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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Pragmatism, by William James
+#2 in our series by William James
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+Title: Pragmatism
+       A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking
+
+Author: William James
+
+Release Date: February, 2004 [EBook #5116]
+[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
+[This file was first posted on May 1, 2002]
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+Edition: 10
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+Language: English
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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PRAGMATISM ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Steve Harris, Charles Franks
+and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team.
+
+
+
+
+
+PRAGMATISM
+
+
+
+A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking
+
+By William James (1907)
+
+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 arid 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
+imagine 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 of
+
+PRAGMATISM
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Pragmatism, by William James
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