, everything that veils reality from us, in order to bring us face to face with reality itself” (Laughter, p. 157). It is true that if we read further on this page, and elsewhere in Bergson, we will be able to see that there is for him in art and in the spiritual life a kind of intelligence and knowledge. But it is difficult to work out an expression or a characterisation of this intelligence and this knowledge. “Art,” he says, “is only a more direct vision of reality.” And again: “Realism is in the work when idealism is in the soul, and it is only through ideality that we can resume contact with reality” (ibid.).
[419] It is only fair to Bergson to remember that he is himself aware of the appearances of this dualism in his writings, that he apologises as it were for them, intending the distinction to be, not absolute, but relative. “Let us say at the outset that the distinctions we are going to make will be too sharply drawn, just because we wish to define in instinct what is instinctive, and in intelligence what is intelligent, whereas all concrete instinct is mingled with intelligence, as all real intelligence is penetrated by instinct. Moreover [this is quite an important expression of Bergson’s objection to the old “faculty” psychology], neither intelligence nor instinct lends itself to rigid definition; they are tendencies and not things. Also it must not be forgotten that ... we are considering intelligence and instinct as going out of life which deposits them along its course” (Creative Evolution, p. 143).
[420] He talks in the Creative Evolution of a “real time” and a “pure duration” of a real duration that “bites” into things and leaves on them the mark of its tooth, of a “ceaseless upspringing of something new,” of “our progress in pure duration,” or a “movement which creates at once the intellectuality of mind and the materiality of things” (p. 217). I have no hesitation in saying that all this is unthinkable to me, and that it might indeed be criticised by Rationalism as inconsistent with our highest and most real view of things.
[421] He admits himself that “If our analysis is correct, it is consciousness, or rather supra-consciousness that is at the origin of life” (Creative Evolution, p. 275).
[422] “Now, if the same kind of action is going on everywhere, whether it is that which is striving to remake itself, I simply express this probable similitude when I speak of a centre from which worlds shoot out as rockets in a fireworks display—provided, however, that I do not present [there is a great idea here, a true piece of ‘Kantianism’] this centre as a thing, but as a continuity of shooting out. God thus defined has nothing of the already made. He is unceasing life, action, freedom. Creation so conceived is not a mystery; we experience it in ourselves when we act freely” (Creative Evolution, p. 262).
[424] It is somewhat difficult, and it is not necessary for our purposes, to explain what might be meant by the “Idealism” of Bergson—at least in the sense of a cosmology, a theory of the “real.” It is claimed for him, and he claims for himself that he is in a sense both an “idealist” and a “realist,” believing at once (1) that matter is an “abstraction” (an unreality), and (2) that there is more in matter than the qualities revealed by our perceptions. [We must remember that he objects to the idea of qualities in things in the old static sense. “There are no things; there are only actions.”] What we might mean by his initial idealism is the following: “Matter, in our view, is an aggregate of images. And by ‘image’ we mean [Matter and Memory, the Introduction] a certain existence which is more than that which the idealist calls a representation, but less than that which the realist calls a thing—an existence placed half-way between the ‘thing’ and the ‘representation.’ This conception of matter is simply that of common sense.” ... “For common sense, then, the object exists in itself, and, on the other hand, the object is in itself pictorial, as we perceive it: image it is, but a self-existing image.” Now, this very idea of a “self-existing image” implies to me the whole idealism of philosophy, and Bergson is not free of it. And, of course, as we have surely seen, his “creative-evolution” philosophy is a stupendous piece of idealism, but an idealism moreover to which the science of the day is also inclining.
[425] There is so much that is positive and valuable in his teaching, that he is but little affected by formal criticism.
[426] Cf. “We have now enumerated a few of the essential features of human intelligence. But we have hitherto considered the individual in isolation, without taking account of social life. In reality man is a being who lives in society. If it be true [even] that the human intellect aims at fabrication, we must add that, for that as well as other purposes, it is associated with other intellects. Now it is difficult to imagine a society whose members do not communicate by signs,” etc. etc. (Creative Evolution, p. 166). Indeed all readers of Bergson know that he is constantly making use of the social factor and of “co-operation” by way of accounting for the general advance of mankind. It may be appropriate in this same connexion to cite the magnificent passage towards the close of Creative Evolution in which he rises to the very heights of the idea [Schopenhauer and Hartmann had it before him, and also before the socialists and the collectivists] of humanity’s being possibly able to surmount even the greatest of the obstacles that beset it in its onward path: “As the smallest grain of dust [Creative Evolution, pp. 285–6] is bound up with our entire solar system, drawn along with it in that undivided movement of descent which is materiality itself, so all organised beings, from the humblest to the highest, ... do but evidence a single impulsion, the inverse of the movement of matter, and in itself indivisible. All the living hold together, and all yield to the same tremendous push. The animal takes its stand on the plant, man bestrides animality, and the whole of humanity, in space and in time, is one immense army galloping beside and before and behind each of us in an overwhelming charge to beat down every resistance and clear the most formidable obstacles, perhaps even death.”
[427] Cf. p. 160 and [p. 262].
[428] He comes in sight of some of them, as he often does of so many things. “It is as if a vague and formless being, whom we may call, as we will [C.E., p. 281], man or superman, had sought to realise himself, and had succeeded only by abandoning a part of himself on the way. The losses are represented by the rest of the animal world, and even by the vegetable world, at least in what these have that is positive and above the accidents of evolution.”
[429] From what has been said in this chapter about Bergson, and from the remarks that were made in the second chapter about Renouvier and the French Critical Philosophy, the reader may perhaps be willing to admit that our Anglo-American Transcendental philosophy would perhaps not have been so abstract and so rationalistic had it devoted more attention, than it has evidently given, to some of the more representative French thinkers of the nineteenth century.
[430] We must remember that nowhere in his writings does Bergson claim any great originality for his many illuminative points of view. He is at once far too much of a catholic scholar (in the matter of the history of philosophy, say), and far too much of a scientist (a man in living touch with the realities and the theories of the science of the day) for this. His findings about life and mind are the outcome of a broad study of the considerations of science and of history and of criticism. By way, for example, of a quotation from a scientific work upon biology that seems to me to reveal some apparent basis in fact (as seen by naturalists) for the “creative evolution” upon which Bergson bases his philosophy, I append the following: “We have gone far enough to see that the development of an organism from an egg is a truly wonderful process. We need but go back again and look at the marvellous simplicity of the egg to be convinced of it. Not only do cells differentiate, but cell-groups act together like well-drilled battalions, cleaving apart here, fusing together there, forming protective coverings or communicating channels, apparently creating out of nothing, a whole set of nutritive and reproductive organs, all in orderly and progressive sequence, producing in the end that orderly disposed cell aggregate, that individual life unit which we know as an earthworm. Although the forces involved are beyond our ken, the grosser processes are evident” (Needham, General Biology, p. 175; italics mine). Of course it is evident from his books that Bergson does not take much account of such difficult facts and topics as the mistakes of instinct, etc. And I have just spoken of his optimistic avoidance of some of the deeper problems of the moral and spiritual life of man.
[431] “This amounts to saying that the theory of knowledge and theory of life seem to us inseparable [Creative Evolution, p. xiii.; italics Bergson’s]. A theory of life that is not accompanied by a criticism of knowledge is obliged to accept, as they stand, the concepts which the understanding puts at its disposal: it can but enclose the facts, willing or not, in pre-existing frames which it regards as ultimate. It thus obtains a symbolism which is convenient, perhaps even necessary to positive science, but not a direct vision of its object.”
[432] I more than agree with Bergson that our whole modern philosophy since Descartes has been unduly influenced by physics and mathematics. And I deplore the fact that the “New Realism” which has come upon us by way of a reaction (see p. 53) from the subjectivism of Pragmatism, should be travelling apparently in this backward direction—away, to say the very least, from some of the things clearly seen even by biologists and psychologists. See [p. 144].
[433] As I have indicated in my Preface, I am certainly the last person in the world to affect to disparage the importance of the thin end of the wedge of Critical Idealism introduced into the English-speaking world by Green and the Cairds, and their first followers (like the writers in the old Seth-Haldane, Essays on Philosophical Criticism). Their theory of knowledge, or “epistemology,” was simply everything to the impoverished condition of our philosophy at the time, but, as Bergson points out, it still left many of us [the fault perhaps was our own, to some extent] in the position of “taking” the scientific reading of the world as so far true, and of thinking that we had done well in philosophy when we simply partly “transformed” it. The really important thing was to see with this epistemology that the scientific reading of the world is not in any sense initial “fact” for philosophy.