Moore. It is plain enough. You bid us turn to the cultivation, the nurture, of certain values in human life. But the question is whether these are or are not values. And that is a question of their relation to the Universe—to Reality. If Reality substantiates them, then indeed they are values; if it mocks and flouts them—as it surely does if what mechanical science calls Nature be ultimate and absolute—then they are not values. You and your kind are really the sentimentalists, because you are sheer subjectivists. You say: Accept the dream as real; do not question about it; add a little iridescence to its fog and extend it till it obscure even more of Reality than it naturally does, and all is well! I say: Perhaps the dream is no dream but an intimation of the solidest and most ultimate of all realities; and a thorough examination of what the positivist, the materialist, accepts as solid, namely, science, reveals as its own aim, standard, and presupposition that Reality is one all-exhaustive spiritual Being.
Eaton. This is about the way I thought my begging of the question would turn out. You insist upon translating my position into terms of your own; I am not then surprised to hear that it would be a begging of the question for you to hold my views. My point is precisely that it is only as long as you take the position that some Reality beyond—some metaphysical or transcendental reality—is necessary to substantiate empirical values that you can even discuss whether the latter are genuine or illusions. Drop the presupposition that you read into everything I say, the idea that the reality of things as they are is dependent upon something beyond and behind, and the facts of the case just stare you in the eyes: Goods are, a multitude of them—but, unfortunately, evils also are; and all grades, pretty much, of both. Not the contrast and relation of experience in toto to something beyond experience drives men to religion and then to philosophy; but the contrast within experience of the better and the worse, and the consequent problem of how to substantiate the former and reduce the latter. Until you set up the notion of a transcendental reality at large, you cannot even raise the question of whether goods and evils are, or only seem to be. The trouble and the joy, the good and the evil, is that they are; the hope is that they may be regulated, guided, increased in one direction and minimized in another. Instead of neglecting thought, we (I mean the pragmatists) exalt it, because we say that intelligent discrimination of means and ends is the sole final resource in this problem of all problems, the control of the factors of good and ill in life. We say, indeed, not merely that that is what intelligence does, but rather what it is.
Historically, it is quite possible to show how under certain social conditions this human and practical problem of the relation of good and intelligence generated the notion of the transcendental good and the pure reason. As Grimes reminded us, Plato——
Moore. Yes, and Protagoras—don’t forget him; for unfortunately we know both the origin and the consequences of your doctrine that being and seeming are the same. We know quite well that pure empiricism leads to the identification of being and seeming, and that is just why every deeply moral and religious soul from the time of Plato and Aristotle to the present has insisted upon a transcendent reality.
Eaton. Personally I don’t need an absolute to enable me to distinguish between, say, the good of kindness and the evil of slander, or the good of health and the evil of valetudinarianism. In experience, things bear their own specific characters. Nor has the absolute idealist as yet answered the question of how the absolute reality enables him to distinguish between being and seeming in one single concrete case. The trouble is that for him all Being is on the other side of experience, and all experience is seeming.
Grimes. I think I heard you mention history. I wish both of you would drop dialectics and go to history. You would find history to be a struggle for existence—for bread, for a roof, for protected and nourished offspring. You would find history a picture of the masses always going under—just missing—in the struggle, because others have captured the control of natural resources, which in themselves, if not as benign as the eighteenth century imagined, are at least abundantly ample for the needs of all. But because of the monopolization of Nature by a few persons, most men and women only stick their heads above the welter just enough to catch a glimpse of better things, then to be shoved down and under. The only problem of the relation of Nature to human good which is real is the economic problem of the exploitation of natural resources in the equal interests of all, instead of in the unequal interests of a class. The problem you two men are discussing has no existence—and never had any—outside of the heads of a few metaphysicians. The latter would never have amounted to anything, would never have had any career at all, had not shrewd monopolists or tyrants (with the skill that characterizes them) have seen that these speculations about reality and a transcendental world could be distilled into opiates and distributed among the masses to make them less rebellious. That, if you would know, Eaton, is the real historic origin of the ideal world beyond. When you realize that, you will perceive that the pragmatists are only half-way over. You will see that practical questions are practical, and are not to be solved merely by having a theory about theory different from the traditional one—which is all your pragmatism comes to.
Moore. If you mean that your own crass Philistinism is all that pragmatism comes to, I fancy you are about right. Forget that the only end of action is to bring about an approximation to the complete inclusive consciousness; make, as the pragmatists do, consciousness a means to action, and one form of external activity is just as good as another. Art, religion, all the generous reaches of science which do not show up immediately in the factory—these things become meaningless, and all that remains is that hard and dry satisfaction of economic wants which is Grimes’s ideal.
Grimes. An ideal which exists, by the way, only in your imagination. I know of no more convincing proof of the futile irrelevancy of idealism than the damning way in which it narrows the content of actual daily life in the minds of those who uphold idealism. I sometimes think I am the only true idealist. If the conditions of an equitable and ample physical existence for all were once secured, I, for one, have no fears as to the bloom and harvest of art and science, and all the “higher” things of leisure. Life is interesting enough for me; give it a show for all.
Arthur. I find myself in a peculiar position in respect to this discussion. An analysis of what is involved in this peculiarity may throw some light on the points at issue, for I have to believe that analysis and definition of what exists is the essential matter both in resolution of doubts and in steps at reform. For brevity, not from conceit, I will put the peculiarity to which I refer in a personal form. I do not believe for a moment in some different Reality beyond and behind Nature. I do not believe that a manipulation of the logical implications of science can give results which are to be put in the place of those which Science herself yields in her direct application. I accept Nature as something which is, not seems, and Science as her faithful transcript. Yet because I believe these things, not in spite of them, I believe in the existence of purpose and of good. How Eaton can believe that fulfilment and the increasing realization of purpose can exist in human consciousness unless they first exist in the world which is revealed in that consciousness is as much beyond me as how Moore can believe that a manipulation of the method of knowledge can yield considerations of a totally different order from those directly obtained by use of the method. If purpose and fulfilment exist as natural goods, then, and only then, can consciousness itself be a fulfilment of Nature, and be also a natural good. Any other view is inexplicable to sound thinking—save, historically, as a product of modern political individualism and literary romanticism which have combined to produce that idealistic philosophy according to which the mind in knowing the universe creates it.
The view that purpose and realization are profoundly natural, and that consciousness—or, if you will, experience—is itself a culmination and climax of Nature, is not a new view. Formulated by Aristotle, it has always persisted wherever the traditions of sound thinking have not been obscured by romanticism. The modern scientific doctrine of evolution confirms and specifies the metaphysical insight of Aristotle. This doctrine sets forth in detail, and in verified detail, as a genuine characteristic of existence, the tendency toward cumulative results, the definite trend of things toward culmination and achievement. It describes the universe as possessing, in terms of and by right of its own subject-matter (not as an addition of subsequent reflection), differences of value and importance—differences, moreover, that exercise selective influence upon the course of things, that is to say, genuinely determine the events that occur. It tells us that consciousness itself is such a cumulative and culminating natural event. Hence it is relevant to the world in which it dwells, and its determinations of value are not arbitrary, not obiter dicta, but descriptions of Nature herself.