Truth itself, in fact, as may be seen, of course, from the very connexion of the word truth with other words like “try”[281] and “utter” (and in its root with words like “ware” and “verihood”), is a social possession, implying both seekers and finders, listeners and verifiers as well as speakers and thinkers. Its existence implies a universe of discourse, as the logicians put it, in which thoughts and conceptions are elaborated and corrected, not merely by a kind of self-analysis[282] and internal development, but by the test of the action to which they lead and of the “responses” they awaken in the lives and thoughts of other persons. And it is this very sociological[283] and “pluralistic” character of Pragmatism that, along with its tendency to “affirmation” in the matter of the reality of the religious life, has helped to render it (as far as it goes) such a living and such a credible philosophy to-day.

Another consequence of the dynamic idealism and the “radical empiricism” of Pragmatism is the “immediacy” of our contact with reality, for which it is naturally inclined to stand in the matter of what we may call the philosophy of perception. What this new “immediacy” and this new directness of our contact with reality would mean to philosophical and scientific thought can be fully appreciated only by those who have made the effort of years to live in a “thought world,” in which the first reality is what the logicians term “mediation”[284] or inference, a world of thoughts without the reality of a really effective thinker, or the reality of a world of real action—a world from which it is somehow impossible to escape either honestly or logically. It would be a return, of course, on the part of the thinker to the direct sense of life with which we are familiar in instinct and in all true living and in all real thought,[285] in all honest effort and accomplishment, and yet not a “return” in any of the impossible senses in which men have often (and with a tragic earnestness) sought to return to Nature[286] and to the uncorrupted reality of things. And we have not indeed done justice to the “instrumentalism” and the “hypothetical” treatment of ideas and of systems of thought for which Pragmatism and Humanism both stand until we see that so far from its being (almost in any sense) the duty of the thinker to justify, to his philosophy, this direct contact with the infinite life of the world, that has been the common possession of countless mortals who have lived their life, it is, on the contrary, his duty to justify (to himself and to his public) the various thought-systems of metaphysic, by setting forth the various points of departure and the various points of contact they have in the reality of the life of things.[287]

We spoke at the close of our fourth chapter of the strange irony that may be discovered in the fate of philosophers who have come to attach a greater importance to their own speculations and theories than to the great reality (whatever it may be, or whatever it may prove itself to be) of which all philosophy is but an imperfect (although a necessary) explanation. And the reader has doubtless come across the cynical French definition of metaphysics as the “art of losing one’s way systematically”[288] (l’art de s’égarer avec méthode). In view of all this, and in view of all the inevitable pain and difficulty of the solitary thinkers of all time, it is indeed not the least part of the service of Pragmatism and Humanism, and of the “vitalistic” and “voluntaristic” philosophy with which it may be naturally associated to-day, to have compelled even metaphysicians to feel that it is the living reality of the world that we know and that we experience, that is first, last, and foremost the real subject-matter of philosophy.

With the real sceptic, then, with David Hume, we may indeed be “diffident” of our “doubts” and at the same time absolutely “free” and unprejudiced in our hold upon, and in our treatment of, metaphysical systems as, all of them, but so many more or less successful attempts to state and explain, in terms appreciable by the understanding and the reason, the character and the reality of the infinite life with which we are in contact in our acts and in our thoughts and in our aspirations. Of the reality of that life we can never be sceptical, for it is the life that we know in that “world of inter-subjective” intercourse that, according to Pragmatism and Humanism, is implied even in sense-perception and in our daily experience.

CHAPTER VII
PRAGMATISM AS AMERICANISM

In adopting the title he has chosen for the heading of this chapter the writer feels that he has laid himself open to criticism from several different points of view. What has philosophy as the universal science to do with nationalism or with any form of national characteristics? Then even if Pragmatism be discovered to be to some extent “Americanism” in the realm of thought, is this finding, or criticism, a piece of appreciation or a piece of depreciation? And again, is it possible for any individual to grasp, and to understand, and to describe such a living and such a far-reaching force as the Americanism of to-day?

The following things may be said by way of a partial answer to these reflections: (1) There are American characteristics in Pragmatism, and some of them may profitably be studied by way of an attempt to get all the light we can upon its essential nature. Their presence therein has been detected and recognized by critics, both American and foreign, and reference has already been made to some of them in this book. (2) There is no universal reason in philosophy apart from its manifestation in the thoughts and the activities of peoples who have made or who are making their mark upon human history. It may well be that the common reason of mankind has as much to learn from Americanism in the department of theory as it has already been obliged to learn from this same quarter in the realm of practice. (3) One of the most important phases of our entire subject is precisely this very matter of the application of philosophy to “practice,” of the inseparability, to put it directly, of “theory” and “practice.” It would surely, therefore, be the strangest kind of conceit (although signs of it still exist here and there)[289] to debar philosophy from the study of such a practical thing as the Americanism of to-day. To connect the two with any degree of success would certainly not be to depreciate Pragmatism, but to strengthen it by relating it to a spirit that is affecting the entire life and thought of mankind.

One or two other important considerations should also be borne in mind. It goes without saying that there are in the United States and elsewhere any number of Americans who see beyond both contemporary Pragmatism and contemporary Americanism, and to whom it would be, therefore, but a partial estimate of Pragmatism to characterize it as “Americanism.” So much, to be sure, might be inferred from some things that have already been said in respect of the reception and the fate of Pragmatism in its own country. Again, it is one of the errors of the day to think of Americanism as in the main merely a belief in “practicality” and “efficiency.” To those who know it, Americanism is practical idealism, and its aims, instead of being merely materialistic and mechanical, are idealistic to the point of being Utopian. The American belief in work is not really a belief in work for its own sake, but rather a faith in the endless possibilities open to intelligent energy with resources at its command. Lastly, it will here certainly not be necessary either to think or to speak (even if it were possible to do so) of all American characteristics.[290]

Among the American-like characteristics in Pragmatism that have already made themselves apparent in the foregoing chapters are its insistence upon “action” and upon the free creative effort of the individual, its insistence upon the man-made (or the merely human) character of most of our vaunted truths, its instrumentalism, its radicalism,[291] its empiricism (that is to say, its endless faith in experience), its democratic character, and its insistence upon the necessity to philosophy of a broad, tolerant, all-inclusive view of human nature. So, too, are its insistence upon the basal character of belief,[292] and upon the importance of a creed or a philosophy that really “works” in the lives of intelligent men, its feeling of the inadequacy of a merely scholastic or dialectical philosophy, and even its quasi “practical” interpretation of itself in the realms of philosophy and religion and ethics—its confession of itself as a “corridor-theory,” as a point of approach to all the different systems in the history of thought. In addition to these characteristics we shall attempt now to speak, in the most tentative spirit, firstly, of some of the characteristics of American university life of which Pragmatism may perhaps be regarded as a partial expression or reflex, and then after this, of such broadly-marked and such well-known American characteristics as the love of the concrete (in preference to the abstract), the love of experiment and experimentation, an intolerance of doctrinairism and of mere book-learning, the general democratic outlook on life and thought, the composite or amalgam-like character of the present culture of the United States, the sociological interest that characterizes its people, and so on. All these things are clearly to be seen in Pragmatism as a would-be philosophical system, or as a preliminary step in the evolution of such a system.

Owing very largely to the “elective” system that still prevails in the universities of the United States, Philosophy is there (to an extent somewhat inconceivable to the student of the European continent) in the most active competition with other studies, and the success of a professor of philosophy is dependent on the success of his method of presenting his subject to students who all elect studies believed by them to be useful or interesting or practically important. It has long seemed to the writer that there is abundant evidence in the writings of the pragmatists of this inevitable attempt to make philosophy a “live” subject in competition, say, with the other two most popular subjects in American colleges, viz. economics and biology. The importance to the thought of to-day of biological and economic considerations is one of the things most emphatically insisted upon by Professor Dewey in nearly all his recent writings.[293] And both he and James—the fact is only too evident—have always written under the pressure of the economic and sociological interest of the American continent. And even Schiller’s Humanism has become, as we have seen, very largely the metaphysics of the “evolutionary process,” a characterization which we make below[294] as a kind of criticism of the philosophy of Bergson. Our present point, however, is merely that, owing to the generally competitive character of the intellectual life there, this biological influence is felt more acutely in America than elsewhere.