The agapastic development of thought should, if it exists, be distinguished by its purposive character, this purpose being the development of an idea. We should have a direct agapic or sympathetic comprehension and recognition of it, by virtue of the continuity of thought. I here take it for granted that such continuity of thought has been sufficiently proved by the arguments used in my paper on the “Law of Mind” in The Monist of last July. Even if those arguments are not quite convincing in themselves, yet if they are reënforced by an apparent agapasm in the history of thought, the two propositions will lend one another mutual aid. The reader will, I trust, be too well grounded in logic to mistake such mutual support for a vicious circle in reasoning. If it could be shown directly that there is such an entity as the “spirit of an age” or of a people, and that mere individual intelligence will not account for all the phenomena, this would be proof enough at once of agapasticism and of synechism. I must acknowledge that I am unable to produce a cogent demonstration of this; but I am, I believe, able to adduce such arguments as will serve to confirm those which have been drawn from other facts. I believe that all the greatest achievements of mind have been beyond the powers of unaided individuals; and I find, apart from the support this opinion receives from synechistic considerations, and from the purposive character of many great movements, direct reason for so thinking in the sublimity of the ideas and in their occurring simultaneously and independently to a number of individuals of no extraordinary general powers. The pointed Gothic architecture in several of its developments appears to me to be of such a character. All attempts to imitate it by modern architects of the greatest learning and genius appear flat and tame, and are felt by their authors to be so. Yet at the time the style was living, there was quite an abundance of men capable of producing works of this kind of gigantic sublimity and power. In more than one case, extant documents show that the cathedral chapters, in the selection of architects, treated high artistic genius as a secondary consideration, as if there were no lack of persons able to supply that; and the results justify their confidence. Were individuals in general, then, in those ages possessed of such lofty natures and high intellect? Such an opinion would break down under the first examination.
How many times have men now in middle life seen great discoveries made independently and almost simultaneously! The first instance I remember was the prediction of a planet exterior to Uranus by Leverrier and Adams. One hardly knows to whom the principle of the conservation of energy ought to be attributed, although it may reasonably be considered as the greatest discovery science has ever made. The mechanical theory of heat was set forth by Rankine and by Clausius during the same month of February, 1850; and there are eminent men who attribute this great step to Thomson.[[76]] The kinetical theory of gases, after being started by John Bernoulli and long buried in oblivion, was reinvented and applied to the explanation not merely of the laws of Boyle, Charles, and Avogadro, but also of diffusion and viscosity, by at least three modern physicists separately. It is well known that the doctrine of natural selection was presented by Wallace and by Darwin at the same meeting of the British Association; and Darwin in his “Historical Sketch” prefixed to the later editions of his book shows that both were anticipated by obscure forerunners. The method of spectrum analysis was claimed for Swan as well as for Kirchhoff, and there were others who perhaps had still better claims. The authorship of the Periodical Law of the Chemical Elements is disputed between a Russian, a German, and an Englishman; although there is no room for doubt that the principal merit belongs to the first. These are nearly all the greatest discoveries of our times. It is the same with the inventions. It may not be surprising that the telegraph should have been independently made by several inventors, because it was an easy corollary from scientific facts well made out before. But it was not so with the telephone and other inventions. Ether, the first anæsthetic, was introduced independently by three different New England physicians. Now ether had been a common article for a century. It had been in one of the pharmacopœias three centuries before. It is quite incredible that its anæsthetic property should not have been known; it was known. It had probably passed from mouth to ear as a secret from the days of Basil Valentine; but for long it had been a secret of the Punchinello kind. In New England, for many years, boys had used it for amusement. Why then had it not been put to its serious use? No reason can be given, except that the motive to do so was not strong enough. The motives to doing so could only have been desire for gain and philanthropy. About 1846, the date of the introduction, philanthropy was undoubtedly in an unusually active condition. That sensibility, or sentimentalism, which had been introduced in the previous century, had undergone a ripening process, in consequence of which, though now less intense than it had previously been, it was more likely to influence unreflecting people than it had ever been. All three of the ether-claimants had probably been influenced by the desire for gain; but nevertheless they were certainly not insensible to the agapic influences.
I doubt if any of the great discoveries ought, properly, to be considered as altogether individual achievements; and I think many will share this doubt. Yet, if not, what an argument for the continuity of mind, and for agapasticism is here! I do not wish to be very strenuous. If thinkers will only be persuaded to lay aside their prejudices and apply themselves to studying the evidences of this doctrine, I shall be fully content to await the final decision.
Supplementary Essay
THE PRAGMATISM OF PEIRCE
BY
John Dewey
The term pragmatism was introduced into literature in the opening sentences of Professor James’s California Union address in 1898. The sentences run as follows: “The principle of pragmatism, as we may call it, may be expressed in a variety of ways, all of them very simple. In the Popular Science Monthly for January, 1878, Mr. Charles S. Peirce introduces it as follows:” etc. The readers who have turned to the volume referred to have not, however, found the word there. From other sources we know that the name as well as the idea was furnished by Mr. Peirce. The latter has told us that both the word and the idea were suggested to him by a reading of Kant, the idea by the Critique of Pure Reason, the term by the “Critique of Practical Reason.”[[77]] The article in the Monist gives such a good statement of both the idea and the reason for selecting the term that it may be quoted in extenso. Peirce sets out by saying that with men who work in laboratories, the habit of mind is molded by experimental work much more than they are themselves aware. “Whatever statement you may make to him, he [the experimentalist] will either understand as meaning that if a given prescription for an experiment ever can be and ever is carried out in act, an experience of a given description will result, or else he will see no sense at all in what you say.” Having himself the experimental mind and being interested in methods of thinking, “he framed the theory that a conception, that is, the rational purport of a word or other expression, lies exclusively in its bearing upon the conduct of life; so that, since obviously nothing that might not result from experiment can have any direct bearing upon conduct, if one can define accurately all the conceivable experimental phenomena which the affirmation or denial of a concept could imply, one will have therein a complete definition of the concept, and there is absolutely nothing more in it. For this doctrine, he invented the name pragmatism.”
After saying that some of his friends wished him to call the doctrine practicism or practicalism, he says that he had learned philosophy from Kant, and that to one “who still thought in Kantian terms most readily, praktisch and pragmatisch were as far apart as the two poles, the former belonging to a region of thought where no mind of the experimentalist type can ever make sure of solid ground under his feet, the latter expressing relation to some definite human purpose. Now quite the most striking feature of the new theory was its recognition of an inseparable connection between rational cognition and human purpose.”[[78]]
From this brief statement, it will be noted that Peirce confined the significance of the term to the determination of the meaning of terms, or better, propositions; the theory was not, of itself, a theory of the test, or the truth, of propositions. Hence the title of his original article: How to Make Ideas Clear. In his later writing, after the term had been used as a theory of truth,—he proposed the more limited “pragmaticism” to designate his original specific meaning.[[79]] But even with respect to the meaning of propositions, there is a marked difference between his pragmaticism and the pragmatism of, say, James. Some of the critics (especially continental) of the latter would have saved themselves some futile beating of the air, if they had reacted to James’s statements instead of to their own associations with the word “pragmatic.” Thus James says in his California address: “The effective meaning of any philosophic proposition can always be brought down to some particular consequence, in our future practical experience, whether active or passive; the point lying rather in the fact that the experience must be particular, than in the fact that it must be active.” (Italics mine.)
Now the curious fact is that Peirce puts more emphasis upon practise (or conduct) and less upon the particular; in fact, he transfers the emphasis to the general. The following passage is worth quotation because of the definiteness with which it identifies meaning with both the future and with the general. “The rational meaning of every proposition lies in the future. How so? The meaning of a proposition is itself a proposition. Indeed, it is no other than the very proposition of which it is the meaning: it is a translation of it. But of the myriads of forms into which a proposition may be translated, which is that one which is to be called its very meaning? It is, according to the pragmaticist, that form in which the proposition becomes applicable to human conduct, not in these or those special circumstances nor when one entertains this or that special design, but that form which is most applicable to self-control under every situation and to every purpose.” Hence, “it must be simply the general description of all the experimental phenomena which the assertion of the proposition virtually predicts.” Or, paraphrasing, pragmatism identifies meaning with formation of a habit, or way of acting having the greatest generality possible, or the widest range of application to particulars. Since habits or ways of acting are just as real as particulars, it is committed to a belief in the reality of “universals.” Hence it is not a doctrine of phenomenalism, for while the richness of phenomena lies in their sensuous quality, pragmatism does not intend to define these (leaving them, as it were, to speak for themselves), but “eliminates their sential element, and endeavors to define the rational purport, and this it finds in the purposive bearing of the word or proposition in question.” Moreover, not only are generals real, but they are physically efficient. The meanings “the air is stuffy” and “stuffy air is unwholesome” may determine, for example, the opening of the window. Accordingly on the ethical side, “the pragmaticist does not make the summum bonum to consist in action, but makes it to consist in that process of evolution whereby the existent comes more and more to embody those generals...; in other words, becomes, through action an embodiment of rational purports or habits generalized as widely as possible.”[[80]]
The passages quoted should be compared with what Peirce has to say in the Baldwin Dictionary article. There he says that James’s doctrine seems to commit us to the belief “that the end of man is action—a stoical maxim which does not commend itself as forcibly to the present writer at the age of sixty as it did at thirty. If it be admitted, on the contrary, that action wants an end, and that the end must be something of a general description, then the spirit of the maxim itself ... would direct us toward something different from practical facts, namely, to general ideas.... The only ultimate good which the practical facts to which the maxim directs attention can subserve is to further the development of concrete reasonableness.... Almost everybody will now agree that the ultimate good lies in the evolutionary process in some way. If so, it is not in individual reactions in their segregation, but in something general or continuous. Synechism is founded on the notion that the coalescence, the becoming continuous, the becoming governed by laws, the becoming instinct with general ideas, are but phases of one and the same process of the growth of reasonableness. This is first shown to be true with mathematical exactitude in the field of logic, and is thence inferred to hold good metaphysically. It is not opposed to pragmaticism ... but includes that procedure as a step.”
Here again we have the doctrine of pragmaticism as a doctrine that meaning or rational purport resides in the setting up of habits or generalized methods, a doctrine passing over into the metaphysics of synechism. It will be well now to recur explicitly to Peirce’s earlier doctrine which he seems to qualify—although, as he notes, he upheld the doctrine of the reality of generals even at the earlier period. Peirce sets out, in his article on the “Fixation of Belief,” with the empirical difference of doubt and belief expressed in the facts that belief determines a habit while doubt does not, and that belief is calm and satisfactory while doubt is an uneasy and dissatisfied state from which we struggle to emerge; to attain, that is, a state of belief, a struggle which may be called inquiry. The sole object of inquiry is the fixation of belief. The scientific method of fixation has, however, certain rivals: one is that of “tenacity”—constant reiteration, dwelling upon everything conducive to the belief, avoidance of everything which might unsettle it—the will to believe. The method breaks down in practice because of man’s social nature; we have to take account of contrary beliefs in others, so that the real problem is to fix the belief of the community; for otherwise our own belief is precariously exposed to attack and doubt. Hence the resort to the method of authority. This method breaks down in time by the fact that authority can not fix all beliefs in all their details, and because of the conflict which arises between organized traditions. There may then be recourse to what is “agreeable to reason”—a method potent in formation of taste and in esthetic productions and in the history of philosophy,—but a method which again fails to secure permanent agreements in society, and so leaves individual belief at the mercy of attack. Hence, finally, recourse to science, whose fundamental hypothesis is this: “There are real things, whose characters are entirely independent of our opinions about them; those realities affect our senses according to regular laws, and ... by taking advantage of the laws of perception, we can ascertain by reasoning how things really are, and any man if he have sufficient experience and reason enough about it, will be led to the one true conclusion.”[[81]]