Pragmatism and idealism

Enough has perhaps now been said by way of an indication of some of the main characteristics of Pragmatism, and of the matter of its relations to ordinary and to philosophical thinking. Its complexity and some of its confusions and some of its difficulties have also been referred to.

As for the affiliations and the associations of Pragmatism, it would seem that it rests not so much upon its own mere instrumentalism and practicalism as upon some of the many broader and deeper tendencies in ancient and modern thought that have aimed at a dynamic, instead of a static, interpretation of reality.

We have suggested, too, that there are evidently things in traditional philosophy and in Rationalism of which it fails to take cognizance, although it has evidently many things to give to Rationalism in the way of a constructive philosophy of human life.

Now it would be easily possible to continue our study of Pragmatism along some or all of those different lines and points of view. In the matter, for example, of the affiliations and associations of Pragmatism, we could show that, in addition to such things as the “nominalism” and the utilitarianism, and the positivism, and the “voluntarism” and the philosophy of hypotheses, and the “anti-intellectualism” already referred to, Pragmatism has an affinity with things as far apart and as different as the Scottish Philosophy of Common-sense, the sociological philosophy of Comte and his followers, the philosophy of Fichte with its great idea of the world as the “sensualized sphere” of our duty, the “experience” philosophy of Bacon and of the entire modern era, and so on. There is even a “romantic” element in Pragmatism, and it has, in fact, been called “romantic utilitarianism.”206 We can understand this if we think of M. Berthelot’s207 association of it not only with Poincaré, but with Nietzsche, or of Dr. Schiller’s famous declaration that the genius of a man’s logical method should be loved and reverenced by him as is “his bride.”

And there is always in it, to be sure, the important element of sympathy with the religious instincts of mankind. And this is the case, too, whether these instincts are contemplated in some of the forms to which reference has already been made, or in the form, say, expressed by such a typical modern thinker as the late Henry Sidgwick, in his conviction that “Humanity will not, and cannot, acquiesce in a Godless world.”208

Then again we might take up the point of the relations of Pragmatism to doctrines new and old in the history of philosophy, to the main points of departure of different schools of thought, or to fundamental and important positions in many of the great philosophers. The writer finds that he has noticed in this connexion the doctrines of Stoicism and Epicureanism,209 the “probability” philosophy of Locke210 and Butler, and Pascal, the ethics and the natural theology of Cicero, the “voluntarism” of Schopenhauer,211 Aristotle’s philosophy of the Practical Reason,212 Kant’s philosophy of the same, the religious philosophy of theologians like Tertullian, Augustine, Duns Scotus, and so on—to take only a few instances.213 The view of man and his nature represented by all these names is, in the main, an essentially practical, a concrete, and a moral view as opposed to an abstract and a rationalistic view. And of course even to Plato knowledge was only an element in the total spiritual philosophy of man, while his master, Socrates, never really seemed to make any separation between moral and intellectual inquiries.

And as for positions in the great philosophers between which and some of the tendencies of Pragmatism there is more than a merely superficial agreement, we might instance, for example, the tendency of Hume214 to reduce many of the leading categories of our thought to mere habits of mind, to be explained on an instinctive rather than a rationalistic basis; or Comte’s idea of the error of separating reason from instinct;215 or the idea of de Maistre and Bain, and many others that “will” is implied in the notion of “exteriority”; or the idea of Descartes216 that the senses teach us not so much “what is in reality in things,” as “what is beneficial217 or hurtful to the composite whole of mind and body”; or the declaration of Kant that the chief end of metaphysic is God and immortality; or the idea of Spencer218 that the belief in the unqualified supremacy of reason is a superstition of philosophers; or the idea of Plato in the Sophist219 that reality is the capacity for acting or of being acted upon; and so on.

As for such further confirmation of pragmatist teaching as is to be found in typical modern thinking and scholars, thought of almost at random, it would be easy to quote in this connexion from writers as diverse as Höffding, Fouillée, Simmel, Wundt, Mach, Huxley, Hobhouse, and many others. It might be called a typically pragmatist idea, for example, on the part of Mr. L. T. Hobhouse to hold that “The higher conceptions by which idealism has so firmly held are not to be ‘scientifically’ treated in the sense of being explained away. What is genuinely higher we have ... good reason to think must also be truest,” and we “cannot permanently acquiesce in a way of thinking what would resolve it into what is lowest.”220 These last words represent almost a commonplace of the thought of the day. It is held, for example, by men as different and as far apart in their work, and yet as typical of phases of our modern life, as Robert Browning and Sir Oliver Lodge. The close dependence again of the doctrines of any science upon the social life and the prevalent thought of the generation is also essentially a pragmatist idea. Its truth is recognized and insisted upon in the most explicit manner in the recent serviceable manifesto of Professors Geddes and Thomson upon “Evolution,”221 and it obviously affects their whole philosophy of life and mind. It figures too quite prominently in the valuable short Introduction to Science by Professor Thomson in the same series of manuals.

Another typical book of to-day, again (that of Professor Duncan on the New Knowledge of the new physical science), definitely gives up, for example, the “correspondence”222 notion of truth, holding that it is meaningless to think of reality as something outside our thought and our experience of which our ideas might be a possible duplicate. This again we readily recognize as an essentially pragmatist contention. So also is the same writer’s rejection of the notion of “absolute truth,”223 and his confession of the “faith” that is always involved in the thought of completeness or system in our scientific knowledge. “We believe purely as an act of faith and not at all of logic,” he says, “that the universe is essentially determinable thousands of years hence, into some one system which will account for everything and which will be the truth.”224

Nor would it be at all difficult to find confirmation for the pragmatist philosophy of ideas and thoughts in what we may well think of as the general reflective literature of our time, outside the sphere, as it were, of strictly rational or academic philosophy—in writers like F. D. Maurice, W. Pater, A. W. Benn (who otherwise depreciates what he calls “ophelism”), J. H. Newman, Karl Pearson, Carlyle, and others.225 Take the following, for example, quoted with approval from Herschel by Karl Pearson: “The grand and indeed the only character of truth is its capability of enduring the test of universal experience, and coming unchanged out of every possible form of fair discussion.”226 The idea again, for example, recently expressed in a public article by such a widely read and cleverly perverse writer as Mr. Bernard Shaw,227 that “the will that moves us is dogmatic: our brain is only the very imperfect instrument by which we devise practical means for satisfying the will,” might only too naturally be associated with the pragmatist-like anti-intellectualism228 of Bergson, or, for that part of it, with the deeper “voluntarism” of Schopenhauer. The following quotation taken from Mr. Pater reveals how great may be correspondence between the independent findings of a finely sensitive mind like his, and the positions to which the pragmatists are inclined in respect of the psychology of religious belief. “The supposed facts on which Christianity rests, utterly incapable as they have become of any ordinary test, seem to me matter of very much the same sort of assent as we give to any assumption in the strict and ultimate sense, moral. The question whether these facts were real will, I think, always continue to be what I should call one of those natural questions of the human mind.”229 Readers of Carlyle will easily recognize what we might call a more generalized statement of this same truth of Pater’s in the often-quoted words from Heroes and Hero-Worship:230 “By religion I do not mean the church creed which a man professes, the articles of faith which.... But the thing a man does practically believe (and this often enough without asserting it even to himself, much less to others); the thing a man does practically lay to heart and know for certain concerning his vital relations to the mysterious universe, and his duty and destiny there.” It has long seemed to the writer that a similar thing to this might be written (and James has certainly written it) about a man’s “philosophy” as necessarily inclusive of his working beliefs as well as of his mere reasoned opinions, although it is the latter that are generally (by what right?) taken to be properly the subject-matter of philosophy.231 And it is this phase of the pragmatist philosophy that could, I am inclined to think, be most readily illustrated from the opinions of various living and dead writers upon the general working philosophy of human nature as we find this revealed in human history. We are told, for example, by Mr. Hobhouse, in his monumental work upon Morals in Evolution, that in “Taoism the supreme principle of things may be left undefined as something that we experience in ourselves if we throw ourselves upon it, but which we know rather by following or living it than by any process of ratiocination.”232 And “this mystical interpretation,” he adds, “is not confined to Taoism, but in one form or another lies near to hand to all spiritual religions, and expresses one mode of religious consciousness, its aspiration to reach the heart of things and the confidence that it has done so, and found rest there.”

We are reminded, of course, by all such considerations of the philosophy of Bergson, and of its brilliant attempt to make a synthesis of intuition or instinct with reflection or thought, and indeed it may well be that the past difficulties of philosophy with intuition and instinct are due to the fact of its error in unduly separating the intellect from the “will to live,” and from the “creative” evolution that have been such integral factors in the evolution of the life of humanity.

This entire matter, however, of the comparison of pragmatist doctrines to typical tendencies in the thought of the past and the present must be treated by us as subordinate to our main purpose, that of the estimation of the place of Pragmatism in the constructive thought of the present time. With a view to this it will be necessary to revert to the criticism of Pragmatism.

The criticism that has already been made is that in the main Pragmatism is unsystematic and complex and confusing, that it has no adequate theory of “reality,” and no unified theory of philosophy, that it has no satisfactory criterion of the “consequences” by which it proposes to test truth, and that it has not worked out its philosophy of the contribution of the individual with his “activity” and his “purposes” to “reality” generally, and that it is in danger of being a failure in the realm of ethics.233

To all this we shall now seek to add a few words more upon (1) the pragmatist criterion of truth, (2) the weakness of Pragmatism in the realms of logic and theory of knowledge, (3) its failure to give consistent account of the nature of reality, and (4) its unsatisfactoriness in the realm of ethics.

(1) We have already expressed our agreement with the finding of Professor Pratt234 that the pragmatist theory of truth amounts to no more than the harmless doctrine that the meaning of any conception expresses itself in the past, present, or future conduct or experiences of actual, or possible, sentient creatures. Taken literally, however, the doctrine that truth should be tested by consequences is not only harmless but also useless, seeing that Omniscience alone could bring together in thought or in imagination all the consequences of an assertion. Again, it is literally false for the reason that the proof of truth is not in the first instance any kind of “consequences,” not even the “verification” of which pragmatists are so fond. If the truth of which we may happen to be thinking is truth of “fact,” its proof lies in its correspondence (despite the difficulties235 of the idea) with the results of observation or perception.236 And if it be inferential truth, its proof is that of its deduction from previously established truths, or facts, upon a certain plane of knowledge or experience. In short, Pragmatists forget altogether the logical doctrine of the existence (in the world of our human experience, of course) of different established planes of reality, or planes of ascertained knowledge in which all propositions that are not nonsensical or trivial, are, from their very inception, regarded as necessarily true or false. The existence of these various planes of experience or of thought is in fact implied in the pragmatist doctrine of the fundamental character of belief.237 According to this perfectly correct doctrine, the objectivity of truth (i.e. its reality or non-reality in the world of fact or in the world of rational discourse) is the essential thing about it, while the idea of its “consequences” is not. A truth is a proposition whose validity has already been established by evidence or by demonstration. It has then afterwards the immediate “utility” of expressing in an intelligible and convenient manner the fact of certain connexions among things or events. And its ultimate utility to mankind is also at the same time assured, humanity being by its very nature a society of persons who must act, and who act, upon what they believe to be the truth or the reality of things. But a proposition is by no means true because it is useful. Constantine believed eminently in the concord-producing utility of certain confessions enunciated at the Council of Nice, but his belief in this does not prove their truth or reality outside the convictions of the faithful. Nor does the pragmatist or utilitarian character of certain portions of the writings of the Old Testament or of the Koran prove the matter of their literal and factual truth in the ordinary sense of these terms. As Hume said, “When any opinion leads us into absurdities ’tis certainly false, but ’tis not certain that an opinion is false because it has dangerous consequences.”

And then, apart from this conspicuous absence of logic in the views of pragmatists upon “truth,” the expression of their doctrine is so confusing that it is almost impossible to extract any consistent meaning out of it. They are continually confounding conceptions and ideas and propositions, forgetful of the fact that truth resides not in concepts and ideas but only in propositions. While it may be indeed true, as against Rationalism, that all human conceptions whatsoever [and it is only in connexion with “conceptions” that Pragmatism is defined even in such an official place as Baldwin’s Dictionary of Philosophy238] have, and must have, reference to actual or possible human experience or consequences, it is by no means true that the test of a proposition is anything other than the evidence of which we have already spoken.

Then the pragmatists have never adequately defined terms that are so essential to their purposes as “practical,” “truth,” “fact,” “reality,” “consequences,” and they confound, too, “theories” with “truths” and “concepts” just as they confound concepts and propositions.

(2) That logic and the theory of proof is thus one of the weak spots of Pragmatism has perhaps then been sufficiently indicated. We have seen, in fact, the readiness of Pragmatism to confess its inability239 to prove its own philosophy—that is, to prove it in the ordinary sense of the term.240 That it should have made this confession is, of course, only in keeping with the fact that its interest in logic is confined to such subordinate topics as the framing and verification of hypotheses, the development of concepts and judgments in the “thought-process,” and so on. Of complete proof, as involving both deduction and induction, it takes but the scantiest recognition. And it has made almost no effort to connect its discoveries in “genetic logic” and in the theory of hypotheses with the traditional body of logical doctrine.241 Nor, as may perhaps be inferred from the preceding paragraph, has it made any serious attempt to consider the question of the discovery of new truth in relation to the more or less perfectly formulated systems and schemes of truth already in the possession of mankind.

The case is similar in regard to the “theory of knowledge” of the pragmatists. While they have made many important suggestions regarding the relation of all the main categories and principles of our human thought to the theoretical and practical needs of mankind, there is in their teachings little that is satisfactory and explicit in the matter of the systematization of first principles,242 and little too that is satisfactory in respect of the relation of knowledge to reality. They sometimes admit (with James) the importance of general points of view like the “causal,” the “temporal,” “end,” and “purpose,” and so on. At other times they confess with Schiller that questions about ultimate truth and ultimate reality cannot be allowed to weigh upon our spirits, seeing that “actual knowing” always starts from the “existing situation.”

Now of course actual knowing certainly does start from the particular case of the existing situation, but, as all thinkers from Aristotle to Hume have seen, it is by no means explained by this existing situation. In real knowledge this is always made intelligible by references to points of view and to experiences that altogether transcend it. The true theory of knowledge, in short, involves the familiar Kantian distinction between the “origin” and the “validity” of knowledge—a thing that the pragmatists seem continually and deliberately to ignore. Schiller, to be sure, reminds us with justice that we must endeavour to “connect,” rather than invariably “contrast,” the two terms of this distinction. But this again is by no means what the pragmatists themselves have done. They fail, in fact, to connect their hints about the practical or experimental origin of most of our points of view about reality with the problem of the validity of first principles generally.

There is a suggestion here and there in their writings that, as Schiller243 puts it, there can be no coherent system of postulates except as rooted in personality, and that there are postulates at every stage of our development. What this statement means is that there are “points of view” about reality that are incidental to the stage of our natural life (as beings among other beings), others to the stage of conscious sensations and feelings, still others to that of our desires and thoughts, to our aesthetic appreciation, to our moral life, and so on. But, as I have already said, there is little attempt on the part of the pragmatists to distinguish these different stages or planes of experience adequately from one another.

(3) References have already been made to the failures of our Anglo-American pragmatists to attain to any intelligible and consistent kind of reality, whether they conceive of this latter as the sum-total of the efforts of aspiring and achieving human beings, or with Schiller as an “original, plastic sub-stratum,” or as the reality (whatever it is) that is gradually being brought into being by the creative efforts of ourselves and of beings higher or lower than ourselves in the scale of existence. Their deepest thought in the matter seems to be that the universe (our universe?) is essentially “incomplete,” and that the truth of God, as James puts it, “has to run the gauntlet of other truths.” One student of this topic, Professor Leighton, has arrived at the conclusion that pragmatism is essentially “acosmistic,”244 meaning, no doubt, and with good reason, that Pragmatism has no place of any kind for objective order or system. Now it is just this palpable lack of an “objective,” or rational, order that renders the whole pragmatist philosophy liable to the charges of (1) “subjectivism,” and (2) irrationality. There are in it, as we have tried to point out, abundant hints of what reality must be construed to be on the principles of any workable or credible philosophy, namely something that stimulates both our thought and our endeavour. And there is in it the great truth that in action we are not only in contact with reality as such, but with a reality, moreover, that transcends the imperfect reality of our lives as finite individuals and the imperfect character of our limited effort and struggle. But beyond the vague hints that our efforts must somehow count in the final tale of reality, and that what the world of experience seems to be, it must somehow be conceived ultimately to be, there is no standing-ground in the entire pragmatist philosophy for want of what, in plain English, must be termed an intelligible theory of reality. “You see,” says James, “how differently people take things. The world we live in exists diffused and distributed in the form of an indefinitely numerous lot of eaches, coherent in all sorts of ways and degrees; and the tough-minded are perfectly willing to take them at that valuation. They can stand the world, their temper being well adapted to its insecurity.”245

The present writer, some years ago, in an article in Mind,246 ventured to point out the absurdity of expecting the public to believe in a philosophy which sometimes speaks as if we could now, to-day, by our efforts begin to make the world something different from what it is or what it has been. “As far as the past facts go,” so James put it in 1899, “there is indeed no difference. These facts are bagged (is not the phraseology too recklessly sporting?), are captured, and the good that’s in them is gained, be the atoms, be the God their cause.” And again, “Theism and materialism, so indifferent when taken retrospectively [?], point, when we take them prospectively, to wholly different, practical consequences, to opposite outlooks of experience.” And again, “But I say that such an alternation of feelings, reasonable enough in a consciousness that is prospective, as ours now is, and whose world is partly yet to come, would be absolutely senseless (!) and irrational in a purely retrospective consciousness summing up a world already past.” Now on what theory of things is it that the future of the world and our future may be affected by ideal elements and factors (God, Freedom, Recompense, Justice) without having been so affected or determined in the past?247

(4) The unsatisfactoriness of Pragmatism in the realm of ethics. Crucial and hopeless as is the failure of Pragmatism in the realm of ethics, a word or two had better be said of the right of the critic to judge of it in this connexion. In the first place, the thinking public has already expressed its distrust of a doctrine that scruples not to avow its affinity with utilitarianism, with the idea of testing truth and value by mere consequences and by the idea of the useful. “The word ‘expedient,’” wrote a correspondent to Professor James, “has no other meaning than that of self-interest. The pursuit of this has ended by landing a number of officers of national banks in penitentiaries. A philosophy that leads to such results must be unsound.”

Then again, Professor Dewey (now doubtless the foremost living pragmatist) is the joint author of a book upon ethics, the most prominent feature of which is the application of pragmatist-like methods and principles to moral philosophy. This book sums up, too, a great many previous illuminating discussions of his own upon ethical and educational problems, for all of which, and for its general application of the principles of Humanism to the realm of morals he has deservedly won the praise of Professor James himself. So we have thus the warrant both of the public and of Dewey and James for seeking to judge Pragmatism from the point of view of moral philosophy.

Another justification for seeking to judge of Pragmatism from the point of view of moral philosophy is that the whole weight of its “humanism” and of its “valuation” philosophy must inevitably fall upon its view of the moral judgment. Dr. Schiller, we have seen, is quite explicit in his opinion that for Humanism the roots of metaphysics “lie, and must lie,” in ethics. And this is all the more the case, as it were, on account of the proclamation248 by Pragmatism of the inability of Intellectualism to understand morality, and also on account of its recurring contention in respect of the merely hypothetical character of all intellectual truth.

Now, unfortunately for Pragmatism, the one thing that the otherwise illuminating book of Dewey and Tufts almost completely fails to do, as the writer has already sought to indicate, is to provide a theory of the ordinary distinction between right and wrong.249 The only theme that is really successfully pursued in this typically American book is the “constant discovery, formation, and re-formation of the ‘self’ in the ‘ends’ which an individual is called upon to sustain and develop in virtue of his membership of a ‘social whole.’” But this is obviously a study in “genetic psychology,” or in the psychology of ethics, but by no means a study in the theory of ethics. “The controlling principle,” it characteristically tells us, “of the deliberation which renders possible the formation of a voluntary or socialized self out of our original instinctive impulses is the love of the objects which make this transformation possible.” But what is it, we wish to know, that distinguished the objects that make this transformation possible from the objects that do not do so? The only answer that we can see in the book is that anything is “moral” which makes possible a “transition from individualism to efficient social personality”—-obviously again a purely sociological point of view, leaving the question of the standard of efficiency quite open. The whole tendency, in short, of the pragmatist treatment of ethical principles is to the effect that standards and theories of conduct are valuable only in so far as they are, to a certain extent, “fruitful” in giving us a certain “surveying power” in the perplexities and uncertainties of “direct personal behaviour.” They are all, in other words, merely relative or useful, and none of them is absolute and authoritative. It is this last thing, however, that is the real desideratum of ethical theory. And so far as practice is concerned, all that this Pragmatism or “Relativism” in morals inevitably leads to is the conclusion that whatever brings about a change, or a result, or a “new formation,” or a new “development” of the moral situation, is necessarily moral, that “growth” and “liberation” and “fruitfulness,” and “experimentation” are everything, and moral scruples and conscience simply nothing. In the celebrated phrase of Nietzsche, “Everything is permissible and nothing is true or binding.”

Is not, then, this would-be ethical phase of Pragmatism just too modernistic, too merely practical, too merely illuminative and enlightening? And would it not be better for the youth of America (for Dewey’s book is in the American Science Series) and other countries to learn that not everything “practical” and “formative” and “liberative” and “socializing” is moral in the strict sense of the term?250 In saying this I am, of course, giving but a very imperfect idea of the contents of a book which is, in many respects, both epoch-marking and epoch-making. It is, however, unfortunately, in some respects, only too much in touch with “present facts and tendencies,” with the regrettable tendency of the hour, for example, to justify as right any conduct that momentarily “improves the situation,” or that “liberates the activities” of the parties concerned in it. It is not enough, in other words (and this is all, I am inclined to think, that Pragmatism can do in morals), to set up a somewhat suggestive picture of the “life of the moral man in our present transitional” and would-be “constructive” age. A moral man does not merely, in common parlance, “keep up with the procession,” going in for its endless “formations” and “re-formations.” He seeks to “lead” it, and this leading of men, this setting up of a standard of the legitimacy or of the illegitimacy of certain social experiments is just what Pragmatism cannot do in morals.

It is otherwise, doubtless, with a true humanism, or with the humanism that Pragmatism is endeavouring to become.