The second illustration of the pragmatic principle—the supposed opposition between the One and the Many—may be treated more briefly. James suggests certain definite and practical sets of results in which to define ‘oneness’, and tries out the conception to see whether this result or that is what oneness means. He finds this method to clarify the difficulty here as well as in the previous case. In summarizing he says: “I have little doubt myself that this old quarrel might be completely smoothed out to the satisfaction of all claimants, if only the maxim of Peirce were methodically followed here. The current monism on the whole still keeps talking in too abstract a way. It says that the world must either be pure disconnectedness, no universe at all, or absolute unity. It insists that there is no stopping-place half-way. Any connection whatever, says this monism, is only possible if there be still more connection, until at last we are driven to admit the absolutely total connection required. But this absolutely total connection either means nothing, is the mere word ‘one’ spelt long, or else it means the sum of all the partial connections that can possibly be conceived. I believe that when we thus attack the question, and set ourselves to search for these possible connections, and conceive each in a definite and practical way, the dispute is already in a fair way to be settled beyond the chance of misunderstanding, by a compromise in which the Many and the One both get their lawful rights”. (p. 685).
In concluding, James relates Peirce to the English Empiricists, asserting that it was they “who first introduced the custom of interpreting the meaning of conceptions by asking what differences they make for life…. The great English way of investigating a conception is to ask yourself right off, ‘What is it known as? In what facts does it result? What is its cash-value in terms of particular experience? And what special difference would come into the world according as it were true or false?’ Thus does Locke treat the conception of personal identity. What you mean by it is just your chain of memories, says he…. So Berkeley with his ‘matter’. The cash-value of matter is just our physical sensations…. Hume does the same thing with causation. It is known as habitual antecedence…. Stewart and Brown, James Mill, John Mill, and Bain, have followed more or less consistently the same method; and Shadworth Hodgson has used it almost as explicitly as Mr. Peirce…. The short-comings and negations and the baldnesses of the English philosophers in question come, not from their eye to merely practical results, but solely from their failure to track the practical results completely enough to see how far they extend”. (pp. 685-6).
It will be at once observed that James, as well as Peirce, is at this point saying nothing about a new doctrine of truth, but is concerning himself only with a new doctrine of clearness. Meaning and clearness of meanings are his only topics in this paper. Thus he states, “The only meaning of the conception of God lies in the differences which must be made in experience if the conception be true. God’s famous inventory of perfection … either means nothing, says our principle, or it implies certain definite things that we can feel and do at certain definite moments in our lives”. And again in speaking of the pluralism-monism controversy, “Any connection whatever, says this monism, is only possible if there be still more connection, until at last we are driven to admit the absolutely total connection required. But this absolutely total connection either means nothing, is the mere word ‘one’ spelt long, or else it means the sum of all the partial connections….”
But as we all know, James did afterward embrace the new pragmatic theory of truth. While he did not in 1898 use the word pragmatism to designate anything except a new method for securing clearness, yet it can be shown that he had been developing another line of thought, since a much earlier date, which did lead quite directly toward the pragmatic theory of truth. It may be well at this point then to go back and trace the growth of this idea of truth through such writing as he had done before this time. It will be found, I think, that James’ whole philosophic tendency to move away from the transcendental and unitary toward the particular was influencing him towards this new conception.
Development of the Doctrine through the Earlier Writings of James.
The first article which James wrote on truth, as he later states,[3] was entitled “The Function of Cognition”, and was published in Mind in 1885. Commenting on this article in 1909 he asserts that many of the essential theses of the book “Pragmatism”, published twenty-two years later, were already to be found here, and that the difference is mainly one of emphasis.[4]
This article attempts to give a description of knowing as it actually occurs,—not how it originated nor how it is antecedently possible. The thesis is that an idea knows an external reality when it points to it, resembles it, and is able to affect it. The plan of exposition is to start with the simplest imaginable material and then gradually introduce additional matter as it is needed until we have cognition as it actually occurs. James postulates a single, momentarily-existing, floating feeling as the entire content, at the instant, of the universe. What, then, can this momentary feeling know? Calling it a ‘feeling of q’, it can be made any particular feeling (fragrance, pain, hardness) that the reader likes. We see, first, that the feeling cannot properly be said to know itself. There is no inner duality of the knower on the one hand and content or known on the other. “If the content of the feeling occurs nowhere else in the universe outside of the feeling itself, and perish with the feeling, common usage refuses to call it a reality, and brands it as a subjective feature of the feeling’s constitution, or at most as the feeling’s dream. For the feeling to be cognitive in the specific sense, then, it must be self-transcendent”. And we must therefore “create a reality outside of it to correspond to the intrinsic quality q”. This can stand as the first complication of that universe. Agreeing that the feeling cannot be said to know itself, under what conditions does it know the external reality? James replies, “If the newly-created reality resemble the feeling’s quality q, I say that the feeling may be held by us to be cognizant of that reality”. It may be objected that a momentary feeling cannot properly know a thing because it has no time to become aware of any of the relations of the thing. But this rules out only one of the kinds of knowledge, namely “knowledge about” the thing; knowledge as direct acquaintance remains. We may then assert that “if there be in the universe a q other than the q in the feeling the latter may have acquaintance with an entity ejective to itself; an acquaintance moreover, which, as mere acquaintance it would be hard to imagine susceptible either of improvement or increase, being in its way complete; and which would oblige us (so long as we refuse not to call acquaintance knowledge) to say not only that the feeling is cognitive, but that all qualities of feeling, so long as there is anything outside of them which they resemble, are feelings of qualities of existence, and perceptions of outward fact”. But this would be true, as unexceptional rule, only in our artificially simplified universe. If there were a number of different q’s for the feeling to resemble, while it meant only one of them, there would obviously be something more than resemblance in the case of the one which it did know. This fact, that resemblance is not enough in itself to constitute knowledge, can be seen also from remembering that many feelings which do resemble each other closely,—e. g., toothaches—do not on that account know each other. Really to know a thing, a feeling must not only resemble the thing, but must also be able to act on it. In brief, “the feeling of q knows whatever reality it resembles, and either directly or indirectly operates on. If it resemble without operating, it is a dream; if it operates without resembling, it is an error”. Such is the formula for perceptual knowledge. Concepts must be reduced to percepts, after which the same rule holds. We may say, to make the formula complete, “A percept knows whatever reality it directly or indirectly operates on and resembles; a conceptual feeling, or thought, knows a reality, whenever it actually or potentially terminates in a percept that operates on, or resembles that reality, or is otherwise connected with it or with its context”.
“The latter percept [the one to which the concept has been reduced] may be either sensation or sensorial idea; and when I say the thought must terminate in such a percept, I mean that it must ultimately be capable of leading up thereto,—by way of practical experience if the terminal feeling be a sensation; by way of logical or habitual suggestion, if it be only an image in the mind”. “These percepts, these termini, these sensible things, these mere matters of acquaintance, are the only realities we ever directly know, and the whole history of our thought is the history of our substitution of one of them for the other, and the reduction of the substitute to the status of a conceptual sign. Condemned though they be by some thinkers, these sensations are the mother-earth, the anchorage, the stable rock, the first and last limits, the terminus a quo and the terminus ad quem of the mind. To find such sensational termini should be our aim with all our higher thought. They end discussion; they destroy the false conceit of knowledge; and without them we are all at sea with each other’s meanings…. We can never be sure we understand each other till we are able to bring the matter to this test. This is why metaphysical discussions are so much like fighting with the air; they have no practical issue of a sensational kind. Scientific theories, on the other hand, always terminate in definite percepts. You can deduce a possible sensation from your theory and, taking me into your laboratory prove that your theory is true of my world by giving me the sensation then and there”.
At this point James quotes, in substantiation, the following passage from Peirce’s article of 1878: “There is no distinction in meaning so fine as to consist in anything but a possible difference in practice…. It appears, then, that the rule for attaining the highest grade of clearness of apprehension is as follows: Consider what effects, which might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object.”