Pragmatism and idealism

by William Caldwell

[299] At the moment of his death (scribens est mortuus) James was undoubtedly throughout the world the most talked-about English-speaking philosopher, and nowhere more so than in Germany, the home of the transcendentalism that he so doughtily and brilliantly attacked. Stein says, for example, in his article upon “Pragmatism” (Archiv für Philosophie, 14, 1907, II. Ab.), that we “have had nothing like it since Schopenhauer.” I have often thought that James and his work, along with the life and work of other notable American thinkers (and along with the “lead” that America now certainly has over at least England in some departments of study, like political and economic science, experimental psychology, and so on), are part of the debt America owed, some decades ago, to the Old World in the matter of the training of many of her best professors—a debt she has long since cancelled and overpaid. Readers, by the way, who desire more authentic information about James and his work than the present writer is either capable, or desirous, of giving in this book, may peruse either the recent work of Professor Perry of Harvard upon Present Philosophical Tendencies, or the work of M. Flournoy already spoken of. Boutroux has a fine appreciation of the value of James’s philosophical work in the work to which I have already referred. And there was naturally a crop of invaluable articles upon James in the American reviews shortly after his death.

[300] Think alone, for example, of what James says he learnt there from a teacher like Agassiz: “The hours I spent with Agassiz so taught me the difference between all possible abstractionists and all livers in the light of the world’s concrete fulness that I have never been able to forget it.”—From an article upon James in the Journal of Philosophy, ix. p. 527.

[301] While this book was passing through the press my eye fell upon the following words of Professor Santayana in respect of this very personality of James: “It was his personal spontaneity, similar to that of Emerson, and his personal vitality similar to that of nobody else. Conviction and ideas came to him, so to speak, from the subsoil. He had a prophetic sympathy with the dawning sentiments of the age, with the moods of the dumb majority. His way of thinking and feeling represents the true America, and represented in a measure the whole ultra-modern radical world” (Winds of Doctrine, p. 205).

[302] Including, say, the facilities of a completely indexed and authenticated estimate of the work that has been done in different countries upon his particular subject. It is easy to see that the habit and the possibility of work in an environment such as this [and again and again its system and its facilities simply stagger the European] is a thing of the greatest value to the American professor so far as the idea of his own best possible contribution to his age is concerned. Should he merely do over again what others have done? Or shall he try to work in a really new field? Or shall he give himself to the work of real teaching, to the training of competent men, or to the “organization” of his subject with his public? It must be admitted, I think, that the average American professor is a better teacher and guide in his subject than his average colleague in many places in Europe. Hence the justifiable discontent of many American students with what they occasionally find abroad in the way of academic facilities for investigation and advanced study.

[303] The latter (it is perhaps needless to state) have long been perfectly evident to all American teachers of the first rank in the shape, say, of the worthless “research” that is often represented in theses and studies handed in for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, or for other purposes. Anything that seems to be “work done,” anything that has attained to some “consequences” or other, has often been published as studies and researches, and this despite the valuable things that are to be associated with the idea of the pragmatist element in American scholarship. The faults, too, of the undue specialization that still obtains in many American institutions is also, as I have indicated, becoming more and more apparent to American authorities.

[304] I cannot see why idealists should have been so slow to accord to Pragmatism the element of truth in this idea, and to admit that it connects the pragmatist philosophy of “consequences” with the idealist “value-philosophy.”

[305] The greater part, for example, of our British teaching and writing about Kant and Hegel has taken little or no recognition of the peculiar intellectual and social atmosphere under which Criticism and Transcendentalism became intelligible and influential in Germany and elsewhere, or of the equally important matter of the very different ways in which the Kantian and the Hegelian philosophies were interpreted by different schools and different tendencies of thought. A similar thing might, I think, too, be said of the unduly “intellectualistic” manner in which the teachings of Plato and Aristotle have often been presented to our British students—under the influence partly of Hegelianism and partly of the doctrinairism and the intellectualism of our academic Humanism since the time of the Renaissance. Hence the great importance in Greek philosophy of such a recent work as that of F. M. Cornford upon the relation of Religion to Philosophy (From Religion to Philosophy, Arnold, 1912), or of Professor Burnet’s well-known Early Greek Philosophy.

[306] As suggestive of the scant respect for authorities felt by the active-minded American student, I may refer to the boast of Papini that Pragmatism appeals to the virile and the proud-spirited who do not wish to accept their thought from the past.

[307] I am thinking of such events as the “World’s Parliament of Religions” (in Chicago in 1893), the recent international conferences upon “ethical instruction in different countries,” upon “racial problems,” upon “missions,” etc. It would be idle to think that such attempts at the organisation of the knowledge and the effort of the thinking people in the world are quite devoid of philosophical importance. One has only to study, say, von Hartmann, or modern social reform, to be convinced of the contrary.

[308] I trust I may be pardoned if I venture to suggest that in opposition to the democratic attitude of Pragmatism to the ordinary facts of life, and to the ordinary (but often heroic) life of ordinary men, the view of man and the universe that is taken in such an important idealistic book as Dr. Bosanquet’s Individuality and Value is doubtless unduly aristocratic or intellectualistic. It speaks rather of the Greek view of life than of the modern democratic view. As an expression of the quasi democratic attitude of James even in philosophy, we may cite the following: “In this real world of sweat and dirt, it seems to me that when a view of things is noble, that ought to count as a presumption its truth, as a philosophical disqualification. The Prince of Darkness may be a gentleman, as we are told he is, but whatever the God of earth and heaven is, he can surely be no gentleman. His menial services are needed in the dust of our human trials.” [Having rewritten this quotation two or three times, I have lost the reference to its place in James’s writings. It is one of the three books upon Pragmatism and Pluralism.]