[200] See, e.g., an article by Fouillée in the Revue Philosophique, XXI. 5, with the very title “Nécessité d’une interprétation psychologique et sociologique du monde.” Fouillée finds there, as he does elsewhere, that will is the principle that enables us to unify the physical with the psychical world,—an illustration of the fact that the two characteristics I am referring to are really one. A present instance of the introduction of the element of will (the will of man, even) is to be seen in the contention of such a book as M. Lucien Arréat’s Les Croyances de Demain (1898). According to Mind, M. Arréat proposes to substitute the idea that man can by his efforts bring about the supremacy of justice for the traditional idea that justice reigns in the universe.
[201] Manual of Ethics, according to Mr. Stout, International Journal of Ethics, October 1894. There are many similar sentences and ideas in the book.
[202] Elements of Ethics, p. 232.
[203] Now Professor of Logic in St. Andrews.
[204] International Journal of Ethics, October 1894, p. 119.
[205] I think that I must here have meant Professor Watson’s Christianity and Idealism.
[206] And apart from the idealism and the ethical philosophy of which I speak, in the next chapter, as necessary to convert Pragmatism into the Humanism it would like to become, Pragmatism is really a kind of romanticism, the reaction of a personal enthusiasm against the abstractions of a classical rationalism in philosophy. There is an element of this romanticism in James’s heroic philosophy of life, although I would prefer to be the last man in the world to talk against this heroic romanticism in any one. It is the great want of our time, and it is the thing that is prized most in some of the men whom this ephemeral age of ours still delights to honour. It was exhibited both in Browning and in George Meredith, for example. Of the former Mr. Chesterton writes in his trenchant, clean-sweeping little book on The Victorian Age in Literature, p. 175: “What he really was was a romantic. He offered the cosmos as an adventure rather than a scheme.” The same thing could be said about James’s “Will to Believe” Philosophy. Meredith, although far less of an idealist than Browning, was also an optimist by temperament rather than by knowledge or by conviction—hence the elevation of his tone and style in spite of his belated naturalism.
[207] In Un Romantisme utilitaire (Paris, Alcan, 1911), chiefly a study of the Pragmatism of Nietzsche and Poincaré.
[208] I am indebted for this saying of one of my old teachers to Mr. C. F. G. Masterman, in his essay upon Sidgwick in that judicious and interesting book upon the transition from the nineteenth to the twentieth century, In Peril of Change.
[209] Stoicism and Epicureanism, as the matter is generally put, both substitute the practical good of man as an individual for the wisdom or the theoretical perfection that were contemplated by Plato and Aristotle as the highest objects of human pursuit. For Cicero, too, the chief problems of philosophy were in the main practical, the question whether virtue alone is sufficient for happiness, the problem of practical certainty as opposed to scepticism, the general belief in Providence and in immortality, and so on. And Lucretius thinks of the main service of philosophy as consisting in its power of emancipating the human mind from superstition. All this is quite typical of the essentially practical nature of the Roman character, of its conception of education as in the main discipline and duty, of its distrust of Greek intellectualism, and of its preoccupation with the necessities of the struggle for existence and for government, of its lack of leisure, and so on. I do not think that the very first thing about Pragmatism is its desire to return to a practical conception of life, although a tendency in this direction doubtless exists in it.