[279] This idea of a “world of inter-subjective intercourse,” although now a commonplace of sociology, was first expressed for the writer in the first series of the Gifford Lectures of Professor James Ward upon “Naturalism and Agnosticism,” in chapters xv. and xvi. The first of these chapters deals with “Experience and Life,” and the second with the “inter-subjective intercourse” that is really presupposed in the so-called individual experience of which the old psychology used to make so much. The reader who wishes to follow out a development of this idea of a “world of inter-subjective intercourse” cannot do better than follow the argument of Professor Ward’s second series of Gifford Lectures (“The Realm of Ends,” or “Pluralism and Theism”), in which he will find a Humanism and Theism that is at least akin to the theodicy, or the natural theology, of which we might suppose Pragmatism to be enamoured. The double series of these Lectures might well be referred to as an instance of the kind of classical English work in philosophy of which we have spoken as not falling into the extremes either of Pragmatism or of Rationalism. The strong point of the “Realm of Ends,” from the point of view of this book upon Pragmatism and Idealism, is that it moves from first to last in the reality of that world to which the science and the philosophy of the day both seem to point the way. In opposition to “subjectivism” it teaches a Humanism and a Pluralism that we recognise as an expression of the realities of the world of our common life and our common efforts, and from this Humanism it proceeds to a Theism which its author seeks to defend from many of the familiar difficulties of Naturalism. Were the writer concerned with the matter of the development and the elaboration of the philosophy that seems to have precipitated itself into his mind after some years of reflection on the issues between the realists and the idealists, between the rationalists and the pragmatists, he would have to begin by saying that its outlines are at least represented for him in the theistic and pluralistic philosophy of Professor Ward.
[280] According to Professor Dawes Hicks in the Hibbert Journal for April 1913, there is a great deal in the articles of Professor Alexander on “Collective Willing and Truth” that supports some of the positions I am here attempting to indicate, as part of the outcome of the pragmatist-rationalist controversy. “Both goodness and truth depend, in the first place, on the recognition by one man of consciousness in others, and, secondly, upon intersubjective intercourse” (p. 658).
[281] I owe this reference (which I have attempted to verify) to a suggestive and ingenious book (The New Word, by Mr. Allen Upward) lent to me by a Montreal friend. Skeat, in his Dictionary, gives as the meaning of truth, “firm, established, certain, honest, faithful,” connecting it with A.S. tréou, tryw (“preservation of a compact”), Teut. trewa, saying that the “root” is “unknown.” I suppose that similar things might be said about the Greek word ἐτεόν in its different forms, which Liddel and Scott connect with “Sans., satyas (verus), O. Nor. Sannr, A.S. sóth (sooth).” All this seems to justify the idea of the social confirmation of truth for which I am inclined to stand, and the connexion of intellectual truth with ethical truth, with the truth of human life. I agree with Lotze that truths do not float above, or over, or between, things, but that they exist only in the thought of a thinker, in so far as he thinks, or in the action of a living being in the moment of his action—the Microcosmos as quoted in Eisler, article “Wahrheit” in the Wörterbuch. The Truth for man would be the coherence of his knowledge and his beliefs, and there is no abstract truth, or truth in and for itself, no impersonal “whole” of truth.
[282] As in the Hegelian dialectic.
[283] There is another important thing to think of in connexion with this sociological character of Pragmatism. It is a characteristic that may be used to overcome what we have elsewhere talked of as its “subjectivism” and its “individualism,” and its revolutionary tendencies. It is, we might urge, a social and a collective standard of truth that Pragmatism has in view when it thinks of “consequences” and of the test of truth. Lalande takes up this idea in an article in the Revue Philosophique (1906) on “Pragmatisme et Pragmaticisme,” pointing out that Dr. Peirce would apparently tend to base his pragmatism on the subordination of individual to collective thought. Dr. Schiller too, I think, contemplates this social test of truth in his would-be revival of the philosophy of Protagoras—that man is the measure of reality—for man.
[284] See below, p. 197, where we speak of this “mediation” as the first fact for Professor Bosanquet as a prominent “Neo-Hegelian” rationalist.
[285] I have been asked by a friendly critic if I would include “inference” in this “real thought.” I certainly would, because in all real inference we are, or ought to be, concerned with a real subject-matter, a set of relations among realities of one kind or another. Possibly all students in all subjects (especially in philosophy) have lost time in following out a set of inferences in and for themselves. But such a procedure is justified by the increased power that we get over the real subject-matter of our thought. When thought cannot be thus checked by the idea of such increased power, it is idle thought.
[286] I am thinking, of course, of the entire revolutionary and radical social philosophy that harks back (in theory at least) to the “Social Contract” and to the State of Nature philosophy of Rousseau and his associates and predecessors.
[287] See [p. 184] of Chapter VII., where I speak of the ability to do this as the invariable possession of the successful American teacher of philosophy.
[288] An equivalent of it, of course, exists in many sayings, in many countries, in the conception of the task of the metaphysician as that of “a blind man in a dark room hunting for a black cat which—is not there,” reproduced by Sir Ray Lankester in the recent book of H. S. R. Eliot, Modern Science and the Illusions of Bergson. There is generally an error or a fallacy in such descriptions of philosophy—in this Lankester story the error that the secret of the world is a kind of “thing in itself” out of all relation to everything we know and experience—the very error against which the pragmatists are protesting.