[92] See [Chapter VI.], p. 149, upon the doctrine and the fact of “Meaning.”
[93] Professor Pratt, What is Pragmatism? (Macmillan & Co., 1909); H. H. Bawden, The Principles of Pragmatism, a Philosophical Interpretation of Experience, Boston, 1910 (a useful book presenting what may be called a “phenomenological” account of Pragmatism); Moore, Pragmatism and Its Critics.
[94] In Pragmatism and Its Critics (Univ. of Chicago Press).
[95] The manifesto has now become a book. The New Realism (Macmillan). For a useful account of the New Realism and the Old see Professor Perry, Present Philosophical Tendencies, Part V.
[96] The following are my reasons for saying that the “New Realism” was already to some extent lurking in the “radical empiricism” of James. (1) Although teaching unmistakably the “activity” of mind, James seemed to think this activity “selective” rather than “creative” (falling in this idea behind his much-admired Bergson). (2) Despite this belief in the activity of the mind, he had the way of regarding consciousness as (to some extent) the mind’s “content”—an attitude common to all empirical psychologists since Hume and the English associationists. And from this position (legitimate so far from the psychological point of view) he went on to the idea (expressed in a troublesome form in the article, “Does Consciousness exist?”) that consciousness is not an entity or substance—of course it is not in the ordinary sense of “entity.” (3) Then from this he seemed to develop the idea that the various “elements” that enter into consciousness to be transformed into various “relationships” do not suffer any substantial change in this quasi-subjective “activity.” Therefore, as Professor Perry puts it (Present Tendencies, p. 353), “the elements or terms which enter into consciousness and become its content may now be regarded as the same elements which, in so far as otherwise related, compose physical nature [italics mine]. The elements themselves, the ‘materia prima,’ or stuff of pure experience, are neither psychical nor physical.” It is in this last absurd sentence [simply a piece of quasi-scientific analysis, the error of which Critical Idealism would expose in a moment] that the roots, I think, of “new realism” are to be found—a doctrine whose unmitigated externalism is the negation of all philosophy.
[97] See [p. 164] and [p. 230].
[98] I refer to his Aberdeen “Gifford Lectures” on “The World and The Individual,” and to a well-known address of his upon “The Eternal and the Practical” in the Proceedings of the American Philosophical Association. In this latter pamphlet he shows that Pragmatism and the philosophy of Consequences are impossible without “the Eternal” and without Idealism.
[99] The criticisms of which I am thinking are (to select but a few from memory) Green’s well-known admission in respect of Hegelianism, that it would have “to be done all over again”; Mr. Bradley’s admission that he is “not a Hegelian” and (recently) that he has “seen too much of metaphysics” to place any serious weight upon its reasonings; Jowett’s complaint (in the “life” by Campbell) that the Oxford Hegelianism of his day was teaching students to place an undue reliance upon “words” and “concepts” in the place of facts and things; Dr. Bosanquet’s admission (many years ago) that, of course, “gods and men” were more than “bloodless categories”; Professor Pringle Pattison’s criticism of Hegel in his Hegelianism and Personality; Professor Baillie’s criticisms at the end of his Logic of Hegel; Mr. Sturt’s criticism of Neo-Hegelianism in his Idola Theatri, etc.
[100] See the following, for example, from Professor Stout: “Every agreeable or disagreeable sensation has a conative or quasi-conative aspect” (Manual of Psychology, p. 233). Also: “Perception is never merely cognitive” (ibid. p. 242); it has a “conative character and a feeling tone,” etc.