Pragmatism and idealism

by William Caldwell

Enough has perhaps now been said by way of an indication of some of the main characteristics of Pragmatism, and of the matter of its relations to ordinary and to philosophical thinking. Its complexity and some of its confusions and some of its difficulties have also been referred to.

As for the affiliations and the associations of Pragmatism, it would seem that it rests not so much upon its own mere instrumentalism and practicalism as upon some of the many broader and deeper tendencies in ancient and modern thought that have aimed at a dynamic, instead of a static, interpretation of reality.

We have suggested, too, that there are evidently things in traditional philosophy and in Rationalism of which it fails to take cognizance, although it has evidently many things to give to Rationalism in the way of a constructive philosophy of human life.

Now it would be easily possible to continue our study of Pragmatism along some or all of those different lines and points of view. In the matter, for example, of the affiliations and associations of Pragmatism, we could show that, in addition to such things as the “nominalism” and the utilitarianism, and the positivism, and the “voluntarism” and the philosophy of hypotheses, and the “anti-intellectualism” already referred to, Pragmatism has an affinity with things as far apart and as different as the Scottish Philosophy of Common-sense, the sociological philosophy of Comte and his followers, the philosophy of Fichte with its great idea of the world as the “sensualized sphere” of our duty, the “experience” philosophy of Bacon and of the entire modern era, and so on. There is even a “romantic” element in Pragmatism, and it has, in fact, been called “romantic utilitarianism.”[206] We can understand this if we think of M. Berthelot’s[207] association of it not only with Poincaré, but with Nietzsche, or of Dr. Schiller’s famous declaration that the genius of a man’s logical method should be loved and reverenced by him as is “his bride.”

And there is always in it, to be sure, the important element of sympathy with the religious instincts of mankind. And this is the case, too, whether these instincts are contemplated in some of the forms to which reference has already been made, or in the form, say, expressed by such a typical modern thinker as the late Henry Sidgwick, in his conviction that “Humanity will not, and cannot, acquiesce in a Godless world.”[208]

Then again we might take up the point of the relations of Pragmatism to doctrines new and old in the history of philosophy, to the main points of departure of different schools of thought, or to fundamental and important positions in many of the great philosophers. The writer finds that he has noticed in this connexion the doctrines of Stoicism and Epicureanism,[209] the “probability” philosophy of Locke[210] and Butler, and Pascal, the ethics and the natural theology of Cicero, the “voluntarism” of Schopenhauer,[211] Aristotle’s philosophy of the Practical Reason,[212] Kant’s philosophy of the same, the religious philosophy of theologians like Tertullian, Augustine, Duns Scotus, and so on—to take only a few instances.[213] The view of man and his nature represented by all these names is, in the main, an essentially practical, a concrete, and a moral view as opposed to an abstract and a rationalistic view. And of course even to Plato knowledge was only an element in the total spiritual philosophy of man, while his master, Socrates, never really seemed to make any separation between moral and intellectual inquiries.

And as for positions in the great philosophers between which and some of the tendencies of Pragmatism there is more than a merely superficial agreement, we might instance, for example, the tendency of Hume[214] to reduce many of the leading categories of our thought to mere habits of mind, to be explained on an instinctive rather than a rationalistic basis; or Comte’s idea of the error of separating reason from instinct;[215] or the idea of de Maistre and Bain, and many others that “will” is implied in the notion of “exteriority”; or the idea of Descartes[216] that the senses teach us not so much “what is in reality in things,” as “what is beneficial[217] or hurtful to the composite whole of mind and body”; or the declaration of Kant that the chief end of metaphysic is God and immortality; or the idea of Spencer[218] that the belief in the unqualified supremacy of reason is a superstition of philosophers; or the idea of Plato in the Sophist[219] that reality is the capacity for acting or of being acted upon; and so on.

As for such further confirmation of pragmatist teaching as is to be found in typical modern thinking and scholars, thought of almost at random, it would be easy to quote in this connexion from writers as diverse as Höffding, Fouillée, Simmel, Wundt, Mach, Huxley, Hobhouse, and many others. It might be called a typically pragmatist idea, for example, on the part of Mr. L. T. Hobhouse to hold that “The higher conceptions by which idealism has so firmly held are not to be ‘scientifically’ treated in the sense of being explained away. What is genuinely higher we have ... good reason to think must also be truest,” and we “cannot permanently acquiesce in a way of thinking what would resolve it into what is lowest.”[220] These last words represent almost a commonplace of the thought of the day. It is held, for example, by men as different and as far apart in their work, and yet as typical of phases of our modern life, as Robert Browning and Sir Oliver Lodge. The close dependence again of the doctrines of any science upon the social life and the prevalent thought of the generation is also essentially a pragmatist idea. Its truth is recognized and insisted upon in the most explicit manner in the recent serviceable manifesto of Professors Geddes and Thomson upon “Evolution,”[221] and it obviously affects their whole philosophy of life and mind. It figures too quite prominently in the valuable short Introduction to Science by Professor Thomson in the same series of manuals.

Another typical book of to-day, again (that of Professor Duncan on the New Knowledge of the new physical science), definitely gives up, for example, the “correspondence”[222] notion of truth, holding that it is meaningless to think of reality as something outside our thought and our experience of which our ideas might be a possible duplicate. This again we readily recognize as an essentially pragmatist contention. So also is the same writer’s rejection of the notion of “absolute truth,”[223] and his confession of the “faith” that is always involved in the thought of completeness or system in our scientific knowledge. “We believe purely as an act of faith and not at all of logic,” he says, “that the universe is essentially determinable thousands of years hence, into some one system which will account for everything and which will be the truth.”[224]

Nor would it be at all difficult to find confirmation for the pragmatist philosophy of ideas and thoughts in what we may well think of as the general reflective literature of our time, outside the sphere, as it were, of strictly rational or academic philosophy—in writers like F. D. Maurice, W. Pater, A. W. Benn (who otherwise depreciates what he calls “ophelism”), J. H. Newman, Karl Pearson, Carlyle, and others.[225] Take the following, for example, quoted with approval from Herschel by Karl Pearson: “The grand and indeed the only character of truth is its capability of enduring the test of universal experience, and coming unchanged out of every possible form of fair discussion.”[226] The idea again, for example, recently expressed in a public article by such a widely read and cleverly perverse writer as Mr. Bernard Shaw,[227] that “the will that moves us is dogmatic: our brain is only the very imperfect instrument by which we devise practical means for satisfying the will,” might only too naturally be associated with the pragmatist-like anti-intellectualism[228] of Bergson, or, for that part of it, with the deeper “voluntarism” of Schopenhauer. The following quotation taken from Mr. Pater reveals how great may be correspondence between the independent findings of a finely sensitive mind like his, and the positions to which the pragmatists are inclined in respect of the psychology of religious belief. “The supposed facts on which Christianity rests, utterly incapable as they have become of any ordinary test, seem to me matter of very much the same sort of assent as we give to any assumption in the strict and ultimate sense, moral. The question whether these facts were real will, I think, always continue to be what I should call one of those natural questions of the human mind.”[229] Readers of Carlyle will easily recognize what we might call a more generalized statement of this same truth of Pater’s in the often-quoted words from Heroes and Hero-Worship:[230] “By religion I do not mean the church creed which a man professes, the articles of faith which.... But the thing a man does practically believe (and this often enough without asserting it even to himself, much less to others); the thing a man does practically lay to heart and know for certain concerning his vital relations to the mysterious universe, and his duty and destiny there.” It has long seemed to the writer that a similar thing to this might be written (and James has certainly written it) about a man’s “philosophy” as necessarily inclusive of his working beliefs as well as of his mere reasoned opinions, although it is the latter that are generally (by what right?) taken to be properly the subject-matter of philosophy.[231] And it is this phase of the pragmatist philosophy that could, I am inclined to think, be most readily illustrated from the opinions of various living and dead writers upon the general working philosophy of human nature as we find this revealed in human history. We are told, for example, by Mr. Hobhouse, in his monumental work upon Morals in Evolution, that in “Taoism the supreme principle of things may be left undefined as something that we experience in ourselves if we throw ourselves upon it, but which we know rather by following or living it than by any process of ratiocination.”[232] And “this mystical interpretation,” he adds, “is not confined to Taoism, but in one form or another lies near to hand to all spiritual religions, and expresses one mode of religious consciousness, its aspiration to reach the heart of things and the confidence that it has done so, and found rest there.”