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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Pragmatism, by William James
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
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+
+Title: Pragmatism
+       A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking
+
+Author: William James
+
+
+Release Date: February, 2004 [EBook #5116]
+This file was first posted on May 1, 2002
+Last Updated: July 2, 2013
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PRAGMATISM ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Steve Harris, Charles Franks and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team
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+
+PRAGMATISM
+
+A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking
+
+By William James
+
+
+To the Memory of John Stuart Mill
+
+from whom I first learned the pragmatic openness of mind and whom my
+fancy likes to picture as our leader were he alive to-day.
+
+
+
+
+Preface
+
+The lectures that follow were delivered at the Lowell Institute in
+Boston in November and December, 1906, and in January, 1907, at
+Columbia University, in New York. They are printed as delivered, without
+developments or notes. The pragmatic movement, so-called--I do not like
+the name, but apparently it is too late to change it--seems to have
+rather suddenly precipitated itself out of the air. A number of
+tendencies that have always existed in philosophy have all at once
+become conscious of themselves collectively, and of their combined
+mission; and this has occurred in so many countries, and from so many
+different points of view, that much unconcerted statement has resulted.
+I have sought to unify the picture as it presents itself to my own eyes,
+dealing in broad strokes, and avoiding minute controversy. Much futile
+controversy might have been avoided, I believe, if our critics had been
+willing to wait until we got our message fairly out.
+
+If my lectures interest any reader in the general subject, he will
+doubtless wish to read farther. I therefore give him a few references.
+
+In America, John Dewey's 'Studies in Logical Theory' are the foundation.
+Read also by Dewey the articles in the Philosophical Review, vol.
+xv, pp. 113 and 465, in Mind, vol. xv, p. 293, and in the Journal of
+Philosophy, vol. iv, p. 197.
+
+Probably the best statements to begin with however, are F. C. S.
+Schiller's in his 'Studies in Humanism,' especially the essays numbered
+i, v, vi, vii, xviii and xix. His previous essays and in general
+the polemic literature of the subject are fully referred to in his
+footnotes.
+
+Furthermore, see G. Milhaud: le Rationnel, 1898, and the fine articles
+by Le Roy in the Revue de Metaphysique, vols. 7, 8 and 9. Also articles
+by Blondel and de Sailly in the Annales de Philosophie Chretienne, 4me
+Serie, vols. 2 and 3. Papini announces a book on Pragmatism, in the
+French language, to be published very soon.
+
+To avoid one misunderstanding at least, let me say that there is no
+logical connexion between pragmatism, as I understand it, and a doctrine
+which I have recently set forth as 'radical empiricism.' The latter
+stands on its own feet. One may entirely reject it and still be a
+pragmatist.
+
+Harvard University, April, 1907.
+
+
+
+
+Contents
+
+Lecture I
+
+The Present Dilemma in Philosophy
+
+Chesterton quoted. Everyone has a philosophy. Temperament is a factor in
+all philosophizing. Rationalists and empiricists. The tender-minded
+and the tough-minded. Most men wish both facts and religion. Empiricism
+gives facts without religion. Rationalism gives religion without facts.
+The layman's dilemma. The unreality in rationalistic systems. Leibnitz
+on the damned, as an example. M. I. Swift on the optimism of idealists.
+Pragmatism as a mediating system. An objection. Reply: philosophies have
+characters like men, and are liable to as summary judgments. Spencer as
+an example.
+
+Lecture II
+
+What Pragmatism Means
+
+The squirrel. Pragmatism as a method. History of the method. Its
+character and affinities. How it contrasts with rationalism and
+intellectualism. A 'corridor theory.' Pragmatism as a theory of truth,
+equivalent to 'humanism.' Earlier views of mathematical, logical, and
+natural truth. More recent views. Schiller's and Dewey's 'instrumental'
+view. The formation of new beliefs. Older truth always has to be kept
+account of. Older truth arose similarly. The 'humanistic' doctrine.
+Rationalistic criticisms of it. Pragmatism as mediator between
+empiricism and religion. Barrenness of transcendental idealism. How far
+the concept of the Absolute must be called true. The true is the good
+in the way of belief. The clash of truths. Pragmatism unstiffens
+discussion.
+
+Lecture III
+
+Some Metaphysical Problems Pragmatically Considered
+
+The problem of substance. The Eucharist. Berkeley's pragmatic treatment
+of material substance. Locke's of personal identity. The problem of
+materialism. Rationalistic treatment of it. Pragmatic treatment. 'God'
+is no better than 'Matter' as a principle, unless he promise more.
+Pragmatic comparison of the two principles. The problem of design.
+'Design' per se is barren. The question is WHAT design. The problem of
+'free-will.' Its relations to 'accountability.' Free-will a cosmological
+theory. The pragmatic issue at stake in all these problems is what do
+the alternatives PROMISE.
+
+Lecture IV
+
+The One and the Many
+
+Total reflection. Philosophy seeks not only unity, but totality.
+Rationalistic feeling about unity. Pragmatically considered, the world
+is one in many ways. One time and space. One subject of discourse. Its
+parts interact. Its oneness and manyness are co-ordinate. Question of
+one origin. Generic oneness. One purpose. One story. One knower. Value
+of pragmatic method. Absolute monism. Vivekananda. Various types of
+union discussed. Conclusion: We must oppose monistic dogmatism and
+follow empirical findings.
+
+Lecture V
+
+Pragmatism and Common Sense
+
+Noetic pluralism. How our knowledge grows. Earlier ways of thinking
+remain. Prehistoric ancestors DISCOVERED the common sense concepts. List
+of them. They came gradually into use. Space and time. 'Things.' Kinds.
+'Cause' and 'law.' Common sense one stage in mental evolution, due
+to geniuses. The 'critical' stages: 1) scientific and 2) philosophic,
+compared with common sense. Impossible to say which is the more 'true.'
+
+Lecture VI
+
+Pragmatism's Conception of Truth
+
+The polemic situation. What does agreement with reality mean? It means
+verifiability. Verifiability means ability to guide us prosperously
+through experience. Completed verifications seldom needful. 'Eternal'
+truths. Consistency, with language, with previous truths. Rationalist
+objections. Truth is a good, like health, wealth, etc. It is expedient
+thinking. The past. Truth grows. Rationalist objections. Reply to them.
+
+Lecture VII
+
+Pragmatism and Humanism
+
+The notion of THE Truth. Schiller on 'Humanism.' Three sorts of
+reality of which any new truth must take account. To 'take account' is
+ambiguous. Absolutely independent reality is hard to find. The human
+contribution is ubiquitous and builds out the given. Essence of
+pragmatism's contrast with rationalism. Rationalism affirms a
+transempirical world. Motives for this. Tough-mindedness rejects them. A
+genuine alternative. Pragmatism mediates.
+
+Lecture VIII
+
+Pragmatism and Religion
+
+Utility of the Absolute. Whitman's poem 'To You.' Two ways of taking
+it. My friend's letter. Necessities versus possibilities. 'Possibility'
+defined. Three views of the world's salvation. Pragmatism is
+melioristic. We may create reality. Why should anything BE? Supposed
+choice before creation. The healthy and the morbid reply. The 'tender'
+and the 'tough' types of religion. Pragmatism mediates.
+
+
+
+
+PRAGMATISM
+
+
+
+
+Lecture I
+
+The Present Dilemma in Philosophy
+
+In the preface to that admirable collection of essays of his called
+'Heretics,' Mr. Chesterton writes these words: "There are some
+people--and I am one of them--who think that the most practical and
+important thing about a man is still his view of the universe. We think
+that for a landlady considering a lodger, it is important to know his
+income, but still more important to know his philosophy. We think that
+for a general about to fight an enemy, it is important to know
+the enemy's numbers, but still more important to know the enemy's
+philosophy. We think the question is not whether the theory of the
+cosmos affects matters, but whether, in the long run, anything else
+affects them."
+
+I think with Mr. Chesterton in this matter. I know that you, ladies and
+gentlemen, have a philosophy, each and all of you, and that the most
+interesting and important thing about you is the way in which it
+determines the perspective in your several worlds. You know the same
+of me. And yet I confess to a certain tremor at the audacity of the
+enterprise which I am about to begin. For the philosophy which is so
+important in each of us is not a technical matter; it is our more or
+less dumb sense of what life honestly and deeply means. It is only
+partly got from books; it is our individual way of just seeing and
+feeling the total push and pressure of the cosmos. I have no right to
+assume that many of you are students of the cosmos in the class-room
+sense, yet here I stand desirous of interesting you in a philosophy
+which to no small extent has to be technically treated. I wish to fill
+you with sympathy with a contemporaneous tendency in which I profoundly
+believe, and yet I have to talk like a professor to you who are not
+students. Whatever universe a professor believes in must at any rate be
+a universe that lends itself to lengthy discourse. A universe definable
+in two sentences is something for which the professorial intellect has
+no use. No faith in anything of that cheap kind! I have heard friends
+and colleagues try to popularize philosophy in this very hall, but they
+soon grew dry, and then technical, and the results were only partially
+encouraging. So my enterprise is a bold one. The founder of pragmatism
+himself recently gave a course of lectures at the Lowell Institute with
+that very word in its title-flashes of brilliant light relieved
+against Cimmerian darkness! None of us, I fancy, understood ALL that he
+said--yet here I stand, making a very similar venture.
+
+I risk it because the very lectures I speak of DREW--they brought good
+audiences. There is, it must be confessed, a curious fascination in
+hearing deep things talked about, even tho neither we nor the disputants
+understand them. We get the problematic thrill, we feel the presence of
+the vastness. Let a controversy begin in a smoking-room anywhere, about
+free-will or God's omniscience, or good and evil, and see how everyone
+in the place pricks up his ears. Philosophy's results concern us all
+most vitally, and philosophy's queerest arguments tickle agreeably our
+sense of subtlety and ingenuity.
+
+Believing in philosophy myself devoutly, and believing also that a kind
+of new dawn is breaking upon us philosophers, I feel impelled, per fas
+aut nefas, to try to impart to you some news of the situation.
+
+Philosophy is at once the most sublime and the most trivial of human
+pursuits. It works in the minutest crannies and it opens out the widest
+vistas. It 'bakes no bread,' as has been said, but it can inspire our
+souls with courage; and repugnant as its manners, its doubting and
+challenging, its quibbling and dialectics, often are to common people,
+no one of us can get along without the far-flashing beams of light it
+sends over the world's perspectives. These illuminations at least, and
+the contrast-effects of darkness and mystery that accompany them, give
+to what it says an interest that is much more than professional.
+
+The history of philosophy is to a great extent that of a certain clash
+of human temperaments. Undignified as such a treatment may seem to some
+of my colleagues, I shall have to take account of this clash and explain
+a good many of the divergencies of philosophers by it. Of whatever
+temperament a professional philosopher is, he tries when philosophizing
+to sink the fact of his temperament. Temperament is no conventionally
+recognized reason, so he urges impersonal reasons only for his
+conclusions. Yet his temperament really gives him a stronger bias than
+any of his more strictly objective premises. It loads the evidence
+for him one way or the other, making for a more sentimental or a more
+hard-hearted view of the universe, just as this fact or that principle
+would. He trusts his temperament. Wanting a universe that suits it, he
+believes in any representation of the universe that does suit it.
+He feels men of opposite temper to be out of key with the world's
+character, and in his heart considers them incompetent and 'not in
+it,' in the philosophic business, even tho they may far excel him in
+dialectical ability.
+
+Yet in the forum he can make no claim, on the bare ground of his
+temperament, to superior discernment or authority. There arises thus a
+certain insincerity in our philosophic discussions: the potentest of
+all our premises is never mentioned. I am sure it would contribute to
+clearness if in these lectures we should break this rule and mention it,
+and I accordingly feel free to do so.
+
+Of course I am talking here of very positively marked men, men
+of radical idiosyncracy, who have set their stamp and likeness on
+philosophy and figure in its history. Plato, Locke, Hegel, Spencer,
+are such temperamental thinkers. Most of us have, of course, no
+very definite intellectual temperament, we are a mixture of opposite
+ingredients, each one present very moderately. We hardly know our own
+preferences in abstract matters; some of us are easily talked out of
+them, and end by following the fashion or taking up with the beliefs of
+the most impressive philosopher in our neighborhood, whoever he may be.
+But the one thing that has COUNTED so far in philosophy is that a man
+should see things, see them straight in his own peculiar way, and be
+dissatisfied with any opposite way of seeing them. There is no reason
+to suppose that this strong temperamental vision is from now onward to
+count no longer in the history of man's beliefs.
+
+Now the particular difference of temperament that I have in mind
+in making these remarks is one that has counted in literature, art,
+government and manners as well as in philosophy. In manners we find
+formalists and free-and-easy persons. In government, authoritarians and
+anarchists. In literature, purists or academicals, and realists. In art,
+classics and romantics. You recognize these contrasts as familiar; well,
+in philosophy we have a very similar contrast expressed in the pair of
+terms 'rationalist' and 'empiricist,' 'empiricist' meaning your lover of
+facts in all their crude variety, 'rationalist' meaning your devotee to
+abstract and eternal principles. No one can live an hour without both
+facts and principles, so it is a difference rather of emphasis; yet it
+breeds antipathies of the most pungent character between those who
+lay the emphasis differently; and we shall find it extraordinarily
+convenient to express a certain contrast in men's ways of taking their
+universe, by talking of the 'empiricist' and of the 'rationalist'
+temper. These terms make the contrast simple and massive.
+
+More simple and massive than are usually the men of whom the terms are
+predicated. For every sort of permutation and combination is possible in
+human nature; and if I now proceed to define more fully what I have in
+mind when I speak of rationalists and empiricists, by adding to each
+of those titles some secondary qualifying characteristics, I beg you to
+regard my conduct as to a certain extent arbitrary. I select types
+of combination that nature offers very frequently, but by no means
+uniformly, and I select them solely for their convenience in helping
+me to my ulterior purpose of characterizing pragmatism. Historically we
+find the terms 'intellectualism' and 'sensationalism' used as synonyms
+of 'rationalism' and 'empiricism.' Well, nature seems to combine most
+frequently with intellectualism an idealistic and optimistic tendency.
+Empiricists on the other hand are not uncommonly materialistic, and
+their optimism is apt to be decidedly conditional and tremulous.
+Rationalism is always monistic. It starts from wholes and universals,
+and makes much of the unity of things. Empiricism starts from the parts,
+and makes of the whole a collection-is not averse therefore to calling
+itself pluralistic. Rationalism usually considers itself more religious
+than empiricism, but there is much to say about this claim, so I merely
+mention it. It is a true claim when the individual rationalist is what
+is called a man of feeling, and when the individual empiricist prides
+himself on being hard-headed. In that case the rationalist will usually
+also be in favor of what is called free-will, and the empiricist will
+be a fatalist--I use the terms most popularly current. The rationalist
+finally will be of dogmatic temper in his affirmations, while the
+empiricist may be more sceptical and open to discussion.
+
+I will write these traits down in two columns. I think you will
+practically recognize the two types of mental make-up that I mean if
+I head the columns by the titles 'tender-minded' and 'tough-minded'
+respectively.
+
+THE TENDER-MINDED
+
+Rationalistic (going by 'principles'), Intellectualistic, Idealistic,
+Optimistic, Religious, Free-willist, Monistic, Dogmatical.
+
+THE TOUGH-MINDED
+
+Empiricist (going by 'facts'), Sensationalistic, Materialistic,
+Pessimistic, Irreligious, Fatalistic, Pluralistic, Sceptical.
+
+Pray postpone for a moment the question whether the two contrasted
+mixtures which I have written down are each inwardly coherent and
+self-consistent or not--I shall very soon have a good deal to say on
+that point. It suffices for our immediate purpose that tender-minded and
+tough-minded people, characterized as I have written them down, do both
+exist. Each of you probably knows some well-marked example of each type,
+and you know what each example thinks of the example on the other side
+of the line. They have a low opinion of each other. Their antagonism,
+whenever as individuals their temperaments have been intense, has formed
+in all ages a part of the philosophic atmosphere of the time. It forms a
+part of the philosophic atmosphere to-day. The tough think of the tender
+as sentimentalists and soft-heads. The tender feel the tough to be
+unrefined, callous, or brutal. Their mutual reaction is very much like
+that that takes place when Bostonian tourists mingle with a population
+like that of Cripple Creek. Each type believes the other to be inferior
+to itself; but disdain in the one case is mingled with amusement, in the
+other it has a dash of fear.
+
+Now, as I have already insisted, few of us are tender-foot Bostonians
+pure and simple, and few are typical Rocky Mountain toughs, in
+philosophy. Most of us have a hankering for the good things on both
+sides of the line. Facts are good, of course--give us lots of facts.
+Principles are good--give us plenty of principles. The world is
+indubitably one if you look at it in one way, but as indubitably is
+it many, if you look at it in another. It is both one and many--let us
+adopt a sort of pluralistic monism. Everything of course is necessarily
+determined, and yet of course our wills are free: a sort of free-will
+determinism is the true philosophy. The evil of the parts is undeniable;
+but the whole can't be evil: so practical pessimism may be combined with
+metaphysical optimism. And so forth--your ordinary philosophic layman
+never being a radical, never straightening out his system, but living
+vaguely in one plausible compartment of it or another to suit the
+temptations of successive hours.
+
+But some of us are more than mere laymen in philosophy. We are worthy
+of the name of amateur athletes, and are vexed by too much inconsistency
+and vacillation in our creed. We cannot preserve a good intellectual
+conscience so long as we keep mixing incompatibles from opposite sides
+of the line.
+
+And now I come to the first positively important point which I wish to
+make. Never were as many men of a decidedly empiricist proclivity in
+existence as there are at the present day. Our children, one may say,
+are almost born scientific. But our esteem for facts has not neutralized
+in us all religiousness. It is itself almost religious. Our scientific
+temper is devout. Now take a man of this type, and let him be also a
+philosophic amateur, unwilling to mix a hodge-podge system after the
+fashion of a common layman, and what does he find his situation to be,
+in this blessed year of our Lord 1906? He wants facts; he wants
+science; but he also wants a religion. And being an amateur and not an
+independent originator in philosophy he naturally looks for guidance to
+the experts and professionals whom he finds already in the field. A
+very large number of you here present, possibly a majority of you, are
+amateurs of just this sort.
+
+Now what kinds of philosophy do you find actually offered to meet your
+need? You find an empirical philosophy that is not religious enough, and
+a religious philosophy that is not empirical enough for your purpose.
+If you look to the quarter where facts are most considered you find
+the whole tough-minded program in operation, and the 'conflict between
+science and religion' in full blast. Either it is that Rocky Mountain
+tough of a Haeckel with his materialistic monism, his ether-god and his
+jest at your God as a 'gaseous vertebrate'; or it is Spencer treating
+the world's history as a redistribution of matter and motion solely, and
+bowing religion politely out at the front door:--she may indeed continue
+to exist, but she must never show her face inside the temple. For a
+hundred and fifty years past the progress of science has seemed to mean
+the enlargement of the material universe and the diminution of man's
+importance. The result is what one may call the growth of naturalistic
+or positivistic feeling. Man is no law-giver to nature, he is an
+absorber. She it is who stands firm; he it is who must accommodate
+himself. Let him record truth, inhuman tho it be, and submit to it! The
+romantic spontaneity and courage are gone, the vision is materialistic
+and depressing. Ideals appear as inert by-products of physiology; what
+is higher is explained by what is lower and treated forever as a case of
+'nothing but'--nothing but something else of a quite inferior sort. You
+get, in short, a materialistic universe, in which only the tough-minded
+find themselves congenially at home.
+
+If now, on the other hand, you turn to the religious quarter for
+consolation, and take counsel of the tender-minded philosophies, what do
+you find?
+
+Religious philosophy in our day and generation is, among us
+English-reading people, of two main types. One of these is more radical
+and aggressive, the other has more the air of fighting a slow retreat.
+By the more radical wing of religious philosophy I mean the so-called
+transcendental idealism of the Anglo-Hegelian school, the philosophy of
+such men as Green, the Cairds, Bosanquet, and Royce. This philosophy has
+greatly influenced the more studious members of our protestant ministry.
+It is pantheistic, and undoubtedly it has already blunted the edge of
+the traditional theism in protestantism at large.
+
+That theism remains, however. It is the lineal descendant, through one
+stage of concession after another, of the dogmatic scholastic theism
+still taught rigorously in the seminaries of the catholic church. For a
+long time it used to be called among us the philosophy of the Scottish
+school. It is what I meant by the philosophy that has the air of
+fighting a slow retreat. Between the encroachments of the hegelians and
+other philosophers of the 'Absolute,' on the one hand, and those of the
+scientific evolutionists and agnostics, on the other, the men that
+give us this kind of a philosophy, James Martineau, Professor Bowne,
+Professor Ladd and others, must feel themselves rather tightly squeezed.
+Fair-minded and candid as you like, this philosophy is not radical
+in temper. It is eclectic, a thing of compromises, that seeks a modus
+vivendi above all things. It accepts the facts of darwinism, the facts
+of cerebral physiology, but it does nothing active or enthusiastic with
+them. It lacks the victorious and aggressive note. It lacks prestige in
+consequence; whereas absolutism has a certain prestige due to the more
+radical style of it.
+
+These two systems are what you have to choose between if you turn to the
+tender-minded school. And if you are the lovers of facts I have
+supposed you to be, you find the trail of the serpent of rationalism, of
+intellectualism, over everything that lies on that side of the line. You
+escape indeed the materialism that goes with the reigning empiricism;
+but you pay for your escape by losing contact with the concrete parts
+of life. The more absolutistic philosophers dwell on so high a level
+of abstraction that they never even try to come down. The absolute mind
+which they offer us, the mind that makes our universe by thinking it,
+might, for aught they show us to the contrary, have made any one of a
+million other universes just as well as this. You can deduce no single
+actual particular from the notion of it. It is compatible with any state
+of things whatever being true here below. And the theistic God is almost
+as sterile a principle. You have to go to the world which he has created
+to get any inkling of his actual character: he is the kind of god that
+has once for all made that kind of a world. The God of the theistic
+writers lives on as purely abstract heights as does the Absolute.
+Absolutism has a certain sweep and dash about it, while the usual theism
+is more insipid, but both are equally remote and vacuous. What you want
+is a philosophy that will not only exercise your powers of intellectual
+abstraction, but that will make some positive connexion with this actual
+world of finite human lives.
+
+You want a system that will combine both things, the scientific
+loyalty to facts and willingness to take account of them, the spirit of
+adaptation and accommodation, in short, but also the old confidence in
+human values and the resultant spontaneity, whether of the religious or
+of the romantic type. And this is then your dilemma: you find the two
+parts of your quaesitum hopelessly separated. You find empiricism with
+inhumanism and irreligion; or else you find a rationalistic philosophy
+that indeed may call itself religious, but that keeps out of all
+definite touch with concrete facts and joys and sorrows.
+
+I am not sure how many of you live close enough to philosophy to realize
+fully what I mean by this last reproach, so I will dwell a little longer
+on that unreality in all rationalistic systems by which your serious
+believer in facts is so apt to feel repelled.
+
+I wish that I had saved the first couple of pages of a thesis which
+a student handed me a year or two ago. They illustrated my point so
+clearly that I am sorry I cannot read them to you now. This young man,
+who was a graduate of some Western college, began by saying that he had
+always taken for granted that when you entered a philosophic class-room
+you had to open relations with a universe entirely distinct from the one
+you left behind you in the street. The two were supposed, he said, to
+have so little to do with each other, that you could not possibly occupy
+your mind with them at the same time. The world of concrete personal
+experiences to which the street belongs is multitudinous beyond
+imagination, tangled, muddy, painful and perplexed. The world to which
+your philosophy-professor introduces you is simple, clean and noble.
+The contradictions of real life are absent from it. Its architecture is
+classic. Principles of reason trace its outlines, logical necessities
+cement its parts. Purity and dignity are what it most expresses. It is a
+kind of marble temple shining on a hill.
+
+In point of fact it is far less an account of this actual world than
+a clear addition built upon it, a classic sanctuary in which the
+rationalist fancy may take refuge from the intolerably confused and
+gothic character which mere facts present. It is no EXPLANATION of our
+concrete universe, it is another thing altogether, a substitute for it,
+a remedy, a way of escape.
+
+Its temperament, if I may use the word temperament here, is utterly
+alien to the temperament of existence in the concrete. REFINEMENT is
+what characterizes our intellectualist philosophies. They exquisitely
+satisfy that craving for a refined object of contemplation which is so
+powerful an appetite of the mind. But I ask you in all seriousness to
+look abroad on this colossal universe of concrete facts, on their awful
+bewilderments, their surprises and cruelties, on the wildness which
+they show, and then to tell me whether 'refined' is the one inevitable
+descriptive adjective that springs to your lips.
+
+Refinement has its place in things, true enough. But a philosophy that
+breathes out nothing but refinement will never satisfy the empiricist
+temper of mind. It will seem rather a monument of artificiality. So we
+find men of science preferring to turn their backs on metaphysics as on
+something altogether cloistered and spectral, and practical men shaking
+philosophy's dust off their feet and following the call of the wild.
+
+Truly there is something a little ghastly in the satisfaction with which
+a pure but unreal system will fill a rationalist mind. Leibnitz was
+a rationalist mind, with infinitely more interest in facts than
+most rationalist minds can show. Yet if you wish for superficiality
+incarnate, you have only to read that charmingly written 'Theodicee' of
+his, in which he sought to justify the ways of God to man, and to prove
+that the world we live in is the best of possible worlds. Let me quote a
+specimen of what I mean.
+
+Among other obstacles to his optimistic philosophy, it falls to Leibnitz
+to consider the number of the eternally damned. That it is infinitely
+greater, in our human case, than that of those saved he assumes as a
+premise from the theologians, and then proceeds to argue in this way.
+Even then, he says:
+
+"The evil will appear as almost nothing in comparison with the good, if
+we once consider the real magnitude of the City of God. Coelius Secundus
+Curio has written a little book, 'De Amplitudine Regni Coelestis,' which
+was reprinted not long ago. But he failed to compass the extent of the
+kingdom of the heavens. The ancients had small ideas of the works of
+God. ... It seemed to them that only our earth had inhabitants, and even
+the notion of our antipodes gave them pause. The rest of the world for
+them consisted of some shining globes and a few crystalline spheres.
+But to-day, whatever be the limits that we may grant or refuse to the
+Universe we must recognize in it a countless number of globes, as big
+as ours or bigger, which have just as much right as it has to support
+rational inhabitants, tho it does not follow that these need all be men.
+Our earth is only one among the six principal satellites of our sun. As
+all the fixed stars are suns, one sees how small a place among visible
+things our earth takes up, since it is only a satellite of one among
+them. Now all these suns MAY be inhabited by none but happy creatures;
+and nothing obliges us to believe that the number of damned persons is
+very great; for a VERY FEW INSTANCES AND SAMPLES SUFFICE FOR THE UTILITY
+WHICH GOOD DRAWS FROM EVIL. Moreover, since there is no reason to
+suppose that there are stars everywhere, may there not be a great space
+beyond the region of the stars? And this immense space, surrounding all
+this region, ... may be replete with happiness and glory. ... What now
+becomes of the consideration of our Earth and of its denizens? Does it
+not dwindle to something incomparably less than a physical point, since
+our Earth is but a point compared with the distance of the fixed stars.
+Thus the part of the Universe which we know, being almost lost in
+nothingness compared with that which is unknown to us, but which we
+are yet obliged to admit; and all the evils that we know lying in this
+almost-nothing; it follows that the evils may be almost-nothing in
+comparison with the goods that the Universe contains."
+
+Leibnitz continues elsewhere: "There is a kind of justice which aims
+neither at the amendment of the criminal, nor at furnishing an example
+to others, nor at the reparation of the injury. This justice is founded
+in pure fitness, which finds a certain satisfaction in the expiation
+of a wicked deed. The Socinians and Hobbes objected to this punitive
+justice, which is properly vindictive justice and which God has reserved
+for himself at many junctures. ... It is always founded in the fitness
+of things, and satisfies not only the offended party, but all wise
+lookers-on, even as beautiful music or a fine piece of architecture
+satisfies a well-constituted mind. It is thus that the torments of the
+damned continue, even tho they serve no longer to turn anyone away from
+sin, and that the rewards of the blest continue, even tho they confirm
+no one in good ways. The damned draw to themselves ever new penalties
+by their continuing sins, and the blest attract ever fresh joys by their
+unceasing progress in good. Both facts are founded on the principle of
+fitness, ... for God has made all things harmonious in perfection as I
+have already said."
+
+Leibnitz's feeble grasp of reality is too obvious to need comment from
+me. It is evident that no realistic image of the experience of a damned
+soul had ever approached the portals of his mind. Nor had it occurred to
+him that the smaller is the number of 'samples' of the genus 'lost-soul'
+whom God throws as a sop to the eternal fitness, the more unequitably
+grounded is the glory of the blest. What he gives us is a cold literary
+exercise, whose cheerful substance even hell-fire does not warm.
+
+And do not tell me that to show the shallowness of rationalist
+philosophizing I have had to go back to a shallow wigpated age. The
+optimism of present-day rationalism sounds just as shallow to the
+fact-loving mind. The actual universe is a thing wide open, but
+rationalism makes systems, and systems must be closed. For men in
+practical life perfection is something far off and still in process of
+achievement. This for rationalism is but the illusion of the finite
+and relative: the absolute ground of things is a perfection eternally
+complete.
+
+I find a fine example of revolt against the airy and shallow optimism
+of current religious philosophy in a publication of that valiant
+anarchistic writer Morrison I. Swift. Mr. Swift's anarchism goes a
+little farther than mine does, but I confess that I sympathize a
+good deal, and some of you, I know, will sympathize heartily with his
+dissatisfaction with the idealistic optimisms now in vogue. He begins
+his pamphlet on 'Human Submission' with a series of city reporter's
+items from newspapers (suicides, deaths from starvation and the like) as
+specimens of our civilized regime. For instance:
+
+"'After trudging through the snow from one end of the city to the other
+in the vain hope of securing employment, and with his wife and six
+children without food and ordered to leave their home in an upper east
+side tenement house because of non-payment of rent, John Corcoran, a
+clerk, to-day ended his life by drinking carbolic acid. Corcoran lost
+his position three weeks ago through illness, and during the period of
+idleness his scanty savings disappeared. Yesterday he obtained work with
+a gang of city snow shovelers, but he was too weak from illness and was
+forced to quit after an hour's trial with the shovel. Then the
+weary task of looking for employment was again resumed. Thoroughly
+discouraged, Corcoran returned to his home late last night to find his
+wife and children without food and the notice of dispossession on the
+door.' On the following morning he drank the poison.
+
+"The records of many more such cases lie before me [Mr. Swift goes on];
+an encyclopedia might easily be filled with their kind. These few I cite
+as an interpretation of the universe. 'We are aware of the presence of
+God in His world,' says a writer in a recent English Review. [The very
+presence of ill in the temporal order is the condition of the perfection
+of the eternal order, writes Professor Royce ('The World and the
+Individual,' II, 385).] 'The Absolute is the richer for every discord,
+and for all diversity which it embraces,' says F. H. Bradley (Appearance
+and Reality, 204). He means that these slain men make the universe
+richer, and that is Philosophy. But while Professors Royce and Bradley
+and a whole host of guileless thoroughfed thinkers are unveiling
+Reality and the Absolute and explaining away evil and pain, this is the
+condition of the only beings known to us anywhere in the universe with
+a developed consciousness of what the universe is. What these people
+experience IS Reality. It gives us an absolute phase of the universe. It
+is the personal experience of those most qualified in all our circle
+of knowledge to HAVE experience, to tell us WHAT is. Now, what does
+THINKING ABOUT the experience of these persons come to compared with
+directly, personally feeling it, as they feel it? The philosophers are
+dealing in shades, while those who live and feel know truth. And the
+mind of mankind-not yet the mind of philosophers and of the proprietary
+class-but of the great mass of the silently thinking and feeling men,
+is coming to this view. They are judging the universe as they have
+heretofore permitted the hierophants of religion and learning to judge
+THEM. ...
+
+"This Cleveland workingman, killing his children and himself [another
+of the cited cases], is one of the elemental, stupendous facts of this
+modern world and of this universe. It cannot be glozed over or minimized
+away by all the treatises on God, and Love, and Being, helplessly
+existing in their haughty monumental vacuity. This is one of the simple
+irreducible elements of this world's life after millions of years of
+divine opportunity and twenty centuries of Christ. It is in the moral
+world like atoms or sub-atoms in the physical, primary, indestructible.
+And what it blazons to man is the ... imposture of all philosophy
+which does not see in such events the consummate factor of conscious
+experience. These facts invincibly prove religion a nullity. Man will
+not give religion two thousand centuries or twenty centuries more to try
+itself and waste human time; its time is up, its probation is ended.
+Its own record ends it. Mankind has not sons and eternities to spare for
+trying out discredited systems...." [Footnote: Morrison I. Swift, Human
+Submission, Part Second, Philadelphia, Liberty Press, 1905, pp. 4-10.]
+
+Such is the reaction of an empiricist mind upon the rationalist bill of
+fare. It is an absolute 'No, I thank you.' "Religion," says Mr. Swift,
+"is like a sleep-walker to whom actual things are blank." And such,
+tho possibly less tensely charged with feeling, is the verdict of
+every seriously inquiring amateur in philosophy to-day who turns to the
+philosophy-professors for the wherewithal to satisfy the fulness of his
+nature's needs. Empiricist writers give him a materialism, rationalists
+give him something religious, but to that religion "actual things are
+blank." He becomes thus the judge of us philosophers. Tender or tough,
+he finds us wanting. None of us may treat his verdicts disdainfully, for
+after all, his is the typically perfect mind, the mind the sum of whose
+demands is greatest, the mind whose criticisms and dissatisfactions are
+fatal in the long run.
+
+It is at this point that my own solution begins to appear. I offer the
+oddly-named thing pragmatism as a philosophy that can satisfy both kinds
+of demand. It can remain religious like the rationalisms, but at the
+same time, like the empiricisms, it can preserve the richest intimacy
+with facts. I hope I may be able to leave many of you with as favorable
+an opinion of it as I preserve myself. Yet, as I am near the end of my
+hour, I will not introduce pragmatism bodily now. I will begin with it
+on the stroke of the clock next time. I prefer at the present moment to
+return a little on what I have said.
+
+If any of you here are professional philosophers, and some of you I know
+to be such, you will doubtless have felt my discourse so far to have
+been crude in an unpardonable, nay, in an almost incredible degree.
+Tender-minded and tough-minded, what a barbaric disjunction! And, in
+general, when philosophy is all compacted of delicate intellectualities
+and subtleties and scrupulosities, and when every possible sort of
+combination and transition obtains within its bounds, what a brutal
+caricature and reduction of highest things to the lowest possible
+expression is it to represent its field of conflict as a sort of
+rough-and-tumble fight between two hostile temperaments! What a
+childishly external view! And again, how stupid it is to treat the
+abstractness of rationalist systems as a crime, and to damn them because
+they offer themselves as sanctuaries and places of escape, rather than
+as prolongations of the world of facts. Are not all our theories just
+remedies and places of escape? And, if philosophy is to be religious,
+how can she be anything else than a place of escape from the crassness
+of reality's surface? What better thing can she do than raise us out of
+our animal senses and show us another and a nobler home for our minds in
+that great framework of ideal principles subtending all reality, which
+the intellect divines? How can principles and general views ever be
+anything but abstract outlines? Was Cologne cathedral built without an
+architect's plan on paper? Is refinement in itself an abomination? Is
+concrete rudeness the only thing that's true?
+
+Believe me, I feel the full force of the indictment. The picture I
+have given is indeed monstrously over-simplified and rude. But like all
+abstractions, it will prove to have its use. If philosophers can treat
+the life of the universe abstractly, they must not complain of an
+abstract treatment of the life of philosophy itself. In point of fact
+the picture I have given is, however coarse and sketchy, literally true.
+Temperaments with their cravings and refusals do determine men in their
+philosophies, and always will. The details of systems may be reasoned
+out piecemeal, and when the student is working at a system, he may
+often forget the forest for the single tree. But when the labor is
+accomplished, the mind always performs its big summarizing act, and the
+system forthwith stands over against one like a living thing, with that
+strange simple note of individuality which haunts our memory, like the
+wraith of the man, when a friend or enemy of ours is dead.
+
+Not only Walt Whitman could write "who touches this book touches a man."
+The books of all the great philosophers are like so many men. Our
+sense of an essential personal flavor in each one of them, typical but
+indescribable, is the finest fruit of our own accomplished philosophic
+education. What the system pretends to be is a picture of the great
+universe of God. What it is--and oh so flagrantly!--is the revelation of
+how intensely odd the personal flavor of some fellow creature is. Once
+reduced to these terms (and all our philosophies get reduced to them in
+minds made critical by learning) our commerce with the systems reverts
+to the informal, to the instinctive human reaction of satisfaction or
+dislike. We grow as peremptory in our rejection or admission, as when a
+person presents himself as a candidate for our favor; our verdicts are
+couched in as simple adjectives of praise or dispraise. We measure the
+total character of the universe as we feel it, against the flavor of the
+philosophy proffered us, and one word is enough.
+
+"Statt der lebendigen Natur," we say, "da Gott die Menschen schuf
+hinein"--that nebulous concoction, that wooden, that straight-laced
+thing, that crabbed artificiality, that musty schoolroom product, that
+sick man's dream! Away with it. Away with all of them! Impossible!
+Impossible!
+
+Our work over the details of his system is indeed what gives us our
+resultant impression of the philosopher, but it is on the resultant
+impression itself that we react. Expertness in philosophy is measured
+by the definiteness of our summarizing reactions, by the immediate
+perceptive epithet with which the expert hits such complex objects
+off. But great expertness is not necessary for the epithet to come. Few
+people have definitely articulated philosophies of their own. But almost
+everyone has his own peculiar sense of a certain total character in
+the universe, and of the inadequacy fully to match it of the peculiar
+systems that he knows. They don't just cover HIS world. One will be too
+dapper, another too pedantic, a third too much of a job-lot of opinions,
+a fourth too morbid, and a fifth too artificial, or what not. At any
+rate he and we know offhand that such philosophies are out of plumb and
+out of key and out of 'whack,' and have no business to speak up in the
+universe's name. Plato, Locke, Spinoza, Mill, Caird, Hegel--I prudently
+avoid names nearer home!--I am sure that to many of you, my hearers,
+these names are little more than reminders of as many curious personal
+ways of falling short. It would be an obvious absurdity if such ways of
+taking the universe were actually true. We philosophers have to reckon
+with such feelings on your part. In the last resort, I repeat, it will
+be by them that all our philosophies shall ultimately be judged. The
+finally victorious way of looking at things will be the most completely
+IMPRESSIVE way to the normal run of minds.
+
+One word more--namely about philosophies necessarily being abstract
+outlines. There are outlines and outlines, outlines of buildings
+that are FAT, conceived in the cube by their planner, and outlines of
+buildings invented flat on paper, with the aid of ruler and compass.
+These remain skinny and emaciated even when set up in stone and mortar,
+and the outline already suggests that result. An outline in itself is
+meagre, truly, but it does not necessarily suggest a meagre thing. It is
+the essential meagreness of WHAT IS SUGGESTED by the usual rationalistic
+philosophies that moves empiricists to their gesture of rejection. The
+case of Herbert Spencer's system is much to the point here. Rationalists
+feel his fearful array of insufficiencies. His dry schoolmaster
+temperament, the hurdy-gurdy monotony of him, his preference for
+cheap makeshifts in argument, his lack of education even in mechanical
+principles, and in general the vagueness of all his fundamental ideas,
+his whole system wooden, as if knocked together out of cracked hemlock
+boards--and yet the half of England wants to bury him in Westminster
+Abbey.
+
+Why? Why does Spencer call out so much reverence in spite of his
+weakness in rationalistic eyes? Why should so many educated men who
+feel that weakness, you and I perhaps, wish to see him in the Abbey
+notwithstanding?
+
+Simply because we feel his heart to be IN THE RIGHT PLACE
+philosophically. His principles may be all skin and bone, but at any
+rate his books try to mould themselves upon the particular shape of
+this, particular world's carcase. The noise of facts resounds through
+all his chapters, the citations of fact never cease, he emphasizes
+facts, turns his face towards their quarter; and that is enough. It
+means the right kind of thing for the empiricist mind.
+
+The pragmatistic philosophy of which I hope to begin talking in my
+next lecture preserves as cordial a relation with facts, and, unlike
+Spencer's philosophy, it neither begins nor ends by turning positive
+religious constructions out of doors--it treats them cordially as well.
+
+I hope I may lead you to find it just the mediating way of thinking that
+you require.
+
+
+
+
+Lecture II
+
+What Pragmatism Means
+
+Some years ago, being with a camping party in the mountains, I
+returned from a solitary ramble to find everyone engaged in a ferocious
+metaphysical dispute. The corpus of the dispute was a squirrel--a live
+squirrel supposed to be clinging to one side of a tree-trunk; while over
+against the tree's opposite side a human being was imagined to stand.
+This human witness tries to get sight of the squirrel by moving rapidly
+round the tree, but no matter how fast he goes, the squirrel moves
+as fast in the opposite direction, and always keeps the tree between
+himself and the man, so that never a glimpse of him is caught. The
+resultant metaphysical problem now is this: DOES THE MAN GO ROUND THE
+SQUIRREL OR NOT? He goes round the tree, sure enough, and the squirrel
+is on the tree; but does he go round the squirrel? In the unlimited
+leisure of the wilderness, discussion had been worn threadbare. Everyone
+had taken sides, and was obstinate; and the numbers on both sides were
+even. Each side, when I appeared, therefore appealed to me to make it
+a majority. Mindful of the scholastic adage that whenever you meet a
+contradiction you must make a distinction, I immediately sought and
+found one, as follows: "Which party is right," I said, "depends on what
+you PRACTICALLY MEAN by 'going round' the squirrel. If you mean passing
+from the north of him to the east, then to the south, then to the west,
+and then to the north of him again, obviously the man does go round him,
+for he occupies these successive positions. But if on the contrary you
+mean being first in front of him, then on the right of him, then behind
+him, then on his left, and finally in front again, it is quite as
+obvious that the man fails to go round him, for by the compensating
+movements the squirrel makes, he keeps his belly turned towards the man
+all the time, and his back turned away. Make the distinction, and there
+is no occasion for any farther dispute. You are both right and both
+wrong according as you conceive the verb 'to go round' in one practical
+fashion or the other."
+
+Altho one or two of the hotter disputants called my speech a shuffling
+evasion, saying they wanted no quibbling or scholastic hair-splitting,
+but meant just plain honest English 'round,' the majority seemed to
+think that the distinction had assuaged the dispute.
+
+I tell this trivial anecdote because it is a peculiarly simple example
+of what I wish now to speak of as THE PRAGMATIC METHOD. The pragmatic
+method is primarily a method of settling metaphysical disputes that
+otherwise might be interminable. Is the world one or many?--fated or
+free?--material or spiritual?--here are notions either of which may
+or may not hold good of the world; and disputes over such notions are
+unending. The pragmatic method in such cases is to try to interpret each
+notion by tracing its respective practical consequences. What difference
+would it practically make to anyone if this notion rather than that
+notion were true? If no practical difference whatever can be traced,
+then the alternatives mean practically the same thing, and all dispute
+is idle. Whenever a dispute is serious, we ought to be able to show some
+practical difference that must follow from one side or the other's being
+right.
+
+A glance at the history of the idea will show you still better what
+pragmatism means. The term is derived from the same Greek word [pi rho
+alpha gamma mu alpha], meaning action, from which our words 'practice'
+and 'practical' come. It was first introduced into philosophy by Mr.
+Charles Peirce in 1878. In an article entitled 'How to Make Our Ideas
+Clear,' in the 'Popular Science Monthly' for January of that year
+[Footnote: Translated in the Revue Philosophique for January, 1879 (vol.
+vii).] Mr. Peirce, after pointing out that our beliefs are really rules
+for action, said that to develope a thought's meaning, we need only
+determine what conduct it is fitted to produce: that conduct is for
+us its sole significance. And the tangible fact at the root of all our
+thought-distinctions, however subtle, is that there is no one of them so
+fine as to consist in anything but a possible difference of practice.
+To attain perfect clearness in our thoughts of an object, then, we need
+only consider what conceivable effects of a practical kind the object
+may involve--what sensations we are to expect from it, and what
+reactions we must prepare. Our conception of these effects, whether
+immediate or remote, is then for us the whole of our conception of the
+object, so far as that conception has positive significance at all.
+
+This is the principle of Peirce, the principle of pragmatism. It lay
+entirely unnoticed by anyone for twenty years, until I, in an address
+before Professor Howison's philosophical union at the university of
+California, brought it forward again and made a special application
+of it to religion. By that date (1898) the times seemed ripe for its
+reception. The word 'pragmatism' spread, and at present it fairly
+spots the pages of the philosophic journals. On all hands we find the
+'pragmatic movement' spoken of, sometimes with respect, sometimes with
+contumely, seldom with clear understanding. It is evident that the term
+applies itself conveniently to a number of tendencies that hitherto have
+lacked a collective name, and that it has 'come to stay.'
+
+To take in the importance of Peirce's principle, one must get accustomed
+to applying it to concrete cases. I found a few years ago that Ostwald,
+the illustrious Leipzig chemist, had been making perfectly distinct
+use of the principle of pragmatism in his lectures on the philosophy of
+science, tho he had not called it by that name.
+
+"All realities influence our practice," he wrote me, "and that influence
+is their meaning for us. I am accustomed to put questions to my classes
+in this way: In what respects would the world be different if this
+alternative or that were true? If I can find nothing that would become
+different, then the alternative has no sense."
+
+That is, the rival views mean practically the same thing, and meaning,
+other than practical, there is for us none. Ostwald in a published
+lecture gives this example of what he means. Chemists have long wrangled
+over the inner constitution of certain bodies called 'tautomerous.'
+Their properties seemed equally consistent with the notion that an
+instable hydrogen atom oscillates inside of them, or that they are
+instable mixtures of two bodies. Controversy raged; but never was
+decided. "It would never have begun," says Ostwald, "if the combatants
+had asked themselves what particular experimental fact could have been
+made different by one or the other view being correct. For it would then
+have appeared that no difference of fact could possibly ensue; and the
+quarrel was as unreal as if, theorizing in primitive times about the
+raising of dough by yeast, one party should have invoked a 'brownie,'
+while another insisted on an 'elf' as the true cause of the phenomenon."
+[Footnote: 'Theorie und Praxis,' Zeitsch. des Oesterreichischen
+Ingenieur u. Architecten-Vereines, 1905, Nr. 4 u. 6. I find a still
+more radical pragmatism than Ostwald's in an address by Professor W.
+S. Franklin: "I think that the sickliest notion of physics, even if a
+student gets it, is that it is 'the science of masses, molecules and the
+ether.' And I think that the healthiest notion, even if a student does
+not wholly get it, is that physics is the science of the ways of taking
+hold of bodies and pushing them!" (Science, January 2, 1903.)]
+
+It is astonishing to see how many philosophical disputes collapse
+into insignificance the moment you subject them to this simple test of
+tracing a concrete consequence. There can BE no difference any-where
+that doesn't MAKE a difference elsewhere--no difference in abstract
+truth that doesn't express itself in a difference in concrete fact and
+in conduct consequent upon that fact, imposed on somebody, somehow,
+somewhere and somewhen. The whole function of philosophy ought to be
+to find out what definite difference it will make to you and me,
+at definite instants of our life, if this world-formula or that
+world-formula be the true one.
+
+There is absolutely nothing new in the pragmatic method. Socrates was
+an adept at it. Aristotle used it methodically. Locke, Berkeley and Hume
+made momentous contributions to truth by its means. Shadworth Hodgson
+keeps insisting that realities are only what they are 'known-as.'
+But these forerunners of pragmatism used it in fragments: they were
+preluders only. Not until in our time has it generalized itself, become
+conscious of a universal mission, pretended to a conquering destiny. I
+believe in that destiny, and I hope I may end by inspiring you with my
+belief.
+
+Pragmatism represents a perfectly familiar attitude in philosophy, the
+empiricist attitude, but it represents it, as it seems to me, both in
+a more radical and in a less objectionable form than it has ever yet
+assumed. A pragmatist turns his back resolutely and once for all upon
+a lot of inveterate habits dear to professional philosophers. He turns
+away from abstraction and insufficiency, from verbal solutions, from bad
+a priori reasons, from fixed principles, closed systems, and pretended
+absolutes and origins. He turns towards concreteness and adequacy,
+towards facts, towards action, and towards power. That means the
+empiricist temper regnant, and the rationalist temper sincerely given
+up. It means the open air and possibilities of nature, as against dogma,
+artificiality and the pretence of finality in truth.
+
+At the same time it does not stand for any special results. It is
+a method only. But the general triumph of that method would mean an
+enormous change in what I called in my last lecture the 'temperament'
+of philosophy. Teachers of the ultra-rationalistic type would be frozen
+out, much as the courtier type is frozen out in republics, as the
+ultramontane type of priest is frozen out in protestant lands. Science
+and metaphysics would come much nearer together, would in fact work
+absolutely hand in hand.
+
+Metaphysics has usually followed a very primitive kind of quest. You
+know how men have always hankered after unlawful magic, and you know
+what a great part, in magic, WORDS have always played. If you have his
+name, or the formula of incantation that binds him, you can control the
+spirit, genie, afrite, or whatever the power may be. Solomon knew the
+names of all the spirits, and having their names, he held them subject
+to his will. So the universe has always appeared to the natural mind as
+a kind of enigma, of which the key must be sought in the shape of
+some illuminating or power-bringing word or name. That word names the
+universe's PRINCIPLE, and to possess it is, after a fashion, to
+possess the universe itself. 'God,' 'Matter,' 'Reason,' 'the Absolute,'
+'Energy,' are so many solving names. You can rest when you have them.
+You are at the end of your metaphysical quest.
+
+But if you follow the pragmatic method, you cannot look on any such word
+as closing your quest. You must bring out of each word its practical
+cash-value, set it at work within the stream of your experience. It
+appears less as a solution, then, than as a program for more work,
+and more particularly as an indication of the ways in which existing
+realities may be CHANGED.
+
+THEORIES THUS BECOME INSTRUMENTS, NOT ANSWERS TO ENIGMAS, IN WHICH
+WE CAN REST. We don't lie back upon them, we move forward, and, on
+occasion, make nature over again by their aid. Pragmatism unstiffens all
+our theories, limbers them up and sets each one at work. Being nothing
+essentially new, it harmonizes with many ancient philosophic tendencies.
+It agrees with nominalism for instance, in always appealing to
+particulars; with utilitarianism in emphasizing practical aspects; with
+positivism in its disdain for verbal solutions, useless questions, and
+metaphysical abstractions.
+
+All these, you see, are ANTI-INTELLECTUALIST tendencies. Against
+rationalism as a pretension and a method, pragmatism is fully armed
+and militant. But, at the outset, at least, it stands for no particular
+results. It has no dogmas, and no doctrines save its method. As the
+young Italian pragmatist Papini has well said, it lies in the midst of
+our theories, like a corridor in a hotel. Innumerable chambers open out
+of it. In one you may find a man writing an atheistic volume; in the
+next someone on his knees praying for faith and strength; in a third
+a chemist investigating a body's properties. In a fourth a system
+of idealistic metaphysics is being excogitated; in a fifth the
+impossibility of metaphysics is being shown. But they all own the
+corridor, and all must pass through it if they want a practicable way of
+getting into or out of their respective rooms.
+
+No particular results then, so far, but only an attitude of orientation,
+is what the pragmatic method means. THE ATTITUDE OF LOOKING AWAY FROM
+FIRST THINGS, PRINCIPLES, 'CATEGORIES,' SUPPOSED NECESSITIES; AND OF
+LOOKING TOWARDS LAST THINGS, FRUITS, CONSEQUENCES, FACTS.
+
+So much for the pragmatic method! You may say that I have been praising
+it rather than explaining it to you, but I shall presently explain it
+abundantly enough by showing how it works on some familiar problems.
+Meanwhile the word pragmatism has come to be used in a still wider
+sense, as meaning also a certain theory of TRUTH. I mean to give a whole
+lecture to the statement of that theory, after first paving the way,
+so I can be very brief now. But brevity is hard to follow, so I ask
+for your redoubled attention for a quarter of an hour. If much remains
+obscure, I hope to make it clearer in the later lectures.
+
+One of the most successfully cultivated branches of philosophy in our
+time is what is called inductive logic, the study of the conditions
+under which our sciences have evolved. Writers on this subject have
+begun to show a singular unanimity as to what the laws of nature and
+elements of fact mean, when formulated by mathematicians, physicists and
+chemists. When the first mathematical, logical and natural uniformities,
+the first LAWS, were discovered, men were so carried away by the
+clearness, beauty and simplification that resulted, that they believed
+themselves to have deciphered authentically the eternal thoughts of the
+Almighty. His mind also thundered and reverberated in syllogisms.
+He also thought in conic sections, squares and roots and ratios, and
+geometrized like Euclid. He made Kepler's laws for the planets to
+follow; he made velocity increase proportionally to the time in falling
+bodies; he made the law of the sines for light to obey when refracted;
+he established the classes, orders, families and genera of plants and
+animals, and fixed the distances between them. He thought the archetypes
+of all things, and devised their variations; and when we rediscover any
+one of these his wondrous institutions, we seize his mind in its very
+literal intention.
+
+But as the sciences have developed farther, the notion has gained ground
+that most, perhaps all, of our laws are only approximations. The laws
+themselves, moreover, have grown so numerous that there is no counting
+them; and so many rival formulations are proposed in all the branches of
+science that investigators have become accustomed to the notion that no
+theory is absolutely a transcript of reality, but that any one of them
+may from some point of view be useful. Their great use is to summarize
+old facts and to lead to new ones. They are only a man-made language,
+a conceptual shorthand, as someone calls them, in which we write our
+reports of nature; and languages, as is well known, tolerate much choice
+of expression and many dialects.
+
+Thus human arbitrariness has driven divine necessity from scientific
+logic. If I mention the names of Sigwart, Mach, Ostwald, Pearson,
+Milhaud, Poincare, Duhem, Ruyssen, those of you who are students will
+easily identify the tendency I speak of, and will think of additional
+names.
+
+Riding now on the front of this wave of scientific logic Messrs.
+Schiller and Dewey appear with their pragmatistic account of what truth
+everywhere signifies. Everywhere, these teachers say, 'truth' in our
+ideas and beliefs means the same thing that it means in science. It
+means, they say, nothing but this, THAT IDEAS (WHICH THEMSELVES ARE BUT
+PARTS OF OUR EXPERIENCE) BECOME TRUE JUST IN SO FAR AS THEY HELP US TO
+GET INTO SATISFACTORY RELATION WITH OTHER PARTS OF OUR EXPERIENCE, to
+summarize them and get about among them by conceptual short-cuts instead
+of following the interminable succession of particular phenomena. Any
+idea upon which we can ride, so to speak; any idea that will carry us
+prosperously from any one part of our experience to any other part,
+linking things satisfactorily, working securely, simplifying,
+saving labor; is true for just so much, true in so far forth, true
+INSTRUMENTALLY. This is the 'instrumental' view of truth taught so
+successfully at Chicago, the view that truth in our ideas means their
+power to 'work,' promulgated so brilliantly at Oxford.
+
+Messrs. Dewey, Schiller and their allies, in reaching this general
+conception of all truth, have only followed the example of geologists,
+biologists and philologists. In the establishment of these other
+sciences, the successful stroke was always to take some simple process
+actually observable in operation--as denudation by weather, say, or
+variation from parental type, or change of dialect by incorporation of
+new words and pronunciations--and then to generalize it, making it apply
+to all times, and produce great results by summating its effects through
+the ages.
+
+The observable process which Schiller and Dewey particularly singled out
+for generalization is the familiar one by which any individual settles
+into NEW OPINIONS. The process here is always the same. The individual
+has a stock of old opinions already, but he meets a new experience that
+puts them to a strain. Somebody contradicts them; or in a reflective
+moment he discovers that they contradict each other; or he hears of
+facts with which they are incompatible; or desires arise in him which
+they cease to satisfy. The result is an inward trouble to which his
+mind till then had been a stranger, and from which he seeks to escape
+by modifying his previous mass of opinions. He saves as much of it as he
+can, for in this matter of belief we are all extreme conservatives. So
+he tries to change first this opinion, and then that (for they resist
+change very variously), until at last some new idea comes up which he
+can graft upon the ancient stock with a minimum of disturbance of the
+latter, some idea that mediates between the stock and the new experience
+and runs them into one another most felicitously and expediently.
+
+This new idea is then adopted as the true one. It preserves the older
+stock of truths with a minimum of modification, stretching them just
+enough to make them admit the novelty, but conceiving that in ways as
+familiar as the case leaves possible. An outree explanation, violating
+all our preconceptions, would never pass for a true account of a
+novelty. We should scratch round industriously till we found something
+less excentric. The most violent revolutions in an individual's beliefs
+leave most of his old order standing. Time and space, cause and effect,
+nature and history, and one's own biography remain untouched. New truth
+is always a go-between, a smoother-over of transitions. It marries old
+opinion to new fact so as ever to show a minimum of jolt, a maximum of
+continuity. We hold a theory true just in proportion to its success in
+solving this 'problem of maxima and minima.' But success in solving
+this problem is eminently a matter of approximation. We say this theory
+solves it on the whole more satisfactorily than that theory; but that
+means more satisfactorily to ourselves, and individuals will emphasize
+their points of satisfaction differently. To a certain degree,
+therefore, everything here is plastic.
+
+The point I now urge you to observe particularly is the part played by
+the older truths. Failure to take account of it is the source of much
+of the unjust criticism leveled against pragmatism. Their influence is
+absolutely controlling. Loyalty to them is the first principle--in
+most cases it is the only principle; for by far the most usual way
+of handling phenomena so novel that they would make for a serious
+rearrangement of our preconceptions is to ignore them altogether, or to
+abuse those who bear witness for them.
+
+You doubtless wish examples of this process of truth's growth, and the
+only trouble is their superabundance. The simplest case of new truth is
+of course the mere numerical addition of new kinds of facts, or of new
+single facts of old kinds, to our experience--an addition that involves
+no alteration in the old beliefs. Day follows day, and its contents are
+simply added. The new contents themselves are not true, they simply COME
+and ARE. Truth is what we say about them, and when we say that they have
+come, truth is satisfied by the plain additive formula.
+
+But often the day's contents oblige a rearrangement. If I should now
+utter piercing shrieks and act like a maniac on this platform, it
+would make many of you revise your ideas as to the probable worth of my
+philosophy. 'Radium' came the other day as part of the day's content,
+and seemed for a moment to contradict our ideas of the whole order of
+nature, that order having come to be identified with what is called
+the conservation of energy. The mere sight of radium paying heat away
+indefinitely out of its own pocket seemed to violate that conservation.
+What to think? If the radiations from it were nothing but an escape of
+unsuspected 'potential' energy, pre-existent inside of the atoms, the
+principle of conservation would be saved. The discovery of 'helium' as
+the radiation's outcome, opened a way to this belief. So Ramsay's view
+is generally held to be true, because, altho it extends our old ideas of
+energy, it causes a minimum of alteration in their nature.
+
+I need not multiply instances. A new opinion counts as 'true' just in
+proportion as it gratifies the individual's desire to assimilate the
+novel in his experience to his beliefs in stock. It must both lean on
+old truth and grasp new fact; and its success (as I said a moment ago)
+in doing this, is a matter for the individual's appreciation. When
+old truth grows, then, by new truth's addition, it is for subjective
+reasons. We are in the process and obey the reasons. That new idea is
+truest which performs most felicitously its function of satisfying our
+double urgency. It makes itself true, gets itself classed as true, by
+the way it works; grafting itself then upon the ancient body of truth,
+which thus grows much as a tree grows by the activity of a new layer of
+cambium.
+
+Now Dewey and Schiller proceed to generalize this observation and
+to apply it to the most ancient parts of truth. They also once were
+plastic. They also were called true for human reasons. They also
+mediated between still earlier truths and what in those days were novel
+observations. Purely objective truth, truth in whose establishment the
+function of giving human satisfaction in marrying previous parts of
+experience with newer parts played no role whatever, is nowhere to be
+found. The reasons why we call things true is the reason why they ARE
+true, for 'to be true' MEANS only to perform this marriage-function.
+
+The trail of the human serpent is thus over everything. Truth
+independent; truth that we FIND merely; truth no longer malleable to
+human need; truth incorrigible, in a word; such truth exists indeed
+superabundantly--or is supposed to exist by rationalistically minded
+thinkers; but then it means only the dead heart of the living tree, and
+its being there means only that truth also has its paleontology and its
+'prescription,' and may grow stiff with years of veteran service and
+petrified in men's regard by sheer antiquity. But how plastic even the
+oldest truths nevertheless really are has been vividly shown in our
+day by the transformation of logical and mathematical ideas, a
+transformation which seems even to be invading physics. The ancient
+formulas are reinterpreted as special expressions of much wider
+principles, principles that our ancestors never got a glimpse of in
+their present shape and formulation.
+
+Mr. Schiller still gives to all this view of truth the name of
+'Humanism,' but, for this doctrine too, the name of pragmatism seems
+fairly to be in the ascendant, so I will treat it under the name of
+pragmatism in these lectures.
+
+Such then would be the scope of pragmatism--first, a method; and second,
+a genetic theory of what is meant by truth. And these two things must be
+our future topics.
+
+What I have said of the theory of truth will, I am sure, have appeared
+obscure and unsatisfactory to most of you by reason of us brevity. I
+shall make amends for that hereafter. In a lecture on 'common sense' I
+shall try to show what I mean by truths grown petrified by antiquity. In
+another lecture I shall expatiate on the idea that our thoughts become
+true in proportion as they successfully exert their go-between function.
+In a third I shall show how hard it is to discriminate subjective from
+objective factors in Truth's development. You may not follow me wholly
+in these lectures; and if you do, you may not wholly agree with me. But
+you will, I know, regard me at least as serious, and treat my effort
+with respectful consideration.
+
+You will probably be surprised to learn, then, that Messrs. Schiller's
+and Dewey's theories have suffered a hailstorm of contempt and ridicule.
+All rationalism has risen against them. In influential quarters Mr.
+Schiller, in particular, has been treated like an impudent schoolboy who
+deserves a spanking. I should not mention this, but for the fact that it
+throws so much sidelight upon that rationalistic temper to which I have
+opposed the temper of pragmatism. Pragmatism is uncomfortable away from
+facts. Rationalism is comfortable only in the presence of abstractions.
+This pragmatist talk about truths in the plural, about their utility
+and satisfactoriness, about the success with which they 'work,' etc.,
+suggests to the typical intellectualist mind a sort of coarse lame
+second-rate makeshift article of truth. Such truths are not real truth.
+Such tests are merely subjective. As against this, objective truth must
+be something non-utilitarian, haughty, refined, remote, august, exalted.
+It must be an absolute correspondence of our thoughts with an equally
+absolute reality. It must be what we OUGHT to think, unconditionally.
+The conditioned ways in which we DO think are so much irrelevance and
+matter for psychology. Down with psychology, up with logic, in all this
+question!
+
+See the exquisite contrast of the types of mind! The pragmatist clings
+to facts and concreteness, observes truth at its work in particular
+cases, and generalizes. Truth, for him, becomes a class-name for all
+sorts of definite working-values in experience. For the rationalist it
+remains a pure abstraction, to the bare name of which we must defer.
+When the pragmatist undertakes to show in detail just WHY we must defer,
+the rationalist is unable to recognize the concretes from which his own
+abstraction is taken. He accuses us of DENYING truth; whereas we have
+only sought to trace exactly why people follow it and always ought
+to follow it. Your typical ultra-abstractionist fairly shudders at
+concreteness: other things equal, he positively prefers the pale and
+spectral. If the two universes were offered, he would always choose the
+skinny outline rather than the rich thicket of reality. It is so much
+purer, clearer, nobler.
+
+I hope that as these lectures go on, the concreteness and closeness to
+facts of the pragmatism which they advocate may be what approves itself
+to you as its most satisfactory peculiarity. It only follows here the
+example of the sister-sciences, interpreting the unobserved by the
+observed. It brings old and new harmoniously together. It converts the
+absolutely empty notion of a static relation of 'correspondence' (what
+that may mean we must ask later) between our minds and reality, into
+that of a rich and active commerce (that anyone may follow in detail and
+understand) between particular thoughts of ours, and the great universe
+of other experiences in which they play their parts and have their uses.
+
+But enough of this at present? The justification of what I say must be
+postponed. I wish now to add a word in further explanation of the claim
+I made at our last meeting, that pragmatism may be a happy harmonizer
+of empiricist ways of thinking, with the more religious demands of human
+beings.
+
+Men who are strongly of the fact-loving temperament, you may remember me
+to have said, are liable to be kept at a distance by the small sympathy
+with facts which that philosophy from the present-day fashion of
+idealism offers them. It is far too intellectualistic. Old fashioned
+theism was bad enough, with its notion of God as an exalted monarch,
+made up of a lot of unintelligible or preposterous 'attributes'; but, so
+long as it held strongly by the argument from design, it kept some touch
+with concrete realities. Since, however, darwinism has once for all
+displaced design from the minds of the 'scientific,' theism has lost
+that foothold; and some kind of an immanent or pantheistic deity working
+IN things rather than above them is, if any, the kind recommended to our
+contemporary imagination. Aspirants to a philosophic religion turn, as a
+rule, more hopefully nowadays towards idealistic pantheism than towards
+the older dualistic theism, in spite of the fact that the latter still
+counts able defenders.
+
+But, as I said in my first lecture, the brand of pantheism offered is
+hard for them to assimilate if they are lovers of facts, or empirically
+minded. It is the absolutistic brand, spurning the dust and reared upon
+pure logic. It keeps no connexion whatever with concreteness. Affirming
+the Absolute Mind, which is its substitute for God, to be the rational
+presupposition of all particulars of fact, whatever they may be, it
+remains supremely indifferent to what the particular facts in our world
+actually are. Be they what they may, the Absolute will father them. Like
+the sick lion in Esop's fable, all footprints lead into his den,
+but nulla vestigia retrorsum. You cannot redescend into the world of
+particulars by the Absolute's aid, or deduce any necessary consequences
+of detail important for your life from your idea of his nature. He gives
+you indeed the assurance that all is well with Him, and for his eternal
+way of thinking; but thereupon he leaves you to be finitely saved by
+your own temporal devices.
+
+Far be it from me to deny the majesty of this conception, or its
+capacity to yield religious comfort to a most respectable class of
+minds. But from the human point of view, no one can pretend that it
+doesn't suffer from the faults of remoteness and abstractness. It is
+eminently a product of what I have ventured to call the rationalistic
+temper. It disdains empiricism's needs. It substitutes a pallid outline
+for the real world's richness. It is dapper; it is noble in the bad
+sense, in the sense in which to be noble is to be inapt for humble
+service. 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
+against its truth, and as a philosophic 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, even more than his
+dignity is needed in the empyrean.
+
+Now pragmatism, devoted tho she be to facts, has no such materialistic
+bias as ordinary empiricism labors under. Moreover, she has no objection
+whatever to the realizing of abstractions, so long as you get about
+among particulars with their aid and they actually carry you somewhere.
+Interested in no conclusions but those which our minds and our
+experiences work out together, she has no a priori prejudices against
+theology. IF THEOLOGICAL IDEAS PROVE TO HAVE A VALUE FOR CONCRETE LIFE,
+THEY WILL BE TRUE, FOR PRAGMATISM, IN THE SENSE OF BEING GOOD FOR SO
+MUCH. FOR HOW MUCH MORE THEY ARE TRUE, WILL DEPEND ENTIRELY ON THEIR
+RELATIONS TO THE OTHER TRUTHS THAT ALSO HAVE TO BE ACKNOWLEDGED.
+
+What I said just now about the Absolute of transcendental idealism is a
+case in point. First, I called it majestic and said it yielded religious
+comfort to a class of minds, and then I accused it of remoteness and
+sterility. But so far as it affords such comfort, it surely is not
+sterile; it has that amount of value; it performs a concrete function.
+As a good pragmatist, I myself ought to call the Absolute true 'in so
+far forth,' then; and I unhesitatingly now do so.
+
+But what does TRUE IN SO FAR FORTH mean in this case? To answer, we need
+only apply the pragmatic method. What do believers in the Absolute mean
+by saying that their belief affords them comfort? They mean that since
+in the Absolute finite evil is 'overruled' already, we may, therefore,
+whenever we wish, treat the temporal as if it were potentially the
+eternal, be sure that we can trust its outcome, and, without sin,
+dismiss our fear and drop the worry of our finite responsibility. In
+short, they mean that we have a right ever and anon to take a moral
+holiday, to let the world wag in its own way, feeling that its issues
+are in better hands than ours and are none of our business.
+
+The universe is a system of which the individual members may relax their
+anxieties occasionally, in which the don't-care mood is also right for
+men, and moral holidays in order--that, if I mistake not, is part, at
+least, of what the Absolute is 'known-as,' that is the great difference
+in our particular experiences which his being true makes for us, that
+is part of his cash-value when he is pragmatically interpreted. Farther
+than that the ordinary lay-reader in philosophy who thinks favorably of
+absolute idealism does not venture to sharpen his conceptions. He can
+use the Absolute for so much, and so much is very precious. He is pained
+at hearing you speak incredulously of the Absolute, therefore, and
+disregards your criticisms because they deal with aspects of the
+conception that he fails to follow.
+
+If the Absolute means this, and means no more than this, who can
+possibly deny the truth of it? To deny it would be to insist that men
+should never relax, and that holidays are never in order. I am well
+aware how odd it must seem to some of you to hear me say that an idea is
+'true' so long as to believe it is profitable to our lives. That it is
+GOOD, for as much as it profits, you will gladly admit. If what we do
+by its aid is good, you will allow the idea itself to be good in so far
+forth, for we are the better for possessing it. But is it not a strange
+misuse of the word 'truth,' you will say, to call ideas also 'true' for
+this reason?
+
+To answer this difficulty fully is impossible at this stage of
+my account. You touch here upon the very central point of Messrs.
+Schiller's, Dewey's and my own doctrine of truth, which I cannot discuss
+with detail until my sixth lecture. Let me now say only this, that truth
+is ONE SPECIES OF GOOD, and not, as is usually supposed, a category
+distinct from good, and co-ordinate with it. THE TRUE IS THE NAME OF
+WHATEVER PROVES ITSELF TO BE GOOD IN THE WAY OF BELIEF, AND GOOD, TOO,
+FOR DEFINITE, ASSIGNABLE REASONS. Surely you must admit this, that if
+there were NO good for life in true ideas, or if the knowledge of them
+were positively disadvantageous and false ideas the only useful ones,
+then the current notion that truth is divine and precious, and its
+pursuit a duty, could never have grown up or become a dogma. In a world
+like that, our duty would be to SHUN truth, rather. But in this world,
+just as certain foods are not only agreeable to our taste, but good for
+our teeth, our stomach and our tissues; so certain ideas are not only
+agreeable to think about, or agreeable as supporting other ideas that we
+are fond of, but they are also helpful in life's practical struggles. If
+there be any life that it is really better we should lead, and if there
+be any idea which, if believed in, would help us to lead that life,
+then it would be really BETTER FOR US to believe in that idea, UNLESS,
+INDEED, BELIEF IN IT INCIDENTALLY CLASHED WITH OTHER GREATER VITAL
+BENEFITS.
+
+'What would be better for us to believe'! This sounds very like a
+definition of truth. It comes very near to saying 'what we OUGHT to
+believe': and in THAT definition none of you would find any oddity.
+Ought we ever not to believe what it is BETTER FOR US to believe? And
+can we then keep the notion of what is better for us, and what is true
+for us, permanently apart?
+
+Pragmatism says no, and I fully agree with her. Probably you also agree,
+so far as the abstract statement goes, but with a suspicion that if
+we practically did believe everything that made for good in our own
+personal lives, we should be found indulging all kinds of fancies about
+this world's affairs, and all kinds of sentimental superstitions about a
+world hereafter. Your suspicion here is undoubtedly well founded, and it
+is evident that something happens when you pass from the abstract to the
+concrete, that complicates the situation.
+
+I said just now that what is better for us to believe is true UNLESS THE
+BELIEF INCIDENTALLY CLASHES WITH SOME OTHER VITAL BENEFIT. Now in real
+life what vital benefits is any particular belief of ours most liable
+to clash with? What indeed except the vital benefits yielded by OTHER
+BELIEFS when these prove incompatible with the first ones? In other
+words, the greatest enemy of any one of our truths may be the rest
+of our truths. Truths have once for all this desperate instinct of
+self-preservation and of desire to extinguish whatever contradicts them.
+My belief in the Absolute, based on the good it does me, must run the
+gauntlet of all my other beliefs. Grant that it may be true in giving me
+a moral holiday. Nevertheless, as I conceive it,--and let me speak now
+confidentially, as it were, and merely in my own private person,--it
+clashes with other truths of mine whose benefits I hate to give up on
+its account. It happens to be associated with a kind of logic of which I
+am the enemy, I find that it entangles me in metaphysical paradoxes
+that are inacceptable, etc., etc.. But as I have enough trouble in
+life already without adding the trouble of carrying these intellectual
+inconsistencies, I personally just give up the Absolute. I just TAKE my
+moral holidays; or else as a professional philosopher, I try to justify
+them by some other principle.
+
+If I could restrict my notion of the Absolute to its bare holiday-giving
+value, it wouldn't clash with my other truths. But we cannot easily thus
+restrict our hypotheses. They carry supernumerary features, and these it
+is that clash so. My disbelief in the Absolute means then disbelief
+in those other supernumerary features, for I fully believe in the
+legitimacy of taking moral holidays.
+
+You see by this what I meant when I called pragmatism a mediator and
+reconciler and said, borrowing the word from Papini, that he unstiffens
+our theories. She has in fact no prejudices whatever, no obstructive
+dogmas, no rigid canons of what shall count as proof. She is completely
+genial. She will entertain any hypothesis, she will consider any
+evidence. It follows that in the religious field she is at a great
+advantage both over positivistic empiricism, with its anti-theological
+bias, and over religious rationalism, with its exclusive interest in
+the remote, the noble, the simple, and the abstract in the way of
+conception.
+
+In short, she widens the field of search for God. Rationalism sticks
+to logic and the empyrean. Empiricism sticks to the external senses.
+Pragmatism is willing to take anything, to follow either logic or the
+senses, and to count the humblest and most personal experiences. She
+will count mystical experiences if they have practical consequences.
+She will take a God who lives in the very dirt of private fact-if that
+should seem a likely place to find him.
+
+Her only test of probable truth is what works best in the way of leading
+us, what fits every part of life best and combines with the collectivity
+of experience's demands, nothing being omitted. If theological ideas
+should do this, if the notion of God, in particular, should prove to do
+it, how could pragmatism possibly deny God's existence? She could see
+no meaning in treating as 'not true' a notion that was pragmatically so
+successful. What other kind of truth could there be, for her, than all
+this agreement with concrete reality?
+
+In my last lecture I shall return again to the relations of pragmatism
+with religion. But you see already how democratic she is. Her manners
+are as various and flexible, her resources as rich and endless, and her
+conclusions as friendly as those of mother nature.
+
+
+
+
+Lecture III
+
+Some Metaphysical Problems Pragmatically Considered
+
+I am now to make the pragmatic method more familiar by giving you some
+illustrations of its application to particular problems. I will begin
+with what is driest, and the first thing I shall take will be the
+problem of Substance. Everyone uses the old distinction between
+substance and attribute, enshrined as it is in the very structure
+of human language, in the difference between grammatical subject and
+predicate. Here is a bit of blackboard crayon. Its modes, attributes,
+properties, accidents, or affections,--use which term you will,--are
+whiteness, friability, cylindrical shape, insolubility in water,
+etc., etc. But the bearer of these attributes is so much chalk,
+which thereupon is called the substance in which they inhere. So the
+attributes of this desk inhere in the substance 'wood,' those of my coat
+in the substance 'wool,' and so forth. Chalk, wood and wool, show again,
+in spite of their differences, common properties, and in so far forth
+they are themselves counted as modes of a still more primal substance,
+matter, the attributes of which are space occupancy and impenetrability.
+Similarly our thoughts and feelings are affections or properties of our
+several souls, which are substances, but again not wholly in their own
+right, for they are modes of the still deeper substance 'spirit.'
+
+Now it was very early seen that all we know of the chalk is
+the whiteness, friability, etc., all WE KNOW of the wood is the
+combustibility and fibrous structure. A group of attributes is what each
+substance here is known-as, they form its sole cash-value for our actual
+experience. The substance is in every case revealed through THEM; if we
+were cut off from THEM we should never suspect its existence; and if
+God should keep sending them to us in an unchanged order, miraculously
+annihilating at a certain moment the substance that supported them, we
+never could detect the moment, for our experiences themselves would be
+unaltered. Nominalists accordingly adopt the opinion that substance is
+a spurious idea due to our inveterate human trick of turning names
+into things. Phenomena come in groups--the chalk-group, the wood-group,
+etc.--and each group gets its name. The name we then treat as in a
+way supporting the group of phenomena. The low thermometer to-day,
+for instance, is supposed to come from something called the 'climate.'
+Climate is really only the name for a certain group of days, but it is
+treated as if it lay BEHIND the day, and in general we place the name,
+as if it were a being, behind the facts it is the name of. But the
+phenomenal properties of things, nominalists say, surely do not
+really inhere in names, and if not in names then they do not inhere
+in anything. They ADhere, or COhere, rather, WITH EACH OTHER, and the
+notion of a substance inaccessible to us, which we think accounts
+for such cohesion by supporting it, as cement might support pieces of
+mosaic, must be abandoned. The fact of the bare cohesion itself is all
+that the notion of the substance signifies. Behind that fact is nothing.
+
+Scholasticism has taken the notion of substance from common sense and
+made it very technical and articulate. Few things would seem to have
+fewer pragmatic consequences for us than substances, cut off as we are
+from every contact with them. Yet in one case scholasticism has proved
+the importance of the substance-idea by treating it pragmatically. I
+refer to certain disputes about the mystery of the Eucharist. Substance
+here would appear to have momentous pragmatic value. Since the accidents
+of the wafer don't change in the Lord's supper, and yet it has become
+the very body of Christ, it must be that the change is in the substance
+solely. The bread-substance must have been withdrawn, and the divine
+substance substituted miraculously without altering the immediate
+sensible properties. But tho these don't alter, a tremendous difference
+has been made, no less a one than this, that we who take the sacrament,
+now feed upon the very substance of divinity. The substance-notion
+breaks into life, then, with tremendous effect, if once you allow that
+substances can separate from their accidents, and exchange these latter.
+
+This is the only pragmatic application of the substance-idea with
+which I am acquainted; and it is obvious that it will only be treated
+seriously by those who already believe in the 'real presence' on
+independent grounds.
+
+MATERIAL SUBSTANCE was criticized by Berkeley with such telling effect
+that his name has reverberated through all subsequent philosophy.
+Berkeley's treatment of the notion of matter is so well known as to need
+hardly more than a mention. So far from denying the external world which
+we know, Berkeley corroborated it. It was the scholastic notion of a
+material substance unapproachable by us, BEHIND the external world,
+deeper and more real than it, and needed to support it, which Berkeley
+maintained to be the most effective of all reducers of the external
+world to unreality. Abolish that substance, he said, believe that God,
+whom you can understand and approach, sends you the sensible world
+directly, and you confirm the latter and back it up by his divine
+authority. Berkeley's criticism of 'matter' was consequently absolutely
+pragmatistic. Matter is known as our sensations of colour, figure,
+hardness and the like. They are the cash-value of the term. The
+difference matter makes to us by truly being is that we then get such
+sensations; by not being, is that we lack them. These sensations then
+are its sole meaning. Berkeley doesn't deny matter, then; he simply
+tells us what it consists of. It is a true name for just so much in the
+way of sensations.
+
+Locke, and later Hume, applied a similar pragmatic criticism to the
+notion of SPIRITUAL SUBSTANCE. I will only mention Locke's treatment
+of our 'personal identity.' He immediately reduces this notion to its
+pragmatic value in terms of experience. It means, he says, so much
+consciousness,' namely the fact that at one moment of life we remember
+other moments, and feel them all as parts of one and the same personal
+history. Rationalism had explained this practical continuity in our life
+by the unity of our soul-substance. But Locke says: suppose that God
+should take away the consciousness, should WE be any the better
+for having still the soul-principle? Suppose he annexed the same
+consciousness to different souls, | should we, as WE realize OURSELVES,
+be any the worse for that fact? In Locke's day the soul was chiefly a
+thing to be rewarded or punished. See how Locke, discussing it from this
+point of view, keeps the question pragmatic:
+
+Suppose, he says, one to think himself to be the same soul that once was
+Nestor or Thersites. Can he think their actions his own any more than
+the actions of any other man that ever existed? But | let him once find
+himself CONSCIOUS of any of the actions of Nestor, he then finds himself
+the same person with Nestor. ... In this personal identity is founded
+all the right and justice of reward and punishment. It may be reasonable
+to think, no one shall be made to answer for what he knows nothing of,
+but shall receive his doom, his consciousness accusing or excusing.
+Supposing a man punished now for what he had done in another life,
+whereof he could be made to have no consciousness at all, what
+difference is there between that punishment and being created miserable?
+
+Our personal identity, then, consists, for Locke, solely in
+pragmatically definable particulars. Whether, apart from these
+verifiable facts, it also inheres in a spiritual principle, is a merely
+curious speculation. Locke, compromiser that he was, passively tolerated
+the belief in a substantial soul behind our consciousness. But his
+successor Hume, and most empirical psychologists after him, have denied
+the soul, save as the name for verifiable cohesions in our inner life.
+They redescend into the stream of experience with it, and cash it into
+so much small-change value in the way of 'ideas' and their peculiar
+connexions with each other. As I said of Berkeley's matter, the soul is
+good or 'true' for just SO MUCH, but no more.
+
+The mention of material substance naturally suggests the doctrine of
+'materialism,' but philosophical materialism is not necessarily knit
+up with belief in 'matter,' as a metaphysical principle. One may
+deny matter in that sense, as strongly as Berkeley did, one may be a
+phenomenalist like Huxley, and yet one may still be a materialist in the
+wider sense, of explaining higher phenomena by lower ones, and leaving
+the destinies of the world at the mercy of its blinder parts and forces.
+It is in this wider sense of the word that materialism is opposed to
+spiritualism or theism. The laws of physical nature are what run things,
+materialism says. The highest productions of human genius might be
+ciphered by one who had complete acquaintance with the facts, out of
+their physiological conditions, regardless whether nature be there only
+for our minds, as idealists contend, or not. Our minds in any case would
+have to record the kind of nature it is, and write it down as operating
+through blind laws of physics. This is the complexion of present day
+materialism, which may better be called naturalism. Over against it
+stands 'theism,' or what in a wide sense may be termed 'spiritualism.'
+Spiritualism says that mind not only witnesses and records things, but
+also runs and operates them: the world being thus guided, not by its
+lower, but by its higher element.
+
+Treated as it often is, this question becomes little more than a
+conflict between aesthetic preferences. Matter is gross, coarse, crass,
+muddy; spirit is pure, elevated, noble; and since it is more consonant
+with the dignity of the universe to give the primacy in it to what
+appears superior, spirit must be affirmed as the ruling principle. To
+treat abstract principles as finalities, before which our intellects
+may come to rest in a state of admiring contemplation, is the great
+rationalist failing. Spiritualism, as often held, may be simply a
+state of admiration for one kind, and of dislike for another kind,
+of abstraction. I remember a worthy spiritualist professor who always
+referred to materialism as the 'mud-philosophy,' and deemed it thereby
+refuted.
+
+To such spiritualism as this there is an easy answer, and Mr. Spencer
+makes it effectively. In some well-written pages at the end of the
+first volume of his Psychology he shows us that a 'matter' so infinitely
+subtile, and performing motions as inconceivably quick and fine as those
+which modern science postulates in her explanations, has no trace of
+grossness left. He shows that the conception of spirit, as we mortals
+hitherto have framed it, is itself too gross to cover the exquisite
+tenuity of nature's facts. Both terms, he says, are but symbols,
+pointing to that one unknowable reality in which their oppositions
+cease.
+
+To an abstract objection an abstract rejoinder suffices; and so far as
+one's opposition to materialism springs from one's disdain of matter as
+something 'crass,' Mr. Spencer cuts the ground from under one. Matter is
+indeed infinitely and incredibly refined. To anyone who has ever looked
+on the face of a dead child or parent the mere fact that matter COULD
+have taken for a time that precious form, ought to make matter sacred
+ever after. It makes no difference what the PRINCIPLE of life may be,
+material or immaterial, matter at any rate co-operates, lends itself
+to all life's purposes. That beloved incarnation was among matter's
+possibilities.
+
+But now, instead of resting in principles after this stagnant
+intellectualist fashion, let us apply the pragmatic method to the
+question. What do we MEAN by matter? What practical difference can it
+make NOW that the world should be run by matter or by spirit? I think we
+find that the problem takes with this a rather different character.
+
+And first of all I call your attention to a curious fact. It makes not
+a single jot of difference so far as the PAST of the world goes, whether
+we deem it to have been the work of matter or whether we think a divine
+spirit was its author.
+
+Imagine, in fact, the entire contents of the world to be once for all
+irrevocably given. Imagine it to end this very moment, and to have
+no future; and then let a theist and a materialist apply their rival
+explanations to its history. The theist shows how a God made it; the
+materialist shows, and we will suppose with equal success, how it
+resulted from blind physical forces. Then let the pragmatist be asked to
+choose between their theories. How can he apply his test if the world
+is already completed? Concepts for him are things to come back into
+experience with, things to make us look for differences. But by
+hypothesis there is to be no more experience and no possible differences
+can now be looked for. Both theories have shown all their consequences
+and, by the hypothesis we are adopting, these are identical. The
+pragmatist must consequently say that the two theories, in spite of
+their different-sounding names, mean exactly the same thing, and that
+the dispute is purely verbal. [I am opposing, of course, that the
+theories HAVE been equally successful in their explanations of what is.]
+
+For just consider the case sincerely, and say what would be the WORTH
+of a God if he WERE there, with his work accomplished and his world run
+down. He would be worth no more than just that world was worth. To that
+amount of result, with its mixed merits and defects, his creative power
+could attain, but go no farther. And since there is to be no future;
+since the whole value and meaning of the world has been already paid in
+and actualized in the feelings that went with it in the passing, and now
+go with it in the ending; since it draws no supplemental significance
+(such as our real world draws) from its function of preparing something
+yet to come; why then, by it we take God's measure, as it were. He
+is the Being who could once for all do THAT; and for that much we
+are thankful to him, but for nothing more. But now, on the contrary
+hypothesis, namely, that the bits of matter following their laws could
+make that world and do no less, should we not be just as thankful to
+them? Wherein should we suffer loss, then, if we dropped God as an
+hypothesis and made the matter alone responsible? Where would any
+special deadness, or crassness, come in? And how, experience being what
+is once for all, would God's presence in it make it any more living or
+richer?
+
+Candidly, it is impossible to give any answer to this question. The
+actually experienced world is supposed to be the same in its details
+on either hypothesis, "the same, for our praise or blame," as Browning
+says. It stands there indefeasibly: a gift which can't be taken back.
+Calling matter the cause of it retracts no single one of the items that
+have made it up, nor does calling God the cause augment them. They are
+the God or the atoms, respectively, of just that and no other world. The
+God, if there, has been doing just what atoms could do--appearing in the
+character of atoms, so to speak--and earning such gratitude as is due to
+atoms, and no more. If his presence lends no different turn or issue to
+the performance, it surely can lend it no increase of dignity. Nor would
+indignity come to it were he absent, and did the atoms remain the only
+actors on the stage. When a play is once over, and the curtain down,
+you really make it no better by claiming an illustrious genius for its
+author, just as you make it no worse by calling him a common hack.
+
+Thus if no future detail of experience or conduct is to be deduced from
+our hypothesis, the debate between materialism and theism becomes quite
+idle and insignificant. Matter and God in that event mean exactly the
+same thing--the power, namely, neither more nor less, that could make
+just this completed world--and the wise man is he who in such a case
+would turn his back on such a supererogatory discussion. Accordingly,
+most men instinctively, and positivists and scientists deliberately,
+do turn their backs on philosophical disputes from which nothing in the
+line of definite future consequences can be seen to follow. The verbal
+and empty character of philosophy is surely a reproach with which we
+are, but too familiar. If pragmatism be true, it is a perfectly sound
+reproach unless the theories under fire can be shown to have alternative
+practical outcomes, however delicate and distant these may be. The
+common man and the scientist say they discover no such outcomes, and if
+the metaphysician can discern none either, the others certainly are
+in the right of it, as against him. His science is then but pompous
+trifling; and the endowment of a professorship for such a being would be
+silly.
+
+Accordingly, in every genuine metaphysical debate some practical issue,
+however conjectural and remote, is involved. To realize this, revert
+with me to our question, and place yourselves this time in the world we
+live in, in the world that HAS a future, that is yet uncompleted whilst
+we speak. In this unfinished world the alternative of 'materialism or
+theism?' is intensely practical; and it is worth while for us to spend
+some minutes of our hour in seeing that it is so.
+
+How, indeed, does the program differ for us, according as we consider
+that the facts of experience up to date are purposeless configurations
+of blind atoms moving according to eternal laws, or that on the other
+hand they are due to the providence of God? As far as the past facts
+go, indeed there is no difference. Those facts are in, are bagged, are
+captured; and the good that's in them is gained, be the atoms or be the
+God their cause. There are accordingly many materialists about us
+to-day who, ignoring altogether the future and practical aspects of the
+question, seek to eliminate the odium attaching to the word materialism,
+and even to eliminate the word itself, by showing that, if matter could
+give birth to all these gains, why then matter, functionally considered,
+is just as divine an entity as God, in fact coalesces with God, is what
+you mean by God. Cease, these persons advise us, to use either of these
+terms, with their outgrown opposition. Use a term free of the clerical
+connotations, on the one hand; of the suggestion of gross-ness,
+coarseness, ignobility, on the other. Talk of the primal mystery, of the
+unknowable energy, of the one and only power, instead of saying either
+God or matter. This is the course to which Mr. Spencer urges us; and if
+philosophy were purely retrospective, he would thereby proclaim himself
+an excellent pragmatist.
+
+But philosophy is prospective also, and, after finding what the world
+has been and done and yielded, still asks the further question 'what
+does the world PROMISE?' Give us a matter that promises SUCCESS, that is
+bound by its laws to lead our world ever nearer to perfection, and any
+rational man will worship that matter as readily as Mr. Spencer
+worships his own so-called unknowable power. It not only has made for
+righteousness up to date, but it will make for righteousness forever;
+and that is all we need. Doing practically all that a God can do, it is
+equivalent to God, its function is a God's function, and is exerted in
+a world in which a God would now be superfluous; from such a world a God
+could never lawfully be missed. 'Cosmic emotion' would here be the right
+name for religion.
+
+But is the matter by which Mr. Spencer's process of cosmic evolution is
+carried on any such principle of never-ending perfection as this? Indeed
+it is not, for the future end of every cosmically evolved thing or
+system of things is foretold by science to be death and tragedy; and
+Mr. Spencer, in confining himself to the aesthetic and ignoring the
+practical side of the controversy, has really contributed nothing
+serious to its relief. But apply now our principle of practical results,
+and see what a vital significance the question of materialism or theism
+immediately acquires.
+
+Theism and materialism, so indifferent when taken retrospectively,
+point, when we take them prospectively, to wholly different outlooks of
+experience. For, according to the theory of mechanical evolution, the
+laws of redistribution of matter and motion, tho they are certainly to
+thank for all the good hours which our organisms have ever yielded
+us and for all the ideals which our minds now frame, are yet fatally
+certain to undo their work again, and to redissolve everything that they
+have once evolved. You all know the picture of the last state of the
+universe which evolutionary science foresees. I cannot state it better
+than in Mr. Balfour's words: "The energies of our system will decay, the
+glory of the sun will be dimmed, and the earth, tideless and inert,
+will no longer tolerate the race which has for a moment disturbed its
+solitude. Man will go down into the pit, and all his thoughts will
+perish. The uneasy, consciousness which in this obscure corner has for
+a brief space broken the contented silence of the universe, will be at
+rest. Matter will know itself no longer. 'Imperishable monuments' and
+'immortal deeds,' death itself, and love stronger than death, will be as
+though they had never been. Nor will anything that is, be better or be
+worse for all that the labour, genius, devotion, and suffering of man
+have striven through countless generations to effect." [Footnote: The
+Foundations of Belief, p. 30.]
+
+That is the sting of it, that in the vast driftings of the cosmic
+weather, tho many a jeweled shore appears, and many an enchanted
+cloud-bank floats away, long lingering ere it be dissolved--even as our
+world now lingers, for our joy-yet when these transient products are
+gone, nothing, absolutely NOTHING remains, of represent those particular
+qualities, those elements of preciousness which they may have enshrined.
+Dead and gone are they, gone utterly from the very sphere and room of
+being. Without an echo; without a memory; without an influence on aught
+that may come after, to make it care for similar ideals. This utter
+final wreck and tragedy is of the essence of scientific materialism
+as at present understood. The lower and not the higher forces are the
+eternal forces, or the last surviving forces within the only cycle of
+evolution which we can definitely see. Mr. Spencer believes this as much
+as anyone; so why should he argue with us as if we were making silly
+aesthetic objections to the 'grossness' of 'matter and motion,' the
+principles of his philosophy, when what really dismays us is the
+disconsolateness of its ulterior practical results?
+
+No the true objection to materialism is not positive but negative. It
+would be farcical at this day to make complaint of it for what it IS for
+'grossness.' Grossness is what grossness DOES--we now know THAT. We make
+complaint of it, on the contrary, for what it is NOT--not a permanent
+warrant for our more ideal interests, not a fulfiller of our remotest
+hopes.
+
+The notion of God, on the other hand, however inferior it may be
+in clearness to those mathematical notions so current in mechanical
+philosophy, has at least this practical superiority over them, that it
+guarantees an ideal order that shall be permanently preserved. A world
+with a God in it to say the last word, may indeed burn up or freeze,
+but we then think of him as still mindful of the old ideals and sure to
+bring them elsewhere to fruition; so that, where he is, tragedy is
+only provisional and partial, and shipwreck and dissolution not the
+absolutely final things. This need of an eternal moral order is one
+of the deepest needs of our breast. And those poets, like Dante and
+Wordsworth, who live on the conviction of such an order, owe to that
+fact the extraordinary tonic and consoling power of their verse. Here
+then, in these different emotional and practical appeals, in these
+adjustments of our concrete attitudes of hope and expectation, and all
+the delicate consequences which their differences entail, lie the
+real meanings of materialism and spiritualism--not in hair-splitting
+abstractions about matter's inner essence, or about the metaphysical
+attributes of God. Materialism means simply the denial that the moral
+order is eternal, and the cutting off of ultimate hopes; spiritualism
+means the affirmation of an eternal moral order and the letting loose of
+hope. Surely here is an issue genuine enough, for anyone who feels
+it; and, as long as men are men, it will yield matter for a serious
+philosophic debate.
+
+But possibly some of you may still rally to their defence. Even whilst
+admitting that spiritualism and materialism make different prophecies
+of the world's future, you may yourselves pooh-pooh the difference as
+something so infinitely remote as to mean nothing for a sane mind. The
+essence of a sane mind, you may say, is to take shorter views, and to
+feel no concern about such chimaeras as the latter end of the world.
+Well, I can only say that if you say this, you do injustice to human
+nature. Religious melancholy is not disposed of by a simple flourish of
+the word insanity. The absolute things, the last things, the overlapping
+things, are the truly philosophic concerns; all superior minds feel
+seriously about them, and the mind with the shortest views is simply the
+mind of the more shallow man.
+
+The issues of fact at stake in the debate are of course vaguely enough
+conceived by us at present. But spiritualistic faith in all its forms
+deals with a world of PROMISE, while materialism's sun sets in a sea of
+disappointment. Remember what I said of the Absolute: it grants us moral
+holidays. Any religious view does this. It not only incites our more
+strenuous moments, but it also takes our joyous, careless, trustful
+moments, and it justifies them. It paints the grounds of justification
+vaguely enough, to be sure. The exact features of the saving future
+facts that our belief in God insures, will have to be ciphered out
+by the interminable methods of science: we can STUDY our God only by
+studying his Creation. But we can ENJOY our God, if we have one, in
+advance of all that labor. I myself believe that the evidence for God
+lies primarily in inner personal experiences. When they have once given
+you your God, his name means at least the benefit of the holiday. You
+remember what I said yesterday about the way in which truths clash and
+try to 'down' each other. The truth of 'God' has to run the gauntlet of
+all our other truths. It is on trial by them and they on trial by it.
+Our FINAL opinion about God can be settled only after all the truths
+have straightened themselves out together. Let us hope that they shall
+find a modus vivendi!
+
+Let me pass to a very cognate philosophic problem, the QUESTION of
+DESIGN IN NATURE. God's existence has from time immemorial been held to
+be proved by certain natural facts. Many facts appear as if expressly
+designed in view of one another. Thus the woodpecker's bill, tongue,
+feet, tail, etc., fit him wondrously for a world of trees with grubs hid
+in their bark to feed upon. The parts of our eye fit the laws of light
+to perfection, leading its rays to a sharp picture on our retina. Such
+mutual fitting of things diverse in origin argued design, it was held;
+and the designer was always treated as a man-loving deity.
+
+The first step in these arguments was to prove that the design existed.
+Nature was ransacked for results obtained through separate things being
+co-adapted. Our eyes, for instance, originate in intra-uterine darkness,
+and the light originates in the sun, yet see how they fit each other.
+They are evidently made FOR each other. Vision is the end designed,
+light and eyes the separate means devised for its attainment.
+
+It is strange, considering how unanimously our ancestors felt the force
+of this argument, to see how little it counts for since the triumph
+of the darwinian theory. Darwin opened our minds to the power of
+chance-happenings to bring forth 'fit' results if only they have time
+to add themselves together. He showed the enormous waste of nature in
+producing results that get destroyed because of their unfitness. He also
+emphasized the number of adaptations which, if designed, would argue
+an evil rather than a good designer. Here all depends upon the point
+of view. To the grub under the bark the exquisite fitness of the
+woodpecker's organism to extract him would certainly argue a diabolical
+designer.
+
+Theologians have by this time stretched their minds so as to embrace
+the darwinian facts, and yet to interpret them as still showing divine
+purpose. It used to be a question of purpose AGAINST mechanism, of
+one OR the other. It was as if one should say "My shoes are evidently
+designed to fit my feet, hence it is impossible that they should have
+been produced by machinery." We know that they are both: they are made
+by a machinery itself designed to fit the feet with shoes. Theology need
+only stretch similarly the designs of God. As the aim of a football-team
+is not merely to get the ball to a certain goal (if that were so, they
+would simply get up on some dark night and place it there), but to get
+it there by a fixed MACHINERY OF CONDITIONS--the game's rules and the
+opposing players; so the aim of God is not merely, let us say, to make
+men and to save them, but rather to get this done through the sole
+agency of nature's vast machinery. Without nature's stupendous laws and
+counterforces, man's creation and perfection, we might suppose, would be
+too insipid achievements for God to have designed them.
+
+This saves the form of the design-argument at the expense of its old
+easy human content. The designer is no longer the old man-like deity.
+His designs have grown so vast as to be incomprehensible to us humans.
+The WHAT of them so overwhelms us that to establish the mere THAT of a
+designer for them becomes of very little consequence in comparison.
+We can with difficulty comprehend the character of a cosmic mind whose
+purposes are fully revealed by the strange mixture of goods and evils
+that we find in this actual world's particulars. Or rather we cannot by
+any possibility comprehend it. The mere word 'design' by itself has,
+we see, no consequences and explains nothing. It is the barrenest of
+principles. The old question of WHETHER there is design is idle.
+The real question is WHAT is the world, whether or not it have a
+designer--and that can be revealed only by the study of all nature's
+particulars.
+
+Remember that no matter what nature may have produced or may be
+producing, the means must necessarily have been adequate, must have been
+FITTED TO THAT PRODUCTION. The argument from fitness to design would
+consequently always apply, whatever were the product's character. The
+recent Mont-Pelee eruption, for example, required all previous history
+to produce that exact combination of ruined houses, human and animal
+corpses, sunken ships, volcanic ashes, etc., in just that one hideous
+configuration of positions. France had to be a nation and colonize
+Martinique. Our country had to exist and send our ships there. IF God
+aimed at just that result, the means by which the centuries bent their
+influences towards it, showed exquisite intelligence. And so of any
+state of things whatever, either in nature or in history, which we
+find actually realized. For the parts of things must always make SOME
+definite resultant, be it chaotic or harmonious. When we look at what
+has actually come, the conditions must always appear perfectly designed
+to ensure it. We can always say, therefore, in any conceivable world, of
+any conceivable character, that the whole cosmic machinery MAY have been
+designed to produce it.
+
+Pragmatically, then, the abstract word 'design' is a blank cartridge. It
+carries no consequences, it does no execution. What sort of design? and
+what sort of a designer? are the only serious questions, and the study
+of facts is the only way of getting even approximate answers. Meanwhile,
+pending the slow answer from facts, anyone who insists that there is a
+designer and who is sure he is a divine one, gets a certain pragmatic
+benefit from the term--the same, in fact which we saw that the terms
+God, Spirit, or the Absolute, yield us 'Design,' worthless tho it be
+as a mere rationalistic principle set above or behind things for our
+admiration, becomes, if our faith concretes it into something theistic,
+a term of PROMISE. Returning with it into experience, we gain a more
+confiding outlook on the future. If not a blind force but a seeing
+force runs things, we may reasonably expect better issues. This vague
+confidence in the future is the sole pragmatic meaning at present
+discernible in the terms design and designer. But if cosmic confidence
+is right not wrong, better not worse, that is a most important meaning.
+That much at least of possible 'truth' the terms will then have in them.
+
+Let me take up another well-worn controversy, THE FREE-WILL PROBLEM.
+Most persons who believe in what is called their free-will do so after
+the rationalistic fashion. It is a principle, a positive faculty or
+virtue added to man, by which his dignity is enigmatically augmented. He
+ought to believe it for this reason. Determinists, who deny it, who say
+that individual men originate nothing, but merely transmit to the
+future the whole push of the past cosmos of which they are so small
+an expression, diminish man. He is less admirable, stripped of this
+creative principle. I imagine that more than half of you share our
+instinctive belief in free-will, and that admiration of it as a
+principle of dignity has much to do with your fidelity.
+
+But free-will has also been discussed pragmatically, and, strangely
+enough, the same pragmatic interpretation has been put upon it by both
+disputants. You know how large a part questions of ACCOUNTABILITY have
+played in ethical controversy. To hear some persons, one would suppose
+that all that ethics aims at is a code of merits and demerits. Thus does
+the old legal and theological leaven, the interest in crime and sin and
+punishment abide with us. 'Who's to blame? whom can we punish? whom
+will God punish?'--these preoccupations hang like a bad dream over man's
+religious history.
+
+So both free-will and determinism have been inveighed against and called
+absurd, because each, in the eyes of its enemies, has seemed to prevent
+the 'imputability' of good or bad deeds to their authors. Queer antinomy
+this! Free-will means novelty, the grafting on to the past of something
+not involved therein. If our acts were predetermined, if we merely
+transmitted the push of the whole past, the free-willists say, how could
+we be praised or blamed for anything? We should be 'agents' only, not
+'principals,' and where then would be our precious imputability and
+responsibility?
+
+But where would it be if we HAD free-will? rejoin the determinists. If a
+'free' act be a sheer novelty, that comes not FROM me, the previous
+me, but ex nihilo, and simply tacks itself on to me, how can _I_, the
+previous I, be responsible? How can I have any permanent CHARACTER that
+will stand still long enough for praise or blame to be awarded? The
+chaplet of my days tumbles into a cast of disconnected beads as soon
+as the thread of inner necessity is drawn out by the preposterous
+indeterminist doctrine. Messrs. Fullerton and McTaggart have recently
+laid about them doughtily with this argument.
+
+It may be good ad hominem, but otherwise it is pitiful. For I ask you,
+quite apart from other reasons, whether any man, woman or child, with a
+sense for realities, ought not to be ashamed to plead such principles
+as either dignity or imputability. Instinct and utility between them
+can safely be trusted to carry on the social business of punishment and
+praise. If a man does good acts we shall praise him, if he does bad acts
+we shall punish him--anyhow, and quite apart from theories as to whether
+the acts result from what was previous in him or are novelties in a
+strict sense. To make our human ethics revolve about the question of
+'merit' is a piteous unreality--God alone can know our merits, if we
+have any. The real ground for supposing free-will is indeed pragmatic,
+but it has nothing to do with this contemptible right to punish which
+had made such a noise in past discussions of the subject.
+
+Free-will pragmatically means NOVELTIES IN THE WORLD, the right to
+expect that in its deepest elements as well as in its surface phenomena,
+the future may not identically repeat and imitate the past. That
+imitation en masse is there, who can deny? The general 'uniformity
+of nature' is presupposed by every lesser law. But nature may be only
+approximately uniform; and persons in whom knowledge of the world's past
+has bred pessimism (or doubts as to the world's good character, which
+become certainties if that character be supposed eternally fixed) may
+naturally welcome free-will as a MELIORISTIC doctrine. It holds up
+improvement as at least possible; whereas determinism assures us that
+our whole notion of possibility is born of human ignorance, and that
+necessity and impossibility between them rule the destinies of the
+world.
+
+Free-will is thus a general cosmological theory of PROMISE, just like
+the Absolute, God, Spirit or Design. Taken abstractly, no one of these
+terms has any inner content, none of them gives us any picture, and
+no one of them would retain the least pragmatic value in a world
+whose character was obviously perfect from the start. Elation at mere
+existence, pure cosmic emotion and delight, would, it seems to me,
+quench all interest in those speculations, if the world were nothing but
+a lubberland of happiness already. Our interest in religious metaphysics
+arises in the fact that our empirical future feels to us unsafe, and
+needs some higher guarantee. If the past and present were purely good,
+who could wish that the future might possibly not resemble them? Who
+could desire free-will? Who would not say, with Huxley, "let me be wound
+up every day like a watch, to go right fatally, and I ask no better
+freedom." 'Freedom' in a world already perfect could only mean
+freedom to BE WORSE, and who could be so insane as to wish that? To be
+necessarily what it is, to be impossibly aught else, would put the
+last touch of perfection upon optimism's universe. Surely the only
+POSSIBILITY that one can rationally claim is the possibility that things
+may be BETTER. That possibility, I need hardly say, is one that, as the
+actual world goes, we have ample grounds for desiderating.
+
+Free-will thus has no meaning unless it be a doctrine of RELIEF. As
+such, it takes its place with other religious doctrines. Between them,
+they build up the old wastes and repair the former desolations. Our
+spirit, shut within this courtyard of sense-experience, is always saying
+to the intellect upon the tower: 'Watchman, tell us of the night, if it
+aught of promise bear,' and the intellect gives it then these terms of
+promise.
+
+Other than this practical significance, the words God, free-will,
+design, etc., have none. Yet dark tho they be in themselves, or
+intellectualistically taken, when we bear them into life's thicket with
+us the darkness THERE grows light about us. If you stop, in dealing with
+such words, with their definition, thinking that to be an intellectual
+finality, where are you? Stupidly staring at a pretentious sham! "Deus
+est Ens, a se, extra et supra omne genus, necessarium, unum, infinite
+perfectum, simplex, immutabile, immensum, aeternum, intelligens,"
+etc.,--wherein is such a definition really instructive? It means less,
+than nothing, in its pompous robe of adjectives. Pragmatism alone can
+read a positive meaning into it, and for that she turns her back upon
+the intellectualist point of view altogether. 'God's in his heaven;
+all's right with the world!'--THAT'S the heart of your theology, and for
+that you need no rationalist definitions.
+
+Why shouldn't we all of us, rationalists as well as pragmatists, confess
+this? Pragmatism, so far from keeping her eyes bent on the immediate
+practical foreground, as she is accused of doing, dwells just as much
+upon the world's remotest perspectives.
+
+See then how all these ultimate questions turn, as it were, up
+their hinges; and from looking backwards upon principles, upon an
+erkenntnisstheoretische Ich, a God, a Kausalitaetsprinzip, a Design, a
+Free-will, taken in themselves, as something august and exalted above
+facts,--see, I say, how pragmatism shifts the emphasis and looks forward
+into facts themselves. The really vital question for us all is, What is
+this world going to be? What is life eventually to make of itself? The
+centre of gravity of philosophy must therefore alter its place. The
+earth of things, long thrown into shadow by the glories of the upper
+ether, must resume its rights. To shift the emphasis in this way means
+that philosophic questions will fall to be treated by minds of a
+less abstractionist type than heretofore, minds more scientific and
+individualistic in their tone yet not irreligious either. It will be
+an alteration in 'the seat of authority' that reminds one almost of the
+protestant reformation. And as, to papal minds, protestantism has
+often seemed a mere mess of anarchy and confusion, such, no doubt, will
+pragmatism often seem to ultra-rationalist minds in philosophy. It will
+seem so much sheer trash, philosophically. But life wags on, all the
+same, and compasses its ends, in protestant countries. I venture to
+think that philosophic protestantism will compass a not dissimilar
+prosperity.
+
+
+
+
+Lecture IV
+
+The One and the Many
+
+We saw in the last lecture that the pragmatic method, in its dealings
+with certain concepts, instead of ending with admiring contemplation,
+plunges forward into the river of experience with them and prolongs the
+perspective by their means. Design, free-will, the absolute mind, spirit
+instead of matter, have for their sole meaning a better promise as to
+this world's outcome. Be they false or be they true, the meaning of them
+is this meliorism. I have sometimes thought of the phenomenon called
+'total reflexion' in optics as a good symbol of the relation between
+abstract ideas and concrete realities, as pragmatism conceives it. Hold
+a tumbler of water a little above your eyes and look up through the
+water at its surface--or better still look similarly through the flat
+wall of an aquarium. You will then see an extraordinarily brilliant
+reflected image say of a candle-flame, or any other clear object,
+situated on the opposite side of the vessel. No candle-ray, under these
+circumstances gets beyond the water's surface: every ray is totally
+reflected back into the depths again. Now let the water represent the
+world of sensible facts, and let the air above it represent the world of
+abstract ideas. Both worlds are real, of course, and interact; but they
+interact only at their boundary, and the locus of everything that lives,
+and happens to us, so far as full experience goes, is the water. We are
+like fishes swimming in the sea of sense, bounded above by the superior
+element, but unable to breathe it pure or penetrate it. We get our
+oxygen from it, however, we touch it incessantly, now in this part, now
+in that, and every time we touch it we are reflected back into the water
+with our course re-determined and re-energized. The abstract ideas of
+which the air consists, indispensable for life, but irrespirable by
+themselves, as it were, and only active in their re-directing function.
+All similes are halting but this one rather takes my fancy. It shows
+how something, not sufficient for life in itself, may nevertheless be an
+effective determinant of life elsewhere.
+
+In this present hour I wish to illustrate the pragmatic method by one
+more application. I wish to turn its light upon the ancient problem
+of 'the one and the many.' I suspect that in but few of you has this
+problem occasioned sleepless nights, and I should not be astonished if
+some of you told me it had never vexed you. I myself have come, by long
+brooding over it, to consider it the most central of all philosophic
+problems, central because so pregnant. I mean by this that if you know
+whether a man is a decided monist or a decided pluralist, you perhaps
+know more about the rest of his opinions than if you give him any other
+name ending in IST. To believe in the one or in the many, that is the
+classification with the maximum number of consequences. So bear with
+me for an hour while I try to inspire you with my own interest in the
+problem.
+
+Philosophy has often been defined as the quest or the vision of the
+world's unity. We never hear this definition challenged, and it is true
+as far as it goes, for philosophy has indeed manifested above all things
+its interest in unity. But how about the VARIETY in things? Is that such
+an irrelevant matter? If instead of using the term philosophy, we talk
+in general of our intellect and its needs we quickly see that unity
+is only one of these. Acquaintance with the details of fact is always
+reckoned, along with their reduction to system, as an indispensable
+mark of mental greatness. Your 'scholarly' mind, of encyclopedic,
+philological type, your man essentially of learning, has never lacked
+for praise along with your philosopher. What our intellect really aims
+at is neither variety nor unity taken singly but totality.[Footnote:
+Compare A. Bellanger: Les concepts de Cause, et l'activite intentionelle
+de l'Esprit. Paris, Alcan, 1905, p. 79 ff.] In this, acquaintance with
+reality's diversities is as important as understanding their connexion.
+The human passion of curiosity runs on all fours with the systematizing
+passion.
+
+In spite of this obvious fact the unity of things has always been
+considered more illustrious, as it were, than their variety. When a
+young man first conceives the notion that the whole world forms
+one great fact, with all its parts moving abreast, as it were, and
+interlocked, he feels as if he were enjoying a great insight, and looks
+superciliously on all who still fall short of this sublime conception.
+Taken thus abstractly as it first comes to one, the monistic insight is
+so vague as hardly to seem worth defending intellectually. Yet probably
+everyone in this audience in some way cherishes it. A certain abstract
+monism, a certain emotional response to the character of oneness, as
+if it were a feature of the world not coordinate with its manyness, but
+vastly more excellent and eminent, is so prevalent in educated circles
+that we might almost call it a part of philosophic common sense. Of
+COURSE the world is one, we say. How else could it be a world at all?
+Empiricists as a rule, are as stout monists of this abstract kind as
+rationalists are.
+
+The difference is that the empiricists are less dazzled. Unity doesn't
+blind them to everything else, doesn't quench their curiosity for
+special facts, whereas there is a kind of rationalist who is sure to
+interpret abstract unity mystically and to forget everything else, to
+treat it as a principle; to admire and worship it; and thereupon to come
+to a full stop intellectually.
+
+'The world is One!'--the formula may become a sort of number-worship.
+'Three' and 'seven' have, it is true, been reckoned sacred numbers; but,
+abstractly taken, why is 'one' more excellent than 'forty-three,'
+or than 'two million and ten'? In this first vague conviction of the
+world's unity, there is so little to take hold of that we hardly know
+what we mean by it.
+
+The only way to get forward with our notion is to treat it
+pragmatically. Granting the oneness to exist, what facts will be
+different in consequence? What will the unity be known-as? The world is
+one--yes, but HOW one? What is the practical value of the oneness for
+US?
+
+Asking such questions, we pass from the vague to the definite, from the
+abstract to the concrete. Many distinct ways in which oneness predicated
+of the universe might make a difference, come to view. I will note
+successively the more obvious of these ways.
+
+1. First, the world is at least ONE SUBJECT OF DISCOURSE. If its
+manyness were so irremediable as to permit NO union whatever of it
+parts, not even our minds could 'mean' the whole of it at once: the
+would be like eyes trying to look in opposite directions. But in point
+of fact we mean to cover the whole of it by our abstract term 'world' or
+'universe,' which expressly intends that no part shall be left out. Such
+unity of discourse carries obviously no farther monistic specifications.
+A 'chaos,' once so named, has as much unity of discourse as a cosmos.
+It is an odd fact that many monists consider a great victory scored for
+their side when pluralists say 'the universe is many.' "'The universe'!"
+they chuckle--"his speech bewrayeth him. He stands confessed of monism
+out of his own mouth." Well, let things be one in that sense! You can
+then fling such a word as universe at the whole collection of them, but
+what matters it? It still remains to be ascertained whether they are one
+in any other sense that is more valuable.
+
+2. Are they, for example, CONTINUOUS? Can you pass from one to another,
+keeping always in your one universe without any danger of falling out?
+In other words, do the parts of our universe HANG together, instead of
+being like detached grains of sand?
+
+Even grains of sand hang together through the space in which they are
+embedded, and if you can in any way move through such space, you can
+pass continuously from number one of them to number two. Space and
+time are thus vehicles of continuity, by which the world's parts hang
+together. The practical difference to us, resultant from these forms of
+union, is immense. Our whole motor life is based upon them.
+
+3. There are innumerable other paths of practical continuity among
+things. Lines of INFLUENCE can be traced by which they together.
+Following any such line you pass from one thing to another till you
+may have covered a good part of the universe's extent. Gravity and
+heat-conduction are such all-uniting influences, so far as the physical
+world goes. Electric, luminous and chemical influences follow similar
+lines of influence. But opaque and inert bodies interrupt the continuity
+here, so that you have to step round them, or change your mode of
+progress if you wish to get farther on that day. Practically, you have
+then lost your universe's unity, SO FAR AS IT WAS CONSTITUTED BY THOSE
+FIRST LINES OF INFLUENCE. There are innumerable kinds of connexion that
+special things have with other special things; and the ENSEMBLE of any
+one of these connexions forms one sort of system by which things are
+conjoined. Thus men are conjoined in a vast network of ACQUAINTANCESHIP.
+Brown knows Jones, Jones knows Robinson, etc.; and BY CHOOSING YOUR
+FARTHER INTERMEDIARIES RIGHTLY you may carry a message from Jones to the
+Empress of China, or the Chief of the African Pigmies, or to anyone
+else in the inhabited world. But you are stopped short, as by a
+non-conductor, when you choose one man wrong in this experiment. What
+may be called love-systems are grafted on the acquaintance-system. A
+loves (or hates) B; B loves (or hates) C, etc. But these systems are
+smaller than the great acquaintance-system that they presuppose.
+
+Human efforts are daily unifying the world more and more in definite
+systematic ways. We found colonial, postal, consular, commercial
+systems, all the parts of which obey definite influences that propagate
+themselves within the system but not to facts outside of it. The result
+is innumerable little hangings-together of the world's parts within the
+larger hangings-together, little worlds, not only of discourse but of
+operation, within the wider universe. Each system exemplifies one type
+or grade of union, its parts being strung on that peculiar kind of
+relation, and the same part may figure in many different systems, as
+a man may hold several offices and belong to various clubs. From this
+'systematic' point of view, therefore, the pragmatic value of the
+world's unity is that all these definite networks actually and
+practically exist. Some are more enveloping and extensive, some less so;
+they are superposed upon each other; and between them all they let no
+individual elementary part of the universe escape. Enormous as is the
+amount of disconnexion among things (for these systematic influences and
+conjunctions follow rigidly exclusive paths), everything that exists is
+influenced in SOME way by something else, if you can only pick the way
+out rightly Loosely speaking, and in general, it may be said that all
+things cohere and adhere to each other SOMEHOW, and that the universe
+exists practically in reticulated or concatenated forms which make of
+it a continuous or 'integrated' affair. Any kind of influence whatever
+helps to make the world one, so far as you can follow it from next
+to next. You may then say that 'the world IS One'--meaning in these
+respects, namely, and just so far as they obtain. But just as definitely
+is it NOT one, so far as they do not obtain; and there is no species of
+connexion which will not fail, if, instead of choosing conductors for
+it, you choose non-conductors. You are then arrested at your very
+first step and have to write the world down as a pure MANY from that
+particular point of view. If our intellect had been as much interested
+in disjunctive as it is in conjunctive relations, philosophy would have
+equally successfully celebrated the world's DISUNION.
+
+The great point is to notice that the oneness and the manyness are
+absolutely co-ordinate here. Neither is primordial or more essential or
+excellent than the other. Just as with space, whose separating of things
+seems exactly on a par with its uniting of them, but sometimes one
+function and sometimes the other is what come home to us most, so,
+in our general dealings with the world of influences, we now need
+conductors and now need non-conductors, and wisdom lies in knowing which
+is which at the appropriate moment.
+
+4. All these systems of influence or non-influence may be listed under
+the general problem of the world's CAUSAL UNITY. If the minor causal
+influences among things should converge towards one common causal origin
+of them in the past, one great first cause for all that is, one might
+then speak of the absolute causal unity of the world. God's fiat on
+creation's day has figured in traditional philosophy as such an absolute
+cause and origin. Transcendental Idealism, translating 'creation' into
+'thinking' (or 'willing to' think') calls the divine act 'eternal'
+rather than 'first'; but the union of the many here is absolute, just
+the same--the many would not BE, save for the One. Against this notion
+of the unity of origin of all there has always stood the pluralistic
+notion of an eternal self-existing many in the shape of atoms or even of
+spiritual units of some sort. The alternative has doubtless a pragmatic
+meaning, but perhaps, as far as these lectures go, we had better leave
+the question of unity of origin unsettled.
+
+5. The most important sort of union that obtains among things,
+pragmatically speaking, is their GENERIC UNITY. Things exist in kinds,
+there are many specimens in each kind, and what the 'kind' implies for
+one specimen, it implies also for every other specimen of that kind. We
+can easily conceive that every fact in the world might be singular,
+that is, unlike any other fact and sole of its kind. In such a world of
+singulars our logic would be useless, for logic works by predicating
+of the single instance what is true of all its kind. With no two
+things alike in the world, we should be unable to reason from our past
+experiences to our future ones. The existence of so much generic unity
+in things is thus perhaps the most momentous pragmatic specification of
+what it may mean to say 'the world is One.' ABSOLUTE generic unity would
+obtain if there were one summum genus under which all things without
+exception could be eventually subsumed. 'Beings,' 'thinkables,'
+'experiences,' would be candidates for this position. Whether the
+alternatives expressed by such words have any pragmatic significance or
+not, is another question which I prefer to leave unsettled just now.
+
+6. Another specification of what the phrase 'the world is One' may mean
+is UNITY OF PURPOSE. An enormous number of things in the world subserve
+a common purpose. All the man-made systems, administrative, industrial,
+military, or what not, exist each for its controlling purpose. Every
+living being pursues its own peculiar purposes. They co-operate,
+according to the degree of their development, in collective or tribal
+purposes, larger ends thus enveloping lesser ones, until an absolutely
+single, final and climacteric purpose subserved by all things without
+exception might conceivably be reached. It is needless to say that the
+appearances conflict with such a view. Any resultant, as I said in
+my third lecture, MAY have been purposed in advance, but none of the
+results we actually know in is world have in point of fact been purposed
+in advance in all their details. Men and nations start with a vague
+notion of being rich, or great, or good. Each step they make brings
+unforeseen chances into sight, and shuts out older vistas, and the
+specifications of the general purpose have to be daily changed. What is
+reached in the end may be better or worse than what was proposed, but it
+is always more complex and different.
+
+Our different purposes also are at war with each other. Where one can't
+crush the other out, they compromise; and the result is again different
+from what anyone distinctly proposed beforehand. Vaguely and generally,
+much of what was purposed may be gained; but everything makes strongly
+for the view that our world is incompletely unified teleologically and
+is still trying to get its unification better organized.
+
+Whoever claims ABSOLUTE teleological unity, saying that there is one
+purpose that every detail of the universe subserves, dogmatizes at
+his own risk. Theologians who dogmalize thus find it more and more
+impossible, as our acquaintance with the warring interests of the
+world's parts grows more concrete, to imagine what the one climacteric
+purpose may possibly be like. We see indeed that certain evils minister
+to ulterior goods, that the bitter makes the cocktail better, and that
+a bit of danger or hardship puts us agreeably to our trumps. We can
+vaguely generalize this into the doctrine that all the evil in the
+universe is but instrumental to its greater perfection. But the scale
+of the evil actually in sight defies all human tolerance; and
+transcendental idealism, in the pages of a Bradley or a Royce, brings us
+no farther than the book of Job did--God's ways are not our ways, so let
+us put our hands upon our mouth. A God who can relish such superfluities
+of horror is no God for human beings to appeal to. His animal spirits
+are too high. In other words the 'Absolute' with his one purpose, is not
+the man-like God of common people.
+
+7. AESTHETIC UNION among things also obtains, and is very analogous to
+ideological union. Things tell a story. Their parts hang together so as
+to work out a climax. They play into each other's hands expressively.
+Retrospectively, we can see that altho no definite purpose presided
+over a chain of events, yet the events fell into a dramatic form, with
+a start, a middle, and a finish. In point of fact all stories end; and
+here again the point of view of a many is that more natural one to take.
+The world is full of partial stories that run parallel to one another,
+beginning and ending at odd times. They mutually interlace and interfere
+at points, but we cannot unify them completely in our minds. In
+following your life-history, I must temporarily turn my attention from
+my own. Even a biographer of twins would have to press them alternately
+upon his reader's attention.
+
+It follows that whoever says that the whole world tells one story utters
+another of those monistic dogmas that a man believes at his risk. It is
+easy to see the world's history pluralistically, as a rope of which each
+fibre tells a separate tale; but to conceive of each cross-section of
+the rope as an absolutely single fact, and to sum the whole longitudinal
+series into one being living an undivided life, is harder. We have
+indeed the analogy of embryology to help us. The microscopist makes a
+hundred flat cross-sections of a given embryo, and mentally unites them
+into one solid whole. But the great world's ingredients, so far as
+they are beings, seem, like the rope's fibres, to be discontinuous
+cross-wise, and to cohere only in the longitudinal direction. Followed
+in that direction they are many. Even the embryologist, when he follows
+the DEVELOPMENT of his object, has to treat the history of each single
+organ in turn. ABSOLUTE aesthetic union is thus another barely abstract
+ideal. The world appears as something more epic than dramatic.
+
+So far, then, we see how the world is unified by its many systems,
+kinds, purposes, and dramas. That there is more union in all these ways
+than openly appears is certainly true. That there MAY be one sovereign
+purpose, system, kind, and story, is a legitimate hypothesis. All I
+say here is that it is rash to affirm this dogmatically without better
+evidence than we possess at present.
+
+8. The GREAT monistic DENKMITTEL for a hundred years past has been
+the notion of THE ONE KNOWER. The many exist only as objects for his
+thought--exist in his dream, as it were; and AS HE KNOWS them, they have
+one purpose, form one system, tell one tale for him. This notion of an
+ALL-ENVELOPING NOETIC UNITY in things is the sublimest achievement of
+intellectualist philosophy. Those who believe in the Absolute, as the
+all-knower is termed, usually say that they do so for coercive reasons,
+which clear thinkers cannot evade. The Absolute has far-reaching
+practical consequences, some of which I drew attention in my second
+lecture. Many kinds of difference important to us would surely follow
+from its being true. I cannot here enter into all the logical proofs of
+such a Being's existence, farther than to say that none of them seem to
+me sound. I must therefore treat the notion of an All-Knower simply as
+an hypothesis, exactly on a par logically with the pluralist notion that
+there is no point of view, no focus of information extant, from
+which the entire content of the universe is visible at once. "God's
+consciousness," says Professor Royce,[Footnote: The Conception of
+God, New York, 1897, p. 292.] "forms in its wholeness one luminously
+transparent conscious moment"--this is the type of noetic unity on which
+rationalism insists. Empiricism on the other hand is satisfied with the
+type of noetic unity that is humanly familiar. Everything gets known by
+SOME knower along with something else; but the knowers may in the end be
+irreducibly many, and the greatest knower of them all may yet not know
+the whole of everything, or even know what he does know at one single
+stroke:--he may be liable to forget. Whichever type obtained, the world
+would still be a universe noetically. Its parts would be conjoined
+by knowledge, but in the one case the knowledge would be absolutely
+unified, in the other it would be strung along and overlapped.
+
+The notion of one instantaneous or eternal Knower--either adjective
+here means the same thing--is, as I said, the great intellectualist
+achievement of our time. It has practically driven out that conception
+of 'Substance' which earlier philosophers set such store by, and by
+which so much unifying work used to be done--universal substance which
+alone has being in and from itself, and of which all the particulars
+of experience are but forms to which it gives support. Substance has
+succumbed to the pragmatic criticisms of the English school. It appears
+now only as another name for the fact that phenomena as they come are
+actually grouped and given in coherent forms, the very forms in which
+we finite knowers experience or think them together. These forms of
+conjunction are as much parts of the tissue of experience as are the
+terms which they connect; and it is a great pragmatic achievement for
+recent idealism to have made the world hang together in these directly
+representable ways instead of drawing its unity from the 'inherence' of
+its parts--whatever that may mean--in an unimaginable principle behind
+the scenes.
+
+'The world is one,' therefore, just so far as we experience it to be
+concatenated, one by as many definite conjunctions as appear. But then
+also NOT one by just as many definite DISjunctions as we find. The
+oneness and the manyness of it thus obtain in respects which can
+be separately named. It is neither a universe pure and simple nor
+a multiverse pure and simple. And its various manners of being one
+suggest, for their accurate ascertainment, so many distinct programs
+of scientific work. Thus the pragmatic question 'What is the oneness
+known-as? What practical difference will it make?' saves us from all
+feverish excitement over it as a principle of sublimity and carries us
+forward into the stream of experience with a cool head. The stream may
+indeed reveal far more connexion and union than we now suspect, but we
+are not entitled on pragmatic principles to claim absolute oneness in
+any respect in advance.
+
+It is so difficult to see definitely what absolute oneness can mean,
+that probably the majority of you are satisfied with the sober attitude
+which we have reached. Nevertheless there are possibly some radically
+monistic souls among you who are not content to leave the one and the
+many on a par. Union of various grades, union of diverse types, union
+that stops at non-conductors, union that merely goes from next to next,
+and means in many cases outer nextness only, and not a more internal
+bond, union of concatenation, in short; all that sort of thing seems to
+you a halfway stage of thought. The oneness of things, superior to their
+manyness, you think must also be more deeply true, must be the more
+real aspect of the world. The pragmatic view, you are sure, gives us
+a universe imperfectly rational. The real universe must form an
+unconditional unit of being, something consolidated, with its parts
+co-implicated through and through. Only then could we consider our
+estate completely rational. There is no doubt whatever that this
+ultra-monistic way of thinking means a great deal to many minds. "One
+Life, One Truth, one Love, one Principle, One Good, One God"--I quote
+from a Christian Science leaflet which the day's mail brings into my
+hands--beyond doubt such a confession of faith has pragmatically an
+emotional value, and beyond doubt the word 'one' contributes to the
+value quite as much as the other words. But if we try to realize
+INTELLECTUALLY what we can possibly MEAN by such a glut of oneness we
+are thrown right back upon our pragmatistic determinations again. It
+means either the mere name One, the universe of discourse; or it means
+the sum total of all the ascertainable particular conjunctions and
+concatenations; or, finally, it means some one vehicle of conjunction
+treated as all-inclusive, like one origin, one purpose, or one knower.
+In point of fact it always means one KNOWER to those who take it
+intellectually to-day. The one knower involves, they think, the other
+forms of conjunction. His world must have all its parts co-implicated
+in the one logical-aesthetical-teleological unit-picture which is his
+eternal dream.
+
+The character of the absolute knower's picture is however so impossible
+for us to represent clearly, that we may fairly suppose that the
+authority which absolute monism undoubtedly possesses, and probably
+always will possess over some persons, draws its strength far less from
+intellectual than from mystical grounds. To interpret absolute monism
+worthily, be a mystic. Mystical states of mind in every degree are shown
+by history, usually tho not always, to make for the monistic view. This
+is no proper occasion to enter upon the general subject of mysticism,
+but I will quote one mystical pronouncement to show just what I mean.
+The paragon of all monistic systems is the Vedanta philosophy of
+Hindostan, and the paragon of Vedantist missionaries was the late
+Swami Vivekananda who visited our shores some years ago. The method of
+Vedantism is the mystical method. You do not reason, but after going
+through a certain discipline YOU SEE, and having seen, you can report
+the truth. Vivekananda thus reports the truth in one of his lectures
+here:
+
+"Where is any more misery for him who sees this Oneness in the
+Universe...this Oneness of life, Oneness of everything? ...This
+separation between man and man, man and woman, man and child, nation
+from nation, earth from moon, moon from sun, this separation between
+atom and atom is the cause really of all the misery, and the Vedanta
+says this separation does not exist, it is not real. It is merely
+apparent, on the surface. In the heart of things there is Unity still.
+If you go inside you find that Unity between man and man, women and
+children, races and races, high and low, rich and poor, the gods and
+men: all are One, and animals too, if you go deep enough, and he who has
+attained to that has no more delusion. ... Where is any more delusion
+for him? What can delude him? He knows the reality of everything, the
+secret of everything. Where is there any more misery for him? What does
+he desire? He has traced the reality of everything unto the Lord, that
+centre, that Unity of everything, and that is Eternal Bliss, Eternal
+Knowledge, Eternal Existence. Neither death nor disease, nor sorrow nor
+misery, nor discontent is there ... in the centre, the reality, there
+is no one to be mourned for, no one to be sorry for. He has penetrated
+everything, the Pure One, the Formless, the Bodiless, the Stainless, He
+the Knower, He the Great Poet, the Self-Existent, He who is giving to
+everyone what he deserves."
+
+Observe how radical the character of the monism here is. Separation is
+not simply overcome by the One, it is denied to exist. There is no many.
+We are not parts of the One; It has no parts; and since in a sense we
+undeniably ARE, it must be that each of us is the One, indivisibly and
+totally. AN ABSOLUTE ONE, AND I THAT ONE--surely we have here a religion
+which, emotionally considered, has a high pragmatic value; it imparts a
+perfect sumptuosity of security. As our Swami says in another place:
+
+"When man has seen himself as one with the infinite Being of the
+universe, when all separateness has ceased, when all men, all women, all
+angels, all gods, all animals, all plants, the whole universe has been
+melted into that oneness, then all fear disappears. Whom to fear? Can
+I hurt myself? Can I kill myself? Can I injure myself? Do you fear
+yourself? Then will all sorrow disappear. What can cause me sorrow? I am
+the One Existence of the universe. Then all jealousies will disappear;
+of whom to be jealous? Of myself? Then all bad feelings disappear.
+Against whom will I have this bad feeling? Against myself? There is none
+in the universe but me. ... Kill out this differentiation; kill out this
+superstition that there are many. 'He who, in this world of many, sees
+that One; he who in this mass of insentiency sees that One Sentient
+Being; he who in this world of shadow catches that Reality, unto him
+belongs eternal peace, unto none else, unto none else.'"
+
+We all have some ear for this monistic music: it elevates and reassures.
+We all have at least the germ of mysticism in us. And when our idealists
+recite their arguments for the Absolute, saying that the slightest union
+admitted anywhere carries logically absolute Oneness with it, and that
+the slightest separation admitted anywhere logically carries disunion
+remediless and complete, I cannot help suspecting that the palpable weak
+places in the intellectual reasonings they use are protected from their
+own criticism by a mystical feeling that, logic or no logic, absolute
+Oneness must somehow at any cost be true. Oneness overcomes MORAL
+separateness at any rate. In the passion of love we have the mystic germ
+of what might mean a total union of all sentient life. This mystical
+germ wakes up in us on hearing the monistic utterances, acknowledges
+their authority, and assigns to intellectual considerations a secondary
+place.
+
+I will dwell no longer on these religious and moral aspects of the
+question in this lecture. When I come to my final lecture there will be
+something more to say.
+
+Leave then out of consideration for the moment the authority which
+mystical insights may be conjectured eventually to possess; treat the
+problem of the One and the Many in a purely intellectual way; and we
+see clearly enough where pragmatism stands. With her criterion of the
+practical differences that theories make, we see that she must equally
+abjure absolute monism and absolute pluralism. The world is one just
+so far as its parts hang together by any definite connexion. It is many
+just so far as any definite connexion fails to obtain. And finally it
+is growing more and more unified by those systems of connexion at least
+which human energy keeps framing as time goes on.
+
+It is possible to imagine alternative universes to the one we know, in
+which the most various grades and types of union should be embodied.
+Thus the lowest grade of universe would be a world of mere WITHNESS, of
+which the parts were only strung together by the conjunction 'and.' Such
+a universe is even now the collection of our several inner lives. The
+spaces and times of your imagination, the objects and events of your
+day-dreams are not only more or less incoherent inter se, but are wholly
+out of definite relation with the similar contents of anyone else's
+mind. Our various reveries now as we sit here compenetrate each other
+idly without influencing or interfering. They coexist, but in no order
+and in no receptacle, being the nearest approach to an absolute 'many'
+that we can conceive. We cannot even imagine any reason why they SHOULD
+be known all together, and we can imagine even less, if they were known
+together, how they could be known as one systematic whole.
+
+But add our sensations and bodily actions, and the union mounts to
+a much higher grade. Our audita et visa and our acts fall into those
+receptacles of time and space in which each event finds its date and
+place. They form 'things' and are of 'kinds' too, and can be classed.
+Yet we can imagine a world of things and of kinds in which the causal
+interactions with which we are so familiar should not exist. Everything
+there might be inert towards everything else, and refuse to propagate
+its influence. Or gross mechanical influences might pass, but no
+chemical action. Such worlds would be far less unified than ours. Again
+there might be complete physico-chemical interaction, but no minds; or
+minds, but altogether private ones, with no social life; or social
+life limited to acquaintance, but no love; or love, but no customs
+or institutions that should systematize it. No one of these grades of
+universe would be absolutely irrational or disintegrated, inferior tho
+it might appear when looked at from the higher grades. For instance, if
+our minds should ever become 'telepathically' connected, so that we knew
+immediately, or could under certain conditions know immediately, each
+what the other was thinking, the world we now live in would appear to
+the thinkers in that world to have been of an inferior grade.
+
+With the whole of past eternity open for our conjectures to range in, it
+may be lawful to wonder whether the various kinds of union now realized
+in the universe that we inhabit may not possibly have been successively
+evolved after the fashion in which we now see human systems evolving in
+consequence of human needs. If such an hypothesis were legitimate, total
+oneness would appear at the end of things rather than at their origin.
+In other words the notion of the 'Absolute' would have to be replaced by
+that of the 'Ultimate.' The two notions would have the same content--the
+maximally unified content of fact, namely--but their time-relations
+would be positively reversed. [Footnote: Compare on the Ultimate,
+Mr. Schiller's essay "Activity and Substance," in his book entitled
+Humanism, p. 204.]
+
+After discussing the unity of the universe in this pragmatic way, you
+ought to see why I said in my second lecture, borrowing the word from my
+friend G. Papini, that pragmatism tends to UNSTIFFEN all our theories.
+The world's oneness has generally been affirmed abstractly only, and as
+if anyone who questioned it must be an idiot. The temper of monists has
+been so vehement, as almost at times to be convulsive; and this way of
+holding a doctrine does not easily go with reasonable discussion and the
+drawing of distinctions. The theory of the Absolute, in particular, has
+had to be an article of faith, affirmed dogmatically and exclusively.
+The One and All, first in the order of being and of knowing, logically
+necessary itself, and uniting all lesser things in the bonds of mutual
+necessity, how could it allow of any mitigation of its inner
+rigidity? The slightest suspicion of pluralism, the minutest wiggle of
+independence of any one of its parts from the control of the totality,
+would ruin it. Absolute unity brooks no degrees--as well might you claim
+absolute purity for a glass of water because it contains but a single
+little cholera-germ. The independence, however infinitesimal, of a part,
+however small, would be to the Absolute as fatal as a cholera-germ.
+
+Pluralism on the other hand has no need of this dogmatic rigoristic
+temper. Provided you grant SOME separation among things, some tremor of
+independence, some free play of parts on one another, some real novelty
+or chance, however minute, she is amply satisfied, and will allow you
+any amount, however great, of real union. How much of union there may
+be is a question that she thinks can only be decided empirically. The
+amount may be enormous, colossal; but absolute monism is shattered if,
+along with all the union, there has to be granted the slightest modicum,
+the most incipient nascency, or the most residual trace, of a separation
+that is not 'overcome.'
+
+Pragmatism, pending the final empirical ascertainment of just what the
+balance of union and disunion among things may be, must obviously range
+herself upon the pluralistic side. Some day, she admits, even total
+union, with one knower, one origin, and a universe consolidated in
+every conceivable way, may turn out to be the most acceptable of all
+hypotheses. Meanwhile the opposite hypothesis, of a world imperfectly
+unified still, and perhaps always to remain so, must be sincerely
+entertained. This latter hypothesis is pluralism's doctrine. Since
+absolute monism forbids its being even considered seriously, branding it
+as irrational from the start, it is clear that pragmatism must turn its
+back on absolute monism, and follow pluralism's more empirical path.
+
+This leaves us with the common-sense world, in which we find things
+partly joined and partly disjoined. 'Things,' then, and their
+'conjunctions'--what do such words mean, pragmatically handled? In
+my next lecture, I will apply the pragmatic method to the stage of
+philosophizing known as Common Sense.
+
+
+
+
+Lecture V
+
+Pragmatism and Common Sense
+
+In the last lecture we turned ourselves from the usual way of talking
+of the universe's oneness as a principle, sublime in all its blankness,
+towards a study of the special kinds of union which the universe
+enfolds. We found many of these to coexist with kinds of separation
+equally real. "How far am I verified?" is the question which each
+kind of union and each kind of separation asks us here, so as good
+pragmatists we have to turn our face towards experience, towards
+'facts.'
+
+Absolute oneness remains, but only as an hypothesis, and that hypothesis
+is reduced nowadays to that of an omniscient knower who sees all things
+without exception as forming one single systematic fact. But the knower
+in question may still be conceived either as an Absolute or as an
+Ultimate; and over against the hypothesis of him in either form the
+counter-hypothesis that the widest field of knowledge that ever was or
+will be still contains some ignorance, may be legitimately held. Some
+bits of information always may escape.
+
+This is the hypothesis of NOETIC PLURALISM, which monists consider so
+absurd. Since we are bound to treat it as respectfully as noetic monism,
+until the facts shall have tipped the beam, we find that our pragmatism,
+tho originally nothing but a method, has forced us to be friendly to the
+pluralistic view. It MAY be that some parts of the world are connected
+so loosely with some other parts as to be strung along by nothing but
+the copula AND. They might even come and go without those other parts
+suffering any internal change. This pluralistic view, of a world of
+ADDITIVE constitution, is one that pragmatism is unable to rule out from
+serious consideration. But this view leads one to the farther hypothesis
+that the actual world, instead of being complete 'eternally,' as the
+monists assure us, may be eternally incomplete, and at all times subject
+to addition or liable to loss.
+
+It IS at any rate incomplete in one respect, and flagrantly so. The very
+fact that we debate this question shows that our KNOWLEDGE is incomplete
+at present and subject to addition. In respect of the knowledge it
+contains the world does genuinely change and grow. Some general remarks
+on the way in which our knowledge completes itself--when it does
+complete itself--will lead us very conveniently into our subject for
+this lecture, which is 'Common Sense.'
+
+To begin with, our knowledge grows IN SPOTS. The spots may be large or
+small, but the knowledge never grows all over: some old knowledge always
+remains what it was. Your knowledge of pragmatism, let us suppose, is
+growing now. Later, its growth may involve considerable modification of
+opinions which you previously held to be true. But such modifications
+are apt to be gradual. To take the nearest possible example, consider
+these lectures of mine. What you first gain from them is probably a
+small amount of new information, a few new definitions, or distinctions,
+or points of view. But while these special ideas are being added, the
+rest of your knowledge stands still, and only gradually will you 'line
+up' your previous opinions with the novelties I am trying to instil, and
+modify to some slight degree their mass.
+
+You listen to me now, I suppose, with certain prepossessions as to my
+competency, and these affect your reception of what I say, but were I
+suddenly to break off lecturing, and to begin to sing 'We won't go home
+till morning' in a rich baritone voice, not only would that new fact be
+added to your stock, but it would oblige you to define me differently,
+and that might alter your opinion of the pragmatic philosophy, and in
+general bring about a rearrangement of a number of your ideas. Your mind
+in such processes is strained, and sometimes painfully so, between its
+older beliefs and the novelties which experience brings along.
+
+Our minds thus grow in spots; and like grease-spots, the spots spread.
+But we let them spread as little as possible: we keep unaltered as much
+of our old knowledge, as many of our old prejudices and beliefs, as we
+can. We patch and tinker more than we renew. The novelty soaks in; it
+stains the ancient mass; but it is also tinged by what absorbs it. Our
+past apperceives and co-operates; and in the new equilibrium in which
+each step forward in the process of learning terminates, it happens
+relatively seldom that the new fact is added RAW. More usually it is
+embedded cooked, as one might say, or stewed down in the sauce of the
+old.
+
+New truths thus are resultants of new experiences and of old truths
+combined and mutually modifying one another. And since this is the case
+in the changes of opinion of to-day, there is no reason to assume that
+it has not been so at all times. It follows that very ancient modes
+of thought may have survived through all the later changes in men's
+opinions. The most primitive ways of thinking may not yet be wholly
+expunged. Like our five fingers, our ear-bones, our rudimentary caudal
+appendage, or our other 'vestigial' peculiarities, they may remain as
+indelible tokens of events in our race-history. Our ancestors may at
+certain moments have struck into ways of thinking which they might
+conceivably not have found. But once they did so, and after the fact,
+the inheritance continues. When you begin a piece of music in a certain
+key, you must keep the key to the end. You may alter your house ad
+libitum, but the ground-plan of the first architect persists--you can
+make great changes, but you cannot change a Gothic church into a Doric
+temple. You may rinse and rinse the bottle, but you can't get the taste
+of the medicine or whiskey that first filled it wholly out.
+
+My thesis now is this, that OUR FUNDAMENTAL WAYS OF THINKING ABOUT
+THINGS ARE DISCOVERIES OF EXCEEDINGLY REMOTE ANCESTORS, WHICH HAVE BEEN
+ABLE TO PRESERVE THEMSELVES THROUGHOUT THE EXPERIENCE OF ALL SUBSEQUENT
+TIME. They form one great stage of equilibrium in the human mind's
+development, the stage of common sense. Other stages have grafted
+themselves upon this stage, but have never succeeded in displacing it.
+Let us consider this common-sense stage first, as if it might be final.
+
+In practical talk, a man's common sense means his good judgment, his
+freedom from excentricity, his GUMPTION, to use the vernacular word. In
+philosophy it means something entirely different, it means his use of
+certain intellectual forms or categories of thought. Were we lobsters,
+or bees, it might be that our organization would have led to our using
+quite different modes from these of apprehending our experiences. It
+MIGHT be too (we cannot dogmatically deny this) that such categories,
+unimaginable by us to-day, would have proved on the whole as serviceable
+for handling our experiences mentally as those which we actually use.
+
+If this sounds paradoxical to anyone, let him think of analytical
+geometry. The identical figures which Euclid defined by intrinsic
+relations were defined by Descartes by the relations of their points to
+adventitious co-ordinates, the result being an absolutely different and
+vastly more potent way of handling curves. All our conceptions are what
+the Germans call denkmittel, means by which we handle facts by thinking
+them. Experience merely as such doesn't come ticketed and labeled, we
+have first to discover what it is. Kant speaks of it as being in
+its first intention a gewuehl der erscheinungen, a rhapsodie der
+wahrnehmungen, a mere motley which we have to unify by our wits. What
+we usually do is first to frame some system of concepts mentally
+classified, serialized, or connected in some intellectual way, and then
+to use this as a tally by which we 'keep tab' on the impressions that
+present themselves. When each is referred to some possible place in the
+conceptual system, it is thereby 'understood.' This notion of parallel
+'manifolds' with their elements standing reciprocally in 'one-to-one
+relations,' is proving so convenient nowadays in mathematics and logic
+as to supersede more and more the older classificatory conceptions.
+There are many conceptual systems of this sort; and the sense
+manifold is also such a system. Find a one-to-one relation for your
+sense-impressions ANYWHERE among the concepts, and in so far forth you
+rationalize the impressions. But obviously you can rationalize them by
+using various conceptual systems.
+
+The old common-sense way of rationalizing them is by a set of concepts
+of which the most important are these:
+
+Thing;
+
+The same or different;
+
+Kinds;
+
+Minds;
+
+Bodies;
+
+One Time;
+
+One Space;
+
+Subjects and attributes;
+
+Causal influences;
+
+The fancied;
+
+The real.
+
+We are now so familiar with the order that these notions have woven for
+us out of the everlasting weather of our perceptions that we find it
+hard to realize how little of a fixed routine the perceptions follow
+when taken by themselves. The word weather is a good one to use here.
+In Boston, for example, the weather has almost no routine, the only law
+being that if you have had any weather for two days, you will probably
+but not certainly have another weather on the third. Weather-experience
+as it thus comes to Boston, is discontinuous and chaotic. In point of
+temperature, of wind, rain or sunshine, it MAY change three times a
+day. But the Washington weather-bureau intellectualizes this disorder by
+making each successive bit of Boston weather EPISODIC. It refers it to
+its place and moment in a continental cyclone, on the history of which
+the local changes everywhere are strung as beads are strung upon a cord.
+
+Now it seems almost certain that young children and the inferior animals
+take all their experiences very much as uninstructed Bostonians take
+their weather. They know no more of time or space as world-receptacles,
+or of permanent subjects and changing predicates, or of causes,
+or kinds, or thoughts, or things, than our common people know of
+continental cyclones. A baby's rattle drops out of his hand, but the
+baby looks not for it. It has 'gone out' for him, as a candle-flame goes
+out; and it comes back, when you replace it in his hand, as the flame
+comes back when relit. The idea of its being a 'thing,' whose permanent
+existence by itself he might interpolate between its successive
+apparitions has evidently not occurred to him. It is the same with dogs.
+Out of sight, out of mind, with them. It is pretty evident that they
+have no GENERAL tendency to interpolate 'things.' Let me quote here a
+passage from my colleague G. Santayana's book.
+
+"If a dog, while sniffing about contentedly, sees afar off his master
+arriving after long absence...the poor brute asks for no reason why
+his master went, why he has come again, why he should be loved, or why
+presently while lying at his feet you forget him and begin to grunt and
+dream of the chase--all that is an utter mystery, utterly unconsidered.
+Such experience has variety, scenery, and a certain vital rhythm;
+its story might be told in dithyrambic verse. It moves wholly by
+inspiration; every event is providential, every act unpremeditated.
+Absolute freedom and absolute helplessness have met together: you
+depend wholly on divine favour, yet that unfathomable agency is not
+distinguishable from your own life. ...[But] the figures even of that
+disordered drama have their exits and their entrances; and their cues
+can be gradually discovered by a being capable of fixing his
+attention and retaining the order of events. ...In proportion as such
+understanding advances each moment of experience becomes consequential
+and prophetic of the rest. The calm places in life are filled with power
+and its spasms with resource. No emotion can overwhelm the mind, for
+of none is the basis or issue wholly hidden; no event can disconcert it
+altogether, because it sees beyond. Means can be looked for to escape
+from the worst predicament; and whereas each moment had been formerly
+filled with nothing but its own adventure and surprised emotion, each
+now makes room for the lesson of what went before and surmises what
+may be the plot of the whole."[Footnote: The Life of Reason: Reason in
+Common Sense, 1905, p. 59.]
+
+Even to-day science and philosophy are still laboriously trying to part
+fancies from realities in our experience; and in primitive times they
+made only the most incipient distinctions in this line. Men believed
+whatever they thought with any liveliness, and they mixed their dreams
+with their realities inextricably. The categories of 'thought' and
+'things' are indispensable here--instead of being realities we now call
+certain experiences only 'thoughts.' There is not a category, among
+those enumerated, of which we may not imagine the use to have thus
+originated historically and only gradually spread.
+
+That one Time which we all believe in and in which each event has its
+definite date, that one Space in which each thing has its position,
+these abstract notions unify the world incomparably; but in their
+finished shape as concepts how different they are from the loose
+unordered time-and-space experiences of natural men! Everything that
+happens to us brings its own duration and extension, and both are
+vaguely surrounded by a marginal 'more' that runs into the duration
+and extension of the next thing that comes. But we soon lose all our
+definite bearings; and not only do our children make no distinction
+between yesterday and the day before yesterday, the whole past being
+churned up together, but we adults still do so whenever the times are
+large. It is the same with spaces. On a map I can distinctly see the
+relation of London, Constantinople, and Pekin to the place where I am;
+in reality I utterly fail to FEEL the facts which the map symbolizes.
+The directions and distances are vague, confused and mixed. Cosmic space
+and cosmic time, so far from being the intuitions that Kant said they
+were, are constructions as patently artificial as any that science can
+show. The great majority of the human race never use these notions, but
+live in plural times and spaces, interpenetrant and DURCHEINANDER.
+
+Permanent 'things' again; the 'same' thing and its various 'appearances'
+and 'alterations'; the different 'kinds' of thing; with the 'kind' used
+finally as a 'predicate,' of which the thing remains the 'subject'--what
+a straightening of the tangle of our experience's immediate flux and
+sensible variety does this list of terms suggest! And it is only
+the smallest part of his experience's flux that anyone actually does
+straighten out by applying to it these conceptual instruments. Out of
+them all our lowest ancestors probably used only, and then most vaguely
+and inaccurately, the notion of 'the same again.' But even then if
+you had asked them whether the same were a 'thing' that had endured
+throughout the unseen interval, they would probably have been at a
+loss, and would have said that they had never asked that question, or
+considered matters in that light.
+
+Kinds, and sameness of kind--what colossally useful DENKMITTEL for
+finding our way among the many! The manyness might conceivably have
+been absolute. Experiences might have all been singulars, no one of them
+occurring twice. In such a world logic would have had no application;
+for kind and sameness of kind are logic's only instruments. Once we know
+that whatever is of a kind is also of that kind's kind, we can travel
+through the universe as if with seven-league boots. Brutes surely never
+use these abstractions, and civilized men use them in most various
+amounts.
+
+Causal influence, again! This, if anything, seems to have been an
+antediluvian conception; for we find primitive men thinking that almost
+everything is significant and can exert influence of some sort. The
+search for the more definite influences seems to have started in the
+question: "Who, or what, is to blame?"--for any illness, namely, or
+disaster, or untoward thing. From this centre the search for causal
+influences has spread. Hume and 'Science' together have tried to
+eliminate the whole notion of influence, substituting the entirely
+different DENKMITTEL of 'law.' But law is a comparatively recent
+invention, and influence reigns supreme in the older realm of common
+sense.
+
+The 'possible,' as something less than the actual and more than the
+wholly unreal, is another of these magisterial notions of common sense.
+Criticize them as you may, they persist; and we fly back to them the
+moment critical pressure is relaxed. 'Self,' 'body,' in the substantial
+or metaphysical sense--no one escapes subjection to THOSE forms
+of thought. In practice, the common-sense DENKMITTEL are uniformly
+victorious. Everyone, however instructed, still thinks of a 'thing' in
+the common-sense way, as a permanent unit-subject that 'supports' its
+attributes interchangeably. No one stably or sincerely uses the more
+critical notion, of a group of sense-qualities united by a law. With
+these categories in our hand, we make our plans and plot together, and
+connect all the remoter parts of experience with what lies before our
+eyes. Our later and more critical philosophies are mere fads and fancies
+compared with this natural mother-tongue of thought.
+
+Common sense appears thus as a perfectly definite stage in our
+understanding of things, a stage that satisfies in an extraordinarily
+successful way the purposes for which we think. 'Things' do exist, even
+when we do not see them. Their 'kinds' also exist. Their 'qualities' are
+what they act by, and are what we act on; and these also exist. These
+lamps shed their quality of light on every object in this room. We
+intercept IT on its way whenever we hold up an opaque screen. It is
+the very sound that my lips emit that travels into your ears. It is the
+sensible heat of the fire that migrates into the water in which we boil
+an egg; and we can change the heat into coolness by dropping in a
+lump of ice. At this stage of philosophy all non-European men without
+exception have remained. It suffices for all the necessary practical
+ends of life; and, among our own race even, it is only the highly
+sophisticated specimens, the minds debauched by learning, as Berkeley
+calls them, who have ever even suspected common sense of not being
+absolutely true.
+
+But when we look back, and speculate as to how the common-sense
+categories may have achieved their wonderful supremacy, no reason
+appears why it may not have been by a process just like that by which
+the conceptions due to Democritus, Berkeley, or Darwin, achieved their
+similar triumphs in more recent times. In other words, they may have
+been successfully DISCOVERED by prehistoric geniuses whose names the
+night of antiquity has covered up; they may have been verified by the
+immediate facts of experience which they first fitted; and then from
+fact to fact and from man to man they may have SPREAD, until all
+language rested on them and we are now incapable of thinking naturally
+in any other terms. Such a view would only follow the rule that has
+proved elsewhere so fertile, of assuming the vast and remote to conform
+to the laws of formation that we can observe at work in the small and
+near.
+
+For all utilitarian practical purposes these conceptions amply suffice;
+but that they began at special points of discovery and only gradually
+spread from one thing to another, seems proved by the exceedingly
+dubious limits of their application to-day. We assume for certain
+purposes one 'objective' Time that AEQUABILITER FLUIT, but we don't
+livingly believe in or realize any such equally-flowing time. 'Space'
+is a less vague notion; but 'things,' what are they? Is a constellation
+properly a thing? or an army? or is an ENS RATIONIS such as space or
+justice a thing? Is a knife whose handle and blade are changed the
+'same'? Is the 'changeling,' whom Locke so seriously discusses, of the
+human 'kind'? Is 'telepathy' a 'fancy' or a 'fact'? The moment you pass
+beyond the practical use of these categories (a use usually suggested
+sufficiently by the circumstances of the special case) to a merely
+curious or speculative way of thinking, you find it impossible to say
+within just what limits of fact any one of them shall apply.
+
+The peripatetic philosophy, obeying rationalist propensities, has
+tried to eternalize the common-sense categories by treating them very
+technically and articulately. A 'thing' for instance is a being, or
+ENS. An ENS is a subject in which qualities 'inhere.' A subject is a
+substance. Substances are of kinds, and kinds are definite in number,
+and discrete. These distinctions are fundamental and eternal. As terms
+of DISCOURSE they are indeed magnificently useful, but what they mean,
+apart from their use in steering our discourse to profitable issues,
+does not appear. If you ask a scholastic philosopher what a substance
+may be in itself, apart from its being the support of attributes, he
+simply says that your intellect knows perfectly what the word means.
+
+But what the intellect knows clearly is only the word itself and its
+steering function. So it comes about that intellects SIBI PERMISSI,
+intellects only curious and idle, have forsaken the common-sense level
+for what in general terms may be called the 'critical' level of thought.
+Not merely SUCH intellects either--your Humes and Berkeleys and Hegels;
+but practical observers of facts, your Galileos, Daltons, Faradays, have
+found it impossible to treat the NAIFS sense-termini of common sense
+as ultimately real. As common sense interpolates her constant 'things'
+between our intermittent sensations, so science EXTRApolates her world
+of 'primary' qualities, her atoms, her ether, her magnetic fields, and
+the like, beyond the common-sense world. The 'things' are now invisible
+impalpable things; and the old visible common-sense things are supposed
+to result from the mixture of these invisibles. Or else the whole NAIF
+conception of thing gets superseded, and a thing's name is interpreted
+as denoting only the law or REGEL DER VERBINDUNG by which certain of our
+sensations habitually succeed or coexist.
+
+Science and critical philosophy thus burst the bounds of common sense.
+With science NAIF realism ceases: 'Secondary' qualities become unreal;
+primary ones alone remain. With critical philosophy, havoc is made of
+everything. The common-sense categories one and all cease to represent
+anything in the way of BEING; they are but sublime tricks of human
+thought, our ways of escaping bewilderment in the midst of sensation's
+irremediable flow.
+
+But the scientific tendency in critical thought, tho inspired at first
+by purely intellectual motives, has opened an entirely unexpected range
+of practical utilities to our astonished view. Galileo gave us accurate
+clocks and accurate artillery-practice; the chemists flood us with new
+medicines and dye-stuffs; Ampere and Faraday have endowed us with the
+New York subway and with Marconi telegrams. The hypothetical things that
+such men have invented, defined as they have defined them, are showing
+an extraordinary fertility in consequences verifiable by sense. Our
+logic can deduce from them a consequence due under certain conditions,
+we can then bring about the conditions, and presto, the consequence
+is there before our eyes. The scope of the practical control of nature
+newly put into our hand by scientific ways of thinking vastly exceeds
+the scope of the old control grounded on common sense. Its rate of
+increase accelerates so that no one can trace the limit; one may even
+fear that the BEING of man may be crushed by his own powers, that his
+fixed nature as an organism may not prove adequate to stand the strain
+of the ever increasingly tremendous functions, almost divine creative
+functions, which his intellect will more and more enable him to wield.
+He may drown in his wealth like a child in a bath-tub, who has turned on
+the water and who cannot turn it off.
+
+The philosophic stage of criticism, much more thorough in its negations
+than the scientific stage, so far gives us no new range of practical
+power. Locke, Hume, Berkeley, Kant, Hegel, have all been utterly
+sterile, so far as shedding any light on the details of nature goes, and
+I can think of no invention or discovery that can be directly traced
+to anything in their peculiar thought, for neither with Berkeley's
+tar-water nor with Kant's nebular hypothesis had their respective
+philosophic tenets anything to do. The satisfactions they yield to their
+disciples are intellectual, not practical; and even then we have to
+confess that there is a large minus-side to the account.
+
+There are thus at least three well-characterized levels, stages or types
+of thought about the world we live in, and the notions of one stage
+have one kind of merit, those of another stage another kind. It is
+impossible, however, to say that any stage as yet in sight is absolutely
+more TRUE than any other. Common sense is the more CONSOLIDATED stage,
+because it got its innings first, and made all language into its ally.
+Whether it or science be the more AUGUST stage may be left to private
+judgment. But neither consolidation nor augustness are decisive marks of
+truth. If common sense were true, why should science have had to
+brand the secondary qualities, to which our world owes all its living
+interest, as false, and to invent an invisible world of points and
+curves and mathematical equations instead? Why should it have needed
+to transform causes and activities into laws of 'functional variation'?
+Vainly did scholasticism, common sense's college-trained younger sister,
+seek to stereotype the forms the human family had always talked with,
+to make them definite and fix them for eternity. Substantial forms (in
+other words our secondary qualities) hardly outlasted the year of our
+Lord 1600. People were already tired of them then; and Galileo, and
+Descartes, with his 'new philosophy,' gave them only a little later
+their coup de grace.
+
+But now if the new kinds of scientific 'thing,' the corpuscular and
+etheric world, were essentially more 'true,' why should they have
+excited so much criticism within the body of science itself? Scientific
+logicians are saying on every hand that these entities and their
+determinations, however definitely conceived, should not be held for
+literally real. It is AS IF they existed; but in reality they are like
+co-ordinates or logarithms, only artificial short-cuts for taking us
+from one part to another of experience's flux. We can cipher fruitfully
+with them; they serve us wonderfully; but we must not be their dupes.
+
+There is no RINGING conclusion possible when we compare these types
+of thinking, with a view to telling which is the more absolutely true.
+Their naturalness, their intellectual economy, their fruitfulness for
+practice, all start up as distinct tests of their veracity, and as a
+result we get confused. Common sense is BETTER for one sphere of life,
+science for another, philosophic criticism for a third; but whether
+either be TRUER absolutely, Heaven only knows. Just now, if I understand
+the matter rightly, we are witnessing a curious reversion to the
+common-sense way of looking at physical nature, in the philosophy of
+science favored by such men as Mach, Ostwald and Duhem. According to
+these teachers no hypothesis is truer than any other in the sense of
+being a more literal copy of reality. They are all but ways of talking
+on our part, to be compared solely from the point of view of their USE.
+The only literally true thing is REALITY; and the only reality we know
+is, for these logicians, sensible reality, the flux of our sensations
+and emotions as they pass. 'Energy' is the collective name (according
+to Ostwald) for the sensations just as they present themselves (the
+movement, heat, magnetic pull, or light, or whatever it may be) when
+they are measured in certain ways. So measuring them, we are enabled
+to describe the correlated changes which they show us, in formulas
+matchless for their simplicity and fruitfulness for human use. They are
+sovereign triumphs of economy in thought.
+
+No one can fail to admire the 'energetic' philosophy. But the
+hypersensible entities, the corpuscles and vibrations, hold their own
+with most physicists and chemists, in spite of its appeal. It seems too
+economical to be all-sufficient. Profusion, not economy, may after all
+be reality's key-note.
+
+I am dealing here with highly technical matters, hardly suitable for
+popular lecturing, and in which my own competence is small. All the
+better for my conclusion, however, which at this point is this. The
+whole notion of truth, which naturally and without reflexion we assume
+to mean the simple duplication by the mind of a ready-made and given
+reality, proves hard to understand clearly. There is no simple test
+available for adjudicating offhand between the divers types of thought
+that claim to possess it. Common sense, common science or corpuscular
+philosophy, ultra-critical science, or energetics, and critical or
+idealistic philosophy, all seem insufficiently true in some regard and
+leave some dissatisfaction. It is evident that the conflict of these so
+widely differing systems obliges us to overhaul the very idea of truth,
+for at present we have no definite notion of what the word may mean. I
+shall face that task in my next lecture, and will add but a few words,
+in finishing the present one.
+
+There are only two points that I wish you to retain from the present
+lecture. The first one relates to common sense. We have seen reason to
+suspect it, to suspect that in spite of their being so venerable, of
+their being so universally used and built into the very structure
+of language, its categories may after all be only a collection of
+extraordinarily successful hypotheses (historically discovered or
+invented by single men, but gradually communicated, and used by
+everybody) by which our forefathers have from time immemorial unified
+and straightened the discontinuity of their immediate experiences,
+and put themselves into an equilibrium with the surface of nature so
+satisfactory for ordinary practical purposes that it certainly would
+have lasted forever, but for the excessive intellectual vivacity of
+Democritus, Archimedes, Galileo, Berkeley, and other excentric geniuses
+whom the example of such men inflamed. Retain, I pray you, this
+suspicion about common sense.
+
+The other point is this. Ought not the existence of the various types of
+thinking which we have reviewed, each so splendid for certain purposes,
+yet all conflicting still, and neither one of them able to support a
+claim of absolute veracity, to awaken a presumption favorable to the
+pragmatistic view that all our theories are INSTRUMENTAL, are mental
+modes of ADAPTATION to reality, rather than revelations or gnostic
+answers to some divinely instituted world-enigma? I expressed this view
+as clearly as I could in the second of these lectures. Certainly the
+restlessness of the actual theoretic situation, the value for some
+purposes of each thought-level, and the inability of either to expel the
+others decisively, suggest this pragmatistic view, which I hope that the
+next lectures may soon make entirely convincing. May there not after all
+be a possible ambiguity in truth?
+
+
+
+
+Lecture VI
+
+Pragmatism's Conception of Truth
+
+When Clerk Maxwell was a child it is written that he had a mania for
+having everything explained to him, and that when people put him off
+with vague verbal accounts of any phenomenon he would interrupt them
+impatiently by saying, "Yes; but I want you to tell me the PARTICULAR GO
+of it!" Had his question been about truth, only a pragmatist could
+have told him the particular go of it. I believe that our contemporary
+pragmatists, especially Messrs. Schiller and Dewey, have given the only
+tenable account of this subject. It is a very ticklish subject, sending
+subtle rootlets into all kinds of crannies, and hard to treat in the
+sketchy way that alone befits a public lecture. But the Schiller-Dewey
+view of truth has been so ferociously attacked by rationalistic
+philosophers, and so abominably misunderstood, that here, if anywhere,
+is the point where a clear and simple statement should be made.
+
+I fully expect to see the pragmatist view of truth run through the
+classic stages of a theory's career. First, you know, a new theory is
+attacked as absurd; then it is admitted to be true, but obvious
+and insignificant; finally it is seen to be so important that its
+adversaries claim that they themselves discovered it. Our doctrine of
+truth is at present in the first of these three stages, with symptoms
+of the second stage having begun in certain quarters. I wish that this
+lecture might help it beyond the first stage in the eyes of many of you.
+
+Truth, as any dictionary will tell you, is a property of certain of our
+ideas. It means their 'agreement,' as falsity means their disagreement,
+with 'reality.' Pragmatists and intellectualists both accept this
+definition as a matter of course. They begin to quarrel only after
+the question is raised as to what may precisely be meant by the term
+'agreement,' and what by the term 'reality,' when reality is taken as
+something for our ideas to agree with.
+
+In answering these questions the pragmatists are more analytic and
+painstaking, the intellectualists more offhand and irreflective. The
+popular notion is that a true idea must copy its reality. Like
+other popular views, this one follows the analogy of the most usual
+experience. Our true ideas of sensible things do indeed copy them. Shut
+your eyes and think of yonder clock on the wall, and you get just such
+a true picture or copy of its dial. But your idea of its 'works' (unless
+you are a clock-maker) is much less of a copy, yet it passes muster, for
+it in no way clashes with the reality. Even tho it should shrink to the
+mere word 'works,' that word still serves you truly; and when you
+speak of the 'time-keeping function' of the clock, or of its spring's
+'elasticity,' it is hard to see exactly what your ideas can copy.
+
+You perceive that there is a problem here. Where our ideas cannot copy
+definitely their object, what does agreement with that object mean?
+Some idealists seem to say that they are true whenever they are what
+God means that we ought to think about that object. Others hold the
+copy-view all through, and speak as if our ideas possessed truth just
+in proportion as they approach to being copies of the Absolute's eternal
+way of thinking.
+
+These views, you see, invite pragmatistic discussion. But the great
+assumption of the intellectualists is that truth means essentially
+an inert static relation. When you've got your true idea of anything,
+there's an end of the matter. You're in possession; you KNOW; you have
+fulfilled your thinking destiny. You are where you ought to be mentally;
+you have obeyed your categorical imperative; and nothing more need
+follow on that climax of your rational destiny. Epistemologically you
+are in stable equilibrium.
+
+Pragmatism, on the other hand, asks its usual question. "Grant an idea
+or belief to be true," it says, "what concrete difference will its being
+true make in anyone's actual life? How will the truth be realized?
+What experiences will be different from those which would obtain if
+the belief were false? What, in short, is the truth's cash-value in
+experiential terms?"
+
+The moment pragmatism asks this question, it sees the answer: TRUE IDEAS
+ARE THOSE THAT WE CAN ASSIMILATE, VALIDATE, CORROBORATE AND VERIFY.
+FALSE IDEAS ARE THOSE THAT WE CANNOT. That is the practical difference
+it makes to us to have true ideas; that, therefore, is the meaning of
+truth, for it is all that truth is known-as.
+
+This thesis is what I have to defend. The truth of an idea is not a
+stagnant property inherent in it. Truth HAPPENS to an idea. It BECOMES
+true, is MADE true by events. Its verity is in fact an event, a process:
+the process namely of its verifying itself, its veri-FICATION. Its
+validity is the process of its valid-ATION.
+
+But what do the words verification and validation themselves
+pragmatically mean? They again signify certain practical consequences of
+the verified and validated idea. It is hard to find any one phrase
+that characterizes these consequences better than the ordinary
+agreement-formula--just such consequences being what we have in mind
+whenever we say that our ideas 'agree' with reality. They lead us,
+namely, through the acts and other ideas which they instigate, into or
+up to, or towards, other parts of experience with which we feel all the
+while-such feeling being among our potentialities--that the original
+ideas remain in agreement. The connexions and transitions come to us
+from point to point as being progressive, harmonious, satisfactory. This
+function of agreeable leading is what we mean by an idea's verification.
+Such an account is vague and it sounds at first quite trivial, but it
+has results which it will take the rest of my hour to explain.
+
+Let me begin by reminding you of the fact that the possession of true
+thoughts means everywhere the possession of invaluable instruments
+of action; and that our duty to gain truth, so far from being a
+blank command from out of the blue, or a 'stunt' self-imposed by our
+intellect, can account for itself by excellent practical reasons.
+
+The importance to human life of having true beliefs about matters of
+fact is a thing too notorious. We live in a world of realities that can
+be infinitely useful or infinitely harmful. Ideas that tell us which
+of them to expect count as the true ideas in all this primary sphere of
+verification, and the pursuit of such ideas is a primary human duty. The
+possession of truth, so far from being here an end in itself, is only a
+preliminary means towards other vital satisfactions. If I am lost in
+the woods and starved, and find what looks like a cow-path, it is of the
+utmost importance that I should think of a human habitation at the end
+of it, for if I do so and follow it, I save myself. The true thought
+is useful here because the house which is its object is useful. The
+practical value of true ideas is thus primarily derived from the
+practical importance of their objects to us. Their objects are, indeed,
+not important at all times. I may on another occasion have no use
+for the house; and then my idea of it, however verifiable, will be
+practically irrelevant, and had better remain latent. Yet since almost
+any object may some day become temporarily important, the advantage of
+having a general stock of extra truths, of ideas that shall be true of
+merely possible situations, is obvious. We store such extra truths away
+in our memories, and with the overflow we fill our books of reference.
+Whenever such an extra truth becomes practically relevant to one of our
+emergencies, it passes from cold-storage to do work in the world, and
+our belief in it grows active. You can say of it then either that 'it
+is useful because it is true' or that 'it is true because it is useful.'
+Both these phrases mean exactly the same thing, namely that here is
+an idea that gets fulfilled and can be verified. True is the name for
+whatever idea starts the verification-process, useful is the name for
+its completed function in experience. True ideas would never have been
+singled out as such, would never have acquired a class-name, least of
+all a name suggesting value, unless they had been useful from the outset
+in this way.
+
+From this simple cue pragmatism gets her general notion of truth as
+something essentially bound up with the way in which one moment in our
+experience may lead us towards other moments which it will be worth
+while to have been led to. Primarily, and on the common-sense level, the
+truth of a state of mind means this function of A LEADING THAT IS WORTH
+WHILE. When a moment in our experience, of any kind whatever, inspires
+us with a thought that is true, that means that sooner or later we dip
+by that thought's guidance into the particulars of experience again and
+make advantageous connexion with them. This is a vague enough statement,
+but I beg you to retain it, for it is essential.
+
+Our experience meanwhile is all shot through with regularities. One
+bit of it can warn us to get ready for another bit, can 'intend' or
+be 'significant of' that remoter object. The object's advent is the
+significance's verification. Truth, in these cases, meaning nothing but
+eventual verification, is manifestly incompatible with waywardness on
+our part. Woe to him whose beliefs play fast and loose with the order
+which realities follow in his experience: they will lead him nowhere or
+else make false connexions.
+
+By 'realities' or 'objects' here, we mean either things of common sense,
+sensibly present, or else common-sense relations, such as dates, places,
+distances, kinds, activities. Following our mental image of a house
+along the cow-path, we actually come to see the house; we get the
+image's full verification. SUCH SIMPLY AND FULLY VERIFIED LEADINGS ARE
+CERTAINLY THE ORIGINALS AND PROTOTYPES OF THE TRUTH-PROCESS. Experience
+offers indeed other forms of truth-process, but they are all conceivable
+as being primary verifications arrested, multiplied or substituted one
+for another.
+
+Take, for instance, yonder object on the wall. You and I consider it to
+be a 'clock,' altho no one of us has seen the hidden works that make it
+one. We let our notion pass for true without attempting to verify. If
+truths mean verification-process essentially, ought we then to call such
+unverified truths as this abortive? No, for they form the overwhelmingly
+large number of the truths we live by. Indirect as well as direct
+verifications pass muster. Where circumstantial evidence is sufficient,
+we can go without eye-witnessing. Just as we here assume Japan to exist
+without ever having been there, because it WORKS to do so, everything we
+know conspiring with the belief, and nothing interfering, so we assume
+that thing to be a clock. We USE it as a clock, regulating the length
+of our lecture by it. The verification of the assumption here means its
+leading to no frustration or contradiction. VerifiABILITY of wheels and
+weights and pendulum is as good as verification. For one truth-process
+completed there are a million in our lives that function in this state
+of nascency. They turn us TOWARDS direct verification; lead us into the
+SURROUNDINGS of the objects they envisage; and then, if everything runs
+on harmoniously, we are so sure that verification is possible that we
+omit it, and are usually justified by all that happens.
+
+Truth lives, in fact, for the most part on a credit system. Our
+thoughts and beliefs 'pass,' so long as nothing challenges them, just as
+bank-notes pass so long as nobody refuses them. But this all points to
+direct face-to-face verifications somewhere, without which the fabric of
+truth collapses like a financial system with no cash-basis whatever.
+You accept my verification of one thing, I yours of another. We trade on
+each other's truth. But beliefs verified concretely by SOMEBODY are the
+posts of the whole superstructure.
+
+Another great reason--beside economy of time--for waiving complete
+verification in the usual business of life is that all things exist
+in kinds and not singly. Our world is found once for all to have that
+peculiarity. So that when we have once directly verified our ideas about
+one specimen of a kind, we consider ourselves free to apply them to
+other specimens without verification. A mind that habitually
+discerns the kind of thing before it, and acts by the law of the
+kind immediately, without pausing to verify, will be a 'true' mind
+in ninety-nine out of a hundred emergencies, proved so by its conduct
+fitting everything it meets, and getting no refutation.
+
+INDIRECTLY OR ONLY POTENTIALLY VERIFYING PROCESSES MAY THUS BE TRUE AS
+WELL AS FULL VERIFICATION-PROCESSES. They work as true processes would
+work, give us the same advantages, and claim our recognition for the
+same reasons. All this on the common-sense level of, matters of fact,
+which we are alone considering.
+
+But matters of fact are not our only stock in trade. RELATIONS AMONG
+PURELY MENTAL IDEAS form another sphere where true and false beliefs
+obtain, and here the beliefs are absolute, or unconditional. When they
+are true they bear the name either of definitions or of principles. It
+is either a principle or a definition that 1 and 1 make 2, that 2 and 1
+make 3, and so on; that white differs less from gray than it does from
+black; that when the cause begins to act the effect also commences. Such
+propositions hold of all possible 'ones,' of all conceivable 'whites'
+and 'grays' and 'causes.' The objects here are mental objects.
+Their relations are perceptually obvious at a glance, and no
+sense-verification is necessary. Moreover, once true, always true, of
+those same mental objects. Truth here has an 'eternal' character. If you
+can find a concrete thing anywhere that is 'one' or 'white' or 'gray,'
+or an 'effect,' then your principles will everlastingly apply to it. It
+is but a case of ascertaining the kind, and then applying the law of its
+kind to the particular object. You are sure to get truth if you can but
+name the kind rightly, for your mental relations hold good of everything
+of that kind without exception. If you then, nevertheless, failed to get
+truth concretely, you would say that you had classed your real objects
+wrongly.
+
+In this realm of mental relations, truth again is an affair of leading.
+We relate one abstract idea with another, framing in the end great
+systems of logical and mathematical truth, under the respective terms of
+which the sensible facts of experience eventually arrange themselves,
+so that our eternal truths hold good of realities also. This marriage of
+fact and theory is endlessly fertile. What we say is here already true
+in advance of special verification, IF WE HAVE SUBSUMED OUR OBJECTS
+RIGHTLY. Our ready-made ideal framework for all sorts of possible
+objects follows from the very structure of our thinking. We can no more
+play fast and loose with these abstract relations than we can do so with
+our sense-experiences. They coerce us; we must treat them consistently,
+whether or not we like the results. The rules of addition apply to our
+debts as rigorously as to our assets. The hundredth decimal of pi, the
+ratio of the circumference to its diameter, is predetermined ideally
+now, tho no one may have computed it. If we should ever need the figure
+in our dealings with an actual circle we should need to have it given
+rightly, calculated by the usual rules; for it is the same kind of truth
+that those rules elsewhere calculate.
+
+Between the coercions of the sensible order and those of the ideal
+order, our mind is thus wedged tightly. Our ideas must agree with
+realities, be such realities concrete or abstract, be they facts or be
+they principles, under penalty of endless inconsistency and frustration.
+So far, intellectualists can raise no protest. They can only say that we
+have barely touched the skin of the matter.
+
+Realities mean, then, either concrete facts, or abstract kinds of things
+and relations perceived intuitively between them. They furthermore and
+thirdly mean, as things that new ideas of ours must no less take account
+of, the whole body of other truths already in our possession. But what
+now does 'agreement' with such three-fold realities mean?--to use again
+the definition that is current.
+
+Here it is that pragmatism and intellectualism begin to part company.
+Primarily, no doubt, to agree means to copy, but we saw that the mere
+word 'clock' would do instead of a mental picture of its works, and that
+of many realities our ideas can only be symbols and not copies. 'Past
+time,' 'power,' 'spontaneity'--how can our mind copy such realities?
+
+To 'agree' in the widest sense with a reality, CAN ONLY MEAN TO BE
+GUIDED EITHER STRAIGHT UP TO IT OR INTO ITS SURROUNDINGS, OR TO BE PUT
+INTO SUCH WORKING TOUCH WITH IT AS TO HANDLE EITHER IT OR SOMETHING
+CONNECTED WITH IT BETTER THAN IF WE DISAGREED. Better either
+intellectually or practically! And often agreement will only mean
+the negative fact that nothing contradictory from the quarter of that
+reality comes to interfere with the way in which our ideas guide us
+elsewhere. To copy a reality is, indeed, one very important way of
+agreeing with it, but it is far from being essential. The essential
+thing is the process of being guided. Any idea that helps us to DEAL,
+whether practically or intellectually, with either the reality or its
+belongings, that doesn't entangle our progress in frustrations, that
+FITS, in fact, and adapts our life to the reality's whole setting, will
+agree sufficiently to meet the requirement. It will hold true of that
+reality.
+
+Thus, NAMES are just as 'true' or 'false' as definite mental pictures
+are. They set up similar verification-processes, and lead to fully
+equivalent practical results.
+
+All human thinking gets discursified; we exchange ideas; we lend and
+borrow verifications, get them from one another by means of social
+intercourse. All truth thus gets verbally built out, stored up, and made
+available for everyone. Hence, we must TALK consistently just as we must
+THINK consistently: for both in talk and thought we deal with kinds.
+Names are arbitrary, but once understood they must be kept to. We
+mustn't now call Abel 'Cain' or Cain 'Abel.' If we do, we ungear
+ourselves from the whole book of Genesis, and from all its connexions
+with the universe of speech and fact down to the present time. We throw
+ourselves out of whatever truth that entire system of speech and fact
+may embody.
+
+The overwhelming majority of our true ideas admit of no direct or
+face-to-face verification-those of past history, for example, as of Cain
+and Abel. The stream of time can be remounted only verbally, or verified
+indirectly by the present prolongations or effects of what the past
+harbored. Yet if they agree with these verbalities and effects, we can
+know that our ideas of the past are true. AS TRUE AS PAST TIME ITSELF
+WAS, so true was Julius Caesar, so true were antediluvian monsters,
+all in their proper dates and settings. That past time itself was, is
+guaranteed by its coherence with everything that's present. True as the
+present is, the past was also.
+
+Agreement thus turns out to be essentially an affair of leading--leading
+that is useful because it is into quarters that contain objects that are
+important. True ideas lead us into useful verbal and conceptual
+quarters as well as directly up to useful sensible termini. They lead
+to consistency, stability and flowing human intercourse. They lead away
+from excentricity and isolation, from foiled and barren thinking. The
+untrammeled flowing of the leading-process, its general freedom from
+clash and contradiction, passes for its indirect verification; but all
+roads lead to Rome, and in the end and eventually, all true processes
+must lead to the face of directly verifying sensible experiences
+SOMEWHERE, which somebody's ideas have copied.
+
+Such is the large loose way in which the pragmatist interprets the word
+agreement. He treats it altogether practically. He lets it cover any
+process of conduction from a present idea to a future terminus, provided
+only it run prosperously. It is only thus that 'scientific' ideas,
+flying as they do beyond common sense, can be said to agree with their
+realities. It is, as I have already said, as if reality were made of
+ether, atoms or electrons, but we mustn't think so literally. The term
+'energy' doesn't even pretend to stand for anything 'objective.' It is
+only a way of measuring the surface of phenomena so as to string their
+changes on a simple formula.
+
+Yet in the choice of these man-made formulas we cannot be capricious
+with impunity any more than we can be capricious on the common-sense
+practical level. We must find a theory that will WORK; and that means
+something extremely difficult; for our theory must mediate between all
+previous truths and certain new experiences. It must derange common
+sense and previous belief as little as possible, and it must lead to
+some sensible terminus or other that can be verified exactly. To 'work'
+means both these things; and the squeeze is so tight that there is
+little loose play for any hypothesis. Our theories are wedged and
+controlled as nothing else is. Yet sometimes alternative theoretic
+formulas are equally compatible with all the truths we know, and then we
+choose between them for subjective reasons. We choose the kind of theory
+to which we are already partial; we follow 'elegance' or 'economy.'
+Clerk Maxwell somewhere says it would be "poor scientific taste" to
+choose the more complicated of two equally well-evidenced conceptions;
+and you will all agree with him. Truth in science is what gives us the
+maximum possible sum of satisfactions, taste included, but consistency
+both with previous truth and with novel fact is always the most
+imperious claimant.
+
+I have led you through a very sandy desert. But now, if I may be allowed
+so vulgar an expression, we begin to taste the milk in the cocoanut. Our
+rationalist critics here discharge their batteries upon us, and to reply
+to them will take us out from all this dryness into full sight of a
+momentous philosophical alternative.
+
+Our account of truth is an account of truths in the plural, of processes
+of leading, realized in rebus, and having only this quality in common,
+that they PAY. They pay by guiding us into or towards some part of a
+system that dips at numerous points into sense-percepts, which we may
+copy mentally or not, but with which at any rate we are now in the kind
+of commerce vaguely designated as verification. Truth for us is simply
+a collective name for verification-processes, just as health, wealth,
+strength, etc., are names for other processes connected with life, and
+also pursued because it pays to pursue them. Truth is MADE, just as
+health, wealth and strength are made, in the course of experience.
+
+Here rationalism is instantaneously up in arms against us. I can imagine
+a rationalist to talk as follows:
+
+"Truth is not made," he will say; "it absolutely obtains, being a unique
+relation that does not wait upon any process, but shoots straight over
+the head of experience, and hits its reality every time. Our belief that
+yon thing on the wall is a clock is true already, altho no one in
+the whole history of the world should verify it. The bare quality of
+standing in that transcendent relation is what makes any thought true
+that possesses it, whether or not there be verification. You pragmatists
+put the cart before the horse in making truth's being reside in
+verification-processes. These are merely signs of its being, merely our
+lame ways of ascertaining after the fact, which of our ideas already has
+possessed the wondrous quality. The quality itself is timeless, like all
+essences and natures. Thoughts partake of it directly, as they partake
+of falsity or of irrelevancy. It can't be analyzed away into pragmatic
+consequences."
+
+The whole plausibility of this rationalist tirade is due to the fact
+to which we have already paid so much attention. In our world,
+namely, abounding as it does in things of similar kinds and similarly
+associated, one verification serves for others of its kind, and one
+great use of knowing things is to be led not so much to them as to their
+associates, especially to human talk about them. The quality of truth,
+obtaining ante rem, pragmatically means, then, the fact that in such a
+world innumerable ideas work better by their indirect or possible than
+by their direct and actual verification. Truth ante rem means only
+verifiability, then; or else it is a case of the stock rationalist trick
+of treating the NAME of a concrete phenomenal reality as an independent
+prior entity, and placing it behind the reality as its explanation.
+Professor Mach quotes somewhere an epigram of Lessing's:
+
+Sagt Hanschen Schlau zu Vetter Fritz, "Wie kommt es, Vetter Fritzen,
+Dass grad' die Reichsten in der Welt, Das meiste Geld besitzen?"
+
+Hanschen Schlau here treats the principle 'wealth' as something distinct
+from the facts denoted by the man's being rich. It antedates them; the
+facts become only a sort of secondary coincidence with the rich man's
+essential nature.
+
+In the case of 'wealth' we all see the fallacy. We know that wealth is
+but a name for concrete processes that certain men's lives play a
+part in, and not a natural excellence found in Messrs. Rockefeller and
+Carnegie, but not in the rest of us.
+
+Like wealth, health also lives in rebus. It is a name for processes,
+as digestion, circulation, sleep, etc., that go on happily, tho in this
+instance we are more inclined to think of it as a principle and to say
+the man digests and sleeps so well BECAUSE he is so healthy.
+
+With 'strength' we are, I think, more rationalistic still, and decidedly
+inclined to treat it as an excellence pre-existing in the man and
+explanatory of the herculean performances of his muscles.
+
+With 'truth' most people go over the border entirely, and treat the
+rationalistic account as self-evident. But really all these words in TH
+are exactly similar. Truth exists ante rem just as much and as little as
+the other things do.
+
+The scholastics, following Aristotle, made much of the distinction
+between habit and act. Health in actu means, among other things, good
+sleeping and digesting. But a healthy man need not always be sleeping,
+or always digesting, any more than a wealthy man need be always handling
+money, or a strong man always lifting weights. All such qualities sink
+to the status of 'habits' between their times of exercise; and similarly
+truth becomes a habit of certain of our ideas and beliefs in their
+intervals of rest from their verifying activities. But those activities
+are the root of the whole matter, and the condition of there being any
+habit to exist in the intervals.
+
+'The true,' to put it very briefly, is only the expedient in the way of
+our thinking, just as 'the right' is only the expedient in the way of
+our behaving. Expedient in almost any fashion; and expedient in the
+long run and on the whole of course; for what meets expediently all
+the experience in sight won't necessarily meet all farther experiences
+equally satisfactorily. Experience, as we know, has ways of BOILING
+OVER, and making us correct our present formulas.
+
+The 'absolutely' true, meaning what no farther experience will ever
+alter, is that ideal vanishing-point towards which we imagine that all
+our temporary truths will some day converge. It runs on all fours with
+the perfectly wise man, and with the absolutely complete experience;
+and, if these ideals are ever realized, they will all be realized
+together. Meanwhile we have to live to-day by what truth we can
+get to-day, and be ready to-morrow to call it falsehood. Ptolemaic
+astronomy, euclidean space, aristotelian logic, scholastic metaphysics,
+were expedient for centuries, but human experience has boiled over
+those limits, and we now call these things only relatively true, or true
+within those borders of experience. 'Absolutely' they are false; for we
+know that those limits were casual, and might have been transcended by
+past theorists just as they are by present thinkers.
+
+When new experiences lead to retrospective judgments, using the past
+tense, what these judgments utter WAS true, even tho no past thinker
+had been led there. We live forwards, a Danish thinker has said, but we
+understand backwards. The present sheds a backward light on the world's
+previous processes. They may have been truth-processes for the actors
+in them. They are not so for one who knows the later revelations of the
+story.
+
+This regulative notion of a potential better truth to be established
+later, possibly to be established some day absolutely, and having powers
+of retroactive legislation, turns its face, like all pragmatist
+notions, towards concreteness of fact, and towards the future. Like the
+half-truths, the absolute truth will have to be MADE, made as a relation
+incidental to the growth of a mass of verification-experience, to which
+the half-true ideas are all along contributing their quota.
+
+I have already insisted on the fact that truth is made largely out
+of previous truths. Men's beliefs at any time are so much experience
+funded. But the beliefs are themselves parts of the sum total of the
+world's experience, and become matter, therefore, for the next day's
+funding operations. So far as reality means experienceable reality,
+both it and the truths men gain about it are everlastingly in process
+of mutation-mutation towards a definite goal, it may be--but still
+mutation.
+
+Mathematicians can solve problems with two variables. On the Newtonian
+theory, for instance, acceleration varies with distance, but distance
+also varies with acceleration. In the realm of truth-processes facts
+come independently and determine our beliefs provisionally. But these
+beliefs make us act, and as fast as they do so, they bring into sight or
+into existence new facts which re-determine the beliefs accordingly. So
+the whole coil and ball of truth, as it rolls up, is the product of a
+double influence. Truths emerge from facts; but they dip forward into
+facts again and add to them; which facts again create or reveal new
+truth (the word is indifferent) and so on indefinitely. The 'facts'
+themselves meanwhile are not TRUE. They simply ARE. Truth is the
+function of the beliefs that start and terminate among them.
+
+The case is like a snowball's growth, due as it is to the distribution
+of the snow on the one hand, and to the successive pushes of the boys on
+the other, with these factors co-determining each other incessantly.
+
+The most fateful point of difference between being a rationalist and
+being a pragmatist is now fully in sight. Experience is in mutation,
+and our psychological ascertainments of truth are in mutation--so much
+rationalism will allow; but never that either reality itself or truth
+itself is mutable. Reality stands complete and ready-made from all
+eternity, rationalism insists, and the agreement of our ideas with it
+is that unique unanalyzable virtue in them of which she has already told
+us. As that intrinsic excellence, their truth has nothing to do with our
+experiences. It adds nothing to the content of experience. It makes
+no difference to reality itself; it is supervenient, inert, static, a
+reflexion merely. It doesn't EXIST, it HOLDS or OBTAINS, it belongs to
+another dimension from that of either facts or fact-relations, belongs,
+in short, to the epistemological dimension--and with that big word
+rationalism closes the discussion.
+
+Thus, just as pragmatism faces forward to the future, so does
+rationalism here again face backward to a past eternity. True to her
+inveterate habit, rationalism reverts to 'principles,' and thinks that
+when an abstraction once is named, we own an oracular solution.
+
+The tremendous pregnancy in the way of consequences for life of this
+radical difference of outlook will only become apparent in my later
+lectures. I wish meanwhile to close this lecture by showing that
+rationalism's sublimity does not save it from inanity.
+
+When, namely, you ask rationalists, instead of accusing pragmatism
+of desecrating the notion of truth, to define it themselves by saying
+exactly what THEY understand by it, the only positive attempts I can
+think of are these two:
+
+1. "Truth is just the system of propositions which have an
+un-conditional claim to be recognized as valid." [Footnote: A. E.
+Taylor, Philosophical Review, vol. xiv, p. 288.]
+
+2. Truth is a name for all those judgments which we find ourselves under
+obligation to make by a kind of imperative duty. [Footnote: H.
+Rickert, Der Gegenstand der Erkenntniss, chapter on 'Die
+Urtheilsnothwendigkeit.']
+
+The first thing that strikes one in such definitions is their
+unutterable triviality. They are absolutely true, of course, but
+absolutely insignificant until you handle them pragmatically. What do
+you mean by 'claim' here, and what do you mean by 'duty'? As
+summary names for the concrete reasons why thinking in true ways is
+overwhelmingly expedient and good for mortal men, it is all right to
+talk of claims on reality's part to be agreed with, and of obligations
+on our part to agree. We feel both the claims and the obligations, and
+we feel them for just those reasons.
+
+But the rationalists who talk of claim and obligation EXPRESSLY SAY
+THAT THEY HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH OUR PRACTICAL INTERESTS OR PERSONAL
+REASONS. Our reasons for agreeing are psychological facts, they say,
+relative to each thinker, and to the accidents of his life. They are his
+evidence merely, they are no part of the life of truth itself. That
+life transacts itself in a purely logical or epistemological, as
+distinguished from a psychological, dimension, and its claims antedate
+and exceed all personal motivations whatsoever. Tho neither man nor God
+should ever ascertain truth, the word would still have to be defined as
+that which OUGHT to be ascertained and recognized.
+
+There never was a more exquisite example of an idea abstracted from the
+concretes of experience and then used to oppose and negate what it was
+abstracted from.
+
+Philosophy and common life abound in similar instances. The
+'sentimentalist fallacy' is to shed tears over abstract justice and
+generosity, beauty, etc., and never to know these qualities when you
+meet them in the street, because there the circumstances make them
+vulgar. Thus I read in the privately printed biography of an eminently
+rationalistic mind: "It was strange that with such admiration for beauty
+in the abstract, my brother had no enthusiasm for fine architecture, for
+beautiful painting, or for flowers." And in almost the last philosophic
+work I have read, I find such passages as the following: "Justice
+is ideal, solely ideal. Reason conceives that it ought to exist, but
+experience shows that it can-not. ... Truth, which ought to be, cannot
+be. ... Reason is deformed by experience. As soon as reason enters
+experience, it becomes contrary to reason."
+
+The rationalist's fallacy here is exactly like the sentimentalist's.
+Both extract a quality from the muddy particulars of experience, and
+find it so pure when extracted that they contrast it with each and all
+its muddy instances as an opposite and higher nature. All the while it
+is THEIR nature. It is the nature of truths to be validated, verified.
+It pays for our ideas to be validated. Our obligation to seek truth is
+part of our general obligation to do what pays. The payments true ideas
+bring are the sole why of our duty to follow them.
+
+Identical whys exist in the case of wealth and health. Truth makes no
+other kind of claim and imposes no other kind of ought than health and
+wealth do. All these claims are conditional; the concrete benefits we
+gain are what we mean by calling the pursuit a duty. In the case of
+truth, untrue beliefs work as perniciously in the long run as true
+beliefs work beneficially. Talking abstractly, the quality 'true' may
+thus be said to grow absolutely precious, and the quality 'untrue'
+absolutely damnable: the one may be called good, the other bad,
+unconditionally. We ought to think the true, we ought to shun the false,
+imperatively.
+
+But if we treat all this abstraction literally and oppose it to its
+mother soil in experience, see what a preposterous position we work
+ourselves into.
+
+We cannot then take a step forward in our actual thinking. When shall
+I acknowledge this truth and when that? Shall the acknowledgment be
+loud?--or silent? If sometimes loud, sometimes silent, which NOW? When
+may a truth go into cold-storage in the encyclopedia? and when shall it
+come out for battle? Must I constantly be repeating the truth 'twice
+two are four' because of its eternal claim on recognition? or is
+it sometimes irrelevant? Must my thoughts dwell night and day on my
+personal sins and blemishes, because I truly have them?--or may I sink
+and ignore them in order to be a decent social unit, and not a mass of
+morbid melancholy and apology?
+
+It is quite evident that our obligation to acknowledge truth, so far
+from being unconditional, is tremendously conditioned. Truth with a big
+T, and in the singular, claims abstractly to be recognized, of course;
+but concrete truths in the plural need be recognized only when their
+recognition is expedient. A truth must always be preferred to a
+falsehood when both relate to the situation; but when neither does,
+truth is as little of a duty as falsehood. If you ask me what o'clock it
+is and I tell you that I live at 95 Irving Street, my answer may indeed
+be true, but you don't see why it is my duty to give it. A false address
+would be as much to the purpose.
+
+With this admission that there are conditions that limit the application
+of the abstract imperative, THE PRAGMATISTIC TREATMENT OF TRUTH SWEEPS
+BACK UPON US IN ITS FULNESS. Our duty to agree with reality is seen to
+be grounded in a perfect jungle of concrete expediencies.
+
+When Berkeley had explained what people meant by matter, people thought
+that he denied matter's existence. When Messrs. Schiller and Dewey
+now explain what people mean by truth, they are accused of denying ITS
+existence. These pragmatists destroy all objective standards, critics
+say, and put foolishness and wisdom on one level. A favorite formula for
+describing Mr. Schiller's doctrines and mine is that we are persons who
+think that by saying whatever you find it pleasant to say and calling it
+truth you fulfil every pragmatistic requirement.
+
+I leave it to you to judge whether this be not an impudent slander. Pent
+in, as the pragmatist more than anyone else sees himself to be, between
+the whole body of funded truths squeezed from the past and the coercions
+of the world of sense about him, who so well as he feels the immense
+pressure of objective control under which our minds perform their
+operations? If anyone imagines that this law is lax, let him keep its
+commandment one day, says Emerson. We have heard much of late of the
+uses of the imagination in science. It is high time to urge the use of
+a little imagination in philosophy. The unwillingness of some of our
+critics to read any but the silliest of possible meanings into our
+statements is as discreditable to their imaginations as anything I know
+in recent philosophic history. Schiller says the true is that which
+'works.' Thereupon he is treated as one who limits verification to
+the lowest material utilities. Dewey says truth is what gives
+'satisfaction.' He is treated as one who believes in calling everything
+true which, if it were true, would be pleasant.
+
+Our critics certainly need more imagination of realities. I have
+honestly tried to stretch my own imagination and to read the best
+possible meaning into the rationalist conception, but I have to confess
+that it still completely baffles me. The notion of a reality calling on
+us to 'agree' with it, and that for no reasons, but simply because
+its claim is 'unconditional' or 'transcendent,' is one that I can make
+neither head nor tail of. I try to imagine myself as the sole reality
+in the world, and then to imagine what more I would 'claim' if I were
+allowed to. If you suggest the possibility of my claiming that a mind
+should come into being from out of the void inane and stand and COPY me,
+I can indeed imagine what the copying might mean, but I can conjure up
+no motive. What good it would do me to be copied, or what good it would
+do that mind to copy me, if farther consequences are expressly and
+in principle ruled out as motives for the claim (as they are by our
+rationalist authorities) I cannot fathom. When the Irishman's admirers
+ran him along to the place of banquet in a sedan chair with no bottom,
+he said, "Faith, if it wasn't for the honor of the thing, I might as
+well have come on foot." So here: but for the honor of the thing, I
+might as well have remained uncopied. Copying is one genuine mode
+of knowing (which for some strange reason our contemporary
+transcendentalists seem to be tumbling over each other to repudiate);
+but when we get beyond copying, and fall back on unnamed forms of
+agreeing that are expressly denied to be either copyings or leadings or
+fittings, or any other processes pragmatically definable, the WHAT of
+the 'agreement' claimed becomes as unintelligible as the why of it.
+Neither content nor motive can be imagined for it. It is an absolutely
+meaningless abstraction. [Footnote: I am not forgetting that Professor
+Rickert long ago gave up the whole notion of truth being founded on
+agreement with reality. Reality, according to him, is whatever agrees
+with truth, and truth is founded solely on our primal duty. This
+fantastic flight, together with Mr. Joachim's candid confession of
+failure in his book The Nature of Truth, seems to me to mark the
+bankruptcy of rationalism when dealing with this subject. Rickert deals
+with part of the pragmatistic position under the head of what he calls
+'Relativismus.' I cannot discuss his text here. Suffice it to say
+that his argumentation in that chapter is so feeble as to seem almost
+incredible in so generally able a writer.]
+
+Surely in this field of truth it is the pragmatists and not the
+rationalists who are the more genuine defenders of the universe's
+rationality.
+
+
+
+
+Lecture VII
+
+Pragmatism and Humanism
+
+What hardens the heart of everyone I approach with the view of truth
+sketched in my last lecture is that typical idol of the tribe, the
+notion of THE Truth, conceived as the one answer, determinate and
+complete, to the one fixed enigma which the world is believed to
+propound. For popular tradition, it is all the better if the answer
+be oracular, so as itself to awaken wonder as an enigma of the second
+order, veiling rather than revealing what its profundities are supposed
+to contain. All the great single-word answers to the world's riddle,
+such as God, the One, Reason, Law, Spirit, Matter, Nature, Polarity, the
+Dialectic Process, the Idea, the Self, the Oversoul, draw the admiration
+that men have lavished on them from this oracular role. By amateurs in
+philosophy and professionals alike, the universe is represented as
+a queer sort of petrified sphinx whose appeal to man consists in a
+monotonous challenge to his divining powers. THE Truth: what a perfect
+idol of the rationalistic mind! I read in an old letter--from a gifted
+friend who died too young--these words: "In everything, in science, art,
+morals and religion, there MUST be one system that is right and EVERY
+other wrong." How characteristic of the enthusiasm of a certain stage of
+youth! At twenty-one we rise to such a challenge and expect to find the
+system. It never occurs to most of us even later that the question 'what
+is THE truth?' is no real question (being irrelative to all conditions)
+and that the whole notion of THE truth is an abstraction from the fact
+of truths in the plural, a mere useful summarizing phrase like THE Latin
+Language or THE Law.
+
+Common-law judges sometimes talk about the law, and school-masters talk
+about the latin tongue, in a way to make their hearers think they mean
+entities pre-existent to the decisions or to the words and syntax,
+determining them unequivocally and requiring them to obey. But the
+slightest exercise of reflexion makes us see that, instead of being
+principles of this kind, both law and latin are results. Distinctions
+between the lawful and the unlawful in conduct, or between the
+correct and incorrect in speech, have grown up incidentally among the
+interactions of men's experiences in detail; and in no other way do
+distinctions between the true and the false in belief ever grow up.
+Truth grafts itself on previous truth, modifying it in the process, just
+as idiom grafts itself on previous idiom, and law on previous law. Given
+previous law and a novel case, and the judge will twist them into fresh
+law. Previous idiom; new slang or metaphor or oddity that hits the
+public taste:--and presto, a new idiom is made. Previous truth; fresh
+facts:--and our mind finds a new truth.
+
+All the while, however, we pretend that the eternal is unrolling, that
+the one previous justice, grammar or truth is simply fulgurating, and
+not being made. But imagine a youth in the courtroom trying cases with
+his abstract notion of 'the' law, or a censor of speech let loose
+among the theatres with his idea of 'the' mother-tongue, or a professor
+setting up to lecture on the actual universe with his rationalistic
+notion of 'the Truth' with a big T, and what progress do they make?
+Truth, law, and language fairly boil away from them at the least touch
+of novel fact. These things MAKE THEMSELVES as we go. Our rights,
+wrongs, prohibitions, penalties, words, forms, idioms, beliefs, are so
+many new creations that add themselves as fast as history proceeds.
+Far from being antecedent principles that animate the process, law,
+language, truth are but abstract names for its results.
+
+Laws and languages at any rate are thus seen to be man-made: things.
+Mr. Schiller applies the analogy to beliefs, and proposes the name of
+'Humanism' for the doctrine that to an unascertainable extent our truths
+are man-made products too. Human motives sharpen all our questions,
+human satisfactions lurk in all our answers, all our formulas have a
+human twist. This element is so inextricable in the products that Mr.
+Schiller sometimes seems almost to leave it an open question whether
+there be anything else. "The world," he says, "is essentially [u lambda
+nu], it is what we make of it. It is fruitless to define it by what it
+originally was or by what it is apart from us; it IS what is made of it.
+Hence ... the world is PLASTIC." [Footnote: Personal Idealism, p. 60.]
+He adds that we can learn the limits of the plasticity only by trying,
+and that we ought to start as if it were wholly plastic, acting
+methodically on that assumption, and stopping only when we are
+decisively rebuked.
+
+This is Mr. Schiller's butt-end-foremost statement of the humanist
+position, and it has exposed him to severe attack. I mean to defend the
+humanist position in this lecture, so I will insinuate a few remarks at
+this point.
+
+Mr. Schiller admits as emphatically as anyone the presence of resisting
+factors in every actual experience of truth-making, of which the
+new-made special truth must take account, and with which it has perforce
+to 'agree.' All our truths are beliefs about 'Reality'; and in any
+particular belief the reality acts as something independent, as a thing
+FOUND, not manufactured. Let me here recall a bit of my last lecture.
+
+'REALITY' IS IN GENERAL WHAT TRUTHS HAVE TO TAKE ACCOUNT OF; [Footnote:
+Mr. Taylor in his Elements of Metaphysics uses this excellent pragmatic
+definition.] and the FIRST part of reality from this point of view is
+the flux of our sensations. Sensations are forced upon us, coming we
+know not whence. Over their nature, order, and quantity we have as good
+as no control. THEY are neither true nor false; they simply ARE. It is
+only what we say about them, only the names we give them, our theories
+of their source and nature and remote relations, that may be true or
+not.
+
+The SECOND part of reality, as something that our beliefs must also
+obediently take account of, is the RELATIONS that obtain between our
+sensations or between their copies in our minds. This part falls into
+two sub-parts: 1) the relations that are mutable and accidental, as
+those of date and place; and 2) those that are fixed and essential
+because they are grounded on the inner natures of their terms--such as
+likeness and unlikeness. Both sorts of relation are matters of immediate
+perception. Both are 'facts.' But it is the latter kind of fact that
+forms the more important sub-part of reality for our theories of
+knowledge. Inner relations namely are 'eternal,' are perceived whenever
+their sensible terms are compared; and of them our thought--mathematical
+and logical thought, so-called--must eternally take account.
+
+The THIRD part of reality, additional to these perceptions (tho largely
+based upon them), is the PREVIOUS TRUTHS of which every new inquiry
+takes account. This third part is a much less obdurately resisting
+factor: it often ends by giving way. In speaking of these three portions
+of reality as at all times controlling our belief's formation, I am only
+reminding you of what we heard in our last hour.
+
+Now however fixed these elements of reality may be, we still have a
+certain freedom in our dealings with them. Take our sensations. THAT
+they are is undoubtedly beyond our control; but WHICH we attend to,
+note, and make emphatic in our conclusions depends on our own interests;
+and, according as we lay the emphasis here or there, quite different
+formulations of truth result. We read the same facts differently.
+'Waterloo,' with the same fixed details, spells a 'victory' for an
+englishman; for a frenchman it spells a 'defeat.' So, for an optimist
+philosopher the universe spells victory, for a pessimist, defeat.
+
+What we say about reality thus depends on the perspective into which we
+throw it. The THAT of it is its own; but the WHAT depends on the WHICH;
+and the which depends on US. Both the sensational and the relational
+parts of reality are dumb: they say absolutely nothing about themselves.
+We it is who have to speak for them. This dumbness of sensations has
+led such intellectualists as T.H. Green and Edward Caird to shove them
+almost beyond the pale of philosophic recognition, but pragmatists
+refuse to go so far. A sensation is rather like a client who has given
+his case to a lawyer and then has passively to listen in the courtroom
+to whatever account of his affairs, pleasant or unpleasant, the lawyer
+finds it most expedient to give.
+
+Hence, even in the field of sensation, our minds exert a certain
+arbitrary choice. By our inclusions and omissions we trace the field's
+extent; by our emphasis we mark its foreground and its background; by
+our order we read it in this direction or in that. We receive in short
+the block of marble, but we carve the statue ourselves.
+
+This applies to the 'eternal' parts of reality as well: we shuffle our
+perceptions of intrinsic relation and arrange them just as freely. We
+read them in one serial order or another, class them in this way or
+in that, treat one or the other as more fundamental, until our beliefs
+about them form those bodies of truth known as logics, geometries, or
+arithmetics, in each and all of which the form and order in which the
+whole is cast is flagrantly man-made.
+
+Thus, to say nothing of the new FACTS which men add to the matter of
+reality by the acts of their own lives, they have already impressed
+their mental forms on that whole third of reality which I have called
+'previous truths.' Every hour brings its new percepts, its own facts of
+sensation and relation, to be truly taken account of; but the whole
+of our PAST dealings with such facts is already funded in the previous
+truths. It is therefore only the smallest and recentest fraction of the
+first two parts of reality that comes to us without the human touch, and
+that fraction has immediately to become humanized in the sense of being
+squared, assimilated, or in some way adapted, to the humanized mass
+already there. As a matter of fact we can hardly take in an impression
+at all, in the absence of a pre-conception of what impressions there may
+possibly be.
+
+When we talk of reality 'independent' of human thinking, then, it seems
+a thing very hard to find. It reduces to the notion of what is just
+entering into experience, and yet to be named, or else to some imagined
+aboriginal presence in experience, before any belief about the presence
+had arisen, before any human conception had been applied. It is what is
+absolutely dumb and evanescent, the merely ideal limit of our minds.
+We may glimpse it, but we never grasp it; what we grasp is always some
+substitute for it which previous human thinking has peptonized and
+cooked for our consumption. If so vulgar an expression were allowed us,
+we might say that wherever we find it, it has been already FAKED. This
+is what Mr. Schiller has in mind when he calls independent reality a
+mere unresisting [u lambda nu], which IS only to be made over by us.
+
+That is Mr. Schiller's belief about the sensible core of reality.
+We 'encounter' it (in Mr. Bradley's words) but don't possess it.
+Superficially this sounds like Kant's view; but between categories
+fulminated before nature began, and categories gradually forming
+themselves in nature's presence, the whole chasm between rationalism and
+empiricism yawns. To the genuine 'Kantianer' Schiller will always be to
+Kant as a satyr to Hyperion.
+
+Other pragmatists may reach more positive beliefs about the sensible
+core of reality. They may think to get at it in its independent nature,
+by peeling off the successive man-made wrappings. They may make theories
+that tell us where it comes from and all about it; and if these theories
+work satisfactorily they will be true. The transcendental idealists say
+there is no core, the finally completed wrapping being reality and truth
+in one. Scholasticism still teaches that the core is 'matter.' Professor
+Bergson, Heymans, Strong, and others, believe in the core and bravely
+try to define it. Messrs. Dewey and Schiller treat it as a 'limit.'
+Which is the truer of all these diverse accounts, or of others
+comparable with them, unless it be the one that finally proves the most
+satisfactory? On the one hand there will stand reality, on the other
+an account of it which proves impossible to better or to alter. If
+the impossibility prove permanent, the truth of the account will be
+absolute. Other content of truth than this I can find nowhere. If the
+anti-pragmatists have any other meaning, let them for heaven's sake
+reveal it, let them grant us access to it!
+
+Not BEING reality, but only our belief ABOUT reality, it will contain
+human elements, but these will KNOW the non-human element, in the only
+sense in which there can be knowledge of anything. Does the river make
+its banks, or do the banks make the river? Does a man walk with his
+right leg or with his left leg more essentially? Just as impossible may
+it be to separate the real from the human factors in the growth of our
+cognitive experience.
+
+Let this stand as a first brief indication of the humanistic position.
+Does it seem paradoxical? If so, I will try to make it plausible by a
+few illustrations, which will lead to a fuller acquaintance with the
+subject.
+
+In many familiar objects everyone will recognize the human element. We
+conceive a given reality in this way or in that, to suit our purpose,
+and the reality passively submits to the conception. You can take the
+number 27 as the cube of 3, or as the product of 3 and 9, or as 26 PLUS
+1, or 100 MINUS 73, or in countless other ways, of which one will be
+just as true as another. You can take a chessboard as black squares on
+a white ground, or as white squares on a black ground, and neither
+conception is a false one. You can treat the adjoined figure [Figure of
+a 'Star of David'] as a star, as two big triangles crossing each other,
+as a hexagon with legs set up on its angles, as six equal triangles
+hanging together by their tips, etc. All these treatments are true
+treatments--the sensible THAT upon the paper resists no one of them. You
+can say of a line that it runs east, or you can say that it runs west,
+and the line per se accepts both descriptions without rebelling at the
+inconsistency.
+
+We carve out groups of stars in the heavens, and call them
+constellations, and the stars patiently suffer us to do so--tho if they
+knew what we were doing, some of them might feel much surprised at the
+partners we had given them. We name the same constellation diversely, as
+Charles's Wain, the Great Bear, or the Dipper. None of the names will be
+false, and one will be as true as another, for all are applicable.
+
+In all these cases we humanly make an addition to some sensible reality,
+and that reality tolerates the addition. All the additions 'agree' with
+the reality; they fit it, while they build it out. No one of them is
+false. Which may be treated as the more true, depends altogether on
+the human use of it. If the 27 is a number of dollars which I find in
+a drawer where I had left 28, it is 28 minus 1. If it is the number of
+inches in a shelf which I wish to insert into a cupboard 26 inches wide,
+it is 26 plus 1. If I wish to ennoble the heavens by the constellations
+I see there, 'Charles's Wain' would be more true than 'Dipper.' My
+friend Frederick Myers was humorously indignant that that prodigious
+star-group should remind us Americans of nothing but a culinary utensil.
+
+What shall we call a THING anyhow? It seems quite arbitrary, for we
+carve out everything, just as we carve out constellations, to suit our
+human purposes. For me, this whole 'audience' is one thing, which grows
+now restless, now attentive. I have no use at present for its individual
+units, so I don't consider them. So of an 'army,' of a 'nation.' But
+in your own eyes, ladies and gentlemen, to call you 'audience' is an
+accidental way of taking you. The permanently real things for you are
+your individual persons. To an anatomist, again, those persons are but
+organisms, and the real things are the organs. Not the organs, so much
+as their constituent cells, say the histologists; not the cells, but
+their molecules, say in turn the chemists.
+
+We break the flux of sensible reality into things, then, at our will. We
+create the subjects of our true as well as of our false propositions.
+
+We create the predicates also. Many of the predicates of things express
+only the relations of the things to us and to our feelings. Such
+predicates of course are human additions. Caesar crossed the Rubicon,
+and was a menace to Rome's freedom. He is also an American school-room
+pest, made into one by the reaction of our schoolboys on his writings.
+The added predicate is as true of him as the earlier ones.
+
+You see how naturally one comes to the humanistic principle: you can't
+weed out the human contribution. Our nouns and adjectives are all
+humanized heirlooms, and in the theories we build them into, the inner
+order and arrangement is wholly dictated by human considerations,
+intellectual consistency being one of them. Mathematics and logic
+themselves are fermenting with human rearrangements; physics, astronomy
+and biology follow massive cues of preference. We plunge forward into
+the field of fresh experience with the beliefs our ancestors and we have
+made already; these determine what we notice; what we notice determines
+what we do; what we do again determines what we experience; so from
+one thing to another, altho the stubborn fact remains that there IS a
+sensible flux, what is true of it seems from first to last to be largely
+a matter of our own creation.
+
+We build the flux out inevitably. The great question is: does it,
+with our additions, rise or fall in value? Are the additions WORTHY or
+UNWORTHY? Suppose a universe composed of seven stars, and nothing else
+but three human witnesses and their critic. One witness names the
+stars 'Great Bear'; one calls them 'Charles's Wain'; one calls them the
+'Dipper.' Which human addition has made the best universe of the given
+stellar material? If Frederick Myers were the critic, he would have no
+hesitation in 'turning-down' the American witness.
+
+Lotze has in several places made a deep suggestion. We naively assume,
+he says, a relation between reality and our minds which may be just the
+opposite of the true one. Reality, we naturally think, stands ready-made
+and complete, and our intellects supervene with the one simple duty
+of describing it as it is already. But may not our descriptions, Lotze
+asks, be themselves important additions to reality? And may not previous
+reality itself be there, far less for the purpose of reappearing
+unaltered in our knowledge, than for the very purpose of stimulating
+our minds to such additions as shall enhance the universe's total value.
+"Die erhohung des vorgefundenen daseins" is a phrase used by Professor
+Eucken somewhere, which reminds one of this suggestion by the great
+Lotze.
+
+It is identically our pragmatistic conception. In our cognitive as well
+as in our active life we are creative. We ADD, both to the subject and
+to the predicate part of reality. The world stands really malleable,
+waiting to receive its final touches at our hands. Like the kingdom of
+heaven, it suffers human violence willingly. Man ENGENDERS truths upon
+it.
+
+No one can deny that such a role would add both to our dignity and to
+our responsibility as thinkers. To some of us it proves a most inspiring
+notion. Signer Papini, the leader of italian pragmatism, grows fairly
+dithyrambic over the view that it opens, of man's divinely-creative
+functions.
+
+The import of the difference between pragmatism and rationalism is now
+in sight throughout its whole extent. The essential contrast is that for
+rationalism reality is ready-made and complete from all eternity,
+while for pragmatism it is still in the making, and awaits part of its
+complexion from the future. On the one side the universe is absolutely
+secure, on the other it is still pursuing its adventures.
+
+We have got into rather deep water with this humanistic view, and it is
+no wonder that misunderstanding gathers round it. It is accused of being
+a doctrine of caprice. Mr. Bradley, for example, says that a humanist,
+if he understood his own doctrine, would have to "hold any end however
+perverted to be rational if I insist on it personally, and any idea
+however mad to be the truth if only some one is resolved that he will
+have it so." The humanist view of 'reality,' as something resisting, yet
+malleable, which controls our thinking as an energy that must be
+taken 'account' of incessantly (tho not necessarily merely COPIED) is
+evidently a difficult one to introduce to novices. The situation reminds
+me of one that I have personally gone through. I once wrote an essay on
+our right to believe, which I unluckily called the WILL to Believe.
+All the critics, neglecting the essay, pounced upon the title.
+Psychologically it was impossible, morally it was iniquitous. The
+"will to deceive," the "will to make-believe," were wittily proposed as
+substitutes for it.
+
+THE ALTERNATIVE BETWEEN PRAGMATISM AND RATIONALISM, IN THE SHAPE IN
+WHICH WE NOW HAVE IT BEFORE US, IS NO LONGER A QUESTION IN THE THEORY OF
+KNOWLEDGE, IT CONCERNS THE STRUCTURE OF THE UNIVERSE ITSELF.
+
+On the pragmatist side we have only one edition of the universe,
+unfinished, growing in all sorts of places, especially in the places
+where thinking beings are at work.
+
+On the rationalist side we have a universe in many editions, one real
+one, the infinite folio, or edition de luxe, eternally complete; and
+then the various finite editions, full of false readings, distorted and
+mutilated each in its own way.
+
+So the rival metaphysical hypotheses of pluralism and monism here come
+back upon us. I will develope their differences during the remainder of
+our hour.
+
+And first let me say that it is impossible not to see a temperamental
+difference at work in the choice of sides. The rationalist mind,
+radically taken, is of a doctrinaire and authoritative complexion: the
+phrase 'must be' is ever on its lips. The belly-band of its
+universe must be tight. A radical pragmatist on the other hand is a
+happy-go-lucky anarchistic sort of creature. If he had to live in a tub
+like Diogenes he wouldn't mind at all if the hoops were loose and the
+staves let in the sun.
+
+Now the idea of this loose universe affects your typical rationalists
+in much the same way as 'freedom of the press' might affect a veteran
+official in the russian bureau of censorship; or as 'simplified
+spelling' might affect an elderly schoolmistress. It affects him as
+the swarm of protestant sects affects a papist onlooker. It appears
+as backboneless and devoid of principle as 'opportunism' in politics
+appears to an old-fashioned french legitimist, or to a fanatical
+believer in the divine right of the people.
+
+For pluralistic pragmatism, truth grows up inside of all the finite
+experiences. They lean on each other, but the whole of them, if such a
+whole there be, leans on nothing. All 'homes' are in finite experience;
+finite experience as such is homeless. Nothing outside of the flux
+secures the issue of it. It can hope salvation only from its own
+intrinsic promises and potencies.
+
+To rationalists this describes a tramp and vagrant world, adrift in
+space, with neither elephant nor tortoise to plant the sole of its foot
+upon. It is a set of stars hurled into heaven without even a centre of
+gravity to pull against. In other spheres of life it is true that we
+have got used to living in a state of relative insecurity. The authority
+of 'the State,' and that of an absolute 'moral law,' have resolved
+themselves into expediencies, and holy church has resolved itself into
+'meeting-houses.' Not so as yet within the philosophic class-rooms.
+A universe with such as US contributing to create its truth, a world
+delivered to OUR opportunisms and OUR private judgments! Home-rule for
+Ireland would be a millennium in comparison. We're no more fit for such
+a part than the Filipinos are 'fit for self-government.' Such a world
+would not be RESPECTABLE, philosophically. It is a trunk without a tag,
+a dog without a collar, in the eyes of most professors of philosophy.
+
+What then would tighten this loose universe, according to the
+professors?
+
+Something to support the finite many, to tie it to, to unify and anchor
+it. Something unexposed to accident, something eternal and unalterable.
+The mutable in experience must be founded on immutability. Behind our de
+facto world, our world in act, there must be a de jure duplicate fixed
+and previous, with all that can happen here already there in posse,
+every drop of blood, every smallest item, appointed and provided,
+stamped and branded, without chance of variation. The negatives that
+haunt our ideals here below must be themselves negated in the absolutely
+Real. This alone makes the universe solid. This is the resting deep.
+We live upon the stormy surface; but with this our anchor holds, for it
+grapples rocky bottom. This is Wordsworth's "central peace subsisting at
+the heart of endless agitation." This is Vivekananda's mystical One of
+which I read to you. This is Reality with the big R, reality that makes
+the timeless claim, reality to which defeat can't happen. This is
+what the men of principles, and in general all the men whom I called
+tender-minded in my first lecture, think themselves obliged to
+postulate.
+
+And this, exactly this, is what the tough-minded of that lecture find
+themselves moved to call a piece of perverse abstraction-worship. The
+tough-minded are the men whose alpha and omega are FACTS. Behind the
+bare phenomenal facts, as my tough-minded old friend Chauncey Wright,
+the great Harvard empiricist of my youth, used to say, there is NOTHING.
+When a rationalist insists that behind the facts there is the GROUND of
+the facts, the POSSIBILITY of the facts, the tougher empiricists accuse
+him of taking the mere name and nature of a fact and clapping it behind
+the fact as a duplicate entity to make it possible. That such sham
+grounds are often invoked is notorious. At a surgical operation I heard
+a bystander ask a doctor why the patient breathed so deeply. "Because
+ether is a respiratory stimulant," the doctor answered. "Ah!" said the
+questioner, as if relieved by the explanation. But this is like saying
+that cyanide of potassium kills because it is a 'poison,' or that it is
+so cold to-night because it is 'winter,' or that we have five fingers
+because we are 'pentadactyls.' These are but names for the facts,
+taken from the facts, and then treated as previous and explanatory.
+The tender-minded notion of an absolute reality is, according to the
+radically tough-minded, framed on just this pattern. It is but our
+summarizing name for the whole spread-out and strung-along mass of
+phenomena, treated as if it were a different entity, both one and
+previous.
+
+You see how differently people take things. The world we live in exists
+diffused and distributed, in the form of an indefinitely numerous lot of
+eaches, coherent in all sorts of ways and degrees; and the tough-minded
+are perfectly willing to keep them at that valuation. They can stand
+that kind of world, their temper being well adapted to its insecurity.
+Not so the tender-minded party. They must back the world we find
+ourselves born into by "another and a better" world in which the eaches
+form an All and the All a One that logically presupposes, co-implicates,
+and secures each EACH without exception.
+
+Must we as pragmatists be radically tough-minded? or can we treat
+the absolute edition of the world as a legitimate hypothesis? It is
+certainly legitimate, for it is thinkable, whether we take it in its
+abstract or in its concrete shape.
+
+By taking it abstractly I mean placing it behind our finite life as we
+place the word 'winter' behind to-night's cold weather. 'Winter' is
+only the name for a certain number of days which we find generally
+characterized by cold weather, but it guarantees nothing in that line,
+for our thermometer to-morrow may soar into the 70's. Nevertheless
+the word is a useful one to plunge forward with into the stream of our
+experience. It cuts off certain probabilities and sets up others: you
+can put away your straw-hats; you can unpack your arctics. It is a
+summary of things to look for. It names a part of nature's habits,
+and gets you ready for their continuation. It is a definite instrument
+abstracted from experience, a conceptual reality that you must take
+account of, and which reflects you totally back into sensible
+realities. The pragmatist is the last person to deny the reality of such
+abstractions. They are so much past experience funded.
+
+But taking the absolute edition of the world concretely means a
+different hypothesis. Rationalists take it concretely and OPPOSE it to
+the world's finite editions. They give it a particular nature. It is
+perfect, finished. Everything known there is known along with everything
+else; here, where ignorance reigns, far otherwise. If there is want
+there, there also is the satisfaction provided. Here all is process;
+that world is timeless. Possibilities obtain in our world; in the
+absolute world, where all that is NOT is from eternity impossible,
+and all that IS is necessary, the category of possibility has no
+application. In this world crimes and horrors are regrettable. In that
+totalized world regret obtains not, for "the existence of ill in the
+temporal order is the very condition of the perfection of the eternal
+order."
+
+Once more, either hypothesis is legitimate in pragmatist eyes, for
+either has its uses. Abstractly, or taken like the word winter, as a
+memorandum of past experience that orients us towards the future, the
+notion of the absolute world is indispensable. Concretely taken, it is
+also indispensable, at least to certain minds, for it determines them
+religiously, being often a thing to change their lives by, and by
+changing their lives, to change whatever in the outer order depends on
+them.
+
+We cannot therefore methodically join the tough minds in their rejection
+of the whole notion of a world beyond our finite experience. One
+misunderstanding of pragmatism is to identify it with positivistic
+tough-mindedness, to suppose that it scorns every rationalistic notion
+as so much jabber and gesticulation, that it loves intellectual anarchy
+as such and prefers a sort of wolf-world absolutely unpent and wild
+and without a master or a collar to any philosophic class-room
+product, whatsoever. I have said so much in these lectures against
+the over-tender forms of rationalism, that I am prepared for some
+misunderstanding here, but I confess that the amount of it that I have
+found in this very audience surprises me, for I have simultaneously
+defended rationalistic hypotheses so far as these re-direct you
+fruitfully into experience.
+
+For instance I receive this morning this question on a post-card: "Is a
+pragmatist necessarily a complete materialist and agnostic?" One of my
+oldest friends, who ought to know me better, writes me a letter that
+accuses the pragmatism I am recommending, of shutting out all wider
+metaphysical views and condemning us to the most terre-a-terre
+naturalism. Let me read you some extracts from it.
+
+"It seems to me," my friend writes, "that the pragmatic objection to
+pragmatism lies in the fact that it might accentuate the narrowness of
+narrow minds.
+
+"Your call to the rejection of the namby-pamby and the wishy-washy is of
+course inspiring. But although it is salutary and stimulating to be told
+that one should be responsible for the immediate issues and bearings
+of his words and thoughts, I decline to be deprived of the pleasure and
+profit of dwelling also on remoter bearings and issues, and it is the
+TENDENCY of pragmatism to refuse this privilege.
+
+"In short, it seems to me that the limitations, or rather the dangers,
+of the pragmatic tendency, are analogous to those which beset the unwary
+followers of the 'natural sciences.' Chemistry and physics are eminently
+pragmatic and many of their devotees, smugly content with the data that
+their weights and measures furnish, feel an infinite pity and disdain
+for all students of philosophy and meta-physics, whomsoever. And
+of course everything can be expressed--after a fashion, and
+'theoretically'--in terms of chemistry and physics, that is, EVERYTHING
+EXCEPT THE VITAL PRINCIPLE OF THE WHOLE, and that, they say, there is no
+pragmatic use in trying to express; it has no bearings--FOR THEM. I for
+my part refuse to be persuaded that we cannot look beyond the obvious
+pluralism of the naturalist and the pragmatist to a logical unity in
+which they take no interest."
+
+How is such a conception of the pragmatism I am advocating possible,
+after my first and second lectures? I have all along been offering it
+expressly as a mediator between tough-mindedness and tender-mindedness.
+If the notion of a world ante rem, whether taken abstractly like the
+word winter, or concretely as the hypothesis of an Absolute, can be
+shown to have any consequences whatever for our life, it has a meaning.
+If the meaning works, it will have SOME truth that ought to be held to
+through all possible reformulations, for pragmatism.
+
+The absolutistic hypothesis, that perfection is eternal, aboriginal, and
+most real, has a perfectly definite meaning, and it works religiously.
+To examine how, will be the subject of my next and final lecture.
+
+
+
+
+Lecture VIII
+
+Pragmatism and Religion
+
+At the close of the last lecture I reminded you of the first one,
+in which I had opposed tough-mindedness to tender-mindedness and
+recommended pragmatism as their mediator. Tough-mindedness positively
+rejects tender-mindedness's hypothesis of an eternal perfect edition of
+the universe coexisting with our finite experience.
+
+On pragmatic principles we cannot reject any hypothesis if consequences
+useful to life flow from it. Universal conceptions, as things to take
+account of, may be as real for pragmatism as particular sensations are.
+They have indeed no meaning and no reality if they have no use. But if
+they have any use they have that amount of meaning. And the meaning will
+be true if the use squares well with life's other uses.
+
+Well, the use of the Absolute is proved by the whole course of
+men's religious history. The eternal arms are then beneath. Remember
+Vivekananda's use of the Atman: it is indeed not a scientific use,
+for we can make no particular deductions from it. It is emotional and
+spiritual altogether.
+
+It is always best to discuss things by the help of concrete examples.
+Let me read therefore some of those verses entitled "To You" by Walt
+Whitman--"You" of course meaning the reader or hearer of the poem
+whosoever he or she may be.
+
+Whoever you are, now I place my hand upon you, that you be my poem; I
+whisper with my lips close to your ear, I have loved many women and men,
+but I love none better than you.
+
+
+O I have been dilatory and dumb; I should have made my way straight
+to you long ago; I should have blabb'd nothing but you, I should have
+chanted nothing but you.
+
+
+I will leave all, and come and make the hymns of you; None have
+understood you, but I understand you; None have done justice to you--you
+have not done justice to yourself; None but have found you imperfect--I
+only find no imperfection in you.
+
+
+O I could sing such grandeurs and glories about you! You have not known
+what you are--you have slumber'd upon yourself all your life; What you
+have done returns already in mockeries.
+
+
+But the mockeries are not you; Underneath them, and within them, I see
+you lurk; I pursue you where none else has pursued you; Silence, the
+desk, the flippant expression, the night, the accustom'd routine, if
+these conceal you from others, or from yourself, they do not conceal you
+from me; The shaved face, the unsteady eye, the impure complexion, if
+these balk others, they do not balk me, The pert apparel, the deform'd
+attitude, drunkenness, greed, premature death, all these I part aside.
+
+
+There is no endowment in man or woman that is not tallied in you; There
+is no virtue, no beauty, in man or woman, but as good is in you; No
+pluck, no endurance in others, but as good is in you; No pleasure
+waiting for others, but an equal pleasure waits for you.
+
+
+Whoever you are! claim your own at any hazard! These shows of the
+east and west are tame, compared to you; These immense meadows--these
+interminable rivers--you are immense and interminable as they; You are
+he or she who is master or mistress over them, Master or mistress in
+your own right over Nature, elements, pain, passion, dissolution.
+
+
+The hopples fall from your ankles--you find an unfailing sufficiency;
+Old or young, male or female, rude, low, rejected by the rest, whatever
+you are promulges itself; Through birth, life, death, burial, the means
+are provided, nothing is scanted; Through angers, losses, ambition,
+ignorance, ennui, what you are picks its way.
+
+Verily a fine and moving poem, in any case, but there are two ways of
+taking it, both useful.
+
+One is the monistic way, the mystical way of pure cosmic emotion. The
+glories and grandeurs, they are yours absolutely, even in the midst of
+your defacements. Whatever may happen to you, whatever you may appear to
+be, inwardly you are safe. Look back, LIE back, on your true principle
+of being! This is the famous way of quietism, of indifferentism. Its
+enemies compare it to a spiritual opium. Yet pragmatism must respect
+this way, for it has massive historic vindication.
+
+But pragmatism sees another way to be respected also, the pluralistic
+way of interpreting the poem. The you so glorified, to which the hymn
+is sung, may mean your better possibilities phenomenally taken, or the
+specific redemptive effects even of your failures, upon yourself or
+others. It may mean your loyalty to the possibilities of others whom you
+admire and love so, that you are willing to accept your own poor life,
+for it is that glory's partner. You can at least appreciate, applaud,
+furnish the audience, of so brave a total world. Forget the low in
+yourself, then, think only of the high. Identify your life therewith;
+then, through angers, losses, ignorance, ennui, whatever you thus make
+yourself, whatever you thus most deeply are, picks its way.
+
+In either way of taking the poem, it encourages fidelity to ourselves.
+Both ways satisfy; both sanctify the human flux. Both paint the portrait
+of the YOU on a gold-background. But the background of the first way
+is the static One, while in the second way it means possibles in the
+plural, genuine possibles, and it has all the restlessness of that
+conception.
+
+Noble enough is either way of reading the poem; but plainly the
+pluralistic way agrees with the pragmatic temper best, for it
+immediately suggests an infinitely larger number of the details of
+future experience to our mind. It sets definite activities in us at
+work. Altho this second way seems prosaic and earthborn in comparison
+with the first way, yet no one can accuse it of tough-mindedness in any
+brutal sense of the term. Yet if, as pragmatists, you should positively
+set up the second way AGAINST the first way, you would very likely be
+misunderstood. You would be accused of denying nobler conceptions, and
+of being an ally of tough-mindedness in the worst sense.
+
+You remember the letter from a member of this audience from which I read
+some extracts at our previous meeting. Let me read you an additional
+extract now. It shows a vagueness in realizing the alternatives before
+us which I think is very widespread.
+
+"I believe," writes my friend and correspondent, "in pluralism; I
+believe that in our search for truth we leap from one floating cake of
+ice to another, on an infinite sea, and that by each of our acts we make
+new truths possible and old ones impossible; I believe that each man is
+responsible for making the universe better, and that if he does not do
+this it will be in so far left undone.
+
+"Yet at the same time I am willing to endure that my children should be
+incurably sick and suffering (as they are not) and I myself stupid
+and yet with brains enough to see my stupidity, only on one condition,
+namely, that through the construction, in imagination and by reasoning,
+of a RATIONAL UNITY OF ALL THINGS, I can conceive my acts and my
+thoughts and my troubles as SUPPLEMENTED: BY ALL THE OTHER PHENOMENA
+OF THE WORLD, AND AS FORMING--WHEN THUS SUPPLEMENTED--A SCHEME WHICH I
+APPROVE AND ADOPT AS MY I OWN; and for my part I refuse to be persuaded
+that we cannot look beyond the obvious pluralism of the naturalist and
+pragmatist to a logical unity in which they take no interest or stock."
+
+Such a fine expression of personal faith warms the heart of the hearer.
+But how much does it clear his philosophic head? Does the writer
+consistently favor the monistic, or the pluralistic, interpretation of
+the world's poem? His troubles become atoned for WHEN THUS SUPPLEMENTED,
+he says, supplemented, that is, by all the remedies that THE OTHER
+PHENOMENA may supply. Obviously here the writer faces forward into
+the particulars of experience, which he interprets in a
+pluralistic-melioristic way.
+
+But he believes himself to face backward. He speaks of what he calls
+the rational UNITY of things, when all the while he really means their
+possible empirical UNIFICATION. He supposes at the same time that the
+pragmatist, because he criticizes rationalism's abstract One, is cut
+off from the consolation of believing in the saving possibilities of
+the concrete many. He fails in short to distinguish between taking the
+world's perfection as a necessary principle, and taking it only as a
+possible terminus ad quem.
+
+I regard the writer of this letter as a genuine pragmatist, but as a
+pragmatist sans le savoir. He appears to me as one of that numerous
+class of philosophic amateurs whom I spoke of in my first lecture, as
+wishing to have all the good things going, without being too careful
+as to how they agree or disagree. "Rational unity of all things" is
+so inspiring a formula, that he brandishes it offhand, and abstractly
+accuses pluralism of conflicting with it (for the bare names do
+conflict), altho concretely he means by it just the pragmatistically
+unified and ameliorated world. Most of us remain in this essential
+vagueness, and it is well that we should; but in the interest of
+clear-headedness it is well that some of us should go farther, so I
+will try now to focus a little more discriminatingly on this particular
+religious point.
+
+Is then this you of yous, this absolutely real world, this unity that
+yields the moral inspiration and has the religious value, to be taken
+monistically or pluralistically? Is it ante rem or in rebus? Is it a
+principle or an end, an absolute or an ultimate, a first or a last? Does
+it make you look forward or lie back? It is certainly worth while not to
+clump the two things together, for if discriminated, they have decidedly
+diverse meanings for life.
+
+Please observe that the whole dilemma revolves pragmatically about the
+notion of the world's possibilities. Intellectually, rationalism invokes
+its absolute principle of unity as a ground of possibility for the
+many facts. Emotionally, it sees it as a container and limiter of
+possibilities, a guarantee that the upshot shall be good. Taken in this
+way, the absolute makes all good things certain, and all bad things
+impossible (in the eternal, namely), and may be said to transmute the
+entire category of possibility into categories more secure. One sees at
+this point that the great religious difference lies between the men who
+insist that the world MUST AND SHALL BE, and those who are contented
+with believing that the world MAY BE, saved. The whole clash of
+rationalistic and empiricist religion is thus over the validity of
+possibility. It is necessary therefore to begin by focusing upon that
+word. What may the word 'possible' definitely mean?
+
+To unreflecting men the possible means a sort of third estate of being,
+less real than existence, more real than non-existence, a twilight
+realm, a hybrid status, a limbo into which and out of which realities
+ever and anon are made to pass. Such a conception is of course too
+vague and nondescript to satisfy us. Here, as elsewhere, the only way to
+extract a term's meaning is to use the pragmatic method on it. When you
+say that a thing is possible, what difference does it make?
+
+It makes at least this difference that if anyone calls it impossible you
+can contradict him, if anyone calls it actual you can contradict HIM,
+and if anyone calls it necessary you can contradict him too. But these
+privileges of contradiction don't amount to much. When you say a thing
+is possible, does not that make some farther difference in terms of
+actual fact?
+
+It makes at least this negative difference that if the statement be
+true, it follows that there is nothing extant capable of preventing the
+possible thing. The absence of real grounds of interference may thus be
+said to make things not impossible, possible therefore in the bare or
+abstract sense.
+
+But most possibles are not bare, they are concretely grounded, or
+well-grounded, as we say. What does this mean pragmatically? It means,
+not only that there are no preventive conditions present, but that some
+of the conditions of production of the possible thing actually are here.
+Thus a concretely possible chicken means: (1) that the idea of chicken
+contains no essential self-contradiction; (2) that no boys, skunks, or
+other enemies are about; and (3) that at least an actual egg exists.
+Possible chicken means actual egg--plus actual sitting hen, or
+incubator, or what not. As the actual conditions approach completeness
+the chicken becomes a better-and-better-grounded possibility. When the
+conditions are entirely complete, it ceases to be a possibility, and
+turns into an actual fact.
+
+Let us apply this notion to the salvation of the world. What does it
+pragmatically mean to say that this is possible? It means that some of
+the conditions of the world's deliverance do actually exist. The more of
+them there are existent, the fewer preventing conditions you can find,
+the better-grounded is the salvation's possibility, the more PROBABLE
+does the fact of the deliverance become.
+
+So much for our preliminary look at possibility.
+
+Now it would contradict the very spirit of life to say that our minds
+must be indifferent and neutral in questions like that of the world's
+salvation. Anyone who pretends to be neutral writes himself down here
+as a fool and a sham. We all do wish to minimize the insecurity of the
+universe; we are and ought to be unhappy when we regard it as exposed to
+every enemy and open to every life-destroying draft. Nevertheless there
+are unhappy men who think the salvation of the world impossible. Theirs
+is the doctrine known as pessimism.
+
+Optimism in turn would be the doctrine that thinks the world's salvation
+inevitable.
+
+Midway between the two there stands what may be called the doctrine of
+meliorism, tho it has hitherto figured less as a doctrine than as an
+attitude in human affairs. Optimism has always been the regnant DOCTRINE
+in european philosophy. Pessimism was only recently introduced by
+Schopenhauer and counts few systematic defenders as yet. Meliorism
+treats salvation as neither inevitable nor impossible. It treats it as
+a possibility, which becomes more and more of a probability the more
+numerous the actual conditions of salvation become.
+
+It is clear that pragmatism must incline towards meliorism. Some
+conditions of the world's salvation are actually extant, and she cannot
+possibly close her eyes to this fact: and should the residual conditions
+come, salvation would become an accomplished reality. Naturally the
+terms I use here are exceedingly summary. You may interpret the
+word 'salvation' in any way you like, and make it as diffuse and
+distributive, or as climacteric and integral a phenomenon as you please.
+
+Take, for example, any one of us in this room with the ideals which
+he cherishes, and is willing to live and work for. Every such ideal
+realized will be one moment in the world's salvation. But these
+particular ideals are not bare abstract possibilities. They are
+grounded, they are LIVE possibilities, for we are their live champions
+and pledges, and if the complementary conditions come and add
+themselves, our ideals will become actual things. What now are the
+complementary conditions? They are first such a mixture of things as
+will in the fulness of time give us a chance, a gap that we can spring
+into, and, finally, OUR ACT.
+
+Does our act then CREATE the world's salvation so far as it makes room
+for itself, so far as it leaps into the gap? Does it create, not the
+whole world's salvation of course, but just so much of this as itself
+covers of the world's extent?
+
+Here I take the bull by the horns, and in spite of the whole crew of
+rationalists and monists, of whatever brand they be, I ask WHY NOT? Our
+acts, our turning-places, where we seem to ourselves to make ourselves
+and grow, are the parts of the world to which we are closest, the parts
+of which our knowledge is the most intimate and complete. Why should
+we not take them at their face-value? Why may they not be the actual
+turning-places and growing-places which they seem to be, of the
+world--why not the workshop of being, where we catch fact in the making,
+so that nowhere may the world grow in any other kind of way than this?
+
+Irrational! we are told. How can new being come in local spots and
+patches which add themselves or stay away at random, independently of
+the rest? There must be a reason for our acts, and where in the last
+resort can any reason be looked for save in the material pressure or the
+logical compulsion of the total nature of the world? There can be but
+one real agent of growth, or seeming growth, anywhere, and that agent is
+the integral world itself. It may grow all-over, if growth there be, but
+that single parts should grow per se is irrational.
+
+But if one talks of rationality and of reasons for things, and insists
+that they can't just come in spots, what KIND of a reason can there
+ultimately be why anything should come at all? Talk of logic and
+necessity and categories and the absolute and the contents of the whole
+philosophical machine-shop as you will, the only REAL reason I can think
+of why anything should ever come is that someone wishes it to be here.
+It is DEMANDED, demanded, it may be, to give relief to no matter
+how small a fraction of the world's mass. This is living reason, and
+compared with it material causes and logical necessities are spectral
+things.
+
+In short the only fully rational world would be the world of
+wishing-caps, the world of telepathy, where every desire is fulfilled
+instanter, without having to consider or placate surrounding or
+intermediate powers. This is the Absolute's own world. He calls upon the
+phenomenal world to be, and it IS, exactly as he calls for it, no other
+condition being required. In our world, the wishes of the individual are
+only one condition. Other individuals are there with other wishes
+and they must be propitiated first. So Being grows under all sorts
+of resistances in this world of the many, and, from compromise to
+compromise, only gets organized gradually into what may be called
+secondarily rational shape. We approach the wishing-cap type of
+organization only in a few departments of life. We want water and we
+turn a faucet. We want a kodak-picture and we press a button. We want
+information and we telephone. We want to travel and we buy a ticket. In
+these and similar cases, we hardly need to do more than the wishing--the
+world is rationally organized to do the rest.
+
+But this talk of rationality is a parenthesis and a digression. What
+we were discussing was the idea of a world growing not integrally but
+piecemeal by the contributions of its several parts. Take the hypothesis
+seriously and as a live one. Suppose that the world's author put the
+case to you before creation, saying: "I am going to make a world
+not certain to be saved, a world the perfection of which shall be
+conditional merely, the condition being that each several agent does its
+own 'level best.' I offer you the chance of taking part in such a world.
+Its safety, you see, is unwarranted. It is a real adventure, with real
+danger, yet it may win through. It is a social scheme of co-operative
+work genuinely to be done. Will you join the procession? Will you trust
+yourself and trust the other agents enough to face the risk?"
+
+Should you in all seriousness, if participation in such a world were
+proposed to you, feel bound to reject it as not safe enough? Would you
+say that, rather than be part and parcel of so fundamentally pluralistic
+and irrational a universe, you preferred to relapse into the slumber of
+nonentity from which you had been momentarily aroused by the tempter's
+voice?
+
+Of course if you are normally constituted, you would do nothing of the
+sort. There is a healthy-minded buoyancy in most of us which such a
+universe would exactly fit. We would therefore accept the offer--"Top!
+und schlag auf schlag!" It would be just like the world we practically
+live in; and loyalty to our old nurse Nature would forbid us to say no.
+The world proposed would seem 'rational' to us in the most living way.
+
+Most of us, I say, would therefore welcome the proposition and add our
+fiat to the fiat of the creator. Yet perhaps some would not; for there
+are morbid minds in every human collection, and to them the prospect of
+a universe with only a fighting chance of safety would probably make no
+appeal. There are moments of discouragement in us all, when we are sick
+of self and tired of vainly striving. Our own life breaks down, and we
+fall into the attitude of the prodigal son. We mistrust the chances
+of things. We want a universe where we can just give up, fall on our
+father's neck, and be absorbed into the absolute life as a drop of water
+melts into the river or the sea.
+
+The peace and rest, the security desiderated at such moments is security
+against the bewildering accidents of so much finite experience. Nirvana
+means safety from this everlasting round of adventures of which the
+world of sense consists. The hindoo and the buddhist, for this
+is essentially their attitude, are simply afraid, afraid of more
+experience, afraid of life.
+
+And to men of this complexion, religious monism comes with its consoling
+words: "All is needed and essential--even you with your sick soul and
+heart. All are one with God, and with God all is well. The everlasting
+arms are beneath, whether in the world of finite appearances you seem to
+fail or to succeed." There can be no doubt that when men are reduced
+to their last sick extremity absolutism is the only saving scheme.
+Pluralistic moralism simply makes their teeth chatter, it refrigerates
+the very heart within their breast.
+
+So we see concretely two types of religion in sharp contrast. Using our
+old terms of comparison, we may say that the absolutistic scheme appeals
+to the tender-minded while the pluralistic scheme appeals to the tough.
+Many persons would refuse to call the pluralistic scheme religious at
+all. They would call it moralistic, and would apply the word religious
+to the monistic scheme alone. Religion in the sense of self-surrender,
+and moralism in the sense of self-sufficingness, have been pitted
+against each other as incompatibles frequently enough in the history of
+human thought.
+
+We stand here before the final question of philosophy. I said in my
+fourth lecture that I believed the monistic-pluralistic alternative to
+be the deepest and most pregnant question that our minds can frame. Can
+it be that the disjunction is a final one? that only one side can be
+true? Are a pluralism and monism genuine incompatibles? So that, if
+the world were really pluralistically constituted, if it really existed
+distributively and were made up of a lot of eaches, it could only be
+saved piecemeal and de facto as the result of their behavior, and its
+epic history in no wise short-circuited by some essential oneness in
+which the severalness were already 'taken up' beforehand and eternally
+'overcome'? If this were so, we should have to choose one philosophy or
+the other. We could not say 'yes, yes' to both alternatives. There would
+have to be a 'no' in our relations with the possible. We should confess
+an ultimate disappointment: we could not remain healthy-minded and
+sick-minded in one indivisible act.
+
+Of course as human beings we can be healthy minds on one day and sick
+souls on the next; and as amateur dabblers in philosophy we may
+perhaps be allowed to call ourselves monistic pluralists, or free-will
+determinists, or whatever else may occur to us of a reconciling kind.
+But as philosophers aiming at clearness and consistency, and feeling the
+pragmatistic need of squaring truth with truth, the question is forced
+upon us of frankly adopting either the tender or the robustious type of
+thought. In particular THIS query has always come home to me: May not
+the claims of tender-mindedness go too far? May not the notion of a
+world already saved in toto anyhow, be too saccharine to stand? May not
+religious optimism be too idyllic? Must ALL be saved? Is NO price to be
+paid in the work of salvation? Is the last word sweet? Is all 'yes,
+yes' in the universe? Doesn't the fact of 'no' stand at the very core of
+life? Doesn't the very 'seriousness' that we attribute to life mean that
+ineluctable noes and losses form a part of it, that there are genuine
+sacrifices somewhere, and that something permanently drastic and bitter
+always remains at the bottom of its cup?
+
+I can not speak officially as a pragmatist here; all I can say is that
+my own pragmatism offers no objection to my taking sides with this more
+moralistic view, and giving up the claim of total reconciliation. The
+possibility of this is involved in the pragmatistic willingness to treat
+pluralism as a serious hypothesis. In the end it is our faith and not
+our logic that decides such questions, and I deny the right of any
+pretended logic to veto my own faith. I find myself willing to take
+the universe to be really dangerous and adventurous, without therefore
+backing out and crying 'no play.' I am willing to think that the
+prodigal-son attitude, open to us as it is in many vicissitudes, is not
+the right and final attitude towards the whole of life. I am willing
+that there should be real losses and real losers, and no total
+preservation of all that is. I can believe in the ideal as an ultimate,
+not as an origin, and as an extract, not the whole. When the cup is
+poured off, the dregs are left behind forever, but the possibility of
+what is poured off is sweet enough to accept.
+
+As a matter of fact countless human imaginations live in this moralistic
+and epic kind of a universe, and find its disseminated and strung-along
+successes sufficient for their rational needs. There is a finely
+translated epigram in the greek anthology which admirably expresses this
+state of mind, this acceptance of loss as unatoned for, even tho the
+lost element might be one's self:
+
+"A shipwrecked sailor, buried on this coast, Bids you set sail. Full
+many a gallant bark, when we were lost, Weathered the gale."
+
+Those puritans who answered 'yes' to the question: Are you willing to be
+damned for God's glory? were in this objective and magnanimous condition
+of mind. The way of escape from evil on this system is NOT by getting
+it 'aufgehoben,' or preserved in the whole as an element essential but
+'overcome.' It is by dropping it out altogether, throwing it overboard
+and getting beyond it, helping to make a universe that shall forget its
+very place and name.
+
+It is then perfectly possible to accept sincerely a drastic kind of a
+universe from which the element of 'seriousness' is not to be expelled.
+Whoso does so is, it seems to me, a genuine pragmatist. He is willing to
+live on a scheme of uncertified possibilities which he trusts; willing
+to pay with his own person, if need be, for the realization of the
+ideals which he frames.
+
+What now actually ARE the other forces which he trusts to co-operate
+with him, in a universe of such a type? They are at least his fellow
+men, in the stage of being which our actual universe has reached. But
+are there not superhuman forces also, such as religious men of the
+pluralistic type we have been considering have always believed in? Their
+words may have sounded monistic when they said "there is no God but
+God"; but the original polytheism of mankind has only imperfectly and
+vaguely sublimated itself into monotheism, and monotheism itself, so far
+as it was religious and not a scheme of class-room instruction for the
+metaphysicians, has always viewed God as but one helper, primus inter
+pares, in the midst of all the shapers of the great world's fate.
+
+I fear that my previous lectures, confined as they have been to human
+and humanistic aspects, may have left the impression on many of you that
+pragmatism means methodically to leave the superhuman out. I have shown
+small respect indeed for the Absolute, and I have until this moment
+spoken of no other superhuman hypothesis but that. But I trust that you
+see sufficiently that the Absolute has nothing but its superhumanness
+in common with the theistic God. On pragmatistic principles, if the
+hypothesis of God works satisfactorily in the widest sense of the word,
+it is true. Now whatever its residual difficulties may be, experience
+shows that it certainly does work, and that the problem is to build it
+out and determine it, so that it will combine satisfactorily with all
+the other working truths. I cannot start upon a whole theology at the
+end of this last lecture; but when I tell you that I have written a book
+on men's religious experience, which on the whole has been regarded as
+making for the reality of God, you will perhaps exempt my own pragmatism
+from the charge of being an atheistic system. I firmly disbelieve,
+myself, that our human experience is the highest form of experience
+extant in the universe. I believe rather that we stand in much the same
+relation to the whole of the universe as our canine and feline pets
+do to the whole of human life. They inhabit our drawing-rooms and
+libraries. They take part in scenes of whose significance they have no
+inkling. They are merely tangent to curves of history the beginnings and
+ends and forms of which pass wholly beyond their ken. So we are tangents
+to the wider life of things. But, just as many of the dog's and cat's
+ideals coincide with our ideals, and the dogs and cats have daily living
+proof of the fact, so we may well believe, on the proofs that religious
+experience affords, that higher powers exist and are at work to save the
+world on ideal lines similar to our own.
+
+You see that pragmatism can be called religious, if you allow that
+religion can be pluralistic or merely melioristic in type. But whether
+you will finally put up with that type of religion or not is a question
+that only you yourself can decide. Pragmatism has to postpone dogmatic
+answer, for we do not yet know certainly which type of religion is going
+to work best in the long run. The various overbeliefs of men, their
+several faith-ventures, are in fact what are needed to bring the
+evidence in. You will probably make your own ventures severally. If
+radically tough, the hurly-burly of the sensible facts of nature will
+be enough for you, and you will need no religion at all. If radically
+tender, you will take up with the more monistic form of religion:
+the pluralistic form, with its reliance on possibilities that are not
+necessities, will not seem to afford you security enough.
+
+But if you are neither tough nor tender in an extreme and radical
+sense, but mixed as most of us are, it may seem to you that the type
+of pluralistic and moralistic religion that I have offered is as good a
+religious synthesis as you are likely to find. Between the two extremes
+of crude naturalism on the one hand and transcendental absolutism on
+the other, you may find that what I take the liberty of calling the
+pragmatistic or melioristic type of theism is exactly what you require.
+
+
+The End
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
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