(3) “A widely current opinion during the last quarter of a century has been that ‘reasonableness’ is not a good in itself, but only for the sake of something. Whether it be so or not seems to be a synthetical question [i.e. a question that is not merely a verbal question, a question of words], not to be settled by an appeal to the Principle of Contradiction [the principle hitherto relied upon by Rationalism or Intellectualism].... Almost everybody will now agree that the ultimate good lies in the evolutionary process in some way. If so, it is not in individual reactions in their segregation, but in something general or continuous. Synechism is founded on the notion that the coalescence, the becoming continuous, the becoming governed by laws, the becoming instinct with general ideas, are but phases of one and the same process of the growth of reasonableness” (ibid. p. 322. From Dr. Peirce, the bracket clauses being the author’s).
(4) “It is the belief that ideas invariably strive after practical expression, and that our whole life is teleological. Putting the matter logically, logic formulates theoretically what is of regulative importance for life—for our ‘experience’ in view of practical ends. Its philosophical meaning is the conviction that all facts of nature, physically and spiritually, find their expressions in ‘will’; will and energy are identical. This tendency is in agreement with the practical tendencies of American thought and American life in so far as they both set a definite end before Idealism” (Ueberweg-Heinze, Geschichte der Philosophie, vol. iv., written and contributed by Professor Matoon Monroe Curtis, Professor of Philosophy in Western Reserve University, Cleveland, U.S.A.).
(5) See also an article in Mind for October 1900, vol. ix. N.S., upon “Pragmatism” by the author of this book on Pragmatism and Idealism, referred to as one of the early sources in Baldwin’s Philosophical Dictionary (New York and London) and in Ueberweg-Heinze’s Geschichte, Vierter Teil (Berlin, 1906).
The conclusion that I am inclined to draw from the foregoing official statements (and also, say, from another official article like that of M. Lalande in the Revue Philosophique, 1906, on “Pragmatisme et Pragmaticisme”) is that the term “Pragmatism” is not of itself a matter of great importance, and that there is no separate, intelligible, independent, self-consistent system of philosophy that may be called Pragmatism. It is a general name for the Practicalism or Voluntarism or Humanism or the Philosophy of the Practical Reason, or the Activism, or the Instrumentalism, or the Philosophy of Hypotheses, or the Dynamic Philosophy of life and things that is discussed in different ways in this book upon Pragmatism and Idealism. And it is not and cannot be independent of the traditional body of philosophical truth in relation to which it can alone be defined.
CHAPTER II
PRAGMATISM AND THE PRAGMATIST MOVEMENT
In considering some of the results of pragmatist and voluntarist doctrines in the case of European writers, to whom the American-English triumvirate used to look somewhat sympathetically, we may begin with Italy, which boasted, according to Dr. Schiller (writing in 1907), of a youthful band of avowed pragmatists with a militant organ, the Leonardo. “Fundamentally,” declares Papini,[33] the leader of this movement, “Pragmatism means an unstiffening of all our theories and beliefs, by attending to their instrumental value. It incorporates and harmonizes various ancient tendencies, such as Nominalism, with its protest against the use of general terms, Utilitarianism, with its emphasis upon particular aspects and problems, Positivism, with its disdain of verbal and useless questions, Kantism, with its doctrine of the primacy of practical reason, Voluntarism, with its treatment of the intellect as the tool of the will, and Freedom, and a positive attitude towards religious questions. It is the tendency of taking all these, and other theories, for what they are worth, being chiefly a corridor-theory, with doors and avenues into various theories, and a central rallying-ground for them all.” These words are valuable as one of the many confessions of the affiliations of Pragmatism to several other more or less experiential, or practical, views of philosophy. It is perfectly obvious from them that Pragmatism stands, in the main, for the apprehension of all truth as subservient to practice, as but a device for the “economy” of thought, for the grasping of the multiplicity and the complexity of phenomena. It looks upon man as made, in the main, for action, and not for speculation—a doctrine which even Mr. Peirce, by the way, now speaks of as “a stoical maxim which to me, at the age of sixty, does not recommend itself so forcibly as it did at thirty.”[34]
“The various ideal worlds are here,” continues Papini, according to the version of James,[35] “because the real world fails to satisfy us. All our ideal instruments are certainly imperfect. But philosophy can be regenerated ... it can become pragmatic in the general sense of the word, a general theory of human action ... so that philosophic thought will resolve itself into a comparative discussion of all the possible programmes for man’s life, when man is once for all regarded as a creative being.... As such, man becomes a kind of god, and where are we to draw the limits?” In an article called “From Man to God,” Papini, in the Leonardo, lets his imagination work in stretching the limits of this way of thinking.
These prophetic, or Promethean, utterances—and we must never forget that even to the Greeks philosophy was always something of a religion or a life—may be paralleled by some of the more enthusiastic and unguarded, early utterances of Dr. Schiller about “voluntarism” or “metaphysical personalism” as the one “courageous,” and the only potent, philosophy; or about the “storming of the Jericho of rationalism” by the “jeers” and the “trumpetings” of the confident humanists and their pragmatic confrères. The underlying element of truth in them, and, for that part of it, in many of the similar utterances of many of our modern humanists, from Rabelais to Voltaire and from Shelley to Marx and Nietzsche, is, as we may see, that a true metaphysic must serve, not only as a rational system for the intellect, but as a “dynamic”[36] or motive for action and achievement, for the conscious activity of rational, self-conscious beings.
As for the matter of any further developments[37] of the free, creative religion hinted by Papini, we had, in 1903, the solemn declaration of Professor James that “the programme of the man-god is one of the great type programmes of philosophy,” and that he himself had been “slow” in coming to a perception of the full inwardness of the idea. Then it led evidently in Italy itself to a new doctrine which was trumpeted there a year or two ago in the public press as “Futurism,”[38] in which “courage, audacity and rebellion” were the essential elements, and which could not “abide” the mere mention of such things as “priests” and “ideals” and “professors” and “moralism.” The extravagances of Prezzolini, who thinks of man as a “sentimental gorilla,” were apparently the latest outcome of this anarchical individualism and practicalism. Pragmatism was converted by him into a sophisticated opportunism and a modern Machiavellism, a method of attaining contentment in one’s life and of dominating one’s fellow-creatures by playing upon their fancies and prejudices as does the religious charlatan or the quack doctor or the rhetorician.
The reader who may care to contemplate all this radical, pragmatist enthusiasm for the New Reformation in a more accessible, and a less exaggerated, form had better perhaps consult the recent work of Mr. Sturt of Oxford on the Idea of a Free Church. In this work the principles of Pragmatism are applied, first, critically and in the main negatively, to the moral dogmas of traditional Christianity, and then positively to the new conception of religion he would substitute for all this—the development of personality in accordance with the claims of family and of national life. A fair-minded criticism of this book would, I think, lead to the conclusion that the changes contemplated by Mr. Sturt are already part and parcel of the programme of liberal Christianity, whether we study this in the form of the many more or less philosophical presentations of the same in modern German theology, or in the form of the free, moral and social efforts of the voluntary religion of America and England. In America many of the younger thinkers in theology and philosophy are already writing in a more or less popular manner upon Pragmatism as a philosophy that bids fair to harmonize “traditional” and “radical” conceptions of religion. One of these writers, for example, in a recent important commemorative volume,[39] tries to show how this may be done by interpreting the “supernatural,” not as the “trans-experimental,” but as the “ethical” in experience, and by turning “dogmatic” into “historical theology.” And it would not be difficult to find many books and addresses in which the same idea is expressed. The more practical wing of this same party endeavours to connect Pragmatism with the whole philosophy and psychology of religious conversion, as this has been worked over by recent investigators like Stanley Hall,[40] Starbuck,[41] and others, and, above all, by James in his striking volume The Varieties of Religious Experience.[42]