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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 I
S o m e M e t a p h y s i c a l P r o b l e m s
P r a g m a t i c a l l y C o n s i d e r e d
- _____________________________________________
- 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." 1)
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[s] Ich,
a God, a Kausalitätsprinzip, 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.
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1)
The Foundations of Belief, p. 30.
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