Some day, somewhere, we shall meet. Till then good-bye, Dick.
Yours ever
Philip.
THE PRAGMATIC PRINCIPLE: AN APPLICATION.
It was said of the historic centipede that he was so embarrassed by his multitude of legs that locomotion became impossible. Similarly perhaps it may be said of Pragmatism that it suffered principally from the numerous formulations of its principles, all of which sought to explain it, but many of which left it obviously unexplained. Perhaps that is the reason why the vogue which it had seven years ago, following upon Professor James’ brilliant ‘popular lectures,’ was scarcely maintained. On the other hand, this was probably foreseen by some of the most loyal pragmatists. As one said of it, ‘If Pragmatism is going to live and give life, it will be by its spirit and not by any magic contained in pragmatic dicta.’ And it will be generally agreed that as a contribution to the thought of the twentieth century, it has lived and has perhaps quickened other established modes of thought and feeling. ‘On the pragmatic side,’ writes Professor James, ‘we have only one edition of the universe, unfinished, growing in all sorts of places, especially in the places where thinking beings are at work.’
Meanwhile many people were at work endeavouring to compress the pragmatic point of view into a formula. The most generally accepted definition stated that it represented theory as subordinate to practice. Another popular formula gives it as the doctrine that the truth of an assertion is decided by its consequences. And again—this with the authority of Dr. Schiller—‘the making of truth is necessarily and ipso facto also a making of reality.’ But inasmuch as none of these definitions cover the whole ground, and as we are here concerned with a modern and vital application of the pragmatic issue, it may perhaps be worth our while to retrace the history of the matter in the first place to its source, craving the patience of the reader meanwhile.
In the year 1878, at Balliol, there were three men who were destined to exercise strong influence upon the intellectual life of their generation: Benjamin Jowett, the Master; Nettleship, the tutor; and Thomas Hill Green. ‘I do not forget,’ says Professor Wallace, in speaking of the last-named in the preface to his Hegel, ‘what I and others owe to him,—that example of high-souled devotion to truth, and of earnest and intrepid thinking on the deep things of Eternity.’ In his own day perhaps Green was not greatly understood. He was known as the eccentric College tutor; a lecturer in metaphysics (and dry at that) ‘Obscurum per obscurius,’ said a witty undergraduate, though of course a witty undergraduate will say anything. Moreover an idealist, though a member of the City Council; a man of dreams, but a pioneer of evening schools for working men. Such was Green as Oxford knew him, but it is—briefly—with his position in philosophy that we are at the moment concerned.
Like all English idealists,—like Hegel also and the German School,—he built upon the rough foundations once laid down by the philosophers of Asia Minor. The Greeks had seen one thing plainly; that the spiritual entities of Science, Art, morality, or religion were of intrinsic value in themselves as expressions of the self-conscious spirit; but the one thing that lay hidden in the womb of Christianity they lacked, the conception of human brotherhood. So the philosophy of the later centuries, while still reaping where the ancient world had sown, has included the developed ideals of citizenship as well as the life of co-operation made possible therein. When we find one of Green’s works headed ‘Popular Philosophy in its Relation to Life,’ we realise the gist of his teaching. He was in fact a practical mystic, which, as Lord Rosebery said of Cromwell, is a ‘formidable combination.’ To Green, the most solid and practical things about a man were the ideals which he put into practice. That in his philosophy was the one permanent use of any philosophical idea; its working power as a basis for human effort. It will be seen that here we are not very far off from those ‘thinking beings at work’ in the adventurous world of the pragmatist.
The idealism of Green was of a robuster type than some other kindred systems. He never maintained that we as human beings were unnecessary to the working out of the Divine plan. He never denied that by the application of human reason new possibilities may be brought to light, and that out of the treasure-house of the Eternal may be brought forth things at once old and new. And so, consistently, when we consider the personality of this man who was so vivid a directing force in thought and action, we find at the one end a professor of moral philosophy, and at the other the town councillor and worker in the slums.