“The consummation,” says Hegel, in a familiar and often-quoted passage, “of the Infinite aim (i.e. of the purpose of God as omniscient and almighty) consists merely in removing the illusion which makes it seem unaccomplished.”[158] Now although there is a sense in which this great saying must for ever be maintained to contain an element of profound truth,[159] the attitude of Pragmatism in regard to it would be, firstly, that of a rooted objection to its outspoken intellectualism. How can the chief work of the Almighty be conceived to be merely that of getting rid somehow from our minds, or from his, of our mental confusions? And then, secondly, an equally rooted objection is taken to the implication that the individual human being should allow himself to entertain, as possibly true, a view of the general trend of things that renders any notion of his playing an appreciable part therein a theoretical and a practical absurdity.[160] This notion (or “conceit,” if you will) he can surrender only by ceasing to think of his own consciousness of “effort” and of the part played by “effort”[161] and “invention” in the entire animal and human world, and also of his consciousness of duty and of the ideal in general. This latter consciousness of itself bids him to realize certain “norms” or regulative prescripts simply because they are consonant with that higher will which is to him the very truth of his own nature. He cannot, in other words, believe that he is consciously obliged to work and to realize his higher nature for nothing. The accomplishment of ends and of the right must, in other words, be rationally believed by him to be part of the nature of things. It is this conviction, we feel sure, that animates Pragmatism in the opposition it shares both with common sense and with the radical thought of our time against the meaninglessness to Hegelianism, or to Absolutism,[162] many of the hopes and many of the convictions that we feel to be so necessary and so real in the life of mankind generally.

And there are other lines of reflection among Neo-Hegelians against which Pragmatism is equally determined to make a more or less definite protest, in the interest, as before, of our practical and of our moral activity. We may recall, to begin with, the memorable words of Mr. Bradley, in his would-be refutation of the charge that the ideals of Absolutism “to some people” fail to “satisfy our nature’s demands.” “Am I,” he indignantly asks, “to understand that we are to have all we want, and have it just as we want it?” adding (almost in the next line) that he “understands,” of course, that the “views” of Absolutism, or those of any other philosophy, are to be compared “only with views” that aim at “theoretical consistency” and not with mere practical beliefs.[163] Now, speaking for the moment for Pragmatism, can it be truly philosophical to contemplate with equanimity the idea of any such ultimate conflict as is implied in these words between the demands of the intellect[164] and the demands of emotion—to use the term most definitely expressive of a personal, as distinct from a merely intellectual satisfaction?

Then again there is, for example, the dictum of Dr. McTaggart, that there is “no reason to trust God’s goodness without a demonstration which removes the matter from the sphere of faith.”[165] May there not, we would ask, be a view of things according to the truth of which the confidence of the dying Socrates in the reasonableness and the goodness of God are at least as reasonable as his confession, at the same time, of his ignorance of the precise, or the particular, fate both of the just and of the unjust? And is not, too, such a position as that expressed in these words of Dr. McTaggart’s about a logically complete reason for believing in the essential righteousness of things now ruled out of court by some of the concessions of his brother rationalists to Pragmatism, to which reference has already been made? It is so ruled out, for example, even by Mr. Bradley’s condemnation as a “pernicious prejudice” of the idea that “what is wanted for working purpose is the last theoretical certainty about things.”[166]

CHAPTER IV
PRAGMATISM AND HUMAN ACTIVITY

It requires now but a slight degree of penetration to see that beneath this entire matter of an apparent opposition between our “theoretical” and our “practical” satisfaction, and beneath much of the pragmatist insistence upon the “consequences” of ideas and of systems of thought, there is the great question of the simple fact of human action and of its significance for philosophy. And it might truly be said that the raising of this question is not merely another of the more or less definitely marked features of Pragmatism, but in some respects it is one outstanding characteristic.

For some reason or other, or for some strange combination of reasons, the phenomenon that we call “action”[167] (the activity of man as an agent) and the apparently simple facts of the reality and the intelligibility of action have long been regarded as matters of altogether secondary or subordinate importance by the rationalism of philosophy and by the mechanical philosophy of science. This Rationalism and this ostensibly certain and demonstrable mechanical philosophy of science suppose that the one problem of human thought is simply that of the nature of truth or of the nature of reality (the reality of the “physical” world) as if either (or each) of these things were an entity on its own account, an absolutely final finding or consideration. That this has really been the case so far as philosophy is concerned is proved by the fact even of the existence of the many characteristic deliverances and concessions of Rationalism in respect of Pragmatism to which reference has already been made in the preceding chapter. And that it has also been the case so far as science is concerned is proved by the existence of the many dogmatic attempts of many natural philosophers from Holbach to Haeckel to apply the “iron laws” of matter and motion to the reality of everything else under heaven,[168] and of everything in the heavens in spite of the frequent confessions of their own colleagues with regard to the actual and the necessary limits and limitations of science and of the scientific outlook.

Only slowly and gradually, as it were, has the consideration come into the very forefront of our speculative horizon that there is for man as a thinking being no rigid separation between theory and practice, between intellect and volition, between action and thought, between fact and act, between truth and reality.[169] There is clearly volition or aim, for example, in the search after truth. And there is certainly purpose in the attention[170] that is involved even in the simplest piece of perception, the selection of what interests and affects us out of the total field of vision or experience. And it is equally certain that there is thought in action—so long, that is to say, as action is regarded as action and not as impulse. Again, the man who wills the truth submits himself to an imperative just as surely as does the man who explicitly obeys the law of duty. It is thus impossible, as it were, even in the so-called intellectual life, to distinguish absolutely between theoretical and practical considerations—“truth” meaning invariably the relations obtaining in some “sphere,” or order, of fact which we separate off for some purpose or other from the infinite whole of reality. Equally impossible is it to distinguish absolutely between the theoretical and the practical in the case of the highest theoretical activity, in the case, say, of the “contemplation” that Aristotle talks of as the most “godlike” activity of man. This very contemplation, as our Neo-Hegelian[171] friends are always reminding us, is an activity that is just as much a characteristic of man, as is his power of setting his limbs in motion.

We have referred to the desire of the pragmatists to represent, and to discover, a supposedly deeper or more comprehensive view of human nature than that implicitly acted upon by Intellectualism—a view that should provide, as they think, for the organic unity of our active and our so-called reflective tendencies. This desire is surely eminently typical of what we would like to think of as the rediscovery by Pragmatism for philosophy, of the active, or the volitional, aspects of the conscious life of man, and along with this important side of our human nature, the reality also of the activities and the purposes that are revealed in what we sometimes speak of as unconscious nature. The world we know, it would hold, in the spirit and almost in the letter of Bergson, lives and grows by experiment,[172] and by activities and processes and adjustments. Pragmatism has doubtless, as we pointed out, been prone to think of itself as the only philosophy that can bake bread, that can speak to man in terms of the actual life of effort and struggle that he seems called upon to live in the environment in which he finds himself. And, as we have just been insisting, the main ground of its hostility to Rationalism is the apparent tendency of the latter to treat the various concepts and hypotheses that have been devised to explain the world, and to render it intelligible, as if they were themselves of more importance than the real persons and the real happenings that constitute the world of our experience.[173]

If it were at all desirable to recapitulate to any extent those phenomena connected with Pragmatism that seem to indicate its rediscovery of the fact of action, and of the fact of its meaning for philosophy, as its one outstanding characteristic, we may point to such considerations as the following: (1) The fact of its having sought to advance from the stage of a mere “instrumentalist” view of human thought to that of an outspoken “humanism” or a socialized utilitarianism. (2) The fact of its seeking to leave us (as the outcome of philosophy) with all our more important “beliefs,” with a general “working” view of the world in which such things as religion and ideals and enthusiasm are adequately recognized. Pragmatism is really, as we have put it, more interested in belief than in knowledge, the former being to it the characteristic, the conquering attitude of man to the world in which he finds himself. (3) Its main object is to establish a dynamical view of reality, as that which is “everywhere in the making,” as that which signifies to every person firstly that aspect of the life of things in which he is for the time being most vitally interested.[174] (4) In the spirit of the empirical philosophy generally its main anxiety is to do the fullest justice to all the aspects of our so-called human experience, looking upon theories and systems as but points of view for the interpretation of this experience, and of the great universal life that transcends it. And proceeding upon the theory that a true metaphysic must become a true “dynamic” or a true incentive to human motive, it seeks the relationships and affiliations that have been pointed out with all the different liberating and progressive tendencies in the history of human thought. (5) It would “consult moral experience directly,” finding in the world of our ordinary moral and social effort a spiritual reality[175] that raises the individual out of and above and beyond himself. And it bears testimony in its own more or less imperfect manner to the autonomous element[176] in our human personality that, in the moral life, and in such things as religious aspiration and creative effort and social service, transcends the merely theoretical descriptions of the world with which we are familiar in the generalizations of science and of history.

Without attempting meanwhile to probe at all deeply into this pragmatist glorification of “action” and its importance to philosophy, let us think of a few of the considerations that may be urged in support of this idea from sources outside those of the mere practical tendencies and the affiliations of Pragmatism itself.