Now do you not know people whose religion is of this sort? And are not all such forms of religion, as far as they go, practical? Is the recognition of an all-seeing insight, as something real, not in itself calming, sustaining, rationalising? Does it not at the very least awaken in us the ideal which I repeatedly mentioned in our last lecture, the ideal of knowing ourselves even as we are known, and of guiding our lives in the light of such a view of ourselves? Can such an ideal remain wholly a matter of theory? Is it not from its very essence an appeal to the will? [{135}] Was not my elder friend finding a guiding principle of action in a world where he was often misunderstood? Could one steadily conceive God in these terms without constantly renewing one's power to face the world with courage?
Surely you all know many people who value the divine as they define the divine, mainly because they conceive God as what they call the Great Companion. And, for many such, it is the intimately perfect insight of this companion that they seem to themselves most to value. The ways of this companion are to them mysterious. But he knows them. They repeat the word: "He knoweth the way that I take." He sees them. He is close to them. He estimates them. So they view the matter. Is not such a conception a vitally important spring of action for those who possess it?
These illustrations suggest that one ill appreciates the insight of reason, even as so imperfectly and one-sidedly sketched by me at the last lecture, who does not see that this insight has an extremely close connection with the will.
IV
Our illustrations have now prepared the way for a general review of the relations between our reason and our will. We are ready at length to ask whether any insight of reason, whether any general view of the nature and of the unity of the world or of life, [{136}] could possibly be a merely theoretical insight. And if we rightly answer this question, we shall be prepared to reply to the objection that, according to the doctrine of the last lecture, the divine insight which overarches our ignorance, and which has all reality for its object, is a lifeless, or an unpractical, or a merely remote type of pure knowledge.
Our attempt to deal with this new question can best be made by taking a direct advantage of what some of you may suppose to be the most formidable of all objections to the whole argument of the last lecture. In my sketch of a philosophy of the reason, I have so far deliberately avoided mentioning what many of you will have had in mind as you have listened to me, namely, that doctrine about our knowledge, and about truth, and about our mode of access to truth, which to-day goes by the name of Pragmatism. Here we have to do, once more, with some of the favourite theses of James's later years. We have also to do with a view with which my present audience is likely to be familiar, at least so far as concerns both the name pragmatism and the best-known fundamental theses of the pragmatist. For I speak in the immediate neighbourhood of one of the most famous strongholds of the recent pragmatic movement. I can give but a comparatively small portion of our limited time to the task of explaining to you how I view those aspects of pragmatism which here concern our enterprise. Yet this summary discussion will go far, I hope, to show how [{137}] I view the relations between the reason and the will, and in how far our will also seems to me to be a source of religious insight.
That human knowledge is confined to the range furnished by human experience, and cannot be used to transcend that experience, is an opinion widely represented in all modern discussion, and especially in the most recent times. My own account of the insight which I refer to the reason depends not upon simply ignoring this general doctrine about the limitations of our human knowledge, but upon an effort to get a rational view of what it is that we mean by human experience. My result, as I have stated it, may have seemed paradoxical; and I am far from supposing that my brief sketch could remove this paradoxical seeming, or could answer all objections. My thesis is essentially this, that you cannot rationally conceive what human experience is, and means, except by regarding it as the fragment of an experience that is infinitely richer than ours, and that possesses a world-embracing unity and completeness of constitution. My argument for this thesis has been dependent on an assertion about the sense in which any opinion whatever can be either true or false, and upon a doctrine regarding that insight to which we appeal whenever we make any significant assertion.
Now this argument will seem to some of you to have been wholly set aside by that account of the nature of judgments, of assertions, and of their truth or falsity, which pragmatism has recently [{138}] maintained. A new definition of truth, you will say--or, an old definition revived and revised; a new clearness also as to the ancient issues of philosophy; an equally novel recent assimilation of philosophical methods to those that have long been prominent in natural science--these things have combined, at the present moment, to render the Platonic tradition in philosophy and the laborious deductions of Kant, as well as the speculations of the post-Kantian idealists, no longer interesting. I ought, you may insist, to have taken note of this fact before presenting my now antiquated version of the idealistic doctrine of the reason. I ought to have considered fairly the pragmatist's theory of truth. I should then have seen that our human experience may safely be left and must rationally be left, to fight its own way to salvation without any aid from the idea of an universal or all-embracing or divine insight.
How does pragmatism view the very problem about the truth and error of our human opinions which has led me to such far-reaching consequences? For the first, it is the boast of pragmatists that they deal, by preference, with what they call "concrete situations," and our "concrete situation" as human beings dealing with reality is, as they maintain, something much more readily comprehensible than is the idealistic theory of a divine insight. Truth and error are characters that belong to our assertions for reasons which need no overarching heavenly insight to make them clear. In brief, as the [{139}] pragmatists tell us, the story of the nature of truth and of error is this:
An assertion, a judgment, is always an active attitude of a man, whereby, at the moment when he makes this assertion he directs the course of his further activities. To say "My best way out of the woods lies in that direction" is, for a wanderer lost in the forest, simply to point out a rule or plan of action and to expect certain results from following out that plan. This illustration of the man in the woods is due to James. An analogous principle, according to pragmatism, holds for any assertion. To judge is to expect some concrete consequence to follow from some form of activity. An assertion has meaning only in so far as it refers to some object that can be defined in empirical terms and that can be subjected to further direct or indirect tests, whereby its relations to our own activities can become determinate. Thus, then, a judgment, an opinion, if it means anything concrete, is always an appeal to more or less accessible human experience--and is not, as I have been asserting, an appeal to an overarching higher insight. When you make any significant assertion, you appeal to whatever concrete human observations, experiments, or other findings of data, actual or possible, can furnish the test that the opinion calls for. If I assert: "It will rain to-morrow," the assertion is to be verified or refuted by the experience of men just as they live, from moment to moment.