We shall now attempt a somewhat detailed treatment of a few of the more characteristic tendencies of Pragmatism. The following have already been mentioned in our general sketch of its development and of the appearance of the pragmatist philosophy in Europe and America: (1) the attempted modification by Pragmatism of the extremes of Rationalism, and its dissatisfaction with the rationalism of both science and philosophy; (2) its progress from the stage of a mere practical and experimental theory of truth to a broad humanism in which philosophy itself becomes (like art, say) merely an important “dynamic” element in human culture; (3) its preference in the matter of first principles for “faith” and “experience” and a trust in our instinctive “beliefs”; (4) its readiness to affiliate itself with the various liberal and humanistic tendencies in human thought, such as the philosophy of “freedom,” and the “hypothetical method” of science, modern ethical and social idealism, the religious reaction of recent years, the voluntaristic trend in German post-Kantian philosophy, and so on. Our subject in this chapter, however, is rather that of the three or four more or less characteristic assumptions and contentions upon which all these and the many other pragmatist tendencies may be said to rest.

The first and foremost of these assumptions is the position that all truth is “made” truth, “human” truth, truth related to human attitudes and purposes, and that there is no “objective” or “independent” truth, no truth “in whose establishment the function of giving human satisfaction, in marrying previous parts of experience with newer parts, has played no rôle.” Truths were “nothing,” as it were, before they were “discovered,” and the most ancient truths were once “plastic,” or merely susceptible of proof or disproof. Truth is “made” just like “health,” or “wealth,” or “value,” and so on. Insistence, we might say, upon this one note, along with the entire line of reflection that it awakens in him, is really, as Dewey reminds us, the main burden of James’s book upon Pragmatism. Equally characteristic is it too of Dewey himself who is for ever reverting to his doctrine of the factitious character of truth. There is no “fixed distinction,” he tells us, “between the empirical values of the unreflective life and the most abstract process of rational thought.” And to Schiller, again, this same thought is the beginning of everything in philosophy, for with an outspoken acceptance of this doctrine of the “formation” of all truth, Pragmatism, he thinks, can do at least two things that Rationalism is for ever debarred from doing: (1) distinguish adequately “truth” from “fact,” and (2) distinguish adequately truth from error. Whether these two things be, or be not, the consequences of the doctrine in question [and we shall return110 to the point] we may perhaps accept it as, on the whole, harmonious with the teaching of psychology about the nature of our ideas as mental habits, or about thinking as a restrained, or a guided, activity. It is in harmony, too, with the palpable truism that all “truth” must be truth that some beings or other who have once “sought” truth (for some reasons or other) have at last come to regard as satisfying their search and their purposes. And this truism, it would seem, must remain such in spite of, or even along with, any meaning that there may be in the idea of what we call “God’s truth.” By this expression men understand, it would seem, merely God’s knowledge of truths or facts of which we as men may happen to be ignorant. But then there can have been no time in which God can be imagined to have been ignorant of these or any other matters. It is therefore not for Him truth as opposed to falsehood.

And then, again, this pragmatist position about all truth being “made” truth would seem to be valid in view of the difficulty (Plato111 spoke of it) of reconciling God’s supposed absolute knowledge of reality with our finite and limited apprehension of the same.112

The main interest, however, of pragmatists in their somewhat tiresome insistence upon the truism that all truth is made truth is their hostility (Locke had it in his day) to the supposed rationalist position that there is an “a priori” and “objective” truth independent altogether of human activities and human purposes.113 The particular object of their aversion is what Dewey114 talks of as “that dishonesty, that insincerity, characteristic of philosophical discussion, that is manifested in speaking and writing as if certain ultimate abstractions or concepts could be more real than human purposes and human beings, and as if there could be any contradiction between truth and purpose.” As we shall reflect at a later stage115 upon the rationalist theory of truth, we may, meantime, pass over this hostility with the remark that it is, after all, only owing to certain peculiar circumstances (those, say, of its conflict with religion and science and custom) in the development of philosophy that its first principles have been regarded by its votaries as the most real of all realities. These devotees tend to forget in their zeal that the pragmatist way of looking upon all supposed first principles—that of the consideration of their utility in and necessity as explanations of our common experience and its realities—is the only way of explaining their reality, even as conceptions.

It requires to be added—so much may, indeed, have already been inferred from the preceding chapter—that, apart from their hint about the highest truth being necessarily inclusive of the highest human purposes, it is by no means easy to find out from the pragmatists what they mean by truth, or how they would define it. When the matter is pressed home, they generally confess that their attitude is in the main “psychological” rather than philosophical, that it is the “making” of truth rather than its “nature” or its “contents” or its systematic character that interests them. It is the “dynamical” point of view, as they put it, that is essential to them. And out of the sphere and the associations of this contention they do not really travel. They will tell you what it means to hit upon this particular way of looking upon truth, and how stimulating it is to attempt to do so. And they will give you many more or less artificial and tentative, external, descriptions of their philosophy by saying that ideas are “made for man,” and “not man for ideas,” and so on. But, although they deny both the common-sense view that truth is a “correspondence” with external reality, and the rationalist view that truth is a “coherent system” on its own account, they never define truth any more than do their opponents the rationalists. It is a “commerce” and not a “correspondence,” they contend, a commerce116 between certain parts of our experience and certain other parts, or a commerce between our ideas and our purposes, but not a commerce with reality, for the making of truth is itself, in their eyes, the making of reality.

Secondly, it is another familiar characteristic of Pragmatism that, although it fails to give a satisfying account either of truth or reality, the one thing of which it is for ever talking of, as fundamental to our entire life as men, is belief.117 This is the one thing upon which it makes everything else to hang—all knowledge and all action and all theory. And it is, of course, its manifest acceptance of belief as a fundamental principle of our human life, and as a true measure of reality, that has given to Pragmatism its religious atmosphere.118 It is this that has made it such a welcome and such a credible creed to so many disillusioned and free-thinking people to-day, as well as to so many of the faithful and the orthodox. “For, in principle, Pragmatism overcomes the old antithesis of Faith and Reason. It shows, on the one hand, that faith must underlie all reason and pervade it, nay, that at bottom rationality itself is the supremest postulate of Faith.”119 “Truth,” again, as James reminds us, “lives in fact for the most part on a credit system. Our thoughts and beliefs [how literally true this is!] pass so long as nobody challenges them, just as bank-notes pass so long as nobody refuses them.”120

Now it requires but the reflection of a moment to see that the various facts and considerations upon which the two last quotations, and the general devotion of Pragmatism to “belief,” both repose, are all distinctly in favour of the acceptability of Pragmatism at the present time. There is nothing in which people in general are more interested at the beginning of this twentieth century than in belief. It is this, for example, that explains such a thing as the great success to-day in our English-speaking world of such an enterprise as the Hibbert Journal of Philosophy and Religion, or the still greater phenomenon of the world-wide interest of the hour in the subject of comparative religion. Most modern men, the writer is inclined to think, believe121 a great deal more than they know, the chief difficulty about this fact being that there is no recognized way of expressing it in our science or in our philosophy, or of acting upon it in our behaviour in society. It is, however, only the undue prominence of mathematical and physical science since the time of Descartes122 that has made evidence and demonstration the main consideration of philosophy instead of belief, man’s true and fundamental estimate of reality.

We have already123 pointed out that one of the main results of Pragmatism is the acceptance on the part of its leading upholders of our fundamental beliefs about the ultimately real and about the realization of our most deeply cherished purposes. In fact, reality in general is for them, we may say—in the absence from their writings of any better description,—simply that which we can “will,” or “believe in,” as the basis for action and for conscious “creative” effort, or constructive effort. As James himself puts it in his book on The Meaning of Truth: “Since the only realities we can talk about are objects believed in, the pragmatist, whenever he says ‘reality,’ means in the first instance what may count for the man himself as a reality, what he believes at the moment to be such. Sometimes the reality is a concrete sensible presence.... Or his idea may be that of an abstract relation, say of that between the sides and the hypotenuse of a triangle.... Each reality verifies and validates its own idea exclusively; and in each case the verification consists in the satisfactorily-ending consequences, mental or physical, which the idea was to set up.”

We shall later have to refer to the absence from Pragmatism of a criterion for achievement and for “consequences.” And, as far as philosophical theories are concerned, these are all, to the pragmatists, true or false simply in so far as they are practically credible or not. James is quite explicit, for example, about Pragmatism itself in this regard. “No pragmatist,” he holds, “can warrant the objective truth of what he says about the universe; he can only believe it.”124 There is faith, in short, for the pragmatist, in every act, in every phase of thought, the faith that is implied in the realization of the purposes that underlie our attempted acts and thoughts. They eagerly accept, for example, the important doctrine of the modern logician, and the modern psychologist, as to the presence of volition in all “affirmation” and “judgment,” seeing that in every case of affirmation there is a more or less active readjustment of our minds (or our bodies) to what either stimulates or impedes our activity.

A third outstanding characteristic of Pragmatism is the “deeper” view of human nature upon which, in contrast to Rationalism, it supposes itself to rest, and which it seeks to vindicate. It is this supposedly deeper view of human nature for which it is confessedly pleading when it insists, as it is fond of doing, upon the connexion of philosophy with the various theoretical and practical pursuits of mankind, with sciences like biology and psychology, and with social reform,125 and so on. We have, it may be remembered, already intimated that even in practical America men have had their doubts about the depth of a philosophy that looks upon man as made in the main for action and achievement instead of, let us say, the realization of his higher nature. Still, few of the readers of James can have altogether failed to appreciate the significance of some of the many eloquent and suggestive paragraphs he has written upon the limitations of the rationalistic “temperament” and of its unblushing sacrifice of the entire wealth of human nature and of the various pulsating interests of men to the imaginary exigencies of abstract logic and “system.”126 To him and to his colleagues (as to Socrates, for that part of it) man is firstly a being who has habits and purposes, and who can, to some extent, control the various forces of his nature through true knowledge, and in this very discrepancy between the real and the ideal does there lie for the pragmatists the entire problem of philosophy—the problem of Plato, that of the attainment of true virtue through true knowledge.

Deferring, however, the question of the success of the pragmatists in this matter of the unfolding of the true relation between philosophy and human nature, let us think of a few of the teachings of experience upon this truly important and inevitable relation, which no philosophy indeed can for one moment afford to neglect. Insistence upon these facts or teachings and upon the reflections and criticisms to which they naturally give rise is certainly a deeply marked characteristic of Pragmatism.

Man, as has often been pointed out, is endowed with the power of reflection, not so much to enable him to understand the world either as a whole or in its detailed workings as to assist him in the further evolution of his life. His beliefs and choices and his spiritual culture are all, as it were, forces and influences in this direction. Indeed, it is always the soul or the life principle that is the important thing in any individual or any people, so far as a place in the world (or in “history”) is concerned.

Philosophers, as well as other men, often exchange (in the words of Lecky) the “love of truth” as such for the love of “the truth,” that is to say, for the love of the system and the social arrangements that best suit their interests as thinkers. And they too are just as eager as other men for discipleship and influence and honour. Knowledge with them, in other words, means, as Bacon put it, “control”; and even with them it does not, and cannot, remain at the stage of mere cognition. It becomes in the end a conviction or a belief. And thus the philosopher with his system (even a Plato, or a Hegel) is after all but a part of the universe, to be judged as such, along with other lives and other systems—a circumstance hit off early in the nineteenth century by German students when they used to talk of one’s being able (in Berlin) to see the Welt-Geist (Hegel) “taking a walk” in the Thiergarten.

Reality again, so far as either life or science is concerned, means for every man that in which he is most fundamentally interested—ions and radium to the physicist of the hour, life to the biologist, God to the theologian, progress to the philanthropist, and so on.

Further, mankind in general is not likely to abandon its habit of estimating all systems of thought and philosophy from the point of view of their value as keys, or aids, to the problem of the meaning and the development of life as a whole. There is no abstract “truth” or “good” or “beauty” apart from the lives of beings who contemplate, and who seek to create, such things as truth and goodness and beauty.

To understand knowledge and intellect, again, we must indeed look at them in their actual development in connexion with the total vital or personal activity either of the average or even of the exceptional individual. And instead of regarding the affections and the emotions as inimical to knowledge, or as secondary and inferior to it, we ought to remember that they rest in general upon a broader and deeper attitude to reality than does either the perception of the senses127 or the critical analysis of the understanding. In both of these cases is the knowledge that we attain to limited in the main either to what is before us under the conditions of time and space, or to particular aspects of things that we mark off, or separate, from the totality of things. As Bergson reminds us, we “desire” and “will” with the “whole” of our past, but “think” only with “part” of it. Small wonder then that James seeks to connect such a broad phenomenon as religion with many of the unconscious factors (they are not all merely “biological”) in the depth of our personality. Some of the instincts and the phenomena that we encounter there are things that transcend altogether the world that is within the scope of our senses or the reasoning faculties.

Truth, too, grows from age to age, and is simply the formulated knowledge humanity has of itself and its environment. And errors disappear, not so much in consequence of their logical refutation, as in consequence of their inutility and of their inability to control the life and thought of the free man. Readers of Schopenhauer will remember his frequent insistence upon this point of the gradual dissidence and disappearance of error, in place of its summary refutation.

Our “reactions” upon reality are certainly part of what we mean by “reality,” and our philosophy is only too truly “the history of our heart and life” as well as that of our intellectual activity. The historian of philosophy invariably acts upon a recognition of the personal and the national and the epochal influence in the evolution of every philosophical system. And even the new, or the fuller conception of life to which a given genius may attain at some stage or other of human civilization will still inevitably, in its turn, give place to a newer or a more perfect system.

Now Pragmatism is doubtless at fault in seeking to create the impression that Rationalism would seek to deny any, or all, of those characteristic facts of human nature. Still, it is to some extent justified in insisting upon their importance in view of the sharp conflict (we shall later refer to it) that is often supposed to exist between the theoretical and the practical interests of mankind, and that Rationalism sometimes seems to accept with comparative equanimity.128 What Pragmatism is itself most of all seeking after is a view of human nature, and of things generally, in which the fullest justice is done to the facts upon which this very real conflict129 of modern times may be said to rest.

A fourth characteristic of Pragmatism is its notorious “anti-intellectualism,”130 its hostility to the merely dialectical use of terms and concepts and categories,131 to argumentation that is unduly detached from the facts and the needs of our concrete human experience. This anti-intellectualism we prefer meantime to consider not so much in itself and on its own account (if this be possible with a negative creed) as in the light of the results it has had upon philosophy. There is, for example, the general clearing of the ground that has undoubtedly taken place as to the actual or the possible meaning of many terms or conceptions that have long been current with the transcendentalists, such as “pure thought,” the “Absolute,” “truth” in and for itself, philosophy as the “completely rational” interpretation of experience, and so on. And along with this clearing of the ground there are (and also in consequence of the pragmatist movement) a great many recent, striking concessions of Rationalism to practical, and to common-sense, ways of looking at things, the very existence of which cannot but have an important effect upon the philosophy of the near future. Among some of the more typical of these are the following:

From Mr. F. H. Bradley we have the emphatic declarations that the principle of dialectical opposition or the principle of “Non-Contradiction” (formerly, to himself and his followers, the “rule of the game” in philosophy) “does not settle anything about the nature of reality”; that “truth” is an “hypothesis,” and that “except as a means to a foreign end it is useless and impossible”; and “when we judge truth by its own standard it is defective because it fails to include all the facts,”132 and because its contents “cannot be made intelligible throughout and entirely”; that “no truth is idle,” and that “all truth” has “practical” and æsthetic “consequences”; that there is “no such existing thing as pure thought”;133 that we cannot separate truth and practice; that “absolute certainty is not requisite for working purposes”; that it is a “superstition134 to think that the intellect is the highest part of us,” and that it is well to attack a one-sided “intellectualism”; that both “intellectualism” and “voluntarism” are “one-sided,” and that he has no “objection to identifying reality with goodness or satisfaction, so long as this does not mean merely practical satisfaction.”135 Then from this same author comes the following familiar statement about philosophy as a whole: “Philosophy always will be hard, and what it promises in the end is no clear vision nor any complete understanding or vision, but its certain reward is a continual and a heightened appreciation [this is the result of science as well as of philosophy] of the ineffable mystery of life, of life in all its complexities and all its unity and all its worth.”136

Equally typical and equally important is the following concession from Professor Taylor, although, of course, to many people it would seem no concession at all, but rather the mere statement of a fact, which our Neo-Hegelians have only made themselves ridiculous by seeming to have so long overlooked: “Mere truth for the intellect can never be quite the same as ultimate reality. For in mere truth we get reality only in its intellectual aspect, as that which affords a higher satisfaction to thought’s demand for consistency and systematic unity in its object. And as we have seen, this demand can never be quite satisfied by thought itself.137 For thought, to remain thought, must always be something less than the whole reality which it knows.”138

And we may add also from Professor Taylor the following declaration in respect of the notorious inability of Neo-Hegelian Rationalism to furnish the average man with a theory of reality in the contemplation of which he can find at least an adequate motive to conscious effort and achievement: “Quite apart from the facts, due to personal shortcomings and confusions, it is inherent in the nature of metaphysical study that it can make no positive addition to our information, and can itself supply no motive for practical endeavour.”139

Many of those findings are obviously so harmonious with some of the more familiar formulas of the pragmatists that there would seem to be ample warrant for associating them with the results of the pragmatist movement. This is particularly the case, it would seem, with the concession of Mr. Bradley with respect of the “practical” or “hypothetical” conception that we ought to entertain of “truth” and “thinking,” and also with the strictures passed by him upon “mere truth” and “mere intellectualism,” and with Professor Taylor’s position in respect of the inadequacy of the rationalist theory of reality, as in no sense a “dynamic” or an “incentive” for action. And we might well regard Professor Taylor’s finding in respect of mere systematic truth or the “Absolute” (for they are the same thing to him) as confirmatory of Dr. Schiller’s important contention that “in Absolutism” the two “poles” of the “moral” and the “intellectual” character of the Deity “fall apart.” This means, we will remember, that the truth of abstract intellectualism is not the truth for action,140 that absolutism is not able to effect or harmonize between the truth of systematic knowledge and moral truth—if, indeed, there be any such thing as moral truth on the basis of a pure Rationalism.

To be sure, both the extent and even the reality of all this supposed cession of ground in philosophy to the pragmatists has been doubted and denied by the representatives of Rationalism. They would be questioned, too, by many sober thinkers and scholars who have long regarded Hegelian intellectualism and pragmatist “voluntarism” as extremes in philosophy, as inimical, both of them, to the interests of a true and catholic conception of philosophy. The latter, as we know from Aristotle, should be inclusive of the realities both of the intellectual and the practical life.

Pragmatist criticisms of Rationalism, again, may fairly be claimed to have been to a large extent anticipated by the independent findings of living idealist thinkers like Professors Pringle-Pattison, Baillie, Jones, and others, in respect of the supposed extreme claims of Hegelianism, as well as by similar findings and independent constructive efforts on the part of the recent group of the Oxford Personal Idealists.141 That there is still a place for pragmatist anti-intellectualism is evidently the conclusion to be drawn from such things as the present wide acceptance of the philosophy of Bergson, or the recent declarations of Mr. Bradley that we are justified “in the intelligent refusal to accept as final an theoretical criterion which actually so far exists,” and that the “action of narrow consistency must be definitely given up.”

The reflection ought, moreover, to be inserted here that even if Pragmatism has been of some possible service in bringing forth from rationalists some of their many recent confessions of the limitations of an abstract intellectualism, it is not at all unlikely that Rationalism in its turn may succeed in convicting Pragmatism of an undue emphasis142 upon volition and action and upon merely practical truth.

We shall now terminate the foregoing characterization of Pragmatism by a reference to two or three other specific things for which it may, with more or less justice, be supposed to stand in philosophy. These are (1) the repudiation of the “correspondence view”143 of the relation of truth to reality, (2) the rejection of the idea of there being any ultimate or rigid distinction between “appearance” and “reality,” and (3) the reaffirmation of the “teleological” point of view as characteristic of philosophy in distinction from science.

As for (1) it has already been pointed out that this idea of the misleading character of the ordinary “correspondence notion” of truth is claimed by pragmatists as an important result of their proposal to test truth by the standard of the consequences involved in its acceptance.144 The ordinary reader may not, to be sure, be aware of the many difficulties that are apt to arise in philosophy from an apparent acceptance of the common-sense notion of truth as somehow simply a duplicate or a “copy” of external reality. There is the difficulty, say, of our ever being able to prove such a correspondence without being (or “going”) somehow beyond both the truth and the reality in question, so as to be able to detect either coincidence or discrepancy. Or, we might again require some bridge between the ideas in our minds and the supposed reality outside them—“sensations” say, or “experiences,” something, in other words, that would be accepted as “given” and indubitable both by idealists and realists. And there would be the difficulty, too, of saying whether we have to begin for the purposes of all reflective study with what is within consciousness or with what is outside it—in matter say, or in things. And if the former, how we can ever get to the latter, and vice versa. And so on with the many kindred subtleties that have divided thinkers into idealists and realists and conceptualists, monists, dualists, parallelists, and so on.

Now Pragmatism certainly does well in proposing to steer clear of all such difficulties and pitfalls of the ordinary “correspondence notion.” And as we shall immediately refer to its own working philosophy in the matter, we shall meantime pass over this mere point of its rejection of the “correspondence notion” with one or two remarks of a critical nature, (1) Unfortunately for the pragmatists the rejection of the correspondence notion is just as important a feature of Idealism145 as it is of Pragmatism. The latter system therefore can lay no claim to any uniqueness or superiority in this connexion. (2) Pragmatism, as we may perhaps see, cannot maintain its position that the distinction between “idea” and “object” is one “within experience itself” (rather than a distinction between experience and something supposedly outside it) without travelling further in the direction of Idealism146 than it has hitherto been prepared to do. By such a travelling in the direction of Idealism we mean a far more thorough-going recognition of the part played in the making of reality by the “personal” factor, than it has as yet contemplated either in its “instrumentalism” or in its “radical empiricism.” (3) There is, after all, an element of truth in the correspondence notion to which Pragmatism fails to do justice. We shall refer to this failure in a subsequent chapter147 when again looking into its theory of truth and reality.

Despite these objections there is, however, at least one particular respect in regard to which Pragmatism may legitimately claim some credit for its rejection of the correspondence notion. This is its insistence that the truth is not (as it must be on the correspondence theory) a “datum” or a “presentation,” not something given to us by the various objects and things without us, or by their supposed effects upon our senses and our memory and our understanding. It rather, on the contrary, maintains Pragmatism, a “construction” on the part of the mind, an attitude of our “expectant” (or “believing”) consciousness, into which our own reactions upon things enter at least as much as do their supposed effects and impressions upon us. Of course the many difficulties of this thorny subject are by no means cleared up by this mere indication of the attitude of Pragmatism, and we shall return in a later chapter148 to this idea of truth as a construction of the mind instead of a datum, taking care at the same time, however, to refer to the failure of which we have spoken on the part of Pragmatism to recognize the element of truth that is still contained in the correspondence notion.

(2) The rejection of the idea of any rigid, or ultimate distinction between “appearance” and “reality.” This is a still broader rejection than the one to which we have just referred, and may, therefore, be thought of as another more or less fundamental reason for the rejection either of the copy or of the correspondence theory of truth. The reality of things, as Pragmatism conceives it, is not something already “fixed” and “determined,” but rather, something that is “plastic” and “modifiable,” something that is, in fact, undergoing a continuous process of modification, or development, of one kind or another. It must always, therefore, the pragmatist would hold, be defined in terms of the experiences and the activities through which it is known and revealed and through which it is, to some extent, even modified.149

Pragmatism, as we may remember, has been called by James “immediate” or “radical” empiricism, although in one of his last books he seeks to give an independent development to these two doctrines. The cardinal principle of this philosophy is that “things are what they are experienced as being, or that to give a just account of anything is to tell what that thing is experienced to be.”150 And it is perhaps this aspect of the new philosophy of Pragmatism that is most amply and most attractively exhibited in the books of James. It is presented, too, with much freshness and skill in Professor Bawden’s151 book upon Pragmatism, which is an attempt, he says, “to set forth the necessary assumptions of a philosophy in which experience becomes self-conscious as a method.”152

“The new philosophy,” proceeds Bawden,153 “is a pragmatic idealism. Its method is at once intrinsic and immanent and organic or functional. By saying that its method is functional, we mean that its experience must be interpreted from within. We cannot jump out of our skins ... we cannot pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps. We find ourselves in mid-stream of the Niagara of experience, and may define what it is by working back and forth within the current.” “We do not know where we are going, but we are on the way” [the contradiction is surely apparent]. Then, like James, Bawden goes on to interpret Pragmatism by showing what things like self-consciousness, experience, science, social consciousness, space, time, and causation are by showing how they “appear,” and how they “function”—“experience” itself being simply, to him and to his friends, a “dynamic system,” “self-sustaining,” a “whole leaning on nothing.”

The extremes of this “immediate” or “radical” philosophy appear to non-pragmatists to be reached when we read words like those just quoted about the Niagara stream of our experience, and about our life as simply movement and acceleration, or about the celebrated “I think” of Descartes as equally well [!] set forth under the form “It thinks,” or “thinking is going on,” or about the “being” of the individual person as consisting simply in a “doing.” “All this we hold,” says Bawden, “to be not materialism but simply energism.” “There is no ‘truth,’ only ‘truths’—this is another way of putting it—and the only criterion of truth is the changing one of the image or the idea which comes out of our impulses or of the conflict of our habits.” The end of all this modern flowing philosophy is, of course, the “Pluralism” of James, the universe as a society of functioning selves in which reality “may exist in a distributive form, or in the shape, not of an All, but of a set of eaches.” “The essence of life,” as he puts it in his famous essay on Bergson,154 “is its continually changing character,” and we only call it a “confusion” sometimes because we have grown accustomed in our sciences and philosophies to isolate “elements” and “differents” which in reality are “all dissolved in one another.”155 “Relations of every sort, of time, space, difference, likeness, change, rate, cause, or what not, are just as integral members of the sensational flux as terms are.” “Pluralism lets things really exist in the each form, or distributively. Its type of union ... is different from the monistic type of all-einheit. It is what I call the strung-along type, the type of continuity, contiguity, or concatenation.” And so on.

(3) The reaffirmation of the teleological point of view. After the many illustrations and references that have already been given in respect of the tendencies of Pragmatism, it is perhaps hardly necessary to point out that an insistence upon the necessity to philosophy of the “teleological” point of view, of the consideration of both thoughts and things from the point of view of their purpose or utility, is a deeply-marked characteristic of Pragmatism. In itself this demand can hardly be thought of as altogether new, for the idea of considering the nature of anything in the light of its final purpose or end is really as old in our European thought as the philosophy of Aristotle or Anaxagoras. Almost equally familiar is the kindred idea upon which Pragmatism is inclined to felicitate itself, of finding the roots of metaphysic “in ethics,” in the facts of conduct, in the facts of the “ideal” or the “personal” order which we tend156 in human civilization to impose upon what is otherwise thought of by science as the natural order. The form, however, of the teleological argument to which Pragmatism may legitimately be thought to have directed our attention is that of the possible place in the world of reality, and in the world of thought, of the effort and the free initiative of the individual. This place, unfortunately (the case is quite different with Bergson157), Pragmatism has been able, up to the present time, to define, in the main, only negatively—by means of its polemic against the completed and the self-completing “Absolute” of the Neo-Hegelian Rationalists. What this polemic is we can best indicate by quoting from Hegel himself a passage or a line of the reflection against which it is seeking to enter an emphatic and a reasoned protest, and then after this a passage or two from some of our Anglo-Hegelians in the same connexion.

“The consummation,” says Hegel, in a familiar and often-quoted passage, “of the Infinite aim (i.e. of the purpose of God as omniscient and almighty) consists merely in removing the illusion which makes it seem unaccomplished.”158 Now although there is a sense in which this great saying must for ever be maintained to contain an element of profound truth,159 the attitude of Pragmatism in regard to it would be, firstly, that of a rooted objection to its outspoken intellectualism. How can the chief work of the Almighty be conceived to be merely that of getting rid somehow from our minds, or from his, of our mental confusions? And then, secondly, an equally rooted objection is taken to the implication that the individual human being should allow himself to entertain, as possibly true, a view of the general trend of things that renders any notion of his playing an appreciable part therein a theoretical and a practical absurdity.160 This notion (or “conceit,” if you will) he can surrender only by ceasing to think of his own consciousness of “effort” and of the part played by “effort”161 and “invention” in the entire animal and human world, and also of his consciousness of duty and of the ideal in general. This latter consciousness of itself bids him to realize certain “norms” or regulative prescripts simply because they are consonant with that higher will which is to him the very truth of his own nature. He cannot, in other words, believe that he is consciously obliged to work and to realize his higher nature for nothing. The accomplishment of ends and of the right must, in other words, be rationally believed by him to be part of the nature of things. It is this conviction, we feel sure, that animates Pragmatism in the opposition it shares both with common sense and with the radical thought of our time against the meaninglessness to Hegelianism, or to Absolutism,162 many of the hopes and many of the convictions that we feel to be so necessary and so real in the life of mankind generally.

And there are other lines of reflection among Neo-Hegelians against which Pragmatism is equally determined to make a more or less definite protest, in the interest, as before, of our practical and of our moral activity. We may recall, to begin with, the memorable words of Mr. Bradley, in his would-be refutation of the charge that the ideals of Absolutism “to some people” fail to “satisfy our nature’s demands.” “Am I,” he indignantly asks, “to understand that we are to have all we want, and have it just as we want it?” adding (almost in the next line) that he “understands,” of course, that the “views” of Absolutism, or those of any other philosophy, are to be compared “only with views” that aim at “theoretical consistency” and not with mere practical beliefs.163 Now, speaking for the moment for Pragmatism, can it be truly philosophical to contemplate with equanimity the idea of any such ultimate conflict as is implied in these words between the demands of the intellect164 and the demands of emotion—to use the term most definitely expressive of a personal, as distinct from a merely intellectual satisfaction?

Then again there is, for example, the dictum of Dr. McTaggart, that there is “no reason to trust God’s goodness without a demonstration which removes the matter from the sphere of faith.”165 May there not, we would ask, be a view of things according to the truth of which the confidence of the dying Socrates in the reasonableness and the goodness of God are at least as reasonable as his confession, at the same time, of his ignorance of the precise, or the particular, fate both of the just and of the unjust? And is not, too, such a position as that expressed in these words of Dr. McTaggart’s about a logically complete reason for believing in the essential righteousness of things now ruled out of court by some of the concessions of his brother rationalists to Pragmatism, to which reference has already been made? It is so ruled out, for example, even by Mr. Bradley’s condemnation as a “pernicious prejudice” of the idea that “what is wanted for working purpose is the last theoretical certainty about things.”166