In considering some of the results of pragmatist and voluntarist doctrines in the case of European writers, to whom the American-English triumvirate used to look somewhat sympathetically, we may begin with Italy, which boasted, according to Dr. Schiller (writing in 1907), of a youthful band of avowed pragmatists with a militant organ, the Leonardo. “Fundamentally,” declares Papini,33 the leader of this movement, “Pragmatism means an unstiffening of all our theories and beliefs, by attending to their instrumental value. It incorporates and harmonizes various ancient tendencies, such as Nominalism, with its protest against the use of general terms, Utilitarianism, with its emphasis upon particular aspects and problems, Positivism, with its disdain of verbal and useless questions, Kantism, with its doctrine of the primacy of practical reason, Voluntarism, with its treatment of the intellect as the tool of the will, and Freedom, and a positive attitude towards religious questions. It is the tendency of taking all these, and other theories, for what they are worth, being chiefly a corridor-theory, with doors and avenues into various theories, and a central rallying-ground for them all.” These words are valuable as one of the many confessions of the affiliations of Pragmatism to several other more or less experiential, or practical, views of philosophy. It is perfectly obvious from them that Pragmatism stands, in the main, for the apprehension of all truth as subservient to practice, as but a device for the “economy” of thought, for the grasping of the multiplicity and the complexity of phenomena. It looks upon man as made, in the main, for action, and not for speculation—a doctrine which even Mr. Peirce, by the way, now speaks of as “a stoical maxim which to me, at the age of sixty, does not recommend itself so forcibly as it did at thirty.”34

“The various ideal worlds are here,” continues Papini, according to the version of James,35 “because the real world fails to satisfy us. All our ideal instruments are certainly imperfect. But philosophy can be regenerated ... it can become pragmatic in the general sense of the word, a general theory of human action ... so that philosophic thought will resolve itself into a comparative discussion of all the possible programmes for man’s life, when man is once for all regarded as a creative being.... As such, man becomes a kind of god, and where are we to draw the limits?” In an article called “From Man to God,” Papini, in the Leonardo, lets his imagination work in stretching the limits of this way of thinking.

These prophetic, or Promethean, utterances—and we must never forget that even to the Greeks philosophy was always something of a religion or a life—may be paralleled by some of the more enthusiastic and unguarded, early utterances of Dr. Schiller about “voluntarism” or “metaphysical personalism” as the one “courageous,” and the only potent, philosophy; or about the “storming of the Jericho of rationalism” by the “jeers” and the “trumpetings” of the confident humanists and their pragmatic confrères. The underlying element of truth in them, and, for that part of it, in many of the similar utterances of many of our modern humanists, from Rabelais to Voltaire and from Shelley to Marx and Nietzsche, is, as we may see, that a true metaphysic must serve, not only as a rational system for the intellect, but as a “dynamic”36 or motive for action and achievement, for the conscious activity of rational, self-conscious beings.

As for the matter of any further developments37 of the free, creative religion hinted by Papini, we had, in 1903, the solemn declaration of Professor James that “the programme of the man-god is one of the great type programmes of philosophy,” and that he himself had been “slow” in coming to a perception of the full inwardness of the idea. Then it led evidently in Italy itself to a new doctrine which was trumpeted there a year or two ago in the public press as “Futurism,”38 in which “courage, audacity and rebellion” were the essential elements, and which could not “abide” the mere mention of such things as “priests” and “ideals” and “professors” and “moralism.” The extravagances of Prezzolini, who thinks of man as a “sentimental gorilla,” were apparently the latest outcome of this anarchical individualism and practicalism. Pragmatism was converted by him into a sophisticated opportunism and a modern Machiavellism, a method of attaining contentment in one’s life and of dominating one’s fellow-creatures by playing upon their fancies and prejudices as does the religious charlatan or the quack doctor or the rhetorician.

The reader who may care to contemplate all this radical, pragmatist enthusiasm for the New Reformation in a more accessible, and a less exaggerated, form had better perhaps consult the recent work of Mr. Sturt of Oxford on the Idea of a Free Church. In this work the principles of Pragmatism are applied, first, critically and in the main negatively, to the moral dogmas of traditional Christianity, and then positively to the new conception of religion he would substitute for all this—the development of personality in accordance with the claims of family and of national life. A fair-minded criticism of this book would, I think, lead to the conclusion that the changes contemplated by Mr. Sturt are already part and parcel of the programme of liberal Christianity, whether we study this in the form of the many more or less philosophical presentations of the same in modern German theology, or in the form of the free, moral and social efforts of the voluntary religion of America and England. In America many of the younger thinkers in theology and philosophy are already writing in a more or less popular manner upon Pragmatism as a philosophy that bids fair to harmonize “traditional” and “radical” conceptions of religion. One of these writers, for example, in a recent important commemorative volume,39 tries to show how this may be done by interpreting the “supernatural,” not as the “trans-experimental,” but as the “ethical” in experience, and by turning “dogmatic” into “historical theology.” And it would not be difficult to find many books and addresses in which the same idea is expressed. The more practical wing of this same party endeavours to connect Pragmatism with the whole philosophy and psychology of religious conversion, as this has been worked over by recent investigators like Stanley Hall,40 Starbuck,41 and others, and, above all, by James in his striking volume The Varieties of Religious Experience.42

The fact, of course—and I shall immediately refer to it—that Pragmatism has been hailed in France as a salutary doctrine, not merely by Liberals and Evangelicals, but by devout Catholics and Anti-modernists, is perhaps enough to give us some pause in the matter of its application in the sphere of theoretical and practical religion. It is useful, it would seem, sometimes to “liberate” the spirit of man, and useful, too, at other times to connect the strivings of the individual with the more or less organized experiences of past ages.

Turning, then, to France, it is, judging from the claims of the pragmatists, and from some of the literature bearing upon this entire subject,43 fairly evident that there has been a kind of association or relationship between Pragmatism and the following tendencies in recent French philosophy: (1) the “freedom” and “indeterminism” philosophy of Renouvier44 and other members of the Neo-Critical school, and of Boutroux and Bergson, who, “although differing from each other in many important respects,” all “belong to the same movement of thought, the reaction against Hegelianism and the cult of science which has dominated France since the decline of the metaphysics of the school of Cousin”;45 (2) the philosophy of science and scientific hypotheses represented by writers like Poincaré,46 Brunschvicg, Le Roy,47 Milhaud, Abel Rey,48 and others; (3) the religious philosophy and the fideism of the followers of the spiritualistic metaphysic of Bergson, many of whom go further than he does, and “make every effort to bring him to the confessional faith”;49 and (4) the French philosophy of to-day that definitely bears the name of Pragmatism, that of M. Blondel,50 who in 1893 wrote a suggestive work entitled L’Action, and who claims to have coined the word Pragmatism, after much careful consideration and discrimination, as early as 1888—many years before the California pamphlet of James.

The first of these points of correspondence or relationship we can pass over with the remark that we shall have a good deal to say about the advantage enjoyed by Pragmatism over Rationalism in the treatment of “freedom” and the “volitional” side of human nature, and also about the general pragmatist reaction against Rationalism.

And as for the philosophy of science, it has been shown that our English-speaking pragmatists cannot exactly pride themselves in the somewhat indiscriminate manner of James and Schiller upon the supposed support for their “hypothetical” conception of science and philosophy to be found in the work of their French associates upon the logic of science. “The men of great learning who were named as sponsors of this new philosophy have more and more testified what reservations they make, and how greatly their conclusions differ from those which are currently attributed to them.”51 Both Brunschvicg and Poincaré, in fact, take the greatest pains in their books to dissociate themselves from anything like the appearance of an acceptance of the doctrine of the relativity of knowledge, from the signs of any lack of faith in the idea that science, as far as it goes, gives us a true revelation of the nature of reality.

Then in regard to (3) the French pragmatist philosophy or religion we have only to read the reports and the quotations of M. Lalande to see in this philosophy the operation of an uncritical dogmatism or a blind “fideism” to which very few other philosophers, either in France or in any other country, would care to subscribe. “La Revue de Philosophie, which is directed by ecclesiastics, recently extolled pragmatism as a means of proving orthodox beliefs.” ... “This system solves a great many difficulties in philosophy; it explains the necessity of principles marvellously.” ... “The existence of God, Providence and Immortality are demonstrated by their happy effects upon our terrestrial life.” ... “If we can consider the matter carefully, it will be seen that the Good is the useful; for not to be good in anything is synonymous with being bad, and everywhere the true is the useful. It is in this assertion that Pragmatism consists.”52

And as to the fourth tendency, there is, at its outset, according to M. Lalande, a more rational or ethical basis for the fideism of M. Blondel’s book upon action, which starts off with a criticism of philosophic dilettantism quite analogous with that which Mr. Peirce follows in How to Make Our Ideas Clear. But M. Blondel “does not continue in the same manner, and his conclusion is very different. Rejecting all philosophical formalism, he puts his trust in moral experience, and consults it directly. He thinks that moral experience shows that action is not wholly self-contained, but that it presupposes a reality which transcends the world in which we participate.”53

Finally, maintains M. Blondel, “we are unable, as Pascal already said, either to live, or to understand ourselves, by ourselves alone. So that, unless we mutilate our nature by renouncing all earnestness of life, we are necessarily led to recognize in ourselves the presence of God. Our problem, therefore, can only be solved by an act of absolute faith in a positive religion [Catholicism in his case]. This completes the series of acts of faith, without which no action, not even our daily acts, could be accomplished, and without which we should fall into absolute barrenness, both practical and intellectual.”54

Now again these words about our being unable to understand ourselves “by ourselves alone” contain an element of truth which we may associate with the pragmatist tendency to believe in a socialized (as distinguished from an individualistic) interpretation55 of our common moral life, to believe, that is to say, in a society of persons as the truth (or the reality) of the universe, rather than in an interpretation of the universe as the thinking experience of a single absolute intelligence. This, however, is also a point which we are obliged to defer56 until we take up the general subject of the relations between Pragmatism and Rationalism. The other words of the paragraph, in respect of our absolute need of faith in some positive religion, are, of course, expressive again of the uncritical fideism to which reference has already been made. As an offset or alternative to the “free” religion of Papini and James and to the experimental or practical religion of different Protestant bodies, it is enough of itself to give us pause in estimating the real drift57 of Pragmatism in regard to religious faith and the philosophy of religion.58

We shall meantime take leave of French Pragmatism59 with the reflection that it is thus obviously as complex and as confusing and confused a thing as is the Pragmatism of other countries. It is now almost a generation since we began to hear of a renascence of spiritualism60 and idealism in France in connexion not merely with the work of philosophers like Renouvier and Lachelier and Fouillée61 and Boutroux, but with men of letters like De Vogué, Lavisse, Faguet, Desjardins62 and the rest, and some of the French Pragmatism of to-day is but one of the more specialized phases of the broader movement.

And as for the special question of the influence of James and his philosophy upon Bergson, and of that of the possible return influence of Bergson upon James,63 the evidence produced by Lalande from Bergson himself is certainly all to the effect that both men have worked very largely independently of each other, although perfectly cognisant now and then of each other’s publications. Both men, along with their followers (and this is all that needs interest us), have obviously been under the influence of ideas that have long been in the air about the need of a philosophy that is “more truly empirical”64 than the traditional philosophy, and more truly inclined to “discover what is involved in our actions in the ultimate recess, when, unconsciously and in spite of ourselves, we support existence and cling to it whether we completely understand it or not.”65

As for Pragmatism and pragmatist achievements in Germany, there is, as might well be supposed, little need of saying much. The genius of the country is against both; and if there is any Pragmatism in Germany, it must have contrived somehow to have been “born again” of the “spirit” before obtaining official recognition.66 So much even might be inferred from the otherwise generous recognition accorded to the work of James by scholars and thinkers like Eucken and Stein67 and the rest. Those men cannot see Pragmatism save in the broad light of the “humanism” that has always characterised philosophy, when properly appreciated, and understood in the light of its true genesis. Pragmatism has in fact been long known in Germany under the older names of “Voluntarism” and “Humanism,” although it may doubtless be associated there with some of the more pronounced tendencies of the hour, such as the recent insistence of the “Göttingen Fries School” upon the importance of the “genetic” and the “descriptive” point of view in regard even to the matter of the supposed first principles of knowledge, the hypothetical and methodological conception of philosophy taken by philosophical scientists like Mach and Ostwald68 and their followers, the “empiricism” and “realism” of thinkers like the late Dr. Avenarius69 of Zurich.

Then the so-called “teleological,” or “practical,” character of our human thinking has also been recognized in modern German thought long before the days of Peirce and Dewey, even by such strictly academic thinkers as Lotze and Sigwart. The work of the latter thinker upon Logic, by the way, was translated into English under distinctly Neo-Hegelian influences. In the second portion of this work the universal presuppositions of knowledge are considered, not merely as a priori truths, but as akin in some important respects “to the ethical principles by which we are wont to determine and guide our free conscious activity.”70 But even apart from this matter of the natural association of Pragmatism with the Voluntarism that has long existed in German philosophy,71 we may undoubtedly pass to the following things in contemporary and recent German thought as sympathetic, in the main, to the pragmatist tendencies of James and Dewey and Schiller: (1) the practical conception of science and philosophy, as both of them a kind of “economy of the attention,” a sort of “conceptual shorthand”72 (for the purposes of the “description” of our environment) that we have referred to in the case of Mach and Ostwald; (2) the close association between the “metaphysical” and the “cultural” in books like those of Jerusalem73 and Eleutheropulos;74 (3) the sharp criticism of the Rationalism of the Critical Idealism by the two last-mentioned thinkers, and by some of the members of the new Fichte75 School like Schellwien; and last but not least, (4) the tendency to take a psychological76 and a sociological77 (instead of a merely logical) view of the functions of thought and philosophy, that is just as accentuated in Germany at the present time as it is elsewhere.

James and Schiller have both been fond of referring to the work of many of these last-mentioned men as favourable to a conception of philosophy less as a “theory of knowledge” (or a “theory of being”) in the old sense than as a Weltanschauungslehre (a view of the world as whole), a “discussion of the various possible programmes for man’s life” to which reference has already been made in the case of Papini and others. And we might associate with their predilections and persuasions in this regard the apparent Pragmatism also of a great scholar like Harnack78 in reference to the subordination of religious dogma to the realities of the religious life, or the Pragmatism of Ritschl79 himself, in regard to the subordinate place in living religion of mere intellectual theory, or even some of the tendencies of the celebrated value-philosophy of Rickert and Windelband80 and Münsterberg81 and the rest. But again the main trouble about all this quasi-German support for the pragmatists is that most of these contemporary thinkers have taken pains to trace the roots of their teaching back into the great systems of the past. The pragmatists, on the other hand, have been notoriously careless about the matter of the various affiliations of their “corridor-like” and eclectic theory.

There are many reasons, however, against regarding even the philosophical expression of many of the practical and scientific tendencies of Germany as at all favourable to the acceptance of Pragmatism as a satisfactory philosophy from the German point of view. Among these reasons are: (1) The fact that it is naturally impossible to find any real support in past or present German philosophy for the impossible breach that exists in Pragmatism between the “theoretical” and the “practical,” and (2) the fact that Germany has only recently passed through a period of sharp conflict between the psychological (or the “genetic”) and the logical point of view regarding knowledge, resulting in a confessed victory for the latter. And then again (3) even if there is a partial correspondence between Pragmatism and the quasi economic (or “practical”) conception taken of philosophy by some of the younger men in Germany who have not altogether outlived their reaction against Rationalism, there are other tendencies there that are far more characteristic of the spirit and of the traditions of the country. Among these are the New Idealism generally, the strong Neo-Kantian movement of the Marburg school82 and their followers in different places, the revived interest in Hegel83 and in Schelling, the Neo-Romanticism of Jena, with its booklets upon such topics as The Culture of the Soul, Life with Nature, German Idealism, and so on.84 And then (4) there are just as many difficulties in the way of regarding the psychological and sociological philosophy of men like Jerusalem and Eleutheropulos as anything like a final philosophy of knowledge, as there is in attempting to do the same thing with the merely preliminary and tentative philosophy of James and his associates.

Returning now to America and England, although Pragmatism is eminently an American85 doctrine, it would, of course, be absurd to imagine that Pragmatism has carried the entire thought of the United States with it.86 It encountered there, even at the outset, at least something of the contempt and the incredulity and the hostility that it met with elsewhere, and also much of the American shrewd indifference to a much-advertised new article. The message of James as a philosopher, too, was doubtless discounted (at least by the well-informed) in the light of his previous brilliant work as a descriptive psychologist, and also, perhaps, in the light of his wonderfully suggestive personality.87

What actually happened in America in respect of the pragmatist movement was, first of all, the sudden emergence of a magazine literature88 in connexion with the Will-to-Believe philosophy of James and the California address, and in connexion (according to the generous testimony of James) with Deweyism or “Instrumentalism.” Much of this tiresome and hair-splitting magazine discussion of “ideas as instruments of thought,” and of the “consequences” (“theoretical” or “practical” or what not) by which ideas were to be “tested,” was pronounced by James, in 1906, to be largely crude and superficial. It had the indirect merit, however, of yielding one or two valuable estimates of the many inconsistencies in Pragmatism, and of the many different kinds of Pragmatism or instrumentalism that there seemed to be, and of the value of Pragmatism as a “theory of knowledge,” and as a “philosophical generalization.” The upshot of the whole preliminary discussion was (1) the discovery that, Pragmatism having arisen (as Dewey himself put it) out of a multitude of conflicting tendencies in regard to what we might call the “approach” to philosophy, would probably soon “dissolve itself” back again into some of the streams out of which it had arisen,89 and (2) the discovery that all that this early “methodological” pragmatism amounted to was the harmless doctrine that the meaning of any conception expressed itself in the past or future conduct or experience of actual, or possible, sentient creatures.

We shall again take occasion90 to refer to this comparative failure of Pragmatism to give any systematic or unified account of the consequences by which it would seek to test the truth of propositions. Its failure, however, in this connexion is a matter of secondary importance in comparison with the great lesson91 to be drawn from its idea that there can be for man no objective truth about the universe, apart from the idea of its meaning92 or significance to his experience and to his conscious activity.

What is now taking place in America in this second decade [i.e. in the years after 1908] of the pragmatist movement is apparently (1) the sharpest kind of official rationalist condemnation of Pragmatism as an imperfectly proved and a merely “subjective” and a highly unsystematic philosophy; (2) the appearance of a number of instructive booklets93 upon Pragmatism and the pragmatist movement, some of them expository and critical, some of them in the main sympathetic, some of them condemnatory and even contemptuous, and some of them attempts at further constructive work along pragmatist lines; (3) indications here and there of the acceptance and the promulgation of older and newer doctrines antithetic and hostile to Pragmatism—some of them possibly as typically American as Pragmatism itself.

As a single illustration of the partly constructive work that is being attempted in the name and the spirit of pragmatism, we may instance the line of reflection entered upon by Professor Moore94 in consequence of his claim that to Pragmatism the fundamental thing in any judgment or proposition is not so much its consequences, but its “value.” This claim may, no doubt, be supported by the many declarations of James and Schiller that the “true,” like the “good” and the “beautiful,” is simply a “valuation,” and not the fetish that the rationalists make it out to be. It is doubtful, however, as we may try to indicate, whether this “value” interpretation of Pragmatism can be carried out independently of the more systematic attempts at a general philosophy of value that are being made to-day in Germany and America and elsewhere. And then it would be a matter of no ordinary difficulty to clear up the inconsistency that doubtless exists between Pragmatism as a value philosophy and Pragmatism as a mere philosophy of “consequences.” It is “immediate,” and “verifiable,” and “definitely appreciated” consequences, rather than the higher values of our experience that (up to the present time) seem to have bulked largely in the argumentations of the pragmatists.

And as an illustration of a doctrine that is both American and hostile to pragmatism, we may instance the New Realism95 that was recently launched in a collective manifesto in The Journal of Philosophy and Scientific Methods. This realism is, to be sure, hostile to every form of “subjectivism” or personalism, and may in a certain sense be regarded as the emergence into full daylight of the realism or dualism that we found to be lurking96 in James’s “radical empiricism.” It is, therefore, as it were, one of the signs that Pragmatism is perhaps breaking up in America into some of the more elemental tendencies out of which it developed—in this case the American desire for operative (or effective) realism and for a “direct”97 contact with reality instead of the indirect contact of so many metaphysical systems.

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 criticisms99 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. Sidgwick101 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 literature102 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.