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 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM
 
 AGENTS 
 
 America . . The Macmillan Company 
 
 64 & 66 Fifth Avenue, New York 
 
 Australasia The Oxford University Press 
 
 205 Flinders Lane, Melbourne 
 
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 PRAGMATISM 
 
 AND 
 
 IDEALISM 
 
 BY 
 
 WILLIAM CALDWELL, M.A., D.Sc.[Edinr.] 
 
 SIR WILLIAM MACDONALD PROFESSOR OF MORAL PHILOSOPHY, 
 MCGILL UNIVERSITY, MONTREAL 
 
 LONDON 
 ADAM AND CHARLES BLACK 
 
 1913

 
 PREFACE 
 
 What is attempted in this book is an examination 
 of the Pragmatist philosophy in its relations to 
 older and newer tendencies in the thought and 
 practice of mankind. 
 
 While a good deal has been written within the 
 last ten years upon Pragmatism, the issue that it 
 represents is still an open one — to judge at least 
 from recent books and reviews, and from recent 
 official discussions. And there seems to be a 
 favourable opportunity for a general account 
 of the whole subject and for an estimate of its 
 significance. 
 
 In the opening chapter and elsewhere, both in 
 the text and in the footnotes, I have put together 
 some things about the development and the 
 affiliations of Pragmatism, and of pragmatist 
 tendencies, that may not be altogether new to 
 the professional student. Such a presentation, or 
 general conspectus, I have found to be a necessity 
 in the way of a basis both for discussion and for 
 rational comprehension. Taken along with the 
 original pronouncements of James and his confreres
 
 vi PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM 
 
 it affords an indication of the philosophy to which 
 the pragmatists would fain attain, and of the 
 modification of rationalistic philosophy they would 
 fain effect. 
 
 The chapter upon Pragmatism as Americanism 
 is put forth in the most tentative spirit possible, 
 and I have thought more than once of withholding 
 it. Something in this connexion, however, is, 
 in my opinion, needed to cause us to regard the 
 pragmatist philosophy as resting upon a very real 
 tendency of the civilized world of to-day — a 
 tendency that is affecting us all whether we like 
 it or not. 
 
 The chapter upon Pragmatism and Anglo- 
 Hegelian Rationalism is also offered with some 
 degree of reservation and misgiving, for, like 
 many of my contemporaries, I owe nearly every- 
 thing in the way of my introduction to philosophy 
 to the great Neo - Kantian and Neo - Hegelian 
 movement. In its place, I had some months ago 
 a more general chapter upon Pragmatism and 
 Rationalism, containing the results of material 
 that I had been elaborating upon the develop- 
 ment of English Neo-Hegelianism. At the last 
 moment I substituted what is here offered upon 
 the significant high-water output of Hegelianism 
 represented in Dr. Bosanquet's Edinburgh Gifford 
 Lectures. 
 
 In regard to the note upon the Pragmatist 
 elements in the philosophy of Bergson I ought, 
 perhaps, to say that I kept away from Bergson's
 
 PREFACE vii 
 
 last two books until I had written out what had 
 been growing up in my own mind about the 
 activism of Pragmatism and its relations to 
 Idealism. I have found confirmation for much 
 of my own thought in the teaching of this 
 remarkable and significant thinker, and I regret 
 the partial representation of it that is here 
 submitted. 
 
 Having crossed the ocean for the printing of 
 my book, I have in some cases lost or misplaced 
 references that I intended to use or to verify. 
 For this I crave the indulgence of readers and 
 critics. 
 
 I am indebted to the following gentlemen for 
 much kind help and criticism in the revision of 
 my manuscript and proof-sheets for the press : 
 my brother, the Rev. Victor Caldwell, M.A., of 
 Patna, Ayrshire ; Professor John Laird of Queen's 
 University, Belfast; Professor James Seth of the 
 University of Edinburgh ; Professor P. T. Lafleur 
 of M'Gill University. I also owe much in this 
 same connexion to recent conversations with 
 Professors A. Lalande and D. Parodi of Paris, 
 upon Pragmatism and contemporary philosophy 
 generally. 
 
 LONDON, September 191 3.
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 • CHAP. PAGE 
 
 I. Introductory ....... i 
 
 Note on the Meaning of " Pragmatism " . 21 
 
 II. Pragmatism and the Pragmatist Movement . 23 
 
 III. Some Fundamental Characteristics . . 58 
 
 IV. Pragmatism and Human Activity . . . 93 
 
 Appendix to Chapter IV. — Philosophy and 
 
 the Activity-Experience . . . .109 
 
 V. Critical . . . . . . . . 116 
 
 VI. Pragmatism as Humanism . . . . 141 
 
 VII. Pragmatism as Americanism . . . .168 
 
 VIII. Pragmatism and Anglo-Hegelian Rationalism 196 
 
 IX. Pragmatism and Idealism in the Philosophy 
 
 of Bergson ...... 234 
 
 Concluding Remarks ..... 262 
 
 INDEX 267 
 
 IX
 
 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 INTRODUCTORY 
 
 Pragmatism has by this time received so much 
 attention in the reflective literature of the day 
 that any writer upon the subject may now fairly 
 presume upon a general acquaintance with its main 
 principles and contentions. Indeed, it is pro- 
 bable that most thinking people may be credited 
 with the ability to have formed some sort of 
 judgment of their own about a philosophy whose 
 main contention is that true ideas are working 
 ideas, and that truth itself, like a creed or a 
 belief, is simply a working valuation of reality. 
 There are still, however, some things to be said, 
 at least in English, upon the place and the meaning 
 of Pragmatism in the philosophical reconstruction 
 that is generally felt to be so necessary to-day. 
 
 As far as the external signs of any such vital 
 relation between Pragmatism and our recent 
 academic philosophy are concerned, the reader 
 
 may be aware, to begin with, that there have been 
 
 1
 
 2 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM 
 
 many important concessions 1 made to pragmatists 
 by such representative rationalists as Mr. Bradley 
 and Professor Taylor, not to speak of others, 2 and 
 Pragmatism has certainly had a very powerful 
 effect upon the professional philosophy of both 
 England and Germany, judging at least from the 
 extent to which many of the more prominent 
 representatives of philosophy in these countries 
 have apparently been compelled to accord to it 
 at least an official recognition. 3 
 
 Pragmatism, again, in consequence of the 
 different receptions that it has met with at the 
 hands of its friends and its foes, has undergone 
 various phases of exposition and of modification, 
 although it has not yet, nor is it on the whole likely 
 to have, a philosophical output comparable to that 
 of Idealism. It has become more and more 
 conscious of its own affiliations and relations to 
 older, and to broader doctrines, declaring itself, in 
 the hands of Professor James and his friends, to 
 be but a new name for older ways of thinking. 
 
 1 See, for example, the concessions and the fresh statements of the 
 problem of philosophy, and the " clearing of the ground," etc., referred 
 to on p. 76 and p. 74. Also p. 27 in reference to the stir and the 
 activity that have been excited by the pragmatist controversy. See 
 also p. 230, in the eighth chapter, in reference to some things in such a 
 typical intellectualist as Professor Bosanquet that may be construed 
 as a concession to Pragmatism and Humanism. 
 
 2 Dr. Edward Caird affirmed in his memoir of his brother (Principal 
 John Caird) that idealists admit some pragmatist charges. 
 
 8 Professor Stein, a contemporary European authority, to whom 
 we shall again refer below, says, for example, in his well-known articles 
 in the Archiv fiir Philos<yphie (1908), in reference to Pragmatism, that 
 we have had nothing like it [as a ' movement '] " since Nietzsche " 
 (" Der Pragmatismus," p. 9).
 
 INTRODUCTORY 3 
 
 And it has succeeded, in a measure, in clearing 
 itself from liability to the superficial interpreta- 
 tion that it met with a few years ago, when it 
 was scoffed at for teaching that you may believe 
 " what you like," for speaking, for example, as 
 if the " theoretical " consequences of truth were 
 not to be considered as well as the " practical." 
 Although still resting in the main upon an out- 
 spoken declaration of war against Rationalism, it 
 is no longer blind to the place and the value of 
 thought or the "concept," in the matter of the 
 interpretation of our experience. 
 
 Pragmatism, as the theory is generally under- 
 stood, rests in the main upon the work of three 
 men, Professors James and Dewey of America, and 
 Dr. Schiller of Oxford. The fact, along doubtless 
 with other things, that these men have ere now 
 been spoken of as occupying a right, a left, and 
 a centre in the new movement, is presumably 
 an indication that it has already received its 
 highest theoretical expression — presumably in the 
 California pamphlet of Professor James, or in the 
 famous Popular Science Monthly article of Peirce, 
 canonized as the patron saint of the movement by 
 James. 
 
 Whether this be so or not, it has been in the main 
 the work of James to set forth the meaning of 
 Pragmatism as a philosophy of everyday life, as 
 the theory of the attitude of man as man to the 
 world in which he finds himself. Dr. Schiller, 
 again, it is claimed, has done much to set forth
 
 4 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM 
 
 Pragmatism to the world as an essentially human- 
 istic philosophy, recognizing and providing for the 
 rights of faith and of feeling in determining our 
 beliefs and our theories about things. This philo- 
 sophy has " much in common with what in other 
 quarters is called Personalism." It cannot, how- 
 ever, be differentiated so sharply as Dr. Schiller 
 apparently would have us believe from the many 
 manifestations of this philosophy that abound in 
 modern times, from Fichte, and from Lotze, down 
 to men who are still living — Eucken and others. 
 The ingenious Professor Dewey, moreover, is the 
 champion of the scientific, or the empirical, or the 
 " instrumental' ' method in philosophy, and has 
 worked hard and successfully at the reform which 
 he thinks must take place in logical and philoso- 
 phical conceptions when interpreted as simply tools 
 or devices for the economy of our thought. 
 
 When, in pragmatist fashion, we seek to judge 
 of Pragmatism by this last-mentioned matter of 
 its results, by the things it has enabled its advocates 
 to accomplish, we find that we may, to begin with, 
 speak in the following terms of the work of Professor 
 James. He has certainly indicated how the 
 pragmatist method may be applied to the solution 
 of some of the ordinary difficulties of reflective 
 thought ; about, for example, the nature of matter 
 or the nature of the soul, or about the old opposition 
 between the " one " and the " many," about such 
 concepts as " thing," " kinds," " time," " space," 
 the " fancied," the " real," and so on. In all
 
 INTRODUCTORY 5 
 
 such cases an answer, he holds, is obtained by 
 putting, say, the initial difficulty in the following 
 form : " What practical difference can it make 
 now that the world should be run by matter or by 
 spirit ? " 
 
 A fair illustration of his meaning here would be 
 his own characteristic attitude, so far as the 
 philosophy of religion is concerned, to the so- 
 called " theistic " proofs that have been part of the 
 stock in trade of rational theology. A " neces- 
 sary being " and a " whole of truth " and the 
 "Absolute" 1 are not, he would hold, what the 
 average man understands by God ; they have 
 hardly any perceptible effect upon life and con- 
 duct — the all-important matter in the thought 
 of God as he conceives it. Only those notions, 
 he would have it, which can be interpreted by 
 the thought of the " difference " they make to 
 our practical conduct are real notions at all — 
 " Providence," say, or " God " as the guarantor 
 of the reality and the permanence of the moral 
 order, and so on. The " soul," again, he would 
 hold, " is good for just so much and no more." 
 And a similar thing, too, would be true about 
 Berkeley's " matter," or about the " matter " of 
 the materialists. 2 This latter, for instance, cannot 
 
 1 Sec Chapter VIII., where I discuss the natural theology that bases 
 itself upon these supposed principles of a " whole of truth " and the 
 " Absolute." 
 
 2 This statement I think would be warranted by the fact of the 
 tendency of the newer physical science of the day to substitute 
 an electrical, for the old material, or corpuscular, conception of 
 matter, or by the admission, for example, of a contemporary biologist
 
 6 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM 
 
 possibly do all it is claimed to be able to do in the 
 way of an explanation of the order of the world 
 and the phenomena of life. 
 
 Then again, James has written a great many 
 pages upon the so-called deeper view of human 
 nature (as inclusive of will and " emotion " in 
 addition to mere thought) taken by Prag- 
 matism in comparison with that entertained by 
 Rationalism. We shall have occasion to return 
 to this point. 
 
 He has made it clear, too, that it was an unfair 
 interpretation of Pragmatism to take it as a plea 
 for believing what you like, as was said above. 
 Our experience, he puts it, must be consistent, the 
 " parts with the parts," and the " parts with the 
 whole." Beliefs must not clash with other beliefs, 
 the mind being wedged tightly between the coercion 
 of the sensible order and that of the ideal order. 
 By " consequences," too, he contends we may mean 
 intellectual or theoretical consequences as well as 
 practical consequences. 
 
 He has also, along with his brother-pragmatists, 
 raised the question of the nature of Truth, attain- 
 ing to such important results as the following : 
 (i) there is no such thing as pure truth, or ready- 
 made truth ; (2) the " copy-theory " of truth 
 is unintelligible. 1 We shall later be obliged to 
 
 of importance (Verworn, General Physiology, p. 39) that " all attempts 
 to explain the psychical by the physical must fail. The actual problem 
 is . . . not in explaining psychical by physical phenomena but rather 
 in reducing to its psychical elements physical, hke all other psychical 
 phenomena." 1 See p. 81, and p. 150.
 
 INTRODUCTORY 7 
 
 examine the more controversial positions that 
 (3) truth is not an end in itself, but a means 
 towards vital satisfaction ; (4) truth is the 
 " expedient " in the way of thinking, as the right 
 is the expedient 1 in the way of acting, and so 
 on. 
 
 Further, Professor James finds that Pragmatism 
 leaves us with the main body of our common-sense 
 beliefs [Peirce holds practically the same thing], 
 such as the belief in " freedom " — as a " promise 
 and a relief," he adds ; and the belief in the 
 religious outlook upon life, in so far as it " works." 
 This is the attitude and the tenor of the well- 
 known books on The Will to Believe and The 
 Varieties of Religious Experience. 2, " 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 ? " 
 And yet, as against this attitude, Professor James 
 elsewhere finds himself unable to believe " that 
 our human experience is the highest form of 
 experience extant in the universe." It is the 
 
 1 See Chapter V. pp. 136, 138, where we examine, or reflect upon, 
 the ethics of Pragmatism. 
 
 2 The importance of these volumes in the matter of the development, 
 in the minds of thinking people everywhere, of a dynamic and an 
 organic (instead of the older rationalistic and intellectualistic) con- 
 ception of religion and of the religious life cannot possibly be over- 
 estimated. Of course it is only right to add here that such a dynamic 
 and organic view of religion is the property not only of Professor 
 James and his associates, but also of the army of workers of to-day 
 in the realms of comparative religion and anthropology.
 
 8 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM 
 
 emergence of many such incoherences in his 
 writings that gives to his pragmatist philosophy of 
 religion a subjective and temperamental character, 
 and makes it seem to be lacking in any objective 
 basis. " 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 — that is, 
 reliance on possibilities that are not necessities — 
 will not seem to offer you security enough." * He 
 " inclines," on the whole, to " Meliorism," treating 
 satisfaction as neither necessary nor impossible ; 
 the pragmatist lives in " the world of possibilities." 
 
 These words show clearly how difficult it is to 
 pin down Professor James to any single intelligible 
 philosophy of belief, if belief be interpreted as 
 in any sense a " commerce ' of the soul with 
 objective realities, as something more than a 
 merely generous faith in the gradual perfection or 
 betterment of human society. 
 
 " Religious experience," as he puts it in his 
 Pluralistic Universe, "peculiarly so called, needs, 
 in my opinion, to be carefully considered and 
 interpreted by every one who aspires to reason 
 out a more complete philosophy." In this same 
 book, it is declared, however, on the one hand, that 
 " we have outgrown the old theistic orthodoxy, 
 the God of our popular Christianity being simply 
 one member of a pluralistic system " ; and yet, 
 
 1 Pragmatism, p. 300.
 
 INTRODUCTORY 9 
 
 on the other hand, and with equal emphasis, that 
 " we finite minds may simultaneously be conscious 
 with one another in a supernatural intelligence." * 
 The book on The Meaning of Truth seems to 
 return, in the main, to the American doctrine of 
 the strenuous life as the only courageous, and 
 therefore true, attitude to beliefs, as the life that 
 contains, in the plenitude of its energizing, the 
 answer to all questions. " Pluralism affords us," 
 it openly confesses, " no moral holidays, and it is 
 unable to let loose quietistic raptures, and this is 
 a serious deficiency in the pluralistic philosophy 
 which we have professed." Professor James here 
 again attacks Absolutism in the old familiar 
 manner, as somehow unequal to the complexity of 
 things, or the pulsating process of the world, 
 casting himself upon the philosophy of experi- 
 ence, and upon the evident reality of the " many " 
 and of the endless variety of the relations of things, 
 in opposition to the abstract simplicity of the 
 " one," and the limited range of a merely logical, 
 or mathematical, manner of conceiving of reality. 
 " The essential service of Humanism, as I con- 
 ceive the situation, is to have seen that, though 
 one part of experience may lean upon another part 
 to make it what it is in any one of several aspects 
 in which it may be considered, experience as a 
 whole is self-sustaining and leans on nothing. . . . 
 
 1 Or an admission like the following in the Meaning of Truth 
 (p. 243) : "It may be that the truest of all beliefs shall be that in 
 transsubjective realities."
 
 io PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM 
 
 "It gets rid of the standing problems of Monism and 
 of other metaphysical systems and paradoxes." 1 
 
 Professor James exhibits, however, at the same 
 time a very imperfect conception of philosophy, 
 holding that it gives us, in general, " no new range 
 of practical power," ignoring, as it were, the 
 difference between philosophy and poetry and 
 religion and mere personal enthusiasm. And he 
 leaves the whole question of the first principles of 
 both knowledge and conduct practically unsettled. 
 These things are to him but conceptual tools, 2 
 and " working " points of departure for our efforts, 
 and there seems in his books to be no way of reduc- 
 ing them to any kind of system. And he makes, 
 lastly, a most unsuccessful attempt at a theory 
 of reality. Reality is to him sometimes simply a 
 moving equilibrium of experience, the " flux " we 
 have already referred to ; sometimes the fleeting 
 generations of men who have thought out for us 
 all our philosophies and sciences and cults and 
 varied experiences, and sometimes the " common- 
 sense world in which we find things partly joined 
 and partly disjoined." It is sometimes, too, other 
 things even than these. In a chapter of the book 
 upon Pragmatism* it is stated in italics that 
 " reality is, in general, what truths have to take 
 account of," and that it has three parts : (i) " the 
 flux of our sensations," and (2) the " relations that 
 obtain between our sensations, or between their 
 
 1 Meaning of Truth, p. 124, 5. 2 See p. 40 and p. 149. 
 
 3 Pragmatism, pp. 244-245.
 
 INTRODUCTORY n 
 
 copies in our minds," and (3) " the previous truths 
 of which every new inquiry takes account." Then 
 again, in A Pluralistic Universe, 1 it is declared that 
 " there may ultimately never be an All-form at 
 all, that the substance of reality may never get 
 totally collected . . . and that a distributive form 
 of reality, the Each-form, is logically as acceptable 
 and empirical and probable as the All-form." 
 This is the theory of the outspoken " radical 
 empiricism " 2 which is the contention of the 
 volume upon The Meaning of Truth, the main 
 effort of which seems to be to show again that the 
 world is still in the process of making. It has the 
 
 1 A Pluralistic Universe, p. 34. 
 
 2 In respect of James' later doctrine of " radical empiricism " we 
 may quote, for the sake of intelligibility, from Professor Perry (his 
 friend and literary executor) the following : " James' empiricism 
 means, then, first, that ideas are to be tested by direct knowledge, 
 and, second, that knowledge is limited to what can be presented. 
 There is, however, a third consideration which is an application of 
 these, and the means of avoiding a difficulty which is supposed to be 
 fatal to them. This is what James calls ' radical empiricism,' the 
 discovery that ' the relations between things, conjunctive as well as 
 disjunctive, are just as much matters of direct particular experience, 
 neither more nor less so, than the things themselves.' ' Adjacent 
 minima of experience ' are united by the ' persistent identity of certain 
 units, or emphases, or points, or objects, or members ... of the 
 experience-continuum.' Owing to the fact that the connexions of 
 things are thus found along with them, it is unnecessary to introduce 
 any substance below them, or any subject above them, to hold things 
 together " (Present Philosophical Tendencies, p. 365). In regard to this 
 radical empiricism, I am obliged, as a Kantian, to say that, to my 
 mind, it represents the reduction of all Pragmatism and Empiricism 
 to an impossibility — to the fatuous attempt (exploded for ever by 
 Hume) to attempt to explain knowledge and experience without first 
 principles of some kind or another. It is a " new Humism," a thing 
 which no one who has penetrated into the meaning of Hume's Treatise 
 can possibly advocate. A philosophy without first principles, or a 
 philosophy that reduces the relations between experiences to mere 
 " bits " of experience, is indeed no philosophy at all.
 
 12 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM 
 
 additional drawback of bringing Pragmatism 
 down not only to the level of radical empiricism, 
 but to that of common-sense realism or dualism 
 [the belief in the two independent realities of 
 matter and mind], and to that of the " copy- 
 theory " * of truth, from which both Pragmatism 
 and Radical Empiricism are especially supposed 
 to deliver us. "I will say here again, for the sake 
 of emphasis, that the existence of the object . . . 
 is the only reason, in innumerable cases, why the 
 idea does work successfully. . . . Both Dewey 
 and I hold firmly ... to objects independent of 
 our own judgments." 2 Much of all this is, no 
 doubt, like surrendering philosophy altogether. 
 
 In the case of Dr. Schiller, we may notice first 
 his frequent and successful exhibition of the extent 
 to which human activity enters into the constitu- 
 tion not only of " truth," but of " reality," of 
 what we mean by reality. This is interwoven in 
 his books with his whole philosophy of truth 
 as something merely human, as " dependent 
 upon human purposes," asa " valuation " expres- 
 sive of the satisfactory, or the unsatisfactory, 
 nature of the contents of " primary reality." It 
 is interwoven, too, with his doctrine that reality 
 is essentially a v\r), something that is still in the 
 making, something that human beings can some- 
 how re-make and make perfect. Then this posi- 
 tion about truth and reality is used by him, as by 
 James, as a ground of attack against Absolutism, 
 
 1 See p. 82 and p. 154. 2 The Preface, pp. xv., xix.
 
 INTRODUCTORY 13 
 
 with its notion of a " pre-existing ideal " of know- 
 ledge and reality, as already existing in a super- 
 sensible world, that descends magically into the 
 passively recipient soul of man. There is no such 
 thing, he claims, as absolute truth, and the con- 
 ception of an " absolute reality " is both futile and 
 pernicious. Absolutism, too, has an affinity to 
 Solipsism, 1 the difficulties of which it can escape 
 only by self -elimination. 
 
 Then Absolutism is, Schiller continues, " essen- 
 tially irreligious," 2 although it was fostered at first 
 in England for essentially religious purposes. 3 It 
 has developed there now at last, he reminds us, a 
 powerful left 4 wing which, as formerly in Germany, 
 
 1 See p. 159 and p. 212. 
 
 2 As for Dr. Schiller's charge that Absolutism is essentially " irre- 
 ligious " in spite of the fact of its having been (in England) religious 
 at the outset, the best way of meeting this is to insist that it is mainly 
 in its form, rather than its content, that Absolutism is (or was) irre- 
 ligious in both Germany and England. 
 
 3 British students of philosophy are quite well aware that it was the 
 religious and the spiritual motive that seemed to weigh most with 
 Hutchison Stirling and John Caird and Green in their attempts (thirty 
 years ago) to introduce German transcendental philosophy to their 
 fellow-countrymen. Stirling was impressed with the idea of a working 
 correspondence between Hegelianism and Calvinism. John Caird's 
 animus was against the agnosticism of Herbert Spencer and of Mansel, 
 and he found inspiration in this connexion in Hegel's treatment of 
 Kant's theory of the limitations of the understanding. And to Green 
 the attractive thing about Kant was his vindication of a " spiritual 
 principle " in " nature," and in " knowledge," and in " conduct," a 
 principle which rendered absurd the naturalism of the evolutionary 
 philosophy. Friends of this spiritualistic interpretation of German 
 Critical Rationalism find its richest and fullest expression in the 
 books of Edward Caird upon the Evolution of Religion and the 
 Evolution of Theology in the Greek Philosophers. 
 
 4 The idea of a left wing is generally associated in the minds of 
 British students with the destructive criticism of Mr. Bradley in Appear- 
 ance and Reality, in which many, or most, of our ordinary ways of
 
 14 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM 
 
 has opened a quarrel with theology. In Absolu- 
 tism, the two phases of Deity — God as moral 
 principle, and God as an intellectual principle — 
 " fall apart," and absolutist metaphysic has really 
 no connexion with genuine religion. Humanism 
 can " renew Hegelianism " by treating the making 
 of truth as also the making of reality. Freedom 
 is real, and may possibly " pervade the universe." * 
 All truth implies belief, and it is obviously one of 
 the merits of Pragmatism to bring truth and reason 
 together. Beliefs and ideas and wishes are really 
 essential and integral features in real knowing, 
 and if knowing, as above, really transforms our 
 experience, they must be treated as " real forces," 
 which cannot be ignored by philosophy. 2 
 
 Against all this would-be positive, or con- 
 structive, philosophy we must, however, record 
 the fact that the pragmatism of Dr. Schiller breaks 
 down altogether in the matter of the recognition 
 of a distinction between the " discovering ' of 
 
 regarding reality (our beliefs in " primary " and " secondary " 
 qualities of matter, in " space "and" time," in" causation,"" activity," 
 a " self," in " things in themselves," etc.) are convicted of " fatal in- 
 consistencies." See, however, Professor Pringle-Pattison's instructive 
 account of his book in Man's Place in the Cosmos, bringing out the 
 positive side. The " left " is represented too, now, in Dr. Bosanquet's 
 Individuality and Value, which we examine below as the last striking 
 output of British transcendentalism or absolutism. See in this entire 
 connexion Professor James Seth's recent account of the " Idealist 
 Answers to Hume " in his English Philosophy and Schools of Philosophy. 
 
 1 See p. 244. I find a confirmation of this idea in what a biologist 
 like Professor Needham treats of as the " autogenetic nature of re- 
 sponses " (General Biology, p. 474) in animals. 
 
 2 See the Studies in Humanism for all the positions referred to, or 
 quoted, or paraphrased, in these two paragraphs.
 
 INTRODUCTORY 15 
 
 reality and the " making " of reality. And despite 
 the ingenuity of his essay in the first edition of 
 Humanism upon " Activity and Substance," 1 there 
 is not in his writings, any more than in those of 
 James, any coherent or adequate theory of reality. 
 And this is the case whether we think of the 
 " primary reality " upon which we human beings 
 are said to " react," in our knowledge and in our 
 action, or of the supreme reality of God's existence, 
 of which such an interesting speculative account 
 is given in the essay referred to. Nor is there in 
 Dr. Schiller, any more than in James, any adequate 
 conception, either of philosophy as a whole, or of 
 the theory of knowledge, or of the relation of 
 Pragmatism as a " method " (it is modestly claimed 
 to be only such, but the position is not adhered to) 
 to philosophy as such. 2 " For the pragmatic 
 theory of knowledge initial principles are literally 
 apyai, mere starting-points variously, arbitrarily, 
 casually selected, from which we hope to try to 
 
 1 This is an important essay. It reminds the modern reader, for one 
 thing, of the importance of the natural theology of Aristotle. It is an 
 anticipation, too, in its way, of the tendency of modern physics to 
 substitute a dynamic for a static conception of matter, or atoms, or 
 substance. In it Dr. Schiller points out how Aristotle's doctrine of 
 a perfect and self-perfecting Activity [an fripyeia that is not mere 
 change or motion, but a perfect "life" involving the disappearance 
 of "time" and imperfection] is in a sense the solution of the old 
 [Greek] and the modern demand for the substance or essence of things. 
 We shall take occasion (in speaking of the importance to Philosophy of 
 the concept of activity, and in speaking of the Philosophy of Bergson) 
 to use the same idea, to which Dr. Schiller has given an expression in this 
 essay, of God as the eternal or the perfect life of the world. 
 
 2 For a favourable estimate of the services of Dr. Schiller in regard 
 to Pragmatism and Humanism the reader may consult the articles of 
 Captain Knox in the Quarterly Review, 1909.
 
 16 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM 
 
 advance to something better. Little we care what 
 their credentials may be. . . . And as far as the 
 future is concerned, systems of philosophy will 
 abound as before, and will be as various as ever, but 
 they will probably be more brilliant in colouring 
 and more attractive in their form, for they will 
 certainly have to be put forward and acknowledged 
 as works of art that bear the impress of a unique 
 and individual soul." 1 
 
 The main result of pragmatist considerations 
 in the case of Professor Dewey is perhaps that re- 
 consideration of the problems of logic and know- 
 ledge in the light of the facts of genetic and 
 functional psychology which has now become 
 fairly general on the part of English and American 
 students of philosophy. It is through his influence 
 generally that pragmatists seem always to be 
 talking about the way in which we " arrive at ' 
 
 1 Studies in Humanism, p. 19. The remarks made in this para- 
 graph will have to be modified, to some extent, in view of the recent 
 (191 1) appearance of the third edition of Dr. Schiller's Riddles of the 
 Sphinx. This noteworthy book contains, to say the very least, a great 
 deal in the way of a positive ontology, or theory of being, and also many 
 quite different rulings in respect of the nature of metaphysic and of the 
 matter of its relation to science and to common sense. It rests, in the 
 main, upon the idea of a perfect society of perfected individuals as at 
 once the true reality and the end of the world-process — an idea which 
 exists also, at least in germ, in the pluralistic philosophy of Professor 
 James ; and we shall indeed return to this practical, or sociological, 
 philosophy as the outcome, not only of Pragmatism, but also of 
 Idealism, as conceived by representative living thinkers. Despite, how- 
 ever, these many positive and constructive merits of this work of Dr. 
 Schiller's, it is for many reasons not altogether unfair to its spirit to con- 
 tend that his philosophy is still, in the main, that of a humanistic prag- 
 matism in which both " theory " and " practice " are conceived as 
 experimentally and as hypothetically as they are by Professor Dewey.
 
 INTRODUCTORY 17 
 
 our beliefs, about ideas as " instruments " for the 
 interpretation and arrangement of our experience, 
 about the " passage " from cognitive expectation 
 to " fulfilment," about ideas as " plans of action " 
 and mental habits, about the growth and the 
 utility of the truth, about the " instrumental " 
 character of all our thinking, about beliefs as more 
 fundamental than knowledge, and so on. 
 
 Professor Dewey has also written many more 
 or less popular, but none the less highly valuable, 
 short studies upon the application of an instru- 
 mentalist conception of philosophy to education 
 and to social questions. One of his last pieces of 
 service in this connection is a volume in which he 
 associates Pragmatism with the general revolution 
 effected in the entire range of the mental and moral 
 sciences by Darwinism, with the present tendency 
 in philosophy to turn away from ultimate questions 
 to specific problems, and with the reform which, in 
 his opinion, is necessary in our educational ideals * 
 generally. 
 
 These three leading exponents of Pragmatism 
 may be regarded as meeting the objections to 
 philosophy urged respectively by the " man of 
 affairs," by the " mystical, religious " man, and 
 by the "man of science." 2 By this it is meant 
 that the man of affairs will find in James an 
 exposition of philosophy as the study of different 
 ways of looking at the world ; the mystical, religious 
 
 1 See p. 106. 
 2 See Professor Bawden's book upon Pragmatism. 
 
 2
 
 18 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM 
 
 man will find in Schiller a treatment of philosophy 
 as the justification of an essentially spiritual 
 philosophy of life ; and that the scientific man will 
 find in the writings of Dewey and his associates a 
 treatment of philosophy as nothing else than an 
 extension into the higher regions of thought of the 
 same experimental and hypothetical method with 
 which he is already familiar in the physical 
 sciences. 
 
 In this version of the work of the three leading 
 pragmatists it is assumed, of course, that the 
 pragmatist philosophy is the only philosophy that 
 can show to the average man that philosophy can 
 really do something useful — can " bake bread," 
 if you will, can give to a man the food of a man. 
 It is assumed, too, that it is the only philosophy 
 which proceeds scientifically, that is to say, by 
 means of observation and of hypotheses that 
 work," and by subsequent deduction and by 
 verification." And again, that it is the only 
 philosophy that gives to man the realities upon 
 which he can base his aspirations or his faith in 
 distinction, that is to say, from the mere abstrac- 
 tions of Rationalism in any form. 
 
 By way of a few quotations illustrative of the 
 fundamental contentions of the pragmatists, we 
 may select the following : " Ideas become true 
 just in so far as they help us to get into satisfactory 
 relation with other parts of our experience, to 
 summarise them and get about among them by con- 
 ceptional short-cuts instead of following the inter- 

 
 INTRODUCTORY 19 
 
 minable 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, simplify- 
 ing, saving labour — is true for just so much, 
 true in so far forth, true instrumentally." x " The 
 true is the name of whatever proves itself to be 
 good in the way of belief, and good for definite 
 and assignable reasons." 2 From Professor Dewey : 
 " Thinking is a kind of activity which we perform 
 at specific need, just as at other times we engage 
 in other sorts of activity, as converse with a friend, 
 draw a plan for a house, take a walk, eat a dinner, 
 purchase a suit of clothes, etc. etc. The measure 
 of its success, the standard of its validity is pre- 
 cisely the degree in which thinking disposes of the 
 difficulty and allows us to proceed with the more 
 direct modes of experiencing, that are henceforth 
 possessed of more assured and deepened value." 3 
 From Dr. Schiller's book, Studies in Humanism : 
 " Pragmatism is the doctrine that when an 
 assertion claims truth, its consequences are always 
 used to test its claims ; that (2) the truth of an 
 assertion depends on its application ; that (3) the 
 meaning of a rule lies in its application ; that 
 (4) all meaning depends on purpose ; that (5) all 
 mental life is purposive. It [Pragmatism] must 
 constitute itself into (6) a systematic protest 
 
 1 Pragmatism, p. 58. 2 Ibid. 76. 
 
 8 Studies in Logical Theory, p. 2.
 
 20 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM 
 
 against all ignoring of the purposiveness of actual 
 knowing, alike whether it is abstracted from for 
 the sake of the imaginary, pure, or absolute 
 reason of the rationalists, or eliminated for the 
 sake of an equally imaginary or pure mechanism 
 of the naturalists. So conceived, we may describe 
 it as (7) a conscious application to logic of a teleo- 
 logical psychology which implies ultimately a 
 voluntaristic metaphysic." 
 
 From these citations, and from the descriptive 
 remarks of the preceding two paragraphs, we may 
 perhaps be enabled to infer that our Anglo- 
 American Pragmatism has progressed from the 
 stage of (1) a mere method of discussing truth and 
 thinking in relation to the problem of philosophy 
 as a whole, (2) that of a more or less definite and 
 detailed criticism of the rationalism that overlooks 
 the practical, or purposive, character of most of 
 our knowledge, to that of (3) a humanistic or 
 "voluntaristic" or "personalistic" philosophy, with 
 its many different associations and affiliations. 1 
 One of the last developments, for example, of this 
 pragmatist humanism is Dr. Schiller's association 
 of philosophy with the metaphysics of evolution, 
 with the attempt to find the goal of the world- 
 process and of human history in a changeless 
 society of perfected individuals. 
 
 We shall immediately see, however, that this 
 summary description of the growth of Pragmatism 
 
 1 I endeavour to indicate what this Humanism and Personalism 
 may be in my sixth chapter.
 
 INTRODUCTORY 21 
 
 has to be supplemented by a recognition of (1) 
 some of the different phases Pragmatism has 
 assumed on the continent of Europe, (2) the 
 different phases that may be detected in the 
 reception or criticism accorded to it in different 
 countries, and (3) some of the results of the 
 pragmatist movement upon contemporary philo- 
 sophy. All these things have to do with the 
 making of the complex thing that we think of 
 as Pragmatism and the pragmatist movement. 
 
 A NOTE ON THE MEANING OF "PRAGMATISM" 
 
 (1) " The opinion that metaphysics is to be largely cleared up 
 by the application of the following maxim for obtaining clearness 
 of apprehension : ' Consider what effects that might conceivably 
 have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception 
 to have. Then, our conception of these effects is the whole of 
 our conception of the object ' " (Baldwin's Philosophical Dic- 
 tionary, vol. ii. p. 321). [We can see from this citation that the 
 application of its formulae about " consequences " to metaphysics, 
 or philosophy generally, must be considered as a part, or aspect, 
 of the pragmatist philosophy.] 
 
 (2) " The doctrine that the whole meaning of a conception 
 expresses itself in practical consequences ; consequences either 
 in the shape of conduct to be recommended, or in that of experi- 
 ences to be expected, if the conception be true ; which conse- 
 quences would be different, if it were untrue, and must be different 
 from the consequences by which the meaning of other conceptions 
 is in turn expressed. If a second conception should not appear 
 to have other consequence, then it must be really only the first 
 conception under a different name. In methodology, it is certain 
 that to trace and compare their respective consequences is an 
 admirable way of establishing the different meanings of different 
 conceptions" {ibid., from Professor James). 
 
 (3) "A widely current opinion during the last quarter of a 
 century has been that ' reasonableness ' is not a good in itself, but
 
 22 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM 
 
 only for the sake of something. Whether it be so or not seems to 
 be a synthetical question [i.e. a question that is not merely a 
 verbal question, a question of words], not to be settled by an 
 appeal to the Principle of Contradiction [the principle hitherto 
 relied upon by Rationalism or Intellectualism]. . . . Almost 
 everybody will now agree that the ultimate good lies in the evolu- 
 tionary process in some way. If so, it is not in individual re- 
 actions in their segregation, but in something general or con- 
 tinuous. Synechism is founded on the notion that the coalescence, 
 the becoming continuous, the becoming governed by laws, the 
 becoming instinct with general ideas, are but phases of one and 
 the same process of the growth of reasonableness " (ibid. p. 322. 
 From Dr. Peirce, the bracket clauses being the author's). 
 
 (4) " It is the belief that ideas invariably strive after practical 
 expression, and that our whole life is teleological. Putting the 
 matter logically, logic formulates theoretically what is of regula- 
 tive importance for life — for our ' experience ' in view of practical 
 ends. Its philosophical meaning is the conviction that all facts 
 of nature, physically and spiritually, find their expressions in 
 ' will ' ; will and energy are identical. This tendency is in agree- 
 ment with the practical tendencies of American thought and 
 American life in so far as they both set a definite end before 
 Idealism " (Ueberweg-Heinze, Geschichte der Philosophie, vol. 
 iv., written and contributed by Professor Matoon Monroe Curtis, 
 Professor of Philosophy in Western Reserve University, Cleveland, 
 U.S.A.). 
 
 (5) See also an article in Mind for October 1900, vol. ix. N.S., 
 upon " Pragmatism " by the author of this book on Pragmatism 
 and Idealism, referred to as one of the early sources in Baldwin's 
 Philosophical Dictionary (New York and London) and in Ueberweg- 
 Heinze's Geschichte, Vierter Teil (Berlin, 1906). 
 
 The conclusion that I am inclined to draw from the fore- 
 going official statements (and also, say, from another official 
 article like that of M. Lalande in the Revue Philosophique, 1906, 
 on " Pragmatisme et Pragmaticisme ") is that the term " Prag- 
 matism " is not of itself a matter of great importance, and that 
 there is no separate, intelligible, independent, self-consistent 
 system of philosophy that may be called Pragmatism. It is a 
 general name for the Practicalism or Voluntarism or Humanism 
 or the Philosophy of the Practical Reason, or the Activism, or 
 the Instrumentalism, or the Philosophy of Hypotheses, or the 
 Dynamic Philosophy of life and things that is discussed in 
 different ways in this book upon Pragmatism and Idealism. 
 And it is not and cannot be independent of the traditional body 
 of philosophical truth in relation to which it can alone be defined.
 
 CHAPTER II 
 
 PRAGMATISM AND THE PRAGMATIST MOVEMENT 
 
 In considering some of the results of pragmatist 
 and voluntarist doctrines in the case of European 
 writers, to whom the American-English trium- 
 virate used to look somewhat sympathetically, 
 we may begin with Italy, which boasted, accord- 
 ing to Dr. Schiller (writing in 1907), of a youthful 
 band of avowed pragmatists with a militant 
 organ, the Leonardo. " Fundamentally," declares 
 Papini, 1 the leader of this movement, " Prag- 
 matism means an unstiffening of all our theories 
 and beliefs, by attending to their instrumental 
 value. It incorporates and harmonizes various 
 ancient tendencies, such as Nominalism, with its 
 protest against the use of general terms, Utili- 
 tarianism, with its emphasis upon particular 
 aspects and problems, Positivism, with its disdain 
 of verbal and useless questions, Kantism, with its 
 doctrine of the primacy of practical reason, 
 Voluntarism, with its treatment of the intellect 
 as the tool of the will, and Freedom, and a positive 
 
 1 Joum. of Phil. Psychol., 1906, p. 338. 
 23
 
 24 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM 
 
 attitude towards religious questions. It is the 
 tendency of taking all these, and other theories, 
 for what they are worth, being chiefly a corridor- 
 theory, with doors and avenues into various 
 theories, and a central rallying-ground for them 
 all." These words are valuable as one of the 
 many confessions of the affiliations of Pragmatism 
 to several other more or less experiential, or 
 practical, views of philosophy. It is perfectly 
 obvious from them that Pragmatism stands, in 
 the main, for the apprehension of all truth as 
 subservient to practice, as but a device for the 
 " economy " of thought, for the grasping of the 
 multiplicity and the complexity of phenomena. 
 It looks upon man as made, in the main, for action, 
 and not for speculation — a doctrine which even 
 Mr. Peirce, by the way, now speaks of as " a stoical 
 maxim which to me, at the age of sixty, does not 
 recommend itself so forcibly as it did at thirty." x 
 " The various ideal worlds are here," continues 
 Papini, according to the version of James, 2 "because 
 the real world fails to satisfy us. All our ideal 
 instruments are certainly imperfect. But philo- 
 sophy can be regenerated ... it can become 
 pragmatic in the general sense of the word, a 
 general theory of human action ... so that 
 philosophic thought will resolve itself into a com- 
 
 1 From vol. ii. (p. 322) of Baldwin's Dictionary of Philosophy. Dr. 
 C. S. Peirce, formerly a teacher of mathematics and philosophy at 
 Johns Hopkins University, was made by James into the father or 
 patron saint of Pragmatism. James confesses to have been stimulated 
 into Pragmatism by the teachings of Peirce. 
 
 2 Journ, of Phil. Psy., 1906, p. 340.
 
 THE PRAGMATIST MOVEMENT 25 
 
 parative discussion of all the possible programmes 
 for man's life, when man is once for all regarded 
 as a creative being. ... As such, man becomes 
 a kind of god, and where are we to draw the 
 limits ? " In an article called " From Man to 
 God," Papini, in the Leonardo, lets his imagination 
 work in stretching the limits of this way of 
 thinking. 
 
 These prophetic, or Promethean, utterances — 
 and we must never forget that even to the Greeks 
 philosophy was always something of a religion or 
 a life — may be paralleled by some of the more 
 enthusiastic and unguarded, early utterances of 
 Dr. Schiller about " voluntarism " or " meta- 
 physical personalism " as the one " courageous," 
 and the only potent, philosophy ; or about the 
 " storming of the Jericho of rationalism " by the 
 " jeers " and the " trumpetings " of the confident 
 humanists and their pragmatic confreres. The 
 underlying element of truth in them, and, for that 
 part of it, in many of the similar utterances of 
 many of our modern humanists, from Rabelais 
 to Voltaire and from Shelley to Marx and Nietzsche, 
 is, as we may see, that a true metaphysic must 
 serve, not only as a rational system for the intellect, 
 but as a " dynamic " * or motive for action 
 and achievement, for the conscious activity of 
 rational, self-conscious beings. 
 
 As for the matter of any further develop- 
 
 1 See pp. 78, 148 5 and in reference to the last striking presentation 
 of Absolutism, p. 230.
 
 26 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM 
 
 ments 1 of the free, creative religion hinted by 
 Papini, we had, in 1903, the solemn declaration 
 of Professor James that " the programme of the 
 man-god is one of the great type programmes of 
 philosophy," and that he himself had been " slow " 
 in coming to a perception of the full inwardness 
 of the idea. Then it led evidently in Italy itself 
 to a new doctrine which was trumpeted there a 
 year or two ago in the public press as " Futurism," 2 
 in which " courage, audacity and rebellion " were 
 the essential elements, and which could not 
 " abide " the mere mention of such things as 
 " priests " and " ideals " and " professors " and 
 11 moralism." The extravagances of Prezzolini, 
 who thinks of man as a " sentimental gorilla," 
 were apparently the latest outcome of this 
 anarchical individualism and practicalism. Prag- 
 matism was converted by him into a sophisticated 
 opportunism and a modern Machiavellism, a 
 method of attaining contentment in one's life 
 and of dominating one's fellow-creatures by play- 
 ing upon their fancies and prejudices as does the 
 religious charlatan or the quack doctor or the 
 rhetorician. 
 
 The reader who may care to contemplate all 
 
 1 See Bourdeau, Pragmatisme el Modemisme, and W. Riley in the 
 Journ. of Phil. Psy., April and May 191 1 ; the James article, Journ. of 
 Phil., 1906 ; Journ. of Phil., 1907, pp. 26-37, on Papini's " Introduction 
 to Pragmatism " ; The Nation (N.Y.), November 1907, on " Papini's 
 view of the ' daily tragedy ' of life." 
 
 2 Reported to have been inaugurated by a Franco-Italian poet, 
 Martinetti. Of the question of any possible connexion between this 
 " Futurism " with the present Art movement bearing the same name I 
 know nothing definite.
 
 THE PRAGMATIST MOVEMENT 27 
 
 this radical, pragmatist enthusiasm for the New 
 Reformation in a more accessible, and a less 
 exaggerated, form had better perhaps consult 
 the recent work of Mr. Sturt of Oxford on the 
 Idea of a Free Church. In this work the principles 
 of Pragmatism are applied, first, critically and in 
 the main negatively, to the moral dogmas of 
 traditional Christianity, and then positively to 
 the new conception of religion he would substitute 
 for all this — the development of personality in 
 accordance with the claims of family and of 
 national life. A fair-minded criticism of this 
 book would, I think, lead to the conclusion 
 that the changes contemplated by Mr. Sturt are 
 already part and parcel of the programme of 
 liberal Christianity, whether we study this in the 
 form of the many more or less philosophical 
 presentations of the same in modern German 
 theology, or in the form of the free, moral and 
 social efforts of the voluntary religion of America 
 and England. In America many of the younger 
 thinkers in theology and philosophy are already 
 writing in a more or less popular manner upon 
 Pragmatism as a philosophy that bids fair to 
 harmonize " traditional " and " radical ' con- 
 ceptions of religion. One of these writers, for 
 example, in a recent important commemorative 
 volume, 1 tries to show how this may be done by 
 interpreting the " supernatural," not as the " trans- 
 
 1 I refer to the recent volume dedicated by some of his old pupils 
 to Professor Garman — a celebrated teacher of philosophy in one of the 
 older colleges of the United States.
 
 28 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM 
 
 experimental," but as the " ethical " in experience, 
 and by turning " dogmatic " into " historical 
 theology." And it would not be difficult to find 
 many books and addresses in which the same idea 
 is expressed. The more practical wing of this same 
 party endeavours to connect Pragmatism with 
 the whole philosophy and psychology of religious 
 conversion, as this has been worked over by 
 recent investigators like Stanley Hall, 1 Starbuck, 2 
 and others, and, above all, by James in his striking 
 volume The Varieties of Religious Experience* 
 
 The fact, of course — and I shall immediately 
 refer to it — that Pragmatism has been hailed in 
 France as a salutary doctrine, not merely by 
 Liberals and Evangelicals, but by devout Catholics 
 and Anti-modernists, is perhaps enough to give 
 us some pause in the matter of its application in the 
 sphere of theoretical and practical religion. It is 
 useful, it would seem, sometimes to " liberate ' 
 the spirit of man, and useful, too, at other times 
 to connect the strivings of the individual with the 
 more or less organized experiences of past ages. 
 
 Turning, then, to France, it is, judging from 
 the claims of the pragmatists, and from some of 
 
 1 The two large volumes on the Psychology of Adolescence. 
 
 1 The Psychology of Religion. 
 
 3 Even such a book — and it is no doubt in its way a genuine and 
 a noteworthy book — as Harold H. Begbie's Twice-born Men is pointed 
 to by this wing as another instance of the truth of pragmatist principles 
 in the sphere of experimental religion. Schopenhauer, by the way, 
 was inclined to estimate the efficacy of a religion by its power of 
 affecting the will, of converting men so that they were able to over- 
 come the selfish will to live. See my Schopenhauer's System in its 
 Philosophical Significance.
 
 THE PRAGMATIST MOVEMENT 29 
 
 the literature bearing upon this entire subject, 1 
 fairly evident that there has been a kind of associa- 
 tion or relationship between Pragmatism and the 
 following tendencies in recent French philosophy : 
 (1) the " freedom " and " indeterminism " philo- 
 sophy of Renouvier 2 and other members of the 
 
 1 See, for example, the declaration of James and Schiller (in the 
 prefaces to their books and elsewhere) in respect of their attitudes to 
 the work of men like Renouvier, Poincare, Milhaud, Wilbois, Le Roy, 
 Blondel, Pradines, the valuable reports of M. Lalande to the Philosophical 
 Review (1906-7-8), the articles of Woodbridge Riley in the Journal of 
 Philosophy (191 1) upon the continental critics of Pragmatism, the 
 books of Bourdeau, Hebert, Rey, Tonquedoc, Armand Sabatier, Schinz, 
 Picard, Berthelot, those of Poincare, Renouvier, Pradines, and the 
 rest, the older books upon nineteenth-century French philosophy by 
 men like Fouillee, Levy-Bruhl, etc. There are also valuable references 
 upon the French pragmatists in Father Walker's Theories of Knowledge 
 (in the Stoneyhurst Series), and in Professor Inge's valuable little book 
 upon Faith and its Psychology. 
 
 1 The outstanding representative in France during the entire 
 second half of the nineteenth century of " Neo-Criticism " or "Neo- 
 Kantianism," a remarkable and comprehensive thinker, to whose in- 
 fluence, for example, James attributed a part of his mental develop- 
 ment. His review, the Critique Philosophique, was a worthy (idealist) 
 rival of the more positivistically inclined, and merely psychological, 
 review of Ribot, the Revue Philosophique. French Neo-Kantianism, 
 holding, as Renouvier does, that Kant's ethics is the keystone of his 
 system, is not in general inclined to the " positivism " or the " scientific " 
 philosophy of some of the German Neo - Kantians. The critical 
 work of Renouvier proposes some very ingenious and systematic re- 
 arrangements of Kant's philosophy of the categories, and his freedom- 
 philosophy must certainly have done a good deal (along with the work 
 of others) to create the atmosphere in which Bergson lives and 
 moves to-day. With Renouvier, Neo-Kantianism merges itself too 
 in the newer philosophy of " Personalism," and he wrote, indeed, an 
 important book upon this very subject {Le Personnalistne, 1902). In 
 this work, we find a criticism of rationalism that anticipates Pragmatism, 
 the author explicitly contending for a substitution of the principle of 
 " rational belief " instead of the " false principle " of demonstrable 
 or a priori " evidence." Consciousness, he teaches, is the foundation 
 of existence, and " personality " the first " causal principle " of the 
 world (although admitting " creation " to be beyond our compre- 
 hension). He examines critically, too, the notions of the " Absolute "
 
 30 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM 
 
 Neo-Critical school, and of Boutroux and Bergson, 
 who, " although differing from each other in 
 many important respects," all " belong to the 
 same movement of thought, the reaction against 
 Hegelianism and the cult of science which has 
 dominated France since the decline of the meta- 
 physics of the school of Cousin " \ x (2) the philo- 
 sophy of science and scientific hypotheses repre- 
 sented by writers like Poincare, 2 Brunschvicg, 
 
 and of the " Unconditioned," holding that they should not be sub- 
 stantiated into entities. " Belief " is involved in " every act," he 
 teaches — also another pragmatist doctrine. And like his great pre- 
 decessor Malebranche, and like our English Berkeley, he teaches 
 that God is our "natural object," the true "other" of our life. The 
 philosophy of Personalism, the foundations of which are laid in this work, 
 is further developed by Renouvier in a comprehensive work which he 
 published in 1899, in conjunction with M. Prat, on The New Monadology 
 (La Nouvelle Monadologie). This is one of the most complete presenta- 
 tions of a philosophy of " Pluralism " that is at the same time a 
 " Theism " — to be associated, in my opinion, say, with the recent work 
 of Dr. James Ward upon the Realm of Ends, referred to on p. 162. 
 
 1 Philos. Rev. (1906), article by Lalande. 
 
 2 H. Poincare (talked of in recent scientific circles as one of the 
 greatest mathematicians of history) is (he died about a year ago), 
 so far as our present purpose is concerned, one of the important 
 scientific writers of the day upon the subject of the " logic of 
 hypotheses," and of the "hypothetical method" in science — the 
 method which the pragmatists are so anxious to apply to philosophy. 
 He seems (see his La Science et VHypothese, as well as the later book, 
 La Valeur de la Science, referred to by Lalande in his professional reports 
 to the Philosophical Review) to accept to some extent the idea of the 
 " hypothetical " character of the constructions of both the mathe- 
 matical and the physical sciences, believing, however, at the same time 
 that we must not be " unduly sceptical " about their conclusions, 
 revealing as they do something of the " nature of reality." He dis- 
 cusses among other topics the theory of " energetics " of which we speak 
 below in the case of Ostwald. He insists, too, upon the idea that the 
 real is known only by " experience," and that this " experience " 
 includes the comparison of the thoughts of many minds. And yet he 
 believes to some extent in the Kantian theory of the a priori element 
 in knowledge (see La Science, etc., p. 64). It is, however, quite un-
 
 THE PRAGMATIST MOVEMENT 31 
 
 Le Roy, 1 Milhaud, Abel Rey, 2 and others ; (3) the 
 religious philosophy and the fideism of the followers 
 of the spiritualistic metaphysic of Bergson, many 
 of whom go further than he does, and " make 
 every effort to bring him to the confessional faith " ; 3 
 and (4) the French philosophy of to-day that 
 
 necessary for me to presume to enter into the large subject of the 
 precise nature of " hypotheses " in the mathematical and the physical 
 sciences. 
 
 1 A professor of mathematics in Paris and an ardent Bergsonian, and 
 along with Laberthonniere one of the prominent Catholic defenders 
 of Pragmatism and Modernism, author of a book on Dogmatism 
 and Criticism (Dogme et Critique). Not having had the time to examine 
 this book, as somewhat removed from my immediate subject, I append 
 for the benefit of the reader the following statements and quotations from 
 the useful book Faith and its Psychology, by Professor Inge of Cambridge. 
 It is easy to see that the positions represented therein would give 
 rise to controversy as to the historicity or fact of Christianity. 
 " Le Roy gives us some examples of this Catholic Pragmatism. When 
 we say ' God is personal,' we mean ' behave in our relations with 
 God as you do in your relations with a human person.' When we say, 
 ' Jesus is risen from the dead,' we mean ' treat him as if he were your 
 contemporary.' . . . His main theses may be summed up in his own 
 words. ' The current intellectualist conception renders insoluble most 
 of the objections which are now raised against the idea of dogma. A 
 doctrine of the primacy of action, on the contrary, permits us to solve 
 the problem without abandoning anything of the rights of thought or 
 of the exigencies of dogma.' " Le Roy, by the way, has published a book 
 upon the philosophy of Bergson, which is said to be the best book upon 
 the subject. It has been translated into English. 
 
 2 M. Abel Rey, author of a work on the Theory of Physical Science in 
 the hands of Contemporary Scientists (La Thiorie de la physique chez 
 les physiciens contemporains). In this book (I have not had the time 
 to examine it carefully) M. Rey examines the theories and methods 
 of Newton, and also of modern thinkers like Mach and Ostwald, 
 reaching the conclusion that the philosophy with which physical science 
 is most compatible is a " modified form of Positivism," which bears a 
 striking resemblance to " Pragmatism " and the " philosophy of ex- 
 perience." The English reader will find many useful references to Rey 
 in the pages of Father Leslie J. Walker's Theories of Knowledge, in 
 the " Stoneyhurst Philosophical Series." 
 8 Ibidem.
 
 32 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM 
 
 definitely bears the name of Pragmatism, that of 
 M. Blondel, 1 who in 1893 wrote a suggestive work 
 entitled V Action, and who claims to have coined 
 the word Pragmatism, after much careful con- 
 sideration and discrimination, as early as 1888 
 — many years before the California pamphlet of 
 James. 
 
 The first of these points of correspondence or 
 relationship we can pass over with the remark that 
 we shall have a good deal to say about the advant- 
 age enjoyed by Pragmatism over Rationalism 
 in the treatment of " freedom " and the " voli- 
 tional " side of human nature, and also about the 
 general pragmatist reaction against Rationalism. 
 
 And as for the philosophy of science, it has 
 been shown that our English-speaking prag- 
 matists cannot exactly pride themselves in the 
 somewhat indiscriminate manner of James and 
 Schiller upon the supposed support for their 
 " hypothetical " conception of science and philo- 
 sophy to be found in the work of their French 
 associates upon the logic of science. " The men 
 of great learning who were named as sponsors of 
 this new philosophy have more and more testified 
 what reservations they make, and how greatly 
 their conclusions differ from those which are 
 currently attributed to them." 2 Both Brunschvicg 
 and Poincare, in fact, take the greatest pains in 
 
 1 It was impossible to procure a copy of this work of M. Blondel. 
 I have tried to do so twice in Paris. 
 
 a M. Lalande in the Philosophical Review (1906), p. 246.
 
 THE PRAGMATIST MOVEMENT 33 
 
 their books to dissociate themselves from any- 
 thing like the appearance of an acceptance of the 
 doctrine of the relativity of knowledge, from the 
 signs of any lack of faith in the idea that science, 
 as far as it goes, gives us a true revelation of the 
 nature of reality. 
 
 Then in regard to (3) the French pragmatist 
 philosophy or religion we have only to read the 
 reports and the quotations of M. Lalande to see in 
 this philosophy the operation of an uncritical 
 dogmatism or a blind " fideism " to which very 
 few other philosophers, either in France or in any 
 other country, would care to subscribe. " La 
 Revue de Philosophie, which is directed by ecclesi- 
 astics, recently extolled pragmatism as a means of 
 proving orthodox beliefs." ..." This system 
 solves a great many difficulties in philosophy ; 
 it explains the necessity of principles marvellously." 
 ..." The existence of God, Providence and 
 Immortality are demonstrated by their happy 
 effects upon our terrestrial life." . . . " If we can 
 consider the matter carefully, it will be seen that 
 the Good is the useful ; for not to be good in any- 
 thing is synonymous with being bad, and every- 
 where the true is the useful. It is in this assertion 
 that Pragmatism consists." 1 
 
 And as to the fourth tendency, there is, at its 
 outset, according to M. Lalande, a more rational 
 or ethical basis for the fideism of M. Blondel's 
 book upon action, which starts off with a criticism 
 
 1 Ibid. pp. 245-246. 
 
 3
 
 34 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM 
 
 of philosophic dilettantism quite analogous with 
 that which Mr. Peirce follows in How to Make 
 Our Ideas Clear. But M. Blondel " does not 
 continue in the same manner, and his conclusion 
 is very different. Rejecting all philosophical 
 formalism, he puts his trust in moral experience, 
 and consults it directly. He thinks that moral 
 experience shows that action is not wholly self- 
 contained, but that it presupposes a reality which 
 transcends the world in which we participate." x 
 
 Finally, maintains M. Blondel, " we are unable, 
 as Pascal already said, either to live, or to under- 
 stand ourselves, by ourselves alone. So that, unless 
 we mutilate our nature by renouncing all earnest- 
 ness of life, we are necessarily led to recognize in 
 ourselves the presence of God. Our problem, 
 therefore, can only be solved by an act of absolute 
 faith in a positive religion [Catholicism in his case]. 
 This completes the series of acts of faith, without 
 which no action, not even our daily acts, could 
 be accomplished, and without which we should 
 fall into absolute barrenness, both practical and 
 intellectual." 2 
 
 1 I am inclined to attach a great importance to this idea (Kant 
 obviously had it) of " consulting moral experience directly," provided 
 only that the " moral " in our experience is not too rigidly separated 
 from the intellectual. And it would so far, therefore, be only to the 
 credit of Pragmatism if we could associate it with a rational effort to 
 do justice to our moral experience, as indeed possibly presupposing a 
 " reality " that transcends the limits of our mere individuality, a 
 reality that transcends, too, the subjective idealism that figures but 
 too prominently in modern philosophy. See my eighth chapter, p. 223, 
 where I criticize Dr. Bosanquet for not consulting moral experience 
 directly. 
 
 2 Phil. Rev., 1906, p. 243.
 
 THE PRAGMATIST MOVEMENT 35 
 
 Now again these words about our being unable 
 to understand ourselves " by ourselves alone " 
 contain an element of truth which we may associate 
 with the pragmatist tendency to believe in a 
 socialized (as distinguished from an individual- 
 istic) interpretation 1 of our common moral life, 
 to believe, that is to say, in a society of persons 
 as the truth (or the reality) of the universe, 
 rather than in an interpretation of the universe 
 as the thinking experience of a single absolute 
 intelligence. This, however, is also a point which 
 we are obliged to defer 2 until we take up the 
 general subject of the relations between Prag- 
 matism and Rationalism. The other words of 
 the paragraph, in respect of our absolute need 
 of faith in some positive religion, are, of course, 
 expressive again of the uncritical fideism to which 
 reference has already been made. As an offset 
 or alternative to the " free " religion of Papini 
 and James and to the experimental or practical 
 religion of different Protestant bodies, it is enough 
 of itself to give us pause in estimating the real 
 drift 3 of Pragmatism in regard to religious faith and 
 the philosophy of religion. 4 
 
 1 See p. 160. » See p. 200 et. ff. » See p. 64. 
 
 * For a later statement upon the philosophy of religion in France 
 see a report for the Phil. Rev. (vol. xvi. p. 304), by Le Roy. This 
 whole matter is, of course, a subject in itself of the greatest theoretical 
 and practical importance. It is enough for our purpose to have in- 
 dicated the different ways in which Pragmatism and the " Will-to- 
 Believe " philosophy have been received in France, and the different 
 issues raised by this reception. The reader who would care to look 
 at a constructive, philosophical view (by the doyen of French philosophy
 
 36 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM 
 
 We shall meantime take leave of French 
 Pragmatism 1 with the reflection that it is thus 
 obviously as complex and as confusing and con- 
 fused a thing as is the Pragmatism of other 
 countries. It is now almost a generation since 
 
 professors) of the whole issue between the pragmatist or " voluntarist " 
 point of view in religion and the older " intellectual " view, cannot do 
 better than consult Science and Religion in Contemporary Philosophy, 
 by E. Boutroux, a book that is apparently studied everywhere at 
 present in France. Its spirit and substance may be indicated by the 
 following quotations, which follow after some pages in which M. Bou- 
 troux exposes the error of " the radical distinction between theory and 
 practice." "The starting point of science is an abstraction, i.e. an 
 element extracted from the given fact and considered separately. We 
 cannot expect man to be satisfied with the abstract when the concrete is 
 at his disposal. That would be ' something like offering a printed bill 
 of fare as the equivalent for a solid meal.' Man uses science but he lives 
 religion. The part cannot replace the whole ; the symbol cannot 
 suppress reality." . . . " Not only is science unable to replace religion, 
 but she cannot dispense with the subjective reality upon which the latter 
 is grounded. It is pure Scholastic realism to imagine that the objective 
 and the impersonal suffice apart from the subjective in our experience. 
 Between the subjective and the objective no demarcation is given 
 which justifies from the philosophical standpoint the divisions which 
 science imagines for her own convenience " (p. 329). 
 
 1 Since writing these words, I have made (thanks firstly to Dr. 
 Schiller's review in Mind, July 191 1) the acquaintance of the important 
 work of M. Pradines upon the Conditions of Action. In the central 
 conception of this work, that action is " all-including " and that all 
 knowledge is a form of action, I find an important development of much 
 that the pragmatists have long been endeavouring to express, and also 
 in particular a development of the celebrated action philosophy of 
 M. Blondel. I am inclined, with Dr. Schiller, to regard the volumes of 
 M. Pradines as apparently the high-water mark of French pragmatist 
 philosophy in the general sense of the term, although I cannot but at 
 the same time hail with approval their occasional sharp criticism of 
 Pragmatism as to some extent " scepticism and irrationalism." I am 
 inclined to think, too, that the ethical philosophy of M. Pradines has 
 some of the same defects that I shall venture to discuss later in dealing 
 with the application (mainly by Dewey) of Pragmatism to moral theory. 
 Of course his Conditions of Action is by no means as original a production 
 as Blondel's book upon Action.
 
 THE PRAGMATIST MOVEMENT 37 
 
 we began to hear of a renascence of spiritualism 1 
 and idealism in France in connexion not merely 
 with the work of philosophers like Renouvier and 
 Lachelier and Fouillee 2 and Boutroux, but with 
 men of letters like De Vogue, Lavisse, Faguet, 
 Desjardins 3 and the rest, and some of the French 
 Pragmatism of to-day is but one of the more 
 specialized phases of the broader movement. 
 
 1 Fouillee speaks in his book upon the Idealist Movement and the 
 Reaction against Positive Science of the year 1851, as the time of the 
 triumph of " force," of " Naturalism " (Zola, Goncourt, etc.), and of the 
 revival of Idealism by Lachelier, Renouvier, and Boutroux. 
 
 2 See the celebrated work of A. Fouillee, La Psychologie des 
 idees-forces (Paris, 1890). I confess to having been greatly impressed 
 by this book when I first made its acquaintance. In particular, I can 
 think of an idea in Fouillee's book that anticipates even Bergson, 
 namely the fact that every idea or sensation is an effort that is 
 furthered or impeded. But Fouillee's works out in this book the active 
 of the volitional side of nearly every mental power and of the mental 
 life itself, refusing to separate "mind" and "bodily activity." It 
 really anticipates a great deal of the whole French philosophy and 
 psychology of action, including the work of Blondel and Bergson. 
 
 3 M. Paul Desjardins (at present a professor of " letters " at Sevres) 
 was influential in Paris about 1892-93 as the founder of a Union 
 pour I' Action morale," which published a monthly bulletin. This 
 society still exists, but under the name (and the change is indeed highly 
 significant of what Pragmatism in general really needs) L' Union pour 
 la veritt morale et sociale. I append a few words from one of the 
 bulletins I received from M. Desjardins. They are indicative of the 
 spiritualizations of thought and action for which the old society stood. 
 "II ne s'agit de rien moins que de renverser entierement l'echelle de 
 nos jugements, de nos attaches, de mettre en haut ce qui etait en bas, et 
 en bas ce qui etait en haut. II s'agit d'une conversion totale, en 
 somme. . . ." " La regie commune c'est la mediocrite d'ame, ou 
 meme ce qu'on pourrait appeler I'athHsme pratique. En effet, Dieu 
 etant, par rapport a notre conscience, la Volonte que le bien se realise, 
 ou la Regie vivante, on devient pratiquement, athee, fut-on d'ailleurs 
 tres persuade par les preuves philosophiques de l'existence de Dieu, 
 lorsqu'on perd la notion de cette Volonte immuable avec laquelle la 
 notre se confond activement des quelle mtrite le nom de volontt libre, etc." 
 In this last sentence there is a distinctly pragmatist note in the sense 
 of the action philosophy of Blondel and Bergson and the rest.
 
 38 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM 
 
 And as for the special question of the influence 
 of James and his philosophy upon Bergson, and 
 of that of the possible return influence of Bergson 
 upon James, 1 the evidence produced by Lalande 
 from Bergson himself is certainly all to the effect 
 that both men have worked very largely in- 
 dependently of each other, although perfectly 
 cognisant now and then of each other's publica- 
 tions. Both men, along with their followers 
 (and this is all that needs interest us), have 
 obviously been under the influence of ideas that 
 have long been in the air about the need of a philo- 
 sophy that is "more truly empirical" 2 than the 
 traditional philosophy, and more truly inclined 
 to " discover what is involved in our actions in 
 the ultimate recess, when, unconsciously and 
 in spite of ourselves, we support existence and 
 cling to it whether we completely understand it 
 or not." 3 
 
 As for Pragmatism and pragmatist achieve- 
 ments in Germany, there is, as might well be 
 supposed, little need of saying much. The genius 
 of the country is against both ; and if there is any 
 Pragmatism in Germany, it must have contrived 
 somehow to have been " born again " of the 
 
 1 See also the recent book by Flournoy on the Philosophy of James 
 (Paris, 191 1), in which this interesting special subject is discussed as 
 well as the important difference between James and Bergson. 
 
 2 Rey in his Philosophic Moderne, 1908, speaks of the "gleaning of 
 the practical factors of rationalistic systems " as the " new line " in 
 French philosophy (Journ. of Phil., 1911, p. 226). 
 
 3 From the Lalande article already mentioned.
 
 THE PRAGMATIST MOVEMENT 39 
 
 n 
 
 spirit ' before obtaining official recognition. 1 
 So much even might be inferred from the other- 
 wise generous recognition accorded to the work 
 of James by scholars and thinkers like Eucken 
 and Stein 2 and the rest. Those men cannot 
 
 1 This can be seen, for example, in the Preface to Die Philosophic 
 des A Is Ob, the quasi-Pragmatist book recently edited by Vaihinger, the 
 famous commentator on Kant. " We must distinguish in Pragmatism," 
 it is there stated, " what is valuable from the uncritical exaggerations. 
 Uncritical Pragmatism is an epistemological Utilitarianism of the worst 
 sort ; what helps us to make life tolerable is true, etc. . . . Thus 
 Philosophy becomes again an ancilla theologiae ; nay, the state of 
 matters is even worse than this ; it becomes a meretrix theologorum." 
 This, by the way, is a strange and a striking book, and is perhaps the last 
 conspicuous instance from Germany of the vitality, and of the depths 
 of the roots of some of the principles of the pragmatists. The very 
 appearance of the name of Vaihinger in connexion with it (as the editor) 
 must be a considerable shock to rationalists and to Kantians, who have 
 long looked upon Vaihinger as one of the authoritative names in 
 German Transcendentalism. Here, however, he seems to agree with 
 those who treat Kant's ethical philosophy of postulates as the real 
 Kant, making him out, further, as the author of a far-reaching 
 philosophy of the " hypotheses " and the " fictions " that we must 
 use in the interpretation of the universe. With Dr. Schiller, who 
 reviews this work in Mind (19 12), I am inclined to think that it 
 travels too far in the direction of an entirely hypothetical concep- 
 tion of knowledge, out - pragmatising the pragmatists apparently. 
 The student who reads German will find it a veritable magazine of 
 information about nearly all the thinkers of the time who have prag- 
 matist or quasi-pragmatist leanings. All the names, for example, of the 
 German and French writers to whom I refer in this second chapter are 
 mentioned there [I had, of course, written my book before I saw 
 Vaihinger], along with many others. It is as serious an arraignment of 
 abstract rationalism as is to be found in contemporary literature, and 
 edited, as I say, by the Nestor of the Kant students of our time. 
 
 3 Especially in the open-minded and learned articles in the Archiv 
 ftir Philosophic, 1907, Band xiv., Professor Stein (of Bern) is known as 
 one of the most enthusiastic and voluminous writers upon Social 
 Philosophy in Germany. His best-known work is an encyclopedic 
 book upon the social question in the light of philosophy (Die soziale 
 Frage im Lichte der Philosophic, 1903). His tendency here is realistic 
 and naturalistic and evolutionistic, and he thinks (for a philosopher) 
 far too much of men like Herbert Spencer and Mach and Ostwald.
 
 40 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM 
 
 see Pragmatism save in the broad light of 
 the " humanism " that has always characterised 
 philosophy, when properly appreciated, and under- 
 stood in the light of its true genesis. Pragma- 
 tism has in fact been long known in Germany 
 under the older names of " Voluntarism " and 
 " Humanism," although it may doubtless be 
 associated there with some of the more pro- 
 nounced tendencies of the hour, such as the recent 
 insistence of the " Gottingen Fries School " upon 
 the importance of the " genetic " and the " descrip- 
 tive ' ' point of view in regard even to the matter 
 of the supposed first principles of knowledge, 
 the hypothetical and methodological conception 
 of philosophy taken by philosophical scientists 
 like Mach and Ostwald 1 and their followers, the 
 
 What one misses in Stein is a discussion of the social question in relation 
 to some of the deeper problems of philosophy, such as we find in men 
 of our own country like Mackenzie and Bosanquet, and Ritchie, and 
 Jones, and others. His work, however (it has been translated into 
 Russian and French), is a complete literary presentation of the subject, 
 and a valuable source of information. See my review notices of it 
 in the Phil. Rev. vol. xiv. 
 
 1 Mach and Ostwald both represent (for the purposes of our study) 
 the association that undoubtedly exists between Pragmatism and the 
 tendency of all the physical and natural sciences to form " hypotheses " 
 or conceptions, that are to them the best means of " describing " or 
 " explaining " (for any purpose) either facts, or the connexions between 
 facts. Mach (professor of the history and theory of the sciences in 
 Vienna) is a " phenomenalist " and " methodologist " who attacks all 
 a priorism, treating the matter of the arrangement of the " material " of 
 a science under the idea of the " most economic expenditure " of our 
 " mental energy." One of the best known of his books is his Analysis of 
 the Sensations (translated, along with his Popular Science Lectures, in the 
 " Open Court Library " of Chicago). In this work he carries out the 
 idea of his theory of knowledge as a question of the proper relation of 
 " facts " to " symbols." " Thing, body, matter," he says (p. 6), 
 " are all nothing apart from their so-called attributes." " Man possesses
 
 THE PRAGMATIST MOVEMENT 41 
 
 " empiricism " and " realism " of thinkers like 
 the late Dr. Avenarius 1 of Zurich. 
 
 in its highest form the power of consciously and arbitrarily determining 
 his point of view." In his Introduction, he attempts to show how 
 " the ego and the relation of bodies to the ego give rise " to " problems " 
 in the relations simply of " certain complexes " of " sensation to each 
 other." While it is undoubtedly to the credit of Mach that he sees 
 the " subjective," or the " mental," factor in facts and things and objects, 
 it must be said that he ignores altogether the philosophical problems of 
 the ego, or the " self," as something more than a mere object among 
 objects. 
 
 Ostwald is one of the founders of the theory of " Energetics," 
 the theory of the school that believes in substituting a dynamical philo- 
 sophy, for the older, atomic, or mechanical philosophy of matter and 
 motion. He put this philosophy forward in 1895 as the last gift of 
 the nineteenth to the twentieth century. He suggests how this idea of 
 energetics may be applied also to psychical processes, in so far as these 
 may be understood by conceptions that have proved to be useful in 
 our interpretation of the physical world. Our " consciousness would 
 thus come to be looked upon as a property of a peculiar kind of energy 
 of the nerves." The whole idea is a piece of phenomenalistic positivism, 
 and although Ostwald makes an attempt (somewhat in the manner of 
 Herbert Spencer) to explain the " forms," or the categories, of experience 
 as simply " norms " or " rules " that have been handed on from one 
 generation to another, he does not occupy himself with ultimate 
 philosophical questions about the nature either of matter or of energy. 
 His Natural Philosophy has recently been translated into English 
 (Holt & Co., 1910). Its Pragmatism lies in the fact of his looking 
 upon concepts and classification as " not questions " of the so-called 
 " essence " of the thing, " but rather as pertaining to purely practical 
 arrangements for an easier and more successful mastery of scientific 
 problems" (p. 67). He also takes a pragmatist, or "functional," 
 conception of the mental life towards the close of this book. Professor 
 Ostwald lectured some years ago in the United States, and his lectures 
 were attended by students of philosophy and students of science. Pro- 
 fessor (now President) Hibben has written an interesting account of his 
 theory in its philosophical bearings in the Philosophical Review, vol. xii. 
 
 1 The philosophy of Avenarius (born in Paris, but died as Professor 
 of Inductive Philosophy in Zurich) is called " Empirical Criticism," 
 which differs from Idealism by taking a more realistic attitude 
 to ordinary human experience. There is an excellent elementary 
 account of Avenarius in Mind for 1897 by Carstanjen of Zurich. 
 Avenarius goes back in some respects to the teaching of Comte as to 
 the need of interpreting all philosophical theories in the terms of the 
 social environment out of which they come.
 
 42 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM 
 
 Then the so-called " teleological," or "prac- 
 tical," character of our human thinking has 
 also been recognized in modern German thought 
 long before the days of Peirce and Dewey, even 
 by such strictly academic thinkers as Lotze and 
 Sigwart. The work of the latter thinker upon 
 Logic, by the way, was translated into English 
 under distinctly Neo-Hegelian influences. In the 
 second portion of this work the universal pre- 
 suppositions of knowledge are considered, not 
 merely as a priori truths, but as akin in some 
 important respects " to the ethical principles by 
 which we are wont to determine and guide our 
 free conscious activity." x But even apart from 
 this matter of the natural association of Pragma- 
 tism with the Voluntarism that has long existed 
 in German philosophy, 2 we may undoubtedly pass 
 to the following things in contemporary and recent 
 German thought as sympathetic, in the main, to 
 the pragmatist tendencies of James and Dewey 
 and Schiller : (i) the practical conception of 
 science and philosophy, as both of them a kind 
 of " economy of the attention," a sort of " con- 
 ceptual shorthand " 3 (for the purposes of the 
 
 1 Logic, vol. ii. p. 17. English translation by Miss Dendy. In this 
 same section of his work, Lotze talks of the demands of our thought as 
 " postulates " whose claims rest in the end upon our will — auf unserm 
 Wollen. 
 
 2 To be traced to Fichte's well-known initial interpretation of Kant 
 from the standpoint of the Practical Reason of the second " Critique," 
 and to Schelling's late " positive" philosophy, and to Schopenhauer, 
 the will philosopher par excellence. See my Schopenhauer' s System in 
 its Philosophical Significance. 
 
 3 As an illustration of this " conceptual shorthand," I take the
 
 THE PRAGMATIST MOVEMENT 43 
 
 " description " of our environment) that we have 
 referred to in the case of Mach and Ostwald ; (2) the 
 close association between the " metaphysical " 
 and the "cultural" in books like those of Jerusalem 1 
 and Eleutheropulos ; 2 (3) the sharp criticism of 
 
 following lines from Professor Needham's book upon General Biology 
 (p. 222) in respect of " classification " and its relative and changing 
 character. "Whatever our views of relationship, the series in which 
 we arrange organisms are based upon the likenesses and differences we 
 find to exist among them. This is classification. We associate 
 organisms together under group names because, being so numerous and 
 so diverse, it is only thus that our minds can deal with them. Classifica- 
 tion furnishes the handles by which we move all our intellectual luggage. 
 We base our groupings on what we know of the organisms. Our 
 system of classification is therefore liable to change with every advance 
 of knowledge." 
 
 1 Professor Jerusalem (the translator of James's Pragmatism into 
 German) is known as one of the German discoverers of Pragmatism. 
 His Introduction to Philosophy (translated by Professor Sanders, 
 Macmillan & Co., N.Y., 1910) is an admirable, easy, and instructive 
 introduction to philosophy from a pragmatist point of view. It has 
 gone through four editions in Germany. It is quite free from any taint 
 of irrationalism and has sections upon the " theory of knowledge " 
 and the " theory of being." Its spirit may be inferred from the follow- 
 ing quotations. " My philosophy is characterized by the empirical 
 view point, the genetic method, and the biological and the social methods 
 of interpreting the human mind " (the Preface). " Philosophy is the 
 intellectual effort which is undertaken with a view to combining the 
 common experiences of life and the results of scientific investigation 
 into a harmonious and consistent world theory ; a world theory, 
 moreover, which is adapted to satisfy the requirements of the under- 
 standing and the demands of the heart. There was a time when 
 men believed that such a theory could be constructed from the pure 
 forms of thought, without much concern for the results of detailed 
 investigation. But that time is for ever past " (pp. 1 and 2). 
 
 2 Author of a work on Philosophy and Social Economy (Philosophic 
 und Wirthschaft), in which the fundamental idea is that philosophy is 
 essentially nothing more or less than a " conception of life " or a view 
 of the world in general, and that the older rationalistic philosophy will 
 therefore have to be modified in view of modern discoveries and modern 
 ways of looking at things. It has, of course, the limitations of such a 
 point of view, in so far as its author seems to forget that philosophy 
 must lead human life and not merely follow it. My present point is
 
 44 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM 
 
 the Rationalism of the Critical Idealism by the 
 two last-mentioned thinkers, and by some of the 
 members of the new Fichte 1 School like Schellwien ; 
 and last but not least, (4) the tendency to take a 
 psychological 2 and a sociological 3 (instead of a 
 merely logical) view of the functions of thought 
 
 merely to mention of the existence and work of this man as one of the 
 continental thinkers who have anticipated the essentially social con- 
 ception of philosophy taken by the pragmatists. 
 
 1 It is easy to see the influence of Fichte's will philosophy and 
 practical idealism in Schellwien's books (Pkilosophie und Leben, Wille 
 und Erkenntniss, Der Geist der neuern Pkilosophie). He speaks of the 
 primacy of the will (in point of time only, of course), or of the "un- 
 conscious " in the life of man, allowing, however, that man gradually 
 transforms this natural life in the life of '* creative activity " that is 
 his proper life. He states (in the Spirit of the New Philosophy) the 
 pragmatist idea that " belief " (p. 32) or the " feeling " that we have 
 of the ultimate " unity " of " subject and object," precedes (also in 
 point of " time ") knowledge, pointing out, however, in the same place 
 the limitations of belief. These latter, he supposes, to be overcome 
 in the higher knowledge that we have in creative activity— an idea 
 which, I think, may be associated to some extent with the position of 
 Blondel. 
 
 2 In the Phil. Rev. (xvi. p. 250) Dr. Ewald speaks of this work of 
 this psychologizing school as existing alongside of the renewed interest 
 in Fichte and Schelling and Hegel. It is an attempt to revive the 
 teaching of Fries, a Kantian (at Jena) who attempted to establish the 
 Critique of Pure Reason upon a psychological basis, believing that 
 psychology, " based on internal experience," must form the basis of all 
 philosophy. It stands squarely upon the fact that all logical laws 
 and " categories," even the highest and most abstract, in order to 
 " come to consciousness in man," must be given to him as " psycho- 
 logical processes " — a position which is certainly true as far as it goes, 
 and which supports, say, the genetic psychological attitude of Professor 
 Dewey. Its attitude has been sharply criticized in some of his books 
 by Dr. Ernst Cassirer of Berlin, a well-known upholder of a more 
 rationalistic form of Neo-Kantianism. 
 
 3 Dr. Simmel of Berlin (like Stein) is a prominent representative of 
 this school (even in a recent striking book that he wrote upon the 
 philosophy of Kant) . He has written, for example, a most erudite work 
 upon the Philosophy of Money, and this at the same time with all his 
 university work as a fascinating and learned lecturer upon both ancient 
 and modern philosophy.
 
 THE PRAGMATIST MOVEMENT 45 
 
 and philosophy, that is just as accentuated in 
 Germany at the present time as it is elsewhere. 
 
 James and Schiller have both been fond of 
 referring to the work of many of these last- 
 mentioned men as favourable to a conception of 
 philosophy less as a " theory of knowledge " 
 (or a " theory of being ") in the old sense than 
 as a Weltanschauungslehre (a view of the world 
 as whole), a " discussion of the various possible 
 programmes for man's life " to which reference 
 has already been made in the case of Papini and 
 others. And we might associate with their pre- 
 dilections and persuasions in this regard the 
 apparent Pragmatism also of a great scholar like 
 Harnack 1 in reference to the subordination of 
 religious dogma to the realities of the religious 
 life, or the Pragmatism of Ritschl 2 himself, in 
 
 1 Without attempting to enter upon the matter of Harnack's 
 philosophy as a Neo- Kantian of the school of Ritschl, I am thinking 
 simply of things like the following from his book on the Essence of 
 Christianity. " It is to man that religion pertains, to man, as one who 
 in the midst of all change and progress himself never changes " (p. 8). 
 " The point of view of the philosophical theorists in the strict sense of 
 the word will find no place in these lectures. Had they been delivered 
 sixty years ago it would have been our endeavour to try to arrive by 
 speculative reasoning at some general conception of religion, and then 
 to define the Christian religion accordingly. But we have rightly 
 become sceptical about the value of this procedure. Latet dolus in 
 generalibus. We know to-day that life cannot be spanned by general 
 conceptions" (p. 9). See also his protest (on p. 220) against the sub- 
 stitution of a " Hellenistic " view of religion for religion itself — a protest 
 that is, according to Pfleiderer in his Development of Theology (p. 298), a 
 marked characteristic of Harnack's whole History of Dogma. 
 
 2 I am thinking of Ritschl's sharp distinction between " theoretical 
 knowledge " and "religious faith" (which rises to judgments of value 
 about the world that transcend even moral values), and of his idea that 
 the " truth " of faith is practical, and must be " lived." Pfleiderer says
 
 46 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM 
 
 regard to the subordinate place in living 
 religion of mere intellectual theory, or even 
 some of the tendencies of the celebrated value- 
 philosophy of Rickert and Windelband 1 and 
 Miinsterberg 2 and the rest. But again the main 
 trouble about all this quasi-German support for 
 the pragmatists is that most of these contemporary 
 thinkers have taken pains to trace the roots of 
 their teaching back into the great systems of the 
 
 (in his Development of Theology, p. 184) that Ritschl's "conception of 
 religion is occupied with judgments of value [Werturtheile], i.e. with 
 conceptions of our relation to the world which are of moment solely 
 according to their value in awakening feelings of pleasure and pain, as 
 our dominion over the world is furthered or checked." His " acceptance 
 of the idea of God as [with Kant] a practical ' belief,' and not an 
 act of speculative cognition," is also to some extent a pragmatist 
 idea in the sense in which, in this book, I reject pragmatist ideas. 
 Ritschl seems to have in the main only a strongly practical interest 
 in dogmatics holding that " only the things vital are to be made vital 
 in the actual service of the church." He goes the length of holding 
 that " a merely philosophical view of the world has no place in 
 Christian theology," holding that " metaphysical inquiry " applied to 
 " nature " and to " spirit," as " things to be analysed, for the purpose of 
 finding out what they are in themselves, can from the nature of the case 
 have no great value for Christian theology." Of course he is right in 
 holding that the " proofs for the existence of God, conducted by the 
 purely metaphysical method, do not lead to the forces whose repre- 
 sentation is given in Christianity, but merely to conceptions of a 
 world-unity, which conceptions are neutral as regards all religion " 
 (The Theology of Albrecht Ritschl, Swing. Longmans, Green & Co., 
 1 901). I think this last quotation from Ritschl may be used as an 
 expression of the idea of the pragmatists, that a true and complete 
 philosophy must serve as a "dynamic" to human endeavour and to 
 human motive. 
 
 1 See the reference to Windelband in the footnote upon p. 150. 
 
 2 I am thinking of Miinsterberg's contention in his Grundzuge and 
 his other books, that the life of actual persons can never be adequately 
 described by the objective sciences, by psycho-physics, and so on, and 
 of his apparent acceptance of the distinction of Rickert between the 
 " descriptive " and the " normative " sciences (logic, ethics, aesthetics, 
 and so on).
 
 THE PRAGMATIST MOVEMENT 47 
 
 past. The pragmatists, on the other hand, have 
 been notoriously careless about the matter of the 
 various affiliations of their " corridor-like " and 
 eclectic theory. 
 
 There are many reasons, however, against regard- 
 ing even the philosophical expression of many of 
 the practical and scientific tendencies of Germany 
 as at all favourable to the acceptance of Prag- 
 matism as a satisfactory philosophy from the 
 German point of view. Among these reasons are : 
 (1) The fact that it is naturally impossible to find 
 any real support in past or present German philo- 
 sophy for the impossible breach that exists in 
 Pragmatism between the "theoretical" and the 
 " practical," and (2) the fact that Germany has 
 only recently passed through a period of sharp 
 conflict between the psychological (or the 
 " genetic ") and the logical point of view regard- 
 ing knowledge, resulting in a confessed victory 
 for the latter. And then again (3) even if there 
 is a partial correspondence between Pragmatism 
 and the quasi economic (or " practical ") con- 
 ception taken of philosophy by some of the 
 younger men in Germany who have not altogether 
 outlived their reaction against Rationalism, there 
 are other tendencies there that are far more 
 characteristic of the spirit and of the traditions 
 of the country. Among these are the New 
 Idealism generally, the strong Neo-Kantian move- 
 ment of the Marburg school * and their followers 
 
 1 Theleadersof this school are the two influential thinkersand teachers
 
 48 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM 
 
 in different places, the revived interest in Hegel * 
 and in Schelling, the Neo-Romanticism of Jena, 
 with its booklets upon such topics as The Culture 
 of the Soul, Life with Nature, German Idealism, 
 and so on. 2 And then (4) there are just as many 
 difficulties in the way of regarding the psycho- 
 logical and sociological philosophy of men like 
 Jerusalem and Eleutheropulos as anything like a 
 final philosophy of knowledge, as there is in 
 attempting to do the same thing with the merely 
 preliminary and tentative philosophy of James and 
 his associates. 
 
 Cohen and Natorp, the former the author of a well-known book upon 
 Kant's Theory of Experience (1871), formerly much used by English 
 and American students, and the latter the author of an equally famous 
 book upon Plato's Theory of Ideas, which makes an interesting attempt 
 to connect Plato's "Ideas" with the modern notion of the law of a 
 phenomenon. Cohen has given forth recently an important develop- 
 ment of the Kantian philosophy in his two remarkable books upon the 
 Logic of Pure Knowledge and the Ethic of the Pure Will. These works 
 exercise a great influence upon the entire liberal (Protestant and 
 Jewish) thought of the time in Germany. They teach a lofty spiritualism 
 and idealism in the realm of ethics, which transcends altogether any- 
 thing as yet attempted in this direction by Pragmatism. 
 
 1 See the instructive reports to the Philosophical Review by Dr. 
 Ewald of Vienna upon Contemporary Philosophy in Germany. In the 
 1907 volume he speaks of this renewed interest, "on a new basis," in 
 the work of the great founders of transcendentalism as an " important 
 movement partly within and partly outside of Neo-Kantianism," as 
 " a movement heralded by some and derided by others as a reaction," 
 as the " fulfilment of a prophecy by von Hartmann that after Kant 
 we should have Fichte, and after Fichte, Schelling and Hegel." The 
 renewed interest in Schelling, and with it the revival of an interest in 
 university courses in the subject of the Philosophy of Nature (see 
 the recent work of Driesch upon the Science and Philosophy of the 
 Organism) is all part of the recent reaction in Germany against Posi- 
 tivism. 
 
 2 We may associate, I suppose, the new German journal Logos, an 
 international periodical for the " Philosophie der Kultur," with the 
 same movement.
 
 THE PRAGMATIST MOVEMENT 49 
 
 Returning now to America and England, 
 although Pragmatism is eminently an American * 
 doctrine, it would, of course, be absurd to imagine 
 that Pragmatism has carried the entire thought 
 of the United States with it. 2 It encountered there, 
 even at the outset, at least something of the con- 
 tempt and the incredulity and the hostility that it 
 met with elsewhere, and also much of the American 
 shrewd indifference to a much - advertised new 
 article. The message of James as a philosopher, 
 too, was doubtless discounted (at least by the well- 
 informed) in the light of his previous brilliant work 
 as a descriptive psychologist, and also, perhaps, in 
 the light of his wonderfully suggestive personality. 3 
 
 What actually happened in America in respect 
 of the pragmatist movement was, first of all, the 
 sudden emergence of a magazine literature 4 in 
 
 1 See Chapter VII. upon " Pragmatism as Americanism." 
 
 2 See an article in the Critical Review (edited by the late Professor 
 Salmond, of Aberdeen), by the author upon " Recent Tendencies in 
 American Philosophy." The year, I think, was either 1904 or 1905. 
 
 3 See p. 180. 
 
 4 Without pretending to anything like a representative or an ex- 
 haustive statement in the case of this magazine literature, I may mention 
 the following : Professor Perry of Harvard, in his valuable articles 
 for the Journal of Philosophy and Psychology, 1907, vol. iv., upon " A 
 Review of Pragmatism as a Philosophical Generalization," and a 
 
 Review of Pragmatism as a Theory of Knowledge " ; Professor 
 Armstrong in vol. v. of the same journal upon the " Evolution of 
 Pragmatism " ; and Professor Lovejoy in the 1908 vol. upon the 
 ' Thirteen Pragmatisms." These are but a few out of the many that 
 might be mentioned. The reader who is interested in looking for more 
 such must simply consult for himself the Philosophical Review, and 
 Mind, and the Journal of Philosophy and Psychology, for some years 
 after, say, 1903. There is a good list of such articles in a German 
 Doctor Thesis by Professor MacEachran of the University of 
 Alberta, entitled Pragmatismus eine neue Richtung der Philosophic, 
 
 4
 
 50 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM 
 
 connexion with the Will-to-Believe philosophy 
 of James and the California address, and in con- 
 nexion (according to the generous testimony of 
 James) with Deweyism or " Instrumentalism." 
 Much of this tiresome and hair-splitting magazine 
 discussion of " ideas as instruments of thought," 
 and of the " consequences " (" theoretical " or 
 " practical " or what not) by which ideas were to 
 be " tested," was pronounced by James, in 1906, 
 to be largely crude and superficial. It had the 
 indirect merit, however, of yielding one or two 
 valuable estimates of the many inconsistencies 
 in Pragmatism, and of the many different kinds 
 of Pragmatism or instrumentalism that there 
 seemed to be, and of the value of Pragmatism as 
 a " theory of knowledge," and asa" philosophical 
 generalization." The upshot of the whole pre- 
 liminary discussion was (1) the discovery that, 
 Pragmatism having arisen (as Dewey himself put 
 it) out of a multitude of conflicting tendencies 
 in regard to what we might call the " approach ' 
 to philosophy, would probably soon " dissolve 
 itself " back again into some of the streams out 
 of which it had arisen, 1 and (2) the discovery that 
 all that this early " methodological " pragmatism 
 amounted to was the harmless doctrine that the 
 
 Leipzig, 1910. There is also a history of pragmatist articles in the 1907 
 (January) number of the Revue des Sciences, Philosophiques et Theo- 
 logiques. 
 
 1 That this has really taken place can be clearly seen, I think, if 
 we inspect the official programmes of the Proceedings of the American 
 Philosophical Association for the last year or two.
 
 THE PRAGMATIST MOVEMENT 51 
 
 meaning of any conception expressed itself in the 
 past or future conduct or experience of actual, or 
 possible, sentient creatures. 
 
 We shall again take occasion * to refer to this 
 comparative failure of Pragmatism to give any- 
 systematic or unified account of the conse- 
 quences by which it would seek to test the truth 
 of propositions. Its failure, however, in this 
 connexion is a matter of secondary importance 
 in comparison with the great lesson 2 to be drawn 
 from its idea that there can be for man no objective 
 truth about the universe, apart from the idea of 
 its meaning 3 or significance to his experience and 
 to his conscious activity. 
 
 What is now taking place in America in this 
 second decade [i.e. in the years after 1908] of the 
 pragmatist movement is apparently (1) the 
 sharpest kind of official rationalist condemnation 
 of Pragmatism as an imperfectly proved and a 
 merely " subjective ' and a highly unsystematic 
 philosophy ; (2) the appearance of a number of 
 instructive booklets 4 upon Pragmatism and the 
 pragmatist movement, some of them expository 
 and critical, some of them in the main sympathetic, 
 some of them condemnatory and even con- 
 temptuous, and some of them attempts at further 
 
 1 P- 144- 2 See p. 149. 
 
 3 See Chapter VI . , p. 1 49, upon the doctrine and the fact of ' ' Meaning. ' ' 
 * Professor Pratt, What is Pragmatism ? (Macmillan & Co., 1909) ; 
 H. H. Bawden, The Principles of Pragmatism, a Philosophical Inter- 
 pretation of Experience, Boston, 1910 (a useful book presenting what 
 may be called a " phenomenological " account of Pragmatism) ; Moore, 
 Pragmatism and Its Critics.
 
 52 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM 
 
 constructive work along pragmatist lines ; (3) 
 indications here and there of the acceptance and 
 the promulgation of older and newer doctrines 
 antithetic and hostile to Pragmatism — some of 
 them possibly as typically American as Pragmatism 
 itself. 
 
 As a single illustration of the partly constructive 
 work that is being attempted in the name and 
 the spirit of pragmatism, we may instance the line 
 of reflection entered upon by Professor Moore 1 in 
 consequence of his claim that to Pragmatism the 
 fundamental thing in any judgment or proposition 
 is not so much its consequences, but its " value." 
 This claim may, no doubt, be supported by the 
 many declarations of James and Schiller that the 
 " true," like the " good " and the " beautiful," 
 is simply a " valuation," and not the fetish that 
 the rationalists make it out to be. It is doubtful, 
 however, as we may try to indicate, whether this 
 tl value " interpretation of Pragmatism can be 
 carried out independently of the more systematic 
 attempts at a general philosophy of value that are 
 being made to-day in Germany and America and 
 elsewhere. And then it would be a matter of no 
 ordinary difficulty to clear up the inconsistency 
 that doubtless exists between Pragmatism as a 
 value philosophy and Pragmatism as a mere 
 philosophy of " consequences." It is " immediate," 
 and " verifiable," and " definitely appreciated ' 
 consequences, rather than the higher values 
 
 1 In Pragmatism and Its Critics (Univ. of Chicago Press).
 
 THE PRAGMATIST MOVEMENT 53 
 
 of our experience that (up to the present time) 
 seem to have bulked largely in the argumentations 
 of the pragmatists. 
 
 And as an illustration of a doctrine that is both 
 American and hostile to pragmatism, we may 
 instance the New Realism 1 that was recently 
 launched in a collective manifesto in The Journal 
 of Philosophy and Scientific Methods. This 
 realism is, to be sure, hostile to every form of 
 " subjectivism " or personalism, and may in a 
 certain sense be regarded as the emergence into 
 full daylight of the realism or dualism that we 
 found to be lurking 2 in James's " radical empiri- 
 
 1 The manifesto has now become a book, The New Realism (Mac- 
 millan). For a useful account of the New Realism and the Old see 
 Professor Perry, Present Philosophical Tendencies, Part V. 
 
 2 The following are my reasons for saying that the " New Realism " 
 was already to some extent lurking in the " radical empiricism " of 
 James, (i) Although teaching unmistakably the " activity " of mind, 
 James seemed to think this activity " selective " rather than " creative " 
 (falling in this idea behind his much-admired Bergson). (2) Despite 
 this belief in the activity of the mind, he had the way of regarding 
 consciousness as (to some extent) the mind's " content " — an atti- 
 tude common to all empirical psychologists since Hume and the 
 English associationists. And from this position (legitimate so far from 
 the psychological point of view) he went on to the idea (expressed in a 
 troublesome form in the article, " Does Consciousness exist ? ") that 
 consciousness is not an entity or substance — of course it is not in the 
 ordinary sense of " entity." (3) Then from this he seemed to develop 
 the idea that the various " elements " that enter into consciousness to 
 be transformed into various " relationships " do not suffer any sub- 
 stantial change in this quasi-subjective " activity." Therefore, as 
 Professor Perry puts it (Present Tendencies, p. 353), " the elements or 
 terms which enter into consciousness and become its content may 
 now be regarded as the same elements which, in so far as otherwise related, 
 compose physical nature [italics mine]. The elements themselves, the 
 ' materia prima,' or stuff of pure experience, are neither psychical nor 
 physical." It is in this last absurd sentence [simply a piece of quasi- 
 scientific analysis, the error of which Critical Idealism would expose
 
 54 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM 
 
 cism." It is, therefore, as it were, one of the 
 signs that Pragmatism is perhaps breaking up in 
 America into some of the more elemental tendencies 
 out of which it developed — in this case the 
 American desire for operative (or effective) realism 
 and for a " direct " * contact with reality instead 
 of the indirect contact of so many metaphysical 
 systems. 
 
 It is only necessary to add here that it is to the 
 credit of American rationalism of the Neo-Hegelian 
 type that it has shown itself, notably in the 
 writings of Professor Royce, 2 capable, not only of 
 criticising Pragmatism, but of seeking to incor- 
 porate, in a constructive philosophy of the 
 present, some of the features of the pragmatist 
 emphasis upon " will " and " achievement " and 
 " purpose." It is, therefore, in this respect at 
 least in line with some of the best tendencies in 
 contemporary European philosophy. 
 
 Lastly, there are certain tendencies of recent 
 English philosophy with which Pragmatism 
 has special affinities. Among these may be 
 mentioned : (i) the various general and specific 
 
 in a moment] that the roots, I think, of " new realism " are to be found 
 — a doctrine whose unmitigated externalism is the negation of all 
 philosophy. 
 
 1 See p. 164 and p. 230. 
 
 2 I refer to his Aberdeen " Gifford Lectures " on " The World and 
 The Individual," and to a well-known address of his upon " The 
 Eternal and the Practical " in the Proceedings of the American Philo- 
 sophical Association. In this latter pamphlet he shows that Prag- 
 matism and the philosophy of Consequences are impossible without 
 " the Eternal " and without Idealism.
 
 THE PRAGMATIST MOVEMENT 55 
 
 criticisms x that have been made there for at least 
 two generations on the more or less formal and 
 abstract character of the metaphysic of our 
 Neo-Kantians and our Neo-Hegelians ; (2) the 
 concessions that have recently been made by pro- 
 minent rationalists to the undoubtedly purposive, 
 or " teleological," character of our human think- 
 ing, and to the connexion of our mental life 
 with our entire practical and spiritual activity. 
 Many of these concessions are now regarded as 
 the merest commonplaces of speculation, and we 
 shall probably refer to them in our next chapter. 
 Then there is (3) the well-known insistence of some 
 of our foremost psychologists, like Ward and Stout, 2 
 upon the reality of activity and " purpose " in 
 mental process, and upon the part played by 
 them in the evolution of our intellectual life, and 
 of our adjustment to the world in which we find 
 ourselves. And (4) the ethical and social ideal - 
 
 1 The criticisms of which I am thinking are (to select but a few from 
 memory) Green's well-known admission in respect of Hegelianism, that 
 it would have " to be done all over again " ; Mr. Bradley's admission 
 that he is " not a Hegelian " and (recently) that he has " seen too much 
 of metaphysics " to place any serious weight upon its reasonings ; 
 Jowett's complaint (in the " life " by Campbell) that the Oxford 
 Hegelianism of his day was teaching students to place an undue reliance 
 upon "words" and "concepts" in the place of facts and things • 
 Dr. Bosanquet's admission (many years ago) that, of course, " gods 
 and men" were more than " bloodless categories " ; Professor Pringle 
 Pattison's criticism of Hegel in his Hegelianism and Personality ; 
 Professor Baillie's criticisms at the end of his Logic of Hegel ; Mr. Sturt's 
 criticism of Neo-Hegelianism in his Idola Theatri, etc. 
 
 2 See the following, for example, from Professor Stout : " Every 
 agreeable or disagreeable sensation has a conative or quasi-conative 
 aspect" (Manual of Psychology, p. 233). Also: " Perception is never 
 merely cognitive " (ibid. p. 242) ; it has a " conative character and a 
 feeling tone," etc.
 
 56 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM 
 
 ism of such well-known members of our Neo- 
 Hegelian school as Professors Jones, Mackenzie, 
 and Muirhead. These scholars and thinkers 
 are just as insistent as the pragmatists upon 
 the idea that philosophy and thought are, and 
 should be, a practical social " dynamic " — that 
 is to say, " forces " and " motives " making for 
 the perfection of the common life. (5) A great 
 deal of the philosophy of science and of the philo- 
 sophy of axioms and postulates to be found in 
 British writers, from Mill and Jevons to Karl 
 Pearson and Mr. A. Sidgwick 1 and many others. 
 
 Apart from all this, however, or rather, in 
 addition to it, it may be truly said that one of the 
 striking things about recent British philosophical 
 literature 2 is the stir and the activity that have been 
 excited in the rationalist camp by the writings of 
 the pragmatists and the " personal idealists," and 
 by the critics of these newer modes of thought. 
 All this has led to many such re-statements of the 
 problems of philosophy as are to be found in the 
 books of men like Joachim, 3 Henry Jones, 4 A. E. 
 
 1 A. Sidgwick's " Applied Axioms" (Mind, N.S. xiv. p. 42). This 
 is extremely useful, connecting the recent pragmatist movement with 
 the work of the English logicians. See in the same connexion the 
 articles of Captain Knox in the Quarterly Review (April 1909) on 
 " Pragmatism." 
 
 2 During the last ten years Mind has contained articles on the 
 pragmatist controversy by nearly all our prominent academic authorities: 
 Dr. Bradley, Dr. McTaggart, Professor Taylor, Professor Hoernle, Dr. 
 Schiller, Dr. Mellone, Dr. Boyce-Gibson, Mr. Hobhouse, and so on. 
 
 8 Particularly in his valuable book on Truth in which the weakness of 
 the Hegelian conception of truth is set forth along with that of other views. 
 
 4 In Idealism as a Practical Creed, in his Browning as a Religious and 
 Philosophical Teacher, and elsewhere.
 
 THE PRAGMATIST MOVEMENT 57 
 
 Taylor, 1 Boyce-Gibson, 2 Henry H. Sturt, 3 S. H. 
 Mellone, 4 J. H. B. Joseph, 5 and others, and even, 
 say, in such a representative book as that of Pro- 
 fessor Stewart upon the classical theme of Plato's 
 Theory of Ideas. In this work an attempt is made 
 to interpret Plato's " Ideas " in the light of 
 pragmatist considerations as but " categories " 
 or " points of view " which we find it convenient 
 to use in dealing with our sense experience. 
 
 1 In his Elements of Metaphysic, and in many of his recent reviews ; 
 in his review, for example, of Professor Bosanquet's Individuality and 
 Value, in the Review of Theology and Philosophy , and in his Mind 
 (July 1912) review of Professor Ward's Realm of Ends. 
 
 2 In his book upon the Philosophy of Eucken, in God With Us, and 
 elsewhere. 
 
 3 In Idola Theatri (an important criticism of Neo-Hegelian writers), 
 and elsewhere. 
 
 4 In Essays in Philosophical Construction, and in his book upon 
 Logic. 
 
 6 In his Introduction to Logic.
 
 CHAPTER III 
 
 SOME FUNDAMENTAL CHARACTERISTICS 
 
 We shall now attempt a somewhat detailed 
 treatment of a few of the more characteristic 
 tendencies of Pragmatism. The following have 
 already been mentioned in our general sketch 
 of its development and of the appearance of the 
 pragmatist philosophy in Europe and America : 
 (i) the attempted modification by Pragmatism of 
 the extremes of Rationalism, and its dissatisfaction 
 with the rationalism of both science and philo- 
 sophy; (2) its progress from the stage of a mere 
 practical and experimental theory of truth to 
 a broad humanism in which philosophy itself 
 becomes (like art, say) merely an important 
 " dynamic " element in human culture ; (3) its 
 preference in the matter of first principles for 
 " faith " and " experience " and a trust in our 
 instinctive "beliefs" ; (4) its readiness to affiliate 
 itself with the various liberal and humanistic 
 tendencies in human thought, such as the philo- 
 sophy of " freedom," and the " hypothetical 
 method " of science, modern ethical and social 
 
 58
 
 SOME FUNDAMENTAL CHARACTERISTICS 59 
 
 idealism, the religious reaction of recent years, 
 the voluntaristic trend in German post-Kantian 
 philosophy, and so on. Our subject in this 
 chapter, however, is rather that of the three or 
 four more or less characteristic assumptions and 
 contentions upon which all these and the many 
 other pragmatist tendencies may be said to rest. 
 
 The first and foremost of these assumptions is 
 the position that all truth is " made " truth, 
 "human " truth, truth related to human attitudes 
 and purposes, and that there is no " objective " or 
 " independent " truth, no truth " in whose estab- 
 lishment the function of giving human satisfaction, 
 in marrying previous parts of experience with 
 newer parts, has played no role." Truths were 
 " nothing," as it were, before they were " dis- 
 covered," and the most ancient truths were once 
 " plastic," or merely susceptible of proof or dis- 
 proof. Truth is " made " just like " health," or 
 11 wealth," or " value," and so on. Insistence, 
 we might say, upon this one note, along with the 
 entire line of reflection that it awakens in him, is 
 really, as Dewey reminds us, the main burden of 
 James's book upon Pragmatism. Equally char- 
 acteristic is it too of Dewey himself who is for ever 
 reverting to his doctrine of the factitious character 
 of truth. There is no " fixed distinction," he tells 
 us, " between the empirical values of the un- 
 reflective life and the most abstract process of 
 rational thought." And to Schiller, again, this 
 same thought is the beginning of everything in
 
 60 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM 
 
 philosophy, for with an outspoken acceptance of 
 this doctrine of the " formation " of all truth, 
 Pragmatism, he thinks, can do at least two things 
 that Rationalism is for ever debarred from doing : 
 (i) distinguish adequately " truth " from " fact," 
 and (2) distinguish adequately truth from 
 error. Whether these two things be, or be not, 
 the consequences of the doctrine in question [and 
 we shall return 1 to the point] we may perhaps 
 accept it as, on the whole, harmonious with the 
 teaching of psychology about the nature of 
 our ideas as mental habits, or about thinking 
 as a restrained, or a guided, activity. It is in 
 harmony, too, with the palpable truism that all 
 " truth " must be truth that some beings or other 
 who have once " sought " truth (for some reasons 
 or other) have at last come to regard as satisfying 
 their search and their purposes. And this truism, 
 it would seem, must remain such in spite of, or 
 even along with, any meaning that there may be 
 in the idea of what we call " God's truth." By 
 this expression men understand, it would seem, 
 merely God's knowledge of truths or facts of which 
 we as men may happen to be ignorant. But then 
 there can have been no time in which God can be 
 imagined to have been ignorant of these or any 
 other matters. It is therefore not for Him truth 
 as opposed to falsehood. 
 
 And then, again, this pragmatist position about 
 all truth being " made " truth would seem to be 
 
 1 See p. 154.
 
 SOME FUNDAMENTAL CHARACTERISTICS 61 
 
 valid in view of the difficulty (Plato ' spoke 
 of it) of reconciling God's supposed absolute 
 knowledge of reality with our finite and limited 
 apprehension of the same. 2 
 
 The main interest, however, of pragmatists in 
 their somewhat tiresome insistence upon the 
 truism that all truth is made truth is their hostility 
 (Locke had it in his day) to the supposed rationalist 
 position that there is an " a priori " and " objec- 
 tive " truth independent altogether of human 
 activities and human purposes. 3 The particular 
 
 1 " If God has this perfect authority and perfect knowledge, His 
 authority cannot rule us, nor His knowledge know us, or any human 
 thing ; just as our authority does not extend to the gods, nor our know- 
 ledge know anything which is divine ; so by parity of reason they, being 
 gods, are not our masters, neither do they know the things of men " 
 (Parmenides, 134, Jowett's Plato, vol. iv.). 
 
 2 This is, of course, a very old difficulty, involved in the problem 
 of the supposed pre-knowledge of God. Bradley deals with it in the 
 Mind (July 191 1) article upon " Some Aspects of Truth." His solution 
 (as Professor Dawes Hicks notices in the Hibbert Journal, January 
 1912) is the familiar Neo-Hegelian finding, that as a " particular judg- 
 ment" with a " unique context" my truth is "new," but "as an ele- 
 ment in an eternal reality " it was " waiting for me." Readers of 
 Green's Prolegomena are quite ready for this finding. Pragmatists, 
 of course, while insisting on the man-made character of truth, have not 
 as yet come in sight of the difficulties of the divine foreknowledge — in 
 relation to the free purposes and the free discoveries of mortals. 
 
 3 There is, it seems to me, a suggestion of this rationalist position 
 in the fact, for example, that Mr. Bertrana Russell begins his recent 
 booklet upon The Problems of Philosophy with the following inquiry 
 about knowledge : " Is there any knowledge in the world which is so 
 certain that no reasonable man could doubt it ? " I mean that the 
 initial and paramount importance attached here to this question 
 conveys the impression that the supreme reality for philosophy is still 
 some independently certain piece of knowledge. I prefer, with the 
 pragmatists and the humanists, to think of knowledge as concerned 
 with the purposes of persons as intelligent beings, or with the realities 
 revealed in the knowing process. Although there are passages in his 
 book that show Mr. Russell to be aware of the selves and the psychical 
 elements and processes that enter into knowing, they do not affect his
 
 62 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM 
 
 object of their aversion is what Dewey * talks of as 
 " that dishonesty, that insincerity, characteristic 
 of philosophical discussion, that is manifested in 
 speaking and writing as if certain ultimate abstrac- 
 tions or concepts could be more real than human 
 purposes and human beings, and as if there could 
 be any contradiction between truth and purpose." 
 As we shall reflect at a later stage 2 upon the 
 rationalist theory of truth, we may, meantime, 
 pass over this hostility with the remark that it is, 
 after all, only owing to certain peculiar circum- 
 stances (those, say, of its conflict with religion 
 and science and custom) in the development of 
 philosophy that its first principles have been 
 regarded by its votaries as the most real of all 
 realities. These devotees tend to forget in their 
 zeal that the pragmatist way of looking upon all 
 supposed first principles — that of the consideration 
 of their utility in and necessity as explanations of 
 our common experience and its realities — is the 
 only way of explaining their reality, even as 
 conceptions. 
 
 It requires to be added — so much may, indeed, 
 have already been inferred from the preceding 
 chapter — that, apart from their hint about the 
 
 prevailingly rationalistic and impersonal conception of knowledge and 
 philosophy. 
 
 1 In his sympathetic and characteristic review of James's " Prag- 
 matism " in the Journ. of Philos., 1908. 
 
 2 See p. 203 (the note) , and p. 263, where I suggest that no philosophy 
 can exist, or can possibly begin, without some direct contact with 
 reality, without the experience of some person or persons, without 
 assumptions of one kind or another.
 
 SOME FUNDAMENTAL CHARACTERISTICS 63 
 
 highest truth being necessarily inclusive of the 
 highest human purposes, it is by no means easy 
 to find out from the pragmatists what they mean 
 by truth, or how they would define it. When 
 the matter is pressed home, they generally 
 confess that their attitude is in the main " psycho- 
 logical " rather than philosophical, that it is the 
 " making " of truth rather than its " nature " 
 or its " contents " or its systematic character 
 that interests them. It is the " dynamical " 
 point of view, as they put it, that is essential to 
 them. And out of the sphere and the associations 
 of this contention they do not really travel. They 
 will tell you what it means to hit upon this 
 particular way of looking upon truth, and how 
 stimulating it is to attempt to do so. And they 
 will give you many more or less artificial and 
 tentative, external, descriptions of their philosophy 
 by saying that ideas are " made for man," and 
 " not man for ideas," and so on. But, although 
 they deny both the common-sense view that truth 
 is a " correspondence " with external reality, and 
 the rationalist view that truth is a " coherent 
 system " on its own account, they never define 
 truth any more than do their opponents the 
 rationalists. It is a " commerce " and not a 
 " correspondence," they contend, a commerce * 
 between certain parts of our experience and 
 certain other parts, or a commerce between our 
 ideas and our purposes, but not a commerce with 
 
 1 See p. 162.
 
 64 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM 
 
 reality, for the making of truth is itself, in 
 their eyes, the making of reality. 
 
 Secondly, it is another familiar characteristic 
 of Pragmatism that, although it fails to give a 
 satisfying account either of truth or reality, the 
 one thing of which it is for ever talking of, as 
 fundamental to our entire life as men, is belief. 1 
 This is the one thing upon which it makes every- 
 thing else to hang — all knowledge and all action 
 and all theory. And it is, of course, its manifest 
 acceptance of belief as a fundamental principle of 
 our human life, and as a true measure of reality, that 
 has given to Pragmatism its religious atmosphere. 2 
 It is this that has made it such a welcome and 
 such a credible creed to so many disillusioned 
 and free-thinking people to-day, as well as to so 
 many of the faithful and the orthodox. " For, 
 in principle, Pragmatism overcomes the old 
 antithesis of Faith and Reason. It shows, on the 
 one hand, that faith must underlie all reason 
 and pervade it, nay, that at bottom rationality 
 
 1 In this attitude Pragmatism is manifestly in a state of rebellion 
 against " Platonism," if we allow ourselves to think of Pragmatism 
 as capable of confronting Plato. Plato, as we know, definitely sub- 
 ordinates " belief " to " knowledge " and " truth." " As being is to 
 becoming," he says, " so is truth to belief (Timaeus, Jowett's transla- 
 tion). To Plato belief is a conjectural, or imaginative, estimate 
 of reality ; it deals rather with " appearance " or " becoming " than 
 with " reality." " True being " he thinks of as revealed in the Ideas, 
 or the rational entities that are his development and transformation 
 of the " definition " of Socrates. Against all this rationalism Prag- 
 matism (it is enough meantime merely to indicate the fact) would have 
 us return to the common-sense, or the religious, position that it is in- 
 variably what we believe in that determines our notion of reality. 
 
 2 Cf. p 159.
 
 SOME FUNDAMENTAL CHARACTERISTICS 65 
 
 itself is the supremest postulate of Faith." x 
 " Truth," again, as James reminds us, " lives in 
 fact for the most part on a credit system. Our 
 thoughts and beliefs [how literally true this is !] 
 pass so long as nobody challenges them, just as 
 bank-notes pass so long as nobody refuses them." 2 
 Now it requires but the reflection of a moment 
 to see that the various facts and considerations 
 upon which the two last quotations, and the 
 general devotion of Pragmatism to " belief," both 
 repose, are all distinctly in favour of the accept- 
 ability of Pragmatism at the present time. There 
 is nothing in which people in general are more 
 interested at the beginning of this twentieth 
 century than in belief. It is this, for example, 
 that explains such a thing as the great success 
 to-day in our English-speaking world of such an 
 enterprise as the Hibbert Journal of Philosophy 
 and Religion, or the still greater phenomenon of 
 the world-wide interest of the hour in the subject 
 of comparative religion. Most modern men, the 
 writer is inclined to think, believe 3 a great deal 
 
 1 From Dr. Schiller's Humanism. 
 
 3 Pragmatism, p. 207. 
 
 3 It is this dissatisfaction at once with the abstractions of science 
 and of rationalism and with the contradictions that seem to exist between 
 them all and the facts of life and experience as we feel them that 
 constitutes the great dualism, or the great opposition of modern times. 
 I do not wish to emphasize this dualism, nor do I wish to set forth faith 
 or belief in opposition to reason when I extract from both Pragmatism 
 and Idealism the position that it is belief rather than knowledge 
 that is our fundamental estimate of reality. I do not believe, as I 
 indicate in the text above, that this dualism is ultimate. It has come 
 about only from an unfortunate setting of some parts of our nature, 
 or of our experience in opposition to the whole of our nature, or the 
 
 5
 
 66 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM 
 
 more than they know, the chief difficulty 
 about this fact being that there is no recognized 
 way of expressing it in our science or in 
 our philosophy, or of acting upon it in our 
 behaviour in society. It is, however, only the 
 undue prominence of mathematical and physical 
 science since the time of Descartes 1 that has 
 made evidence and demonstration the main 
 consideration of philosophy instead of belief, 
 man's true and fundamental estimate of reality. 
 
 We have already 2 pointed out that one of the 
 main results of Pragmatism is the acceptance on 
 the part of its leading upholders of our fundamental 
 
 whole of our experience. That the opposition, however, between reason 
 and faith still exists in many quarters, and that it is and has been the 
 opposition of modern times, and that the great want of our times is a 
 rational faith that shall recall the world of to-day out of its endless 
 " distraction " (the word is Dr. Bosanquet's), I am certainly inclined 
 to maintain. In proof of this statement it is enough to recall things 
 like the words of Goethe about the conflict of belief and unbelief as the 
 unique theme of the history of the world, or the " ethical headache 
 which was literally a splitting headache," that Mr. Chesterton finds in 
 the minds of many of our great Victorian writers. I shall take leave of 
 it here with three references to its existence taken from the words or 
 the work of living writers. The first shall be the opposition which Mr. 
 Bertrand Russell finds in his Philosophical Essays (in the " Free Man's 
 Worship ") between the " world which science presents for our belief " 
 and the " lofty thoughts that ennoble his little day." The second shall 
 be the inconsistency that exists in Mr. Hugh S. R. Elliot's book upon 
 Modern Science and the Illusions of Professor Bergson, between his initial 
 acceptance of the mechanical, evolutionary system of modern science 
 and his closing acceptance of feeling and poetry and love as the " deepest 
 forms of happiness." The third shall be the declaration of Professor 
 Sir Henry Jones of Glasgow (in the Hibbert Journal, 1903) that " one 
 of the characteristics of our time is the contradiction that exists between 
 its practical faith in morality and its theoretical distrust of the con- 
 ceptions on which they rest." 
 
 1 See p. 203 (note). 8 See p. 7.
 
 SOME FUNDAMENTAL CHARACTERISTICS 67 
 
 beliefs about the ultimately real and about 
 the realization of our most deeply cherished 
 purposes. In fact, reality in general is for them, 
 we may say — in the absence from their writings 
 of any better description, — simply that which we 
 can " will," or " believe in," as the basis for action 
 and for conscious " creative " effort, or construct- 
 ive effort. As James himself puts it in his book 
 on The Meaning of Truth : " Since the only 
 realities we can talk about are objects believed in, 
 the pragmatist, whenever he says ' reality,' means 
 in the first instance what may count for the man 
 himself as a reality, what he believes at the moment 
 to be such. Sometimes the reality is a concrete 
 sensible presence. ... Or his idea may be that 
 of an abstract relation, say of that between the 
 sides and the hypotenuse of a triangle. . . . 
 Each reality verifies and validates its own idea 
 exclusively ; and in each case the verification 
 consists in the satisfactorily-ending consequences, 
 mental or physical, which the idea was to set up." 
 We shall later have to refer to the absence 
 from Pragmatism of a criterion for achievement 
 and for " consequences." And, as far as philo- 
 sophical theories are concerned, these are all, 
 to the pragmatists, true or false simply in 
 so far as they are practically credible or not. 
 James is quite explicit, for example, about 
 Pragmatism itself in this regard. " No prag- 
 matist," he holds, " can warrant the objective 
 truth of what he says about the universe ; he can
 
 68 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM 
 
 only believe it." * There is faith, in short, for 
 the pragmatist, in every act, in every phase of 
 thought, the faith that is implied in the realiza- 
 tion of the purposes that underlie our attempted 
 acts and thoughts. They eagerly accept, for 
 example, the important doctrine of the modern 
 logician, and the modern psychologist, as to the 
 presence of volition in all " affirmation " and 
 " judgment/' seeing that in every case of affirma- 
 tion there is a more or less active readjustment 
 of our minds (or our bodies) to what either 
 stimulates or impedes our activity. 
 
 A third outstanding characteristic of Prag- 
 matism is the " deeper " view of human nature 
 upon which, in contrast to Rationalism, it supposes 
 itself to rest, and which it seeks to vindicate. It 
 is this supposedly deeper view of human nature for 
 which it is confessedly pleading when it insists, 
 as it is fond of doing, upon the connexion of 
 philosophy with the various theoretical and 
 practical pursuits of mankind, with sciences like 
 biology and psychology, and with social reform, 2 
 and so on. We have, it may be remembered, 
 already intimated that even in practical 
 America men have had their doubts about the 
 depth of a philosophy that looks upon man as 
 made in the main for action and achievement 
 instead of, let us say, the realization of his higher 
 nature. Still, few of the readers of James can 
 
 1 From Pragmatism and its Misunderstanders. 
 2 See p. 173.
 
 SOME FUNDAMENTAL CHARACTERISTICS 69 
 
 have altogether failed to appreciate the significance 
 of some of the many eloquent and suggestive 
 paragraphs he has written upon the limitations 
 of the rationalistic " temperament " and of its 
 unblushing sacrifice of the entire wealth of human 
 nature and of the various pulsating interests of 
 men to the imaginary exigencies of abstract logic 
 and " system." x To him and to his colleagues (as 
 to Socrates, for that part of it) man is firstly a 
 being who has habits and purposes, and who can, 
 to some extent, control the various forces of his 
 nature through true knowledge, and in this very 
 discrepancy between the real and the ideal does 
 there lie for the pragmatists the entire problem 
 of philosophy — the problem of Plato, that of the 
 attainment of true virtue through true knowledge. 
 Deferring, however, the question of the success 
 of the pragmatists in this matter of the unfolding 
 of the true relation between philosophy and 
 human nature, let us think of a few of the teachings 
 
 1 " You will 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 up against them. In influential quarters, 
 Mr. Schiller in particular has been treated like an impudent school-boy 
 who deserves a spanking. I should not mention this but for the fact 
 that it throws so much light upon that rationalist temper to which I have 
 opposed the temper of pragmatism. Pragmatism is uncomfortable away 
 from facts. Rationalism is comfortable only in the presence of abstrac- 
 tions. 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 " (James, Pragmatism, pp. 66- 
 67; italics mine). The words about Rationalism being comfortable 
 only in the world of abstractions are substantiated by the procedure of 
 Bosanquet, to whom I refer in Chapter VIII., or by the procedure of 
 Mr. Bertrand Russell, referred to on p. 169.
 
 70 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM 
 
 of experience upon this truly important and 
 inevitable relation, which no philosophy indeed 
 can for one moment afford to neglect. Insistence 
 upon these facts or teachings and upon the reflec- 
 tions and criticisms to which they naturally give 
 rise is certainly a deeply marked characteristic 
 of Pragmatism. 
 
 Man, as has often been pointed out, is endowed 
 with the power of reflection, not so much to enable 
 him to understand the world either as a whole or 
 in its detailed workings as to assist him in the 
 further evolution of his life. His beliefs and 
 choices and his spiritual culture are all, as it were, 
 forces and influences in this direction. Indeed, 
 it is always the soul or the life principle that is 
 the important thing in any individual or any 
 people, so far as a place in the world (or in 
 " history ") is concerned. 
 
 Philosophers, as well as other men, often 
 exchange (in the words of Lecky) the " love of 
 truth " as such for the love of " the truth," that 
 is to say, for the love of the system and the 
 social arrangements that best suit their interests 
 as thinkers. And they too are just as eager as 
 other men for discipleship and influence and 
 honour. Knowledge with them, in other words, 
 means, as Bacon put it, " control " ; and even 
 with them it does not, and cannot, remain at 
 the stage of mere cognition. It becomes in the 
 end a conviction or a belief. And thus the 
 philosopher with his system (even a Plato, or a
 
 SOME FUNDAMENTAL CHARACTERISTICS 71 
 
 Hegel) is after all but a part of the universe, to be 
 judged as such, along with other lives and other 
 systems — a circumstance hit off early in the 
 nineteenth century by German students when 
 they used to talk of one's being able (in Berlin) 
 to see the Welt-Geist (Hegel) " taking a walk " in 
 the Thiergarten. 
 
 Reality again, so far as either life or science 
 is concerned, means for every man that in which 
 he is most fundamentally interested — ions and 
 radium to the physicist of the hour, life to the 
 biologist, God to the theologian, progress to the 
 philanthropist, and so on. 
 
 Further, mankind in general is not likely to 
 abandon its habit of estimating all systems of 
 thought and philosophy from the point of view 
 of their value as keys, or aids, to the problem 
 of the meaning and the development of life as a 
 whole. There is no abstract " truth " or " good " 
 or " beauty " apart from the lives of beings who 
 contemplate, and who seek to create, such 
 things as truth and goodness and beauty. 
 
 To understand knowledge and intellect, again, 
 we must indeed look at them in their actual 
 development in connexion with the total vital 
 or personal activity either of the average or even 
 of the exceptional individual. And instead of 
 regarding the affections and the emotions as 
 inimical to knowledge, or as secondary and inferior 
 to it, we ought to remember that they rest in 
 general upon a broader and deeper attitude to
 
 72 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM 
 
 reality than does either the perception of the 
 senses 1 or the critical analysis of the under- 
 standing. In both of these cases is the knowledge 
 that we attain to limited in the main either to 
 what is before us under the conditions of time 
 and space, or to particular aspects of things that 
 we mark off, or separate, from the totality of 
 things. As Bergson reminds us, we " desire ' 
 and " will " with the " whole " of our past, but 
 " think " only with " part " of it. Small wonder 
 then that James seeks to connect such a broad 
 phenomenon as religion with many of the un- 
 conscious factors (they are not all merely 
 " biological ") in the depth of our personality. 
 Some of the instincts and the phenomena that 
 we encounter there are things that transcend 
 altogether the world that is within the scope of 
 our senses or the reasoning faculties. 
 
 Truth, too, grows from age to age, and 
 is simply the formulated knowledge humanity 
 has of itself and its environment. And errors 
 disappear, not so much in consequence of their 
 logical refutation, as in consequence of their in- 
 utility and of their inability to control the life 
 and thought of the free man. Readers of Schopen- 
 hauer will remember his frequent insistence upon 
 this point of the gradual dissidence and dis- 
 appearance of error, in place of its summary 
 refutation. 
 
 1 See p. 235 in the Bergson chapter where it is suggested that per- 
 ception is limited to what interests us for vital or for practical purposes.
 
 SOME FUNDAMENTAL CHARACTERISTICS 73 
 
 Our " reactions " upon reality are certainly 
 part of what we mean by " reality," and our 
 philosophy is only too truly " the history of our 
 heart and life " as well as that of our intellectual 
 activity. The historian of philosophy invariably 
 acts upon a recognition of the personal and 
 the national and the epochal influence in the 
 evolution of every philosophical system. And 
 even the new, or the fuller conception of life to 
 which a given genius may attain at some stage 
 or other of human civilization will still inevitably, 
 in its turn, give place to a newer or a more perfect 
 system. 
 
 Now Pragmatism is doubtless at fault in seeking 
 to create the impression that Rationalism would 
 seek to deny any, or all, of those characteristic 
 facts of human nature. Still, it is to some extent 
 justified in insisting upon their importance in view 
 of the sharp conflict (we shall later refer to it) that 
 is often supposed to exist between the theoretical 
 and the practical interests of mankind, and 
 that Rationalism sometimes seems to accept with 
 comparative equanimity. 1 What Pragmatism is 
 itself most of all seeking after is a view of human 
 nature, and of things generally, in which the fullest 
 justice is done to the facts upon which this very 
 real conflict 2 of modern times may be said to rest. 
 
 A fourth characteristic of Pragmatism is its 
 notorious " anti-intellectualism," 3 its hostility to 
 
 1 Cf. p. 92. 2 See p. 65. 
 
 3 See p. 234 upon the " anti-intellectualism " in the philosophy of 
 Bergson.
 
 74 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM 
 
 the merely dialectical use of terms and concepts 
 and categories, 1 to argumentation that is unduly 
 detached from the facts and the needs of our 
 concrete human experience. This anti-intellect- 
 ualism we prefer meantime to consider not so 
 much in itself and on its own account (if this be 
 possible with a negative creed) as in the light of the 
 results it has had upon philosophy. There is, for 
 example, the general clearing of the ground that 
 has undoubtedly taken place as to the actual or 
 the possible meaning of many terms or conceptions 
 that have long been current with the transcen- 
 dentalists, such as " pure thought," the ' 'Absolute," 
 ' truth ' in and for itself, philosophy as the 
 " completely rational " interpretation of experi- 
 ence, and so on. And along with this clearing of 
 the ground there are (and also in consequence 
 of the pragmatist movement) a great many recent, 
 striking concessions of Rationalism to practical, 
 and to common-sense, ways of looking at things, 
 the very existence of which cannot but have an 
 important effect upon the philosophy of the near 
 future. Among some of the more typical of these 
 are the following : 
 
 From Mr. F. H. Bradley we have the emphatic 
 declarations that the principle of dialectical 
 opposition or the principle of " Non-Contradic- 
 tion ' (formerly, to himself and his followers, the 
 " rule of the game " in philosophy) " does not 
 settle anything about the nature of reality " ; 
 
 1 See p. 4 and p. 237.
 
 SOME FUNDAMENTAL CHARACTERISTICS 75 
 
 that " truth " is an " hypothesis," and that 
 " except as a means to a foreign end it is useless 
 and impossible " ; and " when we judge truth by 
 its own standard it is defective because it fails to 
 include all the facts," 1 and because its contents 
 " cannot be made intelligible throughout and 
 entirely " ; that " no truth is idle," and that " all 
 truth " has " practical " and aesthetic " con- 
 sequences " ; that there is "no such existing 
 thing as pure thought " ; 2 that we cannot separate 
 
 1 From " Truth and Copying," Mind, No. 62. 
 
 a From " Truth and Practice," in Mind. Cf. '* This denial of tran- 
 scendence, this insistence that all ideas, and more especially such ideas 
 as those of God, are true and real just so far as they work, is to myself 
 most welcome " (Bradley, in Mind, 1908, p. 227, " Ambiguity of 
 Pragmatism "). Mr. Bradley has of recent years made so many such 
 concessions, and has philosophized with such an admirable degree of 
 independence, and has (also admirably) attached so much weight to his 
 own experience of " metaphysics," and of other things besides, that 
 many thinkers like Knox and Dewey and Schiller have been discussing 
 whether he can any longer be regarded as a rationalist. One could 
 certainly study, profitably, the whole evolution of philosophy in 
 England during the last forty years by studying Mr. Bradley's 
 development. He never was, of course, a Hegelian in the complete 
 sense (who ever was ?), and he has now certainly abandoned an 
 abstract, formalistic Rationalism. 
 
 By way of an additional quotation or two from Mr. Bradley, typical 
 of his advance in the direction of the practical philosophy for which 
 Pragmatism stands, we may append the following : " I long ago pointed 
 out that theory takes its origin from practical collision [the main 
 contention of Professor Dewey and his associates]. // Pragmatism 
 means this, I am a pragmatist " (from an article in Mind on the 
 " Ambiguity of Pragmatism" — italics mine). " We may reject the limita- 
 tion of knowledge to the mere world of events which happen, and may 
 deny the claim of this world to be taken as an ultimate foundation. 
 Reality or the Good will be the satisfaction of all the wants of our 
 nature, and theoretical truth will be the perception of ideas which directly 
 satisfy one of those wants, and so invariably make part of the general satis- 
 faction. This is a doctrine which, to my mind, commends itself as 
 true, though it naturally would call for a great deal of explanation " 
 (from Mind, July 1904, p. 325). And, as typical of the kind of final
 
 76 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM 
 
 truth and practice ; that " absolute certainty is 
 not requisite for working purposes " ; that it is a 
 "superstition 1 to think that the intellect is the 
 highest part of us," and that it is well to attack 
 a one-sided " intellectualism " ; that both " in- 
 tellectualism " and " voluntarism " are " one- 
 sided," and that he has no " objection to identify- 
 ing reality with goodness or satisfaction, so long as 
 this does not mean merely practical satisfaction." 2 
 Then from this same author comes the following 
 familiar statement about philosophy as a whole : 
 " Philosophy always will be hard, and what it 
 promises in the end is no clear vision nor any 
 complete understanding or vision, but its certain 
 reward is a continual and a heightened appreciation 
 [this is the result of science as well as of philosophy] 
 of the ineffable mystery of life, of life in all its 
 complexities and all its unity and all its worth." 3 
 Equally typical and equally important is 
 the following concession from Professor Taylor, 
 
 philosophy to which the philosophical reconstruction of the future must 
 somehow attain out of the present quarrel between Pragmatism and 
 Rationalism, the following : " If there were no force in the world but the 
 vested love of God, if the wills in the past were one in effort and in sub- 
 stance with the one Will, if in that Will they are living still and still are 
 so loving, and if again by faith, suffering, and love my will is made really 
 one with theirs, here indeed we should have found at once our answer 
 and our refuge. But with this we should pass surely beyond the limits 
 of any personal individualism " (from Mind, July 1904, p. 316). Dr. 
 Schiller, by the way, has a list of such concessions to Pragmatism on 
 the part of Mr. Bradley in Mind, 1910, p. 35. 
 
 1 Cf. the saying of Herbert Spencer (Autobiography, i. 253) that a 
 " belief in the unqualified supremacy of reason [is] the superstition of 
 philosophers." 
 
 2 See p. 147. 
 
 3 " Truth and Practice," Mind, No. 51.
 
 SOME FUNDAMENTAL CHARACTERISTICS y 7 
 
 although, of course, to many people it would seem 
 no concession at all, but rather the mere statement 
 of a fact, which our Neo-Hegelians have only made 
 themselves ridiculous by seeming to have so long 
 overlooked : " Mere truth for the intellect can never 
 be quite the same as ultimate reality. For in 
 mere truth we get reality only in its intellectual 
 aspect, as that which affords a higher satisfaction 
 to thought's demand for consistency and system- 
 atic unity in its object. And as we have seen, 
 this demand can never be quite satisfied by 
 thought itself. 1 For thought, to remain thought, 
 must always be something less than the whole 
 reality which it knows." 2 
 
 And we may add also from Professor Taylor 
 the following declaration in respect of the notorious 
 inability of Neo-Hegelian Rationalism to furnish 
 the average man with a theory of reality in the 
 contemplation of which he can find at least an 
 adequate motive to conscious effort and achieve- 
 ment : " Quite apart from the facts, due to 
 personal shortcomings and confusions, it is inherent 
 in the nature of metaphysical study that it can 
 make no positive addition to our information, 
 and can itself supply no motive for practical 
 endeavour." 3 
 
 Many of those findings are obviously so 
 harmonious with some of the more familiar 
 
 1 It would be easy to quote to the same effect from other Hegelian 
 students, or, for that part of it, from Hegel himself. 
 
 2 Elements of Metaphysics, p. 411. 
 8 Ibid. p. 414.
 
 78 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM 
 
 formulas of the pragmatists that there would 
 seem to be ample warrant for associating them 
 with the results of the pragmatist movement. 
 This is particularly the case, it would seem, with 
 the concession of Mr. Bradley with respect of the 
 " practical " or " hypothetical " conception that 
 we ought to entertain of " truth " and " thinking," 
 and also with the strictures passed by him upon 
 " mere truth " and " mere intellectualism," and 
 with Professor Taylor's position in respect of the 
 inadequacy of the rationalist theory of reality, 
 as in no sense a " dynamic " or an " incentive " 
 for action. And we might well regard Professor 
 Taylor's finding in respect of mere systematic 
 truth or the " Absolute " (for they are the same 
 thing to him) as confirmatory of Dr. Schiller's im- 
 portant contention that " in Absolutism " the two 
 " poles " of the " moral " and the " intellectual " 
 character of the Deity " fall apart." This means, 
 we will remember, that the truth of abstract 
 intellectualism is not the truth for action, 1 
 that absolutism is not able to effect or harmonize 
 between the truth of systematic knowledge and 
 moral truth — if, indeed, there be any such thing as 
 moral truth on the basis of a pure Rationalism. 
 
 To be sure, both the extent and even the reality 
 of all this supposed cession of ground in philo- 
 sophy to the pragmatists has been doubted and 
 denied by the representatives of Rationalism. 
 They would be questioned, too, by many sober 
 
 1 Cf. p. 14.
 
 SOME FUNDAMENTAL CHARACTERISTICS 79 
 
 thinkers and scholars who have long regarded 
 Hegelian intellectualism and pragmatist " volun- 
 tarism " as extremes in philosophy, as inimical, 
 both of them, to the interests of a true and catholic 
 conception of philosophy. The latter, as we know 
 from Aristotle, should be inclusive of the realities 
 both of the intellectual and the practical life. 
 
 Pragmatist criticisms of Rationalism, again, 
 may fairly be claimed to have been to a large 
 extent anticipated by the independent findings 
 of living idealist thinkers like Professors Pringle- 
 Pattison, Baillie, Jones, and others, in respect of 
 the supposed extreme claims of Hegelianism, as 
 well as by similar findings and independent 
 constructive efforts on the part of the recent 
 group of the Oxford Personal Idealists. 1 That 
 there is still a place for pragmatist anti- 
 intellectualism is evidently the conclusion to 
 be drawn from such things as the present wide 
 acceptance of the philosophy of Bergson, or 
 the recent declarations of Mr. Bradley that we 
 are justified " in the intelligent refusal to accept 
 as final an theoretical criterion which actually 
 so far exists," and that the "action of narrow 
 consistency must be definitely given up." 
 
 The reflection ought, moreover, to be inserted 
 here that even if Pragmatism has been of some 
 possible service in bringing forth from rationalists 
 some of their many recent confessions of the 
 limitations of an abstract intellectualism, it is 
 
 1 Sec the well-known volume Personal Idealism, edited by Mr. Sturt.
 
 80 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM 
 
 not at all unlikely that Rationalism in its turn 
 may succeed in convicting Pragmatism of an 
 undue emphasis 1 upon volition and action and 
 upon merely practical truth. 
 
 We shall now terminate the foregoing char- 
 acterization of Pragmatism by a reference to two 
 or three other specific things for which it may, 
 with more or less justice, be supposed to stand in 
 philosophy. These are (i) the repudiation of 
 the "correspondence view" 2 of the relation of 
 
 1 Cf. pp. 147 and 193. 
 
 2 By this notion is meant the common-sense idea that truth in all 
 cases " corresponds " to fact, my perception of the sunset to the 
 real sunset, my " idea " of a " true " friend to a real person whose 
 outward acts " correspond to " or " faithfully reflect " his inner feelings. 
 See the first chapter of Mr. Joachim's book upon The Nature of Truth, 
 where this notion is examined and found wanting. It is probably 
 the oldest notion of truth, and yet one that takes us readily into philo- 
 sophy from whatever point of view we examine it. It was held by 
 nearly all the Greek philosophers before the time of the Sophists, who 
 first began to teach that truth is what it " appears to be " — the " rela- 
 tivity " position that is upheld, for example, by Goethe, who said that 
 " When I know my relation to myself and to the outer world I call this 
 truth. And thus every man can have his own truth, and yet truth is 
 always the same." The common-sense view was held also by St. 
 Augustine in the words, " That is true what is really what it seems to 
 be (verum est quod ita est, ut videtur)," by Thomas Aquinas as the 
 " adequacy of the intellect to the thing," in so far as the intellect says 
 that that is which really is, or that that is not which is not (adaequatio 
 intellectus et rei), by Suarez, by Goclen, who made it a conformity of 
 the judgment with the thing. Its technical difficulties begin to appear, 
 say in Hobbes, who held that truth consists in the fact of the subject 
 and the predicate being a name of the same thing, or even in Locke, 
 who says : " Truth then seems to me in the proper import of the word 
 to signify nothing but the joining or separating of signs, as the things 
 signified by them, do agree, or disagree, one with another " (Essay, iv. 
 5. 2). How can things "agree" or "disagree" with one another? 
 And an " idea " of course is, anyhow, not a " thing " with a shape and 
 with dimensions that " correspond " to " things," any more than is 
 a " judgment " a relation of two " ideas " " corresponding " to the 
 " relations " of two " things."
 
 SOME FUNDAMENTAL CHARACTERISTICS 81 
 
 truth to reality, (2) the rejection of the idea of 
 there being any ultimate or rigid distinction 
 between " appearance " and " reality," and (3) 
 the reaffirmation of the " teleological " point of 
 view as characteristic of philosophy in distinction 
 from science. 
 
 As for (1) it has already been pointed out that 
 this idea of the misleading character of the ordinary 
 " correspondence notion " of truth is claimed 
 by pragmatists as an important result of their 
 proposal to test truth by the standard of the 
 consequences involved in its acceptance. 1 The 
 ordinary reader may not, to be sure, be aware of 
 the many difficulties that are apt to arise in philo- 
 sophy from an apparent acceptance of the common- 
 sense notion of truth as somehow simply a 
 
 1 " The mind is not a ' mirror ' which passively reflects what it 
 chances to come upon. It initiates and tries ; and its correspondence 
 with the ' outer world ' means that its effort successfully meets the 
 environment in behalf of the organic interest from which it sprang. 
 The mind, like an antenna, feels the way for the organism. It gropes 
 about, advances and recoils, making many random efforts and many 
 failures ; but it is always urged into taking the initiative by the pressure 
 of interest, and doomed to success or failure in some hour of trial when 
 it meets and engages the environment. Such is mind, and such, 
 according to James, are all its operations " (Perry, Present Philosophical 
 Tendencies, p. 351). Or the following : " I hope that," said James in 
 the " lectures " embodied in Pragmatism (New York, 1908) ..." the 
 concreteness and closeness to facts of pragmatism . . . may be what 
 approves itself to you as its most satisfactory peculiarity. It only 
 follows here the example of the sister sciences, interpreting the un- 
 observed by the observed. It brings old and new harmoniously to- 
 gether. It converts the absolutely empty notion of a static relation of 
 ' correspondence ' between our minds and reality, into that of a rich and 
 active commerce (that any one 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 " (p. 68 ; 
 italics mine). 
 
 6
 
 82 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM 
 
 duplicate ora" copy " of external reality. There 
 is the difficulty, say, of our ever being able to prove 
 such a correspondence without being (or " going ") 
 somehow beyond both the truth and the reality 
 in question, so as to be able to detect either 
 coincidence or discrepancy. Or, we might again 
 require some bridge between the ideas in our 
 minds and the supposed reality outside them 
 — " sensations " say, or " experiences," some- 
 thing, in other words, that would be accepted 
 as " given " and indubitable both by idealists 
 and realists. And there would be the difficulty, 
 too, of saying whether we have to begin for the 
 purposes of all reflective study with what is 
 within consciousness or with what is outside 
 it — in matter say, or in things. And if the 
 former, how we can ever get to the latter, 
 and vice versa. And so on with the many 
 kindred subtleties that have divided thinkers into 
 idealists and realists and conceptualists, monists, 
 dualists, parallelists, and so on. 
 
 Now Pragmatism certainly does well in pro- 
 posing to steer clear of all such difficulties and 
 pitfalls of the ordinary " correspondence notion." 
 And as we shall immediately refer to its own 
 working philosophy in the matter, we shall mean- 
 time pass over this mere point of its rejection of 
 the " correspondence notion " with one or two 
 remarks of a critical nature, (i) Unfortunately 
 for the pragmatists the rejection of the corre- 
 spondence notion is just as important a feature
 
 SOME FUNDAMENTAL CHARACTERISTICS 83 
 
 of Idealism 1 as it is of Pragmatism. The latter 
 system therefore can lay no claim to any unique- 
 ness or superiority in this connexion. (2) Prag- 
 matism, as we may perhaps see, cannot maintain 
 its position that the distinction between " idea ' 
 and " object " is one " within experience itself " 
 (rather than a distinction between experience and 
 something supposedly outside it) without travelling 
 further in the direction of Idealism 2 than it 
 has hitherto been prepared to do. By such a 
 travelling in the direction of Idealism we mean 
 a far more thorough-going recognition of the part 
 played in the making of reality by the " personal " 
 factor, than it has as yet contemplated either 
 in its " instrumentalism " or in its " radical 
 empiricism." (3) There is, after all, an element 
 of truth in the correspondence notion to which 
 Pragmatism fails to do justice. We shall refer 
 to this failure in a subsequent chapter 3 when 
 again looking into its theory of truth and 
 reality. 
 
 Despite these objections there is, however, at 
 least one particular respect in regard to which 
 Pragmatism may legitimately claim some credit 
 for its rejection of the correspondence notion. 
 This is its insistence that the truth is not (as it 
 must be on the correspondence theory) a " datum ' 
 or a "presentation," not something given to 
 
 1 " On any view like mine to speak of truth as in the end copying 
 reality, would be senseless " (Bradley in Mind, July 191 1, " On some 
 Aspects of Truth"). 
 
 a See p. 143 and p. 265. 3 See p. 127 and p. 133.
 
 84 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM 
 
 us by the various objects and things without 
 us, or by their supposed effects upon our senses 
 and our memory and our understanding. It 
 rather, on the contrary, maintains Pragmatism, 
 a " construction " on the part of the mind, an 
 attitude of our " expectant " (or " believing ") 
 consciousness, into which our own reactions 
 upon things enter at least as much as do their 
 supposed effects and impressions upon us. Of 
 course the many difficulties of this thorny subject 
 are by no means cleared up by this mere indication 
 of the attitude of Pragmatism, and we shall return 
 in a later chapter 1 to this idea of truth as a 
 construction of the mind instead of a datum, 
 taking care at the same time, however, to refer to 
 the failure of which we have spoken on the part 
 of Pragmatism to recognize the element of truth 
 that is still contained in the correspondence 
 notion. 
 
 (2) The rejection of the idea of any rigid, or 
 ultimate distinction between " appearance ' and 
 " reality." This is a still broader rejection than 
 the one to which we have just referred, and may, 
 therefore, be thought of as another more or less 
 fundamental reason for the rejection either of 
 the copy or of the correspondence theory of truth. 
 The reality of things, as Pragmatism conceives it, 
 is not something already " fixed " and " deter- 
 mined," but rather, something that is " plastic ' 
 and " modifiable," something that is, in fact, under- 
 
 1 See pp. 148-9.
 
 SOME FUNDAMENTAL CHARACTERISTICS 85 
 
 going a continuous process of modification, or 
 development, of one kind or another. It must 
 always, therefore, the pragmatist would hold, be 
 defined in terms of the experiences and the 
 activities through which it is known and revealed 
 and through which it is, to some extent, even 
 modified. 1 
 
 Pragmatism, as we may remember, has been 
 called by James " immediate " or " radical " 
 empiricism, although in one of his last books he 
 seeks to give an independent development to these 
 two doctrines. The cardinal principle of this 
 philosophy is that " things are what they are 
 experienced as being, or that to give a just account 
 of anything is to tell what that thing is experienced 
 to be." 2 And it is perhaps this aspect of the new 
 philosophy of Pragmatism that is most amply and 
 most attractively exhibited in the books of James. 
 It is presented, too, with much freshness and skill 
 in Professor Bawden's 3 book upon Pragmatism, 
 which is an attempt, he says, " to set forth the 
 necessary assumptions of a philosophy in which 
 experience becomes self-conscious as a method." 4 
 
 1 See p. 162. a What is Pragmatism? (Pratt), p. 21. 
 
 3 Principles of Pragmatism, Houghton Mifflin, 1910. 
 
 4 Ibid., Preface. This last sentence, by the way, may be taken as 
 one of the many illustrations that may be given of the crudities and 
 difficulties of some of the literature of Pragmatism. It shows that 
 Pragmatism may sometimes be as guilty of abstractionism as is 
 Rationalism itself. It is not " experience " that becomes " self- 
 conscious," but only " persons." And, similarly, it is only " persons " 
 who pursue " ends " and " satisfy " desires, and who may be said to 
 have a " method." Professor Bawden, of course, means that it is to the 
 credit of Pragmatism that it approaches experience just as it finds it,
 
 86 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM 
 
 " The new philosophy," proceeds Bawden, 1 " is 
 a pragmatic idealism. Its method is at once 
 intrinsic and immanent and organic or functional. 
 By saying that its method is functional, we mean 
 that its experience must be interpreted from 
 within. We cannot jump out of our skins . . . 
 we cannot pull ourselves up by our own boot- 
 straps. We find ourselves in mid-stream of the 
 Niagara of experience, and may define what it is 
 by working back and forth within the current." 
 " We do not know where we are going, but we 
 are on the way " [the contradiction is surely 
 apparent]. Then, like James, Bawden goes on to 
 interpret Pragmatism by showing what things 
 like self-consciousness, experience, science, social 
 consciousness, space, time, and causation are 
 by showing how they " appear," and how they 
 "function" — "experience" itself being simply, 
 to him and to his friends, a "dynamic 
 system," " self-sustaining," a " whole leaning on 
 nothing." 
 
 The extremes of this " immediate" or " radical " 
 philosophy appear to non - pragmatists to be 
 reached when we read words like those just quoted 
 about the Niagara stream of our experience, and 
 about our life as simply movement and acceleration, 
 or about the celebrated " I think " of Descartes 
 as equally well [!] set forth under the form " It 
 
 and that its chief method is the interpretation of the same experience — 
 an easy thing, doubtless, to profess, but somewhat difficult to carry out. 
 1 Principles of Pragmatism, Houghton Mifflin, 1910, pp. 44-45.
 
 SOME FUNDAMENTAL CHARACTERISTICS 87 
 
 thinks," or " thinking is going on," or about the 
 " being " of the individual person as consisting 
 simply in a " doing." " All this we hold," says 
 Bawden, "to be not materialism but simply energism." 
 " There is no ' truth,' only ' truths ' — this is 
 another way of putting it — and the only criterion 
 of truth is the changing one of the image or the 
 idea which comes out of our impulses or of the 
 conflict of our habits." The end of all this 
 modern flowing philosophy is, of course, the 
 " Pluralism " of James, the universe as a society 
 of functioning selves in which reality " may exist 
 in a distributive form, or in the shape, not of an 
 All, but of a set of eaches." " The essence of life," 
 as he puts it in his famous essay on Bergson, 1 " is 
 its continually changing character," and we only 
 call it a "confusion" sometimes because we have 
 grown accustomed in our sciences and philosophies 
 to isolate " elements " and " differents " which in 
 reality are ' ' all dissolved in one another. ' ' 2 " Rela- 
 tions of every sort, of time, space, difference, 
 likeness, change, rate, cause, or what not, are just 
 as integral members of the sensational flux as 
 terms are." " Pluralism lets things really exist 
 in the each form, or distributively. Its type of 
 union ... is different from the monistic type 
 of dH-einheit. It is what I call the strung-along 
 type, the type of continuity, contiguity, or conca- 
 tenation." And so on. 
 
 (3) The reaffirmation of the teleological point 
 1 p. 253. a p. 256.
 
 88 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM 
 
 of view. After the many illustrations and refer- 
 ences that have already been given in respect of 
 the tendencies of Pragmatism, it is perhaps hardly 
 necessary to point out that an insistence upon the 
 necessity to philosophy of the " teleological " 
 point of view, of the consideration of both 
 thoughts and things from the point of view of 
 their purpose or utility, is a deeply - marked 
 characteristic of Pragmatism. In itself this 
 demand can hardly be thought of as altogether 
 new, for the idea of considering the nature of 
 anything in the light of its final purpose or 
 end is really as old in our European thought 
 as the philosophy of Aristotle or Anaxagoras. 
 Almost equally familiar is the kindred idea upon 
 which Pragmatism is inclined to felicitate itself, 
 of finding the roots of metaphysic " in ethics," in 
 the facts of conduct, in the facts of the " ideal " 
 or the " personal " order which we tend 1 in human 
 civilization to impose upon what is otherwise 
 thought of by science as the natural order. The 
 form, however, of the teleological argument to 
 which Pragmatism may legitimately be thought 
 to have directed our attention is that of the 
 possible place in the world of reality, and in 
 the world of thought, of the effort and the 
 free initiative of the individual. This place, 
 unfortunately (the case is quite different with 
 Bergson 2 ), Pragmatism has been able, up to the 
 present time, to define, in the main, only negatively 
 
 1 See p. 146. 3 See p. 240 et jf.
 
 SOME FUNDAMENTAL CHARACTERISTICS 89 
 
 — by means of its polemic against the completed 
 and the self -completing " Absolute " of the Neo- 
 Hegelian Rationalists. What this polemic is we 
 can best indicate by quoting from Hegel himself 
 a passage or a line of the reflection against which 
 it is seeking to enter an emphatic and a reasoned 
 protest, and then after this a passage or two from 
 some of our Anglo-Hegelians in the same con- 
 nexion. 
 
 " The consummation," says Hegel, in a familiar 
 and often-quoted passage, " of the Infinite aim 
 {i.e. of the purpose of God as omniscient and 
 almighty) consists merely in removing the illusion 
 which makes it seem unaccomplished." * Now 
 although there is a sense in which this great saying 
 must for ever be maintained to contain an element 
 of profound truth, 2 the attitude of Pragmatism 
 in regard to it would be, firstly, that of a rooted 
 objection to its outspoken intellectualism. How 
 can the chief work of the Almighty be conceived 
 to be merely that of getting rid somehow from our 
 minds, or from his, of our mental confusions ? 
 And then, secondly, an equally rooted objection is 
 taken ; to the implication that the individual human 
 being should allow himself to entertain, as possibly 
 true, a view of the general trend of things that 
 
 1 Wallace's Logic of Hegel, p. 304. 
 
 * There is a sentence in one of Hawthorne's stories to the effect that 
 man's work is always illusory to some extent, while God is the only 
 worker of realities. I would not go as far as this, believing, as I do, 
 with the pragmatists, that man is at least a fellow-worker with God. 
 But I do find Pragmatism lacking, as 1 indicate elsewhere, in any 
 adequate recognition of the work of God, or the Absolute in the universe.
 
 go PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM 
 
 renders any notion of his playing an appreciable 
 part therein a theoretical and a practical absurdity. 1 
 This notion (or " conceit," if you will) he can 
 surrender only by ceasing to think of his own 
 consciousness of " effort " and of the part played 
 by " effort " 2 and " invention " in the entire 
 animal and human world, and also of his con- 
 sciousness of duty and of the ideal in general. 
 This latter consciousness of itself bids him to 
 realize certain " norms " or regulative prescripts 
 simply because they are consonant with that 
 higher will which is to him the very truth of his 
 own nature. He cannot, in other words, believe 
 that he is consciously obliged to work and to 
 realize his higher nature for nothing. The accom- 
 
 1 I am thinking of such considerations as are suggested in the follow- 
 ing sentences from Maeterlinck : " As we advance through life, it is 
 more and more brought home to us that nothing takes place that is not 
 in accord with some curious, preconceived design ; and of this we never 
 breathe a word, we scarcely let our minds dwell upon it, but of its 
 existence, somewhere above our heads, we are absolutely convinced " 
 (The Treasure of the Humble, p. 17). " But this much at least is 
 abundantly proved to us, that in the work-a-day lives of the very 
 humblest of men spiritual phenomena manifest themselves — mysterious, 
 direct workings, that bring soul nearer to soul " (ibid. 33). " Is it 
 to-day or to-morrow that moulds us ? Do we not all spend the greater 
 part of our lives under the shadow of an event that has not yet come 
 to pass ? " (ibid. 51). I do not of course for one moment imply that 
 the facts of experience referred to in such sentences as these should be 
 received at any higher value than their face value, for there are indeed 
 many considerations to be thought of in connexion with this matter 
 of the realization of our plans and our destiny as individuals. But I 
 do mean that the beliefs to which men cling in this respect are just as 
 much part of the subject-matter of philosophy as other beliefs, say the 
 belief in truth as a whole, or the beliefs investigated by the Society for 
 Psychical Research. And there may conceivably be a view of human 
 nature upon which the beliefs in question are both natural and rational. 
 
 a See p. 101.
 
 SOME FUNDAMENTAL CHARACTERISTICS 91 
 
 plishment of ends and of the right must, in other 
 words, be rationally believed by him to be part 
 of the nature of things. It is this conviction, 
 we feel sure, that animates Pragmatism in the 
 opposition it shares both with common sense and 
 with the radical thought of our time against the 
 meaninglessness to Hegelianism, or to Absolutism, 1 
 many of the hopes and many of the convictions 
 that we feel to be so necessary and so real in the 
 life of mankind generally. 
 
 And there are other lines of reflection among 
 Neo-Hegelians against which Pragmatism is 
 equally determined to make a more or less definite 
 protest, in the interest, as before, of our practical 
 and of our moral activity. We may recall, to 
 begin with, the memorable words of Mr. Bradley, 
 in his would-be refutation of the charge that the 
 ideals of Absolutism " to some people " fail to 
 " satisfy our nature's demands." " Am I," he 
 indignantly asks, " to understand that we are to 
 have all we want, and have it just as we want 
 it ? " adding (almost in the next line) that he 
 " understands," of course, that the " views " of 
 Absolutism, or those of any other philosophy, are 
 to be compared " only with views " that aim at 
 "theoretical consistency" and not with mere 
 practical beliefs. 2 Now, speaking for the moment 
 for Pragmatism, can it be truly philosophical to 
 
 1 See p. 198 on Dr. Bosanquet's dismissal of the problem of teleology 
 from the sphere of reasoned philosophy. 
 
 2 Appearance and Reality, p. 561.
 
 92 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM 
 
 contemplate with equanimity the idea of any such 
 ultimate conflict as is implied in these words 
 between the demands of the intellect 1 and the 
 demands of emotion — to use the term most 
 definitely expressive of a personal, as distinct 
 from a merely intellectual satisfaction ? 
 
 Then again there is, for example, the dictum 
 of Dr. McTaggart, that there is " no reason to trust 
 God's goodness without a demonstration which 
 removes the matter from the sphere of faith." 2 
 May there not, we would ask, be a view of things 
 according to the truth of which the confidence 
 of the dying Socrates in the reasonableness 
 and the goodness of God are at least as reason- 
 able as his confession, at the same time, of his 
 ignorance of the precise, or the particular, fate 
 both of the just and of the unjust ? And is not, 
 too, such a position as that expressed in these 
 words of Dr. McTaggart's about a logically com- 
 plete reason for believing in the essential 
 righteousness of things now ruled out of court by 
 some of the concessions of his brother rationalists 
 to Pragmatism, to which reference has already been 
 made ? It is so ruled out, for example, even by 
 Mr. Bradley's condemnation as a " pernicious 
 prejudice " of the idea that " what is wanted for 
 working purpose is the last theoretical certainty 
 about things." 3 
 
 1 See p. 155. 
 
 a I think that I have taken this phrase from Some Dogmas of 
 Religion. 8 From " Truth and Copying," Mind, No. 62.
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 
 PRAGMATISM AND HUMAN ACTIVITY 
 
 It requires now but a slight degree of penetration 
 to see that beneath this entire matter of an 
 apparent opposition between our " theoretical " 
 and our " practical " satisfaction, and beneath 
 much of the pragmatist insistence upon the 
 " consequences " of ideas and of systems of 
 thought, there is the great question of the simple 
 fact of human action and of its significance for 
 philosophy. And it might truly be said that the 
 raising of this question is not merely another of 
 the more or less definitely marked features of 
 Pragmatism, but in some respects it is one out- 
 standing characteristic. 
 
 For some reason or other, or for some strange 
 combination of reasons, the phenomenon that 
 we call "action" 1 (the activity of man as an 
 
 1 By action in this chapter and elsewhere in this book, I do not mean 
 the mere exhibition or expenditure of physical energy. I mean human 
 activity in general, inclusive of the highest manifestations of this 
 activity, such as the search for truth, contemplation, belief, creative 
 activity of one kind or another, and so on. There is no belief and no 
 contemplation that is not practical as well as theoretical, no truth that 
 fails to shape and to mould the life of the person who entertains it. I 
 
 93
 
 94 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM 
 
 agent) and the apparently simple facts of the 
 reality and the intelligibility of action have long 
 been regarded as matters of altogether secondary 
 or subordinate importance by the rationalism of 
 philosophy and by the mechanical philosophy of 
 science. This Rationalism and this ostensibly 
 certain and demonstrable mechanical philosophy 
 of science suppose that the one problem of 
 human thought is simply that of the nature of 
 truth or of the nature of reality (the reality 
 of the " physical " world) as if either (or each) 
 of these things were an entity on its own 
 account, an absolutely final finding or considera- 
 tion. That this has really been the case so far 
 as philosophy is concerned is proved by the fact 
 even of the existence of the many characteristic 
 deliverances and concessions of Rationalism in 
 respect of Pragmatism to which reference has 
 already been made in the preceding chapter. 
 And that it has also been the case so far as 
 science is concerned is proved by the existence 
 of the many dogmatic attempts of many natural 
 philosophers from Holbach to Haeckel to apply 
 the " iron laws " of matter and motion to the 
 
 quite agree with Maeterlinck, and with Bergson and others, that the 
 soul is to some extent limited by the demands of action and speech, 
 and by the duties and the conventions of social life, but I still believe 
 in the action test for contemplations and thoughts and beliefs and ideas, 
 however lofty. It is only the thoughts that we can act out, that we can 
 consciously act upon in our present human life, and that we can persuade 
 others to act upon, that are valuable to ourselves and to humanity. It 
 is to their discredit that so many men and so many thinkers entertain, 
 and give expression to, views about the universe which renders their 
 activities as agents and as thinkers and as seekers quite inexplicable.
 
 PRAGMATISM AND HUMAN ACTIVITY 95 
 
 reality of everything else under heaven, 1 and of 
 everything in the heavens in spite of the frequent 
 confessions of their own colleagues with regard to 
 the actual and the necessary limits and limitations 
 of science and of the scientific outlook. 
 
 Only slowly and gradually, as it were, has the 
 consideration come into the very forefront of our 
 speculative horizon that there is for man as a 
 thinking being no rigid separation between theory 
 and practice, between intellect and volition, 
 between action and thought, between fact and 
 act, between truth and reality. 2 There is clearly 
 volition or aim, for example, in the search after 
 truth. And there is certainly purpose in the 
 attention 3 that is involved even in the simplest 
 
 1 There are, of course, no heavens in the old mediaeval and 
 Aristotelian sense after the work of Copernicus and Galileo in the 
 physical sciences, and of Kant in the realm of mind. 
 
 2 Professor Moore well points out (Pragmatism and its Critics, p. 13) 
 that the " challenge " of the idea that our thinking has " two founda- 
 tions : one, as the method of purposing — its ' practical ' function ; the 
 other as merely the expression of the specific and independent instinct 
 to know — its ' intellectual ' function," marks the " beginnings of the 
 pragmatic movement." The idea of two kinds of thought goes back to 
 Aristotle and is one of the most famous distinctions of thought. It 
 dominated the entire Middle Ages, and it is still at the root of the false 
 idea that " culture " can be separated from work and service for the 
 common good. I am glad, as I indicate in the text, a few lines further 
 on, that the idealists are doing their share with the pragmatists in 
 breaking it up. In America there is no practical distinction between 
 culture and work. See my chapter on Pragmatism as Americanism. 
 
 8 The importance of this consideration about the " attention " that 
 is (as a matter of fact and a matter of necessity) involved in all " percep- 
 tion," cannot possibly be exaggerated. We perceive in childhood and 
 throughout life in the main what interests us, and what affects our total 
 and organic activity. It is, that is to say, our motor activity, and its 
 direction, that determine what we see and perceive and experience. 
 And in the higher reaches of our life, on the levels of art and religion 
 and philosophy, this determining power becomes what we call our
 
 96 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM 
 
 piece of perception, the selection of what interests 
 and affects us out of the total field of vision or ex- 
 perience. And it is equally certain that there 
 is thought in action — so long, that is to say, 
 as action is regarded as action and not as im- 
 pulse. Again, the man who wills the truth 
 submits himself to an imperative just as surely 
 as does the man who explicitly obeys the law of 
 duty. It is thus impossible, as it were, even 
 in the so-called intellectual life, to distinguish 
 absolutely between theoretical and practical con- 
 siderations — "truth" meaning invariably the 
 relations obtaining in some " sphere," or order, 
 of fact which we separate off for some purpose or 
 other from the infinite whole of reality. Equally 
 impossible is it to distinguish absolutely between 
 the theoretical and the practical in the case 
 of the highest theoretical activity, in the case, 
 say, of the " contemplation " that Aristotle talks 
 of as the most " godlike " activity of man. This 
 very contemplation, as our Neo-Hegelian * friends 
 
 reason and our will and our selective attention. Perception, in other 
 words, is a kind of selective activity, involving what we call impulse 
 and effort and will. Modern philosophy has forgotten this in its 
 treatment of our supposed perception of the world, taking this to 
 be something given instead of something that is constructed by our 
 activity. Hence its long struggle to overcome both the apparent 
 materialism of the world of the senses, and the gap, or hiatus, that 
 has been created by Rationalism between the world as we think it, and 
 the world as it really is. 
 
 1 E.g. Professor Bosanquet, in his 1908 inaugural lecture at St. 
 Andrews upon The Practical Value of Moral Philosophy. " Theory 
 does indeed belong to Practice. It is a form of conation " (p. 9). It 
 " should no doubt be understood as Theoria, or the entire unimpeded life 
 of the soul" (p. 11 ; italics mine).
 
 PRAGMATISM AND HUMAN ACTIVITY 97 
 
 are always reminding us, is an activity that is 
 just as much a characteristic of man, as is his 
 power of setting his limbs in motion. 
 
 We have referred to the desire of the prag- 
 matists to represent, and to discover, a supposedly 
 deeper or more comprehensive view of human 
 nature than that implicitly acted upon by In- 
 tellectualism — a view that should provide, as 
 they think, for the organic unity of our active 
 and our so-called reflective tendencies. This 
 desire is surely eminently typical of what we 
 would like to think of as the rediscovery by 
 Pragmatism for philosophy, of the active, or 
 the volitional, aspects of the conscious life of 
 man, and along with this important side of our 
 human nature, the reality also of the activities 
 and the purposes that are revealed in what 
 we sometimes speak of as unconscious nature. 
 The world we know, it would hold, in the spirit 
 and almost in the letter of Bergson, lives and 
 grows by experiment, 1 and by activities and pro- 
 cesses and adjustments. Pragmatism has doubt- 
 less, as we pointed out, been prone to think of 
 itself as the only philosophy that can bake bread, 
 that can speak to man in terms of the actual life 
 of effort and struggle that he seems called upon 
 to live in the environment in which he finds him- 
 self. And, as we have just been insisting, the 
 
 1 This is surely the teaching of the new physics in respect of the 
 radio-active view of matter. I take up this point again in the Bergson 
 chapter. 
 
 7
 
 98 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM 
 
 main ground of its hostility to Rationalism is the 
 apparent tendency of the latter to treat the various 
 concepts and hypotheses that have been devised 
 to explain the world, and to render it intelligible, 
 as if they were themselves of more importance 
 than the real persons and the real happenings 
 that constitute the world of our experience. 1 
 
 If it were at all desirable to recapitulate to 
 any extent those phenomena connected with 
 Pragmatism that seem to indicate its rediscovery 
 of the fact of action, and of the fact of its meaning 
 for philosophy, as its one outstanding characteristic, 
 we may point to such considerations as the follow- 
 ing : (i) The fact of its having sought to advance 
 from the stage of a mere " instrumentalist " view 
 of human thought to that of an outspoken 
 1 ' humanism ' ' or a socialized utilitarianism. (2) The 
 fact of its seeking to leave us (as the outcome 
 of philosophy) with all our more important 
 " beliefs," with a general " working " view of the 
 world in which such things as religion and ideals 
 and enthusiasm are adequately recognized. 
 Pragmatism is really, as we have put it, more 
 interested in belief than in knowledge, the former 
 being to it the characteristic, the conquering 
 attitude of man to the world in which he finds 
 himself. (3) Its main object is to establish a 
 dynamical view of reality, as that which is 
 " everywhere in the making," as that which 
 signifies to every person firstly that aspect of the 
 
 1 See p. 238.
 
 PRAGMATISM AND HUMAN ACTIVITY 99 
 
 life of things in which he is for the time being 
 most vitally interested. 1 (4) In the spirit of the 
 empirical philosophy generally its main anxiety 
 is to do the fullest justice to all the aspects of 
 our so-called human experience, looking upon 
 theories and systems as but points of view 
 for the interpretation of this experience, and of 
 the great universal life that transcends it. And 
 proceeding upon the theory that a true meta- 
 physic must become a true " dynamic " or a true 
 incentive to human motive, it seeks the relation- 
 ships and affiliations that have been pointed out 
 with all the different liberating and progressive 
 tendencies in the history of human thought. 
 (5) It would " consult moral experience directly," 
 finding in the world of our ordinary moral and 
 social effort a spiritual reality 2 that raises the 
 individual out of and above and beyond himself. 
 And it bears testimony in its own more or less 
 imperfect manner to the autonomous element 3 in 
 our human personality that, in the moral life, and 
 in such things as religious aspiration and creative 
 effort and social service, transcends the merely 
 theoretical descriptions of the world with which 
 we are familiar in the generalizations of science 
 and of history. 
 
 Without attempting meanwhile to probe at all 
 deeply into this pragmatist glorification of "action" 
 and its importance to philosophy, let us think of a 
 
 1 See p. 143 or p. 229 (note). 
 
 2 See p. 34 in Chapter II. in reference to the idea of M. Blondel. 
 
 3 See p. 147 and p. 265.
 
 ioo PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM 
 
 few of the considerations that may be urged in 
 support of this idea from sources outside those 
 of the mere practical tendencies and the affilia- 
 tions of Pragmatism itself. 
 
 There is first of all the consideration that it is 
 the fact of action that unites or brings together 
 what we call " desire " and what we call " thought," 
 the world of our desires and emotions and the 
 world of our thoughts and our knowledge. 
 This is really a consideration of the utmost 
 importance to us when we think of what we have 
 allowed ourselves to call the characteristic dualism x 
 of modern times, the discrepancy that seems to 
 exist between the world of our desires and the 
 impersonal world of science — which latter world 
 educated people are apt to think of as the 
 world before which everything else must bend 
 and break, or at least bow. Our point here is not 
 merely that of the humiliating truth of the wisdom 
 of the wiseacres who used to tell us in our youth 
 that we will anyhow have to act in spite of all 
 our unanswered questions about things, but the 
 plain statement of the fact that (say or think what 
 we will) it is in conscious action that our desires 
 and our thoughts do come together, and that it is 
 there that they are both seen to be but partial 
 expressions of the one reality — the life that is 
 in things and in ourselves, and that engenders in 
 us both emotions and thoughts, even if the latter 
 do sometimes seem to lie " too deep for tears." 
 
 1 See p. 65, note 3.
 
 PRAGMATISM AND HUMAN ACTIVITY 101 
 
 It is with this life and with the objects and 
 aims and ends and realities that develop and 
 sustain it that all our thoughts, as well as all 
 our desires, are concerned. If action, therefore, 
 could only be properly understood, if it can some- 
 how be seen in its universal or its cosmic signific- 
 ance, there would be no discrepancy and no gap 
 between the world of our ideals and the world of 
 our thoughts. We would know what we want, 1 and 
 we would want and desire what we know we can 
 get — the complete development of our personality. 
 Again there is the evidence that exists in the 
 sciences of biology and anthropology in support 
 of the important role played in both animal 
 and human evolution by effort and choice and 
 volition and experimentation. " Already in the 
 contractibility of protoplasm and in the activities 
 of typical protozoons do we find ' activities ' that 
 imply 2 volition of some sort or degree, for there 
 appears to be some selection of food and some 
 spontaneity of movement : changes of direction, 
 the taking of a circuitous course in avoidance of 
 an obstruction, etc., indicate this." Then again, 
 " there are such things as the diversities in 
 secondary sexual characters (the ' after-thoughts 
 of reproduction ' as they are called), the endless 
 shift of parasites, the power of animals to alter 
 their coloration to suit environment, and the 
 
 1 Sec p. 192, note 3. 
 
 8 Needham, General Biology, 191 1. For the mention of this book as 
 a reliable recent manual I am indebted to my colleague, Professor 
 Willey of McGill University.
 
 102 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM 
 
 complex ' internal stimuli ' of the higher animals 
 in their breeding periods and activities, which 
 make us see only too clearly what the so-called 
 struggle for life has been in the animal world." . . . 
 
 Coming up to man let us think of what scientists 
 point out as the effects of man's disturbing 
 influence in nature, and then pass from these on 
 to the facts of anthropology in respect of the 
 conquest of environment by what we call invention 
 and inheritance and free initiative. " In placing 
 invention," says a writer of to-day in a recent 
 brilliant book, " at the bottom of the scale of 
 conditions [i.e. of the conditions of social develop- 
 ment], I definitely break with the opinion that 
 human evolution is throughout a purely natural 
 process. ... It is pre-eminently an artificial 
 construction." 1 Now it requires but the reflection 
 of a moment or two upon considerations such as 
 the foregoing, and upon the attested facts of 
 history as to the breaking up of the tyranny 
 of habit and custom by the force of reflec- 
 tion and free action and free initiative, to grasp 
 how really great should be the significance to 
 philosophy of the active and the volitional nature 
 of man that is thus demonstrably at the root not 
 only of our progress, but of civilization itself. 
 
 If it be objected that while there cannot, 
 indeed, from the point of view of the general 
 culture and civilization of mankind, be any 
 question of the importance to philosophy of the 
 
 1 Marett, Anthropology, p. 155.
 
 PRAGMATISM AND HUMAN ACTIVITY 103 
 
 active effort and of the active thought that underlie 
 this stupendous achievement, the case is perhaps 
 somewhat different when we try to think of the 
 pragmatist glorification of our human action from 
 the point of view of the (physical ?) universe as a 
 whole. 1 To this reflection it is possible here to say 
 but one or two things. Firstly, there is apparently 
 at present no warrant in science for seeking to 
 separate off this human life of ours from the 
 evolution of animal life in general. 2 Equally 
 little is there any warrant for separating the 
 evolution of living matter from the evolution of 
 what we call inanimate matter, not to speak of 
 the initial difficulty of accounting for things 
 like energy and radio-active matter, and the 
 evolution and the devolution that are calmly 
 claimed by science to be involved in the various 
 "systems' within the universe — apart from an 
 ordering and intelligent mind and will. There 
 is therefore, so far, no necessary presumption 
 against the idea of regarding human evolution as 
 at least in some sense a continuation or develop- 
 ment of the life that seems to pervade the uni- 
 
 1 Cf. supra, p. 101 
 
 2 So much may, I suppose, be inferred from the contentions (explicit 
 and implicit) of all biologists and evolutionists. Human life they all 
 seem to regard as a kind of continuity or development of the life of 
 universal nature, whether their theory of the origin of life be that of 
 (1) " spontaneous generation," (2) " cosmozoa " (germs capable of 
 life scattered throughout space), (3) " Preyer's theory of the continuity 
 of life," (4) " Pfliiger's theory of the chemical characteristics of proteid," 
 or (5) the conclusion of Vervvorn himself, " that existing organisms are 
 derived in uninterrupted descent from the first living substance that 
 originated from lifeless substance" (General Physiology, p. 315).
 
 104 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM 
 
 verse in general. And then, secondly, there is the 
 familiar reflection that nearly all that we think 
 we know about the universe as a whole is but an 
 interpretation of it in terms of the life and the 
 energy that we experience in ourselves and in 
 terms of some of the apparent conditions of this 
 life and this energy. For as Bergson reminds 
 us, " As thinking beings we may apply the laws 
 of our physics to our world, and extend them to 
 each of the worlds taken separately, but nothing 
 tells us that they apply to the entire universe nor 
 even that such affirmation has any meaning ; 
 for the universe is not made but is being made 
 continually. It is growing perhaps indefinitely 
 by the addition of new worlds." 1 
 
 On the ground, then, both of science and of 
 philosophy 2 may it be definitely said that this 
 human action of ours, as apparently the highest 
 outcome of the forces of nature, becomes only too 
 
 1 Creative Evolution, pp. 245-5. 
 
 2 It is, I think, an important reflection that it is precisely in this very 
 reality of " action " that science and philosophy come together. That 
 all the sciences meet in the concept, or the fact, of action is, of 
 course, quite evident from the new knowledge of the new physics. 
 Professor M'Dougall has recently brought psychology into line with 
 the natural sciences by defining its subject-matter as the actions 
 or the " behaviour " of human beings and animals. And it is surely 
 not difficult to see that — as I try to indicate — it is in human behaviour 
 that philosophy and science come together. Another consideration 
 in respect of the philosophy of action that has long impressed me 
 is this. If there is one realm in which, more than anywhere else, our 
 traditional rationalism and our traditional empiricism really came 
 together in England, it is the realm of social philosophy, the realm of 
 human activity. It was the breaking down of the entire philosophy of 
 sensations in the matter of the proof of utilitarianism that caused John 
 Stuart Mill to take up the " social philosophy " in respect to which the 
 followers of positivism joined hands with the idealists.
 
 PRAGMATISM AND HUMAN ACTIVITY 105 
 
 naturally and only too inevitably the highest 
 object of our reflective consideration. As Schopen- 
 hauer put it long ago, the human body is the only 
 object in nature that we know " on the inside." 
 And do or think what we will, it is this human 
 life of ours and this mind of ours that have peopled 
 the world of science and the world of philosophy 
 with all the categories and all the distinctions that 
 obtain there, with concepts like the " (Platonic) 
 Ideas," "form," "matter," "energy," "ether," 
 " atom," " substance," " the individual," " the 
 universal," " empty space," " eternity," " the Ab- 
 solute," " value," " final end," and so on. 
 
 There is much doubtless in this action philo- 
 sophy, and much too in the matter of the 
 reasons that may be brought forward in its 
 support, that can become credible and intelligible 
 only as we proceed. But it must all count, it 
 would seem, in support of the idea of the prag- 
 matist rediscovery, for philosophy, of the im- 
 portance of our creative action and of our creative 
 thought. And then there are one or two additional 
 general considerations of which we may well think 
 in the same connexion. 
 
 Pragmatism boasts, as we know, of being 
 a highly democratic ! doctrine, of contending 
 for the emancipation of the individual and 
 his interests from the tyranny of all kinds 
 of absolutism, and all kinds of dogmatism 
 (whether philosophical, or scientific, or social). 
 
 1 See p. 185.
 
 106 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM 
 
 No system either of thought or of practice, no 
 supposed " world- view " of things, no body of 
 scientific laws or abstract truths shall, as long as 
 it holds the field of our attention, entirely crush 
 out of existence the concrete interests and the free 
 self-development of the individual human being. 
 
 A tendency in this direction exists, it must be 
 admitted, in the " determinism " both of natural 
 science and of Hegelianism, and of the social 
 philosophy that has emanated from the one or 
 from the other. Pragmatism, on the contrary, in 
 all matters of the supposed determination, or the 
 attempted limitation, of the individual by what 
 has been accomplished either in Nature or in 
 human history, would incline to what we generally 
 speak of to-day asa" modernistic," ora" liberal- 
 istic," or even a " revolutionary," attitude. It 
 would reinterpret and reconstruct, in the light of 
 the present and its needs, not only the concepts and 
 the methods of science and philosophy, but also 
 the various institutions and the various social 
 practices of mankind. 1 
 
 Similarity Pragmatism would protest, as does 
 the newer education and the newer sociology, 
 against any merely doctrinaire (or " intellectual- 
 istic ") conception of education and culture, sub- 
 stituting in its place the " efficiency " or the 
 " social service " 2 conception. And even if we 
 must admit that this more or less practical 
 ideal of education has been over-emphasized in 
 
 1 See p. 27. 2 See Chapter VII. p. 179.
 
 PRAGMATISM AND HUMAN ACTIVITY 107 
 
 our time, it is still true, as with Goethe, that it 
 is only the " actively- free " man, the man who 
 can work out in service and true accomplishment 
 the ideal of human life, whose production should 
 be regarded as the aim of a sound educational or 
 social policy. 
 
 We shall later attempt to assign some definite 
 reasons for the failure of Pragmatism to make the 
 most of all this apparently justifiable insistence 
 upon action and upon the creative activity of 
 the individual, along with all this sympathy that 
 it seems to evince for a progressive and a libera- 
 tionist view of human policy. 
 
 Meantime, in view of all these considerations, 
 we cannot avoid making the reflection that it 
 is surely something of an anomaly in philo- 
 sophy that a thinker's " study " doubts about his 
 actions and about some of the main instinctive 
 beliefs of mankind (in which he himself shares) 
 should have come to be regarded — as they have 
 been by Rationalism — as considerations of a 
 greater importance than the actions, and the 
 beliefs, and the realities, of which they are the 
 expression. Far be it from the writer to suggest 
 that the suspension of judgment and the 
 refraining from activity, 1 in the absence of 
 adequate reason and motive, are not, and have 
 not been of the greatest value to mankind in the 
 matter of the development of the higher faculties 
 
 1 I am thinking of Pyrrho and Arcesilaus and some of the Greek 
 sceptics and of their irroxv and arapa^ia.
 
 108 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM 
 
 and the higher ideals of the mind. There may 
 well be, however, for Pragmatism, or for any 
 philosophy that can work it out satisfactorily, 
 in the free, creative, activity of man, in the 
 duty that lies upon us all of carrying on our 
 lives to the highest expression, a reason and 
 a truth that must be estimated at their logical 
 worth along with the many other reasons and 
 truths of which we are pleased to think as the 
 truth of things. 
 
 Short, however, of a more genuine attempt on 
 the part of Pragmatism than anything it has as 
 yet given us in this connexion to justify this 
 higher reason and truth that are embodied in 
 our consciousness of ourselves as persons, as 
 rational agents, all its mere " practicalism " and 
 all its " instrumentalism " are but the workaday 
 and the utilitarian philosophy of which we have 
 already complained in its earlier and cruder 
 professions. 1 
 
 After some attention, then, to the matter of the 
 outstanding critical defects of Pragmatism, in its 
 preliminary and cruder forms, we shall again return 
 to our topic of the relatively new subject-matter 
 it has been endeavouring to place before philo- 
 sophy in its insistence upon the importance of 
 action, and upon the need of a " dynamic," instead 
 of an intellectualistic and " spectator-like " theory 
 of human personality. 
 
 1 See p. 26.
 
 APPENDIX 
 
 109 
 
 APPENDIX TO CHAPTER IV 
 
 PHILOSOPHY AND THE ACTIVITY-EXPERIENCE 
 
 [In an article upon the above title in the International Journal 
 0/ Ethics, p. 1898, I attempted to deal with some aspects of the 
 problem that I have just raised in the preceding chapter. I 
 venture to append here some of the statements that I made 
 then upon the importance of action and the " activity-experi- 
 ence " to the philosophy of to-day. I am inclined to regard 
 them (although I have not looked at them until the present 
 moment of passing this book through the press) as a kind of 
 anticipation and confirmation of many of my present pages. 
 Part of my excuse, however, for inserting them here is a hope 
 that these references and suggestions may possibly be of service 
 to the general reader. The extracts follow as they were printed.] 
 
 I. It requires no very profound acquaintance with the trend 
 of the literature of general and specialized philosophy of the last 
 twenty-five years to detect a decidedly practical turn in the 
 recent speculative tendencies of philosophy and philosophers. 
 The older conception of philosophy or metaphysics as an attempt 
 to state (more or less systematically) the value of the world for 
 thought is being slowly modified, if not altogether disappearing, 
 into the attempt to explain or to grasp the significance of the 
 world from the stand-point of the moral and social activity of 
 man. The philosophical student must be to some extent conscious 
 of the difference in respect of both tone and subject-matter 
 between such books as Stirling's Secret of Hegel, E. Caird's Critical 
 Philosophy of Kant (the first editions of both works), Green's 
 Prolegomena to Ethics, and the most recent essays and books of 
 Professors A. Seth x and James 2 and Ward 3 and Sidgwick 4 and 
 
 1 Alan's Place in the Cosmos, a book consisting of essays and re- 
 views published by the author during the last four or five years. They 
 all advocate " humanism in opposition to naturalism," or " ethicism in 
 opposition to a too narrow intellectualism." 
 
 2 The Will to Believe, 1897. 
 
 * " Progress in Philosophy," art. Mind, 15, p. 213. 
 
 * Practical Ethics ; Essays.
 
 no PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM 
 
 Baldwin, 1 and of Mr. Bosanquet 2 and the late Mr. Nettleship, 3 
 and between — to turn to Germany — the writings of Erdmann and 
 Kuno Fischer and Zeller and F. A. Lange, and those of Gizycki, 
 Paulsen, Windelband, Eucken, Hartmann, Deussen, Simmel, and 
 — in France — between the writings of Renouvier and Pillon and 
 Ravaisson, the " Neo-Kantianism " of the Critique Philosophique 
 (1872 -1877), and those of Fouillee, Weber (of Strassburg), 
 Seailles, Dunan, and others, and of general writers like de Vogue, 
 Desjardins, and Brunetiere, and of social philosophers like Bougie, 
 Tarde, Izoulet, and so on. The change of venue in these writers 
 alone, not to speak of the change of the interest of the educated 
 world from such books as Huxley's Hume and Renan's L'Avenir 
 de la Science and Du Bois Reymond's Die Sieben Weltrdthsel, and 
 Tyndall's Belfast Address, to the writings of Herbert Spencer (the 
 Sociology and the general essays on social evolution), Kidd, 
 Nordau, Nietzsche, Mr. Crozier (his important History of Civiliza- 
 tion), and Demolins, 4 and the predominance of investigations into 
 general biology and comparative psychology and sociology over 
 merely logical and conceptual philosophy seem to afford us some 
 warrant for trying to think of what might be called a newer or 
 ethical idealism, an idealism of the will, an idealism of life, in 
 
 1 Mental Development — Social and Ethical Interpretations (a work 
 crowned by the Royal Academy of Denmark). We can see in this 
 book how a psychologist has been led into a far-reaching study of 
 social and ethical development in order to gain an understanding of the 
 growth of even the individual mind. We may indeed say that the 
 individualistic intellectualism of the older psychology is now no more. 
 It was too " abstract " a way of looking at mind. Professor Royce, it is 
 well known, has given, from the stand-point of a professed meta- 
 physician, a cordial welcome to the work of Professor Baldwin. In an 
 important review of Mr. Stout's two admirable volumes on Analytic 
 Psychology {Mind, July, 1897), Professor Royce has insisted strongly 
 upon the need of supplementing introspection by the " interpretation 
 of the reports and the conduct of other people " if we would know much 
 about " dynamic " psychology. It is this " dynamic " psychology — 
 the " dynamics " of the will and of the " feelings " — that I think consti- 
 tutes such an important advance upon the traditional " intellectual " 
 and " individualistic " psychology. 
 
 2 The Psychology of the Moral Self. Macmillan, 1897. I have tried, 
 in a short notice of this book in the Philosophical Review (March, 1898), 
 to indicate the importance of some of its chief contentions. 
 
 3 Philosophical Lectures and Remains, edited by Professor Bradley. 
 
 * Editor of La Science Sociale. His recent work on the Superiority of 
 the Anglo-Saxons (A quoi tient la supiriorite des Anglo-Saxons ?) — a 
 chapter in the study of the conditions of race survival — ran through 
 seventeen editions in a few months, and set the whole press of France 
 and Germany (other countries following suit) into commotion, as well as 
 calling forth pronunciamientos from most of the prominent editors and 
 critics of France, — men like Jules Lemaitre, Paul Bourget, Marcel 
 Prevost, Francois Coppee, Edouard Rod, G. Valbert, etc.
 
 APPENDIX in 
 
 contradistinction to the older or intellectual (epistemological, Neo- 
 Kantian) idealism, the idealism of the intellect. Professor A. 
 Seth, 1 in his recent volume on Man's Place in the Cosmos, suggests 
 that Mr. Bradley's treatise on Appearance and Reality has closed 
 the period of the absorption or assimilation of Kanto-Hegelian 
 principles by the English mind. And there is ample evidence in 
 contemporary philosophical literature to show that even the very 
 men who have, with the help of Stirling and Green and Caird and 
 Bradley and Wallace, " absorbed and assimilated " the principles 
 of critical idealism are now bent upon applying these principles to 
 the solution of concrete problems of art and life and conduct. 
 Two things alone would constitute a difference between the philo- 
 sophy of the last few years and that of the preceding generation : 
 An attempt (strongly 2 accentuated at the present moment) to 
 include elements of feeling and will in our final consciousness of 
 reality, and a tendency (inevitable since Comte and Hegel's 
 Philosophy of History) to extend the philosophical synthesis of the 
 merely " external," or physical, universe so as to make it include 
 the world of man's action and the world that is now glibly called 
 the "social organism." 3 A good deal of the epistemological and 
 
 1 Now Professor A. Seth Pringle-Pattison. 
 
 2 In different ways by all of the following English writers : Professor 
 A. Seth (" It is not in knowledge, then, as such, but in feeling and action 
 that reality is given," Man's Place, etc., p. 122, etc. etc.), by Mr. 
 Bradley {Appearance and Reality), by Mr. Balfour (in his Foundations of 
 Belief), and by Professor James. Professor Eucken, of Jena, in his 
 different books, also insists strongly upon the idea that it is not in 
 knowledge as such, but in the totality of our psychical experience that 
 the principles of philosophy must be sought. Paulsen, in his Einleitung 
 in die Philosophic, and Weber, in his History of Philosophy (books in 
 general use to-day), both advocate a kind of philosophy of the will, the 
 idea that the world is to be regarded as a striving on the part of wills 
 after a partly unconscious ideal. Simmel, in an important article in 
 the Revue de Metaphysique et de Morale, IV. 2, expresses the idea (which 
 it would be well to recognize generally at the present time) that truth is 
 not something objectively apart from us, but rather the name we give 
 to conceptions that have proved to be the guides to useful actions, and 
 so become part of the psychical heritage of human beings. Professor 
 Ribot, of Paris, has written more extensively upon the will and the 
 feelings than upon the intellect, — a fact in keeping with the scientific 
 demands of our day. 
 
 3 See, e.g., an article by Fouillee in the Revue Philosophique, XXI. 5, 
 with the very title " Nccessite d'une interpretation psychologique et 
 sociologique du monde." Fouillee finds there, as he does elsewhere, 
 that will is the principle that enables us to unify the physical with the 
 psychical world, — an illustration of the fact that the two characteristics 
 I am referring to are really one. A present instance of the intro- 
 duction of the element of will (the will of man, even) is to be seen in 
 the contention of such a book as M. Lucien Arreat's Les Croyances de
 
 ii2 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM 
 
 metaphysical philosophy of this century has been merely cosmo- 
 logical, and at best psychological and individualistic. The philo- 
 sophy of the present is, necessarily, to a large extent, sociological 
 and collectivistic and historical. Renan once prophesied that this 
 would be so. And many other men perceived the same fact and 
 acted upon their perception of it — Goethe and Victor Hugo and 
 Carlyle, for example. 
 
 To be sure, any attempt to draw lines of novel and absolute 
 separation between writers of to-day and their immediate prede- 
 cessors would be absurd and impossible, just as would be the 
 attempt to force men who are still living and thinking and develop- 
 ing, into Procrustean beds of system and nomenclature. The 
 history of the philosophy of the last half of this century constitutes 
 a development as continuous and as logical as the philosophy of 
 any similar period of years wherein men have thought persistently 
 and truly upon the problems of life and mind. There were in the 
 'sixties men like Ulrici and Lotze (Renouvier, too, to some extent) 
 who divined the limitations of a merely intellectual philosophy, 
 and who saw clearly that the only way to effect a reconciliation 
 between philosophy and science would be to apply philosophy 
 itself to the problems of the life and thought of the time, just as 
 we find, in 1893, Dr. Edward Caird writing, in his Essays on 
 Literature and Philosophy, that " philosophy, in face of the 
 increasing complexity of modern life, has a harder task laid upon 
 it than ever was laid upon it before. It must emerge from the 
 region of abstract principles and show itself able to deal with the 
 manifold results of empirical science, giving to each of them its 
 proper place and value." Professor Campbell Fraser, while 
 welcoming and sympathetically referring to (in his books upon 
 Berkeley and Locke) the elements of positive value in English 
 and German idealism, has throughout his life contended for the 
 idea (expressed with greatest definiteness in his Gifford Lectures 
 on The Philosophy of Theism) that " in man, as a self-conscious 
 and self -determining agent," is to be found the " best key we 
 possess to the solution of the ultimate problem of the universe " ; 
 while Professor Sidgwick, by virtue of his captivating and 
 ingenious pertinacity in confining philosophical speculation to the 
 fines of the traditional English empiricism, and in keeping it free 
 from the ensnaring subtleties of system and methodology, has 
 exercised a healthful and corrective influence against the ex- 
 tremes alike of transcendentalism and naturalism. And it would 
 
 Demain (1898). According to Mind, M. Arreat proposes to substitute 
 the idea that man can by his efforts bring about the supremacy of 
 justice for the traditional idea that justice reigns in the universe.
 
 APPENDIX 113 
 
 be rash to maintain that all the younger men in philosophy show 
 an intention to act upon the idea (expressed by Wundt, for 
 instance, in his Ethik) that a metaphysic should build upon the 
 facts of the moral life of man ; although we find a " Neo- 
 Hegelian " like Professor Mackenzie l saying that " even the 
 wealth of our inner life depends rather on the width of our 
 objective interests than on the intensity of our self-contempla- 
 tion " ; and an expounder of the ethics of dialectic evolution like 
 Professor Muirhead quoting 2 with approval the thought expressed 
 by George Eliot in the words, " The great world-struggle of 
 developing thought is continually foreshadowed in the struggle of 
 the affections seeking a justification for love and hope " ; and a 
 careful psychologist like Mr. Stout 3 deliberately penning the 
 words, 4 " Our existence as conscious beings is essentially an 
 activity, and activity is a process which, by its very nature, is 
 directed towards an end, and can neither exist nor be conceived 
 apart from this end." There are, doubtless, many philosophers 
 of to-day who are convinced that philosophy is purely an intel- 
 lectual matter, and can never be anything else than an attempt to 
 analyze the world for thought — an attempt to state its value in the 
 terms of thought. Against all these and many similar considera- 
 tions it would be idle to set up a hard and fast codification or 
 characterization of the work of the philosophy or philosophers of 
 to-day. Still, the world will accord the name of philosopher to 
 any man — Renan, for example, or Spencer or Huxley or Nordau 
 or Nietzsche — who comes before it with views upon the universe 
 and humanity that may, for any conceivable reason, be regarded 
 as fundamental. And on this showing of things, as well as from 
 many indications in the work of those who are philosophers by 
 profession, it may be said that the predominating note of the 
 newer philosophy is its openness to the facts of the volitional and 
 emotional and moral and social aspects of man's life, as things 
 that take us further along the path of truth than the mere cate- 
 gories of thought and their manipulation by metaphysic and 
 epistemology. 
 
 II. The Newer Idealism does not dream of questioning the 
 positive work of the Kantian and Neo- Kantian and Neo-Hegelian 
 idealists. It knows only too well that even scientific men like 
 
 1 Manual of Ethics, according to Mr. Stout, International Journal of 
 Ethics, October 1894. There are many similar sentences and ideas in 
 the book. 
 
 2 Elements of Ethics, p. 232. 
 
 8 Now Professor of Logic in St. Andrews. 
 
 * International Journal of Ethics, October 1894, p. 119. 
 
 8
 
 1 1 4 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM 
 
 HeLmholtz and Du Bois Reymond, that " positive " philosophers 
 like Riehl and Laas and Feuerbach and others have, through the 
 influence of the Kantian philosophy, learned and accepted the 
 fact of there being " ideal " or psychical or " mind-supplied " 
 factors in so-called external reality. There are among the 
 educated men of to-day very few Dr. Johnsons who ridicule the 
 psycho-physical, or the metaphysical, analysis of external reality, 
 who believe in a crass and crude and self-sufficient " matter " 
 utterly devoid of psychical attributes or characteristics. True, 
 Herbert Spencer has written words to the effect that " If the 
 Idealist (Berkeley) is right, then the doctrine of Evolution is 
 a dream " ; but then everything in Spencer's philosophy about 
 an " actuality lying behind appearances " and about our being 
 compelled " to regard every phenomenon as a manifestation of 
 some Power by which we are acted upon," is against the possi- 
 bility of our believing that, according to that philosophy, an 
 unconscious and non-spiritual " matter " could evolve itself into 
 conscious life and moral experience. The philosophers of to-day 
 have indeed rejoiced to see Kant's lesson popularized by such 
 various phases and movements of human thought as psycho- 
 physical research, art and aesthetic theory, the interest in 
 Buddhism (with its idealistic theory of the knowledge of the 
 senses), and the speculative biology of Weismann and others. 
 That people generally should see that matter is, for many reasons, 
 something more than mere matter, is to the student of Kant a 
 piece of fulfilled prophecy. And by a plea for a return to reality 
 and life and sociability from conceptualism and criticism and 
 speculative individualism no philosophical scholar for one moment 
 contemplates, as even conceivable, an overlooking of the idealistic 
 interpretation of the data of the senses supplied by Locke and 
 Berkeley and Hume, or of the idealistic interpretation of the data 
 of science and understanding supplied by Kant's " Copernican " 
 discovery. Any real view of the universe must now presuppose 
 the melting down of crass external reality into the phenomena of 
 sense and experience and the transformation of inorganic and 
 organic nature into so many planes or grades of being expressive 
 of the different forms (gravitation, cohesion, vital force, psychic 
 force) in which cosmic energy manifests itself. 
 
 Equally little does the Newer Idealism question the legitimacy 
 or the actual positive service of the " dialectic " of Hegel (as 
 Archimedean a leverage to humanity as was the " concept " of 
 Socrates or the " apperception " of Kant) that has shown the 
 world to be a system in which everything is related to everything 
 else, and shown, too, that all ways of looking at reality that stop
 
 APPENDIX 115 
 
 short of the truths of personality and moral relationship are untrue 
 and inadequate. To use the words of Professor Howison, of 
 California, in the preface to the first edition of Professor Watson's J 
 latest volume (a book that connects the idealism of Glasgow and 
 Oxford with the convictions of the youth of the " Pacific Coast "), 
 the " dominant tone " of the militant and representative philosophy 
 of to-day, is " affirmative and idealistic. The decided majority 
 . . . are animated by the conviction that human thought is able 
 to solve the riddle of life positively ; to solve it in accord with the 
 ideal hopes and interests of human nature." 
 
 1 I think that I must here have meant Professor Watson's 
 Christianity and Idealism.
 
 CHAPTER V 
 
 CRITICAL 
 
 Enough has perhaps now been said by way of an 
 indication of some of the main characteristics of 
 Pragmatism, and of the matter of its relations to 
 ordinary and to philosophical thinking. Its com- 
 plexity and some of its confusions and some of 
 its difficulties have also been referred to. 
 
 As for the affiliations and the associations of 
 Pragmatism, it would seem that it rests not so 
 much upon its own mere instrumentalism and 
 practicalism as upon some of the many broader 
 and deeper tendencies in ancient and modern 
 thought that have aimed at a dynamic, instead 
 of a static, interpretation of reality. 
 
 We have suggested, too, that there are evidently 
 things in traditional philosophy and in Rationalism 
 of which it fails to take cognizance, although it 
 has evidently many things to give to Rationalism 
 in the way of a constructive philosophy of human 
 life. 
 
 Now it would be easily possible to continue 
 our study of Pragmatism along some or all of those 
 different lines and points of view. In the matter, 
 
 116
 
 CRITICAL 117 
 
 for example, of the affiliations and associations 
 of Pragmatism, we could show that, in addition 
 to such things as the "nominalism" and the 
 utilitarianism, and the positivism, and the " volun- 
 tarism " and the philosophy of hypotheses, and 
 the " anti-intellectualism " already referred to, 
 Pragmatism has an affinity with things as far 
 apart and as different as the Scottish Philosophy 
 of Common-sense, the sociological philosophy of 
 Comte and his followers, the philosophy of Fichte 
 with its great idea of the world as the " sensualized 
 sphere " of our duty, the " experience " philosophy 
 of Bacon and of the entire modern era, and so on. 
 There is even a "romantic" element in Prag- 
 matism, and it has, in fact, been called " romantic 
 utilitarianism." 1 We can understand this if we 
 think of M. Berthelot's 2 association of it not only 
 
 1 And apart from the idealism and the ethical philosophy of which 
 I speak, in the next chapter, as necessary to convert Pragmatism into 
 the Humanism it would like to become, Pragmatism is really a kind of 
 romanticism, the reaction of a personal enthusiasm against the abstrac- 
 tions of a classical rationalism in philosophy. There is an element of 
 this romanticism in James's heroic philosophy of life, although I would 
 prefer to be the last man in the world to talk against this heroic romanti- 
 cism in any one. It is the great want of our time, and it is the thing 
 that is prized most in some of the men whom this ephemeral age of 
 ours still delights to honour. It was exhibited both in Browning and 
 in George Meredith, for example. Of the former Mr. Chesterton writes 
 in his trenchant, clean-sweeping little book on The Victorian Age in 
 Literature, p. 175 : " What he really was was a romantic. He offered 
 the cosmos as an adventure rather than a scheme." The same thing 
 could be said about James's *' Will to Believe " Philosophy. Meredith, 
 although far less of an idealist than Browning, was also an optimist by 
 temperament rather than by knowledge or by conviction — hence the 
 elevation of his tone and style in spite of his belated naturalism. 
 
 1 In Un Romantisme utilitaire (Paris, Alcan, 191 1), chiefly a study 
 of the Pragmatism of Nietzsche and Poincare.
 
 n8 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM 
 
 with Poincare, but with Nietzsche, or of Dr. 
 Schiller's famous declaration that the genius of 
 a man's logical method should be loved and 
 reverenced by him as is " his bride." 
 
 And there is always in it, to be sure, the im- 
 portant element of sympathy with the religious 
 instincts of mankind. And this is the case, too, 
 whether these instincts are contemplated in some 
 of the forms to which reference has already been 
 made, or in the form, say, expressed by such a 
 typical modern thinker as the late Henry Sidgwick, 
 in his conviction that " Humanity will not, and 
 cannot, acquiesce in a Godless world." 1 
 
 Then again we might take up the point of the 
 relations of Pragmatism to doctrines new and old 
 in the history of philosophy, to the main points of 
 departure of different schools of thought, or to 
 fundamental and important positions in many of 
 the great philosophers. The writer finds that he 
 has noticed in this connexion the doctrines of 
 Stoicism and Epicureanism, 2 the " probability ' 
 
 1 I am indebted for this saying of one of my old teachers to Mr. 
 C. F. G. Masterman, in his essay upon Sidgwick in that judicious 
 and interesting book upon the transition from the nineteenth to the 
 twentieth century, In Peril of Change. 
 
 2 Stoicism and Epicureanism, as the matter is generally put, both 
 substitute the practical good of man as an individual for the 
 wisdom or the theoretical perfection that were contemplated by Plato 
 and Aristotle as the highest objects of human pursuit. For Cicero, too, 
 the chief problems of philosophy were in the main practical, the question 
 whether virtue alone is sufficient for happiness, the problem of practical 
 certainty as opposed to scepticism, the general belief in Providence and 
 in immortality, and so on. And Lucretius thinks of the main service 
 of philosophy as consisting in its power of emancipating the human 
 mind from superstition. All this is quite typical of the essentially
 
 CRITICAL 119 
 
 philosophy of Locke 1 and Butler, and Pascal, 
 the ethics and the natural theology of Cicero, 
 the " voluntarism " of Schopenhauer, 2 Aristotle's 
 philosophy of the Practical Reason, 3 Kant's philo- 
 sophy of the same, the religious philosophy of 
 theologians like Tertullian, Augustine, Duns Scotus, 
 and so on — to take only a few instances. 4 The 
 
 practical nature of the Roman character, of its conception of education 
 as in the main discipline and duty, of its distrust of Greek intellectualism, 
 and of its preoccupation with the necessities of the struggle for existence 
 and for government, of its lack of leisure, and so on. I do not think 
 that the very first thing about Pragmatism is its desire to return to a 
 practical conception of life, although a tendency in this direction doubt- 
 less exists in it. 
 
 1 The idea that our " demonstrable knowledge is very short, if 
 indeed we have any at all, although our certainty is as great as our 
 happiness, beyond which we have no concernment to know or to be " 
 (Essay, iv. 2-14) ; or Locke's words : " I have always thought the actions 
 of men the best interpreters of their thoughts." 
 
 2 Schopenhauer, for example, used to be fond of repeating that his 
 own philosophy (which took will to be the fundamental reality) was on 
 its very face necessarily more of an ethic than a system like that of 
 Spinoza, for example, which could only be called an ethic by a sort 
 of Incus a non lucendo. 
 
 3 The Practical Reason to Aristotle is the reason that has to do with 
 the pursuit of aims and ends, in distinction from the reason that has 
 to do with knowledge, and the " universal " and science. This 
 twofold distinction has given many problems to his students and to his 
 commentators, and to succeeding generations. It is responsible for 
 the entire mediaeval and Renaissance separation of the intellectual life 
 and the intellectual virtues from the practical life and the practical 
 virtues. 
 
 4 It might be added here that Logic has always recognized the 
 validity, to some extent, of the argument " from consequences " of 
 which Pragmatism makes so much. The form of argumentation that 
 it calls the Dilemma is a proof of this statement. A chain of reasoning 
 that leads to impossible consequences, or that leads to consequences 
 inconsistent with previously admitted truths, is necessarily unsound. 
 That this test of tenable or untenable consequences has often 
 been used in philosophy in the large sense of the term must be known 
 only too well to the well-informed reader. As Sidgwick says in his 
 Method of Ethics : " The truth of a philosopher's premises will always
 
 120 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM 
 
 view of man and his nature represented by all these 
 names is, in the main, an essentially practical, 
 a concrete, and a moral view as opposed to 
 an abstract and a rationalistic view. And of 
 course even to Plato knowledge was only an 
 element in the total spiritual philosophy of man, 
 while his master, Socrates, never really seemed 
 to make any separation between moral and 
 intellectual inquiries. 
 
 And as for positions in the great philosophers 
 between which and some of the tendencies of 
 Pragmatism there is more than a merely super- 
 ficial agreement, we might instance, for example, 
 the tendency of Hume 1 to reduce many of the 
 leading categories of our thought to mere habits 
 of mind, to be explained on an instinctive rather 
 than a rationalistic basis ; or Comte's idea of the 
 error of separating reason from instinct ; 2 or the 
 idea of de Maistre and Bain, and many others that 
 " will " is implied in the notion of " exteriority " ; 
 
 be tested by the acceptability of his conclusions ; if in any im- 
 portant point he is found in flagrant conflict with common opinion, 
 his method will be declared invalid." Reid used the argument from 
 consequences in his examination of the sceptical philosophy of 
 Hume. It is used with effect in Mr. Arthur Balfour's Foundations 
 of Belief in regard to the supposed naturalism of physical science. 
 Edmund Burke applied it to some extent to political theories, or 
 to the abstract philosophical theories upon which some of them were 
 supposedly based. 
 
 1 Pragmatism has been called by some critics a " new-Humism " 
 on the ground of its tendency to do this very thing that is mentioned 
 here in respect of Hume. But the justice or the injustice of this appella- 
 tion is a very large question, into which it is needless for us to enter here. 
 
 2 Cf. " Intelligence is the aptitude to modify conduct in conformity 
 to the circumstances of each case " {The Positive Philosophy , Martineau, 
 i. 465).
 
 CRITICAL 121 
 
 or the idea of Descartes * that the senses teach 
 us not so much " what is in reality in things," as 
 " what is beneficial 2 or hurtful to the composite 
 whole of mind and body " ; or the declaration of 
 Kant that the chief end of metaphysic is God and 
 immortality ; or the idea of Spencer 3 that the 
 belief in the unqualified supremacy of reason is a 
 superstition of philosophers ; or the idea of Plato 
 in the Sophist 4 that reality is the capacity for acting 
 or of being acted upon ; and so on. 
 
 As for such further confirmation of pragmatist 
 teaching as is to be found in typical modern 
 thinking and scholars, thought of almost at 
 random, it would be easy to quote in this con- 
 nexion from writers as diverse as Hoffding, Fouill£e, 
 Simmel, Wundt, Mach, Huxley, Hobhouse, and 
 many others. It might be called a typically 
 pragmatist idea, for example, on the part of Mr. 
 L. T. Hobhouse to hold that "The higher con- 
 ceptions by which idealism has so firmly held are 
 not to be ' scientifically ' treated in the sense of 
 being explained away. What is genuinely higher 
 
 1 Principles of Philosophy, Part II. iii. It is also an eminently 
 pragmatist idea on the part of Descartes to hold that " I should find 
 much more truth in the reasoning of each individual with reference to 
 the affairs in which he is personally interested, and the issue of which 
 must presently punish him if he has judged amiss, than in those con- 
 ducted by a man of letters in his study, regarding speculative matters 
 that are of no practical moment " (Method, Veitch's edition, p. 10). 
 
 2 Principles of Philosophy, Part II. iii. p. 233. 
 
 3 See Principles of Psychology, ch. ii., " Assumption of Meta- 
 physicians," and also elsewhere in his Essays. 
 
 4 " Any power of doing or suffering in a degree however slight was 
 held by us to be the definition of existence " (Sophist, Jowett's Plato, 
 iv. p. 465).
 
 122 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM 
 
 we have . . . good reason to think must also be 
 truest," and we "cannot permanently acquiesce 
 in a way of thinking what would resolve it into 
 what is lowest." x These last words represent 
 almost a commonplace of the thought of the day. 
 It is held, for example, by men as different and as 
 far apart in their work, and yet as typical of phases 
 of our modern life, as Robert Browning and Sir 
 Oliver Lodge. The close dependence again of the 
 doctrines of any science upon the social life and 
 the prevalent thought of the generation is also 
 essentially a pragmatist idea. Its truth is recog- 
 nized and insisted upon in the most explicit 
 manner in the recent serviceable manifesto of Pro- 
 fessors Geddes and Thomson upon " Evolution," 2 
 and it obviously affects their whole philosophy 
 of life and mind. It figures too quite promi- 
 nently in the valuable short Introduction to 
 Science by Professor Thomson in the same series 
 of manuals. 
 
 Another typical book of to-day, again (that of 
 Professor Duncan on the New Knowledge of the new 
 physical science), definitely gives up, for example, 
 the " correspondence " 3 notion of truth, holding 
 that it is meaningless to think of reality as sorae- 
 
 1 The Theory of Knowledge, Preface, p. ix. 
 
 2 " The independence of the doctrines of any science from the social 
 life, the prevalent thought of the generation in which they arise, is 
 indeed a fiction, a superstition of the scientist which we would fain 
 shatter beyond all repair ; but the science becomes all the sounder for 
 recognizing its origins and its resources, its present limitations and its 
 need of fresh light from other minds, from different social moulds " 
 (pp. 215-216). 
 
 8 See p. 81.
 
 CRITICAL 123 
 
 thing outside our thought and our experience of 
 which our ideas might be a possible duplicate. This 
 again we readily recognize as an essentially prag- 
 matist contention. So also is the same writer's 
 rejection of the notion of " absolute truth," J and 
 his confession of the "faith" that is always 
 involved in the thought of completeness or system 
 in our scientific knowledge. " We believe purely 
 as an act of faith and not at all of logic," he says, 
 " that the universe is essentially determinable 
 thousands of years hence, into some one system 
 which will account for everything and which will 
 be the truth." 2 
 
 Nor would it be at all difficult to find confirma- 
 tion for the pragmatist philosophy of ideas and 
 thoughts in what we may well think of as the 
 general reflective literature of our time, outside the 
 sphere, as it were, of strictly rational or academic 
 philosophy — in writers like F. D. Maurice, W. 
 Pater, A. W. Benn (who otherwise depreciates 
 what he calls " ophelism ") , J. H. Newman, Karl 
 Pearson, Carlyle, and others. 3 Take the following, 
 
 * Cf. p. 13. 
 
 4 The New Knowledge, p. 255. 
 
 3 It would indeed be easy to quote from popular writers of the day, 
 like Mr. Chesterton or Mr. A. C. Benson or Mr. H. G. Wells, to show that 
 a knowledge of the existence of Pragmatism as a newer experimental 
 or " sociological " philosophy is now a commonplace of the day. Take 
 the following, for example, from Mr. Wells's Marriage (p. 521) : " It was 
 to be a pragmatist essay, a sustained attempt to undermine the con- 
 fidence of all that scholastic logic-chopping which still lingers like the 
 sequelae of a disease in our University philosophy ... a huge criticism 
 and cleaning up of the existing methods of formulation as a preliminary 
 to the wider and freer discussion of those religious and social issues our 
 generation still shrinks from." " It is grotesque," he said, " and utterly
 
 124 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM 
 
 for example, quoted with approval from Herschel 
 by Karl Pearson : " The grand and indeed the 
 only character of truth is its capability of enduring 
 the test of universal experience, and coming un- 
 changed out of every possible form of fair dis- 
 cussion." x The idea again, for example, recently 
 expressed in a public article by such a widely read 
 and cleverly perverse writer as Mr. Bernard Shaw, 2 
 that " the will that moves us is dogmatic : our 
 brain is only the very imperfect instrument by 
 which we devise practical means for satisfying 
 the will," might only too naturally be associated 
 with the pragmatist-like anti-intellectualism 3 of 
 Bergson, or, for that part of it, with the deeper 
 " voluntarism " of Schopenhauer. The following 
 quotation taken from Mr. Pater reveals how great 
 may be correspondence between the independent 
 findings of a finely sensitive mind like his, and the 
 positions to which the pragmatists are inclined in 
 respect of the psychology of religious belief. " The 
 supposed facts on which Christianity rests, utterly 
 incapable as they have become of any ordinary 
 test, seem to me matter of very much the same 
 sort of assent as we give to any assumption in the 
 strict and ultimate sense, moral. The question 
 whether these facts were real will, I think, always 
 continue to be what I should call one of those 
 
 true that the sanity and happiness of all the world lies in its habits of 
 generalization." 
 
 1 I cannot meantime trace, or place, this quotation, although I 
 remember copying it out of something by Karl Pearson. 
 
 2 In the Literary Digest for 191 1. 3 See p. 234.
 
 CRITICAL 125 
 
 natural questions of the human mind." l Readers 
 of Carlyle will easily recognize what we might call 
 a more generalized statement of this same truth 
 of Pater's in the often-quoted words from Heroes 
 and Hero-Worship : 2 "By religion I do not mean 
 the church creed which a man professes, the 
 articles of faith which .... But the thing a man 
 does practically believe (and this often enough 
 without asserting it even to himself, much less to 
 others); the thing a man does practically lay to 
 heart and know for certain concerning his vital 
 relations to the mysterious universe, and his duty 
 and destiny there." It has long seemed to the 
 writer that a similar thing to this might be written 
 (and James has certainly written it) about a man's 
 " philosophy " as necessarily inclusive of his 
 working beliefs as well as of his mere reasoned 
 opinions, although it is the latter that are 
 generally (by what right ?) taken to be properly 
 the subject-matter of philosophy. 3 And it is this 
 phase of the pragmatist philosophy that could, I 
 am inclined to think, be most readily illustrated 
 from the opinions of various living and dead writers 
 upon the general working philosophy of human 
 nature as we find this revealed in human history. 
 We are told, for example, by Mr. Hobhouse, in his 
 monumental work upon Morals in Evolution, that 
 in " Taoism the supreme principle of things may 
 
 1 From a letter to Mrs. Humphry Ward, quoted in A. C Benson's 
 Walter Pater, p. 200. 2 Lecture I. towards the beginning. 
 
 3 See p. 62 and p. 197. It should be remembered that our reasoned 
 opinions rest upon our working beliefs.
 
 i 2 6 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM 
 
 be left undefined as something that we experience 
 in ourselves if we throw ourselves upon it, but 
 which we know rather by following or living it 
 than by any process of ratiocination." 1 And 
 " this mystical interpretation," he adds, " is not 
 confined to Taoism, but in one form or another 
 lies near to hand to all spiritual religions, and 
 expresses one mode of religious consciousness, its 
 aspiration to reach the heart of things and the 
 confidence that it has done so, and found rest 
 there." 
 
 We are reminded, of course, by all such con- 
 siderations of the philosophy of Bergson, and of its 
 brilliant attempt to make a synthesis of intuition 
 or instinct with reflection or thought, and indeed 
 it may well be that the past difficulties of philo- 
 sophy with intuition and instinct are due to the 
 fact of its error in unduly separating the intellect 
 from the " will to live," and from the " creative " 
 evolution that have been such integral factors in 
 the evolution of the life of humanity. 
 
 This entire matter, however, of the comparison 
 of pragmatist doctrines to typical tendencies in 
 the thought of the past and the present must be 
 treated by us as subordinate to our main purpose, 
 that of the estimation of the place of Pragmatism 
 in the constructive thought of the present time. 
 With a view to this it will be necessary to revert 
 to the criticism of Pragmatism. 
 
 The criticism that has already been made is 
 
 * Vol. ii. p. 86.
 
 CRITICAL 127 
 
 that in the main Pragmatism is unsystematic and 
 complex and confusing, that it has no adequate 
 theory of " reality," and no unified theory of 
 philosophy, that it has no satisfactory criterion of 
 the " consequences " by which it proposes to test 
 truth, and that it has not worked out its philosophy 
 of the contribution of the individual with his 
 " activity " and his " purposes " to " reality " 
 generally, and that it is in danger of being a failure 
 in the realm of ethics. 1 
 
 To all this we shall now seek to add a few words 
 more upon (1) the pragmatist criterion of truth, 
 (2) the weakness of Pragmatism in the realms of 
 logic and theory of knowledge, (3) its failure to 
 give consistent account of the nature of reality, 
 and (4) its unsatisfactoriness in the realm of 
 ethics. 
 
 (1) We have already expressed our agreement 
 with the finding of Professor Pratt 2 that the prag- 
 matist theory of truth amounts to no more than the 
 harmless doctrine that the meaning of any con- 
 ception expresses itself in the past, present, or 
 future conduct or experiences of actual, or possible, 
 sentient creatures. Taken literally, however, the 
 doctrine that truth should be tested by con- 
 sequences is not only harmless but also useless, 
 seeing that Omniscience alone could bring together 
 in thought or in imagination all the consequences 
 of an assertion. Again, it is literally false for the 
 
 1 Sec the reference in Chapter II. p. 26 to the opportunistic ethic 
 of Prezzolini. a In What is Pragmatism? Macmillan & Co.
 
 128 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM 
 
 reason that the proof of truth is not in the first 
 instance any kind of " consequences," not even 
 the " verification " of which pragmatists are so 
 fond. If the truth of which we may happen to 
 be thinking is truth of " fact," its proof lies in its 
 correspondence (despite the difficulties 1 of the idea) 
 with the results of observation or perception. 2 
 And if it be inferential truth, its proof is that of 
 its deduction from previously established truths, 
 or facts, upon a certain plane of knowledge 
 or experience. In short, Pragmatists forget 
 altogether the logical doctrine of the existence 
 (in the world of our human experience, of course) 
 of different established planes of reality, or 
 planes of ascertained knowledge in which all pro- 
 positions that are not nonsensical or trivial, are, 
 from their very inception, regarded as necessarily 
 true or false. The existence of these various 
 planes of experience or of thought is in fact implied 
 in the pragmatist doctrine of the fundamental 
 character of belief. 3 According to this perfectly 
 correct doctrine, the objectivity of truth (i.e. its 
 reality or non-reality in the world of fact or in the 
 world of rational discourse) is the essential thing 
 about it, while the idea of its "consequences' 
 is not. A truth is a proposition whose validity 
 has already been established by evidence or 
 
 i Cf. p. 81. 
 
 2 Professor Pratt makes an attempt in his book on What is Prag- 
 matism ? (pp. 75-6-7) to show that the true meaning of the " correspond- 
 ence theory" is not inconsistent with Pragmatism or that Pragmatism 
 is not inconsistent with this truth. 
 
 8 Cf. supra, p. 64.
 
 CRITICAL 129 
 
 by demonstration. It has then afterwards the 
 immediate "utility" of expressing in an intelli- 
 gible and convenient manner the fact of certain 
 connexions among things or events. And its 
 ultimate utility to mankind is also at the same 
 time assured, humanity being by its very nature a 
 society of persons who must act, and who act, upon 
 what they believe to be the truth or the reality 
 of things. But a proposition is by no means 
 true because it is useful. Constantine believed 
 eminently in the concord-producing utility of 
 certain confessions enunciated at the Council of 
 Nice, but his belief in this does not prove their 
 truth or reality outside the convictions of the faith- 
 ful. Nor does the pragmatist or utilitarian char- 
 acter of certain portions of the writings of the 
 Old Testament or of the Koran prove the matter 
 of their literal and factual truth in the ordinary 
 sense of these terms. As Hume said, " When any 
 opinion leads us into absurdities 'tis certainly false, 
 but 'tis not certain that an opinion is false because 
 it has dangerous consequences." 
 
 And then, apart from this conspicuous absence 
 of logic in the views of pragmatists upon " truth," 
 the expression of their doctrine is so confusing that 
 it is almost impossible to extract any consistent 
 meaning out of it. They are continually con- 
 founding conceptions and ideas and propositions, 
 forgetful of the fact that truth resides not in 
 concepts and ideas but only in propositions. 
 While it may be indeed true, as against Rationalism,
 
 130 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM 
 
 that all human conceptions whatsoever [and 
 it is only in connexion with " conceptions " that 
 Pragmatism is defined even in such an official place 
 as Baldwin's Dictionary of Philosophy x ] have, and 
 must have, reference to actual or possible human 
 experience or consequences, it is by no means true 
 that the test of a proposition is anything other 
 than the evidence of which we have already spoken. 
 
 Then the pragmatists have never adequately 
 defined terms that are so essential to their purposes 
 as " practical," " truth," " fact," " reality," " con- 
 sequences," and they confound, too, " theories " 
 with " truths " and " concepts " just as they 
 confound concepts and propositions. 
 
 (2) That logic and the theory of proof is thus 
 one of the weak spots of Pragmatism has perhaps 
 then been sufficiently indicated. We have seen, 
 in fact, the readiness of Pragmatism to confess its 
 inability 2 to prove its own philosophy — that is, 
 to prove it in the ordinary sense of the term. 3 
 That it should have made this confession is, of 
 course, only in keeping with the fact that its 
 interest in logic is confined to such subordinate 
 topics as the framing and verification of hypo- 
 theses, the development of concepts and judg- 
 ments in the " thought-process," and so on. Of 
 complete proof, as involving both deduction 
 
 1 See the Note on p. 21. 
 
 2 Cf. supra, p. 67. 
 
 3 Papini, in fact (in 1907), went the length of saying that you cannot 
 even define Pragmatism, admitting that it appeals only to certain kinds 
 of persons.
 
 CRITICAL 131 
 
 and induction, it takes but the scantiest 
 recognition. And it has made almost no effort 
 to connect its discoveries in " genetic logic " and 
 in the theory of hypotheses with the traditional 
 body of logical doctrine. 1 Nor, as may perhaps be 
 inferred from the preceding paragraph, has it made 
 any serious attempt to consider the question of the 
 discovery of new truth in relation to the more or 
 less perfectly formulated systems and schemes of 
 truth already in the possession of mankind. 
 
 The case is similar in regard to the " theory of 
 knowledge " of the pragmatists. While they have 
 made many important suggestions regarding the 
 relation of all the main categories and principles 
 of our human thought to the theoretical and 
 practical needs of mankind, there is in their 
 teachings little that is satisfactory and explicit 
 in the matter of the systematization of first 
 principles, 2 and little too that is satisfactory in 
 respect of the relation of knowledge to reality. 
 They sometimes admit (with James) the importance 
 of general points of view like the " causal," the 
 "temporal," "end," and "purpose," and so on. 
 At other times they confess with Schiller that 
 questions about ultimate truth and ultimate 
 
 1 For a serviceable account, in English, of the differences between 
 the pragmatist philosophy of hypotheses and the more fully developed 
 philosophy of science of the day, see Father Walker's Theories of 
 Knowledge, chapter xiii., upon " Pragmatism and Physical Science." 
 
 2 Cf. supra, p. 10 and p. 15. And this failure to systematize be- 
 comes, it should be remembered, all the more exasperating, in view of 
 the prominence given by the pragmatists to the supreme principles of 
 " end " and " consequences."
 
 i 3 2 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM 
 
 reality cannot be allowed to weigh upon our spirits, 
 seeing that " actual knowing " always starts from 
 the " existing situation." 
 
 Now of course actual knowing certainly does 
 start from the particular case of the existing 
 situation, but, as all thinkers from Aristotle 
 to Hume have seen, it is by no means explained 
 by this existing situation. In real knowledge 
 this is always made intelligible by references to 
 points of view and to experiences that altogether 
 transcend it. The true theory of knowledge, in 
 short, involves the familiar Kantian distinction 
 between the " origin ' and the " validity " of 
 knowledge — a thing that the pragmatists seem 
 continually and deliberately to ignore. Schiller, 
 to be sure, reminds us with justice that we must 
 endeavour to " connect," rather than invariably 
 " contrast," the two terms of this distinction. 
 But this again is by no means what the pragmatists 
 themselves have done. They fail, in fact, to 
 connect their hints about the practical or ex- 
 perimental origin of most of our points of view 
 about reality with the problem of the validity 
 of first principles generally. 
 
 There is a suggestion here and there in their 
 writings that, as Schiller * puts it, there can be no 
 coherent system of postulates except as rooted 
 in personality, and that there are postulates 
 at every stage of our development. What this 
 statement means is that there are " points of 
 
 1 In the " Axioms as Postulates " essay in Personal Idealism.
 
 CRITICAL 133 
 
 view " about reality that are incidental to the 
 stage of our natural life (as beings among other 
 beings), others to the stage of conscious sensations 
 and feelings, still others to that of our desires 
 and thoughts, to our aesthetic appreciation, to 
 our moral life, and so on. But, as I have already 
 said, there is little attempt on the part of the 
 pragmatists to distinguish these different stages 
 or planes of experience adequately from one 
 another. 
 
 (3) References have already been made to the 
 failures of our Anglo-American pragmatists to 
 attain to any intelligible and consistent kind of 
 reality, whether they conceive of this latter 
 as the sum-total of the efforts of aspiring and 
 achieving human beings, or with Schiller as an 
 "original, plastic sub-stratum," or as the reality 
 (whatever it is) that is gradually being brought 
 into being by the creative efforts of ourselves and 
 of beings higher or lower than ourselves in the 
 scale of existence. Their deepest thought in the 
 matter seems to be that the universe (our universe ?) 
 is essentially " incomplete," and that the truth of 
 God, as James puts it, " has to run the gauntlet 
 of other truths." One student of this topic, 
 Professor Leighton, has arrived at the conclusion 
 that pragmatism is essentially " acosmistic," x 
 
 1 Bourdeau makes the same charge, saying that all pragmatists 
 have the illusion that " reality is unstable." Professor Stout has 
 something similar in view in referring to Dr. Schiller's " primary 
 reality " in the Mind review of Studies in Humanism. It is only the 
 reality with which we have to do (reality vpbs was as an Aristotelian
 
 134 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM 
 
 meaning, no doubt, and with good reason, that 
 Pragmatism has no place of any kind for objective 
 order or system. Now it is just this palpable 
 lack of an " objective," or rational, order that 
 renders the whole pragmatist philosophy liable 
 to the charges of (i) " subjectivism," and (2) 
 irrationality. There are in it, as we have tried 
 to point out, abundant hints of what reality must 
 be construed to be on the principles of any workable 
 or credible philosophy, namely something that 
 stimulates both our thought and our endeavour. 
 And there is in it the great truth that in action 
 we are not only in contact with reality as 
 such, but with a reality, moreover, that transcends 
 the imperfect reality of our lives as finite individuals 
 and the imperfect character of our limited effort 
 and struggle. But beyond the vague hints that 
 our efforts must somehow count in the .final 
 tale of reality, and that what the world of ex- 
 perience seems to be, it must somehow be con- 
 ceived ultimately to be, there is no standing- 
 ground in the entire pragmatist philosophy for 
 want of what, in plain English, must be termed 
 an intelligible theory of reality. " You see," 
 says James, "how differently people take things. 
 The world we live in exists diffused and distributed 
 
 might say) that is " in the making " : for God there can be no such 
 distinction between process and product. But it is quite evident 
 that Pragmatism does not go far enough to solve, or even to see, such 
 difficulties. It confines itself in the main to the contention that man 
 must think of himself as a maker of reality to some extent — a conten- 
 tion that I hold to be both true and useful, as far as it goes.
 
 CRITICAL 135 
 
 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 take 
 them at that valuation. They can stand the 
 world, their temper being well adapted to its 
 insecurity." * 
 
 The present writer, some years ago, in an article 
 in Mind, 2 ventured to point out the absurdity of 
 expecting the public to believe in a philosophy 
 which sometimes speaks as if we could now, to-day, 
 by our efforts begin to make the world something 
 different from what it is or what it has been. " As 
 far as the past facts go," so James put it in 1899, 
 " there is indeed no difference. These facts are 
 bagged (is not the phraseology too recklessly 
 sporting ?), are captured, and the good that's in 
 them is gained, be the atoms, be the God their 
 cause." And again, " Theism and materialism, 
 so indifferent when taken retrospectively [?], 
 point, when we take them prospectively, to wholly 
 different, practical consequences, to opposite 
 outlooks of experience." And again, " But I say 
 that such an alternation of feelings, reasonable 
 enough in a consciousness that is prospective, as 
 ours now is, and whose world is partly yet to come, 
 would be absolutely senseless (!) and irrational in a 
 purely retrospective consciousness summing up a 
 world already past." Now on what theory of 
 things is it that the future of the world and our 
 future may be affected by ideal elements and 
 
 1 Pragmatism, p. 264. 2 "Pragmatism," October 1900.
 
 136 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM 
 
 factors (God, Freedom, Recompense, Justice) 
 without having been so affected or determined 
 in the past ? x 
 
 (4) The unsatisfactoriness of Pragmatism in 
 the realm of ethics. Crucial and hopeless as is 
 the failure of Pragmatism in the realm of ethics, 
 a word or two had better be said of the right of 
 the critic to judge of it in this connexion. In the 
 first place, the thinking public has already ex- 
 pressed its distrust of a doctrine that scruples not 
 to avow its affinity with utilitarianism, with the 
 idea of testing truth and value by mere conse- 
 quences and by the idea of the useful. " The 
 word ' expedient,' " wrote a correspondent to 
 Professor James, " has no other meaning than that 
 of self-interest. The pursuit of this has ended by 
 landing a number of officers of national banks in 
 penitentiaries. A philosophy that leads to such 
 results must be unsound." 
 
 Then again, Professor Dewey (now doubtless 
 the foremost living pragmatist) is the joint author 
 of a book upon ethics, the most prominent feature 
 of which is the application of pragmatist-like 
 methods and principles to moral philosophy. This 
 book sums up, too, a great many previous illuminat- 
 ing discussions of his own upon ethical and educa- 
 tional problems, for all of which, and for its general 
 application of the principles of Humanism to the 
 realm of morals he has deservedly won the 
 
 1 The same line of reflection will be found in James's Pragmatism, 
 p. 96.
 
 CRITICAL 137 
 
 praise of Professor James himself. So we have 
 thus the warrant both of the public and of Dewey 
 and James for seeking to judge Pragmatism from 
 the point of view of moral philosophy. 
 
 Another justification for seeking to judge of 
 Pragmatism from the point of view of moral 
 philosophy is that the whole weight of its 
 " humanism " and of its " valuation " philosophy 
 must inevitably fall upon its view of the moral 
 judgment. Dr. Schiller, we have seen, is quite 
 explicit in his opinion that for Humanism the roots 
 of metaphysics " lie, and must lie," in ethics. 
 And this is all the more the case, as it were, on 
 account of the proclamation 1 by Pragmatism of 
 the inability of Intellectualism to understand 
 morality, and also on account of its recurring 
 contention in respect of the merely hypothetical 
 character of all intellectual truth. 
 
 1 Professor Moore has a chapter in his book (Pragmatism and its 
 Critics) devoted to the purpose of showing the necessary failure of 
 Absolutism (or of an Intellectualism of the absolutist order) in the 
 realm of ethics, finding in the experimentalism and the quasi-Darwinism 
 of Pragmatism an atmosphere that is, to say the least, more favourable 
 to the realities of our moral experience. While I cannot find so much 
 as he does in the hit-and-miss ethical philosophy of Pragmatism, I 
 quite sympathize with him in his rejection of Absolutism or Rational- 
 ism as a basis for ethics. The following are some of his reasons for 
 this rejection : (1) The " purpose " that is involved in the ethical life 
 must, according to Absolutism, be an all-inclusive and a fixed purpose, 
 allowing of no " advance " and no " retreat " — things that are impera- 
 tive to the idea of the reality of our efforts. (2) Absolutism does not 
 provide for human responsibility ; to it all actions and purposes are 
 those of the Absolute. (3) The ethical ideal of Absolutism is too 
 " static." (4) Absolutism does not provide any material for " new 
 goals and new ideals." See pp. 218-225 in my eighth chapter, where I 
 censure, in the interest of Pragmatism and Humanism, the ethical 
 philosophy of Professor Bosanquet.
 
 138 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM 
 
 Now, unfortunately for Pragmatism, the one 
 thing that the otherwise illuminating book of 
 Dewey and Tufts almost completely fails to do, 
 as the writer has already sought to indicate, is to 
 provide a theory of the ordinary distinction 
 between right and wrong. 1 The only theme that 
 is really successfully pursued in this typically 
 American book is the " constant discovery, forma- 
 tion, and re-formation of the ' self ' in the ' ends ' 
 which an individual is called upon to sustain and 
 develop in virtue of his membership of a ' social 
 whole.' " But this is obviously a study in 
 " genetic psychology," or in the psychology of 
 ethics, but by no means a study in the theory of 
 ethics. " The controlling principle," it character- 
 istically tells us, " of the deliberation which renders 
 possible the formation of a voluntary or socialized 
 self out of our original instinctive impulses is the 
 love of the objects which make this transformation 
 possible." But what is it, we wish to know, that 
 distinguished the objects that make this trans- 
 formation possible from the objects that do not 
 do so ? The only answer that we can see in the 
 book is that anything is " moral " which makes 
 possible a "transition from individualism to efficient 
 social personality" — obviously again a purely 
 sociological point of view, leaving the question 
 of the standard of efficiency quite open. The 
 whole tendency, in short, of the pragmatist treat- 
 
 1 See p. 224, where I arrive at the conclusion that the same thing 
 may be said of the Absolutism of Dr. Bosanquet.
 
 CRITICAL 139 
 
 ment of ethical principles is to the effect that 
 standards and theories of conduct are valuable 
 only in so far as they are, to a certain extent, 
 " fruitful " in giving us a certain " surveying 
 power ' in the perplexities and uncertainties of 
 " direct personal behaviour." They are all, in 
 other words, merely relative or useful, and none 
 of them is absolute and authoritative. It is this 
 last thing, however, that is the real desider- 
 atum of ethical theory. And so far as practice is 
 concerned, all that this Pragmatism or " Relativ- 
 ism ' in morals inevitably leads to is the con- 
 clusion that whatever brings about a change, 
 or a result, or a " new formation," or a new 
 " development " of the moral situation, is neces- 
 sarily moral, that " growth " and " liberation " 
 and " fruitfulness," and " experimentation " are 
 everything, and moral scruples and conscience 
 simply nothing. In the celebrated phrase of 
 Nietzsche, " Everything is permissible and nothing 
 is true or binding." 
 
 Is not, then, this would-be ethical phase of 
 Pragmatism just too modernistic, too merely 
 practical, too merely illuminative and enlighten- 
 ing ? And would it not be better for the 
 youth of America (for Dewey's book is in the 
 American Science Series) and other countries to 
 learn that not everything " practical " and " forma- 
 tive ' and " liberative " and " socializing ' is 
 moral in the strict sense of the term ? ' In saying 
 
 1 Students of that important nineteenth-century book upon Ethics,
 
 140 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM 
 
 this I am, of course, giving but a very imperfect 
 idea of the contents of a book which is, in many 
 respects, both epoch-marking and epoch-making. 
 It is, however, unfortunately, in some respects, 
 only too much in touch with " present facts and 
 tendencies," with the regrettable tendency of 
 the hour, for example, to justify as right any 
 conduct that momentarily " improves the situa- 
 tion," or that " liberates the activities ' of the 
 parties concerned in it. It is not enough, in other 
 words (and this is all, I am inclined to think, that 
 Pragmatism can do in morals), to set up a some- 
 what suggestive picture of the " life of the moral 
 man in our present transitional ' and would- 
 be " constructive " age. A moral man does not 
 merely, in common parlance, " keep up with the 
 procession," going in for its endless "formations' 
 and " re-formations." He seeks to " lead "it, 
 and this leading of men, this setting up of a standard 
 of the legitimacy or of the illegitimacy of certain 
 social experiments is just what Pragmatism can- 
 not do in morals. 
 
 It is otherwise, doubtless, with a true human- 
 ism, or with the humanism that Pragmatism is 
 endeavouring to become. 
 
 the Methods of Ethics, by Henry Sidgwick, will remember that Sidgwick 
 expressly states it as a grave argument against Utilitarianism that it is 
 by no means confirmed by the study of the actual origin of moral 
 distinctions. As we go back in history we do not find that moral 
 prescriptions have merely a utilitarian value.
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 
 PRAGMATISM AS HUMANISM 
 
 In spite of the objections that have been brought 
 in the preceding chapters against Pragmatism as 
 Instrumentalism and Practicalism, the great 
 thing about Pragmatism as the Humanism 
 that it is tending to become is the position that it 
 virtually occupies in respect of the ethical and the 
 personal factors that enter into all our notions 
 about final truth. To Pragmatism the im- 
 portance of these factors in this connexion is 
 apparent from the outset, it being to it the merest 
 truism that by final truth we cannot mean " truth " 
 existing on its own account, but rather the truth 
 of the world as inclusive of man and his purposes. 
 For so much it stands by its very letter as well as 
 by its spirit. And if we can find any confirmation 
 for this attitude in some of the concessions of the 
 rationalists that have been previously mentioned, 
 so much the better, as it were, for Pragmatism. 
 
 Now it might well seem as if Pragmatism by 
 the denial of an absolute or impersonal truth is 
 
 so far simply another version of modern agnosti- 
 
 141
 
 142 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM 
 
 cism, or of the older doctrine of the " relativity " 
 of human knowledge. There is a great difference, 
 however, between these two things and Pragmatism. 
 A mere agnostical, or relativity, philosophy 
 generally carries with it the belief that the inmost 
 reality of things is both unknowable and out of all 
 relation alike to human purpose and to human 
 knowledge. Pragmatism, on the contrary, would 
 like to maintain — if it could do so logically — that 
 in human volition, we do know something about 
 the inward meaning of things, that the " develop- 
 mental " view of things is, when properly inter- 
 preted, the real view, that reality is at least what 
 it comes to be in our " purposes " and in our 
 ideals, and not something different from this. 
 
 The main reason, however, of the inability of 
 Pragmatism to do what it would like to do in this 
 connexion is what we have already complained 
 of as its failure either to recognize, or to use, the 
 help that could be afforded to it by (i) Idealism, 
 and by (2) the " normative " 1 view of ethical 
 science. 
 
 1 What I understand by the " normative idea of ethical science " 
 will become more apparent as I proceed. I may as well state, 
 however, that I look upon the distinction between the " descrip- 
 tive " ideals of science and the " normative " character of the ideals 
 of the ethical and the socio-political sciences as both fundamental 
 and far-reaching. There are two things, as it were, that constitute 
 what we might call the subject-matter of philosophy — "facts" 
 and " ideals " ; or, rather, it is the synthesis and reconciliation of 
 these two orders of reality that constitute the supreme problem of 
 philosophy. It is with the description of facts and of the laws of the 
 sequences of things that the " methodology " of science and of Prag- 
 matism is in the main concerned. And it is because Pragmatism 
 has hitherto shown itself unable to rise above the descriptive and
 
 PRAGMATISM AS HUMANISM 143 
 
 In respect of the first point, we have already 
 suggested, for example, that Pragmatism is in- 
 clined in various ways to make much of its " radical 
 empiricism," its contention that reality must, to 
 begin with, be construed to be what it seems to 
 be in our actual dealings with it and in our actual 
 experience of it. 1 To the biologist, as we put it 
 in our fourth chapter, reality is life ; to the 
 physicist it is energy ; to the theologian it is 
 the unfolding of the dealings of God with His 
 creatures ; to the sociologist it is the sphere of 
 the evolution of the social life of humanity ; 
 to the lover of truth it is a " partly intelligible 
 system." The only rational basis, however, for 
 all this constructive interpretation of reality is 
 the familiar idealist position of the necessary 
 implication of the " subject " in the " object," 
 the fact that " things " or " existences " are 
 invariably thought of as the elements or com- 
 ponent parts in some working system or sphere 
 of reality that is contemplated by some being 
 or beings in reference to some purpose or end. 
 On its so-called lowest plane, indeed, reality is 
 conceived as the play of all the particles of matter, 
 or of all the elemental forces of nature, upon 
 each other. And on this construction of things 
 
 hypothetical science of the day to the ideals of the normative sciences 
 (ethics, aesthetics, etc.) that it is an imperfect philosophy of reality as 
 we know it, or of the different orders of reality. 
 
 1 Cf. Professor Ward in Naturalism and Agnosticism (vol. ii. p. 155) : 
 " What each one immediately deals with in his own experience is, I 
 repeat, objective reality in the most fundamental sense."
 
 144 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM 
 
 the susceptibility of everything to the influence of 
 everything else is no less certainly assumed than in 
 the case of the world of life itself. But, as the 
 idealist realizes in a moment, there is no possibility 
 of separating, either in thought or experimentally, 
 this supposed physical world from the so-called 
 experiences and relations and laws through 
 which it is interpreted and described, even as a 
 world of objects or of forces. This is what 
 Parmenides saw ages ago when he said that 
 " thought " and " being " are the same thing, 
 that " being " belongs to " thought," that " being " 
 is the true object of thought, and that being is the 
 " rational " and the " thinkable " and not some- 
 thing outside thought. It is what a scientist, an 
 expounder of science, like Professor J . A. Thompson 
 means and partly states when he says, speaking 
 of the work of many of his fellow-scientists of the 
 day, " The matter of physical science is an 
 abstraction, whereas the matter of our direct 
 experience is in certain conditions the physical 
 basis of life and the home of the soul." * 
 
 To the objector who again retorts that this line 
 of reflection seems to rest upon a very large 
 assumption as to the nature of the apparently 
 illimitable physical universe, the idealist can but 
 reply, firstly, that we know nothing of the so-called 
 natural world save through the so-called spiritual 
 or psychical world, 2 and secondly, that even the 
 
 1 Introduction to Science, p. 137. 
 
 2 " But if the primitive Amoebae gave rise ' in the natural course of 
 events ' to higher organisms and these to higher, until there emerged
 
 PRAGMATISM AS HUMANISM 145 
 
 most complete description of the world from the 
 point of view of science would, of course, still leave 
 the world of our mental experiences entirely 
 unexplained. It is surely, therefore, so far, much 
 more logical to use this last world as at least the 
 partial explanation of the former rather than 
 vice versa. 
 
 And as for the " normative ' view of ethics 
 and the help it affords to Pragmatism in its 
 contention in respect of final truth, it may be 
 said, to begin with, that it is in the ethical life 
 that what we call the truth of things becomes 
 the basis of an ideal of personal achievement. 
 It is not merely of man's well-known trans- 
 formation and utilization of the forces of nature 
 that we are at present thinking, but of the fact 
 that in the moral life man " superposes," as 
 has been said, an order of his own upon the 
 so-called natural order of things, transforming it 
 into a spiritual order. This superposition, if we 
 will, this transformation, is revealed unmistak- 
 ably in the history of the facts of conduct. 
 
 In the recent elaborate researches in sociological 
 ethics of Hobhouse and Westermarck x we read, 
 
 the supreme Mammal, who by and by had a theory of it all, then the 
 primitive Amoebae which had in them the promise and the potency of 
 all this were very wonderful Amoebae indeed. There must have been 
 more in them than met the eye ! We must stock them with initiatives at 
 least. We are taking a good deal as 'given.' " [Italics mine.] — J. H. 
 Thomson, Introduction to Science, p. 137. 
 
 1 See Westermarck, vol. i. pp. 74, 93, 117, and chapter hi. generally. 
 The sentence further down in respect of the permanent fact of the moral 
 consciousness is from Hobhouse, vol. ii. p. 54. As instances of the latter, 
 Hobhouse talks of things like the " purity of the home, truthfulness, 
 
 10
 
 146 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM 
 
 for example, of facts like the gradual " blunting 
 of the edges of barbarian ideas," and the recognition 
 of the " principal moral obligations " in the early 
 oriental civilizations, the existence of the "doctrine 
 of forgiveness," and of " disinterested retributive 
 kindly emotion," the acceptance and redistribution 
 by Confucius of the traditional standards of 
 Chinese ethics, the " transformation " by the 
 Hebrew prophets of the " law of a barbarous 
 people into the spiritual worship of one God," of 
 a God of " social justice," of " mercy," and finally 
 of " love." Both these writers, in view of such 
 facts and of other facts of a kindred nature, arrive 
 at the conclusion that the supreme authority 
 assigned to the moral law is not altogether an 
 illusion, that there is after all the " great permanent 
 fact of the moral consciousness persisting through 
 all stages of development, that whether we believe 
 or disbelieve in God, or religion, or nature, or what 
 not, there remain for all of us certain things to do 
 which affect us with a greater or less degree of 
 mental discomfort." 
 
 Now as we think of it, there is something that 
 Pragmatism fails to see in respect of this undoubted 
 transformation of the merely physical basis of our 
 life that takes place, or that has taken place, in 
 the moral life of humanity. While firmly holding 
 in its moral philosophy (we can see this in the 
 
 hospitality, help, etc., in Iran, of the doctrine of Non-Resistance in Lao 
 Tsze, of the high conception of personal righteousness revealed in the 
 Book of the Dead, of the contributions of monotheism to ethics, etc. etc.
 
 PRAGMATISM AS HUMANISM 147 
 
 typical work of Dewey and Tufts *) to its far- 
 reaching principle that our entire intellectual life 
 has been worked out in the closest kind of relation 
 to our practical needs, Pragmatism has neverthe- 
 less failed to see that in the highest reaches of 
 our active life the controlling ideas (" justice," 
 " humanity/' " courage," and so on) have a value 
 independently of any consequences other than 
 those of their realization in the purposes and in 
 the dispositions of men. Or, more definitely, it 
 is just because moral ideas, like any ideas, cannot 
 fail to work themselves out into our actions and 
 into our very dispositions and character, that it 
 becomes of the utmost importance to conceive 
 of the truth they embody as having a value 
 above all consequences and above all ordinary 
 utility. If sought ever and always for its own 
 sake, the highest kind of truth and insight, the 
 truth that we apprehend in our highest intuitions 
 and in our highest efforts, will inevitably tend to 
 the creation of a realm of " value," a realm of 
 personal worth and activity that we cannot but 
 regard as the highest reality, 2 or the highest plane 
 
 1 Cf. p. 167. 
 
 2 It may, I suppose, be possible to exaggerate here and to fall to 
 some extent into what Mr. Bradley and Nietzsche and others have 
 thought of as the " radical vice of all goodness " — its tendency to forget 
 that other things, like beauty and truth, may also be thought of as 
 absolute " values," as revelations of the divine. What I am thinking 
 of here is simply the realm of fact that is implied, say, in the idea of 
 Horace, when he speaks of the upright man being undismayed even by 
 the fall of the heavens {impavidum ferient ruinae) or by the idea of 
 the Stoic sage that the virtuous man was as necessary to Jupiter 
 as Jupiter could be to him, or by the idea (attributed to Socrates) that
 
 148 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM 
 
 of experience of which we are conscious. In this 
 thought, then, in the thought of the reality of the 
 life and work of human beings who have given all 
 for truth and goodness and love, there is surely at 
 least a partial clue to the value of the great idea 
 after which Pragmatism is blindly groping in its 
 contention of the importance even to metaphysics 
 of the notion of our human, " purposive " activity. 
 Indeed, when we think of the matter carefully 
 it is doubtful whether the human mind would ever 
 even have attained to the notion of ideal truth, 
 with the correlative thought of the shortcomings 
 or the limits of our ordinary knowledge, if it had 
 not been for the moral life and the serious problem 
 it sets before us as men — that of the complete 
 satisfaction or the complete assertion of our human 
 personality. We seek truth in the first instance 
 because we wish to act upon certainty or upon 
 adequate certainty, and because we feel that we 
 must be determined by what appeals to our own 
 convictions and motives, by what has become part 
 of our own life and consciousness. It is only in fact 
 because we will it, and because we want it, that the 
 " ideal " exists — the ideal of anything, more certain 
 
 if the rulers of the universe do not prefer the just man to the unjust it 
 is better to die than to live. If against all this sort of thing one is 
 reminded by realism of the " splendid immoralism " of Nature, of its 
 apparent indifference to all good and ill desert, I can but reply, as I 
 have done elsewhere in this book, that the Nature of which physical 
 science speaks is an " abstraction " and an unreality, and that it 
 matters, therefore, very little whether such a Nature is, or is not, 
 indifferent to morality. We know, however, of no Nature apart from 
 life, and mind, and consciousness, and thought, and will. It is God, 
 and not Nature, who makes the sun to shine on the just and the unjust.
 
 PRAGMATISM AS HUMANISM 149 
 
 knowledge about something, for example, or grati- 
 fied curiosity, or satisfied desire, and so on. In 
 every case, say, of the pursuit of an ideal we desire 
 something or some state of things that does not yet 
 exist. The actual, if indeed (which is doubtful) 
 we can think of the actual merely as such, does 
 not engender the notion of the ideal, although 
 there is possibly a suggestion of the " ideal ' in 
 the " meaning " that we cannot, even in sense 
 perception, 1 attach to the actual. 
 
 Even science, as we call it, is very far from 
 being a mere description of the actual, it is an 
 ideal " construction " or " interpretation " of the 
 same in the interest, not of mere utility, but of the 
 wonder and the curiosity and the intellectual and 
 aesthetical satisfaction of our entire personality, 
 of our disinterested love of the highest truth. 2 
 
 1 By this " meaning " is to be understood firstly the effects upon our 
 appetitive and conative tendencies of the various specific items (whether 
 sensation, or affections, or emotions, or what not) of our experience, 
 the significance, that is to say, to our total general activity of all the 
 particular happenings and incidents of our experience. Psychologists 
 all tell us of the vast system of " dispositions " with which our psycho- 
 physical organism is equipped at birth, and through the help of which 
 we interpret the sensations and occurrences of our experience. And 
 in addition to these dispositions we have, in the case of the adult, the 
 coming into play of the many associations and memories that are 
 acquired during the experiences of a single lifetime. It is these various 
 associations that interpret to us the present and give it meaning. In a 
 higher sense we might interpret " meaning " as expressive of the higher 
 predicates, like the good and the beautiful and the true, that we apply 
 to some things in the world of our socialized experience. And in the 
 highest sense we might interpret it as the significance that we attach to 
 human history as distinguished from the mere course of events — the 
 significance upon which the philosophy of history reposes. See Eucken 
 in the article upon the Philosophy of History in the " systematic " 
 volume of Hinneberg's Kultur der Gegenwart. 
 
 2 See our second chapter upon the different continental and British
 
 150 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM 
 
 A striking example of the part played by moral 
 and personal factors in the evolution of truth may 
 easily be found, as has already been suggested, in 
 some of the circumstances connected with the 
 evolution of the Platonic philosophy in the mind 
 of its creator. Plato's constant use of the dialogue 
 form of exposition is of itself an expression of the 
 fact that philosophy was always to him a living 
 and a personal thing, the outcome of an intellec- 
 tual emotion of the soul in its efforts after true 
 knowledge and spiritual perfection. It speaks also 
 of Plato's essentially social conception of philo- 
 sophy, as a creation arising out of the contact of 
 mind with mind, in the search after wisdom and 
 virtue and justice. And there is little doubt that 
 his own discontent with the social conditions of 
 his time and with the false wisdom of the sophists 
 was a powerful impulse in his mind in the develop- 
 ment of that body of intellectual and ethical truth 
 for all time that is to be found in his works. The 
 determining consideration, again, in the argu- 
 ments for immortality in the Phaedo is not so 
 much the imperfect physical and theoretical 
 philosophy on which they are partly made to 
 
 representatives of the hypothetical treatment of scientific laws and 
 conceptions that is such a well-marked tendency of the present time. 
 By no one perhaps was this theory put more emphatically than by 
 Windelband (of Strassburg) in his Prdludien (1884) and in his Geschichte 
 und Naturwissensckaft (1894). In the latter he contrasts the real 
 individuals and personalities with which the historians deal with the 
 impersonal abstractions of natural science. I fully subscribe to this 
 distinction, and think that it underlies a great deal of the thought of 
 recent times.
 
 PRAGMATISM AS HUMANISM 151 
 
 repose as the tremendous conviction of Plato of 
 the supreme importance of right conduct, of his 
 belief in the principle of the " best." 
 
 Plato has a way, too, of talking of truth as a 
 kind of " addition " * to being and science, as a 
 " being " that " shares " somehow in the " idea 
 of the Good " — a tendency that, despite the 
 imperfect hold of the Greek mind upon the fact 
 and the conception of personality, we may also 
 look upon as a confirmation of the pragmatist 
 notion of the necessity of ethical and personal 
 factors in a complete theory of truth. 
 
 A still more important instance of the importance 
 of moral and practical factors to a final philosophy 
 of things is to be found in the lasting influence of 
 the great Hebrew teachers upon both the ancient 
 and the modern world, although the mere mention 
 of this topic is apt to give offence to some of our 
 Neo-Hellenists 2 and to thinkers like Schopen- 
 hauer and Nietzsche. The remarkable thing 
 about the Hebrew seers is their intuition of 
 God as " the living source of their life and strength 
 
 1 See " truth and real existence " in the Republic, 508 d — Jowett's 
 rendering of dX-fjOeii re xal t6 6v (" over which truth and real 
 existence are shining "). Also further in the same place, " The cause of 
 science and of truth," a/Way 5' cVio-t^s cuVae /ecu d\T70da?. In 389 e 
 we read that a " high value must be set on truth." Of course 
 to Plato " truth " is also, and perhaps even primarily, real existence, 
 as when he says (Rep. 585), " that which has less of truth will also have 
 less of essence." But in any case truth always means more for him 
 than " mere being," or existence, or " appearance," it is the highest 
 form of being, the object of " science," the great discovery of the 
 higher reason. 
 
 ■ To Professor Bosanquet, for example; see below, p. 213, note 2.
 
 152 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM 
 
 and joy/' not as a mere first principle of thought, 
 not as the substance of things, not as the mere 
 " end of patient search and striving," but as the 
 ''first principle of life and feeling." x And their 
 work for the world lay in the bringing to an end 
 of the entire mythology and cosmology of the age 
 of fable and fancy, and the substitution for all 
 this of the worship of one God, as something 
 distinct and different from all the cults of 
 polytheism, as a great social and ethical achieve- 
 ment, as a true religion that loved justice and 
 social order because it loved God. " In Hebrew 
 poetry," 2 says a recent authority upon this subject, 
 " all things appear in action. The verb is the 
 predominating element in the sentence. And 
 though the shades of time distinctions are blurred, 
 the richness of the language throws the precise 
 complexion of the act into clear, strong light." 
 If this be so, there is, of course, no wonder that 
 this people elaborated for mankind a living and 
 practical, a " pragmatist " (if we will) view of 
 the world, which is so rich by way of its 
 very contrast both to Greek and to modern 
 scientific conceptions. With the enumeration of 
 two specific instances from this same writer 
 of the Hebrew perception of the importance of 
 practical and personal factors to a true grasp of 
 certain fundamental ideas, we may safely leave 
 this great source of some of the leading ideas of 
 
 1 The Poetry of the Old Testament, Professor A. R. Gordon. 
 
 2 Ibid. p. 4.
 
 PRAGMATISM AS HUMANISM 153 
 
 our western world to take care of itself. " The 
 Hebrew counterpart to the Greek ideal of 6 KaXbs 
 Kayados, ' the finely-polished gentleman,' is hasid, 
 the adjective derived from hesed, that is 'the man 
 of love.' As God is love, the good man is likewise 
 a lover both of God and of his fellow-men. His 
 love is indeed the pure reflection of God's- — tender 
 and true and active as His is. For in no other 
 ancient religion are the fear and love of God so 
 indissolubly wedded to moral conduct." x And 
 secondly, speaking of immortality, Professor 
 Gordon says, " The glad hope of immortality 
 rests, not on speculative arguments from the nature 
 of the soul, but on the sure ground of religious 
 experience. Immortality is, in fact, a necessary 
 implicate of personal religion. The man that 
 lives with God is immortal as He is." 2 
 
 If the reader be inclined to interject here that 
 all that this pragmatist talk about the importance 
 of action obviously amounts to is simply the 
 position that the highest truth must somehow 
 take recognition of our beliefs as well as of our 
 knowledge, we can but reply that he is literally 
 so far in the right. Our point, however, for 
 Pragmatism would here be that belief rests not 
 merely upon the intellect, but upon the intellect 
 in conjunction with the active and the ethical 
 nature of man. It is mainly because we feel our- 
 selves to be active and legislative and creative, 
 mainly because we partly are and partly hope to 
 
 1 The Poetry of the Old Testament, p. 160. 2 Ibid. pp. 183-184.
 
 154 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM 
 
 be, as the phrase has it, that we believe as well as 
 seek continually to know. Hence the Tightness 
 and the soundness of Pragmatism in its contention ; 
 the truth is not so much a datum (something given) 
 as a construction, 1 or a thing that is made and 
 invented by way of an approximation to an ideal. 
 That it is this almost in the literal sense of these 
 words is evident from the fact of the slow and 
 gradual accumulation of truth and knowledge 
 about themselves and their environment by the 
 fleeting generations of men. And even to-day 
 the truth is not something that exists in 
 nature or in history or in some privileged in- 
 stitution, or in the teaching of some guild of 
 masters, but rather only in the attitude of mind 
 and heart of the human beings who continue to 
 seek it and to will it and to live it when and 
 where they may. Truth includes, too, the truth 
 of the social order, of civilization 2 — this last costly 
 
 1 It is this false conception of truth as a " datum " or " content " 
 that wrecks the whole of Mr. Bradley's argument in Appearance and 
 Reality. See on the contrary the following quotation from Professor 
 Boyce Gibson (Eucken's Philosophy of Life, p. 109) in respect of the 
 attitude of Eucken towards the idea of truth as a personal ideal. 
 " The ultimate criterion of truth is not the clearness and the distinct- 
 ness of our thinking, nor its correspondence with a reality external to 
 it, nor any other intellectualistic principle. It is spiritual fruitfulness 
 as invariably realized by the personal experient, invariably realized as 
 springing freshly and freely from the inexhaustible resources which 
 our freedom gains from its dependence upon God." 
 
 2 It is part of the greatness of Hegel, I think, to have sought to 
 include the truth of history and of the social order in the truth of philo- 
 sophy, or in spiritual truth generally. His error consists in not allowing 
 for the fresh revelations of truth that have come to the world through 
 the insight of individuals and through the actions and the creations of 
 original men.
 
 PRAGMATISM AS HUMANISM 155 
 
 work being just as much the creation of the mind 
 and the behaviour of men as is knowledge itself. 
 And there can, it would seem, be but slight objec- 
 tion to an admission of the fact that it is only in 
 so far as the truth has been conceived as in- 
 clusive of the truth of human life as well as of that 
 of the world of things that humanity as a whole 
 seems to have any abiding interest in its existence, 
 even where, as in Omar Khayyam and in other 
 writings, the idea of its discovery is given up as 
 impossible. Only, in other words, as the working 
 out of the implications of desire does thought 
 live, and the completest thought is at bottom but 
 the working out of the deepest desire. 1 
 
 These two elements of our life, thought and 
 
 1 There is a sentence in the Metaphysics of which I cannot but think 
 at this point, and which so far at least as the rationalist-pragmatist 
 issue is concerned is really one of the deepest and most instructive ideas 
 in the whole history of philosophy. It is one of Aristotle's troublesome 
 additional statements in reference to something that he has just been 
 discussing — in this case the " object of desire " and the " object of 
 thought." And what he adds in the present instance is this (Bk. xii. 7) : 
 " The primary objects of these two things are the same — tovtwv to. 
 wpuira to, avrd — rendered by Smith and Ross " the primary objects 
 oj thought and desire are the same." The translation, of course, is a matter 
 of some slight difficulty, turning upon the proper interpretation of 
 to. wpwra, " the first things," although, of course, the student soon 
 becomes familiar with what Aristotle means by " first things," and 
 " first philosophy," and " first in nature," and " first for us," and so 
 on. Themistius in his commentary on this passage (Commentaria in 
 Aristotelem Graeca, vol. v. i-vi ; Themistius in Metaphysica, 1072 
 and 17-30) puts it that " in the case of immaterial existences the 
 desirable and the intelligible are the same — in primis vero principiis 
 materiae non immixtis idem est desiderabile atque intelligibile." I 
 am inclined to use this great idea of the identity of the desirable 
 and the intelligible — for conscious, intelligent beings as the funda- 
 mental principle of the true Humanism of which Pragmatism is in 
 search. It is evidently in this identity that Professor Bosanquet
 
 156 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM 
 
 desire, have had indeed a parallel development in 
 the life of mankind. What we call the predicate 
 of thought bespeaks invariably an underlying (or 
 personal) reaction or attitude towards the so-called 
 object of thought. 1 When desire ceases, as it does 
 sometimes in the case of a disappointed man, or the 
 pessimist, or the agnostic, or the mystic, thought 
 too ceases. Even the philosophical mood, as like- 
 wise the expression of a desire, is as such com- 
 parable to other motives or desires, such as the 
 scientific or the practical or the emotional, and 
 subject, too, like them, to the various " conflicts " 
 of personality. 2 The free speculative thought 
 or activity that, with the Greeks, we sometimes 
 think of as the highest attribute of our human 
 nature, is itself but the highest phase of that 
 free creative 3 activity which we have found to 
 
 also believes in when he says : "lam persuaded that if we critically 
 understand what we really want and need, we shall find it established 
 by a straightforward argument " (Preface to Individuality and Value. 
 See the eighth chapter of this book). It is certainly true that the 
 constructive philosophy of which we are in search to-day must leave no 
 gap between thought and desire. 
 
 1 I find an illustration or a confirmation of this thought in the 
 following piece of insight of Mr. Chesterton in regard to the " good," 
 which is no doubt a " predicate " of our total thought and feeling and 
 volition. "Or, in other words, man cannot escape Irom God, because 
 good is God in man ; and insists on omniscience " ( Victorian Age in Litera- 
 ture, p. 246 — italics mine). A belief in goodness is certainly a belief in 
 an active goodness greater than our own ; and it does raise a desire for 
 a comprehension of things. 
 
 2 The reader will find a good deal in Professor Baldwin's Social and 
 Ethical Interpretations of Mental Development upon the relation of 
 truth and thought to desire, and also upon the social, or the pragmatist 
 or the experimental test of beliefs. 
 
 3 See Chapter IX., in reference to Bergson's " creative activity."
 
 PRAGMATISM AS HUMANISM 157 
 
 underlie the moral life and all the various construc- 
 tions of mankind, inclusive of the work of civiliza- 
 tion itself. 
 
 Lastly, there is, as we know, ample warrant 
 in the past and the present reflections of men of 
 science upon the apparent limits 1 and limita- 
 
 1 The reader who is anxious to obtain a working idea of the limits 
 of knowledge from a scientific point of view had better consult such 
 pieces of literature as Sir Oliver Lodge's recent examination of Haeckel's 
 Riddle of the Universe, Professor Ward's Naturalism and Agnosticism, 
 Merz's History of European Thought during the Nineteenth Century, or 
 Verworn's General Physiology (with its interesting account of the 
 different theories of the origin of life, and its admission that after all 
 we know matter only through mind and sensation). Perusal of the 
 most recent accessible literature upon this whole subject will reveal 
 the fact that these old questions about the origin of life and motion, 
 and about the nature of evolution, are still as unsettled as they were in 
 the last half of the last century. It is not merely, however, of the 
 actual limits of science at any one time that we are obliged, as human 
 beings, to think, but of the limits of science in view of the fact that 
 our knowledge comes to us in part, under the conditions of space and 
 time, and under the conditions of the limits of our senses and of 
 our understanding. Knowledge is certainly limited in the light of 
 what beings other than ourselves may know, and in the light of what 
 we would like to know about the universe of life and mind. 
 
 I do not think that this whole question of the limits of our 
 knowledge is such a burning question to-day as it was some years ago, 
 there being several reasons for this. One is that we live in an age of 
 specialization and discursiveness and " technic." It is quite difficult 
 to meet with people who think that they may know, some day, every- 
 thing, from even some single point of view. And then the wide accept- 
 ance of the hypothetical or the pragmatist conception of knowledge 
 has caused us to look upon the matter of the limits of science and 
 knowledge as a relative one, as always related to, and conditioned 
 by, certain points of view and certain assumptions. We are not 
 even warranted, for example, in thinking of mind and matter as 
 separate in the old way, nor can we separate the life of the individual 
 from the life of the race, nor the world from God, nor man from 
 God, and so on. See an article by the writer (in 1898 in the Psy. Rev.) 
 upon " Professor Titchener's View of the Self," dealing with the actual, 
 and the necessary limits, of the point of view of Structural Psychology 
 in regard to the " self." Also Professor Titchener's reply to this article in 
 a subsequent number of the same review, and my own rejoinder.
 
 158 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM 
 
 tions of our knowledge of our environment to 
 justify the correctness of the pragmatist in- 
 sistence upon the ethical and the personal factors 
 that enter into truth. Reference having already 
 been made to these limits, there is perhaps little 
 need of pursuing this topic any further, either 
 so far as the facts themselves are concerned or 
 so far as their admission by scientists and others 
 is concerned. How any supposed mere physical 
 order can ever come to know itself as such, either 
 in the minds of men or in the minds of beings 
 other than men, is of course the crowning diffi- 
 culty of what we call a physical philosophy — 
 a difficulty that transcends altogether the many 
 familiar and universally admitted difficulties in 
 respect of topics like the origin of motion and the 
 origin of life, and the infinite number of adjustments 
 and adaptations involved in the development 
 of the world of things and men with which we are 
 acquainted. Obviously, to say the very least, 
 only when some explanation of consciousness and 
 feeling and thought is added on to our knowledge 
 of Nature (fragmentary as is the latter at best) 
 will the demands of thought and of desire for 
 unity in our knowledge be satisfied or set 
 at rest. Now, of course, to religious thought all 
 this costly explanation, all this completion and 
 systematization of our knowledge are revealed, 
 in the main, only to a faith in God and to a 
 consequent faith in the final " perfection " of our 
 human life as the gradual evolution of a divine
 
 PRAGMATISM AS HUMANISM 159 
 
 kingdom. And while Pragmatism cannot, 
 especially in its cruder or more popular form, be 
 credited with anything like a rational justification 
 of the religious point of view about reality and of 
 the vision it opens up, it may, nevertheless, in 
 virtue of its insistence upon such things as (1) the 
 rationality of the belief that accompanies all 
 knowledge, (2) the supposedly deeper pheno- 
 mena of the science of human nature to which 
 reference has already been made, and (3) the great 
 spiritual reality that is present to the individual 
 in the moral life, and that lifts him " out of him- 
 self," and that makes it impossible for him to 
 " understand himself by himself alone," x justifiably 
 lay claim to the possession of a thorough working 
 sympathy with the religious view of the world. 
 
 With the direction of the attention of the 
 reader to two important corollaries or consequences 
 of the " pluralism " and the " dynamic idealism " 
 of Pragmatism this chapter may well be brought 
 to a termination. 
 
 One of the most obvious corollaries of nearly 
 everything that has been put forward by us in the 
 foregoing chapters as pragmatist doctrine or 
 pragmatist tendency, is the marked distance at 
 which 2 it all seems to stand from the various 
 entanglements of the false philosophy of " sub- 
 jective," or " solipsistic " idealism. In other 
 words, while we have ventured to censure Prag- 
 
 1 See Chapter II. p. 35. 
 2 Despite what we spoke of in Chapter V. as its " subjectivism," p. 134.
 
 160 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM 
 
 matism for its inability to recognize the elemental 
 truth 1 in Idealism, we must now record it as a merit 
 of Pragmatism that it does not, like so much 
 modern philosophy, take its start with the " con- 
 tents " of the consciousness of the individual 
 as the one indubitable beginning, the one incon- 
 cussum quid for all speculation. This starting- 
 point has often, as we know, been taken (even by 
 students of philosophy) to be the very essence 
 of Idealism, but it is not so. Although there 
 is indeed no " object ' without a " subject," 
 no " matter " without " mind," neither mind 
 nor matter is limited to my experience of the 
 same. 2 It is impossible for me to interpret, or 
 even to express, to myself the contents of my 
 experience without using the terms and the con- 
 ceptions that have been invented by minds and 
 by personalities other than my own without whom 
 I could not, and do not, grow up into what I call 
 my " self-consciousness." 3 We have all talked 
 
 1 That is to say, the simple truth that there is no " object " without 
 a " subject," no " physical " world without a world of " psychical " 
 experiences on the part of some beings or some being. If our earth 
 existed before animated beings appeared upon it, it was only as a part 
 of some other " system " which we must think of as the object of some 
 mind or intelligence. 
 
 2 See p. 235, note 2, in the Bergson chapter, where it is suggested 
 that to Bergson human perceptions do not, of course, exhaust matter. 
 
 3 Among the many other good things in Mr. Marett's admirable 
 Anthropology (one of the freshest works upon the subject, suggestive 
 of the need, evidently felt in Oxford as well as elsewhere, of studying 
 philosophy and letters, and nearly everything else in the mental and 
 moral sciences, from the point of view of social anthropology) are the 
 clearness and the relevancy of illustration in his insistence upon the 
 importance of the " social factor " over all our thoughts of ourselves 
 as agents and students in the universe of things." Payne shows us
 
 PRAGMATISM AS HUMANISM 161 
 
 of ourselves (as we know from experience and 
 from psychology) in the third person as objects 
 for a common social experience long before we 
 learn to use the first personal pronoun. And as 
 for the adult, his "ego' or self has a meaning 
 and a reality only in relation to, and in comparison 
 with, the other selves of whom he thinks as his 
 associates. An "ego" implies invariably also an 
 " alter " an "other," and thus our deepest thought 
 about the universe is always, actually and neces- 
 sarily, both personal and social. Even in art, and 
 in religion, and in philosophy, it is the communion 
 of mind with mind, of soul with soul, that 
 is at once our deepest experience and our deepest 
 desire. 
 
 I do not suggest for one moment that Prag- 
 matism is the only philosophy (if indeed we may 
 call it a philosophy at all) that is necessarily 
 
 (p. 146) " reason for believing that the collective ' we ' precedes ' I ' in the 
 order of linguistic evolution. To begin with, in America and elsewhere, 
 ' we ' may be inclusive and mean ' all of us,' or selective, meaning ' some 
 of us only.' Hence a missionary must be very careful, and if he is 
 preaching, must use the inclusive ' we ' in saying ' we have sinned,' 
 whereas, in praying, he must use the selective ' we,' or God would be 
 included in the list of sinners. Similarly ' I ' has a collective form 
 amongst some American languages ; and this is ordinarily employed, 
 whereas the corresponding selective form is used only in special cases. 
 Thus, if the question be ' Who will help ? ' the Apache will reply, ' I- 
 amongst-others,' ' I-for-one ' ; but if he were recounting his personal 
 exploits, he says sheedah, ' I-by-myself,' to show they were wholly his 
 own. Here we seem to have group-consciousness holding its own against 
 individual self-consciousness, as being for primitive folk on the whole the 
 more normal attitude of mind." It is indeed to be hoped that, in the 
 future, philosophy, by discarding its abstractionism and its (closely 
 allied) solipsism, will do its share in making this " group conscious- 
 ness," this consciousness of our being indeed " fellow-workers" with 
 all men, once again a property of our minds and our thoughts. 
 
 11
 
 162 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM 
 
 committed to Pluralism, 1 nor am I, of course, blind 
 to the difficulties that Pluralism, as over against 
 Monism, presents to many thinking minds. But 
 I do here say that if Pragmatism be true, as 
 it is in the main (at least as an " approach " to 
 philosophy), it follows that the reality with 
 which we are in contact in all our thoughts and 
 in all our theorizing is not any or all of the " con- 
 tents " of the consciousness of the individual 
 thinker, but rather the common, personal life of 
 activity and experience and knowledge and 
 emotion that we as individuals share with 
 other individuals. This life is that of an entire 
 " world of intersubjective intercourse," 2 of a 
 
 1 One of Professor James's last books is called A Pluralistic Universe, 
 and both he and Professor Dewey have always written under the 
 pressure of the sociological interest of modern times. In short, it is 
 obvious that the " reality " underlying the entire pragmatist polemic 
 against the hypothetical character of the reading of the world 
 afforded us by the sciences, is the social and personal life that is the 
 deepest thing in our experience. 
 
 2 This idea of a " world of inter-subjective intercourse," although 
 now a commonplace of sociology, was first expressed for the writer in 
 the first series of the Gifford Lectures of Professor James Ward upon 
 " Naturalism and Agnosticism," in chapters xv. and xvi. The first of 
 these chapters deals with " Experience and Life," and the second with 
 the " inter-subjective intercourse " that is really presupposed in the 
 so-called individual experience of which the old psychology used to 
 make so much. The reader who wishes to follow out a development 
 of this idea of a " world of inter-subjective intercourse " cannot do better 
 than follow the argument of Professor Ward's second series of Gifford 
 Lectures (" The Realm of Ends," or " Pluralism and Theism "), in which 
 he will find a Humanism and Theism that is at least akin to the theodicy, 
 or the natural theology, of which we might suppose Pragmatism to be 
 enamoured. The double series of these Lectures might well be referred 
 to as an instance of the kind of classical English work in philosophy of 
 which we have spoken as not falling into the extremes either of Prag- 
 matism or of Rationalism. The strong point of the " Realm of Ends," 
 from the point of view of this book upon Pragmatism and Idealism,
 
 PRAGMATISM AS HUMANISM 163 
 
 communion of thought, and feeling, and effort in 
 which, as persons, we share the common life of 
 persons, and are members one of another. 1 
 
 Truth itself, in fact, as may be seen, of course, 
 from the very connexion of the word truth with 
 other words like " try " 2 and " utter " (and in its 
 
 is that it moves from first to last in the reality of that world to which 
 the science and the philosophy of the day both seem to point the way. 
 In opposition to " subjectivism " it teaches a Humanism and a Pluralism 
 that we recognise as an expression of the realities of the world of our 
 common life and our common efforts, and from this Humanism it 
 proceeds to a Theism which its author seeks to defend from many of 
 the familiar difficulties of Naturalism. Were the writer concerned 
 with the matter of the development and the elaboration of the philo- 
 sophy that seems to have precipitated itself into his mind after some 
 years of reflection on the issues between the realists and the idealists, 
 between the rationalists and the pragmatists, he would have to begin 
 by saying that its outlines are at least represented for him in the theistic 
 and pluralistic philosophy of Professor Ward. 
 
 1 According to Professor Dawes Hicks in the Hibbert Journal for 
 April 191 3, there is a great deal in the articles of Professor Alexander on 
 " Collective Willing and Truth " that supports some of the positions I 
 am here attempting to indicate, as part of the outcome of the pragmatist- 
 rationalist controversy. " Both goodness and truth depend, in the first 
 place, on the recognition by one man of consciousness in others, and, 
 secondly, upon intersubjective intercourse " (p. 658). 
 
 2 I owe this reference (which I have attempted to verify) to a 
 suggestive and ingenious book (The New Word, by Mr. Allen Upward) 
 lent to me by a Montreal friend. Skeat, in his Dictionary, gives as the 
 meaning of truth, " firm, established, certain, honest, faithful," connect- 
 ing it with A.S. trlou, tryw (" preservation of a compact "), Teut. trewa, 
 saying that the " root " is " unknown." I suppose that similar things 
 might be said about the Greek word irebv in its different forms, 
 which Liddel and Scott connect with " Sans., satyas (verus), O. Nor. 
 Sannr, A.S. sdtk (sooth)." All this seems to justify the idea of the 
 social confirmation of truth for which I am inclined to stand, and the 
 connexion of intellectual truth with ethical truth, with the truth of 
 human life. I agree with Lotze that truths do not float above, or over, 
 or between, things, but that they exist only in the thought of a thinker, 
 in so far as he thinks, or in the action of a living being in the moment of 
 his action — the Microcosmos as quoted in Eisler, article " Wahrheit " in 
 the Worterbuch. The Truth for man would be the coherence of his
 
 164 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM 
 
 root with words like " ware " and " verihood "), is 
 a social possession, implying both seekers and 
 finders, listeners and verifiers as well as speakers 
 and thinkers. Its existence implies a universe 
 of discourse, as the logicians put it, in which 
 thoughts and conceptions are elaborated and 
 corrected, not merely by a kind of self-analysis 1 
 and internal development, but by the test of the 
 action to which they lead and of the " re- 
 sponses " they awaken in the lives and thoughts 
 of other persons. And it is this very sociological 2 
 and " pluralistic " character of Pragmatism that, 
 along with its tendency to " affirmation " in the 
 matter of the reality of the religious life, has 
 helped to render it (as far as it goes) such a living 
 and such a credible philosophy to-day. 
 
 Another consequence of the dynamic idealism 
 and the " radical empiricism " of Pragmatism 
 is the " immediacy " of our contact with 
 reality, for which it is naturally inclined to stand 
 
 knowledge and his beliefs, and there is no abstract truth, or truth in and 
 for itself, no impersonal " whole " of truth. 
 
 1 As in the Hegelian dialectic. 
 
 2 There is another important thing to think of in connexion with 
 this sociological character of Pragmatism. It is a characteristic that 
 may be used to overcome what we have elsewhere talked of as 
 its " subjectivism " and its " individualism," and its revolutionary 
 tendencies. It is, we might urge, a social and a collective standard of 
 truth that Pragmatism has in view when it thinks of " consequences " 
 and of the test of truth. Lalande takes up this idea in an article in the 
 Revue Philosophique (1906) on " Pragmatisme et Pragmaticisme," 
 pointing out that Dr. Peirce would apparently tend to base his prag- 
 matism on the subordination of individual to collective thought. Dr. 
 Schiller too, I think, contemplates this social test of truth in his would- 
 be revival of the philosophy of Protagoras — that man is the measure of 
 reality — for man.
 
 PRAGMATISM AS HUMANISM 165 
 
 in the matter of what we may call the philosophy 
 of perception. What this new " immediacy " 
 and this new directness of our contact with reality 
 would mean to philosophical and scientific thought 
 can be fully appreciated only by those who have 
 made the effort of years to live in a " thought 
 world," in which the first reality is what the 
 logicians term " mediation " * or inference, a 
 world of thoughts without the reality of a really 
 effective thinker, or the reality of a world of real 
 action — a world from which it is somehow im- 
 possible to escape either honestly or logically. 
 It would be a return, of course, on the part of 
 the thinker to the direct sense of life with which 
 we are familiar in instinct and in all true living 
 and in all real thought, 2 in all honest effort and 
 accomplishment, and yet not a " return " in any 
 of the impossible senses in which men have often 
 (and with a tragic earnestness) sought to return 
 to Nature 3 and to the uncorrupted reality of things. 
 
 1 See below, p. 197, where we speak of this "mediation" as the 
 first fact for Professor Bosanquet as a prominent " Neo-Hegelian " 
 rationalist. 
 
 2 1 have been asked by a friendly critic if I would include " inference " 
 in this " real thought." I certainly would, because in all real inference 
 we are, or ought to be, concerned with a real subject-matter, a set of 
 relations among realities of one kind or another. Possibly all students 
 in all subjects (especially in philosophy) have lost time in following out 
 a set of inferences in and for themselves. But such a procedure is 
 justified by the increased power that we get over the real subject-matter 
 of our thought. When thought cannot be thus checked by the idea 
 of such increased power, it is idle thought. 
 
 3 I am thinking, of course, of the entire revolutionary and radical 
 social philosophy that harks back (in theory at least) to the " Social 
 Contract " and to the State of Nature philosophy of Rousseau and his 
 associates and predecessors.
 
 166 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM 
 
 And we have not indeed done justice to the 
 " instrumentalism " and the " hypothetical " 
 treatment of ideas and of systems of thought for 
 which Pragmatism and Humanism both stand 
 until we see that so far from its being (almost in 
 any sense) the duty of the thinker to justify, to 
 his philosophy, this direct contact with the infinite 
 life of the world, that has been the common 
 possession of countless mortals who have lived 
 their life, it is, on the contrary, his duty to justify 
 (to himself and to his public) the various thought- 
 systems of metaphysic, by setting forth the various 
 points of departure and the various points of 
 contact they have in the reality of the life of 
 things. 1 
 
 We spoke at the close of our fourth chapter 
 of the strange irony that may be discovered in 
 the fate of philosophers who have come to attach 
 a greater importance to their own speculations 
 and theories than to the great reality (whatever 
 it may be, or whatever it may prove itself to be) 
 of which all philosophy is but an imperfect 
 (although a necessary) explanation. And the 
 reader has doubtless come across the cynical 
 French definition of metaphysics as the " art of 
 losing one's way systematically " 2 (Vart de sigarer 
 
 1 See p. 184 of Chapter VII., where I speak of the ability to do this 
 as the invariable possession of the successful American teacher of 
 philosophy. 
 
 2 An equivalent of it, of course, exists in many sayings, in many 
 countries, in the conception of the task of the metaphysician as that of 
 " a blind man in a dark room hunting for a black cat which — is not 
 there," reproduced by Sir Ray Lankester in the recent book of H. S. R.
 
 PRAGMATISM AS HUMANISM 167 
 
 avec methode). In view of all this, and in view of 
 all the inevitable pain and difficulty of the solitary 
 thinkers of all time, it is indeed not the least part 
 of the service of Pragmatism and Humanism, and 
 of the " vitalistic ' and " voluntaristic ' philo- 
 sophy with which it may be naturally associated 
 to-day, to have compelled even metaphysicians 
 to feel that it is the living reality of the world 
 that we know and that we experience, that is first, 
 last, and foremost the real subject-matter of 
 philosophy. 
 
 With the real sceptic, then, with David 
 Hume, we may indeed be " diffident " of our 
 " doubts " and at the same time absolutely " free " 
 and unprejudiced in our hold upon, and in our 
 treatment of, metaphysical systems as, all of them, 
 but so many more or less successful attempts to 
 state and explain, in terms appreciable by the 
 understanding and the reason, the character and 
 the reality of the infinite life with which we are in 
 contact in our acts and in our thoughts and in our 
 aspirations. Of the reality of that life we can 
 never be sceptical, for it is the life that we know 
 in that " world of inter-subjective " intercourse 
 that, according to Pragmatism and Humanism, 
 is implied even in sense-perception and in our 
 daily experience. 
 
 Eliot, Modern Science and the Illusions of Bergson. There is generally an 
 error or a fallacy in such descriptions of philosophy — in this Lankester 
 story the error that the secret of the world is a kind of " thing in itself " 
 out of all relation to everything we know and experience — the very error 
 against which the pragmatists are protesting.
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 
 PRAGMATISM AS AMERICANISM 
 
 In adopting the title he has chosen for the heading 
 of this chapter the writer feels that he has laid 
 himself open to criticism from several different 
 points of view. What has philosophy as the 
 universal science to do with nationalism or with 
 any form of national characteristics ? Then even 
 if Pragmatism be discovered to be to some extent 
 " Americanism " in the realm of thought, is this 
 finding, or criticism, a piece of appreciation or a 
 piece of depreciation ? And again, is it possible 
 for any individual to grasp, and to understand, 
 and to describe such a living and such a far- 
 reaching force as the Americanism of to-day ? 
 
 The following things may be said by way of a 
 partial answer to these reflections : (i) There are 
 American characteristics in Pragmatism, and some 
 of them may profitably be studied by way of an 
 attempt to get all the light we can upon its essential 
 nature. Their presence therein has been detected 
 and recognized by critics, both American and 
 foreign, and reference has already been made to 
 
 168
 
 PRAGMATISM AS AMERICANISM 169 
 
 some of them in this book. (2) There is no 
 universal reason in philosophy apart from its 
 manifestation in the thoughts and the activities 
 of peoples who have made or who are making their 
 mark upon human history. It may well be that 
 the common reason of mankind has as much to 
 learn from Americanism in the department of 
 theory as it has already been obliged to learn from 
 this same quarter in the realm of practice. (3) 
 One of the most important phases of our entire 
 subject is precisely this very matter of the appli- 
 cation of philosophy to " practice," of the in- 
 separability, to put it directly, of " theory " and 
 " practice." It would surely, therefore, be the 
 strangest kind of conceit (although signs of it 
 still exist here and there) x to debar philosophy 
 
 1 Mr. Bertrand Russell, for example, seems to me to have the 
 prejudice that philosophy is at its best only when occupied with studies 
 which (like the mathematics of his affections) are as remote as possible 
 from human life. " Real life is," he says, " to most men a long second- 
 best, a perpetual compromise between the ideal and the possible ; but 
 the world of pure reason knows no compromise, no practical limitations, 
 no barrier to the creative activity embodying in splendid edifices the 
 passionate aspiration after the perfect form from which all great work 
 springs. Remote from human passions, remote even from the pitiful 
 facts of nature, the generations have gradually created an ordered 
 cosmos where pure thought can dwell as in its natural home, and where 
 one, at least, of our nobler impulses can escape from the dreary exile 
 of the actual world." I cannot — as I have indicated elsewhere in 
 regard to Mr. Russell — see for one moment how there is any justification 
 for looking upon this " ordered cosmos " of mathematical physics as 
 anything other than an abstraction from the real world with which 
 we are acquainted. It is the creation of only one of our many human 
 interests. And I cannot see that the thought that occupies itself with 
 this world is any nobler than the thought that occupies itself with the 
 more complex worlds of life, and of birth and death, and of knowledge 
 and feeling and conduct. Mr. Russell might remember, for one thing, 
 that there have been men (Spinoza among them) who have attempted
 
 170 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM 
 
 from the study of such a practical thing as the 
 Americanism of to-day. To connect the two 
 with any degree of success would certainly not 
 be to depreciate Pragmatism, but to strengthen 
 it by relating it to a spirit that is affecting the 
 entire life and thought of mankind. 
 
 One or two other important considerations 
 should also be borne in mind. It goes without 
 saying that there are in the United States and 
 elsewhere any number of Americans who see 
 beyond both contemporary Pragmatism and 
 contemporary Americanism, and to whom it 
 would be, therefore, but a partial estimate of 
 Pragmatism to characterize it as " Americanism." 
 So much, to be sure, might be inferred from some 
 things that have already been said in respect of 
 the reception and the fate of Pragmatism in its own 
 country. Again, it is one of the errors of the day 
 to think of Americanism as in the main merely 
 a belief in " practicality " and " efficiency." To 
 those who know it, Americanism is practical 
 idealism, and its aims, instead of being merely 
 materialistic and mechanical, are idealistic to 
 the point of being Utopian. The American belief 
 in work is not really a belief in work for its 
 
 to treat of human passions under the light of ascertainable laws, and 
 that it is (to say the very least) as legitimate for philosophy to seek 
 for reason and law in human life, and in the evolution of human 
 history, as in the abstract world of physical and mathematical science. 
 Can, too, a mathematical philosophy afford any final haven for the spirit 
 of man, without an examination of the mind of the mathematician and 
 of the nature of the concepts and symbols that he uses in his researches ? 
 There is a whole world of dispute and discussion about all these things.
 
 PRAGMATISM AS AMERICANISM 171 
 
 own sake, but rather a faith in the endless possi- 
 bilities open to intelligent energy with resources 
 at its command. Lastly, it will here certainly 
 not be necessary either to think or to speak (even 
 if it were possible to do so) of all American 
 characteristics. 1 
 
 Among the American - like characteristics in 
 Pragmatism that have already made them- 
 selves apparent in the foregoing chapters are 
 its insistence upon " action " and upon the free 
 creative effort of the individual, its insistence 
 upon the man-made (or the merely human) 
 character of most of our vaunted truths, its 
 instrumentalism, its radicalism, 2 its empiricism 
 
 1 I have in view in fact only (or mainly) such American character- 
 istics as may be thought of in connexion with the newer intellectual 
 and social atmosphere of the present time, the atmosphere that im- 
 presses the visitor and the resident from the old world, the atmosphere 
 to the creation of which he himself and his fellow-immigrants have 
 contributed, as well as the native-born American of two generations 
 ago — to go no further back. I mean that anything like a far-reaching 
 analysis or consideration of the great qualities that go to make up the 
 " soul " of the United States is, of course, altogether beyond the sphere of 
 my attention for the present. I fully subscribe, in short, to the truth of 
 the following words of Professor Santayana, one of the most scholarly 
 and competent American students (both of philosophy and of life) of 
 the passing generation : " America is not simply a young country 
 with an old mentality ; it is a country with two mentalities, one a 
 survival of the beliefs and standards of the fathers, the other an expres- 
 sion of the instincts, practice, and discoveries of the younger generation. 
 In all the higher things of the mind — in religion, literature, in the moral 
 emotions, it is the hereditary spirit that still prevails, so much so, that 
 Mr. Bernard Shaw finds that America is a hundred years behind the 
 times." — " The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy," in Winds of 
 Doctrine (p. 187). 
 
 2 A contemporary American authority, Professor Bliss Perry, in his 
 book upon The American Mind naturally singles out radicalism as 
 one of the well-marked characteristics of Americans. Among the other 
 characteristics of which he speaks are those of the " love of exaggera-
 
 172 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM 
 
 (that is to say, its endless faith in experience), 
 its democratic character, and its insistence 
 upon the necessity to philosophy of a broad, 
 tolerant, all-inclusive view of human nature. So, 
 too, are its insistence upon the basal character 
 of belief, 1 and upon the importance of a creed 
 or a philosophy that really " works " in the lives 
 of intelligent men, its feeling of the inadequacy 
 of a merely scholastic or dialectical philosophy, 
 and even its quasi "practical' interpretation of 
 itself in the realms of philosophy and religion and 
 ethics — its confession of itself as a " corridor- 
 theory," as a point of approach to all the 
 different systems in the history of thought. In 
 addition to these characteristics we shall attempt 
 now to speak, in the most tentative spirit, firstly, 
 of some of the characteristics of American uni- 
 versity life of which Pragmatism may perhaps 
 be regarded as a partial expression or reflex, 
 and then after this, of such broadly -marked 
 and such well-known American characteristics 
 as the love of the concrete (in preference to 
 the abstract), the love of experiment and ex- 
 
 tion," " idealism," "optimism," "individualism," "public spirit." 1 
 refer, I think, to nearly all these things in my pages, although of course 
 I had not the benefit of Professor Perry's book in writing the present 
 chapter. 
 
 1 I am certainly one of those who insist that we must think of 
 America as (despite some appearances to the contrary — appearances 
 to be seen also, for example, in the West of Canada) fundamentally a 
 religious country. It was founded upon certain great religious ideas 
 that were a highly important counterpart to some of the eighteenth- 
 century fallacies about liberty and equality that exercised their 
 influence upon the fathers of the republic.
 
 PRAGMATISM AS AMERICANISM 173 
 
 perimentation, an intolerance of doctrinairism 
 and of mere book-learning, the general demo- 
 cratic outlook on life and thought, the composite 
 or amalgam-like character of the present culture 
 of the United States, the sociological interest 
 that characterizes its people, and so on. All these 
 things are clearly to be seen in Pragmatism as a 
 would-be philosophical system, or as a preliminary 
 step in the evolution of such a system. 
 
 Owing very largely to the " elective " system 
 that still prevails in the universities of the United 
 States, Philosophy is there (to an extent some- 
 what inconceivable to the student of the European 
 continent) in the most active competition with 
 other studies, and the success of a professor of 
 philosophy is dependent on the success of his 
 method of presenting his subject to students 
 who all elect studies believed by them to be useful 
 or interesting or practically important. It has 
 long seemed to the writer that there is abundant 
 evidence in the writings of the pragmatists of this 
 inevitable attempt to make philosophy a " live " 
 subject in competition, say, with the other two 
 most popular subjects in American colleges, viz. 
 economics and biology. The importance to the 
 thought of to-day of biological and economic 
 considerations is one of the things most emphatic- 
 ally insisted upon by Professor Dewey in nearly 
 all his recent writings. 1 And both he and James 
 
 1 He has recently published a volume dealing especially with the 
 contributions of Biology and Darwinism to philosophy.
 
 i 7 4 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM 
 
 — the fact is only too evident — have always written 
 under the pressure of the economic and socio- 
 logical interest of the American continent. And 
 even Schiller's Humanism has become, as we have 
 seen, very largely the metaphysics of the " evolu- 
 tionary process," a characterization which we make 
 below * as a kind of criticism of the philosophy of 
 Bergson. Our present point, however, is merely 
 that, owing to the generally competitive 
 character of the intellectual life there, this bio- 
 logical influence is felt more acutely in America 
 than elsewhere. 
 
 The one outstanding characteristic again of 
 every approved academic teacher in the United 
 States is his method of handling his subject, just 
 as the one thing that is claimed for Pragmatism by 
 its upholders is that it is particularly a "method- 
 ology " of thought rather than a complete philo- 
 sophy. To the university constituency of the 
 United States a professor without an approved 
 and successful method is as good as dead, for 
 no one would listen to him. The most manifest 
 sign, to be sure, of the possession of such an 
 effective method on the part of the university 
 lecturer is the demonstration of skill in the 
 treatment of his subject, in the " approach " that 
 he makes to it for the beginner, in his power 
 of setting the advanced student to work upon 
 fruitful problems, and of giving him a complete 
 " orientation " in the entire field under considera- 
 
 1 See p. 252.
 
 PRAGMATISM AS AMERICANISM 175 
 
 tion. And then in addition to this he must be 
 able to indicate the practical and the educational 
 value of what he is teaching. 
 
 In his review of James's classical work upon 
 Pragmatism, Dewey, while indicating a number of 
 debatable points in the pragmatist philosophy, 
 declares emphatically his belief in that philosophy 
 as a method of " orientation." The title again of 
 Peirce's famous pamphlet was How to make Ideas 
 Clear — a phrase of itself suggestive enough of the 
 inquiring mind of the young student when 
 oppressed by apparently conflicting and com- 
 peting points of view. " We are acquainted with 
 a thing," says James, " as soon as we have learned 
 how to behave towards it, or how to meet the 
 behaviour we accept from it." In one of his 
 books he talks about physics, for example, as 
 giving us not so much a theory about things as 
 a " practical acquaintance " with bodies ; " the 
 power to take hold of them and handle them," 
 indicating at the same time his opinion that this 
 way of regarding knowledge should be extended 
 to philosophy itself. All of this will serve as a 
 proof or illustration of the essentially " practical ' 
 and " methodological ' conception of philosophy 
 taken by the pragmatists. Papini refers, we 
 remember, to the pragmatist philosophy as a 
 power of " commanding our material," of " manipu- 
 lating " for practical purposes the different 
 " thought-constructions " of the history of philo- 
 sophy. And those who have any familiarity
 
 176 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM 
 
 with the early pragmatist magazine literature 
 know that the pragmatists used to be fond of 
 asking themselves such preliminary and " labora- 
 tory-like " inquiries as the following : " What is 
 truth known as ? ' " What is philosophy known 
 as? " " What are the different ' thought-levels ' 
 upon which we seem to move in our ordin- 
 ary experience ? " They never exactly seem to "de- 
 fine ' philosophy for you, preferring to indicate 
 what it can do for you, and so on. 
 
 Turning now to the matter of American char- 
 acteristics that are broader and deeper than 
 the merely academic, we may find an illustra- 
 tion, for example, of the American practi- 
 cality and the love of the concrete (instead 
 of the abstract or the merely general) in the 
 following declaration of Professor James that 
 " the whole originality of Pragmatism, the whole 
 point in it, is its use of the concrete way of seeing. 
 It begins with concreteness and returns and ends 
 with it." Of the American love of novelty and 
 of interest we may find an illustration in the 
 determination of Pragmatism " never to discuss 
 a question that has absolutely no interest and no 
 meaning to any one." Of Pragmatism as an 
 exemplification of the American love of experiment, 
 and of experimentation, with a view to definite 
 and appreciable " returns," we may give the 
 following : "If you fully believe the pragmatic 
 method you cannot look on any such word, 
 i.e. ' God,' ' Matter,' ' Reason,' ' The Absolute,'
 
 PRAGMATISM AS AMERICANISM 177 
 
 ' Energy/ and such ' solving ' names, as closing 
 your quest. You must bring out in 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 programme for more work 
 and more particularly as an indication of the ways 
 in which existing realities may be changed." Of 
 the American intolerance for mere scholarship 
 and book-learning, and of the American inability 
 to leave any discovery or any finished product 
 alone without some attempt to " improve " upon 
 it or to put it to some new use, we may cite the 
 following : " When may a truth go into cold 
 storage in the encyclopaedias, and when shall it 
 come out for battle ? " 
 
 Another very strongly marked characteristic 
 of American life is the thoroughly eclectic and 
 composite character of its general culture and of 
 the general tone of its public life. American daily 
 life has become, as it were, a kind of social solvent, 
 a huge melting-pot for the culture and the habits 
 and the customs of peoples from all over the earth. 
 This also may be thought of as reflected in the 
 confessedly complex and amalgam-like character 
 of Pragmatism, in its boast and profession of being 
 a synthesis and a fusion of so many different 
 tendencies of human thought. As a juxtaposition, 
 or kind of compound solution, of such a variety 
 of things as the affirmations of religion, the 
 hypothetical method of science, realism, romanti- 
 cism, idealism, utilitarianism, and so on, it reminds 
 
 12
 
 178 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM 
 
 us only too forcibly of the endless number of 
 social groups and traditions, the endless number 
 of interests and activities and projects to be seen 
 and felt in any large American city. 
 
 Still another general characteristic of American 
 life of which we may well think in connexion 
 with Pragmatism is the sociological interest of the 
 country, the pressure of which upon the prag- 
 matists and their writings has already been 
 referred to. The social problem in America has 
 now become * the one problem that is present with 
 everybody, and present most of all, perhaps, 
 with the European immigrant, who has for various 
 reasons hoped that he had left this problem behind 
 him. The effect of this upon Pragmatism is to be 
 seen, not merely in the very living hold that it is 
 inclined to take of philosophy and philosophical 
 problems, 2 but in the fact of its boast of being a 
 "way of living " as well as a " way of thinking." 
 We have examined this idea in our remarks upon 
 the ethics of Pragmatism. 
 
 Of course the outstanding temperamental 
 American characteristic that is most clearly seen 
 in Pragmatism is the great fact of the inevitable 
 bent of the American mind to action and to 
 accomplishment, — its positive inability to enter- 
 tain any idea, or any set of ideas upon any subject 
 whatsoever, without experiencing at the same 
 
 1 The crucial characteristics of the Presidential campaign of 191 2 
 clearly showed this. 
 
 2 We can see this in the many valuable studies and addresses of 
 Professor Dewey upon educational and social problems.
 
 PRAGMATISM AS AMERICANISM 179 
 
 time the inclination to use these ideas for invention 
 and contrivance, 1 for organization and exploitation. 
 Any one who has lived in the United States must 
 in fact have become so habituated and so 
 accustomed to think of his thought and his 
 knowledge and his capacities in terms of their 
 possible social utility, that he simply cannot 
 refrain from judging of any scheme of thought or 
 of any set of ideas in the same light. Anywhere, 
 to be sure, in the United States will they allow a 
 man to think all he pleases about anything what- 
 soever — even pre-Socratic philosophy, say, or 
 esoteric Buddhism. And there is nothing indeed 
 of which the country is said, by those who know 
 it best, to stand so much in need as the most 
 persistent and the most profound thought about 
 all important matters. But such thought, it is 
 always added, must prove to be constructive and 
 positive in character, to be directed not merely 
 to the solution of useless questions or of questions 
 which have long ago been settled by others. 
 
 We shall now endeavour to think of the value 2 
 
 1 It is this fact, or the body of fact and tendency upon which it 
 rests, that causes Americans and all who know them or observe them, to 
 think and speak of the apparently purely " economic " or " business- 
 like " character of the greater part of their activities. Let me quote 
 Professor Bliss Perry here ..." the overwhelming preponderance of 
 the unmitigated business-man face [italics mine], the consummate mono- 
 tonous commonness of the pushing male crowd " (p. 158). " There 
 exists, in other words, in all classes of American society to-day, just as 
 there existed during the Revolution, during the ' transcendental ' 
 movement, in the Civil War, an immense mass of unspiritualised, 
 unvitalised American manhood and womanhood " (p. 160). 
 
 3 And this despite of what I have called elsewhere the comparative 
 failure of Pragmatism to give a rational, and tenable account of 
 " personality " and of the " self."
 
 180 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM 
 
 to philosophy and to the thought and practice of 
 the world (the two things are inseparable) of some 
 or all of these general and special characteristics 
 which we have sought to illustrate in Prag- 
 matism. 
 
 We might begin by suggesting the importance 
 to the world of the production and development 
 of a man of genius like James, 1 whose fresh and 
 living presentation of the problems of philosophy 
 (as seen by a psychologist) has brought the sense 
 of a lasting and far-reaching obligation upon his 
 fellow-students everywhere. In no more favour- 
 able soil could James have grown up into the range 
 and plenitude of his influence than in that of 
 America and of Harvard University, 2 that great 
 
 1 At the moment of his death (scribens est mortuus) James was 
 undoubtedly throughout the world the most talked -about English- 
 speaking philosopher, and nowhere more so than in Germany, the home 
 of the transcendentalism that he so doughtily and brilliantly attacked. 
 Stein says, for example, in his article upon "Pragmatism" (Archiv 
 fur Philosophie, 14, 1907, II. Ab.), that we "have had nothing like 
 it since Schopenhauer." I have often thought that James and his 
 work, along with the life and work of other notable American thinkers 
 (and along with the " lead " that America now certainly has over at 
 least England in some departments of study, like political and economic 
 science, experimental psychology, and so on), are part of the debt 
 America owed, some decades ago, to the Old World in the matter of 
 the training of many of her best professors — a debt she has long since 
 cancelled and overpaid. Readers, by the way, who desire more 
 authentic information about James and his work than the present 
 writer is either capable, or desirous, of giving in this book, may 
 peruse either the recent work of Professor Perry of Harvard upon 
 Present Philosophical Tendencies, or the work of M. Flournoy already 
 spoken of. Boutroux has a fine appreciation of the value of James's 
 philosophical work in the work to which I have already referred. And 
 there was naturally a crop of invaluable articles upon James in the 
 American reviews shortly after his death. 
 
 2 Think alone, for example, of what James says he learnt there from 
 a teacher like Agassiz : " The hours I spent with Agassiz so taught me
 
 PRAGMATISM AS AMERICANISM 181 
 
 nursing-ground of the finest kind of American 
 imperialism. The great thing, of course, about 
 James was his invasion, through the activities of 
 his own personality, 1 of the realm of philosophical 
 rationalism by the fact and the principle of active 
 personality. His whole general activity was a 
 living embodiment of the principle of all human- 
 ism, that personality and the various phases of 
 personal experience are of more importance to 
 philosophy in the way of theory than any number 
 of supposedly self-coherent, rational or abstract 
 systems, than any amount of reasoning that is 
 determined solely by the ideal of conceptual 
 consistency. 
 
 Then again, it might be held that the entire 
 academic world of to-day has a great deal to learn 
 from the conditions under which all subjects 
 (philosophy included) are taught and investigated 
 in the typical American university of the day. 
 We have referred to the fact that the American 
 professor or investigator faces the work of instruc- 
 
 the difference between all possible abstractionists and all livers in the 
 light of the world's concrete fulness that I have never been able to 
 forget it." — From an article upon James in the Journal of Philosophy , 
 ix. p. 527. 
 
 1 While this book was passing through the press my eye fell upon 
 the following words of Professor Santayana in respect of this very person- 
 ality of James : " It was his personal spontaneity, similar to that of 
 Emerson, and his personal vitality similar to that of nobody else. 
 Conviction and ideas came to him, so to speak, from the subsoil. He 
 had a prophetic sympathy with the dawning sentiments of the age, with 
 the moods of the dumb majority. His way of thinking and feeling 
 represents the true America, and represented in a measure the whole 
 ultra-modern radical world " {Winds of Doctrine, p. 205).
 
 182 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM 
 
 tion and research in an environment replete with 
 all modern facilities and conveniences. 1 The very 
 existence of this environment along with the 
 presence throughout his country of university 
 men and workers from all over the world with all 
 their obvious merits and defects as " social types ' 
 prevent him in a hundred ways from that slavery 
 to some one school of thought, to some one method 
 of research that is so often a characteristic of the 
 scholar of the old world. The entire information 
 and scholarship in any one science (say, philo- 
 sophy) is worth to him what he can make of it, 
 here and now, for himself and for his age and for 
 his immediate environment. He simply cannot 
 think of any idea or any line of reflection, in his 
 own or in any other field, without thinking at the 
 same time of its " consequences," immediate, 
 secondary, and remote. This inability is an 
 instance of the working of the pragmatist element 
 
 1 Including, say, the facilities of a completely indexed and authenti- 
 cated estimate of the work that has been done in different countries 
 upon his particular subject. It is easy to see that the habit and the 
 possibility of work in an environment such as this [and again and again 
 its system and its facilities simply stagger the European] is a thing 
 of the greatest value to the American professor so far as the idea of his 
 own best possible contribution to his age is concerned. Should he 
 merely do over again what others have done ? Or shall he try to work 
 in a really new field ? Or shall he give himself to the work of real 
 teaching, to the training of competent men, or to the " organization " 
 of his subject with his public ? It must be admitted, I think, that the 
 average American professor is a better teacher and guide in his subject 
 than his average colleague in many places in Europe. Hence the 
 justifiable discontent of many American students with what they 
 occasionally find abroad in the way of academic facilities for investiga- 
 tion and advanced study.
 
 PRAGMATISM AS AMERICANISM 183 
 
 in scholarship and in thought with all its advantages 
 and disadvantages. 1 
 
 And it is true too, it might be held, even upon 
 the principles of Idealism that the mere facts of 
 knowledge (for they are as endless in number as 
 are the different points of view from which we may 
 perceive and analyse phenomena) are " worth " 2 
 to-day very largely only what they have meant 
 and what they may yet mean to human life, to 
 human thought, to civilization. While there is 
 certainly no useless truth and no utterly un- 
 important fact, it is quite possible to burden 
 and hamper the mind of youth with supposed 
 truths and facts that have little or no relevancy 
 to any coherent or any real point of view about 
 human knowledge and human interests either of 
 the past or the present. It is merely, for example, 
 in the light of the effects that they have had upon 
 the life and thought of humanity 3 that the great 
 
 1 The latter (it is perhaps needless to state) have long been perfectly 
 evident to all American teachers of the first rank in the shape, say, of 
 the worthless " research " that is often represented in theses and 
 studies handed in for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, or for 
 other purposes. Anything that seems to be " work done," anything 
 that has attained to some " consequences " or other, has often been 
 published as studies and researches, and this despite the valuable things 
 that are to be associated with the idea of the pragmatist element in 
 American scholarship. The faults, too, of the undue specialization 
 that still obtains in many American institutions is also, as I have 
 indicated, becoming more and more apparent to American authorities. 
 
 2 I cannot see why idealists should have been so slow to accord to 
 Pragmatism the element of truth in this idea, and to admit that it 
 connects the pragmatist philosophy of " consequences " with the 
 idealist " value-philosophy." 
 
 3 The greater part, for example, of our British teaching and writing 
 about Kant and Hegel has taken little or no recognition of the
 
 184 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM 
 
 philosophical systems of the past ought (after the 
 necessary period of preliminary study on the part 
 of the pupil) to be presented to students in uni- 
 versity lectures. A teacher who cannot set them 
 forth in this spirit is really not a teacher at all — a 
 man who can make his subject live again in the 
 thought of the present. 1 
 
 If the limits of our space and our subject 
 permitted of the attempt, we might easily con- 
 tinue the study of the pragmatist element in 
 American scholarship from the point of view of 
 the whole general economy of a university as a 
 social institution, and from that of the benefit 
 that has accrued to the modern world from the 
 many successful attempts at the organization of 
 knowledge from an international point of view, 
 that have come into being under American 
 initiative. 2 
 
 peculiar intellectual and social atmosphere under which Criticism and 
 Transcendentalism became intelligible and influential in Germany 
 and elsewhere, or of the equally important matter of the very 
 different ways in which the Kantian and the Hegelian philosophies 
 were interpreted by different schools and different tendencies of 
 thought. A similar thing might, I think, too, be said of the unduly 
 " intellectualistic " manner in which the teachings of Plato and Aristotle 
 have often been presented to our British students — under the influ- 
 ence partly of Hegelianism and partly of the doctrinairism and the 
 intellectualism of our academic Humanism since the time of the 
 Renaissance. Hence the great importance in Greek philosophy of 
 such a recent work as that of F. M. Cornford upon the relation 
 of Religion to Philosophy (From Religion to Philosophy, Arnold, 1912), 
 or of Professor Burnet's well-known Early Greek Philosophy. 
 
 1 As suggestive of the scant respect for authorities felt by the 
 active-minded American student, I may refer to the boast of Papini 
 that Pragmatism appeals to the virile and the proud-spirited who do 
 not wish to accept their thought from the past. 
 
 2 I am thinking of such events as the " World's Parliament of
 
 PRAGMATISM AS AMERICANISM 185 
 
 Lastly it is surely impossible to exaggerate the 
 value to philosophy of the so-called " democratic," 1 
 open-minded attitude of Pragmatism that is seen 
 in its unprejudiced recognition of such things 
 as the ordinary facts of life, the struggle that 
 constitutes the life of the average man, the frag- 
 mentary and partial 2 character of most of our 
 
 Religions " (in Chicago in 1893), the recent international conferences 
 upon " ethical instruction in different countries," upon " racial 
 problems," upon " missions," etc. It would be idle to think that such 
 attempts at the organisation of the knowledge and the effort of the 
 thinking people in the world are quite devoid of philosophical import- 
 ance. One has only to study, say, von Hartmann, or modern social 
 reform, to be convinced of the contrary. 
 
 1 I trust I may be pardoned if I venture to suggest that in opposition 
 to the democratic attitude of Pragmatism to the ordinary facts of 
 life, and to the ordinary (but often heroic) life of ordinary men, the 
 view of man and the universe that is taken in such an important 
 idealistic book as Dr. Bosanquet's Individuality and Value is doubtless 
 unduly aristocratic or intellectualistic. It speaks rather of the Greek 
 view of life than of the modern democratic view. As an expression 
 of the quasi democratic attitude of James even in philosophy, we may 
 cite the following: " 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 pre- 
 sumption against its truth, as a philosophical disqualification. The 
 Prince of Darkness may be a gentleman, as we are told he is, but what- 
 ever 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." 
 
 Having rewritten this quotation two or three times, I have lost the 
 reference to its place in James's writings. It is one of the three books 
 upon Pragmatism and Pluralism.] 
 
 2 We may quote, I think, the following passage from Professor 
 Perry to show that the open-mindedness of James was not merely a 
 temperamental and an American characteristic in his case, but a 
 quality or attitude that rested upon an intellectual conviction in respect 
 of the function of ideas. " Since it is their office [i.e. the office of ideas] 
 to pave the way for direct knowledge, or to be temporarily substituted 
 for it, then efficiency is conditioned by their unobtrusiveness, by the 
 readiness with which they subordinate themselves. The commonest case 
 of an idea in James's sense is the word, and the most notable example 
 of his pragmatic or empirical method is his own scrupulous avoidance 
 of verbalism. It follows that since ideas are in and of themselves of
 
 186 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM 
 
 knowledge, and so on. All this contrasts in the 
 most favourable way with the scholastic and the 
 Procrustean attitude to facts that has so long 
 characterized philosophical rationalism from 
 Leibniz and Wolff to the Kantians and to the 
 Neo-Kantians and the Neo-Hegelians of our own 
 time. Thanks partly to this direct and demo- 
 cratic attitude of mind on the part of the prag- 
 matists and humanists, and thanks too to the 
 entire psychological and sociological movement 
 of modern times, the points of view of the different 
 leading thinkers of different countries are beginning 
 to receive their fitting recognition in the general 
 economy of human thought to be compared with 
 each other, and with still other possible points of 
 view. 
 
 No one, it seems to me, can read the books of 
 James without feeling that philosophy can again, 
 as the universal science indeed, " begin any- 
 where " in a far less restricted sense than that in 
 which Hegel interpreted this ingenious saying 
 of his in respect of the freedom of human thinking. 1 
 
 As for the inevitable drawbacks and limitations 
 of the very Americanism which we have been 
 
 no cognitive value, since they are essentially instrumental, they are 
 always on trial, and ' liable to modification in the course of future 
 experience.'" — Present Philosophical Tendencies, p. 364 (italics mine). 
 
 1 It is known to all students that some of the more important 
 writings of this prince of thinkers cannot be intelligibly approached 
 without a long preliminary study of the peculiar " dressing up," or 
 transformation, to which he subjects the various facts of life and 
 existence. And the same tiling is true (to a more modified extent) 
 of the writings of Kant.
 
 PRAGMATISM AS AMERICANISM 187 
 
 endeavouring to discover in Pragmatism, it can- 
 not, to begin with, be entirely without an element 
 of risk to philosophy, and to the real welfare of a 
 country, that the highest kind of insight should 
 be brought too ruthlessly into competition with 
 the various specialized studies, and the various 
 utilitarian l pursuits of modern times, and with 
 popular tendencies generally. The public, for many 
 reasons, should not be too readily encouraged to 
 think of philosophy as merely " a " study like 
 other studies and pursuits, to be baited with the 
 idea of its utility and its profitable consequences. 
 Philosophy, on the contrary, is the universal study 
 that gives to all other studies and pursuits their 
 relative place and value. If left too much to be 
 a mere matter of choice on the part of the young 
 and the unthinking, it will soon find itself in 
 the neglected position of the wisdom that utters 
 her voice at the street corners. It must be 
 secured an integral, and even a necessary place 
 in the world of instruction — a condition that is 
 still the case, it is to be remembered, in Catholic 2 
 
 1 See the wise remark, in this very connexion, of the possible service 
 of philosophy to-day, of Dr. Bosanquet, reproduced upon p. 226. And 
 then, again, we must remember that an unduly pragmatist view of life 
 would tend to make people impervious to ideas that transcend the range 
 and the level of their ordinary interests and activities. 
 
 2 Cf. the following from Professor Pace's Preface to Introduction to 
 Philosophy, by Charles A. Dubray. " In Catholic colleges, importance 
 has always been attached to the study of philosophy both as a means 
 of culture and as a source of information regarding the great truths 
 which are influential in supporting Christian belief and in shaping 
 character." Of course these same words might be used as descriptive of 
 what Professor Santayana calls the "older tradition" in all American 
 colleges. It is interesting, by the way, to note also the pragmatist
 
 188 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM 
 
 as distinguished from many so-called " liberal " 
 and " Protestant " seats of learning. 
 
 It is possible indeed, as we have already 
 suggested, that the recognition of an aristocratic 
 or a Catholic element in learning would, in 
 some respects, be of more true use in the schools 
 of America than a mere pragmatist philosophy 
 of life and education. And it is therefore not to 
 be wondered at that Americans themselves should 
 already have expressed something of a distrust for 
 a philosophy and an educational policy that are 
 too akin to the practical commercialism of the 
 hour. 1 
 
 Then again, despite the large element of truth 
 that there is in the idea of philosophy " discover- 
 ing ' (rather than itself " being ") the true 
 " dynamic " or " motive-awakening " view of the 
 system of things in which we live, philosophy 
 itself was never intended to bear the entire weight 
 and strain that are put upon it by the pragmatists. 
 In their enthusiasm they would make out of it, as 
 we have seen, a religion (and a new one at that !) 
 and a social philosophy, as well as the theory 
 of knowledge and the " approach " to reality that 
 we are accustomed to look for in a system of 
 philosophy. 
 
 touch in the same Preface to this Catholic manual. " But if this 
 training is to be successful, philosophy must be presented, not as a 
 complex of abstruse speculations on far-off inaccessible topics, but as a 
 system of truths that enter with vital consequence into our ordinary 
 thinking and our everyday conduct." 
 1 See p. 136.
 
 PRAGMATISM AS AMERICANISM 189 
 
 It is only in periods of transition and recon- 
 struction, like the present age, when men have 
 become acutely sensible of the limitations of 
 traditional views of things, that they are inclined 
 in their disappointment to look to scientific and 
 professional thinkers for creeds that shall take 
 the place of what they seem for the moment 
 to be losing. It is in such times chiefly that 
 philosophy flourishes, and that it is apt to acquire 
 an undue importance by being called upon to do 
 things that of itself it cannot do. Among the 
 latter impossibilities is to be placed, for example, 
 the idea of its being able to offer (almost in any 
 sense) a substitute for the direct experience * of 
 the common life, or for the realities of our affections 
 and our emotions, or for the ideals engendered 
 by the common life. 
 
 Owing partly to the limitations of the Intel- 
 lectualism that has hitherto characterized so much 
 of the culture and the educational policy of the 
 last century there are still everywhere scores of 
 people under the illusion that the truth of life will 
 be revealed to them in the theory of some book, 
 in the new views or the new gospel of some 
 emancipated and original thinker. In this vain 
 hope of theirs they are obviously forgetful of even 
 the pragmatist truth that all theories are but a 
 kind of transformation, or abstract expression, 
 of the experiences of real life and of real living. 
 And part of the trouble with the pragmatists is 
 
 1 See above, p. 34 and p. 165.
 
 igo PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM 
 
 that they themselves have unwittingly ministered 
 to this mistaken attitude of mind by creating the 
 impression that their theory of taking the kingdom 
 of Heaven by storm, by the violence of their 
 postulations and of their plea for a " working 
 view" of things, is indeed the new gospel of 
 which men have long been in search. The race, 
 however, is not always to the swift and the eager, 
 nor the kingdom to those who are loudest in their 
 cryings of " Lord, Lord." And as a friend of mine 
 aptly applied it as against all practicalism and 
 Pragmatism, " there remaineth a rest to the 
 people of God." * The ordinary man, it should be 
 borne in mind, does not in a certain sense really 
 need philosophy. Its audience is with the few, and 
 it is to do it but scant service to think of making 
 it attractive to the many by the obliteration of 
 most of its distinctive characteristics and diffi- 
 culties, and by the failure to point out its inherent 
 limitations. It is not by any means, as we have 
 been indicating, a substitute either for life, or for 
 positive religion. Nor can it ever have much of 
 a message, even for the few, if they imagine them- 
 selves, on account of their wisdom, to be elevated 
 above the needs of the ordinary discipline of life. 
 
 Then again, there is surely an element of con- 
 siderable danger in the American-like depreciation 
 
 1 It is not, however, " rest " that the pragmatists want, even in 
 heaven, but renewed opportunities for achievement. " ' There shall be 
 news,' W. James was fond of saying with rapture, quoting from the 
 unpublished poem of a new friend, ' there shall be news in heaven.'" 
 — Professor Santayana in Winds of Doctrine, p. 209.
 
 PRAGMATISM AS AMERICANISM 191 
 
 of doctrine and theory which we have noticed 
 in two or three different connexions on the part 
 of Pragmatism. In the busy, necessitous life of 
 the United States this depreciation 1 is sometimes 
 said to be visible in the great sacrifice of life 2 
 and energy that is continually taking place there 
 owing to an unduly literal acceptance on the part 
 of every one of the idea that each individual has 
 a sort of divine right to seek and to interpret his 
 experience for himself. In Pragmatism it might 
 be said to be illustrated in the comparative weak- 
 ness in the essentials of logic and ethics to which 
 we have already referred, in the matter of a 
 sound theory of first principles. And also in its 
 failure to take any really critical recognition 3 of 
 the question of its theoretical and practical 
 affiliations to tendencies new and old, many or 
 
 1 In using this expression I am acutely conscious of its limitations 
 and of its misleading character. There is nothing in which Americans 
 so thoroughly believe as knowledge and instruction and information. 
 A belief in education is in fact the one prevailing religion of the 
 country — the one thing in which all classes, without any exception, 
 unfeignedly believe, and for which the entire country makes enormous 
 sacrifices. 
 
 2 In using this expression I am not blind to such outstanding char- 
 acteristics of American life as (i) the enormous amount of preventive 
 philanthropy that exists in the United States ; (2) the well-known 
 system of checks in the governmental machinery of the country ; (3) 
 the readiness with which Americans fly to legislation for the cure 
 of evils ; (4) the American sensitiveness to pain and their hesitation 
 about the infliction of suffering or punishment, etc. Nor do I forget 
 the sacrifice of life entailed by modern necessities and modern inven- 
 tions in countries other than America. I simply mean that owing to 
 the constant stream of immigration, and to the spirit of youthfulness 
 that pervades the country, the willingness of people to make experi- 
 ments with themselves and their lives is one of the many remarkable 
 things about the United States. 3 See p. 117.
 
 i 9 2 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM 
 
 most of which have long ago been estimated at 
 their true worth and value. Then there is its 
 comparatively superficial interpretation 1 of what 
 is known in the thought of the day as "Darwinism" 
 and " Evolutionism " and the endless belief of 
 the unthinking in " progress," and its failure 
 to see that its very Americanism 2 and its very 
 popularity are things that are deserving of the 
 most careful study and criticism. What have the 
 pragmatists left in their hands of their theory, if 
 its mere " methodology " and its " efficiency- 
 philosophy " and its would-be enthusiasm were 
 eliminated from it ? 
 
 Like Americanism in general (which began, of 
 course, as a revolutionary and a " liberationist ' 
 policy), Pragmatism is inclined in some ways 
 to make too much of peoples' rights and 
 interests, and too little of their duties and 
 privileges and of their real needs and their funda- 
 mental, human instincts. It is in the under- 
 standing alone of these latter things that true 
 wisdom and true satisfaction 3 are to be found. 
 And like the American demand for pleasure 
 
 1 And this despite the enormous amount of work that has been 
 done by American biologists upon the "factors" of evolution, and 
 upon a true interpretation of Darwinism and of Weismannism and 
 of the evolutionary theory generally. 
 
 2 Even Professor James, for example, dismissed (far too readily, in 
 my opinion) as a " sociological romance " a well-known book (published 
 both in French and in English) by Professor Schinz entitled Anti- 
 Pragmatism. Although in some respects a superficial and exaggerated 
 piece of work, this book did discover certain important things about 
 Pragmatism and about its relation to American life. 
 
 3 It is probably a perception of this truth that has led Dr. Bosanquet
 
 PRAGMATISM AS AMERICANISM 193 
 
 and for a good time generally, Pragmatism is in 
 many respects too much a mere philosophy of 
 " postulations " and " demands," too much a 
 mere formulation of the eager and impetuous 
 demands of the emancipated man and woman 
 of the time — as forgetful as they of many of the 
 deeper 1 facts of life and of the economy of our 
 human civilization. In demanding that the 
 " consequences " of all pursuits (even those of 
 study and philosophy) shall be " satisfying," and 
 that philosophy shall satisfy our active nature, 
 it forgets the sense of disillusionment that comes 
 to all rash and mistaken effort. It certainly does 
 not follow that a man is going to get certain things 
 from the world and from philosophy merely because 
 he demands them any more than does the discovery 
 and the possession of happiness follow from the 
 "right" 2 of the individual to seek it in his own best 
 way. Nor is it even true that man is called upon 
 to " act " to anything like the extent contemplated 
 by an unduly enthusiastic Americanism and an 
 
 to express the opinion that the whole pragmatist issue may be settled 
 by an examination of the notion of " satisfaction." He must mean, 
 I think, that satisfaction is impossible to man without a recognition 
 of many of the ideal factors that are almost entirely neglected by the 
 pragmatists — except by Bergson, if it be fair to call him a pragmatist. 
 
 1 Bourdeau, for example, has suggested that its God is not really 
 God, but merely an old domestic servant destined to do us personal 
 services — help us to carry our trunk and our cross in the midst of 
 sweat and dirt. He is not a gentleman even. " No wonder," he adds, " it 
 was condemned at Rome." See his Pragmatisme et Modernisme, p. 82. 
 
 2 I am thinking here of the words in the Constitution of the State 
 of California (they are printed in Mr. Bryce's American Commonwealth — 
 at least in the earlier editions) to the effect that it is the natural right 
 of all men to seek and to " obtain [!] " happiness. 
 
 13
 
 i 9 4 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM 
 
 unduly enthusiastic Pragmatism. The writer is 
 glad to be able to append in this connexion a 
 quotation taken by an American critic of Prag- 
 matism from Forberg in his criticism of the action- 
 philosophy of Fichte : " Action, action, is the 
 vocation of man ! Strictly speaking, this principle 
 is false. Man is not called upon to act, but to act 
 justly. If he cannot act without acting unjustly 
 he had better remain inactive." 
 
 It would not be difficult to match this quota- 
 tion, or perhaps to surpass it, with something from 
 Carlyle in respect of the littleness of man's claims, 
 not merely for enjoyment, but even for existence ; 
 but we will pass on. 
 
 Pragmatism, as we have suggested, certainly 
 falls too readily into line with the tendency of 
 the age to demand means and instruments and 
 utilities and working satisfactions, instead of 
 ends and purposes and values, to demand pleasure 
 and enjoyment instead of happiness and blessed- 
 ness. Instead of allowing itself to do this it 
 should have undertaken a criticism both of the 
 so-called "wants" of the age, and of the sound- 
 ness of its own views in respect of the truth 
 and the happiness that are proper to man as 
 man. There is a fine epigram of Goethe's in 
 respect of the limitations of the revolutionary 
 and the liberationist attitude of those who would 
 seek to " free " men without first trying to under- 
 stand them, and to help them to their true inward 
 development.
 
 PRAGMATISM AS AMERICANISM 195 
 
 Alle Freiheits-Apostel, sie waren mir immer zuwider. 
 Willkur suchte doch nur jeder am Ende fur sich. 
 Willst du viele befrein, so wag' es vielen zu dienen. 
 Wie gefahrlich das sey, willst du es wissen ? Versuch's. 1 
 
 Until Pragmatism then makes it clear that 
 it is the free rational activity, and the higher 
 spiritual nature of man that is to it the norm of 
 all our thought, and all our activity, and the true 
 test of all " consequences," it has not risen to the 
 height of the distinctive message that it is capable 
 of giving to the thought of the present time. 
 Unqualified by some of the ideal considerations 
 to which we have attempted, in its name, and in 
 its interest, to give an expression, it would not be, 
 for example, a philosophy that could be looked 
 upon by the great East as the last word of our 
 Western wisdom or our Western experience. It 
 will be well, however, to say nothing more in 
 this connexion until we have looked at the con- 
 siderations that follow (in our next chapter) upon 
 the lofty, but impersonal, idealisation of the life 
 and thought of man attempted by our Anglo- 
 Hegelian Rationalism, and until we have re- 
 flected, too, upon the more feasible form of 
 Idealism attempted in the remarkable philosophy 
 of Bergson, 2 the greatest of all the pragmatists. 
 
 1 " Epigramme," Venice, 1790. [" I could never abide any of those 
 freedom-gospellers. All that they ever wanted was to get things 
 running so as to suit themselves. If you are anxious to set people free, 
 just make a beginning by trying to serve them. The simplest attempt 
 will teach you how dangerous this effort may be."] 
 
 2 See Chapter IX.
 
 CHAPTER VIII 
 
 PRAGMATISM AND ANGLO-HEGELIAN 
 RATIONALISM 
 
 The form of Anglo-German Rationalism or Intel- 
 lectualism which I shall venture to select for the 
 purposes of consideration from the point of view 
 of Pragmatism and Humanism is the first volume 
 of the recent Gifford Lectures of Dr. Bernard 
 Bosanquet, who has long been regarded by the 
 philosophical public of Great Britain as one of the 
 most characteristic members of a certain section 
 of our Neo-Hegelian school. I shall first give the 
 barest outline of the argument and contentions 
 of " The Principle of Individuality and Value," 
 and then venture upon some paragraphs of what 
 shall seem to me to be relevant criticism. 
 
 Dr. Bosanquet's initial position is a conception 
 of philosophy, and its task which is for him and his 
 book final and all-determining. To him Philo- 
 sophy is (as it is to some extent to Hegel) " logic " 
 or " the spirit of totality." It is " essentially of 
 the concrete and the whole," as Science is of the 
 
 " abstract and the part." Although the best thing 
 
 196
 
 PRAGMATISM AND RATIONALISM 197 
 
 in life is not necessarily " philosophy," philosophy 
 in this sense of " logic " is the clue to " reality 
 and value and freedom," the key to everything, 
 in short, that we can, or that we should, or that we 
 actually do desire and need. It [philosophy] is 
 " a rendering in coherent thought of what lies at 
 the heart of actual life and love." His next step 
 is to indicate " the sort of things," or the sort of 
 " experiences," or the sort of " facts " that philo- 
 sophy needs as its material, if it would accomplish 
 its task as " universal logic." This he does 
 (1) negatively, by the rejection of any form of 
 " immediateness," or " simple apprehension," such 
 as the " solid fact," the " sense of being," or the 
 " unshareable self " of which we sometimes seem 
 to hear, or such as the " naive ideas " of " com- 
 pensating justice," x " ethics 2 which treats the indi- 
 vidual as isolated" and "teleology" 3 as "guidance 
 by finite minds," as the data (or as part of the data) 
 of philosophy ; and (2) positively, by declaring 
 
 1 On what grounds does Professor Bosanquet think of " compensating 
 justice " as a naive idea ? It is on the contrary one of the highest and 
 deepest, and one of the most comprehensive to which the human mind 
 has ever attained— giving rise to the various theogonies and theodicies 
 and religious systems of mankind. It is at the bottom, for example, of 
 the theodicy and the philosophy of Leibniz, the founder of the Rational- 
 ism of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Europe. 
 
 2 Could any system of ethics which took such an impossible and 
 such a belated conception of the individual be regarded as ethics at all ? 
 
 3 I do not think that this is a fair preliminary description of the 
 problem of teleology. A person who believes in the realization of 
 purpose in some experiences with which he thinks himself to be ac- 
 quainted does not plead for the guidance of the universe by finite minds, 
 but simply for a view of it that shall include the truth of human purposes. 
 And of course there may be in the universe beings other than ourselves 
 who also realize purposes.
 
 198 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM 
 
 that his subject-matter throughout will be " the 
 principle of ' individuality/ of ' self -completeness/ 
 as the clue to reality." This " individuality " 
 or " self-completeness " is then set forth in a 
 quasi-Platonic manner as the " universal," the 
 real " universal " being (he insists) the " concrete 
 universal," the " whole," that is to say, " the 
 logical system of connected members," that is to 
 him the " ideal of all thought." We must think 
 of this " individuality," therefore, either as "a 
 living world, complete and acting out of itself, a 
 positive, self-moulding cosmos," or "as a definite 
 striving of the universe " [I] 1 
 
 The next question (so far as our partial purposes 
 are concerned) that Dr. Bosanquet asks is, " What 
 help do we get from the notion of a ' mind ' which 
 1 purposes ' or ' desires ' things in appreciating 
 the work of factors in the universe, or of the 
 universe as [ex-hypothesi] self-directing and self- 
 experiencing whole ? " The answer is spread 
 over several chapters, and is practically this, that 
 although there is undoubtedly a " teleology " in 
 the universe (in the shape of the " conjunctions 
 and results of the co-operation of men," or of 
 " the harmony of geological and biological evolu- 
 tion "), and although " minds such as ours play a 
 part in the work of direction, we cannot judge of 
 this work in question in any human manner." 
 The real test of teleology or value is " wholeness," 
 " completeness," " individuality " [the topic of 
 
 1 Italics and exclamation mine.
 
 PRAGMATISM AND RATIONALISM 199 
 
 the book], and it is made quite clear that it is the 
 "Absolute" who is "rear' and "individual" 
 and not we. We are, indeed, in our lives " carried 
 to the Absolute without a break," * and our nature 
 "is only in process of being communicated to us." 2 
 "We should not think of ourselves after the pattern 
 of separate things or personalities in the legal 
 sense, nor even as selves in the sense of isolation 
 and exclusion of others." " Individuality " being 
 this " logical self -completeness," there can be 
 only one " Individual," and this one Individual 
 is the one criterion of " value," or " reality," or 
 " existence," " importance " and " reality [!] " 
 being sides of the one " characteristic " [i.e. 
 " thinkableness " as a whole]. Dr. Bosanquet 
 confesses in his seventh chapter that this idea 
 of his of " individuality," or " reality," is es- 
 sentially the Greek idea that it is only the " whole 
 nature " of things that gives them their reality 
 or value. 
 
 We are then assured, towards the close of this 
 remarkable book, that " freedom " (the one thing 
 
 1 Italics mine. There is a large element of truth in this great idea 
 of Professor Bosanquet's, connecting [for our purposes] his philosophy 
 with the theism and the personalism for which we are contending as 
 the only true and real basis for Humanism. 
 
 2 Readers who remember Green's Prolegomena to Ethics will 
 remember that it is one of the difficulties of that remarkable, but one- 
 sided, production (exposed, I think, with many other defects in Pro- 
 fessor Taylor's brilliant, but unduly intellectualistic Problem of Conduct) 
 that it also seems to teach a kind of " Determinism " in ethics, in what 
 our nature is unduly communicated to us by the Absolute, or the 
 " Eternal Consciousness." This whole way of looking at things must 
 largely be abandoned to-day.
 
 200 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM 
 
 that we mortals value as the greatest of all "goods") 
 is " the inherent effort of mind considered as a [!] 
 world, and that the " Absolute " [the " universal " 
 of logic, Plato's " Idea "] is the " high-water mark 
 of our effort," and that each " self " is " more like 
 a rising and a falling tide than an isolated pillar with 
 a fixed circumference." The great fact of the 
 book, the fact upon which its accomplished author 
 rests when he talks in his Preface of his belief, 
 " that in the main the work [of philosophy] has 
 been done," is the daily " transmutation of 
 experience according to the level of the mind's 
 energy and self-completeness," the continued and 
 the continuous "self -interpretation [of 'experience'] 
 through the fundamental principle of individu- 
 ality." 
 
 Now it is quite obvious that according to many 
 of the considerations that have been put forward 
 as true in the foregoing chapters, this philosophy 
 of Dr. Bosanquet's which treats the " concept," 
 or the " universal " as an end in itself (as the one 
 answer to all possible demands for a " teleology ") 
 and as an " individual," " a perfected and self- 
 perfecting [!] individual," can be regarded as 
 but another instance of the abstract Rationalism 
 against which Pragmatism and Humanism have 
 entered their protests. It is untrue, therefore, 
 to the real facts of knowledge and the real 
 facts of human nature. It will be sufficient to 
 state that the considerations of which we are 
 thinking are (in the main) the positions that have
 
 PRAGMATISM AND RATIONALISM 201 
 
 been taken in respect of such things as : (1) the 
 claim that a true metaphysic must serve not 
 merely as an intellectual " system " but as a 
 " dynamic," and as a " motive " for action and 
 achievement; (2) the fact of the "instrumental" 
 character of thought and of ideas, and of all 
 systems (of science or of philosophy or of 
 politics) that fail to include as part of their data 
 the various ideals of mankind ; (3) the idea that 
 all truth and all thought imply a belief in the 
 existence of objects and persons independent of 
 the mere mental states or activities of the think- 
 ing individual, and that belief rather than know- 
 ledge is, and always has been, man's funda- 
 mental and working estimate of reality ; (4) 
 the fact that our human actions and re-actions 
 upon reality are a part of what we mean by 
 " reality," and that these actions and re-actions of 
 ours are real and not imaginary ; (5) the attitude 
 in general of Pragmatism to Rationalism ; (6) the 
 various concessions that have been made by 
 representative rationalists to the pragmatist 
 movement. 
 
 Dr. Bosanquet's theory of reality has already 
 impressed some of his most competent critics as 
 utterly inadequate as a motive or an incentive to 
 the efforts and endeavours of men as we know 
 them in history and in actual life, and we shall 
 immediately return to this topic. And although 
 there are many signs in his Lectures that he is 
 himself quite aware of the probability of such an
 
 202 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM 
 
 impression, his book proceeds upon the even tenor 
 of its way, following wherever his argument may 
 lead him, irrespective entirely of the truth con- 
 tained in the facts and the positions we have 
 just recounted and reaffirmed. It lends itself, 
 therefore, only too naturally to our present use 
 of it as a highly instructive presentation of many, 
 or most, of the tendencies of Rationalism and 
 Intellectualism, against which Pragmatism and 
 Humanism would fain protest. At the same time 
 there is in it, as we hope to show, a fundamental 
 element 1 of truth and of fact without which there 
 could be no Pragmatism and no Humanism, and 
 indeed no philosophy at all. 
 
 A broad, pervading inconsistency 2 in In- 
 
 1 See below, p. 226. 
 
 2 It is, I am inclined to think, the existence of this contradiction in 
 Dr. Bosanquet's Lectures that will cause the average intelligent person 
 to turn away from them as not affording an adequate account of the 
 reality of the world of persons and things with which he knows himself 
 to be directly and indirectly acquainted. Another way of stating the 
 same thing would be to say that Absolutism fails to take any adequate 
 recognition of that most serious contradiction (or " defect ") in our ex- 
 perience of which we have already spoken as the great dualism of modern 
 times, the opposition between reason and faith an opposition that is 
 not relieved either by the greatest of the continually increasing dis- 
 coveries of science, or by any, or all, of the systems of all the thinkers. 
 Hegelianism in general assures us that from the point of view of a 
 " higher synthesis " this opposition does not exist or that it is somehow 
 " transcended." And its method of effecting this synthesis is to convert 
 the opposition between faith and reason into the opposition between 
 what it calls '* Understanding " and what it calls " Reason " [an 
 opposition that is to some extent a fictitious one, " reason " being, to 
 begin with, but another name for our power of framing general con- 
 ceptions or notions, and not therefore different from "understanding"]. 
 It removes, that is to say, the opposition between two different phases 
 or aspects of our experience by denying the existence of one of 
 them altogether. It changes the opposition between knowledge and
 
 PRAGMATISM AND RATIONALISM 203 
 
 dividuality and Value " which militates somewhat 
 seriously against the idea of its being regarded 
 as a tenable philosophy, is the obvious one 
 between the position (1) that true reality is 
 necessarily individual, and the position (2) that 
 reality is to be found in the " universal ' (or the 
 "concept ") of logic. 1 It would, however, perhaps 
 be unfair to expect Dr. Bosanquet to effect a 
 
 faith into an opposition between an alleged lower and an alleged 
 higher way of knowing. This alleged higher way of knowing, how- 
 ever, is, when we look into it, but the old ideal of the perfect 
 demonstration of all the supposed contents of our knowledge (prin- 
 ciples and facts alike) that has haunted modern philosophy from the 
 time of Descartes. It is an unattainable ideal because no philosophy 
 in the world can begin without some assumption (either of " fact " 
 or of principle), and because our knowledge of the world comes 
 to us in a piecemeal fashion — under the conditions of time and 
 space. A fact prior to all the issues of the demand of Rationalism 
 for a supposedly perfect demonstration is the existence of the conscious 
 beings (Dr. Bosanquet himself, for example) who seek this supposed 
 certainty in order that they may act better — in ignorance of the fact that 
 complete initial certainty on our part as to all the issues and aspects 
 of our actions would tend to destroy the personal character of our 
 choice as moral agents, as beings who may occasionally act beyond the 
 given and the calculable, and set up precedents and ideals for ourselves 
 and for others — for humanity. It is this underlying faith then in the 
 reality of our moral and spiritual nature that we would alone oppose 
 (and only in a relative sense) to the supposed certainties of a completely 
 rational, or a priori, demonstration, the whole contention of humanism 
 being that it is in the interests of the former reality that the latter 
 certainties exist. The apparent opposition between faith and reason 
 would be surmounted by a philosophy that should make conscious- 
 ness of ourselves as persons the primal certainty, and all other forms 
 of consciousness or of knowledge secondary and tributary, as it were, 
 to this. 
 
 1 I am aware that there is a difference between the " universal " of 
 ordinary formal logic and Dr. Bosanquet's (or Hegel's) " concrete 
 universal," but it is needless for me to think of it here. Dr. Bosanquet 
 uses in his Lectures the phrase " logical universal " for his " concrete 
 universal " or his principle of positive coherence. It is always logical 
 coherence that he has in view.
 
 204 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM 
 
 harmony between these two positions that Aris- 
 totle (who held them both) was himself very 
 largely unable to do. There is, in other words, a 
 standing and a lasting contradiction between 
 any and all philosophy which holds that it is 
 reason [or logic] alone that attains to truth and 
 reality, and the apparently natural and inevit- 
 able tendency of the human mind [it is repre- 
 sented in Dr. Bosanquet's own procedure] to 
 seek after " reality " in the " individual " thing, 
 or person, or being, and in the perfecting of 
 " individuality " in God (or in a kingdom of 
 perfected individuals). 
 
 The positive errors, however, which we would 
 venture to refer to as even more fatal to Dr. 
 Bosanquet's book than any of its incidental in- 
 consistencies are those connected with the following 
 pieces of procedure on his part : (i) his manifest 
 tendency to treat the " universal " as if it were 
 an entity on its own account with a sort of develop- 
 ment and " value " and " culmination " of its 
 own ; * (2) his tendency to talk and think as if 
 a " characteristic " or a " predicate " (i.e. the 
 " characteristic " or " quality " that some ex- 
 periencing being or some thinker attributes to 
 reality) could be treated as anything at all apart 
 from the action and the reaction of this " experient ' 
 
 1 " For everywhere it is creative Logic, the nature of the whole working 
 in the detail, which constitutes experience, and is appreciable in so far 
 as experience has value." Now Logic of itself does not thus " work " 
 or " do " anything. It is men or persons who do things by the help 
 of logic and reasoning and other things — realities and forces, etc.
 
 PRAGMATISM AND RATIONALISM 205 
 
 (or " thinker ") conceived as an agent ; (3) the 
 tendency to talk of " minds " x rather than persons, 
 as " purposing " and " desiring " things ; (4) his 
 tendency to talk as if " teleology " were " whole- 
 ness " ; (5) his tendency to regard (somewhat in the 
 manner of Spinoza) " selves " and " persons " as 
 like " rising and falling tides," and of the self as 
 a " world of content " 2 engaged in certain " trans- 
 formations " ; and (6) his tendency to think and 
 speak as if demonstration [" mediation " is perhaps 
 his favourite way of thinking of the logical process] 
 were an end in itself, as if we lived to think, instead 
 of thinking to live. 
 
 In opposition to all this it may be affirmed 
 firstly that every " conception " of the human 
 mind is but the more or less clear consciousness 
 of a disposition to activity, and is representative, 
 not so much of the " features " of objects which 
 might appear to be their " characteristics " from 
 a purely theoretical point of view, as of the different 
 
 1 Cf. p. 31. " We are minds," he says, "i.e. living microcosms, not 
 with hard and fast limits, but determined by our range and powers 
 which fluctuate very greatly." My point simply is that this is too 
 intellectual! stic a conception of man's personality. We have minds, 
 but we are not minds. 
 
 2 See p. 192. " But as the self is essentially a world of content en- 
 gaged in certain transformations"; and p. 193, " a conscious being . . . 
 is a world ... in which the Absolute begins to reveal its proper 
 nature." How can a " world of content " [that is to say, the " sphere 
 of discourse" of what some person is thinking for some purpose or 
 other] be " engaged " in certain transformations ? It is the person, or 
 the thinker, who is transforming the various data of his experience 
 for his purposes as a man among men. It is time that philosophy ceased 
 to make itself ridiculous by calmly writing down such abstractions as 
 if they were facts.
 
 206 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM 
 
 ways in which objects have seemed to men to sub- 
 serve the needs of their souls and bodies. The 
 study of the development of the " concept " in 
 connexion with the facts of memory and with the 
 slow evolution of language, and with the "socialized 
 percepts " of daily life will all tend to confirm this 
 position. The phenomena of religion, for example, 
 and all the main concepts of all the religions are 
 to be studied not merely as intellectual phenomena, 
 as solutions of some of the many difficulties of 
 modern Agnosticism, or of modern Rationalism, 
 or of modern Criticism, but as an expressive 
 of the modes of behaviour of human beings (with 
 all their needs and all their ideals) towards 
 the universe in which they find themselves, and 
 towards the various beings, seen and unseen, which 
 this universe symbolises to them. These pheno- 
 mena and these conceptions are unintelligible, in 
 short, apart from the various activities and cults 
 and social practices and social experiences and 
 what not, with which they have dealt from first 
 to last. 
 
 Then it is literally impossible to separate in the 
 manner of Dr. Bosanquet the " predicate " of 
 thought from the active relations sustained by 
 things towards each other, or towards the human 
 beings who seek to interpret these active relations 
 for any or for all " purposes." Dr. Bosanquet's 
 idea, however, of the relation of " mind " to 
 " matter," to use these symbols for the nonce (for 
 they are but such), is in the main purely "repre-
 
 PRAGMATISM AND RATIONALISM 207 
 
 sentational " x or intellectualistic. 2 To him "mind" 
 seems to reflect either a " bodily content " or 
 some other kind of " content " 3 that seems to 
 exist for a " spectator " of the world, or for the 
 " Absolute," rather than for the man himself as an 
 agent, who of course uses his memories of himself, 
 or his " ideal " of himself, for renewed effort and 
 activity. One of the most important consequences 
 of this unduly intellectualistic view of mind is 
 that Dr. Bosanquet seems (both theoretically and 
 practically) unable to see the place of " mind," 
 as " purpose," in ordinary life, 4 or of the place of 
 mind in evolution, 5 giving us in his difficult but 
 important chapter on the " relation of mind and 
 body ' a version of things that approaches only 
 too perilously close to Parallelism or Dualism, or 
 even to Materialism. 6 And along with this quasi- 
 " representational " or " copy-like " theory of 
 mind there are to be associated his representational 
 
 1 Cf. " Mind as the significance and interpretation of reality," p. 27. 
 
 2 " Mind has nothing of its own but the active form of totality, every- 
 thing positive it draws from Nature." 
 
 8 This again is an abstraction, and how on earth can it be said that 
 " mind " and conscious life " reflect " merely certain abstractions (or 
 creations) of their own ? They have invented such terms as " content " 
 for certain purposes, and their own being and nature is therefore more 
 than these terms. Mind is not a " content " ; it makes all other things 
 " contents " for itself. 
 
 4 It has even there, according to Dr. Bosanquet, only its purely 
 theoretic function of working after its own perfection in the way of 
 attaining to a logical " universal." " The peculiarity of mind for us, 
 is to be a world of experience working itself out towards harmony and 
 completeness." This is simply not true. 
 
 6 " Finite consciousness, whether animal or human, did not make 
 its body." 
 
 6 " Thus there is nothing in mind which the physical counterpart 
 cannot represent." (Italics mine.)
 
 208 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM 
 
 and intellectualistic views of the " self " * and the 
 " universal " 2 and " spirit." 3 
 
 There are, doubtless, hints in Dr. Bosanquet's 
 pages of a more " dynamic " view of mind or of 
 a deeper view 4 than this merely "representational " 
 view, but they are not developed or worked into the 
 main portion of his argument, which they would 
 doubtless very largely transform. This is greatly 
 to be regretted, for we remember that even Hegel 
 seemed to notice the splitting-up of the real 
 for our human purposes which takes place in the 
 ordinary judgment. And of course, as we have 
 
 1 " What we call the individual, then, is not a fixed essence, but a 
 living world of content representing a certain range of externality." 
 P. 289. 
 
 2 " The system of the universe, as was said in an earlier Lecture, might 
 be described as a representative system. Nature, or externality [!] fives 
 in the fives of conscious beings. (Italics mine.) 
 
 3 " Spirit is a light, a focus, a significance [!] which can only be by 
 contact with a ' nature ' an external world." 
 
 * " For, on the other hand, it has been urged and we feel, that it is 
 thought which constructs and sustains the fabric of experience, and that it 
 is thought-determinations which invest even sense-experience with its 
 value and its meaning. . . . The ultimate tendency of thought, we have 
 seen, is not to generalise, but to constitute a world," p. 55. Again, " the 
 true office of thought, we begin to see, is to build up, to inspire with 
 meaning, to intensify, to vivify. The object which thought, in the true 
 sense, has worked upon, is not a relic of decaying sense, but is a living 
 world, analogous to a perception of the beautiful, in which every thought- 
 determination adds fresh point and deeper bearing to every element of 
 the whole," p. 58. And on p. 178 he says that he sees no objection to 
 an idealist recognising the " use made of " " laws " and " dispositions " 
 in recent psychology. [How one wishes that Dr. Bosanquet had really 
 worked into his philosophy the idea that every mental " element " is 
 in a sense a " disposition " to activity !] Some of these statements of 
 Dr. Bosanquet's have almost a pragmatist ring about them, a suggestion 
 of a living and dynamic (rather than a merely intellectualistic) con- 
 ception of thought. They may therefore be associated by the reader 
 with the concessions to Pragmatism by other rationalists of which we 
 spoke in an early chapter (see p. 74).
 
 PRAGMATISM AND RATIONALISM 209 
 
 noticed, all " purpose " is practical and theoretical 
 at one and the same time. 
 
 Then, thirdly, it is persons, and not " minds," 
 who desire and purpose things, " mind ' being 
 a concept invented by the spectator of activity 
 in a person other than himself, which (from 
 the analogy of his own conscious activity and 
 experience) he believes to be purposive. 1 Dr. 
 Bosanquet's use, too, of the expression "mind " 
 invariably leaves out of the range of consideration 
 the phenomena of desire and volition — intelligible, 
 both of them, only by reference to an end that 
 is to be understood from within, and not from 
 outside of the personality, from the point of 
 view of the mere spectator. The phenomena of 
 desire and volition are just as integral ingredients 
 of our lives as persons as are our cognitive states. 
 
 Fourthly, it is doubtful whether the treatment 
 of teleology as " wholeness " (or its sublimation 
 in " Individuality and Value " into " wholeness ") 
 is much of an explanation of this difficult topic, 
 or indeed whether it is any explanation at all. 
 Dr. Bosanquet, in fact, confesses that teleology 
 is a conception which " loses its distinctive meaning 
 as we deepen its philosophical interpretation, and 
 that it has very little meaning when applied to 
 the universe as a whole " [a thing that is apparent 
 to any Kantian student]. "It is impossible 
 seriously," he says, " to treat a mind which is the 
 universe [!] as a workman of limited resources, 
 
 1 See Chapter III. p. 90. 
 
 14
 
 210 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM 
 
 aiming at some things and obliged to accept others 
 as means to these." And it is equally impossible, 
 he holds, to apply " to the universe " the dis- 
 tinction of " what is purpose for its own sake and 
 what is not so." In fact, Dr. Bosanquet's treat- 
 ment of teleology is thus mainly negative, as 
 including not only this rejection 1 of the notion in 
 reference to the " universe as a whole," but its 
 rejection, too, in reference to the purposes of our 
 human life; 2 although he admits (as of course 
 he must) that the conception of end or purpose 
 is drawn from some of the features (" the simplest 
 features," he says) of our " finite life," or " finite 
 consciousness," If the notion were "to be re- 
 tained at all," he says, " it could only be a 
 name for some principle which would help to tell 
 us what has value quite independent of being or not 
 being, the purpose of some mind." 3 Now, of course, 
 according to the Pragmatism and Humanism that 
 we have been considering in this book, no intelligent 
 person could take any conceivable interest in such 
 a useless fancy as a teleology of this kind. Thus 
 teleology is really blotted out altogether of 
 existence in this volume, and with its disappearance 
 there must go also the notion of any value that 
 might be intelligibly associated with the idea of the 
 
 1 I must say that apart from any questions in detail about this 
 rejection of teleology by Dr. Bosanquet, there is something inexplicable 
 about it to me. He cannot retain his own great notion of " wholeness " 
 without the idea of" end," because" wholeness " is a demand of thought 
 that is guided by some idea of purpose or end. 
 
 2 See p. 90. 
 
 3 Italics mine.
 
 PRAGMATISM AND RATIONALISM 211 
 
 attainment of purposes or ends by the human 
 beings with whom we are acquainted in our 
 ordinary daily life. 
 
 We shall below 1 refer to the fact that this 
 rejection of teleology and value is one that must 
 be regarded as fatal to ethics or to Absolutism in 
 the realm of ethics. It requires, too, to be added 
 here that even the most unprejudiced reading of 
 Dr. Bosanquet's work must create in the mind of 
 the reader the conviction that its author is 
 altogether unfair to the views of those who believe 
 in the existence of definite manifestations of 
 purpose in human life. 2 He talks as if those who 
 uphold this idea or this fact are committed either 
 to the absurd notion that man is " the end of the 
 universe," or to the equally absurd notion that 
 " art, thought, society, history, in which mind 
 begins to transcend its finiteness should be ascribed 
 to the directive abilities of units in a plurality, 
 precisely apart from the world content and 
 the underlying solidarity of spirits, the medium 
 through which all great things are done." 
 
 With a view of bringing our discussion of these 
 striking Gifford Lectures within the scope of the 
 general subject of this book the following might 
 be regarded as their leading, fundamental char- 
 acteristics to which the most serious kind of 
 exception might well be taken : (1) its " abstrac- 
 tionism " 3 and its general injustice to fact due to 
 
 1 P. 225. 2 gee p. 90. 
 
 3 Having already given instances of this abstractionism in the case
 
 212 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM 
 
 its initial and persistent " conviction " x [strange 
 to say, this is the very word used by Bosanquet] 
 that the real movement in things is a " logical " 
 movement ; (2) its fallacious conception of the task 
 of philosophy as mainly the obligation to think the 
 world " without contradiction " ; (3) its obvious 
 tendency in the direction of the " subjective 
 idealism " 2 that has been the bane of so much 
 modern philosophy and that is discarded altogether 3 
 by Pragmatism and Humanism ; (4) its retention 
 
 of such things as the " self " and the " universal " and " spirit," it will 
 suffice to point out here in addition (i) its tendency to talk of " experi- 
 ence " and " experiences " as if there could be such things apart from the 
 prior real existence of the experients or the experiencing persons with 
 whom we are acquainted in our daily life, and (2) its tendency to talk 
 of getting at " the heart of actual life and love " in a " system " which 
 leaves no place for the real existence of either gods or men who live 
 and love. And then I trust that it may not be regarded as an 
 impertinence to allege as another puzzling piece of abstractionism on 
 the part of Dr. Bosanquet, that he has allowed himself to speak and 
 think in his book as if his theory of the " concrete universal " were 
 practically a new thing in the thought of our time — apart altogether, 
 that is to say, from the important work in this same direction of 
 other Neo-Hegelian writers, and apart, too, from the unique work of 
 Hegel in the same connexion. 
 
 1 See below, p. 230. 
 
 2 This is revealed in the main in its exposition of the world as the 
 logical system of a single complete individual experience — a tend- 
 ency that students of philosophy know to exist in Neo-Hegelianism 
 generally from Green to Bradley. I admit that this tendency is 
 literally a different thing from solipsism in the ordinary sense, as the 
 inability of a particular finite person to prove to himself that any 
 person or thing exists except himself. It is still, however, it seems 
 to me, possible to regard as solipsistic the tendency to set forth the 
 universe as the experience, or the thought, of a single experient or a 
 single thinker, even although the impersonalism of Dr. Bosanquet's 
 logical " whole ' conflicts somewhat with the individuality of his 
 Absolute. 
 
 8 Cf. p. 160.
 
 PRAGMATISM AND RATIONALISM 213 
 
 of many of the characteristic polemical 1 faults 
 of Neo-Hegelianism and its manifestation of a 
 similar spirit of polemical unfairness 2 on the part 
 of their accomplished author ; (5) its implica- 
 tion in several really hopeless contradictions in 
 addition to the broad contradiction already re- 
 ferred to ; (6) its failure [a common Neo-Hegelian 
 failing] to do justice to the spirit and (in certain 
 important regards) the letter of Kant ; (7) its 
 essential non-moralism or its apparently anti- 
 ethical character. 
 
 As for the first of these charges, the " abstrac- 
 tionism " of " Individuality and Value," coming 
 as it does on the top of the general perversity 
 of the book, is really a very disastrous thing 
 
 1 The well-known inability of Mr. Bradley, for example, to be content 
 with the reality of any portion or any phase of reality that falls short 
 of what he regards as absolute reality, and with the merely relative 
 meaning that he attaches to any category of the " finite." Also the 
 well-known Neo-Hegelian tendency to make an opponent forge the 
 weapon by which he is to be dislodged from any particular point of view. 
 In the case of Dr. Bosanquet this tendency takes the form of making 
 out any one who holds to a belief in the real existence of finite conscious 
 persons to hold the absurd position of believing in "an impervious 
 and isolated self," a thing, of course, that no one who knows anything 
 about biology or ethics, or social psychology, really does. 
 
 2 As another instance of Dr. Bosanquet's unintentional unfairness 
 to his opponents, I would note his positive injustice to Theism as such. 
 What many of us think of (however imperfectly) and believe in as God 
 is invariably to him " a theistic Demiurge in his blankness and isolation.' ' 
 I do not believe in such an abstract Demiurge any more than I believe 
 in the separate, isolated self that he conjures up to his mind when he 
 thinks of personality. The problem of the twentieth century may well 
 be what Dr. Ward has signalised as the relation of God to the "Absolute " 
 of the Hegelian metaphysicians, but this suggestion simply means to 
 me the discovery on the part of philosophers of terms and concepts 
 more adequate to the Supreme Being than either the Absolute, or the 
 external deity rejected by Dr. Bosanquet.
 
 214 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM 
 
 for philosophy. While we may pardon an en- 
 thusiastic literary Frenchman x for saying that, 
 " The fact is, you see, that a fine book is the end 
 for which the world was made," there is hardly 
 any excuse for a philosopher like Dr. Bosanquet 
 coming before the world with the appearance of 
 believing that the richly differentiated universe 
 that we know only in part, exists for the benefit 
 of the science that he represents, for the dialectic 
 of the metaphysician, to enable the " universal " 
 to " become more differentiated " and " more in- 
 dividualized," to become " more representative ' 
 of the " whole." 2 We might compare, says Dr. 
 Bosanquet, in a striking and an enthralling 3 
 passage, " the Absolute to Dante's mind as uttered 
 in the Divine Comedy ... as including in a 
 single, whole poetic experience a world of space 
 and persons, . . . things that, to any ordinary 
 
 1 Stephane Mallarme, according to Nordau in Degeneration, p. 103. 
 
 2 And the general reader must remember that the " whole " is always 
 (with all due respect to his high dialectic ability and his high temper 
 of mind and his scholarship) a kind of ignis fatuus in Dr. Bosanquet's 
 book, a kind of shadow thrown by the lamps and the tools of his own 
 choosing in his Quixotic search. The "whole" is the "perfected 
 individuality " of the individual who sets out to find truth in this 
 great world of ours with all its real possibilities of gain and loss. 
 It is the completion of the " system " of truth to which the truth- 
 seeker would fain reduce the entire universe, that becomes for him (for 
 the time being) the mere " subject-matter " of his thought. It is, that 
 is to say, in both cases, a purely formal conception— an abstraction, 
 although to Dr. Bosanquet it is the reality implied in the very exist- 
 ence and activity of the individual thinker. But the latter is the case 
 to him only because he looks upon man as existing to think instead of as 
 thinking to exist. 
 
 3 That is to say, for the scholar and the lover of Dante and Dante's 
 world.
 
 PRAGMATISM AND RATIONALISM 215 
 
 mind, fall apart." Now even apart from the 
 highly interesting question of the manifestly great 
 and far-reaching influence of Dante over Dr. 
 Bosanquet, and apart, too, from the notable 
 modesty of Dr. Bosanquet's confession as to the 
 " imperfect " character of the simile just repro- 
 duced, no one to-day can think of attaching any 
 ultimate importance to " Dante's mind " without 
 thinking of the extent to which this truly great 
 man 1 was under the influence, not only of his own 
 passions and of the general " problem " of his own 
 life, but of such specialized influences as, for 
 example (1) the mediaeval dualism between the 
 City of God and the Empire of the World, (2) 
 Aristotle's unfortunate separation of the " intel- 
 lectual " and the " practical " virtues, (3) the evil 
 as well as the good of the dogmatic theology of 
 the fathers of the Church. Goethe is of infinitely 
 more value to us men of the twentieth century 
 than Dante. And one of the very things Goethe 
 is most calculated to teach us is precisely this very 
 matter of the limitations of the cultural ideal of the 
 Middle Ages and of the entire Renaissance period 
 that succeeded it. 2 We should never, therefore, 
 think for a moment of taking Dr. Bosanquet's 
 intellectual abstractionism about the " universal " 
 literally without thinking at the same time of its 
 
 1 For he was not merely a " mind," reflecting " Italy " and " minds " 
 and " experiences." 
 
 2 And that, we might add, is still kept alive by some of our 
 humanists and educators of to-day as the ideal for both primary and 
 secondary education.
 
 216 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM 
 
 limitations, and of its sources in Plato and in 
 Hegel and in Neo-Hegelian rationalism, and of 
 remembering with Hegel himself, " after all, the 
 movement of the notion is a sort of illusion." 
 
 Then, secondly, to attempt to think in philo- 
 sophy or any other science merely in accordance 
 with the Principle of <( Non-Contradiction' will 
 never 1 take us beyond the few initial positions 
 of fact or of principle (God, "substance," pure 
 being, matter, identity, final cause, freedom, force, 
 the will, the idea a perfect being, or what not) with 
 which we happen for one reason or another to start 
 in our reflections. Nor will this procedure ac- 
 count, of course, for these initial assumptions or 
 facts. 
 
 Thirdly, in virtue of its implication in the 
 " solipsism ' and the " representationalism " of 
 Subjective Idealism, Dr. Bosanquet's " Absolute " 
 is inferior (both so far as fact and theory are con- 
 cerned) to the Pluralism and the possible Theism 
 of Pragmatism and Humanism to which we have 
 already made partial references. 2 
 
 1 This is a thing that the beginner is taught in lectures introductory 
 to the study of the philosophy of Kant — in regard to Kant's relation 
 to the barren, dogmatic formalism of Wolff — a one-sided interpreter of 
 the philosophy of Leibniz. I am quite aware that Dr. Bosanquet does 
 not merely use the Principle of Non-Contradiction in the aggressive, or 
 polemical, manner of Mr. Bradley in Appearance and Reality. The 
 principle of positive coherence at which he aims, begins, to some extent, 
 where Mr. Bradley stopped. But it is still the idea of consistency or 
 inconsistency, with certain presuppositions of his own, that rules his 
 thinking ; it determines, from the very outset of his Lectures, what 
 he accepts and what he rejects. 
 
 2 See p. 152 and p. 156, note 2.
 
 PRAGMATISM AND RATIONALISM 217 
 
 Fourthly, it is only natural that, on account of 
 these, its many polemical mannerisms, " Individu- 
 ality and Value " has already made upon some 
 of its critics the impression of being a book that 
 refuses to see things as they are — in the interests 
 of their forced adaptation to the purposes of a 
 preconceived philosophical theory. 
 
 Fifthly, there is certainly a sufficient number of 
 contradictions in " Individuality and Value " to 
 prevent it from being regarded as a consistent and 
 a workable (i.e. really explanatory) account of 
 our experience as we actually know it. Of these 
 contradictions we think the following may well be 
 enumerated here : (1) That between Dr. Bosan- 
 quet's professed principle of accepting as real only 
 that which is " mediated " or established by proof, 
 and the arbitrariness he displays in announcing 
 convictions like the following : " That what really 
 matters is not the preservation of separate minds 
 as such, but the qualities and achievement which, 
 as trustees of the universe, they elicit from the 
 resources assigned them." (2) The contradiction 
 between his belief in the conservation of " values " 
 without the conservation of the existence of the 
 individuals who " elicit " these " values," or who 
 are, as he puts it, the " trustees " for the " uni- 
 verse." (3) That between what he logically wants 
 (his " concrete individual ") and what he gives us 
 (an impersonal " system "). (4) The contradiction 
 between the completed personal life in God (or 
 in a perfected society of individuals) that most of
 
 218 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM 
 
 us (judging from the great religions of the world) 
 want as human beings, and the impersonal 
 " conceptual " experience of his book. (5) The 
 contradiction that exists between his intellectual- 
 ism and his commendable belief in " great con- 
 victions " and " really satisfying emotions and 
 experiences. (6) The standing contradiction be- 
 tween his " solipsistic " view of reality (his reduc- 
 tion of the universe to the conceptual experience 
 of a single self -perfecting individual), and the 
 facts of history in support of the idea of the 
 " new," or the " creative " character of the con- 
 tributions of countless individuals and groups of 
 individuals, to the evolution of the life of the 
 world, or the life of the infinite number of worlds 
 that make up what we think of as the universe. 
 (7) The remarkable contradiction between Dr. 
 Bosanquet's calm rejection in his argumentation 
 of all " naive ideas " and his own na'ive or Greek- 
 like faith in reason, in the substantial existence of 
 the concept or the idea over and above the 
 phenomena and the phenomenal experiences which 
 it is used to intepret. 
 
 Lastly, as for the matter of the non-moralism or 
 the essentially anti-ethical character of " Individu- 
 ality and Value," this is a characteristic of the 
 book that should, as such, be partly apparent from 
 what has already been said, in respect of its main 
 argument and its main contentions, and in respect 
 of the apparent contributions of Pragmatism and 
 Humanism to philosophy generally. The abstrac-
 
 PRAGMATISM AND RATIONALISM 219 
 
 tionism of the book, and the absence in it of any 
 real provision for the realities of purpose and 
 of accomplishment (and even of " movement " 
 and "process" in any real sense of these words), 
 are all obviously against the interests of ethics 
 and of conduct, as purposive, human action. 
 So, too, are the findings of the critics that Dr. 
 Bosanquet's " Absolute " is not a reality (for, 
 with Professor Taylor and others, man must x have 
 an Absolute, or a God, in whom he can believe as 
 real) that inspires to action and to motive on the 
 part of ordinary human beings. And it is also 
 fatal to the ethical interests of his book that he 
 does not see with the pragmatists that our human 
 actions and reactions must be regarded as part 
 of what we mean by " reality." And so on. 
 
 Apart, however, from these and other hostile 
 pre-suppositions the following would seem to be 
 the chief reasons for pronouncing, as unsatisfactory, 
 the merely incidental treatment that is accorded 
 in " Individuality and Value " to ethics and to 
 the ethical life. 
 
 (1) It is not "conduct" or the normative 2 
 voluntary actions of human beings (in a 
 world or society of real human beings) requiring 
 " justice " and " guidance " and " help " that is 
 discussed in these Lectures, but abstractions like 
 
 1 I use this word " must " in a logical as well as in an ethical sense, 
 seeing that all judgment implies a belief in the reality of a world of 
 persons independent of the mere fact of " judgment " as a piece of 
 mental process. 
 
 2 See p. 145.
 
 220 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM 
 
 " desire," or " ordinary desire," or " the selective 
 conations of finite minds," or " the active form of a 
 totality of striving " or [worst of all] the " self as 
 it happens to be," that are discussed there. 
 
 (2) Even if conduct, as of course an " organic 
 totality " in its way, be faced for the nonce in " In- 
 dividuality and Value," it is invariably branded 
 and thought of by Dr. Bosanquet as " naive moral- 
 ity," * and it is forthwith promptly transformed 
 
 1 On p. 345 the words are : " When we consider the naive or elementary 
 life of morality and religion " ; and on p. 346 : " The naive, or simple 
 self of every-day morality and religion," and the marginal heading of the 
 page upon which these words occur is " The naive good self compared 
 to grasp of a fundamental principle alone." Could anything more 
 clearly indicate what the Kantians call a confusion of categories [in the 
 case in point the categories of " goodness " and the categories of 
 "truth"] or what Aristotle calls a fieTapaais eh &\\o yivos, the un- 
 conscious treatment of one order of facts by the terms and conceptions 
 of another order of facts. To Dr. Bosanquet as the Neo-Hellenist that 
 he is in his professed creed, badness is practically stupidity, and " lack 
 of unification of life," and " failure of theoretical grasp." This con- 
 fusion between goodness and wisdom is again indicated on p. 347 in 
 the words : " A man is good in so far as his being is ' unified at ' all in 
 any sphere of wisdom or activity." [This is simply not true, and its 
 falsity is a more unforgivable thing in the case of Dr. Bosanquet 
 than it is in the case of the pragmatists who also tend to make 
 the ' moral ' a kind of ' unification ' or ' effectiveness ' in ' purpose '] 
 As a proof of Dr. Bosanquet's transformation of the facts of the ethical 
 life in the interest of logical theory, we can point to p. 334 : " Our 
 actions and ideas issue from our world as a conclusion from its premises, 
 or as a poem from its author's spirit," or to p. 53, where it is definitely 
 stated that the " self, as it happens to be," cannot, in any of its " three 
 aspects," " serve as a test of reality." To do the latter, it must, in his 
 opinion, follow the law of the " universal," i.e. become a logical con- 
 ception. Now of course (1) it is not the self " as it happens to be" that 
 is chiefly dealt with in ethics, but rather the self as it ought to be. And 
 (2) the ethical self, or the " person," does not follow the " law of the 
 universal " [a logical law] but the law of right and wrong [an ethical 
 law]. As a proof of the subordination of the facts of conduct to the 
 facts of aesthetics, we may take the words on p. 348 where aesthetic 
 excellence is said to be " goodness in the wider or (' shall we say ') in the
 
 PRAGMATISM AND RATIONALISM 221 
 
 and transmuted, in the most open and unabashed 
 manner in the interests and exigencies of (1) logi- 
 cal theory, (2) aesthetics and aesthetic products 
 [perhaps Dr. Bosanquet's deepest or most emotional 
 interest], and (3) metaphysical theory of a highly 
 abstract character. 
 
 (3) The conception of ethics as a " normative 
 science " and of conduct as free and autonomous, 1 
 and as the voluntary affirmation of a norm or 
 standard or type or ideal, is conspicuous by its 
 absence. 
 
 (4) There is really no place either in Dr. 
 
 narrower sense." Now the distinction between ethics and aesthetics is 
 not one of degree, but one of kind. 
 
 And as another illustration of his tendency to transform ethical facts 
 in the light of a metaphysical, or a logical, theory [they are the same 
 thing to him] we may quote the emphatic declaration on p. 356 : " Our 
 effort has been to bring the conception of moral and individual initiative 
 nearer to the idea of logical determination," or the equally outspoken 
 declaration on p. 353 : " But metaphysical theory, viewing the self in its 
 essential basis of moral solidarity with the natural and social world . . . 
 cannot admit that the independence of the self, though a fact, is more than 
 a partial fact." Or the words at the top of this same page : " The 
 primary principle that should govern the whole discussion is this, that the 
 attitude of moral judgment and responsibility for decisions is only one 
 among other attitudes and spheres of experience." These last words 
 alone would prove definitely the non-ethical character of " Individu- 
 ality and Value." The ethical life is to its author only a " quatenus 
 consider atur," only a possible point of view, only an aspect of reality, 
 only an aspect, therefore, of a " logical system." Now if the ethical life 
 of the world is to count for anything at all, it may be said that the 
 ethical life is no mere aspect of the life of the self, and no mere aspect 
 of the life of the world, seeing that " nature " in the sense of mere 
 " physical nature " does not come into the sphere of morality at all. 
 It is rather the activity of the " whole self," or the " normative " 
 reflection of the self as a whole upon all the merely partial or sub- 
 ordinate aspects of its activity, upon bodily life, economic life, intel- 
 lectual activity, and so on that constitutes the world of morality. 
 
 1 See p. 147, and p. 244.
 
 222 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM 
 
 Bosanquet's " concrete universal " or in his 
 fugitive pages upon ethics for the reality of the 
 distinction between good and evil (as " willed " 
 in actions or as present in dispositions and tend- 
 encies). Good and evil 1 are for him, " contents " 
 either for himself as a spectator of man's actions, 
 or for the " concrete universal," or the " whole," 
 or the completed " individual " of his too consum- 
 mate book. 
 
 (5) Like nearly all forms of Absolutism (Hegel- 
 ianism, Neo-Hegelianism, Spinozism, Hobbism) 
 Dr. Bosanquet's ethics (or the vestigial ethics 
 with which he leaves us) comes perilously near 
 to what is known as Determinism 2 or Fatalism or 
 even Materialism. 
 
 1 Good and evil to Dr. Bosanquet are two quasi-rational systems 
 in active antagonism as claiming to attach different " principles and 
 predicates " to identical data. The essence of their antagonism to Dr. 
 Bosanquet is not, however, that evil is contemplated, as it must be 
 sooner or later, in repentance for example as wrong, but rather that the 
 " evil " is an imperfect " logical striving (p. 351) of the self after unity " 
 which is in " contradiction with a fuller and sounder striving " after 
 the same. The evil self is to him merely the vehicle of a logical con- 
 tradiction in the self. 
 
 2 This is seen in his admission (on p. 351) that the " bad will " no 
 less than the " good will " is a logical necessity, when taken along with 
 his doctrine about mind and body, his doctrine of the " dependence " 
 (p. 318) of the finite individual upon the external mechanical world. 
 Dr. Bosanquet, of course, thinks that even in this apparent Deter- 
 minism he is justifiably supplementing the ordinary ideas about the 
 " self " as " creative " and " originative " (p. 354), by the wider 
 recognition that I am more or less completely doing the work of the 
 " universe " as a " member " in a " greater self." And he adds in the 
 same sentence the words that " I am in a large measure continuous with 
 the greater (p. 355) self," and " dyed with its colours " — a further step 
 in Determinism, as it were, and a step which, with the preceding one 
 to which we have just referred, no critic can fail to connect with the 
 Determinism that we have already found to be implicated in his
 
 PRAGMATISM AND RATIONALISM 223 
 
 As for the first of the preceding five points, 
 it is perfectly evident that any discussion of the 
 various psychological phenomena that are doubt- 
 less involved in conduct can be regarded as but 
 a preliminary step to the discussion of the real 
 problems of ethics — that of the actions and habits 
 and standards of persons who are the subjects of 
 rights and duties and who affirm certain actions 
 to be right, and certain other actions to be 
 wrong. The point, however, about Dr. Bosan- 
 quet's psychological abstractionism, especially 
 when it rises to the height of writing as if the 
 " self " as the " active form of a totality of striv- 
 ing,' ' or the "self as it happens to be," were the 
 same thing as the " personal self " with which we 
 alone are mainly concerned in ethics, is that it 
 is but another instance of the old " spectator " 1 
 fallacy that we have already found to underlie his 
 whole treatment of the " self " and of " purpose " 
 and of " striving." Such a philosophy, or point of 
 view, is quite foreign to ethics, because it is only 
 in the ethical life that we think of ourselves 
 as " persons," as beings playing a part, as actors 
 or players upon the great stage of life. By 
 not facing the ethical life directly, from within, 
 instead of from without, Dr. Bosanquet has 
 entirely failed to understand it. And if he had 
 
 doctrine of the " self," and in his general doctrine that the " external " 
 must be frankly accepted as a factor in the universe. 
 
 1 By the " spectator " fallacy we mean his tendency to talk and 
 think of the self as it is for a spectator or student, looking at matters 
 from the outside, and not as the self is for the man himself.
 
 224 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM 
 
 attempted this internal consideration of " person- 
 ality," his whole metaphysic of " individuality " 
 and of the great society of beings who inhabit. 
 (or who may be thought of as inhabiting) this 
 universe, would have been very different from 
 what it is. 
 
 Then as for the second and third points, it is 
 surely evident from the footnotes that have been 
 appended in connexion with the matter of his 
 transformation of the facts of ethics in the interests 
 of other things like logic, and aesthetics, and 
 metaphysics, that there is indeed, in Bosanquet, 
 no recognition of what must be called the genuine, 
 or independent reality of the moral life, or of the 
 moral ideal as a force in human nature. And 
 as for the fourth point, students of modern ethics 
 are naturally by this time perfectly familiar 
 with the tendency of Rationalism to make evil 
 action and the " evil self " simply the affirmation 
 of a " logically incoherent " point of view. It 
 exists in an English writer like Wollaston 1 as well 
 as in a German philosopher like Hegel. This 
 tendency is indeed a piece of sophistry and illu- 
 sion because the distinction between good and 
 evil, and the distinction between right and 
 wrong (perhaps the better and the more crucial 
 formulation of the two — for us moderns at least) 
 
 1 Wollaston is the English ethical philosopher who, according to 
 Leslie Stephen's account, thought, after thirty years of meditation, 
 that the only reason he had for not breaking his wife's head with a 
 stick was, that this would be tantamount to a denial that his wife was 
 his wife.
 
 PRAGMATISM AND RATIONALISM 225 
 
 is unintelligible apart from the fact or the idea of 
 the existence of moral agents, who make (in their 
 volition, and in the judgments that accom- 
 pany or precede their volitions) a " norm," or 
 rule, or line between the ethically permissible 
 and the ethically unpermissible. The rationalism 
 that makes these distinctions merely a matter of 
 " logic," overlooks the fact that in actual life men 
 must be warded off from wrong-doing (and they 
 are in many cases actually so warded off by their 
 consciences and by other things, like the love 
 of home, or the love of honour, or the love of God) 
 by something stronger than the mere idea of a 
 possible theoretical mistake. 
 
 As for the fifth point of the Determinism or the 
 Necessitarianism that hangs like a sword of 
 Damocles over the entire ethic of Dr. Bosanquet, 
 the nature of this should be perfectly apparent 
 from many of the statements and considerations 
 that have been brought forward as typical of his 
 entire line of thought. He teaches a " passivism " 1 
 and an " intellectualism " that are just as pro- 
 nounced and just as essential to his thought as 
 they are to the great system of his master, Hegel, 
 in whose ambitious philosophy of spirit man's 
 whole destiny is unfolded without the possibility 
 
 1 See Idola Theatri by Henry Sturt (the editor of the well-known 
 " Personal Idealism " volume) of Oxford — a book that enumerates and 
 examines many of the fallacies of the Neo-Hegelian school. Mr. Sturt's 
 first chapter is entitled the " Passive Fallacy," which he calls, with 
 some degree of justice, the prime mistake of the idealistic philosophy, 
 meaning by this the " ignoring " of the " kinetic " and the " dynamic " 
 character of our experience.
 
 226 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM 
 
 of his playing himself any appreciable part in the 
 impersonal, dialectic movement in which it is 
 made to consist. 
 
 It is now necessary to speak definitely and out- 
 spokenly of the element of supreme truth and 
 value in Dr. Bosanquet's unique book, of the 
 positive contribution it makes to philosophy and 
 to natural theology. 1 This is, in a word, its 
 tribute to the permanent element of truth and 
 reality in the idealistic philosophy. And he testi- 
 fies to this in his " belief" that in the main the work 
 of philosophy has been done, and " that what is now 
 needed is to recall and concentrate the modern 
 mind from its distraction rather than to invent 
 wholly new theoretic conceptions." This declara- 
 tion is of itself a position of considerable import- 
 ance, however widely one is obliged to differ from 
 its author as to what exactly it is that has already 
 been demonstrated and accomplished " in philo- 
 sophy." If there has really been " nothing done " 
 in philosophy since the time of Socrates, if philo- 
 sophy is to-day no true antithesis of, and corrective 
 to science, then there is possible neither Prag- 
 matism, nor Humanism, nor any other, possibly 
 more fundamental, philosophy. There can, as 
 Dr. Bosanquet puts it, indeed be no progress if no 
 definite ground is ever to be recognized as gained." 
 This then is the first thing of transcendent im- 
 portance in " Individuality and Value," its insist- 
 
 1 It is Natural Theology that is the subject proper of the Gifford 
 Lectures.
 
 PRAGMATISM AND RATIONALISM 227 
 
 ance upon the fundamentally different estimate 
 of reality given by philosophy in distinction from 
 science and its merely hypothetical treatment 
 of reality. This " difference " is, of course, but 
 natural, seeing that to philosophy there are no 
 things or phenomena without minds, or persons 
 or beings to whom they appear as things and 
 phenomena. 
 
 The second great thing of " Individuality and 
 Value ' is its insistence upon the need to all 
 philosophy of a recognized grasp of the principle 
 of " Meaning." x What this instance implies to 
 Dr. Bosanquet is, that " at no point in our lives 
 [either] as [agents or] thinkers are we to accept 
 any supposed element of fact or circumstance as 
 having any significance " apart from the great 
 "whole' or the great "reality," with which we 
 believe ourselves to be in contact in our daily 
 experience, when interpreted in the light of our 
 consciousness of ourselves as persons. In the letter 
 of the book his interpretation of the great "whole," 
 or the great reality, of life is by no means as 
 broad and as deep as the one at which we have 
 just hinted in attempting to describe his position. 
 But overriding altogether the mere intellectualism 
 of Dr. Bosanquet's interpretation, is the fact of 
 the dynamic idealism for which he virtually stands, 2 
 in virtue of the great and the simple effort of his 
 lectures 3 to find " value " in " our daily experience 
 
 1 See p. 149 of Chapter VI. 
 
 2 With, we might almost say, the pragmatists and the humanists. 
 
 3 This is really their main distinguishing characteristic and merit.
 
 228 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM 
 
 with its huge obstinate plurality of independent 
 facts." He would start, as we mentioned (at the 
 beginning of this chapter), with what he believes 
 to be " the daily transformation of our experience 
 as verified within what we uncritically take as our 
 private consciousness, so far as its weakness may 
 permit," and " as verified on a larger scale when 
 we think of such splendid creations as the State and 
 fine art and religion," and when we think, too, of 
 " the mode of our participation in them." Now 
 again nothing could indeed be more nobly true 
 (in idea) of the great work of the philosopher than 
 the proper theory and description of this " daily 
 transformation " of our lives, out of the life of 
 " sense " and the life of selfishness, into the 
 spiritual communion 1 that is the essence of all 
 right thinking and all right living. 
 
 But we may go further than all this and 
 signalize one or two things in Dr. Bosanquet that 
 we venture to construe as a kind of unconscious 
 testimony, on his part, to the very humanism for 
 which we have been contending throughout. 
 
 The things to which we refer are, firstly, his use 
 of the word " belief " 2 in speaking of his opinion 
 that the work of philosophy has in the main been 
 accomplished, and, second, his fine and really 
 praiseworthy 3 confession that his lectures, whatever 
 
 1 See p. 162. 
 
 2 " Indeed, I do not conceal my belief that in the main the work has 
 been done." — Preface. 
 
 3 I think that the confession is a praiseworthy one in view of the 
 fact of the prejudice of Rationalism, that philosophy has nothing to do 
 with convictions but only with knowledge.
 
 PRAGMATISM AND RATIONALISM 229 
 
 they may have done or may not have done, at least 
 " contain the record of a very strong conviction." 
 Dr. Bosanquet's departure, in the letter of his 
 argumentation, from the spirit of these declarations 
 only accentuates what we regard as the regrettable 
 failure and abstractionism of his whole official 
 (or professed) philosophy. 
 
 His use of the word belief 1 shows that it is, 
 
 » By belief I have understood throughout this book simply man's 
 working sense for reality, and I am inclined to think that this is almost 
 the best definition that could be given of it — our working sense for 
 reality. It is at least, despite its apparent evasiveness, most in harmony 
 with the pragmatist-humanist inclusion of will elements and feeling 
 elements in our knowledge and in our apprehension of reality. It is 
 also in harmony with the conception of reality which may, in my 
 opinion, be extracted from both Pragmatism and Idealism — that reality 
 is what it proves itself to be in the daily transformation of our experi- 
 ence. By the retention of the term " working " in this attempted 
 definition I express my agreement with the idea that action, and the 
 willingness to act, is an essential element in belief. The outstanding 
 positions in the definitions of belief that are generally given in philo- 
 sophical dictionaries are, firstly, that belief is a conviction or subjective 
 apprehension of truth or reality in distinction from demonstrable 
 knowledge or direct evidence ; and, secondly, that feeling elements and 
 action elements enter into it. I am inclined to think that the sharp 
 antithesis between belief and knowledge, or the tendency of philo- 
 sophical books to emphasise the difference between belief and know- 
 ledge, is a characteristic, or consequence, of our modern way of looking 
 at things, of our break with the unfortunate, medieval conception of 
 faith and of the higher reason. The study of the facts either of the 
 history of religion or of the history of science, will convince us, I think, 
 that it is always belief, and that it still is belief (as the working sense 
 for reality), that is man's measure of reality, our knowledge about the 
 universe being at all times but a more or less perfect working out of our 
 beliefs and of their implications — of our sense of the different ways in 
 which the world affects us, and of the ways in which we are affected 
 towards it. Nor do I think, as I have indicated in different places, that 
 " reality " can be defined apart from belief, reality being that in which 
 we believe for all purposes, theoretical and practical and emotional. 
 In the conception of reality as a world of intersubjective intercourse 
 in which beings, or persons at different stages of development, share in 
 a common spiritual life, we have attained so far (and only so far) to
 
 230 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM 
 
 after all his professional homage to " mediation ' 
 and to the necessary abstractions of logic and 
 system, belief and not knowledge that is to him 
 the final and " working " estimate of truth and 
 of reality. And the same conclusion follows from 
 the second matter of the confession of which we 
 have spoken, that his entire argumentation is but 
 the expression of a strong conviction. 1 It is again, 
 therefore, we would insist a spiritual conviction, 
 and not a conceptual system that is actually 
 and necessarily the moving force of his entire 
 intellectual activity. And, we would add to his 
 own face, it is a conviction moreover that " works," 
 and not a " logical whole " or a mere conceptual 
 ideal, that he must (as a philosopher) engender in 
 the mind of his average reader about reality. His 
 " logical whole " and his " individuality as logi- 
 cal completeness," " work " with him [Professor 
 Bosanquet] for the reason that he is primarily 
 an intellectual worker, a worker in the realm 
 of mind. But reality (as the whole world of 
 human work and human effort is there to 
 
 the truth that is common to an idealism of the type of Dr. Bosanquet's, 
 and to pragmatist-humanism when properly developed and interpreted. 
 There are, I find, upon thinking of the matter, any number of philo- 
 sophers and thinkers who interpret belief, in the larger sense of the 
 term, as our complete and final estimate of reality, and as therefore not 
 exclusive of, but inclusive of knowledge in the ordinary sense of the 
 term. 
 
 1 He even says in the Abstract of his first lecture upon the " Central 
 Experiences," that Lord Gifford's desire that his lecturers should "try 
 to communicate " a "grave experience " is the demand that "intro- 
 duces us to the double task of philosophy. It [philosophy] needs the 
 best of logic, but also the best of life, and neither can be had in philo- 
 sophy without the other."
 
 PRAGMATISM AND RATIONALISM 231 
 
 tell us) is more than an intellectual system. 
 And what is a conviction to him is not 
 necessarily a conviction that works with the 
 ordinary man, who knows reality better than 
 he does, or who knows it (like himself) in his 
 desires and in his beliefs rather than in the 
 terms and conceptions that are the mere tools 
 of the intellect and the specialist. For, taking 
 his book as a whole, we may say about it that the 
 dissolution of reality into a conceptual system 
 that is effected there is at best but another con- 
 vincing proof of the truth of the words of the 
 great David Hume, 1 that the understanding, 
 " when it acts alone, and according to its most 
 general principles, entirely subverts itself, and 
 leaves not the slightest degree of evidence in any 
 proposition, either in philosophy or common life." 
 
 1 Treatise upon Human Nature, sect. vii. (Green and Grose, i. 547). 
 
 NOTE 
 
 It is necessary for me to append a few words as to the possible 
 connexion between the foregoing criticism of the first volume of 
 Dr. Bosanquet's Gifford Lectures and the subject-matter of the 
 second volume, which appeared while I was preparing the manu- 
 script of this book for the press. I have been able only to inspect 
 its contents and to inform myself about the ways in which it has 
 impressed some of its representative critics. What I have thus 
 learned does not, in my opinion, make it necessary for me to unsay 
 or to rewrite what I have said in this chapter. My desire was to 
 indicate the kind of criticism that the pragmatists and the human- 
 ists, as far as I understand them, would be inclined to make of 
 Absolutism as represented in the Principle of Individuality and 
 Value as the last significant Anglo-Hegelian output. This, I
 
 232 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM 
 
 think, I have done, and the reader may be desirably left to himself 
 to settle the question of the relation of the first of Dr. Bosanquet's 
 books to its companion volume that appeared in the following 
 calendar year. I cannot, however, be so wilfully blind to the 
 existence of this second great " Gifford " book of his as to appear 
 to ignore the fact, that on its very face and surface it seems to do 
 many of the things that I have allowed myself to signalize as 
 things that Absolutism and Anglo-Hegelianism have not done, or 
 have done but imperfectly. Its very title, The Value and Destiny 
 of the Individual, and the titles of many of its chapters, and the 
 reception accorded to it in such instructive reviews as those of 
 Professor Sir Henry Jones and Professor Muirhead (in the July 
 numbers of the Hibbert Journal and Mind respectively), are to 
 my mind convincing proof that it is by far the most serious Anglo- 
 Hegelian attempt of the passing generation to deal with many of 
 the objections that have been brought against Rationalistic 
 Idealism by the pragmatists and the voluntarists, by the defenders 
 of faith and feeling and experience, and (before all these recent 
 people) by many independent idealist writers of our time in 
 England and elsewhere. In the interest of truth and of the 
 thinking public generally, I append the mere titles of some of the 
 chapters and divisions of Dr. Bosanquet's second volume : " The 
 Value of Personal Feeling, and the Grounds of the Distinctness 
 of Persons," " The Moulding of Souls," " The Miracle of Will," 
 the " Hazards and Hardships of Finite Selfhood," the " Stability 
 and Security of Finite Selfhood," " The Religious Consciousness," 
 "The Destiny of the Finite Self," "The Gates of the Future." 
 There is in all the rich content that is thus indicated, and in all 
 the high and deep discussion of " the ideas of a lifetime " that it 
 includes, a veritable mine of philosophical reflection for the reader 
 who desires to think in a connected, or Hegelian, manner about 
 things — a mine, too, that is at least indicative of the wide territory 
 both of fact and of principle upon which pragmatist philosophy 
 must enter before it can become a true philosophy. I cannot find, 
 however — this was surely not to be expected in a thinker of Dr. 
 Bosanquet's power — that the principles of argumentation that 
 determined the nature and contents of the earlier volume have un- 
 dergone any modification in its success or successor ; indeed, what 
 is here offered, and discovered by the reader and the critics, is but 
 a continuation and application of the same dialectic principles to 
 " finite beings, that is, in effect to human souls." If any one 
 will take upon himself the task of estimating the success or the 
 non-success of the enterprise he will travel through a piece of 
 philosophical writing that is as comprehensive and as coherent, 
 and as elevating in its tone, as anything that has appeared from 
 the Neo-Hegelian camp. The things that I chiefly feel and believe 
 about it are, firstly, that its account of the facts of life and thought 
 are, again, all determined by certain presuppositions about con- 
 ceivability and about the principles of contradiction and negation ; 
 secondly, that it is still the same " whole " of logic that is to it 
 the test of all reality and individuality ; and, thirdly, that it is,
 
 PRAGMATISM AND RATIONALISM 233 
 
 again, a great pity that Dr. Bosanquet should not have acted upon 
 some sort of recognition of the relation of his own dialectical 
 principles to those of his master Hegel, or to those of some of his 
 Neo-Hegelian predecessors in England and America. Although 
 it is almost an impertinence on the part of one who has just made 
 the acquaintance of this outstanding volume to speak in any detail 
 of its contents, I can indicate part of my meaning by pointing 
 out that it is throughout such things as " finite mind," the " finite 
 mind " that is " best understood by approaching it from the side of 
 the continuum " [the " whole "], the "finite mind " that is "shaped 
 by the universe," that is " torn between existence and self- 
 transcendence," " appearance," an " externality which is the 
 object of mind," the " positive principle of totality or individuality 
 manifesting itself in a number of forms," " good " and " evil as 
 attitudes concerning a creature's whole being," " volition " in 
 terms of the " principle that there is for every situation a larger 
 and more effective point of view than the given " — that are dis- 
 cussed, and not the real persons who have what they call 
 " minds " and " volitions " and " attitudes," and who invent all 
 these principles and distinctions to describe the world of their 
 experience and the world of their thoughts. As against him 
 Pragmatism and Humanism would, I think, both insist that the 
 first reality for all thought and speculation is not the " logical 
 whole " that underlies, in the mind of the thinker, the greater 
 number of all his categories and distinctions, but the life and the 
 fives of the persons in a world of inter-subjective intercourse, 
 wherein these points of view are used for different purposes. And I 
 cannot see how Dr. Bosanquet is entitled to scorn all those who 
 hold to the idea of the reality of the fives of the persons who are 
 agents and thinkers in this personal realm, which is for us the 
 highest reality of the universe, as believers in the " exclusiveness 
 of personality," although I would certainly agree with him that 
 our experience, when properly interpreted, carries us beyond the 
 subjectivism and the individualism of some forms of Pragmatism 
 or Pluralism. The reader who is anxious to know about the real 
 value of the Hegelianism upon which Dr. Bosanquet's philosophy 
 reposes should consult the work of Croce upon the " living " and 
 the " dead " elements in Hegel's System. It has recently been 
 translated into English. Dr. Bosanquet, like many Hegelians, 
 seems to me to overlook almost entirely the important elements 
 in the philosophy of Kant — of some of which I speak of in the 
 next chapter as developed in the spiritualistic philosophy of 
 Bergson.
 
 CHAPTER IX 
 
 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM IN THE 
 PHILOSOPHY OF BERGSON 1 
 
 The pragmatist elements in the philosophy of 
 Bergson of which it is, perhaps, legitimate for us 
 to speak here are (i) his " Anti-Intellectualism," 
 and (2) his " Activism " or " Actionism." The 
 latter culminates in his freedom-philosophy and 
 his spiritualism. I shall comment shortly upon 
 these two things, and then suggest one or two 
 general criticisms of his philosophy as a whole. 
 
 Bergson's anti-intellectualism rests ultimately 
 upon his contention that the human intellect is 
 related in the main to the needs of action, that the 
 brain is an organ of action rather than an organ 
 
 1 I had originally the idea of calling this chapter by the more modest 
 title of a note upon " pragmatist elements " in the teaching of 
 Bergson. I have allowed myself to call it a chapter partly for the sake 
 of symmetry, and partly because the footnotes and the criticism 
 (of his Idealism) have carried it beyond the limits of a note. I find, too, 
 (as I have partly indicated in my preface) in the teaching of Bergson so 
 many things that make up almost the very body of truth and fact upon 
 which Pragmatism, and Humanism, and Idealism all repose (or ought to 
 repose) that I quote them directly in my footnotes. They indicate to 
 me the scope and the territory of my entire subject. And they are a 
 confirmation to me of much that I had myself arrived at before I read 
 a line of Bergson. 
 
 234
 
 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BERGSON 235 
 
 of thought, that our intelligence is at home 
 only in the realm of the physical and the mathe- 
 matical sciences, 1 that contrivance and inven- 
 tion and the practical comprehension of the 
 " material " are its proper activities, and that 
 for these latter purposes it splits up the world 
 of the senses and the understanding into a dis- 
 continuous aggregate of physical units, which 
 it then proceeds to reconstruct in a spatial 
 and temporal order. We perceive in Nature, 
 he holds, what interests 2 us in the way of 
 
 1 " Our intelligence, as it leaves the hands of nature, has for its chief 
 object the unorganised solid" (Creative Evolution, p. 162); "of im- 
 mobility alone does the intellect form a clear idea " (ibid. 164). " The 
 aspect of life that is accessible to the intellect — as indeed to our senses, 
 of which our intellect is the extension — is that which offers a hold to 
 action" (ibid. 170). "We see that the intellect, so skilful in dealing 
 with the inert, is awkward the moment it touches the living. Whether 
 it wants to treat the life of the body or the life of the mind, it pro- 
 ceeds with the rigour, the stiffness, and the brutality of the instrument 
 not designed for such use. The history of hygiene or of pedagogy 
 teaches us much in this matter. When we think of the cardinal, 
 urgent, and constant need we have to preserve our bodies and to raise 
 our souls, of the special facilities given to each of us in this field to 
 experiment continually on ourselves and on others, of the palpable 
 injury by which the wrongness of a medical or a pedagogical practice 
 is made manifest and punished at once, we are amazed at the stupidity 
 and especially at the persistence of errors. We may easily find their 
 origin in the natural obstinacy with which we treat the living like the 
 lifeless, and think all reality, however fluid, under the form of the 
 sharply-defined solid. We are at ease only in the discontinuous, in the 
 immobile, in the dead. The intellect is characterised by a natural inability 
 to comprehend life " (Creative Evolution, p. 174). (Italics mine.) 
 
 2 " I look and I think I see, I listen and I think I hear, I examine 
 myself and I think I am reading the very depths of my heart. But 
 what I see and hear of the outer world is purely and simply a selection 
 made by my senses to serve as a light to my conduct ; what I know of 
 myself is what comes to the surface, what participates in my actions. 
 My senses and my consciousness, therefore, give me no more than a 
 practical simplification of reality in the vision they furnish me of myself
 
 236 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM 
 
 our vital needs ; our intellect is adapted, not 
 for the understanding or the purely rational 
 (" abstract ") comprehension of " causality " and 
 the "life of things," but for the maintenance 
 and furtherance of our own lives, and for the 
 creation of the instruments and agencies (signs, 
 language, tools, imagined sequences and laws, 
 essences, causes, the "descriptions" of science, 
 the special senses, the convolutions of the brain, 
 etc.) that minister to this. Science is to- 
 day still penetrated through and through with 
 primitive metaphysics, with the metaphysics 
 of animism, with a belief in separate things 
 like forces, atoms, elements, or what not — 
 indicative all of them of its attempt to " divide 
 up " the real that it may command it for theoretical 
 and practical purposes. We can see this in the 
 ' structural psychology " 1 of the day and its 
 analysis of our mental life into " elements," in 
 
 and of things, the differences that are useless to man are obliterated, 
 the resemblances that are useful to him are emphasised ; ways are 
 traced out for me in advance along which my activity is to travel. 
 These ways are the ways which all mankind has trod before me. Things 
 have been classified with a view to the use I can derive from them " 
 (Laughter, p. 151). " Life implies the acceptance of the utilitarian side 
 of things in order to respond to them by appropriate reactions ; all 
 other impressions must be dimmed or else reach us vague and blurred " 
 (ibid. p. 131). These last words give us a glimpse of a very important 
 part of Bergson's teaching— his idea, namely (Voltaire has it in his 
 Micromegas), that " matter " is greater than our perceptions, that our 
 perceptions reveal to us only those aspects of the physical universe 
 with which we are practically concerned. 
 
 1 Some years ago psychologists began to distinguish a " structural " 
 from a " functional " psychology, meaning by the former what is 
 otherwise called Psycho- Physics or (to some extent) Experimental 
 Psychology.
 
 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BERGSON 237 
 
 respect of the number and character of which 
 there are lasting differences of opinion among the 
 masters of the science — into " impressions," and 
 " affections," and sensations, images, memories, 
 ideas, and so on. And we can see it, too, in the 
 erroneous attempts sometimes made by psycho- 
 logists to treat these entities as if they had clearly 
 defined temporal and spatial characteristics or 
 qualities. 
 
 The supreme mistake of philosophy, according 
 to Bergson, has been to import into the domain of 
 speculation a method of thinking that was origin- 
 ally destined for action. It has forgotten that 
 nearly all the leading conceptions of common 
 sense and of science and of " analysis " have 
 been invented, not for final and general, but for 
 relative and particular purposes. And it has 
 fallen too readily under the influence of a certain 
 traditional view of the relations between meta- 
 physics and science — the view, namely, that 
 philosophy should just take the findings of 
 science and of common -sense about the world 
 as its initial material, subjecting them, of course, 
 to a certain preliminary reinterpretation, but 
 finally reconstructing them, almost as they were, 
 into a system. 1 The one thing, in short, that 
 
 1 Cf. " At first sight it may seem prudent to leave the consideration 
 of facts to positive science, to let physics and chemistry busy them- 
 selves with matter, the biological and psychological sciences with life. 
 The task of the philosopher is then clearly defined. He takes facts and 
 laws from the scientist's hand, and whether he tries to go beyond them 
 in order to reach their deeper causes, or whether he thinks it impossible 
 to go further, and even proves it by the analysis of scientific knowledge,
 
 238 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM 
 
 philosophy has failed to understand is the life 
 and the movement and the process of the 
 world, as an infinitely more important fact than 
 the endless terms and conceptions and entities 
 (" will," " reason," " Ideas," etc.) into which it 
 has been analysed. We might sum up the whole 
 by saying that Bergson's anti-intellectualism is 
 simply a protest, not against the use, but only 
 against the " systematic misuse " x of general con- 
 ceptions that have been current in science and 
 philosophy " since the time of Socrates," a protest, 
 however, that in his case is not merely general and 
 negative, but particularised and positive. 
 
 2 
 
 in both cases he has for the facts and relations, handed over by science, 
 the sort of respect that is due to a final verdict. To this knowledge he 
 adds a critique of the faculty of knowing, and also, if he thinks 
 proper, a metaphysic ; but the matter of knowledge he regards as the 
 affair of science, and not of philosophy " (Creative Evolution, pp. 204-5). 
 [All this represents only too faithfully what even some of our Neo- 
 Kantians have been saying, and teaching, although there is an error 
 in their whole procedure here.] 
 
 1 Schopenhauer's phrase. See my book upon Schopenhauer's 
 System. 
 
 2 It is chiefly in Matter and Memory (in which, by the way, there 
 are pages and pages of criticism of the rationalism of philosophy that 
 are as valuable as anything we have in philosophy since the time of 
 Descartes — Kant not excepted) that we are to look for the detailed 
 philosophy of sensation and of perception, and the detailed philosophy 
 of science upon which this protest of Bergson's against the excesses of 
 " conceptualism " rests. I indicate, too, at different places in this 
 chapter some of the other special considerations upon which it rests. 
 The gist of the whole is to be found, perhaps, in his contention that our 
 science and our philosophy of the past centuries have both regarded 
 " perception " as teaching us (somehow) what things are independently 
 of their effect upon us, and of their place in the moving equilibrium of 
 things — the truth being on the contrary (with Pragmatism and Human- 
 ism) that our knowledge has throughout a necessary relation to 
 ourselves and to our place in the universe, and to our liberation from 
 matter in the life of the spirit.
 
 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BERGSON 239 
 
 Like any and all anti-intellectualism, Bergson's 
 anti-intellectualism is liable to serious misinter- 
 pretation, and it is currently misinterpreted and 
 misrepresented as " irrationalism." His intention, 
 however, is not to destroy and to condemn philo- 
 sophy and reasoning, and to exalt mere in- 
 tuition and faith, but rather to " liberate " x 
 our human consciousness of ourselves and of the 
 world from the dogmatism of what he regards to 
 be the utilitarian intellect, from the many hopeless 
 contradictions and antinomies and puzzles of 
 the mere analytic understanding. Philosophy, in 
 particular, he would free from the last traces and 
 symptoms of scientific rationalism, although fully 
 aware of the fact that our modern philosophy had 
 its very departure from the rationalism of the 
 great founders of modern science like Kepler and 
 Galileo and the rest. 
 
 He would strike at the roots of all this confident 
 
 1 He expresses this idea in the following way in the Introduction to 
 Matter and Memory: " Psychology has for its object the study of the 
 human mind for practical utility," whereas in " metaphysics " we see 
 " this same mind striving (the idea, as we say elsewhere, is not free from 
 difficulty) to transcend the conditions of useful action and to come back 
 to itself as to a pure creative energy." Or in the following sentences 
 from his Creative Evolution : " We must remember that philosophy, 
 as we define it, has not yet become completely conscious of itself. Physics 
 understands its role when it pushes matter into the direction of 
 spatiality ; but has metaphysics understood its role when it has simply 
 trodden the steps of physics, in the chimerical hope of going farther 
 in the same direction ? Should not its own task be, on the contrary, to 
 remount the incline that physics descends, to bring matters back to its 
 origins, and to build up progressively a cosmology which would be, so to 
 speak, a reversed psychology. All that which seems positive to the 
 physicist and to the geometrician would become, from this new point 
 of view, an interruption or inversion of the true positivity which would 
 have to be defined in psychological terms " (pp. 219-20, italics mine).
 
 240 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM 
 
 rationalism or scientific philosophy by opening 
 up a broader and a deeper view of truth than 
 that afforded to the merely piece-meal and 
 utilitarian view. 
 
 As for the Actionism and the action philosophy 
 of Bergson, this is perhaps more in line than any 
 other tendency of the day with the new life and 
 the new thought of the twentieth century, although 
 (like Pragmatism) it stands in need of correction 
 or revision by the principles of a sound ethical 
 philosophy, by the Idealism that is not, and can- 
 not be, the mere creation of to-day or yesterday. 
 In essence it is, to begin with, but an extension to 
 the mind as a whole and to all its so-called special 
 faculties (" sensation," " perception," " memory," 
 " ideation," " judgment," " thinking," " emotion," 
 and the rest) of the " dynamic," * instead of the 
 
 1 As an indication of what the acceptance of the dynamic instead of 
 the static view of matter on the part of Bergson means, I cite the phrase 
 (or the conception) on p. 82 of Matter and Memory, the effect that " matter 
 is here as elsewhere the vehicle of an action," or the even more emphatic 
 declaration on p. 261 of Creative Evolution, " There are no things, there 
 are only actions." It is impossible, of course, that these mere extracts 
 can convey to the mind of the casual reader the same significance 
 that they obtain in their setting in the pages of Bergson, although it is 
 surely almost a matter of common knowledge about his teaching, that 
 one of the first things it does is to begin with the same activistic or 
 " actionistic " view of nature and matter that seems to be the stock 
 in trade of the physics of our time since the discoveries pertaining to 
 radio-activity, etc. Being only a layman in such matters, I may be 
 excused for quoting from a recent booklet (whose very presence in the 
 series in which it appears is to people like myself a guarantee of its 
 scientific reliability) in which I find this same activistic view of 
 matter that I find in Bergson. " What are the processes by which the 
 primary rock material is shifted ? There is the wind that, etc. etc. . . . 
 There are the streams and rivers that, etc. . . . There is the sea 
 constantly wearing away, etc. . . . Then there are ' subtle ' physical
 
 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BERGSON 241 
 
 older, static point of view that the recent science 
 of our time has applied to matter and to life, and 
 that Pragmatism and the " hypothetical method ' 
 have sought to apply to all the ordinary concep- 
 tions and constructions that exist in the different 
 domains of the different sciences. 1 It is also, 
 from our point of view, as we may see, an attempt 
 at the expression, in the terms of a comparatively 
 simple philosophy, of many of the considerations 
 in respect of knowledge and conduct that have 
 been brought forward in the preceding pages of 
 this book. We have already dwelt in different 
 ways, for example, upon the fact that there is 
 no perception or sensation without an organic 
 reaction on the part of the percipient or the 
 sentient being, that an idea is in a sense a motor 
 
 and ' chemical ' forces. And the action of plants. . . . Hence by 
 various mechanical, organic, and chemical processes the materials origin- 
 ally scattered through the rocks of the earth's crust, and floating 
 in the air or water, are collected into layers and form beds of sand, 
 clay, limestone, salt, and the various mineral fuels, including peat and 
 coal " (The Making of the Earth, by Professor Gregory, F.R.S., of 
 Glasgow University: Williams and Norgate). 
 
 It is only right to state here, or to remind the reader in this matter 
 of a " dynamic " view of matter, that Bergson not only dissipates 
 matter into force or energy or activity (as do the physicists of 
 to-day), but also actually credits the world of matter and life with a 
 kind of consciousness (and why not be courageous about it ? ) in 
 which what I have already called the " susceptibility of everything to 
 everything else," or the action of everything upon everything else, 
 becomes credible and intelligible. " No doubt, also, the material universe 
 itself, defined as the totality of images, is a kind of consciousness in which 
 everything compensates and neutralises everything else, a consciousness of 
 which all the potential parts, balancing each other by a reaction which is 
 always equal to the action, reciprocally hinder each from standing out " 
 (Matter and Memory, p. 313). 
 
 1 See Chapter III., and also the references to Mach, Ostwald, 
 Poincare, and others, in the second chapter and elsewhere. 
 
 16
 
 242 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM 
 
 attitude (a way of comprehending particulars or 
 particular facts in relation to our purposes and 
 our ends), that a logical judgment represents 
 a " division " of the real, or of the processes of 
 Nature, for some purpose or other, that our 
 whole mental life is purposive, that there is no 
 " pure " cognition without attendant emotion and 1 
 volition, that it is in action that desire and 
 thought come together, that our whole know- 
 ledge of the world is necessarily a knowledge of it 
 in terms of our purposes and our highest attitudes, 
 and so on. All of this is, as it were, an indication 
 of the psychological and the logical considerations 
 upon which Bergson bases his positive, 2 activistic, 
 philosophy of mind. 
 
 1 " There is no intelligence in which some traces of instinct are not 
 to be discovered, more, no instinct that is not surrounded with a fringe 
 of intelligence" (Creative Evolution, p. 143). 
 
 2 ' ' We will not dwell here upon a point we have dealt with in former 
 works. Let us merely recall that a theory [the theory of contemporary 
 physiological psychology] such as that according to which consciousness 
 is attached to certain neurons, and is thrown off from their work like 
 a phosphorescence, may be accepted by the scientist for the detail of 
 analysis ; it is a convenient mode of expression. But it is nothing else. 
 In reality, a living being is a centre of action. It represents a certain 
 sum of contingency entering into the world, that is to say, a certain 
 quantity of possible action — a quantity variable with individuals and 
 especially with species. The nervous system of an animal marks out 
 the flexible lines on which its action will run (although the potential 
 energy is accumulated in the muscles rather than in the nervous system 
 itself) ; its nervous centres indicate, by their development and their 
 configuration, the more or less extended choice it will have among 
 more or less numerous and complicated actions. Now, since the 
 awakening of consciousness in a living creature is the more complete, 
 the greater the latitude of choice allowed to it and the larger the amount 
 of action bestowed upon it, it is clear that the development of conscious- 
 ness will appear to be dependent on that of the nervous centres. On 
 the other hand, every state of consciousness being, in one aspect of it,
 
 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BERGSON 243 
 
 It is to be remembered in Bergson's interest 
 that when we speak of his Actionism * we do not 
 mean a narrowing down 2 on his part of the activities 
 of the soul to physical labour and to mere utili- 
 tarian effort, but its capacity, also, for that 
 creative activity which he takes to be the very 
 keynote of personal life and the evolutionary 
 process. 
 
 As for the freedom-philosophy with which 
 Bergson's Actionism is to be associated, this is 
 worked out by him, firstly, in the most perfect 
 correspondence with what he believes to be the 
 facts of life and mind ; and, secondly, in terms of 
 that anti-rationalism (or hostility to the merely 
 
 a question put to the motor activity and even the beginning of a reply, 
 there is no psychical event that does not imply the entry into play of the 
 cortical mechanisms. Everything seems, therefore, to happen as if 
 consciousness sprang from the brain, and as if the detail of conscious 
 activity were modelled on that of the cerebral activity. In reality 
 consciousness does not spring from the brain, but brain and conscious- 
 ness correspond because equally they measure . . . the quantity of 
 choice that the living being has at its disposal " (Creative Evolution, 
 pp. 266-7). 
 
 1 " Instead of starting from affection [or ' sensation ' in the old 
 sense of the haphazard sensation] of which we can say nothing, since 
 there is no reason why it should be what it is rather than anything else, 
 we start from action, that is to say, from our power of effecting changes 
 in things, a faculty attested by consciousness, and towards which all 
 the powers of the organised body are seen to converge. So we place 
 ourselves at once in the midst of extended images [to Bergson as an 
 idealist things are at the same time images or ideas for a con- 
 sciousness in other things, or in us, or in beings other than ourselves], 
 and in this material universe we perceive centres of indetermination 
 characteristic of life " (Matter and Memory, p. 67). 
 
 a Cf. the words in the Preface to Matter and Memory: " The whole 
 personality, which, normally narrowed down by action, expands with the 
 unscrewing of the vice in which it has allowed itself to be squeezed," or the 
 words in the same place about the task of metaphysics being the attempt 
 of the " mind striving to transcend the conditions of useful action."
 
 244 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM 
 
 scientific intellect) which is his working theory of 
 knowledge. His views upon this subject have 
 also been depreciated and misunderstood by some 
 of his opponents who attack what they call his 
 " intuitional " treatment of the freedom-question 
 — his insistence upon the direct intuition of our 
 life that we have when we act consciously, and 
 when we are " most ourselves " — when we act out 
 " freely " our own nature. To him the primary 
 fact for any human being is the life-impulse that 
 is both instinctive and reflective, that is certainly 
 far more of a fundamental reality than any of 
 those entities or concepts (" cells," " atoms," 
 " forces," " laws," or what not) which, with Kant, 
 he clearly sees to be the creation of the intellect 
 for its descriptive and practical purposes. This 
 life is " free " in the sense that we are not " deter- 
 mined " by any or all of those forces and laws to 
 which our intellect subjects everything else, but 
 which it cannot apply to the life that is more than 
 mere matter, that is a real becoming and a 
 real process, a real creation and development. 
 
 The " spiritualism," again, of his interpreta- 
 tion of this life and activity rests, to begin with, 
 upon his opinion that the very inception of 
 the activity, and the adjustment, and the 
 selection in which the simplest life-effort, and 
 the simplest perception of a living being con- 
 sist, indicate the presence and the operation of a 
 controlling agency, 1 or mind, or principle of 
 
 1 We refer elsewhere in this chapter to Bergson's idea that living
 
 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BERGSON 245 
 
 spiritual " choice " that is not, and cannot be, 
 explained on the principles of a mechanical science 
 or philosophy. This principle is, in a word, the 
 life-force, or the creative activity, the elan vital 
 
 beings are " centres of indetermination," that is to say, creatures who 
 hold their place in nature and that of their species by " persisting in 
 their own being " (the language of Spinoza) by acting and reacting 
 upon some of the many forces of nature that act upon them, and by 
 avoiding the action of other forces and other animals. " They allow 
 to pass through them," he says, " so to speak, those external influences 
 which are indifferent to them ; the others isolated become ' perceptions ' 
 by their very isolation" {Matter and Memory, pp. 28, 29) . We also refer to 
 Bergson's idea that the life-force has expressed itself along different 
 grades of being (mineral, animal, and so on). Both these ideas are a 
 partial explanation of what we mean by the presence of a spiritual 
 activity in both inanimate and animate nature. So also is Bergson's 
 idea that the purely mechanical explanation either of nature or of 
 life is but a device of the intellect for the purposes of description. 
 More specifically it is expressed, too, in his idea that " Our representa- 
 tion of matter is the measure of our possible action upon bodies ; it 
 results from the discarding of what has no interest for our needs, or 
 more generally for our functions" {Matter and Memory, p. 30), or that 
 " Consciousness" is just this choice of *' attaining to " or attending to 
 " certain parts and certain aspects of those parts " of the " material 
 universe " {ibid. p. 31), or that" sense-perception " is an" elementary 
 question to my motor activity." " The truth is that my nervous 
 system, interposed between the objects which affect my body and 
 those which I can influence, is a mere conductor, transmitting, sending 
 back, or inhibiting movement. This conductor is composed of an 
 enormous number of threads which stretch from the periphery to the 
 centre, and from the centre to the periphery. As many threads pass 
 from the periphery to the centre, so many points of space are there able 
 to make an appeal to my will, and to put, so to speak, an elementary 
 question to my motor activity. Every such question is what is termed a 
 perception " {ibid. 40, 41 ; italics mine). Or, as he puts it, on p. 313, " No 
 doubt the choice of perception from among images in general is the 
 effect of a discernment which foreshadows spirit. . . . But to touch the 
 reality of spirit we must place ourselves at the point where an individual 
 consciousness, continuing and retaining the past in a present enriched 
 by it, thus escapes the law of necessity, the law which ordains that the 
 past shall ever follow itself in a present which merely repeats it in 
 another form, and that all things shall ever be flowing away. When 
 we pass from pure perception to memory, we definitely abandon matter 
 for spirit."
 
 246 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM 
 
 of which we read so much in his books, that has 
 "seized upon matter," vitalizing it into force and 
 energy, into the " play " upon each other of all 
 the varied activities and grades and forms of the 
 will to live, and into the various forms of socialized 
 and co-operative living on the part of animals and 
 men. We shall immediately remark upon the 
 matter of the apparent limitations of this spiritual 
 philosophy of life, or reality, that is here but 
 indicated or stated. 
 
 One of its essential features, so far as we are 
 at present concerned, is his claim that his in- 
 troduction of a spiritual principle into the life- 
 force, or the creative activity that has expressed 
 itself in the various grades and forms of life, both 
 animal and human, is not a phase of the old philo- 
 sophy 1 or theology of " final causes " or of a pre- 
 determined 2 " teleology." To this old finalism or 
 
 1 Bergson is always able to detect the relapses even of " mechanism " 
 and of the mechanical philosophy of science into " finalism," as 
 when he says on p. 72 of his Creative Evolution, " To sum up, if the 
 accidental variations that bring about evolution are insensible varia- 
 tions, some good genius must be appealed to — the genius of the future 
 species — in order to preserve and accumulate these variations, for 
 " selection " will not look after this. If, on the other hand, the acci- 
 dental variations are sudden, then, for the previous function to go on, 
 or for a new function to take its place, all the changes that have 
 happened together must be complementary. So we have to fall back 
 on the good genius again to obtain the convergence of simultaneous 
 changes, as before to be assured of the continuity of direction of succes- 
 sive variations." 
 
 2 We must remember that to Bergson evolution has taken place 
 along different lines — those of Automatism (in plant-life), Instinct (in 
 animal life), and Intelligence (in human life and the higher animals), and 
 that along none of those lines are we to fall into the errors either of 
 materialism, or of " Darwinism " (the belief in " accidental variations "), 
 or of the " design-philosophy," or even of theories like neo-Lamarckian-
 
 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BERGSON 247 
 
 teleology 1 the life of organic nature (the " organs " 
 and " cells," the " instinctive " actions, and the 
 " adjustments " of animals, and so on) were all 
 due to the work of a pre-existing, calculating 
 intelligence operating upon matter ; whereas to 
 him they are but different expressions or creations 
 of the life-force that is as little predetermined 
 in organic evolution, as it is in the realm of the 
 activities interpreted for us (in part) by the newer 
 physics and the newer chemistry — in the processes, 
 for example, that are exemplified in the generation 
 of a star out of a nebula. This entire treatment, 
 however, of the notion of purpose in nature is a 
 matter of great difficulty in the philosophy of 
 Bergson, and his own thought (as I shall presently 
 state) is apt to strike us as just as hypothetical as 
 some of the views he attempts to combat. It 
 raises, too, the question of the valuation of his 
 philosophy as a whole, and of its relation to the 
 great thinker who still stands in the very centre 
 of the entire modern movement from Copernicus 
 to Comte and Darwin — Immanuel Kant. 2 
 
 We shall best get at the matter of the fuller 
 developments of the philosophy of Bergson that 
 are of interest to us at present, by indicating some 
 
 ism " or neo-vitalism. To him all these philosophies are but imperfect 
 and hypothetical attempts to grasp " movement " and " life " which 
 both " transcend finality, if we understand by finality the realisation of 
 an idea conceived or conceivable in advance" (Creative Evolution, p. 236). 
 
 1 " Paleyism " or " Miltonism " are still good names for the thing, 
 I have read in some competent book upon Evolution. 
 
 2 See below, p. 261.
 
 248 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM 
 
 of the results that would accrue from it to the 
 constructive philosophy in which we are interested 
 as the outcome of Pragmatism and Idealism. 
 Among these would be, firstly, a new and a fresh, 
 and yet a perfectly rational apprehension of the 
 fact of the necessarily abstract and hypothetical * 
 character of the analyses to which our world 
 is subjected by the science and by the technic 
 and the supposed " economy " of our present 
 culture. 2 Then an equally new and equally 
 
 1 To Bergson concepts are just as hypothetical in the realm of 
 science, as they are to thinkers like Mach and Poincare, and 
 Professor Ward of Cambridge. See the following, for example, 
 from Matter and Memory (p. 263) : " We shall never explain by 
 means of particles, whatever these may be, the simple properties of 
 matter ; at most we can thus follow out into corpuscles as artificial as 
 the corpus, the body itself — the actions and reactions of this body 
 with regard to all the others. This is precisely the object of chemistry. 
 It studies bodies rather than matter ; and so we understand why it stops 
 at the atom, which is still endowed with the general properties of 
 matter. But the materiality of the atom dissolves more and more 
 under the eyes of the physicist. We have no reason, for instance, for 
 representing the atom to ourselves as a solid, rather than as a liquid 
 or gaseous, nor for picturing the reciprocal action of atoms by shocks 
 rather than in any other way." Or, the following characteristic 
 passage from the same book (p. 280) in respect of the hypothetical 
 character of the concepts of " pure time " and " pure space " : " Homo- 
 geneous space and homogeneous time are then neither properties of 
 things nor essential conditions of our faculty of knowing them ; they 
 express, in an abstract form, the double work of solidification and of 
 division, which we effect on the moving continuity of the real in order 
 to obtain there a fulcrum for our action, in order to fix within it 
 starting-points for our operation, in short, to introduce into it real 
 changes. They are the diagrammatic designs of our eventual action 
 upon matter." 
 
 2 Like his celebrated contemporary Eucken, and like many other 
 thinkers of their time, Bergson is profoundly convinced of the one- 
 sidedness of the so-called scientific culture of our day, and of the 
 error of any and all conceptions of education and of social policy that 
 are based upon it. Although I refer below to the limitations of his view 
 that the intellect is adapted only to matter and to mechanical construe-
 
 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BERGSON 249 
 
 rational (or " rationally grounded ") conviction 
 of the inadequacy of the physical and the scientific 
 categories to the comprehension and the explana- 
 tion of life and of the life of the spirit. Thirdly, 
 a confirmation of many of the tendencies to which 
 the Pragmatism and the Voluntarism and the 
 Humanism of the last century have given a more 
 or less one-sided and imperfect formulation. 
 Among such confirmed tendencies are (a) the 
 attempt they have all made to attain to a deeper x 
 view of human nature than the view hitherto 
 taken by rationalism and intellectualism, (/3) their 
 emphasis upon the freedom and the initiative 2 
 
 tion, I append the following quotation as symptomatic of his value 
 as a spiritual teacher in our scientific age: " As regards human in- 
 telligence (Creative Evolution, pp. 145-6) it has not been sufficiently 
 noted that mechanical invention has been from the first its essential 
 feature, that even to-day our social life gravitates around the manufacture 
 and use of artificial instruments. . . . This we hardly realise, because it 
 takes longer to change ourselves than to change our tools. ... In thousands 
 of years, when seen from the distance, only the broad lines of our present 
 age will be visible, our wars and our revolutions will count for little, even 
 supposing they are remembered at all, but the steam-engine, and the 
 procession of inventions of every kind that accompanied it, will perhaps 
 be spoken of as we speak of the bronze or of the chipped stone of pre- 
 historic times ; it will serve to define an age." 
 
 1 I find this in Bergson's whole attribution of much of our " per- 
 ceptual " and " scientific " knowledge of things to the " needs of 
 action," and in the detailed reasons that we attempt on pp. 236-238 to 
 indicate for his polemic against rationalism. 
 
 2 This confirmation I find in Bergson's whole philosophy of per- 
 ception and sensation referred to on p. 236, and in his idea of a living 
 being as a " centre of action " or " a centre of indetermination." In 
 fact it is obvious that he is one of the very greatest of the upholders 
 of the "freedom" of the life of the individual, and of the fact that 
 each new individual contributes something new of its own to the sum- 
 total of existence, to the life of its species, and to the life of the world. 
 Of course there is no more an explanation in his teaching of the causes 
 of " variation" or the differences at birth between the off-spring of 
 men and of animals, than there is in the philosophy of Darwin.
 
 250 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM 
 
 of the individual and upon the necessity, on the 
 part of philosophy, of a " dynamic " or " motive- 
 awakening " 1 theory of reality, (7) their insistence 2 
 
 1 The idea of this necessity is confirmed in Bergson's whole philosophy 
 of man's life as a life of action, as a constant surmounting of obstacles, 
 as a life that reacts in its own way upon the life of nature, upon the life 
 of the human species as such, upon the infinite life and energy and 
 " love " of God — if we may soar to this great thought. See, for 
 example, what he writes in explanation of the " discordance " of 
 which he speaks thus : " Our freedom, in the very movements by 
 which it is affirmed, creates the growing habits that will stifle it 
 if it fails to renew itself by a constant effort : it is dogged by 
 automatism. The letter kills the spirit. And our most ardent enthusi- 
 asm, as soon as it is externalised into action, is so naturally congealed 
 into the cold calculation of interest or vanity, the one takes so easily 
 the shape of the other, that we might confuse them together, doubt 
 our sincerity, deny goodness and love." The explanatory words are 
 the following. [They are quite typical of the kind of philosophy of life 
 that Bergson thinks of as alone worthy of the name of a philosophy of 
 the living. And the reference to " love," as the highest " dynamic " 
 force in this world of ours, occurs at their close.] " The profound cause 
 of this discordance lies in an irremediable difference of rhythm. Life 
 is general, is mobility itself ; particular manifestations of life accept 
 this mobility reluctantly, and constantly lag behind. It is always 
 going ahead ; they want to mark time. Evolution in general would 
 fain go on in a straight line ; each special evolution is a kind of circle. 
 Like eddies of dust raised by the wind as it passes, the living turn on 
 themselves, borne up by the great blast of life. They are therefore 
 relatively stable, and counterfeit immobility so well that we treat each 
 of them as a thing rather than as a progress, forgetting that the very 
 permanence of their form is only the outline of a movement. At times, 
 however, in a fleeting vision, the invisible breath that bears them is 
 materialised before our eyes. We have this sudden illumination before 
 certain forms of maternal love, so striking and in most animals so touching, 
 observable even in the solicitude of the plant for its seed. This love > 
 in which some have seen the great mystery of life, may possibly deliver us 
 life's secret. It shows us each generation leaning over the generation 
 that shall follow. It allows us a glimpse of the fact that the living 
 being is above all a thoroughfare, and that the essence of life is in the 
 movement by which life is transmitted " (Creative Evolution, pp. 134-5 > 
 italics mine). It is surely needless to point out how much truer to 
 human nature, truer therefore to an important part of reality, this life- 
 philosophy is than the abstractionism of Professor Bosanquet in the 
 preceding chapter. 
 
 2 This insistence is, I think, amply confirmed by the very fact of
 
 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BERGSON 251 
 
 similarly upon the necessity to our thought of a 
 direct contact with reality, and upon the impossi- 
 bility of our beginning in philosophy without 
 assumptions of one kind or another, (8) their 
 refusal to make any ultimate separation * between 
 the intellect and the will, between the highest 
 thought and the highest emotion, (e) their 
 tendency to regard belief 2 rather than know- 
 
 the immediate contact with life and reality indicated in the quotation 
 that is given in the preceding note upon the " motive-awakening," 
 or the " dynamic " character of the philosophy of Bergson. It is also 
 confirmed in his manifest insistence upon the one fact that all philosophy 
 must assume (and has for ever assumed) the fact of life, the fact of the 
 life and thought of God that underlies all our life and all our thought. 
 
 1 This position of the pragmatists is certainly confirmed by Bergson's 
 entire doctrine of the brain and of the intellect — that their main service 
 is, in the first instance, to interpret the " life " of things, its relation to 
 our own will and to our practical activity. I have suggested, too, in 
 this chapter that it is obviously a characteristic, or a consequence, of 
 the philosophy of Bergson that our highest thought about ourselves 
 and about the world should be relative to, and provocative, of our 
 highest emotion. 
 
 2 It is only with some degree of care and reservation that I wish to 
 refer to any apparent confirmation of this idea by Bergson. And, as 
 always, I object to the idea of any ultimate separation or " dualism " 
 between faith and knowledge — faith being implied in all " knowledge." 
 There is no opposition in Bergson, or in the principles of his philosophy, 
 between faith and knowledge ; it is rather his idea that " the faculty 
 of seeing should be made one with the act of willing " (Creative Evolu~ 
 Hon, 250; his italics), and that " philosophy" should "proceed, with 
 the powers of conceptual thought alone, to the ideal reconstruction of all 
 things, even of life (C.E. xi. ; italics mine). My reasons for finding in his 
 writings a confirmation of the idea that it is indeed our rational and 
 spiritual faith, rather than our demonstrable knowledge, that is to us 
 the measure of truth and reality, are such considerations as the 
 following (in addition to those of the clauses just quoted), his close 
 association between the intellectual and the " volitional," his general 
 faith in " creative evolution," in the idea that our " consciousness " 
 means for us " new choices " and (real) " new possibilities," his faith 
 in the higher intuitions of the mind, in the spiritual nature of man, his 
 belief that the building up of the true philosophy of the future will 
 involve " the collective and progressive effort of many thinkers, of
 
 252 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM 
 
 ledge as our fundamental estimate of truth and 
 reality. 
 
 A fourth constructive result, however, of the 
 philosophy of Bergson would be not the mere 
 confirmation of any number of pragmatist and 
 humanist tendencies, but their integration, and 
 their transformation into the evidences and the 
 manifestation of a new spiritual philosophy 
 of life and of the universe generally. It is this 
 possible quasi integration and transformation of so 
 many of the tendencies of Pragmatism and 
 Voluntarism and of the Philosophy of Science of 
 the day, that makes Bergson the greatest of 
 all the pragmatists — although the term hardly 
 occurs in his main writings, and although he 
 breathes from first to last the air of an idealism 1 
 and a spiritualism that is above and beyond 
 all the mere instrumentalism, and the mere 
 empiricism and the ethical opportunism of 
 Pragmatism. 
 
 The following are some of the difficulties and 
 counter-considerations that stand in the way of the 
 intelligibility and the supposed novelty of the philo- 
 sophy of Bergson. (i) It is in some respects but 
 a biological philosophy after all, a would-be philo- 
 sophical interpretation of the " evolutionary pro- 
 cess ' which takes many things for granted and 
 
 many observers also, completing, correcting, and improving one an- 
 other " (C.E. xiv.), etc. etc. 
 1 See below, p. 257, note 1.
 
 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BERGSON 253 
 
 ignores many difficulties. Some of these things 
 are the life-force itself, the ilan de vie, the vital 
 aspects that he sees in the forces of nature, the 
 " eternal movement " of which he is always 
 speaking as the only reality and as the very life 
 of the universe, the whole " adaptation ' philo- 
 sophy that characterises his own teleology despite 
 his attacks on "mechanism" and on "finalism," 
 and so on. One is tempted, indeed, to think 
 that in much of all this he forgets his own doctrine 
 of the hypothetical character of science and 
 philosophy, and that, in his very anxiety to 
 escape from mechanism and from rationalism, 
 and Paleyism, he credits Nature with a con- 
 tingency and a " freedom " l that corresponds 
 in their way to the chaos, of which the Greeks 
 thought as a necessary background to the 
 cosmos. He seems, in other words, to deify into 
 a kind of eternal " becoming " and a quasi free 
 and creative " duration," his own (necessary) 
 inability to grasp the system of things. 
 
 Then, secondly, there is a veritable crop of 
 difficulties that arise out of his contention that our 
 intellect is adapted " only to matter." What, for 
 example, of the various non-utilitarian 2 intuitions 
 of art and morality and religion, that are as un- 
 
 1 See p. 14 in reference to Dr. Schiller's suggestion that " freedom " 
 may " pervade the universe." 
 
 2 " From time to time, however, in a fit of absent-mindedness, 
 nature raises up souls that are more detached from life. . . . Were this 
 detachment complete, did the soul no longer cleave to action by any 
 of its perceptions, it would be the soul of an artist such as the world 
 has never yet seen " {Laughter, p. 154).
 
 254 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM 
 
 doubtedly facts of our conscious experience as is 
 our comprehension and utilisation of " matter " 
 for the various purposes of civilisation ? 1 If it be 
 literally true that our understanding is " in- 
 capacitated " for the comprehension of life and 
 of the creative activities of the soul, a new set 
 of categories and a higher form of intelligence 
 (than the merely material) must be elaborated 
 for this special purpose. And if this higher form 
 of intelligence be the " intuition " of which 
 Bergson undoubtedly makes so much, then he 
 must be more careful than he often is in suggesting 
 that intuition and a philosophy of our intuitions 
 " must go counter to the intellect." 2 His theory 
 of art reduces itself, for example, in the main to 
 the negative contention that spiritual perception 
 is always simply " anti-mechanical," 3 simply the 
 power of seeing things in another way than that 
 of the engineer or the craftsman, the homofaber. 
 
 1 Cf. p. 235. 
 
 2 Cf. " We must break with scientific habits which are adapted to 
 the fundamental requirements of thought, we must do violence to the 
 mind, go counter to the natural bent of the intellect. But that is just the 
 function of philosophy " (Creative Evolution, p. 31). 
 
 3 " So art, whether it be painting or sculpture, poetry or music, has 
 no other object than to brush aside the utilitarian symbols, the con- 
 ventional and socially accepted generalities, in short, everything that 
 veils reality from us, in order to bring us face to face with reality itself " 
 (Laughter, p. 157). It is true that if we read further on this page, and 
 elsewhere in Bergson, we will be able to see that there is for him in art 
 and in the spiritual life a kind of intelligence and knowledge. But it 
 is difficult to work out an expression or a characterisation of this in- 
 telligence and this knowledge. " Art," he says, " is only a more direct 
 vision of reality." And again : " Realism is in the work when idealism 
 is in the soul, and it is only through ideality that we can resume contact 
 with reality " (ibid.).
 
 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BERGSON 255 
 
 Thirdly, there are many dualisms or oppositions 
 in his doctrine or expressed teaching, reducible 
 all of them to the one great Cartesian dualism 
 between the mind and the matter that are said 
 by him to intersect in memory, and in percep- 
 tion, and in the life of the spirit generally — the 
 opposition, for example, between instinct and in- 
 telligence, that between intelligence and intuition, 1 
 between the "mechanical" and the "organic," 
 between the " upward " and the " downward " 
 movements that he attributes to the life-force. 
 And there is a striking inconsistency between 
 his apparent acceptance of the teaching of Kant 
 in respect of the limitations of the physical and 
 the temporal way of looking at things (ourselves 
 included and our actions) and his belief in an 
 eternal " duration," 2 or movement, or process of 
 
 1 It is only fair to Bergson to remember that he is himself aware of 
 the appearances of this dualism in his writings, that he apologises as it 
 were for them, intending the distinction to be, not absolute, but relative. 
 " Let us say at the outset that the distinctions we are going to make 
 will be too sharply drawn, just because we wish to define in instinct 
 what is instinctive, and in intelligence what is intelligent, whereas all 
 concrete instinct is mingled with intelligence, as all real intelligence is 
 penetrated by instinct. Moreover [this is quite an important ex- 
 pression of Bergson's objection to the old " faculty " psychology], 
 neither intelligence nor instinct lends itself to rigid definition ; they are 
 tendencies and not things. Also it must not be forgotten that .... we 
 are considering intelligence and instinct as going out of life which deposits 
 them along its course" (Creative Evolution, p. 143). 
 
 2 He talks in the Creative Evolution of a " real time " and a "pure 
 duration " of a real duration that " bites " into things and leaves on 
 them the mark of its tooth, of a " ceaseless upspringing of something 
 new," of " our progress in pure duration," or a " movement which 
 creates at once the intellectuality of mind and the materiality of 
 things" (p. 217). I have no hesitation in saying that all this is un- 
 thinkable to me, and that it might indeed be criticised by Rational- 
 ism as inconsistent with our highest and most real view of things.
 
 256 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM 
 
 which he is always speaking as the very life 
 and texture of everything. This " real " or 
 "pure" "duration" is a thing that troubles all 
 students of his philosophy ; it seems to make 
 Bergson believe in what James talked of as a 
 " strung-along " universe. And there is an in- 
 consistency between the supremacy that he seems 
 willing to accord to mind and spirit in the case of 
 the new individuals who are always being born 
 into the world, and the absence of a similar 
 supremacy (or determining role) in the case of 
 the mind or spirit without whose existence and 
 operation the universe is unthinkable. 1 
 
 As for the latter contradiction, we may note in 
 his favour that he talks, at least once or twice, of 
 "God" as "unceasing life " 2 and " active freedom," 
 and I am inclined to take this master thought as 
 possibly a kind of foundation for his rich and 
 suggestive philosophy of life and reality. But 
 there is in his writings nothing like the thorough- 
 going attempt that we find in the philosophy of 
 Aristotle 3 to ground the motion and the life of 
 
 1 He admits himself that " If our analysis is correct, it is conscious- 
 ness, or rather supra-consciousness that is at the origin of life " 
 (Creative Evolution, p. 275). 
 
 2 " Now, if the same kind of action is going on everywhere, whether 
 it is that which is striving to remake itself, I simply express this probable 
 similitude when I speak of a centre from which worlds shoot out as rockets 
 in a fireworks display — provided, however, that I do not present [there 
 is a great idea here, a true piece of ' Kantianism '] this centre as a 
 thing, but as a continuity of shooting out. God thus defined has 
 nothing of the already made. He is unceasing life, action, freedom. 
 Creation so conceived is not a mystery ; we experience it in ourselves 
 when we act freely " (Creative Evolution, p. 262). 
 
 3 See p. 155, note 1.
 
 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BERGSON 257 
 
 the world in God as its final cause and its 
 ultimate explanation. Equally little is there in 
 Bergson a thorough-going attempt to work out 
 the Idealism 1 upon which his whole system reposes 
 — his initial conception of objects as " images," 
 or " ideas " for a consciousness, or for the life- 
 force, or for the different " centres of activity " 
 with which he peoples the worlds. 
 
 Fourthly, there is the drawback from the point 
 of view of social philosophy about the thought 
 of Bergson to which we have already made 
 reference — that it lacks somehow the ethical and 
 the social idealism that would warrant us in think- 
 ing of it as a worthy rival or substitute for the 
 philosophy of history of the great idealists of the 
 
 1 It is somewhat difficult, and it is not necessary for our purposes, 
 to explain what might be meant by the " Idealism " of Bergson — at 
 least in the sense of a cosmology, a theory of the " real " It is 
 claimed for him, and he claims for himself that he is in a sense both an 
 "idealist" and a "realist," believing at once (i) that matter is an 
 "abstraction" (an unreality), and (2) that there is more in matter 
 than the qualities revealed by our perceptions. [We must remember 
 that he objects to the idea of qualities in things in the old static 
 sense. " There are no things ; there are only actions."] What we might 
 mean by his initial idealism is the following : " Matter, in our view, is an 
 aggregate of images. And by ' image ' we mean [Matter and Memory, 
 the Introduction] a certain existence which is more than that which 
 the idealist calls a representation, but less than that which the realist 
 calls a thing — an existence placed half-way between the ' thing ' and 
 the ' representation.' This conception of matter is simply that of 
 common sense." ..." For common sense, then, the object exists in 
 itself, and, on the other hand, the object is in itself pictorial, as we 
 perceive it : image it is, but a self-existing image." Now, this very idea 
 of a " self-existing image " implies to me the whole idealism of philo- 
 sophy, and Bergson is not free of it And, of course, as we have surely 
 seen, his " creative-evolution " philosophy is a stupendous piece of 
 idealism, but an idealism moreover to which the science of the day is 
 also inclining. 
 
 17
 
 258 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM 
 
 past and the present. It is necessary to speak 
 here with the utmost caution if we would avoid 
 doing injustice 1 to Bergson. We cannot mean, 
 for example, that he does not do justice 2 to the 
 social factor in human development of which we 
 have heard so much, perhaps too much, from the 
 sociologists. 3 We might mean, however, and we 
 do in a sense mean that he has not made as much 
 as he might have done of this factor, by develop- 
 ing for the thought of to-day the reality of that 
 world of " spiritual communion " and " inter- 
 
 1 There is so much that is positive and valuable in his teaching, 
 that he is but little affected by formal criticism. 
 
 2 Cf. " We have now enumerated a few of the essential features of 
 human intelligence. But we have hitherto considered the individual 
 in isolation, without taking account of social life. In reality man is a 
 being who lives in society. If it be true [even] that the human intellect 
 aims at fabrication, we must add that, for that as well as other purposes, 
 it is associated with other intellects. Now it is difficult to imagine a 
 society whose members do not communicate by signs," etc. etc. 
 (Creative Evolution, p. 166). Indeed all readers of Bergson know 
 that he is constantly making use of the social factor and of " co-opera- 
 tion " by way of accounting for the general advance of mankind. It 
 may be appropriate in this same connexion to cite the magnificent 
 passage towards the close of Creative Evolution in which he rises to the 
 very heights of the idea [Schopenhauer and Hartmann had it before him, 
 and also before the socialists and the collectivists] of humanity's being 
 possibly able to surmount even the greatest of the obstacles that beset 
 it in its onward path : " As the smallest grain of dust [Creative Evolution, 
 pp. 285-6] is bound up with our entire solar system, drawn along with 
 it in that undivided movement of descent which is materiality itself, 
 so all organised beings, from the humblest to the highest, ... do but 
 evidence a single impulsion, the inverse of the movement of matter, 
 and in itself indivisible. All the living hold together, and all yield to 
 the same tremendous push. The animal takes its stand on the plant, 
 man bestrides animality, and the whole of humanity, in space and in 
 time, is one immense army galloping beside and before and behind 
 each of us in an overwhelming charge to beat down every resistance 
 and clear the most formidable obstacles, perhaps even death." 
 
 3 Cf. p. 160 and p. 262.
 
 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BERGSON 259 
 
 subjective intercourse " of which we have spoken 
 more than once. 
 
 Then we might also contend that Bergson has 
 not as yet, in his philosophy of human life, taken 
 much cognizance of the deeper x experiences of 
 life, of the specifically ethical and religious feelings 
 and thoughts of men. With the pragmatists he 
 is unduly optimistic about the free expansive 
 development of the individual. Against this 
 objection it may be replied, that he has so 
 thoroughly assimilated into the very texture of 
 his thought and feeling some of the finest things in 
 the spiritualism and the idealism of the reflective 
 thought of France 2 that we would not, if we could, 
 wish the germinal or fructifying elements in his 
 system to be different from what they are. His 
 " social ' message is perhaps after all the best 
 thing that it can be — the need of the inward 
 spiritualization of the life and thought of the 
 individual. 
 
 Lastly, in addition to the fine traditional 
 
 1 He comes in sight of some of them, as he often does of so many 
 things. " It is as if a vague and formless being, whom we may call, 
 as we will [C.E., p. 281], man or superman, had sought to realise him- 
 self, and had succeeded only by abandoning a part of himself on the 
 way. The losses are represented by the rest of the animal world, and 
 even by the vegetable world, at least in what these have that is positive 
 and above the accidents of evolution." 
 
 2 From what has been said in this chapter about Bergson, and from 
 the remarks that were made in the second chapter about Renouvier 
 and the French Critical Philosophy, the reader may perhaps be willing 
 to admit that our Anglo-American Transcendental philosophy would 
 perhaps not have been so abstract and so rationalistic had it devoted 
 more attention, than it has evidently given, to some of the more repre- 
 sentative French thinkers of the nineteenth century. 
 
 17a
 
 260 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM 
 
 spiritualism and libertarianism of French philo- 
 sophy, we may think of the voluntarism of Kant 
 and Schopenhauer as also militating somewhat 
 against the idea of Bergson's originality 1 in 
 philosophy. Despite this it is still possible to 
 regard him as one of important, modern, exponents 
 of just that development of the Kantian philosophy 
 that became imperative after Darwinism. He 
 has indeed inaugurated for us that reading of the 
 ' theory of knowledge " in terms of the " theory 
 of life " 2 which is his true and real continua- 
 
 1 We must remember that nowhere in his writings does Bergson 
 claim any great originality for his many illuminative points of view. 
 He is at once far too much of a catholic scholar (in the matter of the 
 history of philosophy, say), and far too much of a scientist (a man in 
 living touch with the realities and the theories of the science of the day) 
 for this. His findings about life and mind are the outcome of a broad 
 study of the considerations of science and of history and of criticism. 
 By way, for example, of a quotation from a scientific work upon 
 biology that seems to me to reveal some apparent basis in fact (as seen 
 by naturalists) for the " creative evolution " upon which Bergson bases 
 his philosophy, I append the following : " We have gone far enough 
 to see that the development of an organism from an egg is a truly 
 wonderful process. We need but go back again and look at the marvel- 
 lous simplicity of the egg to be convinced of it. Not only do cells 
 differentiate, but cell-groups act together like well-drilled battalions, 
 cleaving apart here, fusing together there, forming protective coverings 
 or communicating channels, apparently creating out of nothing, a whole 
 set of nutritive and reproductive organs, all in orderly and progressive 
 sequence, producing in the end that orderly disposed cell aggregate, 
 that individual life unit which we know as an earthworm. Although 
 the forces involved are beyond our ken, the grosser processes are evident " 
 (Needham, General Biology, p. 175; italics mine). Of course it is 
 evident from his books that Bergson does not take much account of 
 such difficult facts and topics as the mistakes of instinct, etc. And 
 I have just spoken of his optimistic avoidance of some of the deeper 
 problems of the moral and spiritual life of man. 
 
 2 " This amounts to saying that the theory of knowledge and theory 
 of life seem to us inseparable [Creative Evolution, p. xiii. ; italics 
 Bergson's]. A theory of life that is not accompanied by a criticism of 
 knowledge is obliged to accept, as they stand, the concepts which the
 
 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BERGSON 261 
 
 tion of the critical work of Kant. Hypothetical 
 although it may be in many respects, it moves 
 (owing to his thorough absorption in the many 
 facts and theories of the biology of recent years) 
 in an atmosphere that is altogether above the 
 confines of the physical and the mathematical * 
 sciences with which alone Kant was (in the main) 
 directly acquainted. It is time that, with the 
 help he affords in his free handling of the facts 
 of life and of the supposed facts and theories of 
 science, we should transform the exiguous " epis- 
 temology" 2 of the past generation into the more 
 perfect hold upon " criticism " and upon the life of 
 things that is represented in his thought. 
 
 understanding puts at its disposal : it can but enclose the facts, willing 
 or not, in pre-existing frames which it regards as ultimate. It thus 
 obtains a symbolism which is convenient, perhaps even necessary to 
 positive science, but not a direct vision of its object." 
 
 1 I more than agree with Bergson that our whole modern 
 philosophy since Descartes has been unduly influenced by physics 
 and mathematics. And I deplore the fact that the " New Realism " 
 which has come upon us by way of a reaction (see p. 53) from the 
 subjectivism of Pragmatism, should be travelling apparently in this 
 backward direction — away, to say the very least, from some of the 
 things clearly seen even by biologists and psychologists. See p. 144. 
 
 3 As I have indicated in my Preface, I am certainly the last person 
 in the world to affect to disparage the importance of the thin end of the 
 wedge of Critical Idealism introduced into the English-speaking world 
 by Green and the Cairds, and their first followers (like the writers in the 
 old Seth-Haldane, Essays on Philosophical Criticism). Their theory 
 of knowledge, or " epistemology," was simply everything to the im- 
 poverished condition of our philosophy at the time, but, as Bergson 
 points out, it still left many of us [the fault perhaps was our own, to some 
 extent] in the position of " taking " the scientific reading of the world as 
 so far true, and of thinking that we had done well in philosophy when 
 we simply partly " transformed " it. The really important thing was 
 to see with this epistemology that the scientific reading of the world is 
 not in any sense initial " fact " for philosophy.
 
 CONCLUDING REMARKS 
 
 Enough has now been said in the foregoing 
 pages about Pragmatism and the philosophy 
 of Actionism in relation to Rationalism, and 
 to the Personalism and the Humanism that 
 they would substitute for it and for Absolutism. 
 Indications have been given too of the short- 
 comings and the defects of this very Personalism 
 or Humanism, and of some of the different 
 lines along which it would require to be re- 
 considered and developed to constitute a satis- 
 factory philosophy. In addition to some of the 
 greater names in the history of philosophy, I 
 have referred — in the footnotes and elsewhere — to 
 the thoughts and the works of living writers who 
 might be profitably studied by the reader in this 
 connexion. 
 
 Pragmatism is in some respects but a sociological 
 or an anthropological doctrine significant of the 
 rediscovery by our age of the doctrine of man, 
 and of its desire to accord to this doctrine the 
 importance that is its due. It represented, to 
 
 begin with (in its Instrumentalism chiefly), the 
 
 262
 
 CONCLUDING REMARKS 263 
 
 discontent of a dying century with the weight of 
 its own creations in the realm of science and 
 theory along with a newer and fresher conscious- 
 ness of the fact that there can be no rigid separa- 
 tion of philosophy from the general thought and 
 practice of mankind. And even if we accept this 
 idea of the supremacy of the doctrine of man over 
 both philosophy and science, this does not mean 
 that we exalt the worker and the prophet over 
 all knowledge, but simply that philosophy must 
 have a theory of reality that provides for their 
 existence and function alongside of those of the 
 thinker or the student as such. The true philo- 
 sophy is in fact the true doctrine of man. 
 
 Another lesson that we may learn from Prag- 
 matism and Humanism is the truth of the con- 
 tention that there can be no philosophy without 
 assumptions of one kind or another, without facts 
 and intuitions and immediate experiences. A 
 philosophy itself is an act or a creation, repre- 
 sentative of the attention of the thinker to certain 
 aspects of his experience and of the experience of 
 the world which he shares with other thinkers and 
 with other agents. And, as Bergson has reminded 
 us, it is often the great intuition underlying the 
 attention and the thought of a philosopher that 
 is of more worth to the world than the dialectic, or 
 the logic, through the aid of which it is set forth 
 and elaborated. This latter he may frequently 
 have inherited or absorbed from the schools of 
 his time.
 
 264 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM 
 
 The reason why the idealists and the dialecti- 
 cians of our time have so often fought shy of 
 beginning with the immediate or the " given," is 
 partly that they are not yet in their thoughts 
 perfectly free of some taint or tincture of the 
 supposed realism or dualism of the common-sense 
 philosophy or the correspondence view of truth. 
 They seem to have the fear that if they admit a 
 given element of fact in speculation they will 
 unconsciously be admitting that there is something 
 outside thought and immediate experience in the 
 true sense of these terms. In this fear they are 
 forgetful of the great lesson of Idealism that there 
 is nothing " outside ' thought and consciousness, 
 no " object " without a " subject," that the world is 
 'phenomenal" of a great experience, which they 
 and other men are engaged in interpreting, and of 
 which we may all become directly conscious. And 
 while to God the end of all experiences and pro- 
 cesses is known from the beginning, or apart from 
 the mere time and space limitations that affect us 
 as finite beings, it is still true that for us as men 
 and as thinkers the reality of things is not " given " 
 apart from the contribution to it that we ourselves 
 make in our responsive and in our creative activity. 
 In contending, therefore, for the reality, in every 
 philosophy, of this assumption of ourselves and 
 of the working value of our thought and of our 
 activity, Pragmatism has been contending in its 
 own fashion for the great doctrine of the sove- 
 reignty of the spirit which (when properly inter-
 
 CONCLUDING REMARKS 265 
 
 preted) is the one thing that can indeed recall the 
 modern mind out of its endless dispersion and dis- 
 traction, and out of its reputed present indiffer- 
 ence. It is in the placing of this great reality 
 before the world, or, rather, of the view of human 
 nature that makes it a possibility, and in intelligi- 
 bility, that (in my opinion) the significance of 
 Pragmatism consists, along with that of the various 
 doctrines with which it may be naturally associ- 
 ated. There are many indications in the best 
 thought and practice of our time that humanity is 
 again awakening to a creative and a self-deter- 
 minative view of itself, of its experience, and of 
 its powers. Of the presuppositions and the con- 
 ditions under which this idea may be regarded 
 as true and intelligible I have already spoken. 
 Its proper interpretation, however, along with the 
 exposition of the metaphysic upon which it must 
 be made to repose, is at least part of the work 
 of the philosophy of the future — if philosophy is 
 true to its task of leading and guiding the thought 
 of mankind.
 
 INDEX 
 
 Absolutism, 13, chap. viii. 
 Action, 91 n., 105, chap. iv. 
 Activity-Experience, 105, 109 
 Alexander, S., 163 
 Anti-Intellectualism, 73, 239 
 Appearance and Reality, 84 
 Arcesilaus, 155 
 Aristotle, 155 
 Armstrong (Prof.), 49 n. 
 Attention, 119 
 Augustine, 107 
 Avenarius, 41 
 
 Bain, 120 
 
 Baldwin, J. M., 156, now. 
 
 Bawden (Prof.), 17, 85 
 
 Belief, 64, 65, 229 n., 251 
 
 Bergson, 72, 104, 126 
 
 Berthelot, 117 
 
 Blondel, 32, 34 
 
 Bosanquet, B., no, 185, chap, viii 
 
 Bourdeau, 26, 133 »., 193 
 
 Boyce-Gibson (Prof.), 154 
 
 Bradley, F. H., 74, 75, 91 
 
 Browning, R., 117 
 
 Brunschvig, 30 
 
 Bryce, James, 193 
 
 Butler, 119 
 
 Caird, E., 112 
 
 Carlyle, 125 
 
 Chesterton, W. K., 117, 156 
 
 Cohen, 48 n. 
 
 Common-sense Beliefs, 7 
 
 Common-sense Philosophy, 117 
 
 Comte, 120 
 
 Contemplation, 96 
 
 Cornford, 184 
 
 Curtis (Prof. M. M.), 22 
 
 Dawes-Hicks (Prof.), 163 
 
 De Maistre, 170 
 
 Descartes, 66, 121 
 
 Desjardins, P., 37 
 
 Dewey, J., 16, 17, 37, 62, 147, 
 
 173. 175 
 Du Bois Reymond, no 
 Duncan (Prof.), 122 
 Duns Scotus, 119 
 
 Eleutheropulos, 43 
 Elliot, H. S. R., 66 
 Epicureanism, 118 
 Eucken, 39, 154 
 Ewald (Dr.), 44, 48 
 
 Flournoy, 180 
 Fouillee, 37 n. 
 Fraser, A. C, 112 
 Futurism, 26 
 
 Geddes, P., 123 
 Goethe, 195, 215 
 Gordon, A., 152-3 
 Green, T. H., 199 
 Gregory (Prof.), 24 
 
 Inge (Dean), 29, 31 
 Invention, 192 
 
 James, W., 3, 4, 24, 35, 39, 45. 
 
 5°. 65, 135, 182, 192 n. 
 Jerusalem, W., 43 
 Joachim, 56 
 Jones, Sir H., 56 
 Joseph, 57 
 
 Kant, 119, 121, 247 
 Kant and Hegel, 183 
 Knox (Capt.), 15 
 
 Lalande, A., 29, 33, 164 
 Lankester (Sir R.), 167 
 
 267
 
 268 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Lecky, 70 
 
 Leighton (Prof.), 133 
 Le Roy, 31 
 Locke, 61, 119 
 Lovejoy (Prof.), 49 
 
 MacEachran (Prof.), 49 n. 
 Mach, 40 
 
 Mackenzie, J. S., 112 
 Maeterlinck, 90 
 Mallarme, 214 
 Marett, 160 
 
 Mastermann, G. F. G., 118 
 M'Dougall, 104 
 McTaggart, J. M. E., 92 
 Meaning, 21, 51, 149 
 Mellone, 57 
 Merz, 157 
 Munsterberg, 46 
 
 Natorp, 48 
 
 Needham (Prof.), 101, 260 
 New Realism, 53 
 Nietzsche, 118, 139, 151 
 
 Ostwald, 40, 41 
 
 Pace (Prof.), 187 
 
 Paleyism, 247 
 
 Papini, 24, 135 
 
 Pascal, 119 
 
 Pater, W., 124 
 
 Peirce, 3, 22 
 
 Perry (Prof.), 53, 185 
 
 Perry, Bliss, 171, 179 
 
 Plato, 57, 61, 121, 150, 151 
 
 Pluralism, 87 
 
 Poincare, 30 
 
 Pradines, 36 n. 
 
 Pragmatism, and American philo- 
 sophy, 49, chap. vii. ; and 
 British thought, 54 ; and 
 French thought, 28 ; and Ger- 
 man thought, 38 ; and Italian 
 thought, 23 ; a democratic 
 doctrine, 105 ; its ethics, 136 ; 
 its pluralism, 162 ; its socio- 
 logical character, 164, 262 ; its 
 theory of knowledge, 131 ; its 
 
 theory of truth, 127 ; its theory 
 of reality, 135 
 Pratt (Prof.), 51, 127 
 
 Radical Empiricism, 85 
 
 Renan, no 
 
 Renouvier, 29 
 
 Rey, 31 
 
 Riley, W., 26 n. 
 
 Ritzsche, 45 
 
 Royce, J., 54 
 
 Russell, B., 61, 66 n., 169 
 
 Santayana, 171, 181, 190 
 
 Schellwien, 44 
 
 Schiller, F. C. S., 12, 14, 16, 132, 
 
 133 
 
 Schinz, 192 n. 
 
 Schopenhauer, 28, 119, 151, 260 
 
 Seth, James, 14 n. 
 
 Seth-Haldane, 260 
 
 Shaw, Bernard, 124 
 
 Sidgwick, H., 56, 118, 119 n., 140 
 
 Sigwart, 42 
 
 Simmel, 44 
 
 Spencer, 41 m, 
 
 Starbuck, 28 
 
 Stoicism, 118 
 
 Stout, G. F., 55 
 
 Subjective Idealism, 259 
 
 Taylor, A. E., 57, 77, 78, 199 n., 2 19 
 
 Teleology, 88, 198 
 
 Tertullian, 119 
 
 Theism, 215 n. 
 
 Themistius, 155 
 
 Thompson, J. H., 144 
 
 Titchener, 157 
 
 Truth, 59, 81, 163 
 
 Tufts, 147 
 
 Tyndall, no 
 
 Vaihinger, 39 
 
 Walker, L. J., 31 
 Ward, James, 30, 55, 143, 162 
 Wells, H. G., 123 
 Westermarck, 145 
 Windelband, 46, 150 
 Wollaston, 224 
 
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