It is only necessary to add here that it is to the credit of American rationalism of the Neo-Hegelian type that it has shown itself, notably in the writings of Professor Royce,[98] capable, not only of criticising Pragmatism, but of seeking to incorporate, in a constructive philosophy of the present, some of the features of the pragmatist emphasis upon “will” and “achievement” and “purpose.” It is, therefore, in this respect at least in line with some of the best tendencies in contemporary European philosophy.
Lastly, there are certain tendencies of recent English philosophy with which Pragmatism has special affinities. Among these may be mentioned: (1) the various general and specific criticisms[99] that have been made there for at least two generations on the more or less formal and abstract character of the metaphysic of our Neo-Kantians and our Neo-Hegelians; (2) the concessions that have recently been made by prominent rationalists to the undoubtedly purposive, or “teleological,” character of our human thinking, and to the connexion of our mental life with our entire practical and spiritual activity. Many of these concessions are now regarded as the merest commonplaces of speculation, and we shall probably refer to them in our next chapter. Then there is (3) the well-known insistence of some of our foremost psychologists, like Ward and Stout,[100] upon the reality of activity and “purpose” in mental process, and upon the part played by them in the evolution of our intellectual life, and of our adjustment to the world in which we find ourselves. And (4) the ethical and social idealism of such well-known members of our Neo-Hegelian school as Professors Jones, Mackenzie, and Muirhead. These scholars and thinkers are just as insistent as the pragmatists upon the idea that philosophy and thought are, and should be, a practical social “dynamic”—that is to say, “forces” and “motives” making for the perfection of the common life. (5) A great deal of the philosophy of science and of the philosophy of axioms and postulates to be found in British writers, from Mill and Jevons to Karl Pearson and Mr. A. Sidgwick[101] and many others.
Apart from all this, however, or rather, in addition to it, it may be truly said that one of the striking things about recent British philosophical literature[102] is the stir and the activity that have been excited in the rationalist camp by the writings of the pragmatists and the “personal idealists,” and by the critics of these newer modes of thought. All this has led to many such re-statements of the problems of philosophy as are to be found in the books of men like Joachim,[103] Henry Jones,[104] A. E. Taylor,[105] Boyce-Gibson,[106] Henry H. Sturt,[107] S. H. Mellone,[108] J. H. B. Joseph,[109] and others, and even, say, in such a representative book as that of Professor Stewart upon the classical theme of Plato’s Theory of Ideas. In this work an attempt is made to interpret Plato’s “Ideas” in the light of pragmatist considerations as but “categories” or “points of view” which we find it convenient to use in dealing with our sense experience.
CHAPTER III
SOME FUNDAMENTAL CHARACTERISTICS
We shall now attempt a somewhat detailed treatment of a few of the more characteristic tendencies of Pragmatism. The following have already been mentioned in our general sketch of its development and of the appearance of the pragmatist philosophy in Europe and America: (1) the attempted modification by Pragmatism of the extremes of Rationalism, and its dissatisfaction with the rationalism of both science and philosophy; (2) its progress from the stage of a mere practical and experimental theory of truth to a broad humanism in which philosophy itself becomes (like art, say) merely an important “dynamic” element in human culture; (3) its preference in the matter of first principles for “faith” and “experience” and a trust in our instinctive “beliefs”; (4) its readiness to affiliate itself with the various liberal and humanistic tendencies in human thought, such as the philosophy of “freedom,” and the “hypothetical method” of science, modern ethical and social idealism, the religious reaction of recent years, the voluntaristic trend in German post-Kantian philosophy, and so on. Our subject in this chapter, however, is rather that of the three or four more or less characteristic assumptions and contentions upon which all these and the many other pragmatist tendencies may be said to rest.
The first and foremost of these assumptions is the position that all truth is “made” truth, “human” truth, truth related to human attitudes and purposes, and that there is no “objective” or “independent” truth, no truth “in whose establishment the function of giving human satisfaction, in marrying previous parts of experience with newer parts, has played no rôle.” Truths were “nothing,” as it were, before they were “discovered,” and the most ancient truths were once “plastic,” or merely susceptible of proof or disproof. Truth is “made” just like “health,” or “wealth,” or “value,” and so on. Insistence, we might say, upon this one note, along with the entire line of reflection that it awakens in him, is really, as Dewey reminds us, the main burden of James’s book upon Pragmatism. Equally characteristic is it too of Dewey himself who is for ever reverting to his doctrine of the factitious character of truth. There is no “fixed distinction,” he tells us, “between the empirical values of the unreflective life and the most abstract process of rational thought.” And to Schiller, again, this same thought is the beginning of everything in philosophy, for with an outspoken acceptance of this doctrine of the “formation” of all truth, Pragmatism, he thinks, can do at least two things that Rationalism is for ever debarred from doing: (1) distinguish adequately “truth” from “fact,” and (2) distinguish adequately truth from error. Whether these two things be, or be not, the consequences of the doctrine in question [and we shall return[110] to the point] we may perhaps accept it as, on the whole, harmonious with the teaching of psychology about the nature of our ideas as mental habits, or about thinking as a restrained, or a guided, activity. It is in harmony, too, with the palpable truism that all “truth” must be truth that some beings or other who have once “sought” truth (for some reasons or other) have at last come to regard as satisfying their search and their purposes. And this truism, it would seem, must remain such in spite of, or even along with, any meaning that there may be in the idea of what we call “God’s truth.” By this expression men understand, it would seem, merely God’s knowledge of truths or facts of which we as men may happen to be ignorant. But then there can have been no time in which God can be imagined to have been ignorant of these or any other matters. It is therefore not for Him truth as opposed to falsehood.
And then, again, this pragmatist position about all truth being “made” truth would seem to be valid in view of the difficulty (Plato[111] spoke of it) of reconciling God’s supposed absolute knowledge of reality with our finite and limited apprehension of the same.[112]
The main interest, however, of pragmatists in their somewhat tiresome insistence upon the truism that all truth is made truth is their hostility (Locke had it in his day) to the supposed rationalist position that there is an “a priori” and “objective” truth independent altogether of human activities and human purposes.[113] The particular object of their aversion is what Dewey[114] talks of as “that dishonesty, that insincerity, characteristic of philosophical discussion, that is manifested in speaking and writing as if certain ultimate abstractions or concepts could be more real than human purposes and human beings, and as if there could be any contradiction between truth and purpose.” As we shall reflect at a later stage[115] upon the rationalist theory of truth, we may, meantime, pass over this hostility with the remark that it is, after all, only owing to certain peculiar circumstances (those, say, of its conflict with religion and science and custom) in the development of philosophy that its first principles have been regarded by its votaries as the most real of all realities. These devotees tend to forget in their zeal that the pragmatist way of looking upon all supposed first principles—that of the consideration of their utility in and necessity as explanations of our common experience and its realities—is the only way of explaining their reality, even as conceptions.
It requires to be added—so much may, indeed, have already been inferred from the preceding chapter—that, apart from their hint about the highest truth being necessarily inclusive of the highest human purposes, it is by no means easy to find out from the pragmatists what they mean by truth, or how they would define it. When the matter is pressed home, they generally confess that their attitude is in the main “psychological” rather than philosophical, that it is the “making” of truth rather than its “nature” or its “contents” or its systematic character that interests them. It is the “dynamical” point of view, as they put it, that is essential to them. And out of the sphere and the associations of this contention they do not really travel. They will tell you what it means to hit upon this particular way of looking upon truth, and how stimulating it is to attempt to do so. And they will give you many more or less artificial and tentative, external, descriptions of their philosophy by saying that ideas are “made for man,” and “not man for ideas,” and so on. But, although they deny both the common-sense view that truth is a “correspondence” with external reality, and the rationalist view that truth is a “coherent system” on its own account, they never define truth any more than do their opponents the rationalists. It is a “commerce” and not a “correspondence,” they contend, a commerce[116] between certain parts of our experience and certain other parts, or a commerce between our ideas and our purposes, but not a commerce with reality, for the making of truth is itself, in their eyes, the making of reality.
Secondly, it is another familiar characteristic of Pragmatism that, although it fails to give a satisfying account either of truth or reality, the one thing of which it is for ever talking of, as fundamental to our entire life as men, is belief.[117] This is the one thing upon which it makes everything else to hang—all knowledge and all action and all theory. And it is, of course, its manifest acceptance of belief as a fundamental principle of our human life, and as a true measure of reality, that has given to Pragmatism its religious atmosphere.[118] It is this that has made it such a welcome and such a credible creed to so many disillusioned and free-thinking people to-day, as well as to so many of the faithful and the orthodox. “For, in principle, Pragmatism overcomes the old antithesis of Faith and Reason. It shows, on the one hand, that faith must underlie all reason and pervade it, nay, that at bottom rationality itself is the supremest postulate of Faith.”[119] “Truth,” again, as James reminds us, “lives in fact for the most part on a credit system. Our thoughts and beliefs [how literally true this is!] pass so long as nobody challenges them, just as bank-notes pass so long as nobody refuses them.”[120]