mBi^mm^ms^^m ^rom, Ike LIBRARY ROBERT D. MACK ■^TyiacA ^^:.:^!^: ^ y^ ^^' ^p i^illtain 2ramc£( THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE: A STUDY IN HUMAN NATURE. GifEord Lectures delivered at Edinburgh University. 8vo. New York, London, Bombay, and Calcutta: Longmans, Green & Co. PRAGMATISM: A NEW NAME FOR SOME OLD WAYS OF THINKING: POPULAR LECTURES ON PHILOSOPHY. 8vo. New York, London, Bom- bay, and Calcutta: Longmans, Green & Co. THE MEANING OF TRUTH: A SEQUEL TO "PRAGMATISM." 8vo. New York, London, Bombay, and Calcutta: Longmans, Green & Co. A PLURALISTIC UNIVERSE: HIBBERT LECTURES ON THE PRESENT SITUATION IN PHILOSOPHY. 8vo. New York, London, Bombay, and Cal- cutta: Longmans, Green & Co. SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY: A BEGINNING OF AN INTRODUC- TION TO PHILOSOPHY. Svo. New York, London, Bombay, and Calcutta: Longmans, Green & Co. ESSAYS IN RADICAL EMPIRICISM. Svo. New York, London, Bombay, and Calcutta : Longmans, Green & Co. THE WILL TO BELIEVE, AND OTHER ESSAYS IN POPULAR PHILOS- OPHY, izmo. New York, London, Bombay, and Calcutta: Longmans, Green &Co. MEMORIES AND STUDIES. 8vo. New York, London, Bombay, and Calcutta: Longmans, Green & Co. THE PRINCIPLES OF PSYCHOLOGY. 2 vols., Svo. New York: Henry Holt & Co. London : Macmillan & Co. PSYCHOLOGY: BRIEFER COURSE. i2mo. New York: Henry Holt & Co. London : Macmillan & Co. TALKS TO TEACHERS ON PSYCHOLOGY: AND TO STUDENTS ON SOME OF LIFE'S IDEALS. i2mo. New York : Henry Holt & Co. London, Bora- bay, and Calcutta : Longmans, Green & Co. HUMAN IMMORTALITY: TWO SUPPOSED OBJECTIONS TO THE DOC- TRINE. i6mo. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co. London: J. M. Dent & Sons, Ltd. COLLECTED ESSAYS AND REVIEWS. Edited by R. B. Perry. Svo. New York, London, Bombay, and Calcutta : Longmans, Green & Co. 1920. HABIT. Reprint of a chapter in " The Principles of Psychology." i6mo. New York : Henry Holt & Co. ON VITAL RESERVES. Reprint of "The Energies of Men " and the " Gospe! of Relaxation." i6mo. New York : Henry Holt & Co. ON SOME OF LIFE'S IDEALS. Reprint of " On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings" and "What Makes a Life Significant." i6mo. New York: Henry Holt & Co. ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY OF THE WRITINGS OF WILLIAM JAMES. By R. B. Perry. Svo. New York, London, Bombay, and Calcutta; Longmans, Green & Co. 1920. THE LITERARY REMAINS OF HENRY JAMES. Edited, with an Introduction, by William James. With Portrait. Crown Svo. Boston : Houghton Mifflin Co. 1885. LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES. Selected and edited with Biographical Intro- duction and Notes by his son Henry James. 2 vols., Svo. Boston : Atlantic Monthly Press, Inc. London: Longmans, Green & Co. 1920. PRAGMATISM A NEW NAME FOR SOME OLD WAYS OF THINKING POPULAR LECTURES ON PHILOSOPHY BY WILLIAM JAMES ^ NEW IMPRESSION LONGMANS, GREEN AND CO. 55 FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK 39 PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON TORONTO BOMBAY CALCUTTA MADRAS 1922 COPYRIGHT 1907 BY WILLIAM JAMES ALL RIGHTS RBSBRVED First Edition June, 1907 Reprinted Jul]' (twice), October, November, 1907 February, September, 190S March, 1909, April, 1910 November, 1910, March, 1911 March, 1912, March, 1913 January, 1914, August, 1916 September, 1919 April, 1921 September, 1922 6 3 TO THE MEMORY OF JOHN STUART MILL FROM WHOM I FIRST LEARNED THE PRAGMATIC OPENNESS OF MIND AND WHOM MY FANCY LIKES TO PICTURE AS OUR LEADER WERE HE ALIVE TO-DAY PREFACE The lectures that follow were delivered at the Lowell Institute in Boston in November and December, 1906, and in January, 1907, at Columbia University, in New York. They are printed as delivered, without developments or notes. The pragmatic movement, so-called — I do not like the name, but apparently it is too late to change it — seems to have rather sud- denly precipitated itself out of the air. A num- ber of tendencies that have always existed in philosophy have all at once become conscious of themselves collectively, and of their com- bined mission; and this has occurred in so many countries, and from so many different points of view, that much unconcerted statement has resulted. I have sought to unify the picture as it presents itself to my own eyes, dealing in broad strokes, and avoiding minute contro- versy. Much futile controversy might have been avoided, I believe, if our critics had been willing to wait until we got our message fairly out. vii PREFACE If my lectures interest any reader in the general subject, he will doubtless wish to read farther. I therefore give him a few references. In America, John Dewey's 'Studies in Logical Theory' are the foundation. Read also by Dewey the articles in the Philosoph- ical Review, vol. xv, pp. 113 and 4^65, in Mind, vol. XV, p. 293, and in the Journal of Philo- sophy, vol. iv, p. 197. Probably the best statements to begin with, however, are F. C. S. Schiller's in his ' Studies in Humanism,' especially the essays numbered i, V, vi, vii, xviii and xix. His previous essays and in general the polemic literature of the subject are fully referred to in his footnotes. Furthermore, see J. Milhaud : le Rationnel, 1898, and the fine articles by Le Roy in the Revue de Metaphysique, vols. 7, 8 and 9. Also articles by Blondel and de Sailly in the Annales de Philosophie Chretienne, 4i'^^ Serie, vols. 2 and 3. Papini announces a book on Pragmatism, in the French language, to be published very soon. To avoid one misunderstanding at least, viii PREFACE let me say that there is no logical connexion between pragmatism, as I understand it, and a doctrine which I have recently set forth as 'radical empiricism.' The latter stands on its own feet. One may entirely reject it and still be a pragmatist. Harvard University, April, 1907. CONTENTS LECTURE I The Present Dilemma in Philosophy .... 3 Chesterton quoted, 3. Everyone has a philosophy, 4. Tempera- ment is a factor in all philosophizing, 7. Rationalists and empiricists, 9. The tender-minded and the tough-minded, 12. Most men wish both facts and religion, 15. Empiricism gives facts without religion, 16. Rationalism gives religion without facts, 17. The layman's dilemma, 19. The unreality in rationalistic systems, 21. Leibnitz on the damned, as an example, 23. M. I. Swift on the optimism of idealists, 27. Pragmatism as a mediating system, 31. An objection, 34. Reply: philosophies have characters like men, and are liable to as summary judgments, 35. Spencer as an example, 39. LECTURE II What Pragmatism Means 43 The squirrel, 43. Pragmatism as a method, 45. History of the method, 46. Its character and affinities, 51. How it contrasts with rationalism and intellectualism, 52. A 'corridor theory,' 54. Prag- matism as a theory of truth, equivalent to 'humanism,' 55. Earlier views of mathematical, logical, and natural truth, 56. More recent views, 67. Schiller's and Dewey's ' instrumental * view, 58. The formation of new beliefs, 59. Older truth always has to be kept account of, 60. Older truth arose similarly, 64. The 'humanistic' doctrine, 65. Rationalistic criticisms of it, 66. Pragmatism as mediator between empiricism and religion, 69. Barrenness of transcendental idealism, 71. How far the concept of the Absolute must be called true, 73. The true is the good in the way of belief, 75. The clash of truths, 77. Pragmatism unstiffens discussion, 79. LECTURE III Some Metaphysical Problems Pragmatically Con- sidered 85 The problem of substance, 85. The Eucharist, 88. Berkeley's pragmatic treatment of material substance, 89. Locke's of per- xi CONTENTS sonal identity, 90. The problem of materialism, 92. Rationalistic treatment of it, 93. Pragmatic treatment, 96. *God' is no better than 'Matter' as a principle, unless he promise more, 100. Prag- matic comparison of the two principles, 103. The problem of de- sign, 109. 'Design' per se is barren, 113. The question is what design, 114. The problem of 'free-will,' 115. Its relations to 'ac- countability,' 116. Free-will a cosmological theory, 119. The prag- matic issue at stake in all these problems is what do the alternatives promise, 122. LECTURE IV The One and the Many . 127 Total reflection, 127. Philosophy seeks not only unity, but totality, 130. Rationalistic feeling about unity, 131. Pragmatically consid- ered, the world is one in many ways, 132. One time and space, 132. One subject of discourse, 133. Its parts mteract, 134. Its oneness and manyness are co-ordinate, 137. Question of one origin, 138. Generic oneness, 139. One purpose, 140. One story, 143. One knower, 145. Valueof pragmatic method, 148. Absolute monism, 149. Vivekanda, 152. Various types of union discussed, 156. Conclusion: We must oppose monistic dogmatism and follow the empirical findings, 160. LECTURE V Pragmatism and Common Sense 165 Noetic pluralism, 166. How our knowledge grows, 167. Earlier ways of thinking remain, 169. Prehistoric ancestors discovered the common sense concepts, 170. List of them, 173. They came grad- ually into use, 174. Space and time, 177. 'Things,' 178. Kinds, 179. 'Cause' and 'law,' 180. Common sense one stage in mental evolution, due to geniuses, 180. The 'critical' stages: 1) scientific and 2) philosophic, compared with common sense, 185. Impossible to say which is the more 'true,' 192. LECTURE VI Pragmatism's Conception of Truth 197 The polemic situation, 197. What does agreement with reality mean? 198-217. It means verifiability, 201. Verifiability means xii CONTENTS ability to guide us prosperously through experience, 202. Com- pleted verifications seldom needful, 207. 'Eternal' truths, 209. G>nsistency, 210; with language, 213; with previous truths, 214. Rationalist objections, 218. Truth is a good, like health, wealth, etc., 220. It is expedient thinking, 222. The past, 223. Truth grows, 224. Rationalist objections, 226. Reply to them, 229. LECTUEE VII Pragmatism and Huimanism 239 The notion of the Truth, 239. Schiller on 'Humanism,* 242. Three sorts of reality of which any new truth must take account, 244. To 'take account' is ambiguous, 245. Absolutely independent reality is hard to find, 248. The human contribution is ubiquitous and builds out the given, 250. Essence of pragmatism's contrast with rationalism, 257. Rationalism affirms a transempirical world, 239. Motives for this, 260. Tough-mindedness rejects them, 262. A genuine alternative, 264. Pragmatism mediates, 266. LECTURE VIII Pragmatism and Religion 273 Utility of the Absolute, 273. Whitman's poem 'To You,' 274. Two ways of taking it, 276. My friend's letter, 278. Necessities versus possibilities, 282. 'Possibility' defined, 283. Three views of the world's salvation, 284. Pragmatism is melioristic, 286. We may create reality, 287. Why should anything he? 288. Supposed choice before creation, 290. The healthy and the morbid reply, 291. The 'tender' and the 'tough' types of religion, 293. Pragmatism mediates, 297. PRAGMATISM A NEW NAME FOR SOME OLD WAYS OF THINKING I THE DILEMMA IN PHILOSOPHY LECTURE I THE PRESENT DILEMMA IN PHILOSOPHY In the preface to that admirable collection of essays of his called 'Heretics,' Mr. Chesterton writes these words : " There are some people — and I am one of them — who think that the most practical and important thing about a man is still his view of the universe. We think that for a landlady considering a lodger it is important to know his income, but still more important to know his philosophy. We think that for a general about to fight an enemy it is important to know the enemy's numbers, but still more important to know the enemy's phil- osophy. We think the question is not whether the theory of the cosmos affects matters, but whether in the long run anything else affects them." I think with Mr. Chesterton in this matter. I know that you, ladies and gentlemen, have a philosophy, each and all of you, and that the most interesting and important thing about you 3 PRAGMATISM is the way in which it determines the perspect- ive in your several worlds. You know the same of me. And yet I confess to a certain tremor at the audacity of the enterprise which I am about to begin. For the philosophy which is so im- portant in each of us is not a technical matter; it is our more or less dumb sense of what life honestly and deeply means. It is only partly got from books ; it is our individual way of just seeing and feeling the total push and pressure of the cosmos. I have no right to assume that many of you are students of the cosmos in the classroom sense, yet here I stand desirous of interesting you in a philosophy which to no small extent has to be technically treated. I wish to fill you with sympathy with a contem- poraneous tendency in which I profoundly be- lieve, and yet I have to talk like a professor to you who are not students. Whatever universe a professor believes in must at any rate be a uni- verse that lends itself to lengthy discourse. A universe definable in two sentences is some- thing for which the professorial intellect has no use. No faith in anything of that cheap kind ! I 4 THE DILEMMA IN PHILOSOPHY have heard friends and colleagues try to popu- larize philosophy in this very hall, but they soon grew dry, and then technical, and the results were only partially encouraging. So my enterprise is a bold one. The founder of prag- matism himself recently gave a course of lec- tures at the Lowell Institute with that very word in its title, — flashes of brilliant light relieved against Cimmerian darkness! None of us, I fancy, understood all that he said — yet here I stand, making a very similar ven- ture. I risk it because the very lectures I speak of drew — they brought good audiences. There is, it must be confessed, a curious fascination in hearing deep things talked about, even though neither we nor the disputants understand them. We get the problematic thrill, we feel the pre- sence of the vastness. Let a controversv be^rin in a smoking-room anywhere, about free-will or God's omniscience, or good and evil, and see how every one in the place pricks up his ears. Philosophy's results concern us all most vitally, and philosophy's queerest arguments 5 PRAGMATISM tickle agreeably our sense of subtlety and in- genuity. Believing in philosophy myself devoutly, and believing also that a kind of new dawn is break- ing upon us philosophers, I feel impelled, fer fas aut nefas, to try to impart to you some news of the situation. Philosophy is at once the most sublime and the most trivial of human pursuits. It works in the minutest crannies and it opens out the widest vistas. It 'bakes no bread,' as has been said, but it can inspire our souls with courage; and repugnant as its manners, its doubting and challenging, its quibbling and dialectics, often are to common people, no one of us can get along without the far-flashing beams of light it sends over the world's perspectives. These illuminations at least, and the contrast-effects of darkness and mystery that accompany them, give to what it says an interest that is much more than professional. The history of philosophy is to a great extent that of a certain clash of human tempera- ments. Undignified as such a treatment may 6 THE DILEMMA IN PHILOSOPHY seem to some of my colleagues, I shall have to take account of this clash and explain a good many of the divergencies of philosophers by it. Of whatever temperament a professional philosopher is, he tries, when philosophizing, to sink the fact of his temperament. Tempera- ment is no conventionally recognized reason, so he urges impersonal reasons only for his con- clusions. Yet his temperament really gives him a stronger bias than any of his more strictly objective premises. It loads the evidence for him one way or the other, making for a more sentimental or a more hard-hearted view of the universe, just as this fact or that principle w^ould. He trusts his temperament. Wanting a universe that suits it, he believes in any re- presentation of the universe that does suit it. He feels men of opposite temper to be out of key with the world's character, and in his heart considers them incompetent and *not in it,' in the philosophic business, even though they may far excel him in dialectical ability. Yet in the forum he can make no claim, on the bare ground of his temperament, to su- 7 PRAGMATISM perior discernment or authority. There arises thus a certain insincerity in our philosophic discussions : the potentest of all our premises is never mentioned. I am sure it would contribute to clearness if in these lectures we should break this rule and mention it, and I accordingly feel free to do so. Of course I am talking here of very posi- tively marked men, men of radical idiosyn- cracy, who have set their stamp and likeness on philosophy and figure in its history. Plato, Locke, Hegel, Spencer, are such temperamen- tal thinkers. Most of us have, of course, no very definite intellectual temperament, we are a mixture of opposite ingredients, each one present very moderately. We hardly know our own preferences in abstract matters; some of us are easily talked out of them, and end by following the fashion or taking up with the be- liefs of the most impressive philosopher in our neighborhood, whoever he may be. But the one thing that has counted so far in philosophy is that a man should see things, see them straight in his own peculiar way, and be dissatisfied with 8 THE DILEMMA IN PHILOSOPHY any opposite way of seeing them. There is no reason to suppose that this strong tempera- mental vision is from now onward to count no longer in the history of man's beliefs. Now the particular difference of tempera- ment that I have in mind in making these re- marks is one that has counted in literature, art, government, and manners as well as in philo- sophy. In manners we find formalists and free- and-easy persons. In government, authorita- rians and anarchists. In literature, purists or academicals, and realists. In art, classics and romantics. You recognize these contrasts as familiar; well, in philosophy we have a very similar contrast expressed in the pair of terms 'rationalist' and 'empiricist,' 'empiricist' meaning your lover of facts in all their crude variety, 'rationalist' meaning your devotee to abstract and eternal principles. No one can live an hour without both facts and principles, so it is a difference rather of emphasis ; yet it breeds antipathies of the most pungent charac- ter between those who lay the emphasis differ- ently; and we shall find it extraordinarily con- 9 PRAGMATISM venient to express a certain contrast in men's ways of taking their universe, by talking of the 'empiricist' and of the 'rationalist' temper. These terms make the contrast simple and massive. More simple and massive than are usually the men of whom the terms are predicated. For every sort of permutation and combination is possible in human nature ; and if I now pro- ceed to define more fully what I have in mind when I speak of rationalists and empiricists, by adding to each of those titles some secondary qualifying characteristics, I beg you to regard my conduct as to a certain extent arbitrary. I select types of combination that nature offers very frequently, but by no means uniformly, and I select them solely for their convenience in helping me to my ulterior purpose of charac- terizing pragmatism. Historically we find the terms 'intellectualism' and 'sensationalism' used as synonyms of 'rationalism' and 'em- piricism.' Well, nature seems to combine most frequently with intellectualism an idealistic and optimistic tendency. Empiricists on the 10 THE DILEMMA IN PHILOSOPHY other hand are not uncommonly materialistic, and their optimism is apt to be decidedly con- ditional and tremulous. Rationalism is always monistic. It starts from wholes and universals, and makes much of the unity of things. Empir- icism starts from the parts, and makes of the whole a collection — is not averse therefore to calling itself pluralistic. Rationalism usually considers itself more religious than empiricism, but there is much to say about this claim, so I merely mention it. It is a true claim when the individual rationalist is what is called a man of feeling, and when the individual empiricist prides himself on being hard-headed. In that case the rationalist will usually also be in favor of what is called free-will, and the empiricist will be a fatalist — I use the terms most popu- larly current. The rationalist finally will be of dogmatic temper in his afl&rmations, while the empiricist may be more sceptical and open to discussion. I will write these traits down in two columns. I think you will practically recognize the two types of mental make-up that I mean if I head H PRAGMATISM the columns by the titles * tender-minded ' and * tough-minded ' respectively. The Tender-minded. The Tough-minded. Rationalistic (going by Empiricist (going by 'principles'), 'facts'), Intellectualistic, Sensationalistic, Idealistic, Materialistic, Optimistic, Pessimistic, Religious, Irreligious, Free-willist, Fatalistic, Monistic, Pluralistic, Dogmatical. Sceptical. Pray postpone for a moment the question whether the two contrasted mixtures which I have written down are each inwardly coherent and self-consistent or not — I shall very soon have a good deal to say on that point. It suf- fices for our immediate purpose that tender- minded and tough-minded people, character- ized as I have written them down, do both exist. Each of you probably knows some well-marked example of each type, and you know what each example thinks of the example on the other side of the line. They have a low opinion of each other. Their antagonism, whenever as individ- uals their temperaments have been intense, has 12 THE DILEMMA IN PHILOSOPHY formed in all ages a part of the philosophic atmosphere of the time. It forms a part of the philosophic atmosphere to-day. The tough think of the tender as sentimentalists and soft- heads. The tender feel the tough to be unre- fined, callous, or brutal. Their mutual reaction is very much like that that takes place when Bostonian tourists mingle with a population like that of Cripple Creek. Each type believes the other to be inferior to itself; but disdain in the one case is mingled with amusement, in the other it has a dash of fear. Now, as I have already insisted, few of us are tender-foot Bostonians pure and simple, and few are typical Rocky Mountain toughs, in philosophy. Most of us have a hankering for the good things on both sides of the line. Facts are good, of course — give us lots of facts. Principles are good — give us plenty of principles. The world is indubitably one if you look at it in one way, but as indubitably is it many, if you look at it in another. It is both one and many — let us adopt a sort of pluralistic monism. Everything of course is necessarily 13 PRAGMATISM determined, and yet of course our wills are free: a sort of free-will determinism is the true philo- sophy. The evil of the parts is undeniable, but the whole can't be evil : so practical pessimism may be combined with metaphysical optimism. And so forth — your ordinary philosophic layman never being a radical, never straight- ening out his system, but living vaguely in one plausible compartment of it or another to suit the temptations of successive hours. But some of us are more than mere laymen in philosophy. We are worthy of the name of amateur athletes, and are vexed by too much inconsistency and vacillation in our creed. We cannot preserve a good intellectual conscience so long as we keep mixing incompatibles from opposite sides of the line. And now I come to the first positively im- portant point which I wish to make. Never were as many men of a decidedly empiricist proclivity in existence as there are at the pre- sent day. Our children, one may say, are al- most born scientific. But our esteem for facts has not neutralized in us all religiousness. It is 14 THE DILEMMA IN PHILOSOPHY itself almost religious. Our scientific temper is devout. Now take a man of this type, and let him be also a philosophic amateur, unwilling to mix a hodge-podge system after the fashion of a common layman, and what does he find his situation to be, in this blessed year of our Lord 1906.? He wants facts; he wants science; but he also wants a religion. And being an amateur and not an independent originator in philosophy he naturally looks for guidance to the experts and professionals whom he finds already in the field. A very large number of you here present, possibly a majority of you, are amateurs of just this sort. Now what kinds of philosophy do you find actually offered to meet your need ? You find an empirical philosophy that is not religious enough, and a religious philosophy that is not empirical enough for your purpose. If you look to the quarter where facts are most considered you find the whole tough-minded program in operation, and the 'conflict between science and religion' in full blast. Either it is that Rocky Mountain tough of a Haeckel with his 15 PRAGMATISM materialistic monism, his ether-god and his jest at your God as a 'gaseous vertebrate'; or it is Spencer treating the world's history as a redistribution of matter and motion solely, and bowing religion politely out at the front door: — she may indeed continue to exist, but she must never show her face inside the temple. For a hundred and fifty years past the pro- gress of science has seemed to mean the enlarge- ment of the material universe and the diminu- tion of man's importance. The result is what one may call the growth of naturalistic or posi- tivistic feeling. Man is no lawgiver to nature, he is an absorber. She it is who stands firm; he it is who must accommodate himself. Let him record truth, inhuman though it be, and submit to it! The romantic spontaneity and courage are gone, the vision is materialistic and depressing. Ideals appear as inert by- products of physiology; what is higher is explained by what is lower and treated for- ever as a case of * nothing but ' — nothing but something else of a quite inferior sort. You get, in short, a materialistic universe, in which 16 THE DILEMMA IN PHILOSOPHY only the tough-minded find themselves con- genially at home. If now, on the other hand, you turn to the religious quarter for consolation, and take counsel of the tender-minded philosophies, what do you find ? Religious philosophy in our day and gener- ation is, among us English-reading people, of two main types. One of these is more radical and aggressive, the other has more the air of fighting a slow retreat. By the more radical wing of religious philosophy I mean the so- called transcendental idealism of the Anglo- Hegelian school, the philosophy of such men as Green, the Cairds, Bosanquet, and Royce. This philosophy has greatly influenced the more studious members of our protestant ministry. It is pantheistic, and undoubtedly it has al- ready blunted the edge of the traditional theism in protestantism at large. That theism remains, however. It is the lineal descendant, through one stage of conces- sion after another, of the dogmatic scholastic theism still taught rigorously in the seminaries 17 PRAGMATISM of the catholic church. For a long time it used to be called among us the philosophy of the Scottish school. It is what I meant by the philosophy that has the air of fighting a slow retreat. Between the encroachments of the hegelians and other philosophers of the ' Abso- lute,' on the one hand, and those of the scienti- fic evolutionists and agnostics, on the other, the men that give us this kind of a philosophy, James Martineau, Professor Bowne, Professor Ladd and others, must feel themselves rather tightly squeezed. Fair-minded and candid as you like, this philosophy is not radical in tem- per. It is eclectic, a thing of compromises, that seeks a modus vivendi above all things. It ac- cepts the facts of Darwinism, the facts of cere- bral physiology, but it does nothing active or enthusiastic with them. It lacks the victorious and aggressive note. It lacks prestige in con- sequence; whereas absolutism has a certain prestige due to the more radical style of it. These two systems are what you have to choose between if you turn to the tender-minded school. And if you are the lovers of facts I have 18 THE DILEMMA IN PHILOSOPHY supposed you to be, you find the trail of the serpent of rationalism, of intellectualism, over everything that lies on that side of the line. You escape indeed the materialism that goes with the reigning empiricism; but you pay for your escape by losing contact with the concrete parts of life. The more absolutistic philo- sophers dwell on so high a level of abstraction that they never even try to come down. The absolute mind which they offer us, the mind that makes our universe by thinking it, might, for aught they show us to the contrary, have made any one of a million other universes just as well as this. You can deduce no single act- ual particular from the notion of it./lt is com- patible with any state of things whatever being true here below. And the theistic God is almost as sterile a principle. You h^ve to go to the world which he has created to get any inkling of his actual character: he is the kind of god that has once for all made that kind of a world. The God of the theistic writers lives on as purely abstract heights as does the Absolute. Abso- lutism has a certain sweep and dash about it, 19 PRAGMATISM while the usual theism is more insipid, but both are equally remote and vacuous. What you want is a philosophy that will not only exercise your powers of intellectual abstraction, but that will make some positive connexion with this actual world of finite human lives. You want a system that will combine both things, the scientific loyalty to facts and will- ingness to take account of them, the spirit of adaptation and accommodation, in short, but also the old confidence in human values and the resultant spontaneity, whether of the relig- ious or of the romantic type. And this is then your dilemma : you find the two parts of your quaesitum hopelessly separated. You find em- piricism with inhumanism and irreligion; or else you find a rationalistic philosophy that indeed may call itself religious, but that keeps out of all definite touch with concrete facts and joys and sorrows. I am not sure how many of you live close enough to philosophy to realize fully what I mean by this last reproach, so I will dwell a lit- tle longer on that unreality in all rationalistic 20 THE DILEMMA IN PHILOSOPHY systems by which your serious beHever in facts is so apt to feel repelled. I wish that I had saved the first couple of pages of a thesis which a student handed me a year or two ago. They illustrated my point so clearly that I am sorry I can not read them to you now. This young man, who was a gradu- ate of some Western college, began by saying that he had always taken for granted that when you entered a philosophic classroom you had to open relations with a universe entirely distinct from the one you left behind you in the street. The two were supposed, he said, to have so little to do with each other, that you could not possibly occupy your mind with them at the same time. The world of concrete personal experiences to which the street belongs is multi- tudinous beyond imagination, tangled, muddy, painful and perplexed. The world to which your philosophy-professor introduces you is simple, clean and noble. The contradictions of real life are absent from it. Its architecture is classic. Principles of reason trace its outlines, logical necessities cement its parts. Purity and 21 PRAGMATISM dignity are what it most expresses. It is a kind of marble temple shining on a hill. In point of fact it is far less an account of this actual world than a clear addition built upon it, a classic sanctuary in which the rationalist fancy may take refuge from the intolerably con- fused and gothic character which mere facts present. It is no explanation of our concrete universe, it is another thing altogether, a sub- stitute for it, a remedy, a way of escape. Its temperament, if I may use the word tem- perament here, is utterly alien to the temper- ament of existence in the concrete. Refinement is what characterizes our intellectualist philo- sophies. They exquisitely satisfy that craving for a refined object of contemplation which is so powerful an appetite of the mind. But I ask you in all seriousness to look abroad on this colossal universe of concrete facts, on their awful bewilderments, their surprises and cruel- ties, on the wildness which they show, and then to tell me whether * refined ' is the one inevit- able descriptive adjective that springs to your lips. 22 THE DILEMMA IN PHILOSOPHY Refinement has its place in things, true enough. But a philosophy that breathes out nothing but refinement will never satisfy the empiricist temper of mind. It will seem rather a monument of artificiality. So we find men of science preferring to turn their backs on meta- physics as on something altogether cloistered and spectral, and practical men shaking phil- osophy's dust off their feet and following the call of the wild. Truly there is something a little ghastly in the satisfaction with which a pure but unreal system will fill a rationalist mind. Leibnitz was a rationalist mind, with infinitely more interest in facts than most rationalist minds can show. Yet if you wish for superficiality incarnate, you have only to read that charmingly writ- ten ' Theodicee ' of his, in which he sought to justify the ways of God to man, and to prove that the world we live in is the best of possible worlds. Let me quote a specimen of what I mean. Among other obstacles to his optimistic philosophy, it falls to Leibnitz to consider the 23 PRAGMATISM number of the eternally damned. That it is infinitely greater, in our human case, than that of those saved, he assumes as a premise from the theologians, and then proceeds to argue in this way. Even then, he says : "The evil will appear as almost nothing in comparison with the good, if we once consider the real magnitude of the City of God. Coelius Secundus Curio has written a little book, ' De Amplitudine Regni Coelestis,' which was re- printed not long ago. But he failed to compass the extent of the kingdom of the heavens. The ancients had small ideas of the works of God. ... It seemed to them that only our earth had inhabitants, and even the notion of our an- tipodes gave them pause. The rest of the world for them consisted of some shining globes and a few crystalline spheres. But to-day, whatever be the limits that we may grant or refuse to the Universe we must recognize in it a countless number of globes, as big as ours or bigger, which have just as much right as it has to support rational inhabitants, tho it does not follow that these need all be men. Our earth is 24 THE DILEMMA IN PHILOSOPHY only one among the six principal satellites of our sun. As all the fixed stars are suns, one sees how small a place among visible things our earth takes up, since it is only a satellite of one among them. Now all these suns ma?/ be inha- bited by none but happy creatures ; and nothing obliges us to believe that the number of damned persons is very great; for a very jew instances and samples suffice for the utility which good draws from evil. Moreover, since there is no reason to suppose that there are stars every- where, may there not be a great space beyond the region of the stars ? And this immense space, surrounding all this region, . . . may be replete with happiness and glory. . . . W hat now becomes of the consideration of our Earth and of its denizens ? Does it not dwindle to something incomparably less than a physical point, since our Earth is but a point compared with the distance of the fixed stars. Thus the part of the Universe which we know, being almost lost in nothingness compared with that which is unknown to us, but which we are yet obliged to admit; and all the evils that we 25 PRAGMATISM know lying in this almost-nothing; it follows that the evils may be almost-nothing in com- parison with Uie goods that the Universe con- tains.'* Leibnitz continues elsewhere : "There is a kind of justice which aims neither at the amendment of the criminal, nor at furnishing an example to others, nor at the reparation of the injury. This justice is founded in pure fitness, which finds a certain satisfac- tion in the expiation of a wicked deed. The Socinians and Hobbes objected to this punitive justice, which is properly vindictive justice, and which God has reserved for himself at many junctures. ... It is always founded in the fitness of things, and satisfies not only the offended party, but all wise lookers-on, even as beautiful music or a fine piece of architecture satisfies a well-constituted mind. It is thus that the torments of the damned continue, even the they serve no longer to turn any one away from sin, and that the rewards of the blest continue, even tho they confirm no one in good ways. The damned draw to themselves ever new 36 THE DILEMMA IN PHILOSOPHY penalties by their continuing sins, and the blest attract ever fresh joys by their unceasing progress in good. Both facts are founded on the principle of fitness, ... for God has made all things harmonious in perfection as I have already said." Leibnitz's feeble grasp of reality is too obvi- ous to need comment from me. It is evident that no realistic image of the experience of a damned soul had ever approached the portals of his mind. Nor had it occurred to him that the smaller is the number of 'samples' of the genus * lost-soul' whom God throws as a sop to the eternal fitness, the more unequitably grounded is the glory of the blest. What he gives us is a cold literary exercise, whose cheer- ful substance even hell-fire does not warm. And do not tell me that to show the shallow- ness of rationalist philosophizing I have had to go back to a shallow wigpated age. The opti- mism of present-day rationalism sounds just as shallow to the fact-loving mind. The actual universe is a thing wide open, but rationalism makes systems, and systems must be closed. 27 PRAGMATISM For men in practical life perfection is something far off and still in process of achievement. This for rationalism is but the illusion of the finite and relative: the absolute ground of things is a perfection eternally complete. I find a fine example of revolt against the airy and shallow optimism of current religious phil- osophy in a publication of that valiant an- archistic writer Morrison I. Swift. Mr. Swift's anarchism goes a little farther than mine does, but I confess that I sympathize a good deal, and some of you, I know, will sympathize heartily with his dissatisfaction with the ideal- istic optimisms now in vogue. He begins his pamphlet on 'Human Submission' with a series of city reporter's items from newspapers (sui- cides, deaths from starvation, and the like) as specimens of our civilized regime. For instance : "After trudging through the snow from one end of the city to the other in the vain hope of securing employment, and with his wife and six children without food and ordered to leave their home in an upper east-side tenement- 28 THE DILEMMA IN PHILOSOPHY house because of non-payment of rent, John Corcoran, a clerk, to-day ended his life by drinking carbolic acid. Corcoran lost his po- sition three weeks ago through illness, and during the period of idleness his scanty savings disappeared. Yesterday he obtained work with a gang of city snow-shovelers, but he was too weak from illness, and was forced to quit after an hour's trial with the shovel. Then the weary task of looking for employment was again resumed. Thoroughly discouraged, Corcoran returned to his home last night to find his wife and children without food and the notice of dispossession on the door. On the following morning he drank the poison. "The records of many more such cases lie before me [Mr. Swift goes on] ; an encyclopedia might easily be filled with their kind. These few I cite as an interpretation of the Universe. *We are aware of the presence of God in his world,' says a writer in a recent English review. [The very presence of ill in the temporal order is the condition of the perfection of the eternal order, writes Professor Royce ( The World and PRAGMATISM the Individual, ii, 385) .] * The Absolute is the richer for every discord and for all the diversity which it embraces/ says F. H. Bradley (Ap- pearance and Reality, 204). He means that these slain men make the universe richer, and that is philosophy. But while Professors Royce and Bradley and a whole host of guileless thor- oughfed thinkers are unveiling Reality and the Absolute and explaining away evil and pain, this is the condition of the only beings known to lis anywhere in the universe with a developed consciousness of what the universe is. What these people experience is Reality. It gives us an absolute phase of the universe. It is the per- sonal experience of those best qualified in our circle of knowledge to have experience, to tell us what is. Now what does thinking about the ex- perience of these persons come to, compared to directly and personally feeling it as they feel it ? The philosophers are dealing in shades, while those who live and feel know truth. And the mind of mankind — not yet the mind of phil- osophers and of the proprietary class — but of the great mass of the silently thinking men and 30 THE DILEMMA IN PHILOSOPHY feeling men, is coming to this view. They are judging the universe as they have hitherto per- mitted the hierophants of religion and learning to judge them. . . . ** This Cleveland workingman, killing his children and himself [another of the cited cases] is one of the elemental stupendous facts of this modern world and of this universe. It cannot be glozed over or minimized away by all the treatises on God, and Love, and Being, help- lessly existing in their monumental vacuity. This is one of the simple irreducible elements of this world's life, after millions of years of opportunity and twenty centuries of Christ. It is in the mental world what atoms or sub-atoms are in the physical, primary, indestructible. And what it blazons to man is the imposture of all philosophy which does not see in such events the consummate factor of all conscious ex- perience. These facts invincibly prove religion a nullity. Man will not give religion two thou- sand centuries or twenty centuries more to try itself and waste human time. Its time is up; its probation is ended ; its own record ends it. 31 PRAGMATISM Mankind has not aeons and eternities to spare for trying out discredited systems."* Such is the reaction of an empiricist mind upon the rationalist bill of fare. It is an abso- lute 'No, I thank you.' * Religion,' says Mr. Swift, 'is like a sleep-walker to whom actual things are blank.' And such, tho possibly less tensely charged with feeling, is the verdict of every seriously inquiring amateur in philo- sophy to-day who turns to the philosophy-pro- fessors for the wherewithal to satisfy the ful- ness of his nature's needs. Empiricist writers give him a materialism, rationalists give him something religious, but to that religion 'actual things are blank.' He becomes thus the judge of us philosophers. Tender or tough, he finds us wanting. None of us may treat his verdicts disdainfully, for after all, his is the typically perfect mind, the mind the sum of whose de- mands is greatest, the mind whose criticisms and dissatisfactions are fatal in the long run. It is at this point that my own solution begins * Morrison I. Swift, Human Submission, Part Second, Philadelphia.^ Liberty Press, 1905, pp. 4-10. 32 THE DILEMMA IN PHILOSOPHY to appear. I offer the oddly-named thing prag- matism as a philosophy that can satisfy both kinds of demand. It can remain religious like the rationalisms, but at the same time, like the empiricisms, it can preserve the richest inti- macy with facts. I hope I may be able to leave many of you with as favorable an opinion of it as I preserve myself. Yet, as I am near the end of my hour, I will not introduce pragmatism bodily now. I will begin with it on the stroke of the clock next time. I prefer at the present moment to return a little on what I have said. If any of you here are professional philo- sophers, and some of you I know to be such, you will doubtless have felt my discourse so far to have been crude in an unpardonable, nay, in an almost incredible degree. Tender-minded and tough-minded, what a barbaric disjunction! And, in general, when philosophy is all com- pacted of delicate intellectualities and subtle- ties and scrupulosities, and when every possible sort of combination and transition obtains within its bounds, what a brutal caricature and reduction of highest things to the lowest possi- 33 PRAGMATISM ble expression is it to represent its field of con- flict as a sort of rough-and-tumble fight between two hostile temperaments! What a childishly external view! And again, how stupid it is to treat the abstractness of rationalist systems as a crime, and to damn them because they offer themselves as sanctuaries and places of escape, rather than as prolongations of the world of facts. Are not all our theories just remedies and places of escape ? And, if philosophy is to be religious, how can she be anything else than a place of escape from the crassness of reality's surface? What better thing can she do than raise us out of our animal senses and show us another and a nobler home for our minds in that great framework of ideal principles sub- tending all reality, which the intellect divines ? How can principles and general views ever be anything but abstract outlines ? Was Cologne cathedral built without an architect's plan on paper ? Is refinement in itself an abomination ? Is concrete rudeness the only thing that's true? Believe me, I feel the full force of the indict- 34 THE DILEMMA IN PHILOSOPHY ment. The picture I have given is indeed mon- strously over-simplified and rude. But like all abstractions, it will prove to have its use. If philosophers can treat the life of the universe abstractly, they must not complain of an ab- stract treatment of the life of philosophy itself. In point of fact the picture I have given is, how- ever coarse and sketchy, literally true. Tem- peraments with their cravings and refusals do determine men in their philosophies, and always will. The details of systems may be reasoned out piecemeal, and when the student is work- ing at a system, he may often forget the for- est for the single tree. But when the labor is accomplished, the mind always performs its big summarizing act, and the system forthwith stands over against one like a living thing, with that strange simple note of individuality which haunts our memory, like the wraith of the man, when a friend or enemy of ours is dead. ^ Not only Walt Whitman could write 'who touches this book touches a man.' The books of all the great philosophers are like so many men. Our sense of an essential personal flavor 35 PRAGMATISM in each one of them, typical but indescribable, is the finest fruit of our own accomplished phil- osophic education. What the system pretends to be is a picture of the great universe of God. What it is, — and oh so flagrantly ! — is the revelation of how intensely odd the personal flavor of some fellow creature is. Once reduced to these terms (and all our philosophies get re- duced to them in minds made critical by learn- ing) our commerce with the systems reverts to the informal, to the instinctive human reaction of satisfaction or dislike. We grow as peremp- tory in our rejection or admission, as when a person presents himself as a candidate for our favor; our verdicts are couched in as simple adjectives of praise or dispraise. We measure the total character of the universe as we feel it, against the flavor of the philosophy proffered us, and one word is enough. *Statt der lebendigen Natur,' we say, *da Gott die Menschen schuf hinein,' — that nebu- lous concoction, that wooden, that straight- laced thing, that crabbed artificiality, that musty schoolroom product, that sick man's 36 THE DILEMMA IN PHILOSOPHY dream! Away with it. Away with all of them! Impossible! Impossible! Our work over the details of his system is indeed what gives us our resultant impression of the philosopher, but it is on the resultant impression itself that we react. Expertness in , philosophy is measured by the definiteness of our summarizing reactions, by the immediate perceptive epithet with which the expert hits such complex objects off. But great expertness is not necessary for the epithet to come. Few people have definitely articulated philosophies of their own. But almost every one has his own peculiar sense of a certain total character in the universe, and of the inadequacy fully to match it of the peculiar systems that he knows. They don't just cover his world. One will be too dapper, another too pedantic, a third too much of a job-lot of opinions, a fourth too morbid, and a fifth too artificial, or what not. At any rate he and we know off-hand that such philosophies are out of plumb and out of key and out of * whack,' and have no business to speak up in the universe's name. Plato, Locke, Spinoza, 37 PRAGMATISM Mill, Caird, Hegel — I prudently avoid names nearer home ! — I am sure that to many of you, my hearers, these names are little more than reminders of as many curious personal ways of falling short. It would be an obvious absurdity if such ways of taking the universe were act- ually true. We philosophers have to reckon with such feelings on your part. In the last resort, I re- peat, it will be by them that all our philosophies shall ultimately be judged. The finally victori- ous way of looking at things will be the most completely impressive way to the normal run of minds. One word more — namely about philosophies necessarily being abstract outlines. There are outlines and outlines, outlines of buildings that are fat, conceived in the cube by their planner, and outlines of buildings invented flat on paper, with the aid of ruler and compass. These remain skinny and emaciated even when set up in stone and mortar, and the outline already suggests that result. An outline in it- self is meagre, truly, but it does not necessarily 38 THE DILEMMA IN PHILOSOPHY suggest a meagre thing. It is the essential mea- greness of what is suggested by the usual ration- alistic philosophies that moves empiricists to their gesture of rejection. The case of Herbert Spencer's system is much to the point here. Rationalists feel his fearful array of insuffi- ciencies. His dry schoolmaster temperament, the hurdy-gurdy monotony of him, his prefer- ence for cheap makeshifts in argument, his lack of education even in mechanical principles, and in general the vagueness of all his fundamental ideas, his whole system wooden, as if knocked together out of cracked hemlock boards— and yet the half of England wants to bury him in Westminster Abbey. Why ? Why does Spencer call out so much reverence in spite of his weakness in rational- istic eyes ? Why should so many educated men who feel that weakness, you and I perhaps, wish to see him in the Abbey notwithstanding ? Simply because we feel his heart to be in the right 'place philosophically. His principles may be all skin and bone, but at any rate his books try to mould themselves upon the particular 39 PRAGMATISM shape of this particular world's carcase. The noise of facts resounds through all his chapters, the citations of fact never cease, he emphasizes facts, turns his face towards their quarter; and that is enough. It means the right kind of thing for the empiricist mind. The pragmatistic philosophy of which I hope to begin talking in my next lecture preserves as cordial a relation with facts, and, unlike Spencer's philosophy, it neither begins nor ends by turning positive religious constructions out of doors — it treats them cordially as well. I hope I may lead you to find it just the medi- ating way of thinking that you require. II WHAT PRAGMATISM MEANS LECTURE II WHAT PRAGMATISM MEANS Some years ago, being with a camping party in the mountains, I returned from a solitary ramble to find every one engaged in a ferocious metaphysical dispute. The corfus of the dis- pute was a squirrel — a live squirrel supposed to be clinging to one side of a tree-trunk; while over against the tree's opposite side a human being was imagined to stand. This human wit- ness tries to get sight of the squirrel by moving rapidly round the tree, but no matter how fast he goes, the squirrel moves as fast in the op- posite direction, and always keeps the tree between himself and the man, so that never a glimpse of him is caught. The resultant meta- physical problem now is this : Does the man go round the squirrel or not ? He goes round the tree, sure enough, and the squirrel is on the tree; but does he go round the squirrel.? In the unlimited leisure of the wilderness, discussion had been worn threadbare. Everyone had taken sides, and was obstinate; and the numbers on 43 PRAGMATISM both sides were even. Each side, when I ap- peared therefore appealed to me to make it a majority. Mindful of the scholastic adage that whenever you meet a contradiction you must make a distinction, I immediately sought and found one, as follows: "Which party is right," I said, "depends on w^hat you practically mean by 'going round' the squirrel. If you mean passing from the north of him to the east, then to the south, then to the west, and then to the north of him again, obviously the man does go round him, for he occupies these successive po- sitions. But if on the contrary you mean being first in front of him, then on the right of him, then behind him, then on his left, and finally in front again, it is quite as obvious that the man fails to go round him, for by the compensating movements the squirrel makes, he keeps his belly turned towards the man all the time, and his back turned away. Make the distinction, and there is no occasion for any farther dispute. You are both right and both wrong according as you conceive the verb 'to go round' in one practical fashion or the other." 44 WHAT PRAGMATISM MEANS Although one or two of the hotter disputants called my speech a shuffling evasion, saying they wanted no quibbling or scholastic hair- splitting, but meant just plain honest English * round,' the majority seemed to think that the distinction had assuaged the dispute. I tell this trivial anecdote because it is a pe- culiarly simple example of what I wish now to speak of as the pragmatic method. The prag- matic method is primarily a method of settling metaphysical disputes that otherwise might be interminable. Is the world one or many ? — fated or free ? — material or spiritual ? — here are notions either of which may or may not hold good of the world ; and disputes over such no- tions are unending. The pragmatic method in such cases is to try to interpret each notion by tracing its respective practical consequences. What difference would it practically make to any one if this notion rather than that notion were true ? If no practical difference whatever can be traced, then the alternatives mean prac- tically the same thing, and all dispute is idle. Whenever a dispute is serious, we ought to be 45 PRAGMATISM able to show some practical difference that must follow from one side or the other's being right. A glance at the history of the idea will show you still better what pragmatism means. The term is derived from the same Greek word TTpdyixa, meaning action, from which our words 'practice' and 'practical' come. It was first introduced into philosophy by Mr. Charles Peirce in 1878. In an article entitled 'How to Make Our Ideas Clear,' in the 'Popular Sci- ence Monthly' for January of that year ^ Mr. Peirce, after pointing out that our beliefs are really rules for action, said that, to develop a thought's meaning, we need only determine what conduct it is fitted to produce : that con- duct is for us its sole significance. And the tangible fact at the root of all our thought- distinctions, however subtle, is that there is no one of them so fine as to consist in anything but a possible difference of practice. To attain pen^ect clearness in our thoughts of an object, then, we need only consider what conceivable * Translated in the Revtte Philosophique for January, 1879 (vol. vii). 46 WHAT PRAGMATISM MEANS effects of a practical kind the object may in- volve — what sensations we are to expect from it, and what reactions we must prepare. Our conception of these effects, whether immediate or remote, is then for us the whole of our con- ception of the object, so far as that conception has positive significance at all. This is the principle of Peirce, the principle of pragmatism. It lay entirely unnoticed by any one for twenty years, until I, in an ad- dress before Professor Howison's philosophical union at the university of California, brought it forward again and made a special application of it to religion. By that date (1898) the times seemed ripe for its reception. The word ' prag- matism' spread, and at present it fairly spots the pages of the philosophic journals. On all hands we find the 'pragmatic movement' spoken of, sometimes with respect, sometimes with contumely, seldom with clear understand- ing. It is evident that the term applies itself conveniently to a number of tendencies that hitherto have lacked a collective name, and that it has *come to stay.' 47 PRAGMATISM To take in the importance of Peirce's princi- ple, one must get accustomed to applying it to concrete cases. I found a few years ago that Ostwald, the illustrious Leipzig chemist, had been making perfectly distinct use of the prin- ciple of pragmatism in his lectures on the philosophy of science, though he had not called it by that name. *'A11 realities influence our practice," he wrote me, "and that influence is their meaning for us. I am accustomed to put questions to my classes in this way : In what respects would the world be different if this alternative or that were true.^ If I can find nothing that would become different, then the alternative has no sense." That is, the rival views mean practically the same thing, and meaning, other than practical, there is for us none. Ostwald in a published lecture gives this example of what he means. Chemists have long wrangled over the inner constitution of certain bodies called ' tautomer- ous.' Their properties seemed equally consist- ent with the notion that an instable hydrogen 48 WHAT PRAGMATISM MEANS atom oscillates inside of them, or that they are instable mixtures of two bodies. Controversy raged, but never was decided. "It would never have begun," says Ostwald, *'if the combatants had asked themselves what particular experi- mental fact could have been made different by one or the other view being correct. For it would then have appeared that no difference of fact could possibly ensue; and the quarrel was as unreal as if, theorizing in primitive times about the raising of dough by yeast, one party should have invoked a 'brownie,' while an- other insisted on an 'elf as the true cause of the phenomenon." ^ It is astonishing to see how many philosoph- ical disputes collapse into insignificance the moment you subject them to this simple test of tracing a concrete consequence. There can be * 'Theorie und Praxis,' Zeiisch. des Oesterreichischen Ingenieur u. Architecten-V ereines, 1905, Nr. 4 u. 6. I find a still more radical prag- matism than Ostwald's in an address by Professor W. S. Franklin: "I think that the sickliest notion of physics, even if a student gets it, is that it is ' the science of masses, molecules, and the ether.' And I think that the healthiest notion, even if a student does not wholly get it, is that physics is the science of the ways of taking hold of bodies and pushing them I" (^Science, January 2, 1903.) 49 PRAGMATISM no difference anywhere that does n't make a difference elsewhere — no difference in abstract truth that does n't express itself in a difference in concrete fact and in conduct consequent upon that fact, imposed on somebody, some- how, somewhere, and somewhen. The whole function of philosophy ought to be to find out what definite difference it will make to you and me, at definite instants of our life, if this world-formula or that world-formula be the true one. There is absolutely nothing new in the prag- matic method. Socrates was an adept at it. Aristotle used it methodically. Locke, Berke- ley, and Hume made momentous contribu- tions to truth by its means. Shadworth Hodg- son keeps insisting that realities are only what they are * known as.* But these forerunners of pragmatism used it in fragments: they w^ere preluders only. Not until in our time has it gen- eralized itself, become conscious of a universal mission, pretended to a conquering destiny. I believe in that destiny, and I hope I may end by inspiring you with my belief. 50 WHAT PRAGMATISM MEANS Pragmatism represents a perfectly familiar attitude in philosophy, the empiricist attitude, but it represents it, as it seems to me, both in a more radical and in a less objectionable form than it has ever yet assumed. A prag- matist turns his back resolutely and once for all upon a lot of inveterate habits dear to pro- fessional philosophers. He turns away from abstraction and insufficiwicy, from verbal solu- tions, from bad a "priori reasons, from fixed principles, closed systems, and pretended abso- lutes and origins. He turns towards concrete- ness and adequacy, towards facts, towards act- ion and towards power. That means the em- piricist temper regnant and the rationalist temper sincerely given up. It means the open air and possibilities of nature, as against dogma, artificiality, and the pretence of finality in truth. At the same time it does not stand for any special results. It is a method only. But the general triumph of that method would mean an enormous change in what I called in my last lecture the 'temperament' of philosophy, 51 PRAGMATISM Teachers of the ultra-rationalistic type would be frozen out, much as the courtier type is frozen out in republics, as the ultramontane type of priest is frozen out in protestant lands. Science and metaphysics would come much nearer together, would in fact work absolutely hand in hand. Metaphysics has usually followed a very primitive kind of quest. You know how men have always hankered after unlawful magic, and you know what a great part in magic words have always played. If you have his name, or the formula of incantation that binds him, you can control the spirit, genie, afrite, or whatever the power may be. Solomon knew the names of all the spirits, and having their names, he held them subject to his will. So the universe has al- ways appeared to the natural mind as a kind of enigma, of which the key must be sought in the shape of some illuminating or power-bringing word or name. That word names the universe's principle, and to possess it is after a fashion to possess the universe itself. 'God,' 'Matter,* 'Reason,' 'the Absolute,' 'Energy,' are so 52 WHAT PRAGMATISM MEANS many solving names. You can rest when you have them. You are at the end of your meta- physical quest. But if you follow the pragmatic method, you cannot look on any such word as closing your quest. You^must bring out of each word its practical cash-value, set it at work within the stream of your experience. It appears less as a solution, then, than as a program for more work, and more particularly as an indication of the ways in w^hich existing realities may be changed. Theories thus become instruments, not an- swers to enigmas, in which we can rest. We don't lie back upon them, w^e move forward, and, on occasion, make nature over again by their aid. Pragmatism unstiffens all our theories, limbers them up and sets each one at work. Being nothing essentially new, it har- monizes with many ancient philosophic tenden- cies. It agrees with nominalism for instance, in always appealing to particulars; with util- itarianism in emphasizing practical aspects; with positivism in its disdain for verbal 53 PRAGMATISM solutions, useless questions and metaphysical abstractions. All these, you see, are anti-intellectualist tend- encies. Against rationalism as a pretension and a method pragmatism is fully armed and mili- tant. But, at the outset, at least, it stands for no particular results. It has no dogmas, and no doctrines save its method. As the young Italian pragmatist Papini has well said, it lies in tho midst of our theories, like a corridor in a hotel. Innumerable chambers open out of it. In one you may find a man writing an atheistic vol- ume; in the next some one on his knees pray- ing for faith and strength ; in a third a chemist investigating a body's properties. In a fourth a system of idealistic metaphysics is being ex- cogitated; in a fifth the impossibility of meta- physics is being shown. But they all own the corridor, and all must pass through it if they want a practicable way of getting into or out of their respective rooms. No particular results then, so far, but only an attitude of orientation, is what the pragmatic method means. The attitude of looking away 54 WHAT PRAGMATISM MEANS from first things, principles, * categories,' sup- posed necessities; and of looJcing towards last things, fruits, consequences, facts. So much for the pragmatic method! You may say that I have been praising it rather than explaining it to you, but I shall presently ex- plain it abundantly enough by showing how it works on some familiar problems. Meanwhile the word pragmatism has come to be used in a still wider sense, as meaning also a certain theory of truth. I mean to give a whole lecture to the statement of that theory, after first pav- ing the w^ay, so I can be very brief now. But brevity is hard to follow, so I ask for your re- doubled attention for a quarter of an hour. If much remains obscure,! hope to make it clearer in the later lectures. One of the most successfully cultivated branches of philosophy in our time is what is called inductive logic, the study of the condi- tions under which our sciences have evolved. Writers on this subject have begun to show a singular unanimity as to what the laws of nature and elements of fact mean, when formu- 55 PRAGMATISM lated by mathematicians, physicists and chem- ists. When the first mathematical, logical, and natural uniformities, the first laws, were dis- covered, men were so carried away by the clear- ness, beauty and simplification that resulted, that they believed themselves to have deci- phered authentically the eternal thoughts of the Almighty. His mind also thundered and reverberated in syllogisms. He also thought in conic sections, squares and roots and ratios, and geometrized like Euclid. He made Kep- ler's laws for the planets to follow; he made velocity increase proportionally to the time in falling bodies; he made the law of the sines for light to obey when refracted; he established the classes, orders, families and genera of plants and animals, and fixed the distances be- tween them. He thought the archetypes of all things, and devised their variations; and when we rediscover any one of these his wondrous institutions, we seize his mind in its very literal intention. But as the sciences have developed farther, the notion has gained ground that most, per- 56 WHAT PRAGMATISM MEANS haps all, of our laws are only approximations. The laws themselves, moreover, have grown so numerous that there is no counting them; and so many rival formulations are proposed in all the branches of science that investigators have become accustomed to the notion that no theory is absolutely a transcript of reality, but that any one of them may from some point of view be useful. Their great use is to summarize old facts and to lead to new ones. They are only a man-made language, a conceptual short- hand, as some one calls them, in which we WTite our reports of nature ; and languages, as is well known, tolerate much choice of expression and many dialects. Thus human arbitrariness has driven divine necessity from scientific logic. If I mention the names of Sigwart, Mach, Ostwald, Pearson, Milhaud, Poincare, Duhem, Ruyssen, those of you who are students will easily identify the tendency I speak of, and will think of addi- tional names. Riding now on the front of this wave of sci- entific logic Messrs. Schiller and Dewey appear 57 PRAGMATISM with their pragmatistic account of what truth everywhere signifies. Everywhere, these teach- ers say, 'truth' in our ideas and beliefs means the same thing that it means in science. It means, they say, nothing but this, that ideas (which themselves are hut 'parts of our experi- ence) become true just in so far as they help us to get into satisfactory relation with other parts of our experience, to summarize them and get about among them by conceptual short-cuts instead of following the interminable succes- sion of particular phenomena. Any idea upon which we can ride, so to speak; any idea that will carry us prosperously from any one part of our experience to any other part, linking things satisfactorily, working securely, simplifying, saving labor; is true for just so much, true in so far forth, true instrumentally . This is the 'instrumental' view of truth taught so suc- cessfully at Chicago, the view that truth in our ideas means their power to *work,' promul- gated so brilliantly at Oxford. Messrs. Dewey, Schiller and their allies, in reaching this general conception of all truth, 58 WHAT PRAGMATISM MEANS have only followed the example of geologists, biologists and philologists. In the establish- ment of these other sciences, the successful stroke was always to take some simple process actually observable in operation — as denuda- tion by weather, say, or variation from parental type, or change of dialect by incorporation of new words and pronunciations — and then to generalize it, making it apply to all times, and produce great results by summating its effects through the ages. The observable process which Schiller and Dewey particularly singled out for generaliza- tion is the familiar one by which any individual settles into new opinions. The process here is always the same. The individual has a stock of old opinions already, but he meets a new expe- rience that puts them to a strain. Somebody contradicts them ; or in a reflective moment he discovers that they contradict each other; or he hears of facts with which they are incompat- ible; or desires arise in him which they cease to satisfy. The result is an inward trouble to which his mind till then had been a stranger, 59 PRAGMATISM and from which he seeks to escape by modify- ing his previous mass of opinions. He saves as much of it as he can, for in this matter of belief we are all extreme conservatives. So he tries to change first this opinion, and then that (for they resist change very variously), until at last some new idea comes up which he can graft upon the ancient stock with a minimum of disturbance of the latter, some idea that mediates between the stock and the new experience and runs them into one another most felicitously and expediently. This new idea is then adopted as the true one. It preserves the older stock of truths with a minimum of modification, stretching them just enough to make them admit the novelty, but conceiving that in ways as familiar as the case leaves possible. An outree explanation, violating all our preconceptions, would never pass for a true account of a novelty. We should scratch round industriously till we found some- thing less excentric. The most violent revolu- tions in an individual's beliefs leave most of his old order standing. Time and space, cause and 60 WHAT PRAGMATISM MEANS effect, nature and history, and one's own bio- graphy remain untouched. New truth is always a go-between, a smoother-over of transitions. It marries old opinion to new fact so as ever to show a minimum of jolt, a maximum of con- tinuity. We hold a theory true just in propor- tion to its success in solving this 'problem of maxima and minima.' But success in solving this problem is eminently a matter of approx- imation. We say this theory solves it on the whole more satisfactorily than that theory; but that means more satisfactorily to ourselves, and individuals will emphasize their points of satis- faction differently. To a certain degree, there- fore, everything here is plastic. The point I now urge you to observe partic- ularly is the part played by the older truths. Failure to take account of it is the source of much of the unjust criticism levelled against pragmatism. Their influence is absolutely con- trolling. Loyalty to them is the first principle — in most cases it is the only principle ; for by far the most usual way of handling phenomena so novel that they would make for a serious re- 61 PRAGMATISM arrangement of our preconceptiou Is to ignore them altogether, or to abuse those who bear witness for them. You doubtless wish examples of this process of truth's growth, and the only trouble is their superabundance. The simplest case of new truth is of course the mere numerical addition of new kinds of facts, or of new single facts of old kinds, to our experience — an addition that involves no alteration in the old beliefs. Day follows day, and its contents are simply added. The new contents themselves are not true, they simply come and are. Truth is what we say about them, and when we say that they have come, truth is satisfied by the plain additive formula. But often the day's contents oblige a re- arrangement. If I should now utter piercing shrieks and act like a maniac on this platform, it would make many of you revise your ideas as to the probable worth of my philosophy. ' Ra- dium ' came the other day as part of the day's content, and seemed for a moment to contra- dict our ideas of the whole order of nature, that 62 WHAT PRAGMATISM MEANS « order having come to be identified with what is called the conservation of energy. The mere sight of radium paying heat away indefinitely out of its own pocket seemed to violate that conservation, ^^hat to think ? If the radia- tions from it were nothing but an escape of unsuspected ' potential ' energy, pre-existent in- side of the atoms, the principle of conservation would be saved. The discovery of 'helium' as the radiation's outcome, opened a way to this belief. So Ramsay's view is generally held to be true, because, although it extends our old ideas of energy, it causes a minimum of altera- tion in their nature. I need not multiply instances. A new opin- ion counts as 'true' just in proportion as it gratifies the individual's desire to assimilate the novel in his experience to his beliefs in stock. It must both lean on old truth and grasp new fact ; and its success (as I said a moment ago) in do- ing this, is a matter for the individual's appre- ciation. When old truth grows, then, by new truth's addition, it is for subjective reasons. We are in the process and obey the reasons. That 63 PRAGMATISM new idea is truest which performs most felic- itously its function of satisfying our double urgency. It makes itself true, gets itself classed as true, by the way it works ; grafting itself then upon the ancient body of truth, which thus grows much as a tree grows by the activity of a new layer of cambium. Now Dewey and Schiller proceed to general- ize this observation and to apply it to the most ancient parts of truth. They also once were plastic. They also were called true for human reasons. They also mediated between still earlier truths and what in those days were novel observations. Purely objective truth, truth in whose establishment the function of giving human satisfaction in marrying previous parts of experience with newer parts played no role whatever, is nowhere to be found. The reasons why we call things true is the reason why they are true, for ' to be true ' means only to perform this marriage-function. The trail of the human serpent is thus over everything. Truth independent; truth that we find merely; truth no longer malleable to hu- 64 WHAT PRAGMATISM MEANS man need; truth incorrigible, in a word; such truth exists indeed superabundantly — or is supposed to exist by rationalistically minded thinkers; but then it means only the dead heart of the living tree, and its being there means only that truth also has its paleontology, and its 'prescription,' and may grow stiff with years of veteran service and petrijfied in men's regard by sheer antiquity. But how plastic even the old- est truths nevertheless really are has been viv- idly shown in our day by the transformation of logical and mathematical ideas, a transforma- tion which seems even to be invading physics. The ancient formulas are reinterpreted as special expressions of much wider principles, principles that our ancestors never got a glimpse of in their present shape and formulation. Mr. Schiller still gives to all this view of truth the name of 'Humanism,' but, for this doctrine too, the name of pragmatism seems fairly to be in the ascendant, so I will treat it under the name of pragmatism in these lectures. Such then would be the scope of pragmatism — first, a method; and second, a genetic theory 65 PRAGMATISM of what is meant by truth. And these two things must be our future topics. What I have said of the theory of truth will, I am sure, have appeared obscure and unsatis- factory to most of you by reason of its brevity. I shall make amends for that hereafter. In a lecture on * common sense ' I shall try to show what I mean by truths grown petrified by antiquity. In another lecture I shall expatiate on the idea that our thoughts become true in proportion as they successfully exert their go- between function. In a third I shall show how hard it is to discriminate subjective from ob- jective factors in Truth's development. You may not follow me wholly in these lectures; and if you do, you may not wholly agree with me. But you will, I know, regard me at least as serious, and treat my effort with respectful consideration. You will probably be surprised to learn, then, that Messrs. Schiller's and Dewey's theories have suffered a hailstorm of contempt and ridi- cule. All rationalism has risen against them. In influential quarters Mr. Schiller, in partic- 66 WHAT PRAGMATISM MEANS ular, 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 sidelight upon that rationalistic temper to which I have opposed the temper of prag- matism. Pragmatism is uncomfortable away from facts. Rationalism is comfortable only in the presence of abstractions. This pragmatist talk about truths in the plural, about their utility and satisfactoriness, about the success with which they 'work,' etc., suggests to the typical intellectualist mind a sort of coarse lame second-rate makeshift article of truth. Such truths are not real truth. Such tests are merely subjective. As against this, objective truth must be something non - utilitarian, haughty, refined, remote, august, exalted. It must be an absolute correspondence of our thoughts with an equally absolute reality. It must be what we ought to think uncondition- ally. The conditioned ways in which we do think are so much irrelevance and matter for psychology. Down with psychology, up with logic, in all this question! 67 PRAGMATISM See the exquisite contrast of the types of mind! The pragmatist clings to facts and concreteness, observes truth at its work in par- ticular cases, and generalizes. Truth, for him, becomes a class-name for all sorts of definite working-values in experience. For the ration- alist it remains a pure abstraction, to the bare name of which we must defer. AYhen the prag- matist undertakes to show in detail just why we must defer, the rationalist is unable to recognize the concretes from which his own abstraction is taken. He accuses us of denying truth; whereas we have only sought to trace exactly why people follow it and always ought to follow it. Your typical ultra-abstractionist fairly shud- ders at concreteness: other things equal, he positively prefers the pale and spectral. If the two universes were offered, he would always choose the skinny outline rather than the rich thicket of reality. It is so much purer, clearer, nobler. I hope that as these lectures go on, the con- creteness and closeness to facts of the pragma- tism which they advocate may be what approves 68 WHAT PRAGMATISM MEANS itself to you as its most satisfactory peculiarity. It only follows here the example of the sister- sciences, interpreting the unobserved by the observed. It brings old and new harmoniously together. It converts the absolutely empty notion of a static relation of 'correspondence' (what that may mean we must ask later) be- tween 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. But enough of this at present ? The justifica- tion of what I say must be postponed. I wish now to add a word in further explanation of the claim I made at our last meeting, that pragma- tism may be a happy harmonizer of empiricist ways of thinking with the more religious de- mands of human beings. Men who are strongly of the fact-loving tem- perament, you may remember me to have said, are liable to be kept at a distance by the small 69 PRAGMATISM sympathy with facts which that philosophy from the present-day fashion of idealism offers them. It is far too intellectualistic. Old fash- ioned theism was bad enough, with its notion of God as an exalted monarch, made up of a lot of unintelligible or preposterous 'attributes'; but, so long as it held strongly by the argument from design, it kept some touch with concrete reali- ties. Since, however, darwinism has once for all displaced design from the minds of the ' scien- tific,' theism has lost that foothold; and some kind of an immanent or pantheistic deity work- ing in things rather than above them is, if any, the kind recommended to our contemporary imagination. Aspirants to a philosophic religion turn, as a rule, more hopefully nowadays to- wards idealistic pantheism than towards the older dualistic theism, in spite of the fact that the latter still counts able defenders. But, as I said in my first lecture, the brand of pantheism offered is hard for them to assimilate if they are lovers of facts, or empirically minded. It is the absolutistic brand, spurning the dust and reared upon pure logic. It keeps no con- 70 WHAT PRAGMATISM MEANS nexion whatever with concreteness. Affirming the Absolute Mind, which is its substitute for God, to be the rational presupposition of all particulars of fact, whatever they may be, it re- mains supremely indifferent to what the par- ticular facts in our world actually are. Be they what they may, the Absolute will father them. Like the sick lion in Esop's fable, all footprints lead i n to his de n, but nulla vestigia retrorsum. You cann ot redes cend i nto t he world of par- ticulars ^Jhe Absolute's. -aiii.jor_deduce any necessary consequences of detail important for your life froin your idea of his nature. He gives you indeed the assurance that all is well with Him, and for his eternal way of thinking; but thereupon he leaves^youjo^be finitely saved by your own temporal devices. Far be it from me to deny the majesty of this conception, or its capacity to yield religious comfort to a most respectable class of minds. But from the human point of view, no one can pretend that it does n't suffer from the faults of remoteness and abstractness. It is eminently a product of what I have ventured to call the 71 -r. PRAGMATISM rationalistic temper. It disdains empiricism's needs. It substitutes a pallid outline for the real world's richness. It is dapper, it is noble in the bad sense, in the sense in which to be noble is to be inapt for humble service. In this real world of sweat and dirt, it seems to me that when a view of things is 'noble,' that ought to count as a presumption against its truth, and as a phil- osophic disqualification. The prince of dark- ness may be a gentleman, as we are told he is, but whatever the God oL earth and heaven is, he can surelj be no gent lem an. His menial services are needed in the dust of our human trials, even more than his dignity is needed in the empyrean. Now pragmatism, devoted though she be to facts, has no such materialistic bias as ordinary empiricism labors under. Moreover, she has no objection whatever to the realizing of abstract- ions, so long as you get about among particu- lars with their aid and they actually carry you somewhere. Interested in no conclusions but those which our minds and our experiences work out together, she has no a priori preju- 72 WHAT PRAGMATISM MEANS dices against theology. If theological ideas 'prove to have a value for concrete life, they will be true, for pragmatism, in the sense of being good for so much. For how much more they are true, will depend entirely on their relations to the other truths that also have to be acknowledged. What I said just now about the Absolute, of transcendental idealism, is a case in point. First, I called it majestic and said it yielded religious comfort to a class of minds, and then I accused it of remoteness and sterility. But so far as it affords such comfort, it surely is not sterile; it has that amount of value; it per- forms a concrete function. As a good pragma- tist, I myself ought to call the Absolute true * in so far forth,' then; and I unhesitatingly now do so. But what does true in so far forth mean in this case ? To answer, we need only apply the prag- matic method. What do believers in the Abso- lute mean by saying that their belief affords them comfort.'^ They mean that since, in the Absolute finite evil is 'overruled' already, we may, therefore, whenever we wish, treat the 73 PRAGMATISM temporal as if it were potentially the eternal, be sure that we can trust its outcome, and, without sin, dismiss our fear and drop the worry of our finite responsibility. In short, they mean that we have a right ever and anon to take a moral holiday, to let the world wag in its own way, feeling that its issues are in better hands than ours and are none of our business. The universe is a system of which the indi- vidual members may relax their anxieties occa- sionally, in which the don't-care mood is also right for men, and moral holidays in order, — that, if I mistake not, is part, at least, of what the Absolute is *known-as,' that is the great difference in our particular experiences which his being true makes, for us, that is his cash- value when he is pragmatically interpreted. Farther than that the ordinary lay-reader in philosophy who thinks favorably of absolute idealism does not venture to sharpen his con- ceptions. He can use the Absolute for so much, and so much is very precious. He is pained at hearing you speak incredulously of the Abso- lute, therefore, and disregards your criticisms 74 WHAT PRAGMATISM MEANS because they deal with aspects of the concept- ion that he fails to follow. If the Absolute means this, and means no more than this, who can possibly deny the truth of it ? To deny it would be to insist that men should never relax, and that holidays are never in order. I am well aware how odd it must seem to some of you to hear me say that an idea is *true' so long as to believe it is profitable to our lives. That it is good, for as much as it profits, you will gladly admit. If what we do by its aid is good, you will allow the idea itself to be good in so far forth, for we are the better for possess- ing it. But is it not a strange misuse of the word 'truth,' you will say, to call ideas also *true' for this reason.'* To answer this difficulty fully is impossible at this stage of my account. You touch here upon the very central point of Messrs. Schiller's, Dewey's and my own doctrine of truth, which I can not discuss with detail until my sixth lecture. Let me now say only this, that truth is one species of good, and not, as is usually sup- 75 PRAGMATISM posed, a category distinct from good, and co-or- dinate with it. The true is the name of whatever proves itself to be good in the way of belief, and good, too, for definite, assignable reasons. Surely you must admit this, that if there were no good for life in true ideas, or if the know- ledge of them were positively disadvantageous and false ideas the only useful ones, then the current notion that truth is divine and precious, and its pursuit a duty, could never have grown up or become a dogma. In a world like that, our duty would be to shun truth, rather. But in this world, just as certain foods are not only agreeable to our taste, but good for our teeth, our stomach, and our tissues ; so certain ideas are not only agreeable to think about, or agree- able as supporting other ideas that we are fond of, but they are also helpful in life's practical struggles. If there be any life that it is really better we should lead, and if there be any idea which, if believed in, would help us to lead that life, then it would be reaWy better for us to believe in that idea, unless, indeed, belief in it inci- dentally clashed with other greater vital benefits, 76 WHAT PRAGMATISM MEANS *What would be better for us to believe'! This sounds very like a definition of truth. It comes very near to saying 'what we ought to believe ' : and in that definition none of you would find any oddity. Ought we ever not to believe what it is better for us to believe ? And can we then keep the notion of what is better for us, and what is true for us, permanently apart ? Pragmatism says no, and I fully agree with her. Probably you also agree, so far as the ab- stract statement goes, but with a suspicion that if we practically did believe everything that made for good in our own personal lives, we should be found indulging all kinds of fancies about this world's affairs, and all kinds of senti- mental superstitions about a world hereafter. Your suspicion here is undoubtedly well founded, and it is evident that something hap- pens when you pass from the abstract to the concrete that complicates the situation. I said just now that what is better for us to believe is true unless the belief incidentally clashes with some other vital benefit. Now in 77 "^ PRAGMATISM real life what vital benefits is any particular belief of ours most liable to clash with ? What indeed except the vital benefits yielded by other beliefs when these prove incompatible with the first ones ? In other words, the greatest enemy of any one of our truths may be the rest of our truths. Truths have once for all this desperate instinct of self-preservation and of desire to extinguish whatever contradicts them. My belief in the Absolute, based on the good it does me, must run the gauntlet of all my other be- liefs. Grant that it may be true in giving me a moral holiday. Nevertheless, as I conceive it, — and let me speak now confidentially, as it were, and merely in my own private person, — it clashes with other truths of mine whose benefits I hate to give up on its account. It happens to be associated with a kind of logic of which I am the enemy, I find that it entangles me in metaphysical paradoxes that are inacceptable, etc., etc. But as I have enough trouble in life already without adding the trouble of carrying these intellectual in- consistencies, I personally just give up the 78 WHAT PRAGMATISM MEANS Absolute. I just takemjuioTal holidays; or else as a professional philosopher, I try to justify them by some other principle. If I could restrict my notion of the Absolute to its bare holiday-giving value, it would n't clash with my other truths. But we can not easily thus restrict our hypotheses. They carry supernumerary features, and these it is that clash so. My disbelief in the Absolute means then disbelief in those other supernumerary features, for I fully believe in the legitimacy of taking moral holidays. You see by this what I meant when I called pragmatism a mediator and reconciler and said, borrowing the word from Papini, that she 'unstiffens' our theories. She has in fact no prejudices whatever, no obstructive dogmas, no rigid canons of what shall count as proof. She is completely genial. She will entertain any hypothesis, she will consider any evidence. It follows that in the religious field she is at a great advantage both over positivistic empir- icism, with its anti-theological bias, and over religious rationalism, with its exclusive interest 79 PRAGMATISM in the remote, the noble, the simple, and the abstract in the way of conception. In short, she widens the field of search for God. Rationalism sticks to logic and the empy- rean. Empiricism sticks to the external senses. Pragmatism is willing to take anything, to fol- low either logic or the senses and to count the humblest and most personal experiences. She will count mystical experiences if they have practical consequences. She will take a God who lives in the very dirt of private fact — if that should seem a likely place to find him. Her only test of probable truth is what works best in the way of leading us, what fits every part of life best and combines with the collect- ivity of experience's demands, nothing being omitted. If theological ideas should do this, if the notion of God, in particular, should prove to do it, how could pragmatism possibly deny God's existence.^ She could see no meaning in treating as * not true ' a notion that was prag- matically so successful. What other kind of truth could there be, for her, than all this agree- ment with concrete reality.^ 80 WHAT PRAGMATISM MEANS In my last lecture I shall return again to the relations of pragmatism with religion. But you see already how democratic she is. Her man- ners are as various and flexible, her resources as rich and endless, and her conclusions as friendly as those of mother nature. Ill SOME METAPHYSICAL PROBLEMS PRAGMATICALLY CONSIDERED LECTURE III SOME METAPHYSICAL PROBLEMS PRAGMATICALLY CONSIDERED I AM now to make the pragmatic method more familiar by giving you some illustrations of its application to particular problems. I will begin with what is driest, and the first thing I shall take will be the problem of Substance. Every one uses the old distinction between substance and attribute, enshrined as it is in the very structure of human language, in the difference between grammatical subject and predicate. Here is a bit of blackboard crayon. Its modes, attributes, properties, accidents, or affections, — use which term you will, — are whiteness, friability, cylindrical shape, insolubility in water, etc., etc. But the bearer of these attributes is so much chalk, which thereupon is called the substance in which they inhere. So the attri- butes of this desk inhere in the substance ' wood,' those of my coat in the substance 'wool,' and so forth. Chalk, wood and wool, show again, in spite of their differences, common properties, 85 PRAGMATISM and in so far forth they are themselves counted as modes of a still more primal sub- stance, matter, the attributes of which are space-occupancy and impenetrability. Simi- larly our thoughts and feelings are affections or properties of our several souls, which are substances, but again not wholly in their own right, for they are modes of the still deeper substance 'spirit/ Now it was very early seen that all we know of the chalk is the whiteness, friability, etc., all we know of the wood is the combustibility and fibrous structure. A group of attributes is what each substance here is known-as, they form its sole cash-value for our actual experi- ence. The substance is in every case revealed through them; if we were cut off from them we should never suspect its existence; and if God should keep sending them to us in an unchanged order, miraculously annihilating at a certain moment the substance that sup- ported them, we never could detect the mo- ment, for our experiences themselves would be unaltered. Nominalists accordingly adopt the 86 SOME METAPHYSICAL PROBLEMS opinion that substance is a spurious idea due to our inveterate human trick of turning names into things. Phenomena come in groups — the chalk-group, the wood-group, etc., — and each group gets its name. The name we then treat as in a way supporting the group of phenomena. The low thermometer to-day, for instance, is supposed to come from something called the 'climate.' Climate is really only the name for a certain group of days, but it is treated as if it lay behind the day, and in general we place the name, as if it were a being, behind the facts it is the name of. But the phenomenal properties of things, nominalists say, surely do not really inhere in names, and if not in names then they do not inhere in anything. They ac^here, or cohere, vsither, with each other, and the notion of a substance inaccessible to us, which we think accounts for such cohesion by supporting it, as cement might support pieces of mosaic, must be abandoned. The fact of the bare cohesion itself is all that the notion of the substance signifies. Behind that fact is nothing. Scholasticism has taken the notion of sub- 87 PRAGMATISM stance from common sense and made it very technical and articulate. Few things would seem to have fewer pragmatic consequences for us than substances, cut off as we are from every contact with them. Yet in one case scholasticism has proved the importance of the substance-idea by treating it pragmatically. I refer to certain disputes about the mystery of the Eucharist. Substance here would appear to have momentous pragmatic value. Since the accidents of the wafer don't change in the Lord's supper, and yet it has become the very body of Christ, it must be that the change is in the substance solely. The bread-substance must have been withdrawn, and the divine sub- stance substituted miraculously without alter- ing the immediate sensible properties. But tho these don't alter, a tremendous difference has been made, no less a one than this, that we who take the sacrament, now feed upon the very substance of divinity. The substance-notion breaks into life, then, with tremendous effect, if once you allow that substances can separate from their accidents, and exchange these latter. 88 SOME METAPHYSICAL PROBLEMS This is the only pragmatic application of the substance-idea with which I am acquainted; and it is obvious that it will only be treated seri- ously by those who already believe in the * real presence' on independent grounds. Material substance was criticised by Berkeley with such telling effect that his name has re- verberated through all subsequent philosophy. Berkeley's treatment of the notion of matter is so well known as to need hardly more than a mention. So far from denying the external world which we know, Berkeley corroborated it. It was the scholastic notion of a material substance unapproachable by us, behind the external world, deeper and more real than it, and needed to support it, which Berkeley main- tained to be the most effective of all reducers of the external world to unreality. Abolish that substance, he said, believe that God, whom you can understand and approach, sends you the sensible world directly, and you confirm the latter and back it up by his divine author- ity. Berkeley's criticism of 'matter' was con- sequently absolutely pragmatistic. Matter is 89 PRAGMATISM known as our sensations of colour, figure, hardness and the like. They are the cash-value of the term. The difference matter makes to us by truly being is that we then get such sensations; by not being, is that we lack them. These sensations then are its sole meaning. Berkeley does n't deny matter, then; he simply tells us what it consists of. It is a true name for just so much in the way of sensations. Locke, and later Hume, applied a similar pragmatic criticism to the notion of spiritual substance. I will only mention Locke's treat- ment of our 'personal identity.' He immedi- ately reduces this notion to its pragmatic value in terms of experience. It means, he says, so much 'consciousness,' namely the fact that at one moment of life we remember other mo- ments, and feel them all as parts of one and the same personal history. Rationalism had ex- plained this practical continuity in our life by the unity of our soul-substance. But Locke says : suppose that God should take away the consciousness, should we be any the better for having still the soul-principle? Suppose 90 SOME METAPHYSICAL PROBLEMS he annexed the same consciousness to different souls, should we, as we realize ourselves, be any the worse for that fact? In Locke's day the soul was chiefly a thing to be rewarded or pun- ished. See how Locke, discussing it from this point of view, keeps the question pragmatic : *' Suppose," he says, "one to think himself to be the same soul that once was Nestor or Thersites. Can he think their actions his own any more than the actions of any other man that ever existed? But let him once find himself conscious of any of the actions of Nestor, he then finds himself the same person with Nestor ... In this personal identity is founded all the right and justice of reward and punish- ment. It may be reasonable to think, no one shall be made to answer for what he knows nothing of, but shall receive his doom, his con- sciousness accusing or excusing. Supposing a man punished now for what he had done in another life, whereof he could be made to have no consciousness at all, what difference is there between that punishment and being created miserable?" 91 PRAGMATISM Our personal identity, then, consists, for Locke, solely in pragmatically definable par- ticulars. Whether, apart from these verifiable facts, it also inheres in a spiritual principle, is a merely curious speculation. Locke, compro- miser that he was, passively tolerated the belief in a substantial soul behind our con- sciousness. But his successor Hume, and most empirical psychologists after him, have denied the soul, save as the name for verifiable co- hesions in our inner life. They redescend into the stream of experience with it, and cash it into so much small-change value in the way of 'ideas' and their peculiar connexions with each other. As I said of Berkeley's matter, the soul is good or ' true ' for just so muchy but no more. The mention of material substance naturally suggests the doctrine of 'materialism,' but philosophical materialism is not necessarily knit up with belief in ' matter,' as a metaphys- ical principle. One may deny matter in that sense, as strongly as Berkeley did, one may be a phenomenalist like Huxley, and yet one may 9S SOME METAPHYSICAL PROBLEMS still be a materialist in the wider sense, of ex- plaining higher phenomena by lower ones, and leaving the destinies of the world at the mercy of its blinder parts and forces. It is in this wider sense of the word that materialism is op- posed to spiritualism or theism. The laws of physical nature are what run things, material- ism says. The highest productions of human genius might be ciphered by one who had com- plete acquaintance with the facts, out of their physiological conditions, regardless whether nature be there only for our minds, as idealists contend, or not. Our minds in any case would have to record the kind of nature it is, and write it down as operating through blind laws of physics. This is the complexion of present day materialism, which may better be called natur- alism. Over against it stands 'theism,' or what in a wide sense may be termed 'spiritualism.' Spiritualism says that mind not only wit- nesses and records things, but also runs and operates them: the world being thus guided, not by its lower, but by its higher element. Treated as it often is, this question becomes 93 PRAGMATISM little more than a conflict between aesthetic pre- ferences. Matter is gross, coarse, crass, muddy; spirit is pure, elevated, noble; and since it is more consonant with the dignity of the uni- verse to give the primacy in it to what appears superior, spirit must be aiBBrmed as the ruling principle. To treat abstract principles as final- ities, before which our intellects may come to rest in a state of admiring contemplation, is the great rationalist failing. Spiritualism, as often held, may be simply a state of admiration for one kind, and of dislike for another kind, of abstraction. I remember a worthy spiritualist professor who always referred to materialism as the* mud-philosophy,' and deemed it thereby refuted. To such spiritualism as this there is an easy answer, and Mr. Spencer makes it effectively. In some well-written pages at the end of the first volume of his Psychology he shows us that a * matter' so infinitely subtile, and perform- ing motions as inconceivably quick and fine as those which modern science postulates in her explanations, has no trace of grossness left. 94 SOME METAPHYSICAL PROBLEMS He shows that the conception of spirit, as we mortals hitherto have framed it, is itself too gross to cover the exquisite tenuity of nature's facts. Both terms, he says, are but symbols, pointing to that one unknowable reality in which their oppositions cease. To an abstract objection an abstract rejoin- der suflSces ; and so far as one's opposition to materialism springs from one's disdain of mat- ter as something ' crass,' Mr. Spencer cuts the ground from under one. Matter is indeed infinitely and incredibly refined. To any one who has ever looked on the face of a dead child or parent the mere fact that matter could have taken for a time that precious form, ought to make matter sacred ever after. It makes no difference what the principle of life may be, material or immaterial, matter at any rate co- operates, lends itself to all life's purposes. That beloved incarnation was among matter's possibilities. But now, instead of resting in principles, after this stagnant intellectualist fashion, let us apply the pragmatic method to the question. 95 PRAGMATISM What do we mean by matter ? What practical difference can it make now that the world should be run by matter or by spirit ? I think we find that the problem takes with this a rather differ- ent character. And first of all I call your attention to a curi- ous fact. It makes not a single jot of difference so far as the 'past of the world goes, whether we deem it to have been the work of matter or whether we think a divine spirit was its author. Imagine, in fact, the entire contents of the world to be once for all irrevocably given. Imagine it to end this very moment, and to have no future; and then let a theist and a materialist apply their rival explanations to its history. The theist shows how a God made it ; the materialist shows, and we will suppose with equal success, how it resulted from blind physical forces. Then let the pragmatist be asked to choose between their theories. How can he apply his test if a world is already com- pleted ? Concepts for him are things to come back into experience with, things to make us look for differences. But by hypothesis there 96 SOME METAPHYSICAL PROBLEMS is to be no more experience and no possible dif- ferences can now be looked for. Both theories have shown all their consequences and, by the hypothesis we are adopting, these are iden- tical. The pragmatist must consequently say that the two theories, in spite of their different- sounding names, mean exactly the same thing, and that the dispute is purely verbal. [I am supposing, of course, that the theories have been equally successful in their explanations of what is.] For just consider the case sincerely, and say what would be the worth of a God if he were there, w^th his work accomplished and his world run down. He w^ould be worth no more than just that w^orld was worth. To that amount of result, with its mixed merits and defects, his creative power could attain but go no farther. And since there is to be no future; since the whole value and meaning of the w^orld has been already paid in and actualized in the feelings that went with it in the passing, and now go with it in the ending; since it draws no sup- plemental significance (such as our real world 97 PRAGMATISM draws) from its function of preparing some- thing yet to come; why then, by it we take God's measure, as it were. He is the Being who could once for all do that; and for that much we are thankful to him, but for nothing more. But now, on the contrary hypothesis, namely, that the bits of matter following their laws could make that world and do no less, should we not be just as thankful to them ? Wherein should we suffer loss, then, if we dropped God as an hypothesis and made the matter alone respon- sible.^ Where would any special deadness, or crassness, come in ? And how, experience being what is once for all, would God's presence in it make it any more living or richer.^ Candidly, it is impossible to give any answer to this question. The actually experienced world is supposed to be the same in its details on either hypothesis, 'the same, for our praise or blame,' as Browning says. It stands there indef easibly : a gift which can't be taken back. Calling mat- ter the cause of it retracts no single one of the items that have made it up, nor does calling God the cause augment them. They are the 98 SOME METAPHYSICAL PROBLEMS God or the atoms, respectively, of just that and no other world. The God, if there, has been doing just what atoms could do — appearing in the character of atoms, so to speak — and earning such gratitude as is due to atoms, and no more. If his presence lends no different turn or issue to the performance, it surely can lend it no increase of dignity. Nor would in- dignity come to it were he absent, and did the atoms remain the only actors on the stage. When a play is once over, and the curtain down, you really make it no better by claiming an il- lustrious genius for its author, just as you make it no worse by calling him a common hack. Thus if no future detail of experience or con- duct is to be deduced from our hypothesis, the debate between materialism and theism be- comes quite idle and insignificant. Matter and God in that event mean exactly the same thing — the power, namely, neither more nor less, that could make just this completed world — and the wise man is he who in such a case would turn his back on such a supererogatory discus- sion. Accordingly, most men instinctively, and 99 PRAGMATISM positivists and scientists deliberately, do turn their backs on philosophical disputes from which nothing in the line of definite future con- sequences can be seen to follow. The verbal and empty character of philosophy is surely a reproach with which we are but too familiar. If pragmatism be true, it is a perfectly sound reproach unless the theories under fire can be -shown to have alternative practical outcomes, however delicate and distant these may be. The common man and the scientist say they discover no such outcomes, and if the meta- physician can discern none either, the others certainly are in the right of it, as against him. His science is then but pompous trifling; and the endowment of a professorship for such a being would be silly. Accordingly, in every genuine metaphysical debate some practical issue, however conjec- tural and remote, is involved. To realize this, revert with me to our question, and place your- selves this time in the world we live in, in the world that has a future, that is yet uncompleted whilst we speak. In this unfinished world the 100 SOME METAPHYSICAL PROBLEMS alternative of 'materialism or theism?' is in- tensely practical ; and it is worth while for us to spend some minutes of our hour in seeing that it is so. How, indeed, does the program differ for us, according as we consider that the facts of ex- perience up to date are purposeless configura- tions of blind atoms moving according to eter- nal laws, or that on the other hand they are due to the providence of God? As far as the past facts go, indeed, there is no difference. Those facts are in, are bagged, are captured; and the good that's in them is gained, be the atoms or be the God their cause. There are accordingly many materialists about us to-day who, ignoring altogether the future and prac- tical aspects of the question, seek to eliminate the odium attaching to the word materialism, and even to eliminate the word itself, by show- ing that, if matter could give birth to all these gains, why then matter, functionally considered, is just as divine an entity as God, in fact co- alesces with God, is what you mean by God. Cease, these persons advise us, to use either of 101 PRAGMATISM these terms, with their outgrown opposition. Use a term free of the clerical connotations, oti the one hand; of the suggestion of grossness, coarseness, ignobility, on the other. Talk of the primal mystery, of the unknowable energy, of the one and only power, instead of saying either God or matter. This is the course to which Mr. Spencer urges us; and if philosophy were purely retrospective, he would thereby pro- claim himself an excellent pragmatist. But philosophy is prospective also, and, after finding what the world has been and done, and yielded, still asks the further question 'what does the world promise ? ' Give us a matter that promises success^ that is bound by its laws to lead our world ever nearer to perfection, and any rational man will worship that matter as readily as Mr. Spencer worships his own so- called unknowable power. It not only has made for righteousness up to date, but it will make for righteousness forever; and that is all we need. Doing practically all that a God can do, it is equivalent to God, its function is a God's function, and in a world in which a God 102 SOME METAPHYSICAL PROBLEMS would be superfluous; from such a world a God could never lawfully be missed. * Cosmic emotion' would here be the right name for religion. But is the matter by which Mr. Spencer's process of cosmic evolution is carried on any such principle of never-ending perfection as this.? Indeed it is not, for the future end of every cosmically evolved thing or system of things is foretold by science to be death trag- edy; and Mr. Spencer, in confining himself to the aesthetic and ignoring the practical side of the controversy, has really contributed nothing serious to its relief. But apply now our prin- ciple of practical results, and see what a vital significance the question of materialism or theism immediately acquires. Theism and materialism, so indifferent when taken retrospectively, point, when we take them prospectively, to wholly different out- looks of experience. For, according to the theory of mechanical evolution, the laws of re- distribution of matter and motion, though they are certainly to thank for all the good hours 103 PRAGMATISM which our organisms have ever yielded us and for all the ideals which our minds now frame, are yet fatally certain to undo their work again, and to redissolve everything that they have once evolved. You all know the picture of the last state of the universe, which evolutionary science foresees. I can not state it better than in Mr. Balfour's words: "The energies of our system will decay, the glory of the sun will be dimmed, and the earth, tideless and inert, will no longer tolerate the race which has for a mo- ment disturbed its solitude. Man will go down into the pit, and all his thoughts will perish. The uneasy consciousness which in this ob- scure corner has for a brief space broken the contented silence of the universe, will be at rest. Matter will know itself no longer. 'Imperish- able monuments' and 'immortal deeds,' death itself, and love stronger than death, will be as if they had not been. Nor will anything that is, be better or worse for all that the labor, genius, devotion, and suffering of man have striven through countless ages to effect." * ' The Foundations of Belie], p. 30. 104 SOME METAPHYSICAL PROBLEMS That is the sting of it, that in the vast drift- ings of the cosmic weather, though many a jewelled shore appears, and many an enchanted cloud-bank floats away, long lingering ere it be dissolved — even as our world now lingers, for our joy — yet when these transient products are gone, nothing, absolutely nothing remains, to represent those particular qualities, those elements of preciousness which they may have enshrined. Dead and gone are they, gone utterly from the very sphere and room of being. Without an echo; without a memory; without an influence on aught that may come after, to make it care for similar ideals. This utter final wreck and tragedy is of the essence of scien- tific materialism as at present understood. The lower and not the higher forces are the eternal forces, or the last surviving forces within the only cycle of evolution which we can definitely see. Mr. Spencer believes this as much as any one; so why should he argue with us as if we were making silly aesthetic objections to the 'grossness' of 'matter and motion,' the prin- ciples of his philosophy, when what really 105 PRAGMATISM dismays us is the disconsolateness of its ulte- rior practical results? No, the true objection to materialism is not positive but negative. It would be farcical at this day to make complaint of it for what it is, for 'grossness.' Crossness is what grossness does — we now know that. We make com- plaint of it, on the contrary, for what it is not — not a permanent warrant for our more ideal interests, not a fulfiUer of our remotest hopes. The notion of God, on the other hand, how- ever inferior it may be in clearness to those mathematical notions so current in mechanical philosophy, has at least this practical superi- ority over them, that it guarantees an ideal order that shall be permanently preserved. A world with a God in it to say the last word, may indeed burn up or freeze, but we then think of him as still mindful of the old ideals and sure to bring them elsewhere to fruition; so that, where he is, tragedy is only provisional and partial, and shipwreck and dissolution not the absolutely final things. This need of an eternal moral order is one of the deepest needs of our 106 SOME METAPHYSICAL PROBLEMS breast. And those poets, like Dante and Words- worth, who live on the conviction of such an order, owe to that fact the extraordinary tonic and consoling power of their verse. Here then, in these different emotional and practical ap- peals, in these adjustments of our concrete attitudes of hope and expectation, and all the delicate consequences which their differences entail, lie the real meanings of materialism and spiritualism — not in hair-splitting ab- stractions about matter's inner essence, or about the metaphysical attributes of God. Materialism means simply the denial that the moral order is eternal, and the cutting off of ultimate hopes; spiritualism means theaflSrm- ation of an eternal moral order and the letting loose of hope. Surely here is an issue genuine enough, for any one who feels it; and, as long as men are men, it will yield matter for a serious philosophic debate. But possibly some of you may still rally to their defence. Even whilst admitting that spiritualism and materialism make different prophecies of the world's future, you may your- 107 PRAGMATISM selves pooh-pooh the difference as something so infinitely remote as to mean nothing for a sane mind. The essence of a sane mind, you may say, is to take shorter views, and to feel no concern about such chimseras as the latter end of the world. Well, I can only say that if you say this, you do injustice to human nature. Religious melancholy is not disposed of by a simple flourish of the word insanity. The ab- solute things, the last things, the overlapping things, are the truly philosophic concerns; all superior minds feel seriously about them, and the mind with the shortest views is simply the mind of the more shallow man. The issues of fact at stake in the debate are of course vaguely enough conceived by us at present. But spiritualistic faith in all its forms deals with a world of promise, while material- ism's sun sets in a sea of disappointment. Re- member what I said of the Absolute : it grants us moral holidays. Any religious view does this. It not only incites our more strenuous moments, but it also takes our joyous, careless, trustful moments, and it justifies them. It 108 SOME METAPHYSICAL PROBLEMS paints the grounds of justification vaguely enough, to be sure. The exact features of the saving future facts that our belief in God insures, will have to be ciphered out by the interminable methods of science : we can study our God only by studying his Creation. But we can enjoy our God, if we have one, in ad- vance of all that labor. I myself believe that the evidence for God lies primarily in inner personal experiences. When they have once given you your God, his name means at least the benefit of the holiday. You remember what I said yesterday about the way in which truths clash and try to 'down' each other. The truth of * God ' has to run the gauntlet of all our other truths. It is on trial by them and they on trial by it. Our final opinion about God can be settled only after all the truths have straightened themselves out together. Let us hope that they shall find a modus vivendi! Let me pass to a very cognate philosophic problem, the questionof design innature. God's existence has from time immemorial been held to be proved by certain natural facts. Many 109 PRAGMATISM facts appear as if expressly designed in view of one another. Thus the woodpecker's bill, tongue, feet, tail, etc., fit him wondrously for a world of trees, with grubs hid in their bark to feed upon. The parts of our eye fit the laws of light to perfection, leading its rays to a sharp picture on our retina. Such mutual fitting of things diverse in origin argued design, it was held; and the designer was always treated as a man-loving deity. The first step in these arguments was to prove that the design existed. Nature was ran- sacked for results obtained through separate things being co-adapted. Our eyes, for in- stance, originate in intra-uterine darkness, and the light originates in the sun, yet see how they fit each other. They are evidently made for each other. Vision is the end designed, light and eyes the separate means devised for its attainment. It is strange, considering how unanimously our ancestors felt the force of this argument, to see how little it counts for since the triumph of the darwinian theory. Darwin opened our 110 SOME METAPHYSICAL PROBLEMS minds to the power of chance-happenings to bring forth * fit ' results if only they have time to add themselves together. He showed the enor- mous waste of nature in producing results that get destroyed because of their unfitness. He also emphasized the number of adaptations which, if designed, would argue an evil rather than a good designer. Here, all depends upon the point of view. To the grub under the bark the exquisite fitness of the woodpecker's organ- ism to extract him would certainly argue a dia- bolical designer. Theologians have by this time stretched their minds so as to embrace the darw^inian facts, and yet to interpret them as still showing divine purpose. It used to be a question of purpose against mechanism, of one or the other. It was as if one should say " My shoes are evi- dently designed to fit my feet, hence it is im- possible that they should have been produced by machinery." We know that they are both: they are made by a machinery itself designed to fit the feet with shoes. Theology need only stretch similarly the designs of God. As the 111 PRAGMATISM aim of a football-team is not merely to get the ball to a certain goal (if that were so, they would simply get up on some dark night and place it there), but to get it there by a fixed machinery of conditions — the game's rules and the opposing players; so the aim of God is not merely, let us say, to make men and to save them, but rather to get this done through the sole agency of nature's vast ma- chinery. Without nature's stupendous laws and counter-forces, man's creation and per- fection, we might suppose, would be too in- sipid achievements for God to have proposed them. This saves the form of the design-argument at the expense of its old easy human content. The designer is no longer the old man-like deity. His designs have grown so vast as to be incomprehensible to us humans. The what of them so overwhelms us that to establish the mere that of a designer for them becomes of very little consequence in comparison. We can with diflBculty comprehend the character of a cosmic mind whose purposes are fully revealed 112 SOME METAPHYSICAL PROBLEMS by the strange mixture of goods and evils that we find in this actual world's particulars. Or rather we cannot by any possibility compre- hend it. The mere word 'design' by itself has no consequences and explains nothing. It is the barrenest of principles. The old ques- tion of whether there is design is idle. The real question is what is the world, whether or not it have a designer — and that can be revealed only by the study of all nature's particulars. Remember that no matter what nature may have produced or may be producing, the means mus t necessarily have been adeq uate, must have been fitted to that production. The argu- ment from fitness to design would consequently always apply, whatever were the product's character. The recent Mont-Pelee eruption, for example, required all previous history to produce that exact combination of ruined houses, human and animal corpses, sunken ships, volcanic ashes, etc., in just that one hideous configuration of positions. France had to be a nation and colonize Martinique. Our country had to exist and send our ships there. 113 PRAGMATISM If God aimed at just that result, the means by which the centuries bent their influences towards it, showed exquisite intelligence. And so of any state of things whatever, either in nature or in history, which we find actually realized. For the parts of things must always make some definite resultant, be it chaotic or harmonious. When we look at what has act- ually come, the conditions must always appear perfectly designed to ensure it. We can always say, therefore, in any conceivable world, of any conceivable character, that the whole cosmic machinery may have been designed to pro- duce it. Pragmatically, then, the abstract word * de- sign' is a blank cartridge. It carries no con- sequences, it does no execution. What design? and what designer.'^ are the only serious ques- tions, and the study of facts is the only way of getting even approximate answers. Mean- while, pending the slow answer from facts, any one who insists that there is a designer and who is sure he is a divine one, gets a certain prag- matic benefit from the term — the same, in 114 SOME METAPHYSICAL PROBLEMS fact, which we saw that the terms God, Spirit, or the Absolute, yield us. 'Design,' worthless tho it be as a mere rationalistic principle set above or behind things for our admiration, be- comes, if our faith concretes it into something theistic, a term of promise. Returning with it into experience, we gain a more confiding out- look on the future. If not a blind force but a seeing force runs things, w^c may reasonably expect better issues. This vague confidence in the future is the sole pragmatic meaning at present discernible in the terms design and de- signer. But if cosmic confidence is right not wrong, better not worse, that is a most import- ant meaning. That much at least of possible * truth' the terms will then have in them. Let me take up another well-worn contro- versy, the free-will problem. Most persons who believe in what is called their free-will do so after the rationalistic fashion. It is a principle, a positive faculty or virtue added to man, by which his dignity is enigmatically augmented. He ought to believe it for this reason. Deter- 115 PRAGMATISM minists, who deny it, who say that individual men originate nothing, but merely transmit to the future the whole push of the past cosmos of which they are so small an expression, dimin- ish man. He is less admirable, stripped of this creative principle. I imagine that more than half of you share our instinctive belief in free- will, and that admiration of it as a principle of dignity has much to do with your fidelity. But free-will has also been discussed prag- matically, and, strangely enough, the same pragmatic interpretation has been put upon it by both disputants. You know how large a part questions of accountability have played in ethical controversy. To hear some persons, one would suppose that all that ethics aims at is a code of merits and demerits. Thus does the old legal and theological leaven, the inter- est in crime and sin and punishment abide with us. *Who 's to blame.? whom can we punish.? whom will God punish.?' — these preoccupations hang like a bad dream over man's religious history. So both free-will and determinism have been 116 SOME METAPHYSICAL PROBLEMS inveighed against and called absurd, because each, in the eyes of its enemies, has seemed to prevent the ' imputability ' of good or bad deeds to their authors. Queer antinomy this ! Free- will means novelty, the grafting on to the past of something not involved therein. If our acts were predetermined, if we merely transmitted the push of the whole past, the f ree-willists say, how could we be praised or blamed for any- thing.^ We should be * agents' only, not 'prin- cipals,' and where then would be our precious imputability and responsibility.^ But where would it be if we had free-will .^^ rejoin the determinists. If a 'free' act be a sheer novelty, that comes not from me, the previous me, but ex nihilo, and simply tacks itself on to me, how can /, the previous I, be responsible.'^ How can I have any permanent character that will stand still long enough for praise or blame to be awarded.^ The chaplet of my days tumbles into a cast of disconnected beads as soon as the thread of inner neces- sity is drawn out by the preposterous in- determinist doctrine. Messrs. Fullerton and 117 PRAGMATISM McTaggart have recently laid about them doughtily with this argument. It may be good ad Jiominem, but otherwise it is pitiful. For I ask you, quite apart from other reasons, whether any man, woman or child, with a sense for realities, ought not to be ashamed to plead such principles as either dignity or imputability. Instinct and utility between them can safely be trusted to carry on the social business of punishment and praise. If a man does good acts we shall praise him, if he does bad acts we shall punish him, — any- how, and quite apart from theories as to whether the acts result from what was previ- ous in him or are novelties in a strict sense. To make our human ethics revolve about the question of * merit' is a piteous unreality — God alone can know our merits, if we have any. The real ground for supposing free-will is indeed pragmatic, but it has nothing to do with this contemptible right to punish which has made such a noise in past discussions of the subject. Free-will pragmatically means novelties in 118 SOME METAPHYSICAL PROBLEMS the worlds the right to expect that in its deepest elements as well as in its surface phenomena, the future may not identically repeat and imitate the past. That imitation en masse is there, who can deny? The general ' uniformity of nature' is presupposed by every lesser law. But nature may be only approximately uni- form; and persons in whom knowledge of the world's past has bred pessimism (or doubts as to the world's good character, which be- come certainties if that character be supposed eternally fixed) may naturally welcome free- will as a melioristic doctrine. It holds up improvement as at least possible; whereas de- terminism assures us that our whole notion of possibility is born of human ignorance, and that necessity and impossibility between them rule the destinies of the world. Free-will is thus a general cosmological theory of promise, just like the Absolute, God, Spirit or Design. Taken abstractly, no one of these terms has any inner content, none of them gives us any picture, and no one of them would retain the least pragmatic value in a world 119 PRAGMATISM whose character was obviously perfect from the start. Elation at mere existence, pure cos- mic emotion and delight, would, it seems to me, quench all interest in those speculations, if the world were nothing but a lubberland of happiness already. Our interest in religious metaphysics arises in the fact that our empir- ical future feels to us unsafe, and needs some higher guarantee. If the past and present were purely good, who could wish that the future might possibly not resemble them? Who could desire free-will.^ Who would not say, with Huxley, ' let me be wound up every day like a watch, to go right fatally, and I ask no better freedom.' 'Freedom' in a world already per- fect could only mean freedom to be worse, and who could be so insane as to wish that.'^ To be necessarily what it is, to be impossibly aught else, would put the last touch of perfection upon optimism's universe. Surely the only possibility that one can rationally claim is the possibility that things may be better. That possibility, I need hardly say, is one that, as the actual world goes, we have ample grounds for desiderating. 120 SOME METAPHYSICAL PROBLEMS Free-will thus has no meaning unless it be a doctrine of relief. As such, it takes its place with other religious doctrines. Between them, they build up the old wastes and repair the former desolations. Our spirit, shut within this courtyard of sense-experience, is always saying to the intellect upon the tower: 'Watch- man, tell us of the night, if it aught of promise bear,' and the intellect gives it then these terms of promise. Other than this practical significance, the words God, free-will, design, etc., have none. Yet dark tho they be in themselves, or intel- lectualistically taken, when we bear them into life's thicket with us the darkness there grows light about us. If you stop, in dealing with such words, with their definition, thinking that to be an intellectual finality, where are you.^ Stu- pidly staring at a pretentious sham! "Deus est Ens, a se, extra et supra omne genus, necessa- rium, unum, infinite perfectum, simplex, im- mutabile, immensum, aeternum, intelligens," etc., — wherein is such a definition really in- structive.'* It means less than nothing, in its 121 PRAGMATISM pompous robe of adjectives. Pragmatism alone can read a positive meaning into it, and for that she turns her back upon the intellectualist point of view altogether. 'God's in his heaven; all's right with the world!' — That's the real heart of your theology, and for that you need no rationalist definitions. Why should n't all of us, rationalists as well as pragmatists, confess this.^ Pragmatism, so far from keeping her eyes bent on the imme- diate practical foreground, as she is accused of doing, dwells just as much upon the world's remotest perspectives. See then how all these ultimate questions turn, as it were, upon their hinges; and from looking backwards upon principles, upon an erkenntnisstheoretische Ich, a God, a Kausali- tdtsprinzip, a Design, a Free-will, taken in themselves, as something august and exalted above facts, — see, I say, how pragmatism shifts the emphasis and looks forward into facts them- selves. The really vital question for us all is. What is this world going to he? What is life eventually to make of itself? The centre of 122 SOME METAPHYSICAL PROBLEMS gravity of philosophy must therefore alter its place. The earth of things, long thrown into shadow by the glories of the upper ether, must resume its rights. To shift the emphasis in this way means that philosophic questions will fall to be treated by minds of a less abstractionist type than heretofore, minds more scientific and individualistic in their tone yet not irreligious either. It will be an alteration in *the seat of authority' that reminds one almost of the pro- testant reformation. And as, to papal minds, protestantism has often seemed a mere mess of anarchy and confusion, such, no doubt, will pragmatism often seem to ultra-rationalist minds in philosophy. It will seem so much sheer trash, philosophically. But life wags on, all the same, and compasses its ends, in pro- testant countries. I venture to think that philosophic protestantism will compass a not dissimilar prosperity. IV THE ONE AND THE MANY LECTURE IV THE ONE AND THE MANY TTe saw in the last lecture that the pragmatic method, in its dealings with certain concepts, instead of ending with admiring contemplation, plunges forward into the river of experience with them and prolongs the perspective by their means. Design, free-will, the absolute mind, spirit instead of matter, have for their sole meaning a better promise as to this world's out- come. Be they false or be they true, the mean- ing of them is this meliorism. I have sometimes thought of the phenomenon called 'total re- flexion' in Optics as a good symbol of the rela- tion between abstract ideas and concrete reali- ties, as pragmatism conceives it. Hold a tumbler of water a little above your eyes and look up through the water at its surface — or better still look similarly through the flat wall of an aquarium. You will then see an extraordinarily brilliant reflected image say of a candle-flame, or any other clear object, situated on the op- posite side of the vessel. No ray, under these 127 PRAGMATISM circumstances gets beyond the water's surface : every ray is totally reflected back into the depths again. Now let the water represent the world of sensible facts, and let the air above it represent the world of abstract ideas. Both worlds are real, of course, and interact; but they interact only at their boundary, and the locus of everything that lives, and happens to us, so far as full experience goes, is the water. We are like fishes swimming in the sea of sense, bounded above by the superior element, but unable to breathe it pure or penetrate it. We get our oxygen from it, however, we touch it incessantly, now in this part, now in that, and every time we touch it, we turn back into the water with our course re-determined and re-en- ergized. The abstract ideas of which the air consists are indispensable for life, but irrespir- able by themselves, as it were, and only active in their re-directing function. All similes are halting, but this one rather takes my fancy. It shows how something, not suflScient for life in itself, may nevertheless be an effective deter- minant of life elsewhere. 128 THE ONE AND THE MANY In this present hour I wish to illustrate the pragmatic method by one more application. I wish to turn its light upon the ancient problem of 'the one and the many.' I suspect that in but few of you has this problem occasioned sleepless nights, and I should not be aston- ished if some of you told me it had never vexed you at all. I myself have come, by long brood- ing over it, to consider it the most central of all philosophic problems, central because so preg- nant. I mean by this that if you know whether a man is a decided monist or a decided plural- ist, you perhaps know more about the rest of his opinions than if you give him any other name ending in ist. To believe in the one or in the many, that is the classification with the maximum number of consequences. So bear with me for an hour while I try to inspire you with my own interest in this problem. Philosophy has often been defined as the quest or the vision of the world's unity. Few persons ever challenge this definition, which is true as far as it goes, for philosophy has indeed manifested above all things its interest in unity. 129 PRAGMATISM But how about the variety in things? Is that such an irrelevant matter? If instead of using the term philosophy, we talk in general of our intellect and its needs, we quickly see that unity is only one of them. Acquaintance with the de- tails of fact is always reckoned, along with their reduction to system, as an indispensable mark of mental greatness. Your 'scholarly' mind, of encyclopedic, philological type, your man essentially of learning, has never lacked for praise along with your philosopher. What our intellect really aims at is neither variety nor unity taken singly, but totality.^ In this, ac- quaintance with reality's diversities is as im- portant as understanding their connexion. Cu- riosity goes pari passu with the systematizing passion. In spite of this obvious fact the unity of things has always been considered more illus- trious, as it were, than their variety. When a young man first conceives the notion that the whole world forms one great fact, with all its * Compare A. Bellanger : Les concepts de Cause, et Vaciivite inten- HoneUe de I' Esprit. Paris, Alcan, 1905, p. 79 ff. 130 THE ONE AND THE MANY parts moving abreast, as it were, and inter- locked, he feels as if he were enjoying a great insight, and looks superciliously on all who still fall short of this sublime conception. Taken thus abstractly as it first comes to one, the mon- istic insight is so vague as hardly to seem worth defending intellectually. Yet probably every one in this audience in some w^ay cherishes it. A certain abstract monism, a certain emotional response to the character of oneness, as if it were a feature of the world not co-ordinate with its manyness, but vastly more excellent and eminent, is so prevalent in educated circles that we might almost call it a part of philosophic common sense. Of course the w^orld is One, we say. How else could it be a world at all ? Empiricists as a rule, are as stout monists of this abstract kind as rationalists are. The difference is that the empiricists are less dazzled. Unity doesn't blind them to every- thing else, doesn't quench their curiosity for special facts, whereas there is a kind of ration- alist who is sure to interpret abstract unity mys- tically and to forget everything else, to treat it 131 PRAGMATISM as a principle; to admire and worship it; and thereupon to come to a full stop intellect- ually. *The world is One!' — the formula may be- come a sort of number-worship. 'Three' and * seven' have, it is true, been reckoned sacred numbers; but, abstractly taken, why is *one' more excellent than * forty-three,' or than 'two million and ten ' ? In this first vague conviction of the world's unity, there is so little to take hold of that we hardly know what we mean by it. The only way to get forward w ith our notion is to treat it pragmatically. Granting the one- ness to exist, what facts will be different in con- sequence.^ What will the unity be known as.^ The world is One — yes, but how one. What is the practical value of the oneness for us. Asking such questions, we pass from the vague to the definite, from the abstract to the concrete. Many distinct ways in which a one- ness predicated of the universe might make a difference, come to view. I will note succes- sively the more obvious of these ways. 132 THE ONE AND THE MANY 1. First, the world is at least one subject of discourse. If its manyness were so irremedi- able as to permit no union whatever of its parts, not even our minds could 'mean' the whole of it at once: they would be like eyes trying to look in opposite directions. But in point of fact we mean to cover the whole of it by our abstract term 'world' or 'universe,' which ex- pressly intends that no part shall be left out. Such unity of discourse carries obviously no farther monistic specifications. A ' chaos,' once so named, has as much unity of discourse as a cosmos. It is an odd fact that many monists consider a great victory scored for their side when pluralists say 'the universe is many.' "'The Universe'!" they chuckle — "his speech bewrayeth him. He stands confessed of mon- ism out of his own mouth." Well, let things be one in so far forth! You can then fling such a word as universe at the whole collection of them, but what matters it ? It still remains to be ascertained whether they are one in any further or more valuable sense. 2. Are they, for example, continuous? Can 133 PRAGMATISM you pass froin one to another, keeping always in your one universe without any danger of falling out? In other words, do the parts of our universe hang together, instead of being like detached grains of sand? Even grains of sand hang together through the space in which they are embedded, and if you can in any way move through such space, you can pass continuously from number one of them to number two. Space and time are thus vehicles of continuity by which the world's parts hang together. The practical difference to us, resultant from these forms of union, is immense. Our whole motor life is based upon them. 3. There are innumerable other paths of practical continuity among things. Lines of in- fluence can be traced by which they hang to- gether. Following. any such line you pass from one thing to another till you may have covered a good part of the universe's extent. Gravity and heat-conduction are such all-uniting influ- ences, so far as the physical world goes. Elec- tric, luminous and chemical influences follow 134 THE ONE AND THE MANY similar lines of influence. But opaque and inert bodies interrupt the continuity here, so that you have to step round them, or change your mode of progress if you wish to get far- ther on that day. Practically, you have then lost your universe's unity, so far as it was constituted by those first lines of influence. There are innumerable kinds of connexion that special things have with other special things; and the ensemble of any one of these connexions forms one sort of system by which things are conjoined. Thus men are conjoined in a vast network ot acquaintanceship. Brown knows Jones, Jones knows Robinson, etc.; and by choosing your farther intermediaries rightly you may carry a message from Jones to the Empress of China, or the Chief of the Afri- can Pigmies, or to any one else in the inhabited world. But you are stopped short, as by a non- conductor, when you choose one man wrong in this experiment. What may be called love- systems are grafted on the acquaintance-sys- tem. A loves (or hates) B ; B loves (or hates) C, etc. But these systems are smaller than the 135 PRAGMATISM great acquaintance-system that they presup' pose. Human efforts are daily unifying the world more and more in definite systematic ways. We found colonial, postal, consular, commer- cial systems, all the parts of which obey defin- ite influences that propagate themselves within the system but not to facts outside of it. The result is innumerable little hangings-together of the world's parts within the larger hangings- together, little worlds, not only of discourse but of operation, within the wider universe. Each system exemplifies one type or grade of union, its parts being strung on that peculiar kind of relation, and the same part may figure in many different systems, as a man may hold various oflBces and belong to several clubs. From this 'systematic' point of view, therefore, the prag- matic value of the world's unity is that all these definite networks actually and practically exist. Some are more enveloping and extensive, some less so; they are superposed upon each other; and between them all they let no individual elementary part of the universe escape. Enor- 136 THE ONE AND THE MANY mous as is the amount of disconnexion among things (for these systematic influences and con- junctions follow rigidly exclusive paths), every- thing that exists is influenced in some way by something else, if you can only pick the way out rightly. Loosely speaking, and in general, it may be said that all things cohere and adhere to each other somehow, and that the universe exists practically in reticulated or concaten- ated forms which make of it a continuous or 'integrated' affair. Any kind of influence whatever helps to make the world one, so far as you can follow it from next to next. You may then say that 'the world is One,' — mean- ing in these respects, namely, and just so far as they obtain. But just as definitely is it not One, so far as they do not obtain; and there is no species of connexion which will not fail, if, instead of choosing conductors for it you choose non-conductors. You are then arrested at your very first step and have to write the world down as a pure many from that particular point of view. If our intellect had been as much inter- ested in disjunctive as it is in conjunctive rela- 137 PRAGMATISM tions, philosophy would have equally success- fully celebrated the world's disunion. The great point is to notice that the oneness and the manyness are absolutely co-ordinate here. Neither is primordial or more essential or excellent than the other. Just as with space, whose separating of things seems exactly on a par with its uniting of them, but sometimes one function and sometimes the other is what comes home to us most, so, in our general deal- ings with the world of influences, we now need conductors and now need non-conductors, and wisdom lies in knowing which is which at the appropriate moment. 4. All these systems of influence or non-in- fluence may be listed under the general pro- blem of the world's causal unity. If the minor causal influences among things should converge towards one common causal origin of them in the past, one great first cause for all that is, one might then speak of the absolute causal unity of the world. God's fiat on creation's day has figured in traditional philosophy as such an absolute cause and origin. Transcendental 138 THE ONE AND THE MANY Idealism, translating 'creation' into 'thinking' (or * willing to think') calls the divine act * eternal' rather than 'first'; but the union of the many here is absolute, just the same — the many would not 6e, save for the One. Against this notion of the unity of origin of all things there has always stood the pluralistic notion of an eternal self-existing many in the shape of atoms or even of spiritual units of some sort. The alternative has doubtless a pragmatic meaning, but perhaps, as far as these lectures go, we had better leave the question of unity of origin unsettled. 5. The most important sort of union that obtains among things, pragmatically speaking, is their generic unity. Things exist in kinds, there are many specimens in each kind, and what the 'kind' implies for one specimen, it implies also for every other specimen of that kind. We can easily conceive that every fact in the world might be singular, that is, unlike any other fact and sole of its kind. In such a world of singulars our logic would be useless, for logic works by predicating of the single in- 139 PRAGMATISM stance what is true of all its kind. With no two things alike in the world, we should be unable to reason from our past experiences to our fu- ture ones. The existence of so much generic unity in things is thus perhaps the most mo- mentous pragmatic specification of what it may mean to say 'the world is One.' Absolute generic unity would obtain if there were one summum genus under which all things without exception could be eventually subsumed. * Be- ings,' ' thinkables,' 'experiences,' would be candidates for this position. Whether the alternatives expressed by such words have any pragmatic significance or not, is another ques- tion which I prefer to leave unsettled just now. 6. Another specification of what the phrase 'the world is one' may mean is unity of pur- pose. An enormous number of things in the world subserve a common purpose. All the man-made systems, administrative, industrial, military, or what not, exist each for its control- ling purpose. Every living being pursues its own peculiar purposes. They co-operate, ac- cording to the degree of their development, in 140 THE ONE AND THE MANY collective or tribal purposes, larger ends thus enveloping lesser ones, until an absolutely sin- gle, final and climacteric purpose subserved by all things without exception might conceivably be reached. It is needless to say that the ap- pearances conflict with such a view. Any re- sultant, as I said in my third lecture, may have been purposed in advance, but none of the results we actually know in this world have in point of fact been purposed in advance in all their details. Men and nations start with a vague notion of being rich, or great, or good. Each step they make brings unforeseen chances into sight, and shuts out older vistas, and the specifications of the general purpose have to be daily changed. What is reached in the end may be better or worse than what was proposed, but it is always more complex and different. Our different purposes also are at war with each other. Where one can't crush the other out, they compromise; and the result is again different from what any one distinctly proposed beforehand. Vaguely and generally, much of what was purposed may be gained; but every- 141 PRAGMATISM thing makes strongly for the view that our world is incompletely unified teleologically and is still trying to get its unification better organized. Whoever claims absolute teleological unity, saying that there is one purpose that every detail of the universe subserves, dogmatizes at his own risk. Theologians who dogmatize thus find it more and more impossible, as our ac- quaintance with the warring interests of the world's parts grows more concrete, to imagine what the one climacteric purpose may possibly be like. We see indeed that certain evils min- ister to ulterior goods, that the bitter makes the cocktail better, and that a bit of danger or hard- ship puts us agreeably to our trumps. We can vaguely generalize this into the doctrine that all the evil in the universe is but instrumental to its greater perfection. But the scale of the evil actually in sight defies all human tolerance; and transcendental idealism, in the pages of a Bradley or a Royce, brings us no farther than the book of Job did — God's ways are not our ways, so let us put our hands upon our mouth. 142 THE ONE AND THE MANY A God who can relish such superfluities of hor- ror is no God for human beings to appeal to. His animal spirits are too high. In other words the 'Absolute' with his one purpose, is not the man-like God of common people. 7. ^Esthetic union among things also obtains, and is very analogous to teleological union. Things tell a story. Their parts hang together so as to work out a climax. They play into each other's hands expressively. Retrospectively, we can see that altho no definite purpose pre- sided over a chain of events, yet the events fell into a dramatic form, with a start, a middle, and a finish. In point of fact all stories end; and here again the point of view of a many is the more natural one to take. The world is full of partial stories that run parallel to one an- other, beginning and ending at odd times. They mutually interlace and interfere at points, but we can not unify them completely in our minds. In following your life-history, I must temporarily turn my attention from my own. Even a biographer of twins would have to press them alternately upon his reader's attention. 143 PRAGMATISM It follows that whoever says that the whole world tells one story utters another of those monistic dogmas that a man believes at his risk. It is easy to see the world's history plural- istically, as a rope of which each fibre tells a separate tale; but to conceive of each cross- section of the rope as an absolutely single fact, and to sum the whole longitudinal series into one being living an undivided life, is harder. We have indeed the analogy of embryology to help us. The microscopist makes a hundred flat cross-sections of a given embryo, and mentally unites them into one solid whole. But the great world's ingredients, so far as they are beings, seem, like the rope's fibres, to be discontinu- ous, cross-wise, and to cohere only in the longi- tudinal direction. Followed in that direction they are many. Even the embryologist, when he follows the development of his object, has to treat the history of each single organ in turn. Absolute aesthetic union is thus another barely abstract ideal. The world appears as some- thing more epic than dramatic. So far, then, we see how the world is unified 144 THE ONE AND THE MANY by its many systems, kinds, purposes, and dramas. That there is more union in all these ways than openly appears is certainly true. That there may be one sovereign purpose, system, kind, and story, is a legitimate hypo- thesis. All I say here is that it is rash to affirm this dogmatically without better evi- dence than we possess at present. 8. The great monistic denhmittel for a hun- dred years past has been the notion of the one Knower. The many exist only as objects for his thought — exist in his dream, as it were; and as he knows them, they have one purpose, form one system, tell one tale for him. This notion of an all enveloping noetic unity in things is the sublimest achievement of intellectualist philosophy. Those who believe in the Abso- lute, as the all-knower is termed, usually say that they do so for coercive reasons, which clear thinkers can not evade. The Absolute has far-reaching practical consequences, to some of which I drew attention in my second lecture. Many kinds of difference important to us would surely follow from its being true. 145 PRAGMATISM I can not here enter into all the logical proofs of such a Being's existence, farther than to say that none of them seem to me sound. I must therefore treat the notion of an All-Knower simply as an hypothesis, exactly on a par logic- ally with the pluralist notion that there is no point of view, no focus of information extant, from which the entire content of the universe is visible at once. ^/" God's conscience," says Professor Royce,^ "forms in its wholeness one luminously transparent conscious moment" — this is the type of noetic unity on which ration- alism insists. Empiricism on the other hand is satisfied with the type of noetic unity that is humanly familiar. Everything gets known by some knower along with something else; but the knowers may in the end be irreducibly many, and the greatest knower of them all may yet not know the whole of everything, or even know what he does know at one single stroke: — he may be liable to forget. Whichever type obtained, the world would still be a universe noetically. Its parts would be conjoined by * The Conception of God, New York, 1897, p. 292. 146 THE ONE AND THE MANY knowledge, but in the one case the knowledge would be absolutely unified, in the other it would be strung along and overlapped. The notion of one instantaneous or eternal Knower — either adjective here means the same thing — is, as I said, the great intellect- ualist achievement of our time. It has prac- tically driven out that conception of 'Sub- stance' which earlier philosophers set such store by, and by which so much unifying w^ork used to be done — universal substance which alone has being in and from itself, and of which all the particulars of experience are but forms to which it gives support. Substance has suc- cumbed to the pragmatic criticisms of the Eng- lish school. It appears now only as another name for the fact that phenomena as they come are actually grouped and given in coherent forms, the very forms in which we finite know- ers experience or think them together. These forms of conjunction are as much parts of the tissue of experience as are the terms which they connect; and it is a great pragmatic achievement for recent idealism to have made 147 PRAGMATISM the world hang together in these directly re presentable ways instead of drawing its unity from the 'inherence' of its parts — whatever that may mean — in an unimaginable principle behind the scenes. * The world is One/ therefore, just so far as we experience it to be concatenated, One by as many definite conjunctions as appear. But then also not One by just as many definite dis- junctions as we find. The oneness and the manyness of it thus obtain in respects which can be separately named. It is neither a uni- verse pure and simple nor a multiverse pure and simple. And its various manners of being One suggest, for their accurate ascertainment, so many distinct programs of scientific work. Thus the pragmatic question * What is the one- ness known as ? What practical difference will it make ? ' saves us from all feverish excitement over it as a principle of sublimity and carries us forward into the stream of experience with a cool head. The stream may indeed reveal far more connexion and union than we now suspect, but we are not entitled on pragmatic 148 THE ONE AND THE MANY principles to claim absolute oneness in any respect in advance. It is so diflScult to see definitely what abso- lute oneness can mean, that probably the majority of you are satisfied with the sober attitude which we have reached. Nevertheless there are possibly some radically monistic souls among you who are not content to leave the one and the many on a par. Union of various grades, union of diverse types, union that stops at non-conductors, union that merely goes from next to next, and means in many cases outer nextness only, and not a more internal bond, union of concatenation, in short; all that sort of thing seems to you a halfway stage of thought. The oneness of things, superior to their many- ness, you think must also be more deeply true, must be the more real aspect of the world. The pragmatic view, you are sure, gives us a uni- verse imperfectly rational. The real universe must form an unconditional unit of being, some- thing consolidated, with its parts co-implicated through and through. Only then could we consider our estate completely rational. 149 PRAGMATISM There is no doubt whatever that this ultra- monistic way of thinking means a great deal to many minds. " One Life, One Truth, one Love, one Principle, One Good, One God" — I quote from a Christian Science leaflet which the day's mail brings into my hands — beyond doubt such a confession of faith has pragmatically an emotional value, and beyond doubt the word *one' contributes to the value quite as much as the other words. But if we try to realize intel- lectually what we can possibly mean by such a glut of oneness we are thrown right back upon our pragmatistic determinations again. It means either the mere name One, the universe of discourse; or it means the sum total of all the ascertainable particular conjunctions and concatenations; or, finally, it means some one vehicle of conjunction treated as all-inclusive, like one origin, one purpose, or one knower. In point of fact it always means one knower to those who take it intellectually to-day. The one knower involves, they think, the other forms of conjunction. His world must have all its parts co-implicated in the one logical- 150 THE ONE AND THE MANY sesthetical-teleological unit-picture which is his eternal dream. The character of the absolute knower's picture is however so impossible for us to re- present clearly, that we may fairly suppose that the authority which absolute monism un- doubtedly possesses, and probably always will possess over some persons, draws its strength far less from intellectual than from mystical grounds. To interpret absolute monism worth- ily, be a mystic. Mystical states of mind in every degree are shown by history, usually tho not always, to make for the monistic view. This is no proper occasion to enter upon the general subject of mysticism, but I will quote one mystical pronouncement to show just what I mean. The paragon of all monistic systems is the Vedanta philosophy of Hindostan, and the paragon of Vedantist missionaries was the late Swami Vivekananda who visited our land some years ago. The method of Vedantism is the mystical method. You do not reason, but after going through a certain discipline you see, and having seen, you can report the truth. 151 PRAGMATISM Vivekananda thus reports the truth in one of his lectures here: ** Where is there any more misery for him who sees this Oneness in the universe, this Oneness of life, Oneness of everything? . . . This separation between man and man, man and woman, man and child, nation from na- tion, earth from moon, moon from sun, this separation between atom and atom is the cause really of all the misery, and the Vedanta says this separation does not exist, it is not real. It is merely apparent, on the surface. In the heart of things there is unity still. If you go in- side you find that unity between man and man, women and children, races and races, high and low, rich and poor, the gods and men : all are One, and animals too, if you go deep enough, and he who has attained to that has no more delusion. . . . Where is there any more delu- sion for him? What can delude him? He knows the reality of everything, the secret of everything. Where is there any more misery for him? What does he desire ? He has traced the reality of everything unto the Lord, that 152 THE ONE AND THE MANY centre, that Unity of everything, and that is Eternal Bliss, Eternal Knowledge, Eternal Existence. Neither death nor disease nor sor- row nor misery nor discontent is There . . . In the Centre, the reality, there is no one to be mourned for, no one to be sorry for. He has penetrated everything, the Pure One, the Formless, the Bodiless, the Stainless, He the Knower, He the great Poet, the Self-Existent, He who is giving to every one what he de- serves." Observe how radical the character of the monism here is. Separation is not simply over- come by the One, it is denied to exist. There is no many. We are not parts of the One; It has no parts; and since in a sense we undeni- ably are, it must be that each of us is the One, indivisibly and totally. An Absolute One, and I that One, — surely we have here a religion which, emotionally considered, has a high pragmatic value; it imparts a perfect sumptu- osity of security. As our Swami says in another place : "When man has seen himself as One with 153 PRAGMATISM the infinite Being of the universe, when all separateness has ceased, when all men, all wo- men, all angels, all gods, all animals, all plants, the whole universe has been melted into that oneness, then all fear disappears. Whom to fear ? Can I hurt myself ? Can I kill myself ? Can I injure myself? Do you fear yourself? Then will all sorrow disappear. What can cause me sorrow ? I am the One Existence of the universe. Then all jealousies will disappear; of whom to be jealous ? Of myself ? Then all bad feelings disappear. Against whom shall I have this bad feeling ? Against myself ? There is none in the universe but me . . . kill out this differentiation, kill out this superstition that there are many. ' He who, in this world of many, sees that One; he who, in this mass of insentiency, sees that One Sentient Being; he who in this world of shadow, catches that Real- ity, unto him belongs eternal peace, unto none else, unto none else.' " We all have some ear for this monistic music: it elevates and reassures. We all have at least the germ of mysticism in us. And when 154 THE ONE AND THE MANY our idealists recite their arguments for the Ab- solute, saying that the slightest union admitted anywhere carries logically absolute Oneness with it, and that the slightest separation ad- mitted anywhere logically carries disunion remediless and complete, I cannot help sus- pecting that the palpable weak places in the intellectual reasonings they use are protected from their own criticism by a mystical feeling that, logic or no logic, absolute Oneness must somehow at any cost be true. Oneness over- comes moral separateness at any rate. In the passion of love we have the mystic germ of what might mean a total union of all sentient life. This mystical germ wakes up in us on hearing the monistic utterances, acknowledges their authority, and assigns to intellectual con- siderations a secondary place. I will dwell no longer on these religious and moral aspects of the question in this lecture. When I come to my final lecture there will be something more to say. Leave then out of consideration for the mo- ment the authority which mystical insights may 155 PRAGMATISM be conjectured eventually to possess ; treat the problem of the One and the Many in a purely intellectual way; and we see clearly enough where pragmatism stands. With her criterion of the practical differences that theories make, we see that she must equally abjure absolute monism and absolute pluralism. The world is One just so far as its parts hang together by any definite connexion. It is many just so far as any definite connexion fails to obtain, ^nd finally it is growing more and more unified by those systems^oT^onnexion at least which human energy keeps framing as time goes on. It is possible to imagine alternative universes to the one we know, in which the most various grades and types of union should be embodied. Thus the lowest grade of universe would be a world of mere withness, of which the parts were only strung together by the conjunction 'and.* Such a universe is even now the collection of our several inner lives. The spaces and times of your imagination, the objects and events of your day-dreams are not only more or less in- coherent inter se, but are wholly out of definite 156 THE ONE AND THE MANY relation with the similar contents of any one else's mind. Our various reveries now as we sit here compenetrate each other idly without influencing or interfering. They coexist, but in no order and in no receptacle, being the nearest approach to an absolute 'many' that we can conceive. We can not even imagine any reason why they should be known all together, and we can imagine even less, if they were known together, how they could be known as one systematic whole. But add our sensations and bodily actions, and the union mounts to a much higher grade. Our audita et visa and our acts fall into those receptacles of time and space in which each event finds its date and place. They form 'things' and are of 'kinds' too, and can be classed. Yet we can imagine a world of things and of kinds in which the causal interactions with which we are so familiar should not exist. Everything there might be inert towards everything else, and refuse to propagate its influence. Or gross mechanical influences might pass, but no chem- ical action. Such worlds would be far less uni- 157 PRAGMATISM fied than ours. Again there might be complete physico-chemical interaction, but no minds; or minds, but altogether private ones, with no so- cial life; or social life limited to acquaintance, but no love; or love, but no customs or institu- tions that should systematize it. No one of these grades of universe would be absolutely irrational or disintegrated, inferior tho it might appear when looked at from the higher grades. For instance, if our minds should ever become ' tele- pathically' connected, so that we knew immedi- ately, or could under certain conditions know immediately, each what the other was think- ing, the world we now live in would appear to the thinkers in that world to have been of an inferior grade. With the whole of past eternity open for our conjectures to range in, it may be lawful to wonder whether the various kinds of union now realized in the universe that we inhabit may not possibly have been successively evolved after the fashion in which we now see human systems evolving in consequence of human needs. If such an hypothesis were legitimate, 158 THE ONE AND THE MANY total oneness would appear at the end of things rather than at their origin. In other words the notion of the * Absolute' would have to be re- placed by that of the 'Ultimate.' The two no- tions would have the same content — the maxi- mally unified content of fact, namely — but their time- relations would be positively reversed.' After discussing the unity of the universe in this pragmatic way, you ought to see why I said in my second lecture, borrowing the word from my friend G. Papini, that pragmatism tends to unstifjen all our theories. The world's oneness has generally been affirmed abstractly only, and as if any one who questioned it must be an idiot. The temper of monists has been so vehement, as almost at times to be convulsive; and this way of holding a doctrine does not easily go with reasonable discussion and the drawing of distinctions. The theory of the Ab- solute, in particular, has had to be an article of faith, affirmed dogmatically and exclusively. The One and All, first in the order of being and ' Compare on the Ultimate, Mr. Schiller's essay "Activity and Sub- stance," in his book entitled Humanism, p. 204. 159 PRAGMATISM of knowing, logically necessary itself, and unit- ing all lesser things in the bonds of mutual necessity, how could it allow of any mitigation of its inner rigidity? The slightest suspicion of pluralism, the minutest wiggle of independ- ence of any one of its parts from the control of the totality would ruin it. Absolute unity brooks no degrees, — as well might you claim absolute purity for a glass of water because it contains but a single little cholera-germ. The independence, however infinitesimal, of a part, however small, would be to the Absolute as fatal as a cholera-germ. Pluralism on the other hand has no need of this dogmatic rigoristic temper. Provided you grant some separation among things, some tre- mor of independence, some free play of parts on one another, some real novelty or chance, however minute, she is amply satisfied, and will allow you any amount, however great, of real union. How much of union there may be is a question that she thinks can only be decided empirically. The amount may be enormous, colossal; but absolute monism is shattered if, leo THE ONE AND THE MANY along with all the union, there has to be granted the slightest modicum, the most incipient nas- cency, or the most residual trace, of a separa- tion that is not 'overcome.' Pragmatism, pending the final empirical ascertainment of just what the balance of union and disunion among things may be, must ob- viously range herself upon the pluralistic side. Some day, she admits, even total union, with one knower, one origin, and a universe con- solidated in every conceivable way, may turn out to be the most acceptable of all hypotheses. Meanwhile the opposite hypothesis, of a world imperfectly unified still, and perhaps always to remain so, must be sincerely entertained. This latter hypothesis is pluralism's doctrine. Since absolute monism forbids its being even considered seriously, branding it as irrational from the start, it is clear that pragmatism must turn its back on absolute monism, and follow pluralism's more empirical path. This leaves us with the common -sense world, in which we find things partly joined and partly disjoined. 'Things,' then, and their 161 PRAGMATISM * conjunctions' — what do such words mean, pragmatically handled? In my next lecture, I will apply the pragmatic method to the stage of philosophizing known as Common Sense. V PRAGMATISM AND COMMON SENSE LECTURE V PRAGMATISM AND COMMON SENSE In the last lecture we turned ourselves from the usual way of talking of the universe's one- ness as a principle, sublime in all its blankness, towards a study of the special kinds of union which the universe enfolds. We found many of these to coexist with kinds of separation equally real. ' How far am I verified? ' is the question which each kind of union and each kind of separation asks us here, so as good pragma- tists we have to turn our face towards experi- ence, towards 'facts.' Absolute oneness remains, but only as an hypothesis, and that hypothesis is reduced now- adays to that of an omniscient knower who sees all things without exception as forming one single systematic fact. But the knower in ques- tion may still be conceived either as an Abso- lute or as an Ultimate; and over against the hypothesis of him in either form the counter- hypothesis that the widest field of knowledge that ever was or will be still contains some 165 PRAGMATISM ignorance, may be legitimately held. Some bits of information always may escape. This is the hypothesis of noetic pluralism^ which monists consider so absurd. Since we are bound to treat it as respectfully as noetic monism, until the facts shall have tipped the beam, we find that our pragmatism, tho orig- inally nothing but a method, has forced us to be friendly to the pluralistic view. It may be that some parts of the world are connected so loosely with some other parts as to be strung along by nothing but the copula and. They might even come and go without those other parts suffering any internal change. This pluralistic view, of a world of additive consti- tution, is one that pragmatism is unable to rule out from serious consideration. But this view leads one to the farther hypothesis that the actual world, instead of being complete 'eternally,' as the monists assure us, may be eternally incomplete, and at all times subject to addition or liable to loss. It is at any rate incomplete in one respect, and flagrantly so. The very fact that we de- 166 COMMON SENSE bate this question shows that our knowledge is incomplete at present and subject to addi- tion. In respect of the knowledge it contains the world does genuinely change and grow. Some general remarks on the way in which our knowledge completes itself — when it does com- plete itself — will lead us very conveniently into our subject for this lecture, which is ' Common Sense.' To begin with, our knowledge grows in spots. The spots may be large or small, but the knowledge never grows all over : some old knowledge always remains what it was. Your knowledge of pragmatism, let us suppose, is growing now. Later, its growth may involve considerable modification of opinions which you previously held to be true. But such modi- fications are apt to be gradual. To take the nearest possible example, consider these lec- tures of mine. What you first gain from them is probably a small amount of new informa- tion, a few new definitions, or distinctions, or points of view. But while these special ideas are being added, the rest of your knowledge 167 PRAGMATISM stands still, and only gradually will you 'line up' your previous opinions with the novelties I am trying to instil, and modify to some slight degree their mass. You listen to me now, I suppose, with cer- tain prepossessions as to my competency, and these affect your reception of what I say, but were I suddenly to break off lecturing, and to begin to sing ' We won't go home till morn- ing' in a rich baritone voice, not only would that new fact be added to your stock, but it would oblige you to define me differently, and that might alter your opinion of the pragmatic philosophy, and in general bring about a re- arrangement of a number of your ideas. Your mind in such processes is strained, and some- times painfully so, between its older beliefs and the novelties which experience brings along. ' Our minds thus grow in spots; and like grease-spots, the spots spread. But we let them spread as little as possible: we keep unaltered as much of our old knowledge, as many of our old prejudices and beliefs, as 168 COMMON SENSE we can. We patch and tinker more than we renew. The novelty soaks in; it stains the ancient mass; but it is also tinged by what absorbs it. Our past apperceives and co-oper- ates; and in the new equilibrium in which each step forward in the process of learning terminates, it happens relatively seldom that the new fact is added raw. More usually it is embedded cooked, as one might say, or stewed down in the sauce of the old. New truths thus are resultants of new experiences and of old truths combined and mutually modifying one another. And since this is the case in the changes of opinion of to- day, there is no reason to assume that it has not been so at all times. It follows that very ancient modes of thought may have survived through all the later changes in men's opinions. The most primitive ways of thinking may not yet be wholly expunged. Like our five fingers, our ear-bones, our rudimentary caudal append- age, or our other 'vestigial' peculiarities, they may remain as indelible tokens of events in our race-history. Our ancestors may at certain 169 PRAGMATISM moments have struck into ways of thinking which they might conceivably not have found. But once they did so, and after the fact, the inheritance continues. When you begin a piece of music in a certain key, you must keep the key to the end. You may alter your house ad libitum, but the ground-plan of the first architect persists — you can make great changes, but you can not change a Gothic church into a Doric temple. You may rinse and rinse the bottle, but you can't get the taste of the medicine or whiskey that first filled it wholly out. My thesis now is this, that our fundamental ways of thinking about things are discoveries of exceedingly remote ancestors, which have been able to preserve themselves throughout the experience of all subsequent time. They form one great stage of equilibrium in the human mind's development, the stage of common sense. Other stages have grafted themselves upon this stage, but have never succeeded in displacing it. Let us consider this common- sense stage first, as if it might be final. 170 COMMON SENSE In practical talk, a man's common sense means his good judgment, his freedom from excentricity, his gumj)tionf to use the vernacu- lar word. In philosophy it means something entirely different, it means his use of certain intellectual forms or categories of thought. Were we lobsters, or bees, it might be that our organization would have led to our using quite different modes from these of apprehending our experiences. It might be too (we can not dogmatically deny this) that such categories, unimaginable by us to-day, would have proved on the whole as serviceable for handling our experiences mentally as those which we actu- ally use. If this sounds paradoxical to any one, let him think of analytical geometry. The identi- cal figures which Euclid defined by intrinsic relations were defined by Descartes by the relations of their points to adventitious co-ordi- nates, the result being an absolutely different and vastly more potent way of handling curves. All our conceptions are what the Germans call Denkmittel, means by which we handle 171 PRAGMATISM facts by thinking them. Experience merely as such doesn't come ticketed and labelled, we have first to discover what it is. Kant speaks of it as being in its first intention a gewiihl der erscheinungeriy a rhapsodie der wahrnehm- ungen.a mere motley which we have to unify by our wits. What we usually do is first to frame some system of concepts mentally classified, serialized, or connected in some intellectual way, and then to use this as a tally by which we 'keep tab' on the impressions that present themselves. When each is referred to some possible place in the conceptual system, it is thereby 'understood.' This notion of parallel ' manifolds ' with their elements standing recip- rocally in 'one-to-one relations,' is proving so convenient nowadays in mathematics and logic as to supersede more and more the older classificatory conceptions. There are many conceptual systems of this sort; and the sense manifold is also such a system. Find a one-to- one relation for your sense-impressions any- where among the concepts, and in so far forth you rationalize the impressions. But obviously 172 COMMON SENSE you can rationalize them by using various con- ceptual systems. The old common-sense way of rationaliz- ing them is by a set of concepts of which the most important are these: Thing; The same or different; Kinds ; Minds; Bodies; One Time; One Space; Subjects and attributes; Causal injfluences; The fancied; The real. We are now so familiar with the order that these notions have woven for us out of the ever- lasting weather of our perceptions that we find it hard to realize how little of a fixed routine the perceptions follow when taken by them- selves. The word weather is a good one to use here. In Boston, for example, the weather has almost no routine, the only law being that if 173 PRAGMATISM you have had any weather for two days, you will probably but not certainly have another weather on the third. Weather-experience as it thus comes to Boston is discontinuous, and chaotic. In point of temperature, of wind, rain or sunshine, it Tiiay change three times a day. But the Washington weather-bureau intellect- ualizes this disorder by making each success- ive bit of Boston weather episodic. It refers it to its place and moment in a continental cy- clone, on the history of which the local changes everywhere are strung as beads are strung upon a cord. Now it seems almost certain that young chil- dren and the inferior animals take all their experiences very much as uninstructed Boston- ians take their weather. They know no more of time, or space, as world-receptacles, or of permanent subjects and changing predicates, or of causes, or kinds, or thoughts, or things, than our common people know of continental cyclones. A baby's rattle drops out of his hand, but the baby looks not for it. It has 'gone out' for him, as a candle-flame goes out; and it 174 COMMON SENSE comes back, when you replace it in his hand, as the flame comes back when relit. The idea of its being a 'thing,' whose permanent exist- ence by itself he might interpolate between its successive apparitions has evidently not oc- curred to him. It is the same with dogs. Out of sight, out of mind, with them. It is pretty evident that they have no general tendency to interpolate 'things.' Let me quote here a pas- sage from my colleague G. Santayana's book. *'If a dog, while sniffing about contentedly, sees his master arriving after a long absence . . . the poor brute asks for no reason why his master went, why he has come again, why he should be loved, or why presently while lying at his feet you forget him and begin to grunt and dream of the chase — all that is an utter mystery, utterly unconsidered. Such ex- perience has variety, scenery, and a certain vital rhythm ; its story might be told in dithy- rambic verse. Jt moves wholly by inspiration; every event is providential, every act unpre- meditated. Absolute freedom and absolute help- lessness have met together: you depend wholly 175 PRAGMATISM on divine favor, yet that unfathomable agency is not distinguishable from your own life. . . . [But] the figures even of that disordered drama have their exits and their entrances; and their cues can be gradually discovered by a being capable of fixing his attention and retaining the order of events. ... In proportion as such understanding advances, each moment of experience becomes conse- quential and prophetic of the rest. The calm places in life are filled with power and its spasms with resource. No emotion can over- whelm the mind, for of none is the basis or issue wholly hidden; no event can disconcert it altogether, because it sees beyond. Means can be looked for to escape from the worst predica- ment; and whereas each moment had been formerly filled with nothing but its own adven- tures and surprised emotion, each now makes room for the lesson of what went before and surmises what may be the plot of the whole." ^ Even to-day science and philosophy are still laboriously trying to part fancies from realities ' The Life of Reason : Reason in Common Sense, 1905, p. 59. 176 COMMON SENSE in our experience; and in primitive times they made only the most incipient distinctions in this line. Men believed whatever they thought with any liveliness, and they mixed their dreams with their realities inextricably. The categories of ' thought ' and * things ' are indispensable here — instead of being realities we now call certain experiences only 'thoughts.' There is not a cate- gory, among those enumerated, of which we may not imagine the use to have thus origi- nated historically and only gradually spread. That one Time which we all believe in and in which each event has its definite date, that one Space in which each thing has its position, these abstract notions unify the world incom- parably; but in their finished shape as con- cepts how different they are from the loose un- ordered time-and-space experiences of natural men ! Everything that happens to us brings its own duration and extension, and both are vaguely surrounded by a marginal *more' that runs into the duration and extension of the next thing that comes. But we soon lose all our definite bearings; and not only do our 177 PRAGMATISM children make no distinction between yesterday and the day before yesterday, the whole past being churned up together, but we adults still do so whenever the times are large. It is the same with spaces. On a map I can distinctly see the relation of London, Constantinople, and Pekin to the place where I am ; in reality I utterly fail to feel the facts which the map symbolizes. The directions and distances are vague, confused and mixed. Cosmic space and cosmic time, so far from being the intuitions that Kant said they were, are constructions as patently artificial as any that science can show. The great majority of the human race never use these notions, but live in plural times and spaces, interpenetrant and durcheinander. Permanent 'things' again; the 'same' thing and its various 'appearances' and 'alterations'; the different 'kinds' of thing; with the 'kind' used finally as a 'predicate,' of which the thing remains the 'subject' — what a straightening of the tangle of our experience's immediate flux and sensible variety does this list of terms suggest! And it is only the smallest part of his 178 COMMON SENSE experience's flux that any one actually does straighten out by applying to it these con- ceptual instruments. Out of them all our lowest ancestors probably used only, and then most vaguely and inaccurately, the notion of 'the same again.' But even then if you had asked them whether the same were a 'thing' that had endured throughout the unseen interval, they would probably have been at a loss, and would have said that they had never asked that question, or considered matters in that light. Kinds, and sameness of kind — what colos- sally useful denkmittel for finding our way among the many! The manyness might con- ceivably have been absolute. Experiences might have all been singulars, no one of them occurring twice. In such a world logic would have had no application; for kind and same- ness of kind are logic's only instruments. Once we know that whatever is of a kind is also of that kind's kind, we can travel through the universe as if with seven-league boots. Brutes surely never use these abstractions, and civil- ized men use them in most various amounts. 179 PRAGMATISM Causal influence, again! This, if anything, seems to have been an antediluvian concep- tion; for we find primitive men thinking that almost everything is significant and can exert influence of some sort. The search for the more definite influences seems to have started in the question: "Who, or what, is to blame?" — for any illness, namely, or disaster, or untoward thing. From this centre the search for causal influences has spread. Hume and * Science' to- gether have tried to eliminate the whole notion of influence, substituting the entirely different denkmittel of 'law.' But law is a comparatively recent invention, and influence reigns supreme in the older realm of common sense. The 'possible,' as something less than the actual and more than the wholly unreal, is another of these magisterial notions of com- mon sense. Criticise them as you may, they persist; and we fly back to them the moment critical pressure is relaxed. 'Self,' 'body,' in the substantial or metaphysical sense — no one escapes subjection to those forms of thought. In practice, the common-sense denkmittel are 180 COMMON SENSE uniformly victorious. Every one, however in- structed, still thinks of a 'thing' in the com- mon-sense way, as a permanent unit-subject that 'supports' its attributes interchangeably. No one stably or sincerely uses the more crit- ical notion, of a group of sense-qualities united by a law. With these categories in our hand, we make our plans and plot together, and connect all the remoter parts of experience with what lies before our eyes. Our later and more critical philosophies are mere fads and fancies compared with this natural mother- tongue of thought. Common sense appears thus as a perfectly definite stage in our understanding of things, a stage that satisfies in an extraordinarily successful way the purposes for which we think. 'Things' do exist, even when we do not see them. Their 'kinds' also exist. Their 'qualities' are what they act by, and are what we act on; and these also exist. These lamps shed their quality of light on every object in this room. We intercept it on its way when- ever we hold up an opaque screen. It is the 181 PRAGMATISM very sound that my lips emit that travels into your ears. It is the sensible heat of the fire that migrates into the water in which we boil an egg ; and we can change the heat into cool- ness by dropping in a lump of ice. At this stage of philosophy all non-European men without exception have remained. It suffices for all the necessary practical ends of life; and, among our race even, it is only the highly sophisticated specimens, the minds debauched by learning, as Berkeley calls them, who have ever even suspected common sense of not being absolutely true. But when we look back, and speculate as to how the common-sense categories may have achieved their wonderful supremacy, no reason appears why it may not have been by a pro- cess just like that by which the conceptions due to Democritus, Berkeley, or Darwin, achieved their similar triumphs in more recent times. In other words, they may have been success- fully discovered by prehistoric geniuses whose names the night of antiquity has covered up; they may have been verified by the immediate 182 COMMON SENSE facts of experience which they first fitted; and then from fact to fact and from man to man they may have spread, until all language rested on them and we are now incapable of thinking naturally in any other terms. Such a view would only follow the rule that has proved elsewhere so fertile, of assuming the vast and remote to conform to the laws of formation that we can observe at work in the small and near. For all utilitarian practical purposes these conceptions amply suffice ; but that they began at special points of discovery and only gradu- ally spread from one thing to another, seems proved by the exceedingly dubious limits of their application to-day. We assume for certain purposes one ' objective ' Time that aequabili- ter fluit, but we don't livingly believe in or realize any such equally-flowing time. * Space' is a less vague notion; but * things,' what are they? Is a constellation properly a thing? or an army ? or is an ens rationis such as space or justice a thing? Is a knife whose handle and blade are changed the ' same ' ? Is the ' change- 183 PRAGMATISM ling,' whom Locke so seriously discusses, of the human * kind ' ? Is * telepathy ' a ' fancy ' or a 'fact'? The moment you pass beyond the practical use of these categories (a use usually suggested sufficiently by the circumstances of the special case) to a merely curious or specu- lative way of thinking, you find it impossible to say within just what limits of fact any one of them shall apply. The peripatetic philosophy, obeying ration- alist propensities, has tried to eternalize the common-sense categories by treating them very technically and articulately. A 'thing' for in- stance is a being, or ens. An e7is is a subject in which qualities 'inhere.' A subject is a sub- stance. Substances are of kinds, and kinds are definite in number, and discrete. These distinctions are fundamental and eternal. As terms of discourse they are indeed magni- ficently useful, but what they mean, apart from their use in steering our discourse to profitable issues, does not appear. If you ask a scholastic philosopher what a substance may be in itself, apart from its being the support of attributes, 184 COMMON SENSE he simply says that your intellect knows per- fectly what the word means. But what the intellect knows clearly is only the word itself and its steering function. So it comes about that intellects sibi permissi, intel- lects only curious and idle, have forsaken the common-sense level for what in general terms may be called the 'critical' level of thought. Not mereljsuch intellects either — your Humes and Berkeleys and Hegels; but practical ob- servers of facts, your Galileos, Daltons, Fara- days, have found it impossible to treat the naifs sense-termini of common sense as ulti- mately real. As common sense interpolates her constant 'things' between our intermittent sensations, so science extrapolates her world of 'primary' qualities, her atoms, her ether, her magnetic fields, and the like, beyond the common-sense world. The 'things' are now invisible impalpable things; and the old visible common-sense things are supposed to result from the mixture of these invisibles. Or else the whole naif conception of thing gets super- seded, and a thing's name is interpreted as 185 PRAGMATISM denoting only the law or regel der verbindung by which certain of our sensations habitually succeed or coexist. Science and critical philosophy thus burst the bounds of common sense. With science naif realism ceases: 'Secondary' qualities be- come unreal; primary ones alone remain. With critical philosophy, havoc is made of everything. The common-sense categories one and all cease to represent anything in the way of being; they are but sublime tricks of human thought, our ways of escaping bewilderment in the midst of sensation's irremediable flow. But the scientific tendency in critical thought, tho inspired at first by purely intellectual mo- tives, has opened an entirely unexpected range of practical utilities to our astonished view. Galileo gave us accurate clocks and accurate artillery-practice; the chemists flood us with new medicines and dye-stuffs; Ampere and Faraday have endowed us with the New York subway and with Marconi telegrams. The hypothetical things that such men have in- vented, defined as they have defined them, are 186 COMMON SENSE showing an extraordinary fertility in conse- quences verifiable by sense. Our logic can de- duce from them a consequence due under certain conditions, we can then bring about the conditions, and presto, the consequence is there before our eyes. The scope of the prac- tical control of nature new^y put into our hand by scientific ways of thinking vastly exceeds the scope of the old control grounded on common sense. Its rate of increase accelerates so that no one can trace the limit; one may even fear that the being of man may be crushed by his own powers, that his fixed nature as an organ- ism may not prove adequate to stand the strain of the ever increasingly tremendous functions, almost divine creative functions, which his intellect will more and more enable him to wield. He may drown in his wealth like a child in a bath-tub, who has turned on the water and who can not turn it off. The philosophic stage of criticism, much more thorough in its negations than the scientific stage, so far gives us no new range of practical power. Locke, Hume, Berkeley, Kant, Hegel, 187 PRAGMATISM have all been utterly sterile, so far as shedding any light on the details of nature goes, and I can think of no invention or discovery that can be directly traced to anything in their pe- culiar thought, for neither with Berkeley's tar- water nor with Kant's nebular hypothesis had their respective philosophic tenets anything to do. The satisfactions they yield to their disciples are intellectual, not practical; and even then we have to confess that there is a large minus-side to the account. There are thus at least three well-character- ized levels, stages or types of thought about the world we live in, and the notions of one stage have one kind of merit, those of another stage another kind. It is impossible, however, to say that any stage as yet in sight is absolutely more true than any other. Common sense is the more consolidated stage, because it got its innings first, and made all language into its ally. Whether it or science be the more august stage may be left to private judgment. But neither consolidation nor augustness are de- cisive marks of truth. If common sense were 188 COMMON SENSE true, why should science have had to brand the secondary qualities, to which our world owes all its living interest, as false, and to in- vent an invisible world of points and curves, and mathematical equations instead? Why should it have needed to transform causes and activities into laws of 'functional variation'? Vainly did scholasticism, common sense's college-trained younger sister, seek to stereo- type the forms the human family had always talked with, to make them definite and fix them for eternity. Substantial forms (in other words our secondary qualities) hardly out- lasted the year of our Lord 1600. People were already tired of them then; and Galileo, and Descartes, with his *new philosophy,' gave them only a little later their coup de grace. But now if the new kinds of scientific ' thing,' the corpuscular and etheric world, were es- sentially more 'true,' why should they have excited so much criticism within the body of science itself? Scientific logicians are saying on every hand that these entities and their determinations, however definitely conceived, 189 PRAGMATISM should not be held for literally real. It is as if they existed; but in reality they are like co-or- dinates or logarithms, only artificial short-cuts for taking us from one part to another of ex- perience's flux. We can cipher fruitfully with them ; they serve us wonderfully ; but we must not be their dupes. There is no ringing conclusion possible when we compare these types of thinking, with a view to telling which is the more absolutely true. Their naturalness, their intellectual eco- nomy, their fruitfulness for practice, all start up as distinct tests of their veracity, and as a result we get confused. Common sense is better for one sphere of life, science for another, philo- sophic criticism for a third; but whether either be truer absolutely. Heaven only knows. Just now, if I understand the matter rightly, we are witnessing a curious reversion to the common sense way of looking at physical nature, in the philosophy of science favored by such men as Mach, Ostwald and Duhem. According to these teachers no hypothesis is truer than any other in the sense of being a more literal copy 190 COMMON SENSE of reality. They are all but ways of talking on our part, to be compared solely from, the point of view of their use. The only literally true thing is reality; and the only reality we know is, for these logicians, sensible reality, the flux of our sensations and emotions as they pass. * Energy' is the collective name (according to Ostwald) for the sensations just as they pre- sent themselves (the movement, heat, mag- netic pull, or light, or whatever it may be) when they are measured in certain ways. So measuring them, we are enabled to describe the correlated changes which they show us, in formulas matchless for their simplicity and fruitfulness for human use. They are sove- reign triumphs of economy in thought. No one can fail to admire the 'energetic' philosophy. But the hypersensible entities, the corpuscles and vibrations, hold their own with most physicists and chemists, in spite of its appeal. It seems too economical to be all- sufficient. Profusion, not economy, may after all be reality's key-note. I am dealing here with highly technical 191 PRAGMATISM matters, hardly suitable for popular lecturing, and in which my own competence is small. All the better for my conclusion, however, which at this point is this. The whole notion of truth, which naturally and without reflex- ion^e assume to mean the simple duplication Iby the minJof a ready-made and given reality, proves hard to understand clearly. There is no simple test available for adjudicating off- hand between the divers types of thought that claim to possess it. Common sense, common science or corpuscular philosophy, ultra-critical science, or energetics, and critical or idealistic philosophy, all seem insufficiently true in some regard and leave some dissatisfaction. It is evident that the conflict of these so widely differing systems obliges us to overhaul the very idea of truth, for at present we have no definite notion of what the word may mean. I shall face that task in my next lecture, and will add but a few words, in finishing the present one. There are only two points that I wish you to retain from the present lecture. The first one 192 COMMON SENSE relates to common sense. We have seen reason to suspect it, to suspect that in spite of their being so venerable, of their being so univer- sally used and built into the very structure of language, its categories may after all be only a collection of extraordinarily successful hypo- theses (historically discovered or invented by single men, but gradually communicated, and used by everybody) by which our forefathers have from time immemorial unified and straightened the discontinuity of their imme- diate experiences, and put themselves into an equilibrium with the surface of nature so satis- factory for ordinary practical purposes that it certainly would have lasted forever, but for the excessive intellectual vivacity of Democri- tus, Archimedes, Galileo, Berkeley, and of other excentric geniuses whom the example of such men inflamed. Retain, I pray you, this suspicion about common sense. The other point is this. Ought not the exist- ence of the various types of thinking which we have reviewed, each so splendid for certain purposes, yet all conflicting still, and neither 193 PRAGMATISM one of them able to support a claim of abso- lute veracity, to awaken a presumption favor- able to the pragmatistic view that all our theo- ries are instrumental, are mental modes of adaptation to reality, rather than revelations or gnostic answers to some divinely instituted world-enigma ? I expressed this view as clearly as I could in the second of these lectures. Cer- tainly the restlessness of the actual theoretic situation, the value for some purposes of each thought-level, and the inability of either to expel the others decisively, suggest this prag- matistic view, which I hope that the next lec- tures may soon make entirely convincing. May there not after all be a possible ambiguity in truth? VI PRAGMATISM'S CONCEPTION OF TRUTH LECTURE VI PRAGMATISM'S CONCEPTION OF TRUTH When Clerk-Maxwell was a child it is writ- ten that he had a mania for having everything explained to him, and that when people put him off with vague verbal accounts of any phe- nomenon he would interrupt them impatiently by saying, ' Yes ; but I want you to tell me the particular go of it!' Had his question been about truth, only a pragmatist could have told him the particular go of it. I believe that our contemporary pragmatists, especially Messrs. Schiller and Dewey, have given the only ten- able account of this subject. It is a very tick- lish subject, sending subtle rootlets into all kinds of crannies, and hard to treat in the sketchy way that alone befits a public lecture. But the Schiller-Dewey view of truth has been so ferociously attacked by rationalistic phil- osophers, and so abominably misunderstood, that here, if anywhere, is the point where a clear and simple statement should be made. 197 PRAGMATISM I fully expect to see the pragmatist view of truth run through the classic stages of a theory's career. First, you know, a new theory is at- tacked as absurd; then it is admitted to be true, but obvious and insignificant; finally it is seen to be so important that its adversaries claim that they themselves discovered it. Our doctrine of truth is at present in the first of these three stages, with symptoms of the second stage having begun in certain quarters. I wish that this lecture might help it beyond the first stage in the eyes of many of you. Truth, as any dictionary will tell you, is a property of certain of our ideas. It means their * agreement,' as falsity means their disagree- ment, with ' reality.' Pragmatists and intellect- ualists both accept this definition as a matter of course. They begin to quarrel only after the question is raised as to what may precisely be meant by the term * agreement,' and what by the term * reality,' when reality is taken as something for our ideas to agree with. In answering these questions the pragma- tists are more analytic and painstaking, the 198 THE NOTION OF TRUTH intellectualists more offhand and irreflective. The popular notion is that a true idea must copy its reality. Like other popular views, this one follows the analogy of the most usual ex- perience. Our true ideas of sensible things do indeed copy them. Shut your eyes and think of yonder clock on the wall, and you get just such a true picture or copy of its dial. But your idea of its ' works ' (unless you are a clock- maker) is much less of a copy, yet it passes muster, for it in no way clashes with the real- ity. Even though it should shrink to the mere word 'works,' that word still serves you truly; and when you speak of the 'time-keeping function' of the clock, or of its spring's 'elas- ticity,' it is hard to see exactly what your ideas can copy. You perceive that there is a problem here. Where our ideas cannot copy definitely their object, what does agreement with that object mean.? Some idealists seem to say that they are true whenever they are what God means that we ought to think about that object. Others hold the copy-view all through, and 199 PRAGMATISM speak as if our ideas possessed truth just in proportion as they approach to being copies of the Absolute's eternal way of thinking. These views, you see, invite pragmatistic discussion. But thegreat assumption of the intellectualists is that truth me^ns^ essentially an inert static relation. When you've got your true idea of anything, there's an end of the matter. You're in possession; you know; you have fulfilled your thinking destiny. You are where you ought to be mentally; you have obeyed your categorical imperative; and no- thing more need follow on that climax of your rational destiny. Epistemologically you are in stable equilibrium. Pragmatism, on the other hand, asks its usual question. " Grant an idea or belief to be true," it says, "what concrete difference will its being true make in any one's actual life.^ How will the truth be realized? What experi- ences will be different from those which would obtain if the belief were false? What, iiLshort, is the truth's cash-value in experiential terms?" The moment pragmatism asks this question, 200 THE NOTION OF TRUTH it sees the answer : True ideas are those that we ^ can assimilate^ validate^ corroborate and verify. False ideas are those that we can not. That is the practical difference it makes to us to have true ideas; that, therefore, is the meaning of truth, for it is all that truth is known-as. This thesis is what I have to defend. The truth of an idea is not a stagnant property inherent in it. Truth happens to an idea. It becomes true, is made true^ by events. Its verity is in fact an event, a process: the_process namely_ofJts_verif y ing itself,_ U y eri^ fication . Its validity js the process ofjts^ YaVid-ation. But what do the words verification and valid- ation themselves pragmatically mean.^ They again signify certain practical consequences of the verified and validated idea. It is hard to find any one phrase that characterizes these consequences better than the ordinary agreement-formula — just such consequences being what we have in mind whenever we say that our ideas * agree' with reality. They lead us, namely, through the acts and other ideas which they instigate, into or up to, 201 PRAGMATISM or towards, other parts of experience with which we feel all the while — such feeling be- ing among our potentialities — that the original ideas remain in agreement. The connexions and transitions come to us from point to point as being progressive, harmonious, satisfactory. This function of agreeable leading is what we mean by an idea's verification. Such an account is vague and it sounds at first quite trivial, but it has results which it will take the rest of my hour to explain. Let me begin by reminding you of the fact that the possession of true thoughts means everywhere the possession^of invaluable instru- ments of action; and that our duty to gain truth, so far from being a blank command from out of the blue, or a 'stunt' self-imposed by our intellect, can account for itself by excellent practical reasons. The importance to human life of having true beliefs about matters of fact is a thing too notorious. We live in a world of realities that can be infinitely useful or infinitely harmful. 202 THE NOTION OF TRUTH Ideas that tell us which of them to expect count as the true ideas in all this primary sphere of verification, and the pursuit of such ideas is a primary human duty. The pos- session of truth, so far from being here an end in itself, is only a preliminary means towards other vital satisfactions. If I am lost in the woods and starved, and find what looks like a cow-path, it is of the utmost importance that I should think of a human habitation at the end of it, for if I do so and follow it, I save myself. The true thought is useful here because the house which is its ob- ject is useful. The^pra£tlcal yaJ^ie^f tj^^ is thus primarily derived from the practical importance of their object s to us. Their ob- jects are, indeed, not important at all times. I may on another occasion have no use for the house; and then my idea of it, however veri- fiable, will be practically irrelevant, and had better remain latent. Yet since almost any object may some day become temporarily important, the advantage of having a general stock of extra truths, of ideas that shall be true 203 PRAGMATISM of merely possible situations, is obvious. We store such extra truths away in our memories, and with the overflow we fill our books of refer- ence. Whenever such an extra truth becomes practically relevant to one of our emergencies, it passes from cold-storage to do work in the world and our belief in it grows active. You can say of it then either that 'it is useful be- cause_itjs_true* or that 'it is Jrue because it is usefu].' Both these phrases mean exactly_the samejthing^ namely^that here is an idea that gets fulfilled and can be verified. True is the name for whatever idea starts the verification- process, useful is the name for its completed function in experience. True ideas would never have been singled out as such, would never have acquired a class-name, least of all a name suggesting value, unless they had been useful from the outset in this way. From this simple cue pragmatism gets her general notion of truth as something essentially bound up with the way in which one moment in our experience may lead us towards other moments which it will be worth while to have 204 THE NOTION OF TRUTH been led to. Primarily, and on the common- sense level, the truth of a state of mind means this function of a leading that is worth while. When a moment in our experience, of any kind whatever, inspires us with a thought that is true, that means that sooner or later we dip by that thought's guidance into the particulars of experience again and^ake^ advantageous con- nexion with them. This is a vague enough statement, but I beg you to retain it, for it is essential. Our experience meanwhile is all shot through with regularities. One bit of it can warn us to get ready for another bit, can * intend' or be * significant of that remoter object. The ob- ject's advent is the significance's verification. Truth, in these cases, meaning nothing but eventual verification, is manifestly incompat ible with waywardness on our part. Woe to him whose beliefs play fast and loose with the order which realities follow in his experience; they will lead him nowhere or else make false connexions. 205 PRAGMATISM By 'realities' or 'objects' here, we mean either things of common sense, sensibly pre- sent, or else common-sense relations, such as dates, places, distances, kinds, activities. Fol- lowing our mental image of a house along the cow- path, we actually come to see the house; we get the image's full verification. Such simply and fully verified leadings are certainly the originals and prototypes of the truth-process. Experience offers indeed other forms of truth- process, but they are all conceivable as being primary verifications arrested, multiplied or substituted one for another. Take, for instance, yonder object on the wall. You and I consider it to be a 'clock,' altho no one of us has seen the hidden works that make it one. We let our notion pass for true withou'. attempting to verify. If truths mean verification-process essentially, ought we then to call such unverified truths as this abort- ive.^ No, for they form the overwhelmingly large number of the truths we live by. Indirect as well as direct verifications pass muster. Where circumstantial evidence is sufficient, we 206 THE NOTION OF TRUTH can go without eye-witnessing. Just as we here assume Japan to exist without ever having been there, because it works to do so, every- thing we know conspiring with the belief, and nothing interfering, so we assume that thing to be a clock. We use it as a clock, regulating the length of our lecture byjt. The verifica- tion of the assumption here_ means its leading to noJ[rustj;aticuL-fit cojnrtra^i Verifia6iZ- ity of wheels and weights and pendulum is as good as verification. For one truth-process completed there are a million in our lives that function in this state of nascency. They turn us towards direct verification; lead us into the surroundings of the objects they envisage ; and then, if everything runs on harmoniously, we are so sure that verification is possible that we omit it, and are usually justified by all that happens. Truth lives, in fact, for the most part on a credit system. Our thoughts and beliefs *pass,' so long as nothing challenges them, just as bank-notes pass so long as nobody refuses them. But this all points to direct face-to-face 207 PRAGMATISM verifications somewhere, without which the fabric of truth collapses like a financial system with no cash-basis whatever. You accept my verification of one thing, I yours of another. We trade on each other's truth. But beliefs verified concretely by somebody are the posts of the whole superstructure. Another great reason — beside economy of time — for waiving complete verification in the usual business of life is that all things exist in kinds and not singly. Our world is found once for all to have that peculiarity. So that when we have once directly verified our ideas about one specimen of a kind, we consider our- selves free to apply them to other specimens without verification. A mind that habitually discerns the kind of thing before it, and acts by the law of the kind immediately, without pausing to verify, will be a 'true' mind in ninety-nine out of a hundred emergencies, proved so by its conduct fitting everything it meets, and getting no refutation. Indirectly or only potentially verifying pro- cesses may thus be true as well as full verifica- 208 THE NOTION OF TRUTH tion-processes. They work as true processes would work, give us the same advantages, and claim our recognition for the same reasons. All this on the common-sense level of matters of fact, which we are alone considering. But matters of fact are not our only stock in trade. Relations among purely mental ideas form another sphere where true and false be- liefs obtain, and here the beliefs are absolute, or unconditional. When they are true they bear the name either of definitions or of prin- ciples. It is either a principle or a definition that I and 1 make 2, that 2 and 1 make 3, and so on; that white differs less from gray than it does from black ; that when the cause begins to act the effect also commences. Such pro- positions hold of all possible 'ones,' of all con- ceivable 'whites' and 'grays' and 'causes.' The objects here are mental objects. Their relations are perceptually obvious at a glance, and no sense-verification is necessary. More- over, once true, always true, of those same mental objects. Truth here has an * eternal' 209 PRAGMATISM character. If you can find a concrete thing any- where that is 'one' or 'white' or 'gray' or an 'effect,' then your principles will everlastingly apply to it. It is but a case of ascertaining the kind, and then applying the law of its kind to the particular object. You are sure to get truth if you can but name the kind rightly, for your mental relations hold good of everything of that kind without exception. If you then, nevertheless, failed to get truth concretely, you would say that you had classed your real objects wrongly. In this realm of mental relations, truth again is an affair of leading. We relate one abstract idea with another, framing in the end great systems of logical and mathematical truth, under the respective terms of which the sensible facts of experience eventually arrange themselves, so that our eternal truths hold good of realities also. This marriage of fact and theory is endlessly fertile. What we say is here already true in advance of special veri- fication,!/ we have subsumed our objects rightly. Our ready-made ideal framework for all sorts 210 THE NOTION OF TRUTH of possible objects follows from the very struc- ture of our thinking. We can no more play f ast and loose with these abstract relations than we can do so with our sense-experiences. They c oerce us; we mu st treat th em cons is- tently, whether or not we li ke the resu lts. The rules of addition apply to our debts as rigor- ously as to our assets. The hundredth decimal of TT, the ratio of the circumference to its dia- meter, is predetermined ideally now, tho no one may have computed it. If we should ever need the figure in our dealings with an actual circle we should need to have it given rightly, calculated by the usual rules; for it is the same kind of truth that those rules else- where calculate. B etween the co erci ons of the sens ible order and those o f the ideal order, our mind is thus wedged^ tightly. Our ideas must agree with y^ reaHties, be^such realities concrete or abstract, bej;hey facts or be they principles, under penalty^^£^iidless_mcqnsis_tency^^a Jrustra- tion. So far, intellectualists can raise no protest. 211 PRAGMATISM They can only say that we have barely touched the skin of the matter. Realities mean, then, either concrete facts, or abstract kinds of thing and relations per- ceived intuitively between them. They fur- thermore and thirdly mean, as things that new ideas of ours must no less take account of, the whole body of other truths already in our possession. But what now does * agree- ment' with such threefold realities mean ? — to use again the definition that is current, Here it is that pragmatism and intellectual- ism begin to part company. Primarily, no doubt, to agree means to copy, but we saw that the mere w^ord 'clock' would do instead of a mental picture of its works, and that of many realities our ideas can only be symbols and not copies. 'Past time,' 'power,' 'spon- taneity,' — how can our mind copy such real- ities ? To 'agree' in the widest sense with a reality can only mean to be guided either straight up to it or into its surroundings, or to be put intdsuch 212 THE NOTION OF TRUTH working touch with it as to handle eitherji or something connected with it better than if we disagreed. Better either intellectually or prac- tically! And often agreement will only mean the negative fact that nothing contradictory from the quarter of that reality comes to inter- fere with the way in which our ideas guide us elsewhere. To copy a reality is, indeed, one very important way of agreeing with it, but it is far from being essential. The essential thing is the process of being guided. Any idea that helps us to deal y wh ether practically or in- tellectually, with either the_reality or its_Jbe- longings, that doesn't entangle our progress in frustrations, that fits, in fact, and adapts our life t^o the reality's whole setting, will_agree sufficiently^ to meetJthe^ requireme nt. It will hold true of that reality. Thus, names are just as 'true' or 'false' as definite mental pictures are. They set up sim- ilar verification-processes, and lead to fully equivalent practical results. All human thinking gets discursified; we exchange ideas; we lend and borrow verifica- 213 PRAGMATISM tlons, get them from one another by means of social intercourse. All truth thus gets verbally built out, stored up, and made available for every one. Hence, we must talk consistently just as we must think consistently: for both in talk and thought we deal with kinds. Names are arbitrary, but once understood they must be kept to. We mustn't now call Abel 'Cain' or Cain 'Abel.' If we do, we un- gear ourselves from the whole book of Genesis, and from all its connexions with the universe of speech and fact down to the present time. We throw ourselves out of whatever truth that entire system of speech and fact may embody. The overwhelming majority of our true ideas admit of no direct or face-to-face veri- fication — those of past history, for example, as of Cain and Abel. The stream of time can be remounted only verbally, or verified indi- rectly by the present prolongations or effects of what the past harbored. Yet if they agree with these verbalities and effects, we can know that our ideas of the past are true. As true as past time itself was, so true was Julius Caesar, £14 THE NOTION OF TRUTH so true were antediluvian monsters, all in their proper dates and settings. That past time itself was, is guaranteed by its coherence with everything that's present. True as the present is, the past was also. Agreement thus turns out to be essentially an affair of leading — leading that is useful because it is into quarters that contain objects that are important. True ideas lead us into useful verbal and conceptual quarters as well as directly up to useful sensible termini. They lead to consistency, stability and flowing hu- man intercourse. They lead away from excen- tricity and isolation, from foiled and barren thinking. The untrammelled flowing of the leading-process, its general freedom from clash and contradiction, passes for its indirect verification; but all roads lead to Rome, ajid in the end and eventually, all true processes must lead to the face of directly^ verifying sensible experiences somewhere, which some- body's ideas have copied. Such is the large loose way in which the pragmatist interprets the word agreement. He 215 PRAGMATISM treats it altogether practically. He lets it cover any process of conduction from a present idea to a future terminus, provided only it run prosperously. It is only thus that 'scientific* ideas, flying as they do beyond common sense, can be said to agree with their realities. It is, as I have already said, as if reality were made of ether, atoms or electrons, but we must n't think so literally. The term 'energy' does n't even pretend to stand for anything 'object- ive.' It is only a way of measuring the sur- face of phenomena so as to string their changes on a simple formula. Yet in the choice of these man-made formu- las we can not be capricious with impunity any more than we can be capricious on the common-sense practical level. We must find a theory that will work; and that means some- thing extremely difficultj^ for oiir_ theory must mediate between all previous truths and per- tain new^ experiences ._ It must derange com- mon sense and previous belief as little as possible, and it mus^ lead to some sensible terminus or other that can be verified exactly. 216 THE NOTION OF TRUTH To 'work' means both these things; and the squeeze is so tight that there is little loose plaj for any hypothesis. Our theories are wedged and controlled as nothing else is. Yet some- times alternative theoretic formulas are equally compatible w^ith all the truths we know, and then we choose between them for subjective reasons. We choose the kind of theory to which we are already partial; we follow 'elegance' or 'economy.' Clerk-Maxwell somewhere says it would be 'poor scientific taste' to choose the more complicated of two equally well-evi- denced conceptions; and you will all agree with him. Truth in science is what gives us the maximum possible sum of satisfactions, taste included, but consistency both with pre- vious truth and with noyeLfact is^ always the most imperious claimant. I have led you through a very sandy deserfr. But now, if I may be allowed so vulgar an ex- pression, we begin to taste the milk in the cocoa- nut. Our rationalist critics here discharge their batteries upon us, and to reply to them will take 217 PRAGMATISM us out from all this dryness into full sight of a momentous philosophical alternative. Our account of truth is an account of truths in the plural, of processes of leading, realized in rebus, and having only this quality in com- mon, that they pay. They pay by guiding us into or towards some part of a system that dips at numerous points into sense-percepts, which we may copy mentally or not, but with which at any rate we are now in the kind of commerce vaguely designated as verification. Truth for us is simply a collective name for verification- processes, just as health, wealth, strength, etc., are names for other processes connected with life, and also pursued because it pays to pur- sue them. Truth is made, just as health, wealth and strength are made, in the course of experi- ence. Here rationalism is instantaneously up in arms against us. I can imagine a rationalist to talk as follows: "Truth is not made," he will say; "it abso- lutely obtains, being a unique relation that does not wait upon any process, but shoots 218 THE NOTION OF TRUTH straight over the head of experience, and hits its reality every time. Our belief that yon thing on the wall is a clock is true already, altho no one in the whole history of the world should verify it. The bare quality of standing in that transcendent relation is what makes any thought true that possesses it, w^hether or not there be verification. You pragmatists put the cart before the horse in making truth's being reside in verification-processes. These are merely signs of its being, merely our lame ways of ascertaining after the fact, which of our ideas already has possessed the wondrous quality. The quality itself is timeless, like all essences and natures. Thoughts partake of it directly, as they partake of falsity or of irrelevancy. It can't be analyzed away into pragmatic con- sequences." The whole plausibility of this rationalist tirade is due to the fact to which we have al- ready paid so much attention. In our world, namely, abounding as it does in things of simi- lar kinds and similarly associated, one verifica- tion serves for others of its kind, and one great 219 PRAGMATISM use of knowing things is to be led not so much to them as to their associates, especially to human talk about them. The quality of truth, obtaining ante rem, pragmatically means, then, the fact that in such a world innumerable ideas work better by their indirect or possible than by their direct and actual verification. Truth ante rem means only verifiability, then; or else it is a case of the stock rationalist trick of treating the name of a concrete phenomenal reality as an independent prior entity, and placing it behind the reality as its explanation. Professor Mach quotes somewhere an epigram of Lessing's: Sagt Hanschen Schlau zu Vetter Fritz, "Wie kommt es, VeUer Fritzen, Dass grad' die Reichsten in der Welt, Das meiste Geld besitzen ? " Hanschen Schlau here treats the principle * wealth' as something distinct from the facts denoted by the man's being rich. It antedates them ; the facts become only a sort of second- ary coincidence with the rich man's essential nature. 220 THE NOTION OF TRUTH In the case of * wealth' we all see the fallacy. We know that wealth is but a name for con- crete processes that certain men's lives play a part in, and not a natural excellence found in Messrs. Rockefeller and Carnegie, but not in the rest of us. Like wealth, health also lives in rebus. It is a name for processes, as digestion, circulation, sleep, etc., that go on happily, tho in this in- stance we are more inclined to think of it as a principle and to say the man digests and sleeps so well because he is so healthy. With * strength' we are, I think, more ration- alistic still, and decidedly inclined to treat it as an excellence pre-existing in the man and explanatory of the herculean performances of his muscles. With 'truth' most people go over the border entirely, and treat the rationalistic account as self-evident. But really all these words in th are exactly similar. Truth exists ante rem just as much and as little as the other things do. • The scholastics, following Aristotle, made much of the distinction between habit and act. 221 PRAGMATISM Health in actu means, among other things, good sleeping and digesting. But a healthy man need not always be sleeping, or always digesting, any more than a wealthy man need be always handling money, or a strong man always lifting weights. All such qualities sink to the status of 'habits' between their times of exercise; and similarly truth becomes a habit of certain of our ideas and beliefs in their intervals of rest from their verifying activities. But those activities are the root of the whole matter, and the condition of there being any habit to exist in the intervals. * The true,' to put it very briefly, is only the expedient in the way of our thinking, just as * the right ' is only the expedient in the way of our behaving. Expedient in almost any fashion; and expedient in the long run and on the whole of course; for what meets expediently all the experience in sight won't necessarily meet all farther experiences equally satisfactorily. Ex- perience, as we know, has ways of boiling over, and making us correct our present formulas. The 'absolutely' true, meaning what no far- ' 222 THE NOTION OF TRUTH ther ex perience will ever alter, is that ideal van- 1 ^ i^hing-point towards which we imagine, that all ou r tem porary truths will sorne day ciJaverge. It runs on all fours with the perfectly wise man, ^ and with the absolutely complete experience; and, if these ideals are ever realized, they will all^be realized together. Meanwhile we have to live to-day by what truth we can get to-day, and be ready to-morrow to call it falsehood. Ptolemaic astronomy, euclidean space, aris- totelian logic, scholastic metaphysics, were expedient for centuries, but human experience has boiled over those limits, and we now call these things only relatively true, or true within, those borders of experience. 'Absolutely' they are false; for we know that those limits were cas- ual, and might have been transcended by past theorists just as they are by present thinkers. When new experiences lead to retrospective judgments, using the past tense, what these judgments utter was true, even tho no past thinker had been led there. We live forwards, a Danish thinker has said, but we understand backwards. The present sheds a backward 223 PRAGMATISM light on the world's previous processes. They may have been truth-processes for the actors in them. They are not so for one who knows the later revelations of the story. This regulative notion of a potential better truth to be established later, possibly to be established some day absolutely, and having powers of retroactive legislation, turns its face, like all pragmatist notions, towards concrete- ness of fact, and towards the future. Like the half-truths, the absolute truth will have Jo be made, made as a relation incidental to the growth of a mass of verification-experience, to which the half-true ideas are all along con- tributing their quota. I have already insisted on the fact that truth is made largely out of previous truths. Men's beliefs at any time are so much experi- ence funded. But the beliefs are themselves parts of the sum total of the world's experience, and become matter, therefore, for the next day's funding operations. So far as reality means experienceable reality, both it and the truths men gain about it are everlastingly in 224 THE NOTION OF TRUTH process of mutation — mutation towards a definite goal, it may be — but still muta- tion. Mathematicians can solve problems with two variables. On the Newtonian theory, for instance, acceleration varies with distance, but distance also varies with acceleration. In the realm of truth-processes facts come independ- ently and determine our beliefs provisionally. But these beliefs make us act, and as fast as they do so, they bring into sight or into exist- ence new facts which re-determine the beliefs accordingly. So the whole coil and ball of truth, as it rolls up, is the product of a double influence. Truths emerge from facts; but they dip forward into facts again and^^d tqjthem; which facts again create or reveal new truth (the word is indifferent) and so on indefinitely. The 'facts* themselves meanwhile are not true. They simply are. Truth is the functiori of the beliefs that start and terminate among them. / The case is like a snowball's growth, due as it is to the distribution of the snow on the one hand, and to the successive pushes of the boys 225 PRAGMATISM on the other, with these factors co-determin ing each other incessantly. \ The most fateful point of difference between being a rationalist and being a pragmatist is now fully in sight. Experience is in mutation, and our psychological ascertainments of truth are in mutation — so much rationalism will allow; but never that either reality itself or truth itself is mutable. Reality stands complete and ready-made from all eternjty, rationalism insists, and the agreement of our ideas with it is that unique unanalyzable virtue in them of which she has already told us. As that intrinsic excellence, their truth has nothing to do with our experiences. It adds nothing to the content of experience. It makes no difference to reality itself; it is supervenient, inert, static, a reflex- ion merely. It doesn't exist, it holds or ob- tains, it belongs to another dimension from that of either facts or fact-relations, belongs, in short, to the epistemological dimension — and with that big word rationalism closes the dis- cussion. 226 THE NOTION OF TRUTH Thus, just as pragmatism faces forward to the future, so does rationalism here again face backward to a past eternity. True to her invet- erate habit, rationalism reverts to 'principles,' and thinks that when an abstraction once is named, we own an oracular solution. The tremendous pregnancy in the way of consequences for life of this radical difference of outlook will only become apparent in my later lectures. I wish meanwhile to close this lecture by showing that rationalism's sublim- ity does not save it from inanity. When, namely, you ask rationalists, instead of accusing pragmatism of desecrating the notion of truth, to define it themselves by saying exactly w^hat they understand by it, the only positive attempts I can think of are these two : 1. "Truth is the system of propositions which have an unconditional claim to be re- cognized as valid." * 2. Truth is a name for all those judgments * A. E. Taylor, Philosophical Review, vol. xiv, p. 288. 227 PRAGMATISM which we find ourselves under obligation to make by a kind of imperative duty.* The first thing that strikes one in such de- finitions is their unutterable triviality. They are absolutely true, of course, but absolutely in- significant until you handle them pragmatic- ally. What do you mean by * claim' here, and what do you mean by *duty'.^ As summary names for the concrete reasons why thinking in true ways is overwhelmingly expedient and good for mortal men, it is all right to talk of claims on reality's part to be agreed with, and of obligations on our part to agree. We feel both the claims and the obligations, and we feel them for just those reasons. But the rationalists who talk of claim and obligation expressly say that they have nothing to do with our ^practical interests or 'personal reasons. Our reasons for agreeing are psycho- logical facts, they say, relative to each thinker, and to the accidents of his life. They are his evidence merely, they are no part of the life of * H. Rickert, Der Gegenstand der Erkenntniss, chapter on 'Die Urtheilsnothwendigkeit.' 228 THE NOTION OF TRUTH truth itself. That Hfe transacts itself in a purely logical or epistemological,as distinguished from a psychological, dimension, and its claims ante- date and exceed all personal motivations what- soever. Tho neither man nor God should ever ascertain truth, the word would still have to be defined as that which ought to be ascer- tained and recognized. There never was a more exquisite example of an idea abstracted from the concretes of experience and then used to oppose and negate what it was abstracted from. Philosophy and common life abound in sim- ilar instances. The^enUmentalist fallacy' is to^ shed je ars ov er abstract justice and gener- osity,^ beauty, etc., and neverjq^know these qualities when you meet them in the street, because the circumstances make them vulvar. Thus I read in the privately printed biography of an eminently rationalistic mind: "It was strange that with such admiration for beauty in the abstract, my brother had no enthusiasm for fine architecture, for beautiful painting, or for flowers." And in almost the last philosophic 229 PRAGMATISM work I have read, I find such passages as the following: "Justice is ideal, solely ideal. Rea- son conceives that it ought to exist, but ex- perience shows that it can not. . . . Truth, which ought to be, can not be. . . . Reason is deformed by experience. As soon as reason enters experience it becomes contrary to rea- son." The rationalist's fallacy here is exactly like the sentimentalist's. Both extract a quality from the muddy particulars of experience, and find it so pure when extracted that they con- trast it with each and all its muddy instances as an opposite and higher nature. All the while it is their nature. It is the nature of truths to be validated, verified. It pays for our ideas to be validated. Our obligation to seek truth is part of our general obligation to do what pays. The payments true ideas bring are the sole why of our duty to follow them. Identical whys exist in the case of wealth and health. Truth makes no other kind of claim and im- poses no other kind of ought than health and wealth do. All these claims are conditional; 230 THE NOTION OF TRUTH the concrete benefits we gain are what we mean by calling the pursuit a duty. In the case of truth, untrue beliefs work as perniciously in the long run as true beliefs work beneficially. Talking abstractly, the quality 'true' may thus be said to grow absolutely precious and the quality * untrue' absolutely damnable: the one may be called good, the other bad, uncon- ditionally. We ought to think the true, we ought to shun the false, imperatively. But if we treat all this abstraction literally and oppose it to its mother soil in experience, see what a preposterous position we work our- selves into. We can not then take a step forward in our actual thinking. When shall I acknowledge this truth and when that.? Shall the acknow- ledgment be loud ? — or silent ? If sometimes loud, sometimes silent, which now ? When may a truth go into cold-storage in the encyclo- pedia.? and when shall it come out for battle ? Must I constantly be repeating the truth * twice two are four' because of its eternal claim on recognition.? or is it sometimes irrelevant.? 231 PRAGMATISM Must my thoughts dwell night and day on my personal sins and blemishes, because I truly have them ? — or may I sink and ignore them in order to be a decent social unit, and not a mass of morbid melancholy and apology ? It is quite evident that our obligation to acknowledge truth, so far from being uncon- ditional, is tremendously conditioned. Truth with a big T, and in the singular, claims ab- stractly to be recognized, of course; but con- crete truths in the plural need be recognized only when their recognition is expedient. A truth must always be preferred to a falsehood when both relate to the situation; but when neither does, truth is as little of a duty as false- hood. If you ask me what o'clock it is and I tell you that I live at 95 Irving Street, my answer may indeed be true, but you don't see why it is my duty to give it. A false address would be as much to the purpose. With this admission that there are conditions that limit the application of the abstract im- perative, the pragmatistic treatment of truth sweeps back upon us in its fulness. Our duty 232 THE NOTION OF TRUTH to agree with reality is seen to be grounded in a perfect jungle of concrete expediencies. When Berkeley had explained what people meant by matter, people thought that he denied matter's existence. When Messrs. Schiller and Dewey now explain what people mean by truth, they are accused of denying its existence. These pragmatists destroy all objective stand- ards, critics say, and put foolishness and wis- dom on one level. A favorite jormula for de- scribing^Ir. Schiljer's doctrines and_mine_is that we are persons who t hink that by saying whatever you fin^Jtpleasaj[itJo_sa^ and calling it truth you fulfil every pragmatistic require- ment. I leave it to you to judge whether this be not an impudent slander. Pent in, as the pragma- tist more than any one else sees himself to be, between the whole body of funded truths squeezed from the past and the coercions of the world of sense about him, who so well as he feels the immense pressure of objective control under_which our minds perform their opera- tions ? If any one imagines that this law is lax, 233 PRAGMATISM let him keep its commandment one day, says Emerson. We have heard much of late of the uses of the imagination in science. It is high time to urge the use of a little imagination in philosophy. The unwillingness of some of our critics to read any but the silliest of possible meanings into our statements is as discreditable to their imaginations as anything I know in re- cent philosophic history. Schiller says the true is that which 'works.' Thereupon he is treated as one who limits verification to the lowest material utilities. Dewey says truth is what gives 'satisfaction.' He is treated as one who believes in calling everything true which, if it were true, would be pleasant. Our critics certainly need more imagination of realities. I have honestly tried to stretch my own imagination and to read the best possible meaning into the rationalist conception, but I have to confess that it still completely baffles me. The notion of a reality calling on us to * agree' with it, and that for no reasons, but simply because its claim is 'unconditional' or 'transcendent,' is one that I can make neither 234 THE NOTION OF TRUTH head nor tail of. I try to imagine myself as the sole reality in the world, and then to imagine what more I would 'claim' if I were allowed to. If you suggest the possibility of my claim- ing that a mind should come into being from out of the void inane and stand and coj^y me, I can indeed imagine what the copying might mean, but I can conjure up no motive. What good it would do me to be copied, or what good it would do that mind to copy me, if further consequences are expressly and in prin- ciple ruled out as motives for the claim (as they are by our rationalist authorities) I can not fathom. When the Irishman's admirers ran him along to the place of banquet in a sedan chair with no bottom, he said, "Faith, if it wasn't for the honor of the thing, I might as well have come on foot." So here: but for the honor of the thing, I might as well have remained uncopied. Copying is one genuine mode of knowing (which for some strange reason our contemporary transcendentalists seem to be tumbling over each other to re- pudiate); but when we get beyond copying, 235 PRAGMATISM and fall back on unnamed forms of agreeing that are expressly denied to be either copyings or leadings or fittings, or any other processes pragmatically definable, the what of the ' agree- ment' claimed becomes as unintelligible as the why of it. Neither content nor motive can be imagined for it. It is an absolutely meaningless abstraction.* Surely in this field of truth it is the prag- matists and not the rationalists who are the more genuine defenders of the universe's rationality. * I am not forgetting that Professor Rickert long ago gave up the whole notion of truth being founded on agreement with reality. Reality according to him, is whatever agrees with truth, and truth is founded solely on our primal duty. This fantastic flight, together with Mr. Joachim's candid confession of failure in his book The Nature of Truth, seems to me to mark the bankruptcy of rationalism when deal- ing with this subject. Rickert deals with part of the pragmatistic po- sition under the head of what he calls ' Relativismus.' I can not discuss his text here. Suffice it to say that his argumentation in that chapter is so feeble as to seem almost incredible in so generally able a writer. VII PRAGMATISM AND HUMANISM LECTURE VII PRAGMATISM AND HUMANISM VV HAT hardens the heart of every one I ap- proach with the view of truth sketched in my last lecture is that typical idol of the tribe, the notion of the Truth, conceived as the one answer, determinate and complete, to the one fixed enigma which the world is believed to propound. For popular tradition, it is all the better if the answer be oracular, so as itself to awaken wonder as an enigma of the second order, veiling rather than revealing what its profundities are supposed to contain. All the great single-word answers to the world's rid- dle, such as God, the One, Reason, Law, Spirit, Matter, Nature, Polarity, the Dialectic Process, the Idea, the Self, the Oversoul, draw the admiration that men have lavished on them from this oracular role. By amateurs in philosophy and professionals alike, the uni- verse is represented as a queer sort of petri- fied sphinx whose appeal to men consists in a monotonous challenge to his divining powers. 239 PRAGMATISM The Truth : what a perfect idol of the ration- alistic mind! I read in an old letter — from a gifted friend who died too young — these words: "In everything, in science, art, morals and religion, there must be one system that is right and every other wrong." How character- istic of the enthusiasm of a certain stage of youth! At twenty-one we rise to such a chal- lenge and expect to find the system. It never occurs to most of us even later that the ques- tion 'what is the truth?' is no real question (being irrelative to all conditions) and that the whole notion of the truth is an abstraction from the fact of truths in the plural, a mere useful summarizing phrase like the Latin Language or the Law. Common-law judges sometimes talk about the law, and schoolmasters talk about the latin tongue, in a way to make their hearers think they mean entities pre-existent to the de- cisions or to the words and syntax, determin- ing them unequivocally and requiring them to obey. But the slightest exercise of reflexion makes us see that, instead of being principles 240 PRAGMATISM AND HUMANISM of this kind, both law and latin are results. Distinctions between the lawful and the unlaw- ful in conduct, or between the correct and in- correct in speech, have grown up incidentally among the interactions of men's experiences in detail ; and in no other way do distinctions between the true and the false in belief ever grow up. Truth grafts itself on previous truth, modifying it in the process, just as idiom grafts itself on previous idiom, and law on previous law. Given previous law and a novel case, and the judge will twist them into fresh law. Previous idiom; new slang or meta- phor or oddity that hits the public taste; — and presto, a new idiom is made. Previous truth; fresh facts:— and our mind finds a new truth. All the while, however, we pretend that the eternal is unrolling, that the one previous jus- tice, grammar or truth are simply fulgurating and not being made. But imagine a youth in the courtroom trying cases with his abstract notion of 'the' law, or a censor of speech let loose among the theatres with his idea of 'the' 241 PRAGMATISM mother- tongue, or a professor setting up to lecture on the actual universe with his ration- alistic notion of ' the Truth ' with a big T, and what progress do they make? Truth, law, and language fairly boil away from them at the least touch of novel fact. These things make themselves as we go. Our rights, wrongs, pro- hibitions, penalties, words, forms, idioms, be- liefs, are so many new creations that add themselves as fast as history proceeds. Far from being antecedent principles that animate the process, law, language, truth are but ab- stract names for its results. Laws and languages at any rate are thus seen to be man-made things. Mr. Schiller applies the analogy to beliefs, and proposes the name of 'Humanism' for the doctrine that to an un- ascertainable extent our truths are man-naade productsjtoo. Human motives sharpen all our questions, human satisfactions lurk in all our answers, all our formulas have a human twist. This element is so inextricable in the products that Mr. Schiller sometimes seems almost to leave it an open question whether there be £4^ PRAGMATISM AND HUMANISM anything else. ''Th^worW^^' he saj^^J^^^^ sent i ally vXtj, i t is what we make ijt. IliSLlmit- less to defi ne lLby_wJiat it originally was or by what it is apar t from us; it is what is mad e of it. He nce ... the world isplaMic." ' He adds that we can learn the limits of the plasticity only by trying, and that we ought to start as if it were wholly plastic, acting methodically on that assumption, and stopping only when we are decisively rebuked. This is Mr. Schiller's butt-end-foremost statement of the humanist position, and it has exposed him to severe attack. I mean to defend the humanist position in this lecture, so I will insinuate a few remarks at this point. Mr. Schiller admits as emphatically as a ny one the presence of resistingja ctors in e very actual ex perience of tru th-making, of which the new-made special truth must take^accpunt, and with which^it has pe rfor ce to 'agree.' All our truths are beliefs about 'Reality'; and jn any particular belief the reality acts as some- thing independent's ajthingjound, not manu- * Personal Idealism, p. GO. 243 PRAGMATISM factured. Let me here recall a bit of my last lecture. 'Reality' is in general what truths have to tahenccount of; ' and the first part of reality from this point of view is the flux of our sensa- tions. Sensations are forced upon us, coming we know not whence. Over their nature, order and quantity we have as good as no control. ThetjSLTe neither true nor false; they simply are. It is only what we say about them, only the names we give them, our theories of their source and nature and remote relations, that may be true or not. The second part of reality, as something that our beliefs must also obedientlyjake Account of is the relations that obtain between our sensa- tions or between their copies in our minds. This part falls into two sub-parts: 1) the rela- tions that are mutable and accidental, as those of date and place ; and 2) those that are fixed and essential because they are grounded on the inner naturesjofjheirterips. Both sorts of rela- ' Mr. Taylor in his Elements of Metaphysics uses this excellent pragmatic definition. 244 PRAGMATISM AND HUMANISM tionare matters of immediate perception. Both are 'facts. ' But it is the latter kind of fact that forms the more important sub-part of reality for our theories of knowledge. Inner re lations namely are 'eternal,' are perceived whene_\er their sensible terms are compared ; and of them ourthought — mathematical and logical thought so-called — must eternally take account. The third part of reality ;, additional to these perceptions (tho largely based upon them), is the previous truths of which every new inquiry takes account. This third part is a much less obdurately resisting factor: it often ends by giving way. In speaking of these three por- tions of reality as at all times controlling our belief's formation, I am only reminding you of what we heard in our last hour. Now however fixed these elements of real- ity may be, we still have a certain freedom in our dealings with them. Take our sensations. That they are is undoubtedly beyond our con- trol; but which we attend to, note, and make emphatic in our conclusions depends on our own interests; and, according as we lay the 245 PRAGMATISM emphasis here or there, quite different formu- lations of truth result. We read the same facts differently. ' Waterloo,' with the same fixed de- tails, spells a 'victory' for an Englishman; for a Frenchman it spells a 'defeat.' So, for an optimist philosopher the universe spells victory, for a pessimist, defeat. What we say about reality thus depends on the perspective iato which we throw_iL_The that of it is its owij; but the what depends on the wJiich; and the which depends on W5. Both the sensational and the relational parts of real- ity are dumb; they say absolutely nothing about themselves. We it is who have to speak for them. This dumbness of sensations has led such intellectualists as T. H. Green and Ed- ward Caird to shove them almost beyond the pale of philosophic recognition, but pragma- tists refuse to go so far. A sensation is rather like a client who has given his case to a lawyer and then has passively to listen in the court- room to whatever account of his affairs, pleas- ant or unpleasant, the lawyer finds it most expedient to give. PRAGMATISM AND HUMANISM Hence, even in the field of sensation, our minds exert a certain arbitrary choice. By our inclusions and omissions we trace the field's ex- tent; by our emphasis we mark its foreground and its background; by our order we read it in this direction or in that. We receive in short the block of marble, but we carve the statue ourselves. This applies to the 'eternaF parts of reality as well : we shuffle our perceptions of intrinsic relation and arrange them just as freely. We read them in one serial order or another, class them in this way or in that, treat one or the other as more fundamental, until our beliefs about them form those bodies of truth known as logics, geometries, or arithmetics, in each and all of which the form and order in which the whole is cast is flagrantly man-made. Thus, to say nothing of the new jads which men add to the matter of reality by the acts of their own lives, they have already impressed their mental forms on that whole third of real- ity which I have called * previous truths.' Every hour brings its new percepts, its own facts of 247 PRAGMATISM sensation and relation, to be truly taken ac- count of; but the whole of our past dealings with such facts is already funded in the previ- ous truths. It is therefore only the smallest and recentest fraction of the first two parts of real- ity that comes to us without the human touch, and that fraction has immediately to become humanized in the sense of being squared, as- similated, or in some way adapted, to the humanized mass already there. As a matter of fact we can hardly take in an impression at all, in the absence of a preconception of what impressions there may possibly be. When we talk of reality 'independent' of humaji^ thinking, then, it seems a thing very hard to find^ It reduces to the notion of what is just entering i nto experience and yet_tp_be named, or else to some imagined aboriginal j^resence in experience, before any belief about the presence had arisen, before any human con- ception had been applied. It is what is abso- lutely dumb and evanescent, the merely ideal limit of our minds. We may glimpse it, but we never grasp it; what we grasp is always some 248 PRAGMATISM AND HUMANISM substitute for it which previous human think- ing has peptonized and cooked for our con- sumption. If so vulgar an expression were allowed us, we might say that wherever we find it, it has been already jaked. This is what Mr. Schiller has in mind when he calls independent reality a mere unresisting vXt^, which is only to be made over by us. That is Mr. Schiller's belief about the ^en- sible core of re ality. We 'encounter* it i in Mr. Bradley's wor ds) but don 't possess it. Su- perficially this sounds like Kant's view; but between categories fulminated before nature began, and categories gradually forming them- selves in nature's presence, the whole chasm between rationalism and empiricism yawns. To the genuine 'Kantianer' Schiller will al- ways be to Kant as a satyr to Hyperion. Other pragmatists may reach more positive beliefs about the sensible core of reality. They may think to get at it in its independent na- ture, by peeling off the successive man-made wrappings. They may make theories that tell us where it comes from and all about it; and £49 rRAGMATISM if these theories work satisfactorily they will be true. The transcendental idealists say there is no core, the finally completed wrapping being reality and truth in one. Scholasticism still teaches that the core is 'matter.' Professor Bergson, Heymans, Strong, and others believe in the core and bravely try to define it. Messrs. Dewey and Schiller treat it as a * limit.' Which is the truer of all these diverse accounts, or of others comparable with them, unless it be the one that finally proves the most satisfactory.? On the one hand there will stand reality, on the other an account of it which it proves impos- sible to better or to alter. If the impossibility prove permanent, the truth of the account will be absolute. Other content of truth than this I can find nowhere. If the anti-pragmatists have any other meaning, let them for heaven's sake reveal it, let them grant us access to it! Not being reality, but only our belief about reality, it will contain human elements, but these will know the non-human element, in the only sense in which there can be knowledge of anything. Does the river make its banks, or 250 PRAGMATISM AND HUMANISM do the banks make the river? Does a man walk with his right leg or with his left leg more essentially ? Just as impos sible may it be to separate the real from the human factors in the growth of our cognitive experience. Let this stand as a first brief indication of the humanistic position. Does it seem para- doxical } If so, I will try to make it plausible by a few illustrations, which will lead to a fuller acquaintance with the subject. In many familiar objects every one will re- cognize the human element. We conceive a given reality in this way or in that, to suit our purpose, and the reality passively submits to the conception. You can take the number 27 as the cube of 3, or as the product of 3 and 9, or as 26 ylus l,or 100 minus 73, or in countless other ways, of which one will be just as true as another. You can take a chess-board as black squares on a white ground, or as white squares on a black ground, and neither conception is a false one. You can treat the adjoined figure as a star, as two big triangles crossing each other, as a hexa- 251 PRAGMATISM gon with legs set up on its angles, as six equal triangles hanging together by their tips, etc. All these treatments are true treatments — the sen sible th at upon the paper resists^o^ne of them. You can say of a line that it runs east, or you can say that it runs west, and the line per se accepts both descriptions without rebelling at the in- consistency. We carve out groups of stars in the heavens, and call them constellations, and the stars patiently suffer us to do so, — though if they knew what we were doing, some of them might feel much surprised at the partners we had given them. We name the same constellation diversely, as Charles's Wain, the Great Bear, or the Dipper. None of the names will be false, and one will be as true as another, for all are applicable. In all these cases we humanly make an ad- dition to some sensible reality, and that reality tolerates the addition. All the additions ' agree' with the reality; they fit it, while they build it 252 PRAGMATISM AND HUMANISM out. No one of them is false. Which may be treated as the more true, depends altogether on the human use of it. If the 27 is a number of dollars which I find in a drawer where I had left 28, it is 28 minus 1. If it is the number of inches in a board which I wish to insert as a shelf into a cupboard 26 inches wide, it is 26 plus 1. If I wish to ennoble the heavens by the constellations I see there, 'Charles's Wain' would be more true than 'Dipper.' My friend Frederick Myers was humorously indignant that that prodigious star-group should remind us Americans of nothing but a culinary utensil. What shall we call a . for this is essentially their attitude, are simply afraid, afraid of more experience, afraid of life. And to men of this complexion, religious monism comes with its consoling words: "All is needed and essential — even you with your sick soul and heart. All are one with God, and with God all is well. The everlasting arms are 292 PRAGMATISM AND RELIGION beneath, whether in the world of finite appear- ance you seem to fail or to succeed . ' ' There can be no doubt that when men are reduced to their last sick extremity absolutism is the only saving scheme. Pluralistic moralism simply makes their teeth chatter, it refrigerates the very heart within their breast. So we see concretely two types of religion in sharp contrast. Using our old terms of compar- ison, we may say that the absolutistic scheme appeals to the tender-minded while the plural- istic scheme appeals to the tough. Many per- sons would refuse to call the pluralistic scheme religious at all. They would call it moralistic, and would apply the word religious to the monistic scheme alone. Religion in the sense of self-surrender, and moralism in the sense of self-sufiicingness, have been pitted against each other as incompatibles frequently enough in the history of human thought. We stand here before the final question of philosophy. I said in my fourth lecture that I believed the monistic-pluralistic alternative to be the deepest and most pregnant question 293 PRAGMATISM that our minds can frame. Can it be that the disjunction is a final one ? that only one side can be true ? Are a pluralism and monism genuine incompatibles ? So that, if the world were really pluralistically constituted, if it really existed distributively and were made up of a lot of caches, it could only be saved piecemeal and de facto as the result of their behavior, and its epic history in no wise short-circuited by some essential oneness in which the severalness were already 'taken up' beforehand and eter- nally 'overcome'? If this were so, we should have to choose one philosophy or the other. We could not say 'yes, yes 'to both alternatives. There would have to be a 'no' in our relations with the possible. We should confess an ulti- mate disappointment: we could not remain healthy-minded and sick-minded in one indi- visible act. Of course as human beings we can be healthy minds on one day and sick souls on the next; and as amateur dabblers in philosophy we may perhaps be allowed to call ourselves monistic pluralists, or free-will determinists, or what- £94 PRAGMATISM AND RELIGION ever else may occur to us of a reconciling kind. But as philosophers aiming at clearness and consistency, and feeling the pragmatistic need of squaring truth with truth, the question is forced upon us of frankly adopting either the tender or the robustious type of thought. In particular this query has always come home to me : May not the claims of tender-mindedness go too far? May not the notion of a world al- ready saved in toto anyhow, be too saccharine to stand? May not religious optimism be too idyllic? Must all be saved? Is no price to be paid in the work of salvation? Is the last word sweet? Is all *yes, yes' in the universe? Do es n't the fact of 'no ' stand at the_very core of life? Doesn't the very * seriousness ' that we attribute to life mean that ineluctable noes and losses form a part of it, that there are genu- ine sacrifices somewhere, and that something permanently drastic and bitter always remains at the bottom of its cup? I can not speak officially as a pragmatist here ; all I can say is that my own pragmatism offers no objection to my taking sides with this more 295 PRAGMATISM moralistic view, and giving up the claim of total reconciliation. The possibility of this is involved in the pragmatistic willingness to treat pluralism as a serious hypothesis. In the^end i^ is our f aith and not our logic that decides such questions, and I deny the right of any pretended logic to veto my own faith. I find myself willing to take the universe to be really dangerous and adventurous, without therefore backing out and crying ' no play.' I am willing to think that the prodigal-son attitude, open to us as it is in many vicissitudes, is not the right and final attitude towards the whole of life. I am willing that there should be real losses and real losers, and no total preservation of all that is. I can believe in the ideal as an ultimate, not as an origin, and as an extract, not the whole. When the cup is poured off, the dregs are left behind for ever, but the possibility of what is poured off is sweet enough to accept. As a matter of fact countless human imag- inations live in this moralistic and epic kind of a universe, and find its disseminated and strung- along successes sufficient for their rational 296 PRAGMATISM AND RELIGION needs. There is a finely translated epigram in the Greek anthology which admirably expresses this state of mind, this acceptance of loss as unatoned for, even though the lost element might be one's self: "A shipwrecked sailor, buried on this coast, Bids you set sail. Full many a gallant bark, when we were lost. Weathered the gale." Those puritans who answered 'yes 'to the ques- tion: Are you willing to be damned for God's glory.? were in this objective and magnan- imous condition of mind. The way of escape from evil on this system is not by getting it *aufgehoben,' or preserved in the whole as an element essential but 'overcome.' It is by drop- ping it out altogether^ throwing it overboard and getting beyond it, helping to make a uni- verse that shall forget its very place and name. It is then perfectly possible to accept sin- cerely a drastic kind of a universe from which the element of * seriousness' is not to be ex- pelled. Whoso does so is, it seems to me, a genuine pragmatist. He is willing to live on 297 PRAGMATISM a scheme of uncertified possibilities which he trusts ; willing to pay with his own person, if need be, for the realization of the ideals which he frames. What now actually are the other forces which he trusts to co-operate with him, in a universe of such a type ? They are at least his fellow men, in the stage of being which our actual universe has reached. But are there not superhuman forces also, such as religious men of the pluralistic type we have been consider- ing have always believed in ? Their words may have sounded monistic when they said '* there is no God but God"; but the original polytheism of mankind has only imperfectly and vaguely sublimated itself into monotheism, and monotheism itself, so far as it was religious and not a scheme of classroom instruction for the metaphysicians, has always viewed God as but one helper, primus inter pares, in the midst of all the shapers of the great world's fate. I fear that my previous lectures, confined as they have been to human and humanistic aspects, may have left the impression on many 298 PRAGMATISM AND RELIGION of you that pragmatism means methodically to leave the superhuman out. I have shown small respect indeed for the Absolute, and I have until this moment spoken of no other superhuman hypothesis but that. But I trust that you see suflSciently that the Absolute has nothing but its superhumanness in common with the theistic God. On prag matistic p rin- ciples, if the hypothesis of God_works satisfac- torily in the widest sense of the wor^, it is true. Now whatever its residual diflSculties may be, experience shows that it certainly does work, and that the problem is to build it out and de- termine it so that it will combine satisfactorily with all the other working truths. I can not start upon a whole theology at the end of this last lecture; but when I tell you that I have written a book on men's religious experience, which on the whole has been regarded as mak- ing for the reality of God, you w^ill perhaps exempt my own pragmatism from the charge of being an atheistic system. I firmly disbe- lieve, myself^ that our human experience is th e highest form of experience extant in the uni- 299 PRAGMATISM verse. I believe rather that we stand in much the same relation to th e whole of the u niverse as our canine and feline petsjlo^t^ the whole of human life. They inhabit our drawing-rooms and libraries. They take part in scenes of whose significance they have no inkling. They are merely tangent to curves of history the beginnings and ends and forms of which pass wholly beyond their ken So we are tangent to the wider life of things. But, just as many of the dog's and cat's ideals coincide with our ideals, and the dogs and cats have daily living proof of the fact, so we may well believe, on the proofs that religious experience affords, that higher powers exist and are at work to save the world on ideal lines similar to our own. You see that pragmatism can be called re- ligious, if you allow that religion can be plural- istic or merely melioristic in type. But whether you will finally put up with that type of relig- ion or not is a question that only you yourself can decide. Pragmatism has to postpone dog- matic answer, for we do not yet know certainly which type of religion is going to work best 300 PRAGMATISM AND RELIGION in the long run. The various overbeliefs of men, their several faith-ventures, are in fact what are needed to bring the evidence in. You will probably make your own ventures sev- erally. If radically tough, the hurly-burly of the sensible facts of nature will be enough for you, and you will need no religion at all. If radically tender, you will take up with the more monistic form of religion : the pluralistic form, with its reliance on possibilities that are not necessities, will not seem to afford you se- curity enough. But if you are neither tough nor tender in an extreme and radical sense, but mixed as most of us are, it may seem to you that the type of pluralistic and moralistic religion that I have offered is as good a religious synthesis as you are likely to find. Between the two extremes of crude naturalism on the one hand and tran- scendental absolutism on the other, you may find that what I take the liberty of calling the pragmatistic or melioristic type of theism is exactly what you require. INDEX INDEX Abbey, Westminster, 39. Abel, 214. Absolute, the, 19, 145, 150 f, 270, 289; its barrenness, 71; its value, 73 f, 282; its inaccept- ability, 78; vs. the 'Ultimate,' 159. Absolute edition of the world, 265 f. Absolute truth, 224. Abstract ideas, their use, 128, 150, 172, 210, 265. Abstractness as a vice in philoso- phizing, 19, 30, 34, 51, 231, 263. Accountability, 116. Additions, human, to the given, 255. Agreement with reality, 212. Ancestral discoveries, 170, 182. Anthology, the Greek, 297. A priori truth, 209. Baby, 174. BALForR, 104 f. Bear, the great, 252 f. Belief, see 'truth.' Berkeley, 89. bosanquet, 17. Boston, 13. Bowne, 18. Bradley, 30, 142, 249, 258. C^SAR, 214, 254. Cain, 214. Caird, 17, 246. Caprice, excluded by pragma- tism. 211, 233, 258. Canse, 180. Charles's Wain, 252 f. Chisterton, 3. Claim, truth as a, 227 f. Clash of beliefs, 76 f. Classroom philosophy, 21. Clerk-Maxwell, 197. Climate, 87. Common sense. Lecture V; de- fined, 171; its 'categories,' 173; a definite stage in evolution; result of saccessive discoveries, 170, 182. Concepts, their use, 128, 172. Conjunctive relations, 147 f. Constellations, 252 f. Copy-theory of truth, 199, 213, 235. Corridor-theory, 54. Cowpath, 203. Creative functions of human mind, 255 f, 287 f. Cripple Creek, 13. 'Critical' level of thought, 185, 189 f. Critical philosophy, 186. Criticisms of pragmatism, 233, 258, 268. Damned, Leibnitz on the, 24. Design in nature, 109-115. Desire creative of reality, 287. Dew-ey, 57, 75. 233. Dilemma of philosorphy, Lecture I, esp)ecially, pp. 15-20. 'Dipper,' the. 252 f. Discourse, universe of, 133; its relation to truth, 212 f. 305 INDEX Disjunctive relations, 148 f. Dog, mind of, 175. DUHEM, 57. Empiricism, 9 f , 51; 'radical,' ix. Energy, 191, 216. Escape, philosophies as places of, 34. Eucharist, 88. EucKEN, 256. Experience, sensible, 172. Facts, 263; empiricism holds by them, 12; pragmatism loves them, 68; idealism neglects them, 70; their relation to truth, 225. Fallacy, the sentimentalist's, 229. Fitness, 113. Football-game, 12. Franklin, 49. Free-will, problem of, 115 f; a melioristic doctrine, 119. FULLERTON, 117. Future, hypothesis of world with- out, 96 f; of world with, 100. Geniuses, prehistoric, 182. God, 19, 70, 72, 80, 97 f, 104- 115, 299; vs. matter as a prin- ciple, 101 f; scholastic defini- tion of, 121; supposed choice offered us by, 290. Good, its relation to truth, 75. Green, 17, 246. Haeckel, 15. Health, 222. Hegel, 185. History of pragmatism, 46 f. Hodgson, 50. Holidays, moral, 74. Humanism, 65; Lecture VII, ea pecially, 242 f. Hl-xley, 120. Ideals, as creative, 286 f. Idealism, transcendental, 17; see 'Absolute'; Berkeley's, 89. Identity, personal, 90 f. Imputability, 117. Influence, 134 f. Instrumental view of truth, 53, 194. Intellectualism, 10, 200; see 'ra- tionalism.' Intellectualist attacks on prag- matism, 67; view of truth. 200, 218, 226. Interaction of things, 134 f. Kant, 172. Kinds. 180. Knower, the absolute, 147, 150. 165. Knowledge, how it grows, 167. Ladd, 18. Law, 'the,' 240; law as a scien- tific concept, 180. Laws of thought and of nature, 50. Laymen in philosophy, 14. Leibnitz, 23 f. Lessing, 220. Letter from member of audience, 268, 278. Levels of thoHght compared, 188- 192. 306 INDEX Locke, 90. Logic, inductive, 55. Lord's supper, 88. LoTZE, 356. - Mach, 57. McTago.\rt, 118. Many, the One and the. Lecture IV; Manyness co-ordinate with oneness, 138. Materialism defined, 93. Matter, Berkeley on, 89; Spencer on its supposed crassness, 9-1; vs. God, as a principle, 98-108. Mechanism, 111. Meliorism, 119, 127, 285 f. Merit, 118. Method, the pragmatic, 45, 51. MiLHAUD, 57. Monism, 276; must be absolute, 159 f; religious, 292 f; con- trasted with pluralism, 259. See ' unity.' Monistic sentiment, 149 f, 159. Mont-Pelee eruption, 113. Moral holidays, 74. Morbid minds, 291. Myees, 256. Mysticism affirms unity, 151 f. Names, 213. Naturalism, 16. New beliefs, their formation, 59. Old truths, their part in forming new truth, 60 f , 245 ; formed out of still older truth, 65 f, 246 f. One, the, and the Many, Lecture IV. Oneness, see 'unity.' Optimism, 23, 29 f, 285. OSTWALD, 48, 57. Pantheism, 70. Papini, 54, 79, 159, 257. Past, reality of the, 214. Pearson, 57. Peirce, 46. Personal identity, 90 f. Pessimism, 285. Philosophies, 38; their contrast with reality, 21, 34; their short- comings, 37. Philosophy, characterized, 3 f, 38; its temperament, 51 f; seeks variety as well as unity, 129; gives a world in two editions, 61, 265 f ; professors of, 33. Pluralism, 160; noetic, 135, 166, 277; contrasted with monism, 259, 293. POINCARE, 57. Possibility, 282 f. Pragmatic method, 45 f, 54. Pragmatism, what it means, Lec- ture II; as a method, 45 f; as a theory of truth, 55; as a medi- ator, 33, 300 f; its history, 47; characterized, 51; its contrast with rationalism, 68, 281; its affinity with Science, 68; its geniality, 80; looks towards facts and the future, 122; fa- vors pluralism, 156, 161, 296; its critics, 233; its relations with religion, Lecture VIII; accused of tough-mindedness, 279; is melioristic, 286. 307 INDEX Principles, rationalism leans on Schlau, Hanschen, (RO them, 12, 52. Promise, God, a term of, 102, 108; design ditto, 115; free will ditto, 120. Protestantism, 123. Punishment, 91, 116. Rationalism, 9 f ; its refined uni- verse, 21, 27; its temperament, 22, 67 f ; characterized, 51 f ; its view of pragmatism, 233, 259 f ; its view of truth, see 'truth.' Rationality, 288, 291. Reality, defined, 212, 244; con- crete, 30; its three parts, 244 f ; hard to find razo, 249; theories of, 250; accepts human addi- tions, 251; which of its deter- minations are the truer? 252; ready made? or still making? 257; exists in distributive form, 264; its relation to desire, 289. Refinement of rationalism's uni- verse, 22. Reflection, total, 127. Religion and pragmatism. Lec- ture VIII. Religion, M. I. Swift on, 31; is of two types, 17, 293 f, 300. RiCKERT, 228, 236. RoTCE, 17, 29, 142, 146. Salvation of world, 284. Santayana, 175. Schiller, 57, 65 f, 75, 159, 233, 240 f, 249. Sciences, their philosophy, 56, 185 f ; their utilty, 186 f. Selective activity of mind, 246 f. Sensations, 246. Sensationalism, 10. Sentimentalist fallacy, 229. Shoes, 111. SiGWART, 57. Single-word solutions of world- enigma, 239. Solomon, 52. Space, a discovery, 174, 177. Spencer, characterized, 39; on 'matter,' 94; his 'unknow- able,' 102. Spliinx, 239. Squirrel, 43. Student's thesis, 21. Substance, 85; material, 89; spir- itual, 90; the category of, 184 f. Summarizing reactions of our mind, 35. Swift, 28. Systematic union of things, 136. Taylor, 227, 244. Temperament, in philosophy, 7, 51. Tender-mindedness, 12 f, 263; in religion, 295 f. Theism, 17, 70, 103. Theories, as instruments, 53, 194. Thesis, my student's, 21. 'Thing,' a common-sense cate- gory, 178, 183 f ; its ambiguity, 253. Time, a discovery, 174, 177, 183. Tough-mindedness, 12 f, 263. Transcendental idealism, 19. True, a species of good, 76; means expedient thinking, 222. 308 INDEX Truth, pragmatic view of. Lec- ture VI; Schiller and Dewey on, 58; its definition, 198; in- tellectualist view of, 200, 218, 226; as the Truth, 239; prag- matically it means verifiabil- ity, 201; its utility, 203; its function of 'leading,' 205 f; is what works, 213 f; is made, 224; rationalist definitions of, 227; their weakness, 230 f; must be concretely discussed, 231. Truths may clash, 78; eternal, 209. See 'old truths.' Ultimate, the, vs. the Absolute, 159. 165. Unification vs. unity, 280. Unity of things. Lecture IV, pas- sim; not philosophy's sole quest, 129 f; pragmatic study of, 132, 148, 155; of system, 136; of origin, 138; generic, 139; of purpose, 140; esthetic, 143; noetic, 145; aflSrmed by Hindu philosophy, 151; vari- ous grades of, 156; absolute, 160. Universe of discourse, 133. Unknowable, the, 102. Usefulness, of truth, 202; of ab- stract concepts, 128, 150, 172, 210,265; of Absolute, 75 f. Ved4nta; 151. Verification defined, 201; vs. verifiability, 207; means lead- ing, 215. Vestigial peculiarities, 169. Vision designed, 109. ViVEKANANDA, 151 f. Wafer, 88. Wealth, 220. Weather, 174. Westminster Abbey, 39. Whitman, 35, 274. Woodpecker, 110. Words, in philosophy, 52. W^orld, two editions of, 259, 264. W'orth,ofGod,97. L 006 864 694 2 UC SOUTHERN REGIONAL LIBRARY FACILITY AA 001 074 475 3