He has made it clear, too, that it was an unfair interpretation of Pragmatism to take it as a plea for believing what you like, as was said above. Our experience, he puts it, must be consistent, the “parts with the parts,” and the “parts with the whole.” Beliefs must not clash with other beliefs, the mind being wedged tightly between the coercion of the sensible order and that of the ideal order. By “consequences,” too, he contends we may mean intellectual or theoretical consequences as well as practical consequences.
He has also, along with his brother-pragmatists, raised the question of the nature of Truth, attaining to such important results as the following: (1) there is no such thing as pure truth, or ready-made truth; (2) the “copy-theory” of truth is unintelligible.[6] We shall later be obliged to examine the more controversial positions that (3) truth is not an end in itself, but a means towards vital satisfaction; (4) truth is the “expedient” in the way of thinking, as the right is the expedient[7] in the way of acting, and so on.
Further, Professor James finds that Pragmatism leaves us with the main body of our common-sense beliefs [Peirce holds practically the same thing], such as the belief in “freedom”—as a “promise and a relief,” he adds; and the belief in the religious outlook upon life, in so far as it “works.” This is the attitude and the tenor of the well-known books on The Will to Believe and The Varieties of Religious Experience.[8] “Our acts, our turning-places, where we seem to ourselves to make ourselves and grow, are the parts of the world to which we are closest, the parts of which our knowledge is the most intimate and complete. Why should we not take them at their face-value?” And yet, as against this attitude, Professor James elsewhere finds himself unable to believe “that our human experience is the highest form of experience extant in the universe.” It is the emergence of many such incoherences in his writings that gives to his pragmatist philosophy of religion a subjective and temperamental character, and makes it seem to be lacking in any objective basis. “If radically tough, the hurly-burly of the sensible facts of nature will be enough for you, and you will need no religion at all. If radically tender, you will take up with the more monistic form of religion: the pluralistic form—that is, reliance on possibilities that are not necessities—will not seem to offer you security enough.”[9] He “inclines,” on the whole, to “Meliorism,” treating satisfaction as neither necessary nor impossible; the pragmatist lives in “the world of possibilities.”
These words show clearly how difficult it is to pin down Professor James to any single intelligible philosophy of belief, if belief be interpreted as in any sense a “commerce” of the soul with objective realities, as something more than a merely generous faith in the gradual perfection or betterment of human society.
“Religious experience,” as he puts it in his Pluralistic Universe, “peculiarly so called, needs, in my opinion, to be carefully considered and interpreted by every one who aspires to reason out a more complete philosophy.” In this same book, it is declared, however, on the one hand, that “we have outgrown the old theistic orthodoxy, the God of our popular Christianity being simply one member of a pluralistic system”; and yet, on the other hand, and with equal emphasis, that “we finite minds may simultaneously be conscious with one another in a supernatural intelligence.”[10]
The book on The Meaning of Truth seems to return, in the main, to the American doctrine of the strenuous life as the only courageous, and therefore true, attitude to beliefs, as the life that contains, in the plenitude of its energizing, the answer to all questions. “Pluralism affords us,” it openly confesses, “no moral holidays, and it is unable to let loose quietistic raptures, and this is a serious deficiency in the pluralistic philosophy which we have professed.” Professor James here again attacks Absolutism in the old familiar manner, as somehow unequal to the complexity of things, or the pulsating process of the world, casting himself upon the philosophy of experience, and upon the evident reality of the “many” and of the endless variety of the relations of things, in opposition to the abstract simplicity of the “one,” and the limited range of a merely logical, or mathematical, manner of conceiving of reality. “The essential service of Humanism, as I conceive the situation, is to have seen that, though one part of experience may lean upon another part to make it what it is in any one of several aspects in which it may be considered, experience as a whole is self-sustaining and leans on nothing.... “It gets rid of the standing problems of Monism and of other metaphysical systems and paradoxes.”[11]
Professor James exhibits, however, at the same time a very imperfect conception of philosophy, holding that it gives us, in general, “no new range of practical power,” ignoring, as it were, the difference between philosophy and poetry and religion and mere personal enthusiasm. And he leaves the whole question of the first principles of both knowledge and conduct practically unsettled. These things are to him but conceptual tools,[12] and “working” points of departure for our efforts, and there seems in his books to be no way of reducing them to any kind of system. And he makes, lastly, a most unsuccessful attempt at a theory of reality. Reality is to him sometimes simply a moving equilibrium of experience, the “flux” we have already referred to; sometimes the fleeting generations of men who have thought out for us all our philosophies and sciences and cults and varied experiences, and sometimes the “common-sense world in which we find things partly joined and partly disjoined.” It is sometimes, too, other things even than these. In a chapter of the book upon Pragmatism[13] it is stated in italics that “reality is, in general, what truths have to take account of,” and that it has three parts: (1) “the flux of our sensations,” and (2) the “relations that obtain between our sensations, or between their copies in our minds,” and (3) “the previous truths of which every new inquiry takes account.” Then again, in A Pluralistic Universe,[14] it is declared that “there may ultimately never be an All-form at all, that the substance of reality may never get totally collected ... and that a distributive form of reality, the Each-form, is logically as acceptable and empirical and probable as the All-form.” This is the theory of the outspoken “radical empiricism”[15] which is the contention of the volume upon The Meaning of Truth, the main effort of which seems to be to show again that the world is still in the process of making. It has the additional drawback of bringing Pragmatism down not only to the level of radical empiricism, but to that of common-sense realism or dualism [the belief in the two independent realities of matter and mind], and to that of the “copy-theory”[16] of truth, from which both Pragmatism and Radical Empiricism are especially supposed to deliver us. “I will say here again, for the sake of emphasis, that the existence of the object ... is the only reason, in innumerable cases, why the idea does work successfully.... Both Dewey and I hold firmly ... to objects independent of our own judgments.”[17] Much of all this is, no doubt, like surrendering philosophy altogether.
In the case of Dr. Schiller, we may notice first his frequent and successful exhibition of the extent to which human activity enters into the constitution not only of “truth,” but of “reality,” of what we mean by reality. This is interwoven in his books with his whole philosophy of truth as something merely human, as “dependent upon human purposes,” as a “valuation” expressive of the satisfactory, or the unsatisfactory, nature of the contents of “primary reality.” It is interwoven, too, with his doctrine that reality is essentially a ὕλη, something that is still in the making, something that human beings can somehow re-make and make perfect. Then this position about truth and reality is used by him, as by James, as a ground of attack against Absolutism, with its notion of a “pre-existing ideal” of knowledge and reality, as already existing in a super-sensible world, that descends magically into the passively recipient soul of man. There is no such thing, he claims, as absolute truth, and the conception of an “absolute reality” is both futile and pernicious. Absolutism, too, has an affinity to Solipsism,[18] the difficulties of which it can escape only by self-elimination.
Then Absolutism is, Schiller continues, “essentially irreligious,”[19] although it was fostered at first in England for essentially religious purposes.[20] It has developed there now at last, he reminds us, a powerful left[21] wing which, as formerly in Germany, has opened a quarrel with theology. In Absolutism, the two phases of Deity—God as moral principle, and God as an intellectual principle—“fall apart,” and absolutist metaphysic has really no connexion with genuine religion. Humanism can “renew Hegelianism” by treating the making of truth as also the making of reality. Freedom is real, and may possibly “pervade the universe.”[22] All truth implies belief, and it is obviously one of the merits of Pragmatism to bring truth and reason together. Beliefs and ideas and wishes are really essential and integral features in real knowing, and if knowing, as above, really transforms our experience, they must be treated as “real forces,” which cannot be ignored by philosophy.[23]
Against all this would-be positive, or constructive, philosophy we must, however, record the fact that the pragmatism of Dr. Schiller breaks down altogether in the matter of the recognition of a distinction between the “discovering” of reality and the “making” of reality. And despite the ingenuity of his essay in the first edition of Humanism upon “Activity and Substance,”[24] there is not in his writings, any more than in those of James, any coherent or adequate theory of reality. And this is the case whether we think of the “primary reality” upon which we human beings are said to “react,” in our knowledge and in our action, or of the supreme reality of God’s existence, of which such an interesting speculative account is given in the essay referred to. Nor is there in Dr. Schiller, any more than in James, any adequate conception, either of philosophy as a whole, or of the theory of knowledge, or of the relation of Pragmatism as a “method” (it is modestly claimed to be only such, but the position is not adhered to) to philosophy as such.[25] “For the pragmatic theory of knowledge initial principles are literally ἀρχαί, mere starting-points variously, arbitrarily, casually selected, from which we hope to try to advance to something better. Little we care what their credentials may be.... And as far as the future is concerned, systems of philosophy will abound as before, and will be as various as ever, but they will probably be more brilliant in colouring and more attractive in their form, for they will certainly have to be put forward and acknowledged as works of art that bear the impress of a unique and individual soul.”[26]