There is a suggestion here and there in their writings that, as Schiller[243] puts it, there can be no coherent system of postulates except as rooted in personality, and that there are postulates at every stage of our development. What this statement means is that there are “points of view” about reality that are incidental to the stage of our natural life (as beings among other beings), others to the stage of conscious sensations and feelings, still others to that of our desires and thoughts, to our aesthetic appreciation, to our moral life, and so on. But, as I have already said, there is little attempt on the part of the pragmatists to distinguish these different stages or planes of experience adequately from one another.
(3) References have already been made to the failures of our Anglo-American pragmatists to attain to any intelligible and consistent kind of reality, whether they conceive of this latter as the sum-total of the efforts of aspiring and achieving human beings, or with Schiller as an “original, plastic sub-stratum,” or as the reality (whatever it is) that is gradually being brought into being by the creative efforts of ourselves and of beings higher or lower than ourselves in the scale of existence. Their deepest thought in the matter seems to be that the universe (our universe?) is essentially “incomplete,” and that the truth of God, as James puts it, “has to run the gauntlet of other truths.” One student of this topic, Professor Leighton, has arrived at the conclusion that pragmatism is essentially “acosmistic,”[244] meaning, no doubt, and with good reason, that Pragmatism has no place of any kind for objective order or system. Now it is just this palpable lack of an “objective,” or rational, order that renders the whole pragmatist philosophy liable to the charges of (1) “subjectivism,” and (2) irrationality. There are in it, as we have tried to point out, abundant hints of what reality must be construed to be on the principles of any workable or credible philosophy, namely something that stimulates both our thought and our endeavour. And there is in it the great truth that in action we are not only in contact with reality as such, but with a reality, moreover, that transcends the imperfect reality of our lives as finite individuals and the imperfect character of our limited effort and struggle. But beyond the vague hints that our efforts must somehow count in the final tale of reality, and that what the world of experience seems to be, it must somehow be conceived ultimately to be, there is no standing-ground in the entire pragmatist philosophy for want of what, in plain English, must be termed an intelligible theory of reality. “You see,” says James, “how differently people take things. The world we live in exists diffused and distributed in the form of an indefinitely numerous lot of eaches, coherent in all sorts of ways and degrees; and the tough-minded are perfectly willing to take them at that valuation. They can stand the world, their temper being well adapted to its insecurity.”[245]
The present writer, some years ago, in an article in Mind,[246] ventured to point out the absurdity of expecting the public to believe in a philosophy which sometimes speaks as if we could now, to-day, by our efforts begin to make the world something different from what it is or what it has been. “As far as the past facts go,” so James put it in 1899, “there is indeed no difference. These facts are bagged (is not the phraseology too recklessly sporting?), are captured, and the good that’s in them is gained, be the atoms, be the God their cause.” And again, “Theism and materialism, so indifferent when taken retrospectively [?], point, when we take them prospectively, to wholly different, practical consequences, to opposite outlooks of experience.” And again, “But I say that such an alternation of feelings, reasonable enough in a consciousness that is prospective, as ours now is, and whose world is partly yet to come, would be absolutely senseless (!) and irrational in a purely retrospective consciousness summing up a world already past.” Now on what theory of things is it that the future of the world and our future may be affected by ideal elements and factors (God, Freedom, Recompense, Justice) without having been so affected or determined in the past?[247]
(4) The unsatisfactoriness of Pragmatism in the realm of ethics. Crucial and hopeless as is the failure of Pragmatism in the realm of ethics, a word or two had better be said of the right of the critic to judge of it in this connexion. In the first place, the thinking public has already expressed its distrust of a doctrine that scruples not to avow its affinity with utilitarianism, with the idea of testing truth and value by mere consequences and by the idea of the useful. “The word ‘expedient,’” wrote a correspondent to Professor James, “has no other meaning than that of self-interest. The pursuit of this has ended by landing a number of officers of national banks in penitentiaries. A philosophy that leads to such results must be unsound.”
Then again, Professor Dewey (now doubtless the foremost living pragmatist) is the joint author of a book upon ethics, the most prominent feature of which is the application of pragmatist-like methods and principles to moral philosophy. This book sums up, too, a great many previous illuminating discussions of his own upon ethical and educational problems, for all of which, and for its general application of the principles of Humanism to the realm of morals he has deservedly won the praise of Professor James himself. So we have thus the warrant both of the public and of Dewey and James for seeking to judge Pragmatism from the point of view of moral philosophy.
Another justification for seeking to judge of Pragmatism from the point of view of moral philosophy is that the whole weight of its “humanism” and of its “valuation” philosophy must inevitably fall upon its view of the moral judgment. Dr. Schiller, we have seen, is quite explicit in his opinion that for Humanism the roots of metaphysics “lie, and must lie,” in ethics. And this is all the more the case, as it were, on account of the proclamation[248] by Pragmatism of the inability of Intellectualism to understand morality, and also on account of its recurring contention in respect of the merely hypothetical character of all intellectual truth.
Now, unfortunately for Pragmatism, the one thing that the otherwise illuminating book of Dewey and Tufts almost completely fails to do, as the writer has already sought to indicate, is to provide a theory of the ordinary distinction between right and wrong.[249] The only theme that is really successfully pursued in this typically American book is the “constant discovery, formation, and re-formation of the ‘self’ in the ‘ends’ which an individual is called upon to sustain and develop in virtue of his membership of a ‘social whole.’” But this is obviously a study in “genetic psychology,” or in the psychology of ethics, but by no means a study in the theory of ethics. “The controlling principle,” it characteristically tells us, “of the deliberation which renders possible the formation of a voluntary or socialized self out of our original instinctive impulses is the love of the objects which make this transformation possible.” But what is it, we wish to know, that distinguished the objects that make this transformation possible from the objects that do not do so? The only answer that we can see in the book is that anything is “moral” which makes possible a “transition from individualism to efficient social personality”—-obviously again a purely sociological point of view, leaving the question of the standard of efficiency quite open. The whole tendency, in short, of the pragmatist treatment of ethical principles is to the effect that standards and theories of conduct are valuable only in so far as they are, to a certain extent, “fruitful” in giving us a certain “surveying power” in the perplexities and uncertainties of “direct personal behaviour.” They are all, in other words, merely relative or useful, and none of them is absolute and authoritative. It is this last thing, however, that is the real desideratum of ethical theory. And so far as practice is concerned, all that this Pragmatism or “Relativism” in morals inevitably leads to is the conclusion that whatever brings about a change, or a result, or a “new formation,” or a new “development” of the moral situation, is necessarily moral, that “growth” and “liberation” and “fruitfulness,” and “experimentation” are everything, and moral scruples and conscience simply nothing. In the celebrated phrase of Nietzsche, “Everything is permissible and nothing is true or binding.”
Is not, then, this would-be ethical phase of Pragmatism just too modernistic, too merely practical, too merely illuminative and enlightening? And would it not be better for the youth of America (for Dewey’s book is in the American Science Series) and other countries to learn that not everything “practical” and “formative” and “liberative” and “socializing” is moral in the strict sense of the term?[250] In saying this I am, of course, giving but a very imperfect idea of the contents of a book which is, in many respects, both epoch-marking and epoch-making. It is, however, unfortunately, in some respects, only too much in touch with “present facts and tendencies,” with the regrettable tendency of the hour, for example, to justify as right any conduct that momentarily “improves the situation,” or that “liberates the activities” of the parties concerned in it. It is not enough, in other words (and this is all, I am inclined to think, that Pragmatism can do in morals), to set up a somewhat suggestive picture of the “life of the moral man in our present transitional” and would-be “constructive” age. A moral man does not merely, in common parlance, “keep up with the procession,” going in for its endless “formations” and “re-formations.” He seeks to “lead” it, and this leading of men, this setting up of a standard of the legitimacy or of the illegitimacy of certain social experiments is just what Pragmatism cannot do in morals.
It is otherwise, doubtless, with a true humanism, or with the humanism that Pragmatism is endeavouring to become.