145 “On any view like mine to speak of truth as in the end copying reality, would be senseless” (Bradley in Mind, July 1911, “On some Aspects of Truth”).
150 What is Pragmatism? (Pratt), p. 21.
151 Principles of Pragmatism, Houghton Mifflin, 1910.
152 Ibid., Preface. This last sentence, by the way, may be taken as one of the many illustrations that may be given of the crudities and difficulties of some of the literature of Pragmatism. It shows that Pragmatism may sometimes be as guilty of abstractionism as is Rationalism itself. It is not “experience” that becomes “self-conscious,” but only “persons.” And, similarly, it is only “persons” who pursue “ends” and “satisfy” desires, and who may be said to have a “method.” Professor Bawden, of course, means that it is to the credit of Pragmatism that it approaches experience just as it finds it, and that its chief method is the interpretation of the same experience—an easy thing, doubtless, to profess, but somewhat difficult to carry out.
153 Principles of Pragmatism, Houghton Mifflin, 1910, pp. 44–45.
154 P. 253.
155 P. 256.
158 Wallace’s Logic of Hegel, p. 304.
159 There is a sentence in one of Hawthorne’s stories to the effect that man’s work is always illusory to some extent, while God is the only worker of realities. I would not go as far as this, believing, as I do, with the pragmatists, that man is at least a fellow-worker with God. But I do find Pragmatism lacking, as 1 indicate elsewhere, in any adequate recognition of the work of God, or the Absolute in the universe.
160 I am thinking of such considerations as are suggested in the following sentences from Maeterlinck: “As we advance through life, it is more and more brought home to us that nothing takes place that is not in accord with some curious, preconceived design; and of this we never breathe a word, we scarcely let our minds dwell upon it, but of its existence, somewhere above our heads, we are absolutely convinced” (The Treasure of the Humble, p. 17). “But this much at least is abundantly proved to us, that in the work-a-day lives of the very humblest of men spiritual phenomena manifest themselves—mysterious, direct workings, that bring soul nearer to soul” (ibid. 33). “Is it to-day or to-morrow that moulds us? Do we not all spend the greater part of our lives under the shadow of an event that has not yet come to pass?” (ibid. 51). I do not of course for one moment imply that the facts of experience referred to in such sentences as these should be received at any higher value than their face value, for there are indeed many considerations to be thought of in connexion with this matter of the realization of our plans and our destiny as individuals. But I do mean that the beliefs to which men cling in this respect are just as much part of the subject-matter of philosophy as other beliefs, say the belief in truth as a whole, or the beliefs investigated by the Society for Psychical Research. And there may conceivably be a view of human nature upon which the beliefs in question are both natural and rational.
162 See p. 198 on Dr. Bosanquet’s dismissal of the problem of teleology from the sphere of reasoned philosophy.
163 Appearance and Reality, p. 561.
165 I think that I have taken this phrase from Some Dogmas of Religion.
166 From “Truth and Copying,” Mind, No. 62.
167 By action in this chapter and elsewhere in this book, I do not mean the mere exhibition or expenditure of physical energy. I mean human activity in general, inclusive of the highest manifestations of this activity, such as the search for truth, contemplation, belief, creative activity of one kind or another, and so on. There is no belief and no contemplation that is not practical as well as theoretical, no truth that fails to shape and to mould the life of the person who entertains it. I quite agree with Maeterlinck, and with Bergson and others, that the soul is to some extent limited by the demands of action and speech, and by the duties and the conventions of social life, but I still believe in the action test for contemplations and thoughts and beliefs and ideas, however lofty. It is only the thoughts that we can act out, that we can consciously act upon in our present human life, and that we can persuade others to act upon, that are valuable to ourselves and to humanity. It is to their discredit that so many men and so many thinkers entertain, and give expression to, views about the universe which renders their activities as agents and as thinkers and as seekers quite inexplicable.
168 There are, of course, no heavens in the old mediaeval and Aristotelian sense after the work of Copernicus and Galileo in the physical sciences, and of Kant in the realm of mind.
169 Professor Moore well points out (Pragmatism and its Critics, p. 13) that the “challenge” of the idea that our thinking has “two foundations: one, as the method of purposing—its ‘practical’ function; the other as merely the expression of the specific and independent instinct to know—its ‘intellectual’ function,” marks the “beginnings of the pragmatic movement.” The idea of two kinds of thought goes back to Aristotle and is one of the most famous distinctions of thought. It dominated the entire Middle Ages, and it is still at the root of the false idea that “culture” can be separated from work and service for the common good. I am glad, as I indicate in the text, a few lines further on, that the idealists are doing their share with the pragmatists in breaking it up. In America there is no practical distinction between culture and work. See my chapter on Pragmatism as Americanism.
170 The importance of this consideration about the “attention” that is (as a matter of fact and a matter of necessity) involved in all “perception,” cannot possibly be exaggerated. We perceive in childhood and throughout life in the main what interests us, and what affects our total and organic activity. It is, that is to say, our motor activity, and its direction, that determine what we see and perceive and experience. And in the higher reaches of our life, on the levels of art and religion and philosophy, this determining power becomes what we call our reason and our will and our selective attention. Perception, in other words, is a kind of selective activity, involving what we call impulse and effort and will. Modern philosophy has forgotten this in its treatment of our supposed perception of the world, taking this to be something given instead of something that is constructed by our activity. Hence its long struggle to overcome both the apparent materialism of the world of the senses, and the gap, or hiatus, that has been created by Rationalism between the world as we think it, and the world as it really is.
171 E.g. Professor Bosanquet, in his 1908 inaugural lecture at St. Andrews upon The Practical Value of Moral Philosophy. “Theory does indeed belong to Practice. It is a form of conation” (p. 9). It “should no doubt be understood as Theoria, or the entire unimpeded life of the soul” (p. 11; italics mine).
172 This is surely the teaching of the new physics in respect of the radio-active view of matter. I take up this point again in the Bergson chapter.
179 Needham, General Biology, 1911. For the mention of this book as a reliable recent manual I am indebted to my colleague, Professor Willey of McGill University.
180 Marett, Anthropology, p. 155.
181 Cf. supra, p. 101.
182 So much may, I suppose, be inferred from the contentions (explicit and implicit) of all biologists and evolutionists. Human life they all seem to regard as a kind of continuity or development of the life of universal nature, whether their theory of the origin of life be that of (1) “spontaneous generation,” (2) “cosmozoa” (germs capable of life scattered throughout space), (3) “Preyer’s theory of the continuity of life,” (4) “Pflüger’s theory of the chemical characteristics of proteid,” or (5) the conclusion of Verworn himself, “that existing organisms are derived in uninterrupted descent from the first living substance that originated from lifeless substance” (General Physiology, p. 315).
183 Creative Evolution, pp. 245–5.
184 It is, I think, an important reflection that it is precisely in this very reality of “action” that science and philosophy come together. That all the sciences meet in the concept, or the fact, of action is, of course, quite evident from the new knowledge of the new physics. Professor M’Dougall has recently brought psychology into line with the natural sciences by defining its subject-matter as the actions or the “behaviour” of human beings and animals. And it is surely not difficult to see that—as I try to indicate—it is in human behaviour that philosophy and science come together. Another consideration in respect of the philosophy of action that has long impressed me is this. If there is one realm in which, more than anywhere else, our traditional rationalism and our traditional empiricism really came together in England, it is the realm of social philosophy, the realm of human activity. It was the breaking down of the entire philosophy of sensations in the matter of the proof of utilitarianism that caused John Stuart Mill to take up the “social philosophy” in respect to which the followers of positivism joined hands with the idealists.
187 See Chapter VII. p. 179.
188 I am thinking of Pyrrho and Arcesilaus and some of the Greek sceptics and of their ἐποχή and ἀταραξία.
190 Man’s Place in the Cosmos, a book consisting of essays and reviews published by the author during the last four or five years. They all advocate “humanism in opposition to naturalism,” or “ethicism in opposition to a too narrow intellectualism.”
191 The Will to Believe, 1897.
192 “Progress in Philosophy,” art. Mind, 15, p. 213.
193 Practical Ethics; Essays.
194 Mental Development—Social and Ethical Interpretations (a work crowned by the Royal Academy of Denmark). We can see in this book how a psychologist has been led into a far-reaching study of social and ethical development in order to gain an understanding of the growth of even the individual mind. We may indeed say that the individualistic intellectualism of the older psychology is now no more. It was too “abstract” a way of looking at mind. Professor Royce, it is well known, has given, from the stand-point of a professed metaphysician, a cordial welcome to the work of Professor Baldwin. In an important review of Mr. Stout’s two admirable volumes on Analytic Psychology (Mind, July, 1897), Professor Royce has insisted strongly upon the need of supplementing introspection by the “interpretation of the reports and the conduct of other people” if we would know much about “dynamic” psychology. It is this “dynamic” psychology—the “dynamics” of the will and of the “feelings”—that I think constitutes such an important advance upon the traditional “intellectual” and “individualistic” psychology.
195 The Psychology of the Moral Self. Macmillan, 1897. I have tried, in a short notice of this book in the Philosophical Review (March, 1898), to indicate the importance of some of its chief contentions.
196 Philosophical Lectures and Remains, edited by Professor Bradley.
197 Editor of La Science Sociale. His recent work on the Superiority of the Anglo-Saxons (À quoi tient la supériorité des Anglo-Saxons?)—a chapter in the study of the conditions of race survival—ran through seventeen editions in a few months, and set the whole press of France and Germany (other countries following suit) into commotion, as well as calling forth pronunciamientos from most of the prominent editors and critics of France,—men like Jules Lemaître, Paul Bourget, Marcel Prevost, François Coppée, Édouard Rod, G. Valbert, etc.
198 Now Professor A. Seth Pringle-Pattison.
199 In different ways by all of the following English writers: Professor A. Seth (“It is not in knowledge, then, as such, but in feeling and action that reality is given,” Man’s Place, etc., p. 122, etc. etc.), by Mr. Bradley (Appearance and Reality), by Mr. Balfour (in his Foundations of Belief), and by Professor James. Professor Eucken, of Jena, in his different books, also insists strongly upon the idea that it is not in knowledge as such, but in the totality of our psychical experience that the principles of philosophy must be sought. Paulsen, in his Einleitung in die Philosophie, and Weber, in his History of Philosophy (books in general use to-day), both advocate a kind of philosophy of the will, the idea that the world is to be regarded as a striving on the part of wills after a partly unconscious ideal. Simmel, in an important article in the Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale, IV. 2, expresses the idea (which it would be well to recognize generally at the present time) that truth is not something objectively apart from us, but rather the name we give to conceptions that have proved to be the guides to useful actions, and so become part of the psychical heritage of human beings. Professor Ribot, of Paris, has written more extensively upon the will and the feelings than upon the intellect,—a fact in keeping with the scientific demands of our day.
200 See, e.g., an article by Fouillée in the Revue Philosophique, XXI. 5, with the very title “Nécessité d’une interprétation psychologique et sociologique du monde.” Fouillée finds there, as he does elsewhere, that will is the principle that enables us to unify the physical with the psychical world,—an illustration of the fact that the two characteristics I am referring to are really one. A present instance of the introduction of the element of will (the will of man, even) is to be seen in the contention of such a book as M. Lucien Arréat’s Les Croyances de Demain (1898). According to Mind, M. Arréat proposes to substitute the idea that man can by his efforts bring about the supremacy of justice for the traditional idea that justice reigns in the universe.
201 Manual of Ethics, according to Mr. Stout, International Journal of Ethics, October 1894. There are many similar sentences and ideas in the book.
202 Elements of Ethics, p. 232.
203 Now Professor of Logic in St. Andrews.
204 International Journal of Ethics, October 1894, p. 119.
205 I think that I must here have meant Professor Watson’s Christianity and Idealism.
206 And apart from the idealism and the ethical philosophy of which I speak, in the next chapter, as necessary to convert Pragmatism into the Humanism it would like to become, Pragmatism is really a kind of romanticism, the reaction of a personal enthusiasm against the abstractions of a classical rationalism in philosophy. There is an element of this romanticism in James’s heroic philosophy of life, although I would prefer to be the last man in the world to talk against this heroic romanticism in any one. It is the great want of our time, and it is the thing that is prized most in some of the men whom this ephemeral age of ours still delights to honour. It was exhibited both in Browning and in George Meredith, for example. Of the former Mr. Chesterton writes in his trenchant, clean-sweeping little book on The Victorian Age in Literature, p. 175: “What he really was was a romantic. He offered the cosmos as an adventure rather than a scheme.” The same thing could be said about James’s “Will to Believe” Philosophy. Meredith, although far less of an idealist than Browning, was also an optimist by temperament rather than by knowledge or by conviction—hence the elevation of his tone and style in spite of his belated naturalism.
207 In Un Romantisme utilitaire (Paris, Alcan, 1911), chiefly a study of the Pragmatism of Nietzsche and Poincaré.
208 I am indebted for this saying of one of my old teachers to Mr. C. F. G. Masterman, in his essay upon Sidgwick in that judicious and interesting book upon the transition from the nineteenth to the twentieth century, In Peril of Change.
209 Stoicism and Epicureanism, as the matter is generally put, both substitute the practical good of man as an individual for the wisdom or the theoretical perfection that were contemplated by Plato and Aristotle as the highest objects of human pursuit. For Cicero, too, the chief problems of philosophy were in the main practical, the question whether virtue alone is sufficient for happiness, the problem of practical certainty as opposed to scepticism, the general belief in Providence and in immortality, and so on. And Lucretius thinks of the main service of philosophy as consisting in its power of emancipating the human mind from superstition. All this is quite typical of the essentially practical nature of the Roman character, of its conception of education as in the main discipline and duty, of its distrust of Greek intellectualism, and of its preoccupation with the necessities of the struggle for existence and for government, of its lack of leisure, and so on. I do not think that the very first thing about Pragmatism is its desire to return to a practical conception of life, although a tendency in this direction doubtless exists in it.
210 The idea that our “demonstrable knowledge is very short, if indeed we have any at all, although our certainty is as great as our happiness, beyond which we have no concernment to know or to be” (Essay, iv. 2–14); or Locke’s words: “I have always thought the actions of men the best interpreters of their thoughts.”
211 Schopenhauer, for example, used to be fond of repeating that his own philosophy (which took will to be the fundamental reality) was on its very face necessarily more of an ethic than a system like that of Spinoza, for example, which could only be called an ethic by a sort of lucus a non lucendo.
212 The Practical Reason to Aristotle is the reason that has to do with the pursuit of aims and ends, in distinction from the reason that has to do with knowledge, and the “universal” and science. This twofold distinction has given many problems to his students and to his commentators, and to succeeding generations. It is responsible for the entire mediæval and Renaissance separation of the intellectual life and the intellectual virtues from the practical life and the practical virtues.
213 It might be added here that Logic has always recognized the validity, to some extent, of the argument “from consequences” of which Pragmatism makes so much. The form of argumentation that it calls the Dilemma is a proof of this statement. A chain of reasoning that leads to impossible consequences, or that leads to consequences inconsistent with previously admitted truths, is necessarily unsound. That this test of tenable or untenable consequences has often been used in philosophy in the large sense of the term must be known only too well to the well-informed reader. As Sidgwick says in his Method of Ethics: “The truth of a philosopher’s premises will always be tested by the acceptability of his conclusions; if in any important point he is found in flagrant conflict with common opinion, his method will be declared invalid.” Reid used the argument from consequences in his examination of the sceptical philosophy of Hume. It is used with effect in Mr. Arthur Balfour’s Foundations of Belief in regard to the supposed naturalism of physical science. Edmund Burke applied it to some extent to political theories, or to the abstract philosophical theories upon which some of them were supposedly based.
214 Pragmatism has been called by some critics a “new-Humism” on the ground of its tendency to do this very thing that is mentioned here in respect of Hume. But the justice or the injustice of this appellation is a very large question, into which it is needless for us to enter here.
215 Cf. “Intelligence is the aptitude to modify conduct in conformity to the circumstances of each case” (The Positive Philosophy, Martineau, i. 465).
216 Principles of Philosophy, Part II. iii. It is also an eminently pragmatist idea on the part of Descartes to hold that “I should find much more truth in the reasoning of each individual with reference to the affairs in which he is personally interested, and the issue of which must presently punish him if he has judged amiss, than in those conducted by a man of letters in his study, regarding speculative matters that are of no practical moment” (Method, Veitch’s edition, p. 10).
217 Principles of Philosophy, Part II. iii. p. 233.
218 See Principles of Psychology, ch. ii., “Assumption of Metaphysicians,” and also elsewhere in his Essays.
219 “Any power of doing or suffering in a degree however slight was held by us to be the definition of existence” (Sophist, Jowett’s Plato, iv. p. 465).
220 The Theory of Knowledge, Preface, p. ix.
221 “The independence of the doctrines of any science from the social life, the prevalent thought of the generation in which they arise, is indeed a fiction, a superstition of the scientist which we would fain shatter beyond all repair; but the science becomes all the sounder for recognizing its origins and its resources, its present limitations and its need of fresh light from other minds, from different social moulds” (pp. 215–216).
223 Cf. p. 13.
224 The New Knowledge, p. 255.
225 It would indeed be easy to quote from popular writers of the day, like Mr. Chesterton or Mr. A. C. Benson or Mr. H. G. Wells, to show that a knowledge of the existence of Pragmatism as a newer experimental or “sociological” philosophy is now a commonplace of the day. Take the following, for example, from Mr. Wells’s Marriage (p. 521): “It was to be a pragmatist essay, a sustained attempt to undermine the confidence of all that scholastic logic-chopping which still lingers like the sequelae of a disease in our University philosophy ... a huge criticism and cleaning up of the existing methods of formulation as a preliminary to the wider and freer discussion of those religious and social issues our generation still shrinks from.” “It is grotesque,” he said, “and utterly true that the sanity and happiness of all the world lies in its habits of generalization.”
226 I cannot meantime trace, or place, this quotation, although I remember copying it out of something by Karl Pearson.
227 In the Literary Digest for 1911.
229 From a letter to Mrs. Humphry Ward, quoted in A. C. Benson’s Walter Pater, p. 200.
230 Lecture I. towards the beginning.
231 See p. 62 and p. 197. It should be remembered that our reasoned opinions rest upon our working beliefs.
232 Vol. ii. p. 86.
233 See the reference in Chapter II. p. 26 to the opportunistic ethic of Prezzolini.
234 In What is Pragmatism? Macmillan & Co.
235 Cf. p. 81.
236 Professor Pratt makes an attempt in his book on What is Pragmatism? (pp. 75–6–7) to show that the true meaning of the “correspondence theory” is not inconsistent with Pragmatism or that Pragmatism is not inconsistent with this truth.
237 Cf. supra, p. 64.
238 See the Note on p. 21.
239 Cf. supra, p. 67.
240 Papini, in fact (in 1907), went the length of saying that you cannot even define Pragmatism, admitting that it appeals only to certain kinds of persons.
241 For a serviceable account, in English, of the differences between the pragmatist philosophy of hypotheses and the more fully developed philosophy of science of the day, see Father Walker’s Theories of Knowledge, chapter xiii., upon “Pragmatism and Physical Science.”
242 Cf. supra, p. 10 and p. 15. And this failure to systematize becomes, it should be remembered, all the more exasperating, in view of the prominence given by the pragmatists to the supreme principles of “end” and “consequences.”
243 In the “Axioms as Postulates” essay in Personal Idealism.
244 Bourdeau makes the same charge, saying that all pragmatists have the illusion that “reality is unstable.” Professor Stout has something similar in view in referring to Dr. Schiller’s “primary reality” in the Mind review of Studies in Humanism. It is only the reality with which we have to do (reality πρὸς ἡμᾶς as an Aristotelian might say) that is “in the making”: for God there can be no such distinction between process and product. But it is quite evident that Pragmatism does not go far enough to solve, or even to see, such difficulties. It confines itself in the main to the contention that man must think of himself as a maker of reality to some extent—a contention that I hold to be both true and useful, as far as it goes.