[240] Papini, in fact (in 1907), went the length of saying that you cannot even define Pragmatism, admitting that it appeals only to certain kinds of persons.
[241] For a serviceable account, in English, of the differences between the pragmatist philosophy of hypotheses and the more fully developed philosophy of science of the day, see Father Walker’s Theories of Knowledge, chapter xiii., upon “Pragmatism and Physical Science.”
[242] Cf. supra, p. 10 and [p. 15]. And this failure to systematize becomes, it should be remembered, all the more exasperating, in view of the prominence given by the pragmatists to the supreme principles of “end” and “consequences.”
[243] In the “Axioms as Postulates” essay in Personal Idealism.
[244] Bourdeau makes the same charge, saying that all pragmatists have the illusion that “reality is unstable.” Professor Stout has something similar in view in referring to Dr. Schiller’s “primary reality” in the Mind review of Studies in Humanism. It is only the reality with which we have to do (reality πρὸς ἡμᾶς as an Aristotelian might say) that is “in the making”: for God there can be no such distinction between process and product. But it is quite evident that Pragmatism does not go far enough to solve, or even to see, such difficulties. It confines itself in the main to the contention that man must think of himself as a maker of reality to some extent—a contention that I hold to be both true and useful, as far as it goes.
[245] Pragmatism, p. 264.
[246] “Pragmatism,” October 1900.
[247] The same line of reflection will be found in James’s Pragmatism, p. 96.
[248] Professor Moore has a chapter in his book (Pragmatism and its Critics) devoted to the purpose of showing the necessary failure of Absolutism (or of an Intellectualism of the absolutist order) in the realm of ethics, finding in the experimentalism and the quasi-Darwinism of Pragmatism an atmosphere that is, to say the least, more favourable to the realities of our moral experience. While I cannot find so much as he does in the hit-and-miss ethical philosophy of Pragmatism, I quite sympathize with him in his rejection of Absolutism or Rationalism as a basis for ethics. The following are some of his reasons for this rejection: (1) The “purpose” that is involved in the ethical life must, according to Absolutism, be an all-inclusive and a fixed purpose, allowing of no “advance” and no “retreat”—-things that are imperative to the idea of the reality of our efforts. (2) Absolutism does not provide for human responsibility; to it all actions and purposes are those of the Absolute. (3) The ethical ideal of Absolutism is too “static.” (4) Absolutism does not provide any material for “new goals and new ideals.” See pp. [218–225] in my eighth chapter, where I censure, in the interest of Pragmatism and Humanism, the ethical philosophy of Professor Bosanquet.
[249] See [p. 224], where I arrive at the conclusion that the same thing may be said of the Absolutism of Dr. Bosanquet.