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.]
309 We may quote, I think, the following passage from Professor Perry to show that the open-mindedness of James was not merely a temperamental and an American characteristic in his case, but a quality or attitude that rested upon an intellectual conviction in respect of the function of ideas. “Since it is their office [i.e. the office of ideas] to pave the way for direct knowledge, or to be temporarily substituted for it, then efficiency is conditioned by their unobtrusiveness, by the readiness with which they subordinate themselves. The commonest case of an idea in James’s sense is the word, and the most notable example of his pragmatic or empirical method is his own scrupulous avoidance of verbalism. It follows that since ideas are in and of themselves of no cognitive value, since they are essentially instrumental, they are always on trial, and ‘liable to modification in the course of future experience.’”—Present Philosophical Tendencies, p. 364 (italics mine).
310 It is known to all students that some of the more important writings of this prince of thinkers cannot be intelligibly approached without a long preliminary study of the peculiar “dressing up,” or transformation, to which he subjects the various facts of life and existence. And the same thing is true (to a more modified extent) of the writings of Kant.
311 See the wise remark, in this very connexion, of the possible service of philosophy to-day, of Dr. Bosanquet, reproduced upon p. 226. And then, again, we must remember that an unduly pragmatist view of life would tend to make people impervious to ideas that transcend the range and the level of their ordinary interests and activities.
312 Cf. the following from Professor Pace’s Preface to Introduction to Philosophy, by Charles A. Dubray. “In Catholic colleges, importance has always been attached to the study of philosophy both as a means of culture and as a source of information regarding the great truths which are influential in supporting Christian belief and in shaping character.” Of course these same words might be used as descriptive of what Professor Santayana calls the “older tradition” in all American colleges. It is interesting, by the way, to note also the pragmatist touch in the same Preface to this Catholic manual. “But if this training is to be successful, philosophy must be presented, not as a complex of abstruse speculations on far-off inaccessible topics, but as a system of truths that enter with vital consequence into our ordinary thinking and our everyday conduct.”
315 It is not, however, “rest” that the pragmatists want, even in heaven, but renewed opportunities for achievement. “‘There shall be news,’ W. James was fond of saying with rapture, quoting from the unpublished poem of a new friend, ‘there shall be news in heaven.’”—Professor Santayana in Winds of Doctrine, p. 209.
316 In using this expression I am acutely conscious of its limitations and of its misleading character. There is nothing in which Americans so thoroughly believe as knowledge and instruction and information. A belief in education is in fact the one prevailing religion of the country—the one thing in which all classes, without any exception, unfeignedly believe, and for which the entire country makes enormous sacrifices.
317 In using this expression I am not blind to such outstanding characteristics of American life as (1) the enormous amount of preventive philanthropy that exists in the United States; (2) the well-known system of checks in the governmental machinery of the country; (3) the readiness with which Americans fly to legislation for the cure of evils; (4) the American sensitiveness to pain and their hesitation about the infliction of suffering or punishment, etc. Nor do I forget the sacrifice of life entailed by modern necessities and modern inventions in countries other than America. I simply mean that owing to the constant stream of immigration, and to the spirit of youthfulness that pervades the country, the willingness of people to make experiments with themselves and their lives is one of the many remarkable things about the United States.
319 And this despite the enormous amount of work that has been done by American biologists upon the “factors” of evolution, and upon a true interpretation of Darwinism and of Weismannism and of the evolutionary theory generally.
320 Even Professor James, for example, dismissed (far too readily, in my opinion) as a “sociological romance” a well-known book (published both in French and in English) by Professor Schinz entitled Anti-Pragmatism. Although in some respects a superficial and exaggerated piece of work, this book did discover certain important things about Pragmatism and about its relation to American life.
321 It is probably a perception of this truth that has led Dr. Bosanquet to express the opinion that the whole pragmatist issue may be settled by an examination of the notion of “satisfaction.” He must mean, I think, that satisfaction is impossible to man without a recognition of many of the ideal factors that are almost entirely neglected by the pragmatists—except by Bergson, if it be fair to call him a pragmatist.
322 Bourdeau, for example, has suggested that its God is not really God, but merely an old domestic servant destined to do us personal services—-help us to carry our trunk and our cross in the midst of sweat and dirt. He is not a gentleman even. “No wonder,” he adds, “it was condemned at Rome.” See his Pragmatisme et Modernisme, p. 82.
323 I am thinking here of the words in the Constitution of the State of California (they are printed in Mr. Bryce’s American Commonwealth—at least in the earlier editions) to the effect that it is the natural right of all men to seek and to “obtain [!]” happiness.
324 “Epigramme,” Venice, 1790. [“I could never abide any of those freedom-gospellers. All that they ever wanted was to get things running so as to suit themselves. If you are anxious to set people free, just make a beginning by trying to serve them. The simplest attempt will teach you how dangerous this effort may be.”]
325 See Chapter IX.
326 On what grounds does Professor Bosanquet think of “compensating justice” as a naïve idea? It is on the contrary one of the highest and deepest, and one of the most comprehensive to which the human mind has ever attained—giving rise to the various theogonies and theodicies and religious systems of mankind. It is at the bottom, for example, of the theodicy and the philosophy of Leibniz, the founder of the Rationalism of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Europe.
327 Could any system of ethics which took such an impossible and such a belated conception of the individual be regarded as ethics at all?
328 I do not think that this is a fair preliminary description of the problem of teleology. A person who believes in the realization of purpose in some experiences with which he thinks himself to be acquainted does not plead for the guidance of the universe by finite minds, but simply for a view of it that shall include the truth of human purposes. And of course there may be in the universe beings other than ourselves who also realize purposes.
329 Italics and exclamation mine.
330 Italics mine. There is a large element of truth in this great idea of Professor Bosanquet’s, connecting [for our purposes] his philosophy with the theism and the personalism for which we are contending as the only true and real basis for Humanism.
331 Readers who remember Green’s Prolegomena to Ethics will remember that it is one of the difficulties of that remarkable, but one-sided, production (exposed, I think, with many other defects in Professor Taylor’s brilliant, but unduly intellectualistic Problem of Conduct) that it also seems to teach a kind of “Determinism” in ethics, in what our nature is unduly communicated to us by the Absolute, or the “Eternal Consciousness.” This whole way of looking at things must largely be abandoned to-day.
332 See below, p. 226.
333 It is, I am inclined to think, the existence of this contradiction in Dr. Bosanquet’s Lectures that will cause the average intelligent person to turn away from them as not affording an adequate account of the reality of the world of persons and things with which he knows himself to be directly and indirectly acquainted. Another way of stating the same thing would be to say that Absolutism fails to take any adequate recognition of that most serious contradiction (or “defect”) in our experience of which we have already spoken as the great dualism of modern times, the opposition between reason and faith an opposition that is not relieved either by the greatest of the continually increasing discoveries of science, or by any, or all, of the systems of all the thinkers. Hegelianism in general assures us that from the point of view of a “higher synthesis” this opposition does not exist or that it is somehow “transcended.” And its method of effecting this synthesis is to convert the opposition between faith and reason into the opposition between what it calls “Understanding” and what it calls “Reason” [an opposition that is to some extent a fictitious one, “reason” being, to begin with, but another name for our power of framing general conceptions or notions, and not therefore different from “understanding”]. It removes, that is to say, the opposition between two different phases or aspects of our experience by denying the existence of one of them altogether. It changes the opposition between knowledge and faith into an opposition between an alleged lower and an alleged higher way of knowing. This alleged higher way of knowing, however, is, when we look into it, but the old ideal of the perfect demonstration of all the supposed contents of our knowledge (principles and facts alike) that has haunted modern philosophy from the time of Descartes. It is an unattainable ideal because no philosophy in the world can begin without some assumption (either of “fact” or of principle), and because our knowledge of the world comes to us in a piecemeal fashion—under the conditions of time and space. A fact prior to all the issues of the demand of Rationalism for a supposedly perfect demonstration is the existence of the conscious beings (Dr. Bosanquet himself, for example) who seek this supposed certainty in order that they may act better—in ignorance of the fact that complete initial certainty on our part as to all the issues and aspects of our actions would tend to destroy the personal character of our choice as moral agents, as beings who may occasionally act beyond the given and the calculable, and set up precedents and ideals for ourselves and for others—for humanity. It is this underlying faith then in the reality of our moral and spiritual nature that we would alone oppose (and only in a relative sense) to the supposed certainties of a completely rational, or a priori, demonstration, the whole contention of humanism being that it is in the interests of the former reality that the latter certainties exist. The apparent opposition between faith and reason would be surmounted by a philosophy that should make consciousness of ourselves as persons the primal certainty, and all other forms of consciousness or of knowledge secondary and tributary, as it were, to this.
334 I am aware that there is a difference between the “universal” of ordinary formal logic and Dr. Bosanquet’s (or Hegel’s) “concrete universal,” but it is needless for me to think of it here. Dr. Bosanquet uses in his Lectures the phrase “logical universal” for his “concrete universal” or his principle of positive coherence. It is always logical coherence that he has in view.
335 “For everywhere it is creative Logic, the nature of the whole working in the detail, which constitutes experience, and is appreciable in so far as experience has value.” Now Logic of itself does not thus “work” or “do” anything. It is men or persons who do things by the help of logic and reasoning and other things—realities and forces, etc.
336 Cf. p. 31. “We are minds,” he says, “i.e. living microcosms, not with hard and fast limits, but determined by our range and powers which fluctuate very greatly.” My point simply is that this is too intellectualistic a conception of man’s personality. We have minds, but we are not minds.
337 See p. 192. “But as the self is essentially a world of content engaged in certain transformations”; and p. 193, “a conscious being ... is a world ... in which the Absolute begins to reveal its proper nature.” How can a “world of content” [that is to say, the “sphere of discourse” of what some person is thinking for some purpose or other] be “engaged” in certain transformations? It is the person, or the thinker, who is transforming the various data of his experience for his purposes as a man among men. It is time that philosophy ceased to make itself ridiculous by calmly writing down such abstractions as if they were facts.
338 Cf. “Mind as the significance and interpretation of reality,” p. 27.
339 “Mind has nothing of its own but the active form of totality, everything positive it draws from Nature.”
340 This again is an abstraction, and how on earth can it be said that “mind” and conscious life “reflect” merely certain abstractions (or creations) of their own? They have invented such terms as “content” for certain purposes, and their own being and nature is therefore more than these terms. Mind is not a “content”; it makes all other things “contents” for itself.
341 It has even there, according to Dr. Bosanquet, only its purely theoretic function of working after its own perfection in the way of attaining to a logical “universal.” “The peculiarity of mind for us, is to be a world of experience working itself out towards harmony and completeness.” This is simply not true.
342 “Finite consciousness, whether animal or human, did not make its body.”
343 “Thus there is nothing in mind which the physical counterpart cannot represent.” (Italics mine.)
344 “What we call the individual, then, is not a fixed essence, but a living world of content representing a certain range of externality.” P. 289.
345 “The system of the universe, as was said in an earlier Lecture, might be described as a representative system. Nature, or externality[!] lives in the lives of conscious beings. (Italics mine.)
346 “Spirit is a light, a focus, a significance[!] which can only be by contact with a ‘nature’ an external world.”
347 “For, on the other hand, it has been urged and we feel, that it is thought which constructs and sustains the fabric of experience, and that it is thought-determinations which invest even sense-experience with its value and its meaning. . . . The ultimate tendency of thought, we have seen, is not to generalise, but to constitute a world,” p. 55. Again, “the true office of thought, we begin to see, is to build up, to inspire with meaning, to intensify, to vivify. The object which thought, in the true sense, has worked upon, is not a relic of decaying sense, but is a living world, analogous to a perception of the beautiful, in which every thought-determination adds fresh point and deeper bearing to every element of the whole,” p. 58. And on p. 178 he says that he sees no objection to an idealist recognising the “use made of” “laws” and “dispositions” in recent psychology. [How one wishes that Dr. Bosanquet had really worked into his philosophy the idea that every mental “element” is in a sense a “disposition” to activity!] Some of these statements of Dr. Bosanquet’s have almost a pragmatist ring about them, a suggestion of a living and dynamic (rather than a merely intellectualistic) conception of thought. They may therefore be associated by the reader with the concessions to Pragmatism by other rationalists of which we spoke in an early chapter (see p. 74).
348 See Chapter III. p. 90.
349 I must say that apart from any questions in detail about this rejection of teleology by Dr. Bosanquet, there is something inexplicable about it to me. He cannot retain his own great notion of “wholeness” without the idea of “end,” because “wholeness” is a demand of thought that is guided by some idea of purpose or end.
351 Italics mine.
352 P. 225.
354 Having already given instances of this abstractionism in the case of such things as the “self” and the “universal” and “spirit,” it will suffice to point out here in addition (1) its tendency to talk of “experience” and “experiences” as if there could be such things apart from the prior real existence of the experients or the experiencing persons with whom we are acquainted in our daily life, and (2) its tendency to talk of getting at “the heart of actual life and love” in a “system” which leaves no place for the real existence of either gods or men who live and love. And then I trust that it may not be regarded as an impertinence to allege as another puzzling piece of abstractionism on the part of Dr. Bosanquet, that he has allowed himself to speak and think in his book as if his theory of the “concrete universal” were practically a new thing in the thought of our time—apart altogether, that is to say, from the important work in this same direction of other Neo-Hegelian writers, and apart, too, from the unique work of Hegel in the same connexion.
355 See below, p. 230.
356 This is revealed in the main in its exposition of the world as the logical system of a single complete individual experience—a tendency that students of philosophy know to exist in Neo-Hegelianism generally from Green to Bradley. I admit that this tendency is literally a different thing from solipsism in the ordinary sense, as the inability of a particular finite person to prove to himself that any person or thing exists except himself. It is still, however, it seems to me, possible to regard as solipsistic the tendency to set forth the universe as the experience, or the thought, of a single experient or a single thinker, even although the impersonalism of Dr. Bosanquet’s logical “whole” conflicts somewhat with the individuality of his Absolute.
357 Cf. p. 160.
358 The well-known inability of Mr. Bradley, for example, to be content with the reality of any portion or any phase of reality that falls short of what he regards as absolute reality, and with the merely relative meaning that he attaches to any category of the “finite.” Also the well-known Neo-Hegelian tendency to make an opponent forge the weapon by which he is to be dislodged from any particular point of view. In the case of Dr. Bosanquet this tendency takes the form of making out any one who holds to a belief in the real existence of finite conscious persons to hold the absurd position of believing in “an impervious and isolated self,” a thing, of course, that no one who knows anything about biology or ethics, or social psychology, really does.
359 As another instance of Dr. Bosanquet’s unintentional unfairness to his opponents, I would note his positive injustice to Theism as such. What many of us think of (however imperfectly) and believe in as God is invariably to him “a theistic Demiurge in his blankness and isolation.” I do not believe in such an abstract Demiurge any more than I believe in the separate, isolated self that he conjures up to his mind when he thinks of personality. The problem of the twentieth century may well be what Dr. Ward has signalised as the relation of God to the “Absolute” of the Hegelian metaphysicians, but this suggestion simply means to me the discovery on the part of philosophers of terms and concepts more adequate to the Supreme Being than either the Absolute, or the external deity rejected by Dr. Bosanquet.
360 Stéphane Mallarmé, according to Nordau in Degeneration, p. 103.
361 And the general reader must remember that the “whole” is always (with all due respect to his high dialectic ability and his high temper of mind and his scholarship) a kind of ignis fatuus in Dr. Bosanquet’s book, a kind of shadow thrown by the lamps and the tools of his own choosing in his Quixotic search. The “whole” is the “perfected individuality” of the individual who sets out to find truth in this great world of ours with all its real possibilities of gain and loss. It is the completion of the “system” of truth to which the truth-seeker would fain reduce the entire universe, that becomes for him (for the time being) the mere “subject-matter” of his thought. It is, that is to say, in both cases, a purely formal conception—an abstraction, although to Dr. Bosanquet it is the reality implied in the very existence and activity of the individual thinker. But the latter is the case to him only because he looks upon man as existing to think instead of as thinking to exist.
362 That is to say, for the scholar and the lover of Dante and Dante’s world.
363 For he was not merely a “mind,” reflecting “Italy” and “minds” and “experiences.”
364 And that, we might add, is still kept alive by some of our humanists and educators of to-day as the ideal for both primary and secondary education.
365 This is a thing that the beginner is taught in lectures introductory to the study of the philosophy of Kant—in regard to Kant’s relation to the barren, dogmatic formalism of Wolff—a one-sided interpreter of the philosophy of Leibniz. I am quite aware that Dr. Bosanquet does not merely use the Principle of Non-Contradiction in the aggressive, or polemical, manner of Mr. Bradley in Appearance and Reality. The principle of positive coherence at which he aims, begins, to some extent, where Mr. Bradley stopped. But it is still the idea of consistency or inconsistency, with certain presuppositions of his own, that rules his thinking; it determines, from the very outset of his Lectures, what he accepts and what he rejects.
367 I use this word “must” in a logical as well as in an ethical sense, seeing that all judgment implies a belief in the reality of a world of persons independent of the mere fact of “judgment” as a piece of mental process.
369 On p. 345 the words are: “When we consider the naïve or elementary life of morality and religion”; and on p. 346: “The naïve, or simple self of every-day morality and religion,” and the marginal heading of the page upon which these words occur is “The naïve good self compared to grasp of a fundamental principle alone.” Could anything more clearly indicate what the Kantians call a confusion of categories [in the case in point the categories of “goodness” and the categories of “truth”] or what Aristotle calls a μετάβασις εἰς ἄλλο γένος, the unconscious treatment of one order of facts by the terms and conceptions of another order of facts. To Dr. Bosanquet as the Neo-Hellenist that he is in his professed creed, badness is practically stupidity, and “lack of unification of life,” and “failure of theoretical grasp.” This confusion between goodness and wisdom is again indicated on p. 347 in the words: “A man is good in so far as his being is ‘unified at’ all in any sphere of wisdom or activity.” [This is simply not true, and its falsity is a more unforgivable thing in the case of Dr. Bosanquet than it is in the case of the pragmatists who also tend to make the ‘moral’ a kind of ‘unification’ or ‘effectiveness’ in ‘purpose.’] As a proof of Dr. Bosanquet’s transformation of the facts of the ethical life in the interest of logical theory, we can point to p. 334: “Our actions and ideas issue from our world as a conclusion from its premises, or as a poem from its author’s spirit,” or to p. 53, where it is definitely stated that the “self, as it happens to be,” cannot, in any of its “three aspects,” “serve as a test of reality.” To do the latter, it must, in his opinion, follow the law of the “universal,” i.e. become a logical conception. Now of course (1) it is not the self “as it happens to be” that is chiefly dealt with in ethics, but rather the self as it ought to be. And (2) the ethical self, or the “person,” does not follow the “law of the universal” [a logical law] but the law of right and wrong [an ethical law]. As a proof of the subordination of the facts of conduct to the facts of aesthetics, we may take the words on p. 348 where aesthetic excellence is said to be “goodness in the wider or (‘shall we say’) in the narrower sense.” Now the distinction between ethics and aesthetics is not one of degree, but one of kind.
And as another illustration of his tendency to transform ethical facts in the light of a metaphysical, or a logical, theory [they are the same thing to him] we may quote the emphatic declaration on p. 356: “Our effort has been to bring the conception of moral and individual initiative nearer to the idea of logical determination,” or the equally outspoken declaration on p. 353: “But metaphysical theory, viewing the self in its essential basis of moral solidarity with the natural and social world ... cannot admit that the independence of the self, though a fact, is more than a partial fact.” Or the words at the top of this same page: “The primary principle that should govern the whole discussion is this, that the attitude of moral judgment and responsibility for decisions is only one among other attitudes and spheres of experience.” These last words alone would prove definitely the non-ethical character of “Individuality and Value.” The ethical life is to its author only a “quatenus consideratur,” only a possible point of view, only an aspect of reality, only an aspect, therefore, of a “logical system.” Now if the ethical life of the world is to count for anything at all, it may be said that the ethical life is no mere aspect of the life of the self, and no mere aspect of the life of the world, seeing that “nature” in the sense of mere “physical nature” does not come into the sphere of morality at all. It is rather the activity of the “whole self,” or the “normative” reflection of the self as a whole upon all the merely partial or subordinate aspects of its activity, upon bodily life, economic life, intellectual activity, and so on that constitutes the world of morality.
371 Good and evil to Dr. Bosanquet are two quasi-rational systems in active antagonism as claiming to attach different “principles and predicates” to identical data. The essence of their antagonism to Dr. Bosanquet is not, however, that evil is contemplated, as it must be sooner or later, in repentance for example as wrong, but rather that the “evil” is an imperfect “logical striving (p. 351) of the self after unity” which is in “contradiction with a fuller and sounder striving” after the same. The evil self is to him merely the vehicle of a logical contradiction in the self.
372 This is seen in his admission (on p. 351) that the “bad will” no less than the “good will” is a logical necessity, when taken along with his doctrine about mind and body, his doctrine of the “dependence” (p. 318) of the finite individual upon the external mechanical world. Dr. Bosanquet, of course, thinks that even in this apparent Determinism he is justifiably supplementing the ordinary ideas about the “self” as “creative” and “originative” (p. 354), by the wider recognition that I am more or less completely doing the work of the “universe” as a “member” in a “greater self.” And he adds in the same sentence the words that “I am in a large measure continuous with the greater (p. 355) self,” and “dyed with its colours”—a further step in Determinism, as it were, and a step which, with the preceding one to which we have just referred, no critic can fail to connect with the Determinism that we have already found to be implicated in his doctrine of the “self,” and in his general doctrine that the “external” must be frankly accepted as a factor in the universe.
373 By the “spectator” fallacy we mean his tendency to talk and think of the self as it is for a spectator or student, looking at matters from the outside, and not as the self is for the man himself.
374 Wollaston is the English ethical philosopher who, according to Leslie Stephen’s account, thought, after thirty years of meditation, that the only reason he had for not breaking his wife’s head with a stick was, that this would be tantamount to a denial that his wife was his wife.
375 See Idola Theatri by Henry Sturt (the editor of the well-known “Personal Idealism” volume) of Oxford—a book that enumerates and examines many of the fallacies of the Neo-Hegelian school. Mr. Sturt’s first chapter is entitled the “Passive Fallacy,” which he calls, with some degree of justice, the prime mistake of the idealistic philosophy, meaning by this the “ignoring” of the “kinetic” and the “dynamic” character of our experience.
376 It is Natural Theology that is the subject proper of the Gifford Lectures.
378 With, we might almost say, the pragmatists and the humanists.
379 This is really their main distinguishing characteristic and merit.