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- P r a g m a t i s m ,
A N e w N a m e f o r S o m e
O l d W a y s o f T h i n k i n g
L e c t u r e I I
W h a t P r a g m a t i s m
M e a n s
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- 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 1) 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." 2)
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.
____________
1)
Translated in the Revue Philosophique for January, 1879 (vol. VII).
2)
'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.)
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