Pragmatism and idealism

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PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM

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PRAGMATISM

AND

IDEALISM

BY

WILLIAM CALDWELL, M.A., D.Sc.[Edinr.]

SIR WILLIAM MACDONALD PROFESSOR OF MORAL PHILOSOPHY,
MCGILL UNIVERSITY, MONTREAL

LONDON
ADAM AND CHARLES BLACK

1913

PREFACE

What is attempted in this book is an examination
of the Pragmatist philosophy in its relations to
older and newer tendencies in the thought and
practice of mankind.

While a good deal has been written within the
last ten years upon Pragmatism, the issue that it
represents is still an open one — to judge at least
from recent books and reviews, and from recent
official discussions. And there seems to be a
favourable opportunity for a general account
of the whole subject and for an estimate of its
significance.

In the opening chapter and elsewhere, both in
the text and in the footnotes, I have put together
some things about the development and the
affiliations of Pragmatism, and of pragmatist
tendencies, that may not be altogether new to
the professional student. Such a presentation, or
general conspectus, I have found to be a necessity
in the way of a basis both for discussion and for
rational comprehension. Taken along with the
original pronouncements of James and his confreres

vi PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM

it affords an indication of the philosophy to which
the pragmatists would fain attain, and of the
modification of rationalistic philosophy they would
fain effect.

The chapter upon Pragmatism as Americanism
is put forth in the most tentative spirit possible,
and I have thought more than once of withholding
it. Something in this connexion, however, is,
in my opinion, needed to cause us to regard the
pragmatist philosophy as resting upon a very real
tendency of the civilized world of to-day — a
tendency that is affecting us all whether we like
it or not.

The chapter upon Pragmatism and Anglo-
Hegelian Rationalism is also offered with some
degree of reservation and misgiving, for, like
many of my contemporaries, I owe nearly every-
thing in the way of my introduction to philosophy
to the great Neo - Kantian and Neo - Hegelian
movement. In its place, I had some months ago
a more general chapter upon Pragmatism and
Rationalism, containing the results of material
that I had been elaborating upon the develop-
ment of English Neo-Hegelianism. At the last
moment I substituted what is here offered upon
the significant high-water output of Hegelianism
represented in Dr. Bosanquet's Edinburgh Gifford
Lectures.

In regard to the note upon the Pragmatist
elements in the philosophy of Bergson I ought,
perhaps, to say that I kept away from Bergson's

PREFACE vii

last two books until I had written out what had
been growing up in my own mind about the
activism of Pragmatism and its relations to
Idealism. I have found confirmation for much
of my own thought in the teaching of this
remarkable and significant thinker, and I regret
the partial representation of it that is here
submitted.

Having crossed the ocean for the printing of
my book, I have in some cases lost or misplaced
references that I intended to use or to verify.
For this I crave the indulgence of readers and
critics.

I am indebted to the following gentlemen for
much kind help and criticism in the revision of
my manuscript and proof-sheets for the press :
my brother, the Rev. Victor Caldwell, M.A., of
Patna, Ayrshire ; Professor John Laird of Queen's
University, Belfast; Professor James Seth of the
University of Edinburgh ; Professor P. T. Lafleur
of M'Gill University. I also owe much in this
same connexion to recent conversations with
Professors A. Lalande and D. Parodi of Paris,
upon Pragmatism and contemporary philosophy
generally.

LONDON, September 191 3.

CONTENTS

• CHAP. PAGE

I. Introductory ....... i

Note on the Meaning of " Pragmatism " . 21

II. Pragmatism and the Pragmatist Movement . 23

III. Some Fundamental Characteristics . . 58

IV. Pragmatism and Human Activity . . . 93

Appendix to Chapter IV. — Philosophy and

the Activity-Experience . . . .109

V. Critical . . . . . . . . 116

VI. Pragmatism as Humanism . . . . 141

VII. Pragmatism as Americanism . . . .168

VIII. Pragmatism and Anglo-Hegelian Rationalism 196

IX. Pragmatism and Idealism in the Philosophy

of Bergson ...... 234

Concluding Remarks ..... 262

INDEX 267

IX

PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM

CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTORY

Pragmatism has by this time received so much
attention in the reflective literature of the day
that any writer upon the subject may now fairly
presume upon a general acquaintance with its main
principles and contentions. Indeed, it is pro-
bable that most thinking people may be credited
with the ability to have formed some sort of
judgment of their own about a philosophy whose
main contention is that true ideas are working
ideas, and that truth itself, like a creed or a
belief, is simply a working valuation of reality.
There are still, however, some things to be said,
at least in English, upon the place and the meaning
of Pragmatism in the philosophical reconstruction
that is generally felt to be so necessary to-day.

As far as the external signs of any such vital
relation between Pragmatism and our recent
academic philosophy are concerned, the reader

may be aware, to begin with, that there have been

1

2 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM

many important concessions 1 made to pragmatists
by such representative rationalists as Mr. Bradley
and Professor Taylor, not to speak of others,2 and
Pragmatism has certainly had a very powerful
effect upon the professional philosophy of both
England and Germany, judging at least from the
extent to which many of the more prominent
representatives of philosophy in these countries
have apparently been compelled to accord to it
at least an official recognition.3

Pragmatism, again, in consequence of the
different receptions that it has met with at the
hands of its friends and its foes, has undergone
various phases of exposition and of modification,
although it has not yet, nor is it on the whole likely
to have, a philosophical output comparable to that
of Idealism. It has become more and more
conscious of its own affiliations and relations to
older, and to broader doctrines, declaring itself, in
the hands of Professor James and his friends, to
be but a new name for older ways of thinking.

1 See, for example, the concessions and the fresh statements of the
problem of philosophy, and the " clearing of the ground," etc., referred
to on p. 76 and p. 74. Also p. 27 in reference to the stir and the
activity that have been excited by the pragmatist controversy. See
also p. 230, in the eighth chapter, in reference to some things in such a
typical intellectualist as Professor Bosanquet that may be construed
as a concession to Pragmatism and Humanism.

2 Dr. Edward Caird affirmed in his memoir of his brother (Principal
John Caird) that idealists admit some pragmatist charges.

8 Professor Stein, a contemporary European authority, to whom
we shall again refer below, says, for example, in his well-known articles
in the Archiv fiir Philos<yphie (1908), in reference to Pragmatism, that
we have had nothing like it [as a ' movement '] " since Nietzsche "
(" Der Pragmatismus," p. 9).

INTRODUCTORY 3

And it has succeeded, in a measure, in clearing
itself from liability to the superficial interpreta-
tion that it met with a few years ago, when it
was scoffed at for teaching that you may believe
" what you like," for speaking, for example, as
if the " theoretical " consequences of truth were
not to be considered as well as the " practical."
Although still resting in the main upon an out-
spoken declaration of war against Rationalism, it
is no longer blind to the place and the value of
thought or the "concept," in the matter of the
interpretation of our experience.

Pragmatism, as the theory is generally under-
stood, rests in the main upon the work of three
men, Professors James and Dewey of America, and
Dr. Schiller of Oxford. The fact, along doubtless
with other things, that these men have ere now
been spoken of as occupying a right, a left, and
a centre in the new movement, is presumably
an indication that it has already received its
highest theoretical expression — presumably in the
California pamphlet of Professor James, or in the
famous Popular Science Monthly article of Peirce,
canonized as the patron saint of the movement by
James.

Whether this be so or not, it has been in the main
the work of James to set forth the meaning of
Pragmatism as a philosophy of everyday life, as
the theory of the attitude of man as man to the
world in which he finds himself. Dr. Schiller,
again, it is claimed, has done much to set forth

4 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM

Pragmatism to the world as an essentially human-
istic philosophy, recognizing and providing for the
rights of faith and of feeling in determining our
beliefs and our theories about things. This philo-
sophy has " much in common with what in other
quarters is called Personalism." It cannot, how-
ever, be differentiated so sharply as Dr. Schiller
apparently would have us believe from the many
manifestations of this philosophy that abound in
modern times, from Fichte, and from Lotze, down
to men who are still living — Eucken and others.
The ingenious Professor Dewey, moreover, is the
champion of the scientific, or the empirical, or the
" instrumental' ' method in philosophy, and has
worked hard and successfully at the reform which
he thinks must take place in logical and philoso-
phical conceptions when interpreted as simply tools
or devices for the economy of our thought.

When, in pragmatist fashion, we seek to judge
of Pragmatism by this last-mentioned matter of
its results, by the things it has enabled its advocates
to accomplish, we find that we may, to begin with,
speak in the following terms of the work of Professor
James. He has certainly indicated how the
pragmatist method may be applied to the solution
of some of the ordinary difficulties of reflective
thought ; about, for example, the nature of matter
or the nature of the soul, or about the old opposition
between the " one " and the " many," about such
concepts as " thing," " kinds," " time," " space,"
the " fancied," the " real," and so on. In all

INTRODUCTORY 5

such cases an answer, he holds, is obtained by
putting, say, the initial difficulty in the following
form : " What practical difference can it make
now that the world should be run by matter or by
spirit ? "

A fair illustration of his meaning here would be
his own characteristic attitude, so far as the
philosophy of religion is concerned, to the so-
called " theistic " proofs that have been part of the
stock in trade of rational theology. A " neces-
sary being " and a " whole of truth " and the
"Absolute"1 are not, he would hold, what the
average man understands by God ; they have
hardly any perceptible effect upon life and con-
duct— the all-important matter in the thought
of God as he conceives it. Only those notions,
he would have it, which can be interpreted by
the thought of the " difference " they make to
our practical conduct are real notions at all —
" Providence," say, or " God " as the guarantor
of the reality and the permanence of the moral
order, and so on. The " soul," again, he would
hold, " is good for just so much and no more."
And a similar thing, too, would be true about
Berkeley's " matter," or about the " matter " of
the materialists.2 This latter, for instance, cannot

1 Sec Chapter VIII., where I discuss the natural theology that bases
itself upon these supposed principles of a " whole of truth " and the
" Absolute."

2 This statement I think would be warranted by the fact of the
tendency of the newer physical science of the day to substitute
an electrical, for the old material, or corpuscular, conception of
matter, or by the admission, for example, of a contemporary biologist

6 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM

possibly do all it is claimed to be able to do in the
way of an explanation of the order of the world
and the phenomena of life.

Then again, James has written a great many
pages upon the so-called deeper view of human
nature (as inclusive of will and " emotion " in
addition to mere thought) taken by Prag-
matism in comparison with that entertained by
Rationalism. We shall have occasion to return
to this point.

He has made it clear, too, that it was an unfair
interpretation of Pragmatism to take it as a plea
for believing what you like, as was said above.
Our experience, he puts it, must be consistent, the
" parts with the parts," and the " parts with the
whole." Beliefs must not clash with other beliefs,
the mind being wedged tightly between the coercion
of the sensible order and that of the ideal order.
By " consequences," too, he contends we may mean
intellectual or theoretical consequences as well as
practical consequences.

He has also, along with his brother-pragmatists,
raised the question of the nature of Truth, attain-
ing to such important results as the following :
(i) there is no such thing as pure truth, or ready-
made truth ; (2) the " copy-theory " of truth
is unintelligible.1 We shall later be obliged to

of importance (Verworn, General Physiology, p. 39) that " all attempts
to explain the psychical by the physical must fail. The actual problem
is . . . not in explaining psychical by physical phenomena but rather
in reducing to its psychical elements physical, hke all other psychical
phenomena." 1 See p. 81, and p. 150.

INTRODUCTORY 7

examine the more controversial positions that
(3) truth is not an end in itself, but a means
towards vital satisfaction ; (4) truth is the
" expedient " in the way of thinking, as the right
is the expedient1 in the way of acting, and so
on.

Further, Professor James finds that Pragmatism
leaves us with the main body of our common-sense
beliefs [Peirce holds practically the same thing],
such as the belief in " freedom " — as a " promise
and a relief," he adds ; and the belief in the
religious outlook upon life, in so far as it " works."
This is the attitude and the tenor of the well-
known books on The Will to Believe and The
Varieties of Religious Experience.2, " Our acts,
our turning-places, where we seem to ourselves
to make ourselves and grow, are the parts of the
world to which we are closest, the parts of which
our knowledge is the most intimate and complete.
Why should we not take them at their face-value ? "
And yet, as against this attitude, Professor James
elsewhere finds himself unable to believe " that
our human experience is the highest form of
experience extant in the universe." It is the

1 See Chapter V. pp. 136, 138, where we examine, or reflect upon,
the ethics of Pragmatism.

2 The importance of these volumes in the matter of the development,
in the minds of thinking people everywhere, of a dynamic and an
organic (instead of the older rationalistic and intellectualistic) con-
ception of religion and of the religious life cannot possibly be over-
estimated. Of course it is only right to add here that such a dynamic
and organic view of religion is the property not only of Professor
James and his associates, but also of the army of workers of to-day
in the realms of comparative religion and anthropology.

8 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM

emergence of many such incoherences in his
writings that gives to his pragmatist philosophy of
religion a subjective and temperamental character,
and makes it seem to be lacking in any objective
basis. " If radically tough, the hurly-burly of
the sensible facts of nature will be enough for you,
and you will need no religion at all. If radically
tender, you will take up with the more monistic
form of religion : the pluralistic form — that is,
reliance on possibilities that are not necessities —
will not seem to offer you security enough." * He
" inclines," on the whole, to " Meliorism," treating
satisfaction as neither necessary nor impossible ;
the pragmatist lives in " the world of possibilities."

These words show clearly how difficult it is to
pin down Professor James to any single intelligible
philosophy of belief, if belief be interpreted as
in any sense a " commerce ' of the soul with
objective realities, as something more than a
merely generous faith in the gradual perfection or
betterment of human society.

" Religious experience," as he puts it in his
Pluralistic Universe, "peculiarly so called, needs,
in my opinion, to be carefully considered and
interpreted by every one who aspires to reason
out a more complete philosophy." In this same
book, it is declared, however, on the one hand, that
" we have outgrown the old theistic orthodoxy,
the God of our popular Christianity being simply
one member of a pluralistic system " ; and yet,

1 Pragmatism, p. 300.

INTRODUCTORY 9

on the other hand, and with equal emphasis, that
" we finite minds may simultaneously be conscious
with one another in a supernatural intelligence." *
The book on The Meaning of Truth seems to
return, in the main, to the American doctrine of
the strenuous life as the only courageous, and
therefore true, attitude to beliefs, as the life that
contains, in the plenitude of its energizing, the
answer to all questions. " Pluralism affords us,"
it openly confesses, " no moral holidays, and it is
unable to let loose quietistic raptures, and this is
a serious deficiency in the pluralistic philosophy
which we have professed." Professor James here
again attacks Absolutism in the old familiar
manner, as somehow unequal to the complexity of
things, or the pulsating process of the world,
casting himself upon the philosophy of experi-
ence, and upon the evident reality of the " many "
and of the endless variety of the relations of things,
in opposition to the abstract simplicity of the
" one," and the limited range of a merely logical,
or mathematical, manner of conceiving of reality.
" The essential service of Humanism, as I con-
ceive the situation, is to have seen that, though
one part of experience may lean upon another part
to make it what it is in any one of several aspects
in which it may be considered, experience as a
whole is self-sustaining and leans on nothing. . . .

1 Or an admission like the following in the Meaning of Truth
(p. 243) : "It may be that the truest of all beliefs shall be that in
transsubjective realities."

io PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM

"It gets rid of the standing problems of Monism and
of other metaphysical systems and paradoxes."1

Professor James exhibits, however, at the same
time a very imperfect conception of philosophy,
holding that it gives us, in general, " no new range
of practical power," ignoring, as it were, the
difference between philosophy and poetry and
religion and mere personal enthusiasm. And he
leaves the whole question of the first principles of
both knowledge and conduct practically unsettled.
These things are to him but conceptual tools,2
and " working " points of departure for our efforts,
and there seems in his books to be no way of reduc-
ing them to any kind of system. And he makes,
lastly, a most unsuccessful attempt at a theory
of reality. Reality is to him sometimes simply a
moving equilibrium of experience, the " flux " we
have already referred to ; sometimes the fleeting
generations of men who have thought out for us
all our philosophies and sciences and cults and
varied experiences, and sometimes the " common-
sense world in which we find things partly joined
and partly disjoined." It is sometimes, too, other
things even than these. In a chapter of the book
upon Pragmatism* it is stated in italics that
" reality is, in general, what truths have to take
account of," and that it has three parts : (i) " the
flux of our sensations," and (2) the " relations that
obtain between our sensations, or between their

1 Meaning of Truth, p. 124, 5. 2 See p. 40 and p. 149.

3 Pragmatism, pp. 244-245.

INTRODUCTORY n

copies in our minds," and (3) " the previous truths
of which every new inquiry takes account." Then
again, in A Pluralistic Universe,1 it is declared that
" there may ultimately never be an All-form at
all, that the substance of reality may never get
totally collected . . . and that a distributive form
of reality, the Each-form, is logically as acceptable
and empirical and probable as the All-form."
This is the theory of the outspoken " radical
empiricism " 2 which is the contention of the
volume upon The Meaning of Truth, the main
effort of which seems to be to show again that the
world is still in the process of making. It has the

1 A Pluralistic Universe, p. 34.

2 In respect of James' later doctrine of " radical empiricism " we
may quote, for the sake of intelligibility, from Professor Perry (his
friend and literary executor) the following : " James' empiricism
means, then, first, that ideas are to be tested by direct knowledge,
and, second, that knowledge is limited to what can be presented.
There is, however, a third consideration which is an application of
these, and the means of avoiding a difficulty which is supposed to be
fatal to them. This is what James calls ' radical empiricism,' the
discovery that ' the relations between things, conjunctive as well as
disjunctive, are just as much matters of direct particular experience,
neither more nor less so, than the things themselves.' ' Adjacent
minima of experience ' are united by the ' persistent identity of certain
units, or emphases, or points, or objects, or members ... of the
experience-continuum.' Owing to the fact that the connexions of
things are thus found along with them, it is unnecessary to introduce
any substance below them, or any subject above them, to hold things
together " (Present Philosophical Tendencies, p. 365). In regard to this
radical empiricism, I am obliged, as a Kantian, to say that, to my
mind, it represents the reduction of all Pragmatism and Empiricism
to an impossibility — to the fatuous attempt (exploded for ever by
Hume) to attempt to explain knowledge and experience without first
principles of some kind or another. It is a " new Humism," a thing
which no one who has penetrated into the meaning of Hume's Treatise
can possibly advocate. A philosophy without first principles, or a
philosophy that reduces the relations between experiences to mere
" bits " of experience, is indeed no philosophy at all.

12 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM

additional drawback of bringing Pragmatism
down not only to the level of radical empiricism,
but to that of common-sense realism or dualism
[the belief in the two independent realities of
matter and mind], and to that of the " copy-
theory " * of truth, from which both Pragmatism
and Radical Empiricism are especially supposed
to deliver us. "I will say here again, for the sake
of emphasis, that the existence of the object . . .
is the only reason, in innumerable cases, why the
idea does work successfully. . . . Both Dewey
and I hold firmly ... to objects independent of
our own judgments." 2 Much of all this is, no
doubt, like surrendering philosophy altogether.

In the case of Dr. Schiller, we may notice first
his frequent and successful exhibition of the extent
to which human activity enters into the constitu-
tion not only of " truth," but of " reality," of
what we mean by reality. This is interwoven in
his books with his whole philosophy of truth
as something merely human, as " dependent
upon human purposes," asa " valuation " expres-
sive of the satisfactory, or the unsatisfactory,
nature of the contents of " primary reality." It
is interwoven, too, with his doctrine that reality
is essentially a v\r), something that is still in the
making, something that human beings can some-
how re-make and make perfect. Then this posi-
tion about truth and reality is used by him, as by
James, as a ground of attack against Absolutism,

1 See p. 82 and p. 154. 2 The Preface, pp. xv., xix.

INTRODUCTORY 13

with its notion of a " pre-existing ideal " of know-
ledge and reality, as already existing in a super-
sensible world, that descends magically into the
passively recipient soul of man. There is no such
thing, he claims, as absolute truth, and the con-
ception of an " absolute reality " is both futile and
pernicious. Absolutism, too, has an affinity to
Solipsism,1 the difficulties of which it can escape
only by self -elimination.

Then Absolutism is, Schiller continues, " essen-
tially irreligious," 2 although it was fostered at first
in England for essentially religious purposes.3 It
has developed there now at last, he reminds us, a
powerful left 4 wing which, as formerly in Germany,

1 See p. 159 and p. 212.

2 As for Dr. Schiller's charge that Absolutism is essentially " irre-
ligious " in spite of the fact of its having been (in England) religious
at the outset, the best way of meeting this is to insist that it is mainly
in its form, rather than its content, that Absolutism is (or was) irre-
ligious in both Germany and England.

3 British students of philosophy are quite well aware that it was the
religious and the spiritual motive that seemed to weigh most with
Hutchison Stirling and John Caird and Green in their attempts (thirty
years ago) to introduce German transcendental philosophy to their
fellow-countrymen. Stirling was impressed with the idea of a working
correspondence between Hegelianism and Calvinism. John Caird's
animus was against the agnosticism of Herbert Spencer and of Mansel,
and he found inspiration in this connexion in Hegel's treatment of
Kant's theory of the limitations of the understanding. And to Green
the attractive thing about Kant was his vindication of a " spiritual
principle " in " nature," and in " knowledge," and in " conduct," a
principle which rendered absurd the naturalism of the evolutionary
philosophy. Friends of this spiritualistic interpretation of German
Critical Rationalism find its richest and fullest expression in the
books of Edward Caird upon the Evolution of Religion and the
Evolution of Theology in the Greek Philosophers.

4 The idea of a left wing is generally associated in the minds of
British students with the destructive criticism of Mr. Bradley in Appear-
ance and Reality, in which many, or most, of our ordinary ways of

14 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM

has opened a quarrel with theology. In Absolu-
tism, the two phases of Deity — God as moral
principle, and God as an intellectual principle —
" fall apart," and absolutist metaphysic has really
no connexion with genuine religion. Humanism
can " renew Hegelianism " by treating the making
of truth as also the making of reality. Freedom
is real, and may possibly " pervade the universe." *
All truth implies belief, and it is obviously one of
the merits of Pragmatism to bring truth and reason
together. Beliefs and ideas and wishes are really
essential and integral features in real knowing,
and if knowing, as above, really transforms our
experience, they must be treated as " real forces,"
which cannot be ignored by philosophy.2

Against all this would-be positive, or con-
structive, philosophy we must, however, record
the fact that the pragmatism of Dr. Schiller breaks
down altogether in the matter of the recognition
of a distinction between the " discovering ' of

regarding reality (our beliefs in " primary " and " secondary "
qualities of matter, in " space "and" time," in" causation,"" activity,"
a " self," in " things in themselves," etc.) are convicted of " fatal in-
consistencies." See, however, Professor Pringle-Pattison's instructive
account of his book in Man's Place in the Cosmos, bringing out the
positive side. The " left " is represented too, now, in Dr. Bosanquet's
Individuality and Value, which we examine below as the last striking
output of British transcendentalism or absolutism. See in this entire
connexion Professor James Seth's recent account of the " Idealist
Answers to Hume " in his English Philosophy and Schools of Philosophy.

1 See p. 244. I find a confirmation of this idea in what a biologist
like Professor Needham treats of as the " autogenetic nature of re-
sponses " (General Biology, p. 474) in animals.

2 See the Studies in Humanism for all the positions referred to, or
quoted, or paraphrased, in these two paragraphs.

INTRODUCTORY 15

reality and the " making " of reality. And despite
the ingenuity of his essay in the first edition of
Humanism upon " Activity and Substance," 1 there
is not in his writings, any more than in those of
James, any coherent or adequate theory of reality.
And this is the case whether we think of the
" primary reality " upon which we human beings
are said to " react," in our knowledge and in our
action, or of the supreme reality of God's existence,
of which such an interesting speculative account
is given in the essay referred to. Nor is there in
Dr. Schiller, any more than in James, any adequate
conception, either of philosophy as a whole, or of
the theory of knowledge, or of the relation of
Pragmatism as a " method " (it is modestly claimed
to be only such, but the position is not adhered to)
to philosophy as such.2 " For the pragmatic
theory of knowledge initial principles are literally
apyai, mere starting-points variously, arbitrarily,
casually selected, from which we hope to try to

1 This is an important essay. It reminds the modern reader, for one
thing, of the importance of the natural theology of Aristotle. It is an
anticipation, too, in its way, of the tendency of modern physics to
substitute a dynamic for a static conception of matter, or atoms, or
substance. In it Dr. Schiller points out how Aristotle's doctrine of
a perfect and self-perfecting Activity [an fripyeia that is not mere
change or motion, but a perfect "life" involving the disappearance
of "time" and imperfection] is in a sense the solution of the old
[Greek] and the modern demand for the substance or essence of things.
We shall take occasion (in speaking of the importance to Philosophy of
the concept of activity, and in speaking of the Philosophy of Bergson)
to use the same idea, to which Dr. Schiller has given an expression in this
essay, of God as the eternal or the perfect life of the world.

2 For a favourable estimate of the services of Dr. Schiller in regard
to Pragmatism and Humanism the reader may consult the articles of
Captain Knox in the Quarterly Review, 1909.

16 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM

advance to something better. Little we care what
their credentials may be. . . . And as far as the
future is concerned, systems of philosophy will
abound as before, and will be as various as ever, but
they will probably be more brilliant in colouring
and more attractive in their form, for they will
certainly have to be put forward and acknowledged
as works of art that bear the impress of a unique
and individual soul." 1

The main result of pragmatist considerations
in the case of Professor Dewey is perhaps that re-
consideration of the problems of logic and know-
ledge in the light of the facts of genetic and
functional psychology which has now become
fairly general on the part of English and American
students of philosophy. It is through his influence
generally that pragmatists seem always to be
talking about the way in which we " arrive at '

1 Studies in Humanism, p. 19. The remarks made in this para-
graph will have to be modified, to some extent, in view of the recent
(191 1) appearance of the third edition of Dr. Schiller's Riddles of the
Sphinx. This noteworthy book contains, to say the very least, a great
deal in the way of a positive ontology, or theory of being, and also many
quite different rulings in respect of the nature of metaphysic and of the
matter of its relation to science and to common sense. It rests, in the
main, upon the idea of a perfect society of perfected individuals as at
once the true reality and the end of the world-process — an idea which
exists also, at least in germ, in the pluralistic philosophy of Professor
James ; and we shall indeed return to this practical, or sociological,
philosophy as the outcome, not only of Pragmatism, but also of
Idealism, as conceived by representative living thinkers. Despite, how-
ever, these many positive and constructive merits of this work of Dr.
Schiller's, it is for many reasons not altogether unfair to its spirit to con-
tend that his philosophy is still, in the main, that of a humanistic prag-
matism in which both " theory " and " practice " are conceived as
experimentally and as hypothetically as they are by Professor Dewey.

INTRODUCTORY 17

our beliefs, about ideas as " instruments " for the
interpretation and arrangement of our experience,
about the " passage " from cognitive expectation
to " fulfilment," about ideas as " plans of action "
and mental habits, about the growth and the
utility of the truth, about the " instrumental "
character of all our thinking, about beliefs as more
fundamental than knowledge, and so on.

Professor Dewey has also written many more
or less popular, but none the less highly valuable,
short studies upon the application of an instru-
mentalist conception of philosophy to education
and to social questions. One of his last pieces of
service in this connection is a volume in which he
associates Pragmatism with the general revolution
effected in the entire range of the mental and moral
sciences by Darwinism, with the present tendency
in philosophy to turn away from ultimate questions
to specific problems, and with the reform which, in
his opinion, is necessary in our educational ideals *
generally.

These three leading exponents of Pragmatism
may be regarded as meeting the objections to
philosophy urged respectively by the " man of
affairs," by the " mystical, religious " man, and
by the "man of science."2 By this it is meant
that the man of affairs will find in James an
exposition of philosophy as the study of different
ways of looking at the world ; the mystical, religious

1 See p. 106.
2 See Professor Bawden's book upon Pragmatism.

2

18 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM

man will find in Schiller a treatment of philosophy
as the justification of an essentially spiritual
philosophy of life ; and that the scientific man will
find in the writings of Dewey and his associates a
treatment of philosophy as nothing else than an
extension into the higher regions of thought of the
same experimental and hypothetical method with
which he is already familiar in the physical
sciences.

In this version of the work of the three leading
pragmatists it is assumed, of course, that the
pragmatist philosophy is the only philosophy that
can show to the average man that philosophy can
really do something useful — can " bake bread,"
if you will, can give to a man the food of a man.
It is assumed, too, that it is the only philosophy
which proceeds scientifically, that is to say, by
means of observation and of hypotheses that
work," and by subsequent deduction and by
verification." And again, that it is the only
philosophy that gives to man the realities upon
which he can base his aspirations or his faith in
distinction, that is to say, from the mere abstrac-
tions of Rationalism in any form.

By way of a few quotations illustrative of the
fundamental contentions of the pragmatists, we
may select the following : " Ideas become true
just in so far as they help us to get into satisfactory
relation with other parts of our experience, to
summarise them and get about among them by con-
ceptional short-cuts instead of following the inter-

INTRODUCTORY 19

minable succession of particular phenomena. Any
idea upon which we can ride, so to speak ; any
idea that will carry us prosperously from any one
part of our experience to any other part, linking
things satisfactorily, working securely, simplify-
ing, saving labour — is true for just so much,
true in so far forth, true instrumentally." x " The
true is the name of whatever proves itself to be
good in the way of belief, and good for definite
and assignable reasons." 2 From Professor Dewey :
" Thinking is a kind of activity which we perform
at specific need, just as at other times we engage
in other sorts of activity, as converse with a friend,
draw a plan for a house, take a walk, eat a dinner,
purchase a suit of clothes, etc. etc. The measure
of its success, the standard of its validity is pre-
cisely the degree in which thinking disposes of the
difficulty and allows us to proceed with the more
direct modes of experiencing, that are henceforth
possessed of more assured and deepened value." 3
From Dr. Schiller's book, Studies in Humanism :
" Pragmatism is the doctrine that when an
assertion claims truth, its consequences are always
used to test its claims ; that (2) the truth of an
assertion depends on its application ; that (3) the
meaning of a rule lies in its application ; that
(4) all meaning depends on purpose ; that (5) all
mental life is purposive. It [Pragmatism] must
constitute itself into (6) a systematic protest

1 Pragmatism, p. 58. 2 Ibid. 76.

8 Studies in Logical Theory, p. 2.

20 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM

against all ignoring of the purposiveness of actual
knowing, alike whether it is abstracted from for
the sake of the imaginary, pure, or absolute
reason of the rationalists, or eliminated for the
sake of an equally imaginary or pure mechanism
of the naturalists. So conceived, we may describe
it as (7) a conscious application to logic of a teleo-
logical psychology which implies ultimately a
voluntaristic metaphysic."

From these citations, and from the descriptive
remarks of the preceding two paragraphs, we may
perhaps be enabled to infer that our Anglo-
American Pragmatism has progressed from the
stage of (1) a mere method of discussing truth and
thinking in relation to the problem of philosophy
as a whole, (2) that of a more or less definite and
detailed criticism of the rationalism that overlooks
the practical, or purposive, character of most of
our knowledge, to that of (3) a humanistic or
"voluntaristic" or "personalistic" philosophy, with
its many different associations and affiliations.1
One of the last developments, for example, of this
pragmatist humanism is Dr. Schiller's association
of philosophy with the metaphysics of evolution,
with the attempt to find the goal of the world-
process and of human history in a changeless
society of perfected individuals.

We shall immediately see, however, that this
summary description of the growth of Pragmatism

1 I endeavour to indicate what this Humanism and Personalism
may be in my sixth chapter.

INTRODUCTORY 21

has to be supplemented by a recognition of (1)
some of the different phases Pragmatism has
assumed on the continent of Europe, (2) the
different phases that may be detected in the
reception or criticism accorded to it in different
countries, and (3) some of the results of the
pragmatist movement upon contemporary philo-
sophy. All these things have to do with the
making of the complex thing that we think of
as Pragmatism and the pragmatist movement.

A NOTE ON THE MEANING OF "PRAGMATISM"

(1) " The opinion that metaphysics is to be largely cleared up
by the application of the following maxim for obtaining clearness
of apprehension : ' Consider what effects that might conceivably
have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception
to have. Then, our conception of these effects is the whole of
our conception of the object ' " (Baldwin's Philosophical Dic-
tionary, vol. ii. p. 321). [We can see from this citation that the
application of its formulae about " consequences " to metaphysics,
or philosophy generally, must be considered as a part, or aspect,
of the pragmatist philosophy.]

(2) " The doctrine that the whole meaning of a conception
expresses itself in practical consequences ; consequences either
in the shape of conduct to be recommended, or in that of experi-
ences to be expected, if the conception be true ; which conse-
quences would be different, if it were untrue, and must be different
from the consequences by which the meaning of other conceptions
is in turn expressed. If a second conception should not appear
to have other consequence, then it must be really only the first
conception under a different name. In methodology, it is certain
that to trace and compare their respective consequences is an
admirable way of establishing the different meanings of different
conceptions" {ibid., from Professor James).

(3) "A widely current opinion during the last quarter of a
century has been that ' reasonableness ' is not a good in itself, but

22 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM

only for the sake of something. Whether it be so or not seems to
be a synthetical question [i.e. a question that is not merely a
verbal question, a question of words], not to be settled by an
appeal to the Principle of Contradiction [the principle hitherto
relied upon by Rationalism or Intellectualism]. . . . Almost
everybody will now agree that the ultimate good lies in the evolu-
tionary process in some way. If so, it is not in individual re-
actions in their segregation, but in something general or con-
tinuous. Synechism is founded on the notion that the coalescence,
the becoming continuous, the becoming governed by laws, the
becoming instinct with general ideas, are but phases of one and
the same process of the growth of reasonableness " (ibid. p. 322.
From Dr. Peirce, the bracket clauses being the author's).

(4) " It is the belief that ideas invariably strive after practical
expression, and that our whole life is teleological. Putting the
matter logically, logic formulates theoretically what is of regula-
tive importance for life — for our ' experience ' in view of practical
ends. Its philosophical meaning is the conviction that all facts
of nature, physically and spiritually, find their expressions in
' will ' ; will and energy are identical. This tendency is in agree-
ment with the practical tendencies of American thought and
American life in so far as they both set a definite end before
Idealism " (Ueberweg-Heinze, Geschichte der Philosophie, vol.
iv., written and contributed by Professor Matoon Monroe Curtis,
Professor of Philosophy in Western Reserve University, Cleveland,
U.S.A.).

(5) See also an article in Mind for October 1900, vol. ix. N.S.,
upon " Pragmatism " by the author of this book on Pragmatism
and Idealism, referred to as one of the early sources in Baldwin's
Philosophical Dictionary (New York and London) and in Ueberweg-
Heinze's Geschichte, Vierter Teil (Berlin, 1906).

The conclusion that I am inclined to draw from the fore-
going official statements (and also, say, from another official
article like that of M. Lalande in the Revue Philosophique, 1906,
on " Pragmatisme et Pragmaticisme ") is that the term " Prag-
matism " is not of itself a matter of great importance, and that
there is no separate, intelligible, independent, self-consistent
system of philosophy that may be called Pragmatism. It is a
general name for the Practicalism or Voluntarism or Humanism
or the Philosophy of the Practical Reason, or the Activism, or
the Instrumentalism, or the Philosophy of Hypotheses, or the
Dynamic Philosophy of life and things that is discussed in
different ways in this book upon Pragmatism and Idealism.
And it is not and cannot be independent of the traditional body
of philosophical truth in relation to which it can alone be defined.

CHAPTER II

PRAGMATISM AND THE PRAGMATIST MOVEMENT

In considering some of the results of pragmatist
and voluntarist doctrines in the case of European
writers, to whom the American-English trium-
virate used to look somewhat sympathetically,
we may begin with Italy, which boasted, accord-
ing to Dr. Schiller (writing in 1907), of a youthful
band of avowed pragmatists with a militant
organ, the Leonardo. " Fundamentally," declares
Papini,1 the leader of this movement, " Prag-
matism means an unstiffening of all our theories
and beliefs, by attending to their instrumental
value. It incorporates and harmonizes various
ancient tendencies, such as Nominalism, with its
protest against the use of general terms, Utili-
tarianism, with its emphasis upon particular
aspects and problems, Positivism, with its disdain
of verbal and useless questions, Kantism, with its
doctrine of the primacy of practical reason,
Voluntarism, with its treatment of the intellect
as the tool of the will, and Freedom, and a positive

1 Joum. of Phil. Psychol., 1906, p. 338.
23

24 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM

attitude towards religious questions. It is the
tendency of taking all these, and other theories,
for what they are worth, being chiefly a corridor-
theory, with doors and avenues into various
theories, and a central rallying-ground for them
all." These words are valuable as one of the
many confessions of the affiliations of Pragmatism
to several other more or less experiential, or
practical, views of philosophy. It is perfectly
obvious from them that Pragmatism stands, in
the main, for the apprehension of all truth as
subservient to practice, as but a device for the
" economy " of thought, for the grasping of the
multiplicity and the complexity of phenomena.
It looks upon man as made, in the main, for action,
and not for speculation — a doctrine which even
Mr. Peirce, by the way, now speaks of as " a stoical
maxim which to me, at the age of sixty, does not
recommend itself so forcibly as it did at thirty." x
" The various ideal worlds are here," continues
Papini, according to the version of James,2 "because
the real world fails to satisfy us. All our ideal
instruments are certainly imperfect. But philo-
sophy can be regenerated ... it can become
pragmatic in the general sense of the word, a
general theory of human action ... so that
philosophic thought will resolve itself into a com-

1 From vol. ii. (p. 322) of Baldwin's Dictionary of Philosophy. Dr.
C. S. Peirce, formerly a teacher of mathematics and philosophy at
Johns Hopkins University, was made by James into the father or
patron saint of Pragmatism. James confesses to have been stimulated
into Pragmatism by the teachings of Peirce.

2 Journ, of Phil. Psy., 1906, p. 340.

THE PRAGMATIST MOVEMENT 25

parative discussion of all the possible programmes
for man's life, when man is once for all regarded
as a creative being. ... As such, man becomes
a kind of god, and where are we to draw the
limits ? " In an article called " From Man to
God," Papini, in the Leonardo, lets his imagination
work in stretching the limits of this way of
thinking.

These prophetic, or Promethean, utterances —
and we must never forget that even to the Greeks
philosophy was always something of a religion or
a life — may be paralleled by some of the more
enthusiastic and unguarded, early utterances of
Dr. Schiller about " voluntarism " or " meta-
physical personalism " as the one " courageous,"
and the only potent, philosophy ; or about the
" storming of the Jericho of rationalism " by the
" jeers " and the " trumpetings " of the confident
humanists and their pragmatic confreres. The
underlying element of truth in them, and, for that
part of it, in many of the similar utterances of
many of our modern humanists, from Rabelais
to Voltaire and from Shelley to Marx and Nietzsche,
is, as we may see, that a true metaphysic must
serve, not only as a rational system for the intellect,
but as a " dynamic " * or motive for action
and achievement, for the conscious activity of
rational, self-conscious beings.

As for the matter of any further develop-

1 See pp. 78, 148 5 and in reference to the last striking presentation
of Absolutism, p. 230.

26 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM

ments1 of the free, creative religion hinted by
Papini, we had, in 1903, the solemn declaration
of Professor James that " the programme of the
man-god is one of the great type programmes of
philosophy," and that he himself had been " slow "
in coming to a perception of the full inwardness
of the idea. Then it led evidently in Italy itself
to a new doctrine which was trumpeted there a
year or two ago in the public press as " Futurism," 2
in which " courage, audacity and rebellion " were
the essential elements, and which could not
" abide " the mere mention of such things as
" priests " and " ideals " and " professors " and
11 moralism." The extravagances of Prezzolini,
who thinks of man as a " sentimental gorilla,"
were apparently the latest outcome of this
anarchical individualism and practicalism. Prag-
matism was converted by him into a sophisticated
opportunism and a modern Machiavellism, a
method of attaining contentment in one's life
and of dominating one's fellow-creatures by play-
ing upon their fancies and prejudices as does the
religious charlatan or the quack doctor or the
rhetorician.

The reader who may care to contemplate all

1 See Bourdeau, Pragmatisme el Modemisme, and W. Riley in the
Journ. of Phil. Psy., April and May 191 1 ; the James article, Journ. of
Phil., 1906 ; Journ. of Phil., 1907, pp. 26-37, on Papini's " Introduction
to Pragmatism " ; The Nation (N.Y.), November 1907, on " Papini's
view of the ' daily tragedy ' of life."

2 Reported to have been inaugurated by a Franco-Italian poet,
Martinetti. Of the question of any possible connexion between this
" Futurism " with the present Art movement bearing the same name I
know nothing definite.

THE PRAGMATIST MOVEMENT 27

this radical, pragmatist enthusiasm for the New
Reformation in a more accessible, and a less
exaggerated, form had better perhaps consult
the recent work of Mr. Sturt of Oxford on the
Idea of a Free Church. In this work the principles
of Pragmatism are applied, first, critically and in
the main negatively, to the moral dogmas of
traditional Christianity, and then positively to
the new conception of religion he would substitute
for all this — the development of personality in
accordance with the claims of family and of
national life. A fair-minded criticism of this
book would, I think, lead to the conclusion
that the changes contemplated by Mr. Sturt are
already part and parcel of the programme of
liberal Christianity, whether we study this in the
form of the many more or less philosophical
presentations of the same in modern German
theology, or in the form of the free, moral and
social efforts of the voluntary religion of America
and England. In America many of the younger
thinkers in theology and philosophy are already
writing in a more or less popular manner upon
Pragmatism as a philosophy that bids fair to
harmonize " traditional " and " radical ' con-
ceptions of religion. One of these writers, for
example, in a recent important commemorative
volume,1 tries to show how this may be done by
interpreting the " supernatural," not as the " trans-

1 I refer to the recent volume dedicated by some of his old pupils
to Professor Garman — a celebrated teacher of philosophy in one of the
older colleges of the United States.

28 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM

experimental," but as the " ethical " in experience,
and by turning " dogmatic " into " historical
theology." And it would not be difficult to find
many books and addresses in which the same idea
is expressed. The more practical wing of this same
party endeavours to connect Pragmatism with
the whole philosophy and psychology of religious
conversion, as this has been worked over by
recent investigators like Stanley Hall,1 Starbuck,2
and others, and, above all, by James in his striking
volume The Varieties of Religious Experience*

The fact, of course — and I shall immediately
refer to it — that Pragmatism has been hailed in
France as a salutary doctrine, not merely by
Liberals and Evangelicals, but by devout Catholics
and Anti-modernists, is perhaps enough to give
us some pause in the matter of its application in the
sphere of theoretical and practical religion. It is
useful, it would seem, sometimes to " liberate '
the spirit of man, and useful, too, at other times
to connect the strivings of the individual with the
more or less organized experiences of past ages.

Turning, then, to France, it is, judging from
the claims of the pragmatists, and from some of

1 The two large volumes on the Psychology of Adolescence.

1 The Psychology of Religion.

3 Even such a book — and it is no doubt in its way a genuine and
a noteworthy book — as Harold H. Begbie's Twice-born Men is pointed
to by this wing as another instance of the truth of pragmatist principles
in the sphere of experimental religion. Schopenhauer, by the way,
was inclined to estimate the efficacy of a religion by its power of
affecting the will, of converting men so that they were able to over-
come the selfish will to live. See my Schopenhauer's System in its
Philosophical Significance.

THE PRAGMATIST MOVEMENT 29

the literature bearing upon this entire subject,1
fairly evident that there has been a kind of associa-
tion or relationship between Pragmatism and the
following tendencies in recent French philosophy :
(1) the " freedom " and " indeterminism " philo-
sophy of Renouvier2 and other members of the

1 See, for example, the declaration of James and Schiller (in the
prefaces to their books and elsewhere) in respect of their attitudes to
the work of men like Renouvier, Poincare, Milhaud, Wilbois, Le Roy,
Blondel, Pradines, the valuable reports of M. Lalande to the Philosophical
Review (1906-7-8), the articles of Woodbridge Riley in the Journal of
Philosophy (191 1) upon the continental critics of Pragmatism, the
books of Bourdeau, Hebert, Rey, Tonquedoc, Armand Sabatier, Schinz,
Picard, Berthelot, those of Poincare, Renouvier, Pradines, and the
rest, the older books upon nineteenth-century French philosophy by
men like Fouillee, Levy-Bruhl, etc. There are also valuable references
upon the French pragmatists in Father Walker's Theories of Knowledge
(in the Stoneyhurst Series), and in Professor Inge's valuable little book
upon Faith and its Psychology.

1 The outstanding representative in France during the entire
second half of the nineteenth century of " Neo-Criticism " or "Neo-
Kantianism," a remarkable and comprehensive thinker, to whose in-
fluence, for example, James attributed a part of his mental develop-
ment. His review, the Critique Philosophique, was a worthy (idealist)
rival of the more positivistically inclined, and merely psychological,
review of Ribot, the Revue Philosophique. French Neo-Kantianism,
holding, as Renouvier does, that Kant's ethics is the keystone of his
system, is not in general inclined to the " positivism " or the " scientific "
philosophy of some of the German Neo - Kantians. The critical
work of Renouvier proposes some very ingenious and systematic re-
arrangements of Kant's philosophy of the categories, and his freedom-
philosophy must certainly have done a good deal (along with the work
of others) to create the atmosphere in which Bergson lives and
moves to-day. With Renouvier, Neo-Kantianism merges itself too
in the newer philosophy of " Personalism," and he wrote, indeed, an
important book upon this very subject {Le Personnalistne, 1902). In
this work, we find a criticism of rationalism that anticipates Pragmatism,
the author explicitly contending for a substitution of the principle of
" rational belief " instead of the " false principle " of demonstrable
or a priori " evidence." Consciousness, he teaches, is the foundation
of existence, and " personality " the first " causal principle " of the
world (although admitting " creation " to be beyond our compre-
hension). He examines critically, too, the notions of the " Absolute "

30 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM

Neo-Critical school, and of Boutroux and Bergson,
who, " although differing from each other in
many important respects," all " belong to the
same movement of thought, the reaction against
Hegelianism and the cult of science which has
dominated France since the decline of the meta-
physics of the school of Cousin " \x (2) the philo-
sophy of science and scientific hypotheses repre-
sented by writers like Poincare,2 Brunschvicg,

and of the " Unconditioned," holding that they should not be sub-
stantiated into entities. " Belief " is involved in " every act," he
teaches — also another pragmatist doctrine. And like his great pre-
decessor Malebranche, and like our English Berkeley, he teaches
that God is our "natural object," the true "other" of our life. The
philosophy of Personalism, the foundations of which are laid in this work,
is further developed by Renouvier in a comprehensive work which he
published in 1899, in conjunction with M. Prat, on The New Monadology
(La Nouvelle Monadologie). This is one of the most complete presenta-
tions of a philosophy of " Pluralism " that is at the same time a
" Theism " — to be associated, in my opinion, say, with the recent work
of Dr. James Ward upon the Realm of Ends, referred to on p. 162.

1 Philos. Rev. (1906), article by Lalande.

2 H. Poincare (talked of in recent scientific circles as one of the
greatest mathematicians of history) is (he died about a year ago),
so far as our present purpose is concerned, one of the important
scientific writers of the day upon the subject of the " logic of
hypotheses," and of the "hypothetical method" in science — the
method which the pragmatists are so anxious to apply to philosophy.
He seems (see his La Science et VHypothese, as well as the later book,
La Valeur de la Science, referred to by Lalande in his professional reports
to the Philosophical Review) to accept to some extent the idea of the
" hypothetical " character of the constructions of both the mathe-
matical and the physical sciences, believing, however, at the same time
that we must not be " unduly sceptical " about their conclusions,
revealing as they do something of the " nature of reality." He dis-
cusses among other topics the theory of " energetics " of which we speak
below in the case of Ostwald. He insists, too, upon the idea that the
real is known only by " experience," and that this " experience "
includes the comparison of the thoughts of many minds. And yet he
believes to some extent in the Kantian theory of the a priori element
in knowledge (see La Science, etc., p. 64). It is, however, quite un-

THE PRAGMATIST MOVEMENT 31

Le Roy,1 Milhaud, Abel Rey,2 and others ; (3) the
religious philosophy and the fideism of the followers
of the spiritualistic metaphysic of Bergson, many
of whom go further than he does, and " make
every effort to bring him to the confessional faith " ; 3
and (4) the French philosophy of to-day that

necessary for me to presume to enter into the large subject of the
precise nature of " hypotheses " in the mathematical and the physical
sciences.

1 A professor of mathematics in Paris and an ardent Bergsonian, and
along with Laberthonniere one of the prominent Catholic defenders
of Pragmatism and Modernism, author of a book on Dogmatism
and Criticism (Dogme et Critique). Not having had the time to examine
this book, as somewhat removed from my immediate subject, I append
for the benefit of the reader the following statements and quotations from
the useful book Faith and its Psychology, by Professor Inge of Cambridge.
It is easy to see that the positions represented therein would give
rise to controversy as to the historicity or fact of Christianity.
" Le Roy gives us some examples of this Catholic Pragmatism. When
we say ' God is personal,' we mean ' behave in our relations with
God as you do in your relations with a human person.' When we say,
' Jesus is risen from the dead,' we mean ' treat him as if he were your
contemporary.' . . . His main theses may be summed up in his own
words. ' The current intellectualist conception renders insoluble most
of the objections which are now raised against the idea of dogma. A
doctrine of the primacy of action, on the contrary, permits us to solve
the problem without abandoning anything of the rights of thought or
of the exigencies of dogma.' " Le Roy, by the way, has published a book
upon the philosophy of Bergson, which is said to be the best book upon
the subject. It has been translated into English.

2 M. Abel Rey, author of a work on the Theory of Physical Science in
the hands of Contemporary Scientists (La Thiorie de la physique chez
les physiciens contemporains). In this book (I have not had the time
to examine it carefully) M. Rey examines the theories and methods
of Newton, and also of modern thinkers like Mach and Ostwald,
reaching the conclusion that the philosophy with which physical science
is most compatible is a " modified form of Positivism," which bears a
striking resemblance to " Pragmatism " and the " philosophy of ex-
perience." The English reader will find many useful references to Rey
in the pages of Father Leslie J. Walker's Theories of Knowledge, in
the " Stoneyhurst Philosophical Series."
8 Ibidem.

32 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM

definitely bears the name of Pragmatism, that of
M. Blondel,1 who in 1893 wrote a suggestive work
entitled V Action, and who claims to have coined
the word Pragmatism, after much careful con-
sideration and discrimination, as early as 1888
— many years before the California pamphlet of
James.

The first of these points of correspondence or
relationship we can pass over with the remark that
we shall have a good deal to say about the advant-
age enjoyed by Pragmatism over Rationalism
in the treatment of " freedom " and the " voli-
tional " side of human nature, and also about the
general pragmatist reaction against Rationalism.

And as for the philosophy of science, it has
been shown that our English-speaking prag-
matists cannot exactly pride themselves in the
somewhat indiscriminate manner of James and
Schiller upon the supposed support for their
" hypothetical " conception of science and philo-
sophy to be found in the work of their French
associates upon the logic of science. " The men
of great learning who were named as sponsors of
this new philosophy have more and more testified
what reservations they make, and how greatly
their conclusions differ from those which are
currently attributed to them."2 Both Brunschvicg
and Poincare, in fact, take the greatest pains in

1 It was impossible to procure a copy of this work of M. Blondel.
I have tried to do so twice in Paris.

a M. Lalande in the Philosophical Review (1906), p. 246.

THE PRAGMATIST MOVEMENT 33

their books to dissociate themselves from any-
thing like the appearance of an acceptance of the
doctrine of the relativity of knowledge, from the
signs of any lack of faith in the idea that science,
as far as it goes, gives us a true revelation of the
nature of reality.

Then in regard to (3) the French pragmatist
philosophy or religion we have only to read the
reports and the quotations of M. Lalande to see in
this philosophy the operation of an uncritical
dogmatism or a blind " fideism " to which very
few other philosophers, either in France or in any
other country, would care to subscribe. " La
Revue de Philosophie, which is directed by ecclesi-
astics, recently extolled pragmatism as a means of
proving orthodox beliefs." ..." This system
solves a great many difficulties in philosophy ;
it explains the necessity of principles marvellously."
..." The existence of God, Providence and
Immortality are demonstrated by their happy
effects upon our terrestrial life." . . . " If we can
consider the matter carefully, it will be seen that
the Good is the useful ; for not to be good in any-
thing is synonymous with being bad, and every-
where the true is the useful. It is in this assertion
that Pragmatism consists." 1

And as to the fourth tendency, there is, at its
outset, according to M. Lalande, a more rational
or ethical basis for the fideism of M. Blondel's
book upon action, which starts off with a criticism

1 Ibid. pp. 245-246.

3

34 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM

of philosophic dilettantism quite analogous with
that which Mr. Peirce follows in How to Make
Our Ideas Clear. But M. Blondel " does not
continue in the same manner, and his conclusion
is very different. Rejecting all philosophical
formalism, he puts his trust in moral experience,
and consults it directly. He thinks that moral
experience shows that action is not wholly self-
contained, but that it presupposes a reality which
transcends the world in which we participate." x

Finally, maintains M. Blondel, " we are unable,
as Pascal already said, either to live, or to under-
stand ourselves, by ourselves alone. So that, unless
we mutilate our nature by renouncing all earnest-
ness of life, we are necessarily led to recognize in
ourselves the presence of God. Our problem,
therefore, can only be solved by an act of absolute
faith in a positive religion [Catholicism in his case].
This completes the series of acts of faith, without
which no action, not even our daily acts, could
be accomplished, and without which we should
fall into absolute barrenness, both practical and
intellectual." 2

1 I am inclined to attach a great importance to this idea (Kant
obviously had it) of " consulting moral experience directly," provided
only that the " moral " in our experience is not too rigidly separated
from the intellectual. And it would so far, therefore, be only to the
credit of Pragmatism if we could associate it with a rational effort to
do justice to our moral experience, as indeed possibly presupposing a
" reality " that transcends the limits of our mere individuality, a
reality that transcends, too, the subjective idealism that figures but
too prominently in modern philosophy. See my eighth chapter, p. 223,
where I criticize Dr. Bosanquet for not consulting moral experience
directly.

2 Phil. Rev., 1906, p. 243.

THE PRAGMATIST MOVEMENT 35

Now again these words about our being unable
to understand ourselves " by ourselves alone "
contain an element of truth which we may associate
with the pragmatist tendency to believe in a
socialized (as distinguished from an individual-
istic) interpretation1 of our common moral life,
to believe, that is to say, in a society of persons
as the truth (or the reality) of the universe,
rather than in an interpretation of the universe
as the thinking experience of a single absolute
intelligence. This, however, is also a point which
we are obliged to defer 2 until we take up the
general subject of the relations between Prag-
matism and Rationalism. The other words of
the paragraph, in respect of our absolute need
of faith in some positive religion, are, of course,
expressive again of the uncritical fideism to which
reference has already been made. As an offset
or alternative to the " free " religion of Papini
and James and to the experimental or practical
religion of different Protestant bodies, it is enough
of itself to give us pause in estimating the real
drift 3 of Pragmatism in regard to religious faith and
the philosophy of religion.4

1 See p. 160. » See p. 200 et. ff. » See p. 64.

* For a later statement upon the philosophy of religion in France
see a report for the Phil. Rev. (vol. xvi. p. 304), by Le Roy. This
whole matter is, of course, a subject in itself of the greatest theoretical
and practical importance. It is enough for our purpose to have in-
dicated the different ways in which Pragmatism and the " Will-to-
Believe " philosophy have been received in France, and the different
issues raised by this reception. The reader who would care to look
at a constructive, philosophical view (by the doyen of French philosophy

36 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM

We shall meantime take leave of French
Pragmatism 1 with the reflection that it is thus
obviously as complex and as confusing and con-
fused a thing as is the Pragmatism of other
countries. It is now almost a generation since

professors) of the whole issue between the pragmatist or " voluntarist "
point of view in religion and the older " intellectual " view, cannot do
better than consult Science and Religion in Contemporary Philosophy,
by E. Boutroux, a book that is apparently studied everywhere at
present in France. Its spirit and substance may be indicated by the
following quotations, which follow after some pages in which M. Bou-
troux exposes the error of " the radical distinction between theory and
practice." "The starting point of science is an abstraction, i.e. an
element extracted from the given fact and considered separately. We
cannot expect man to be satisfied with the abstract when the concrete is
at his disposal. That would be ' something like offering a printed bill
of fare as the equivalent for a solid meal.' Man uses science but he lives
religion. The part cannot replace the whole ; the symbol cannot
suppress reality." . . . " Not only is science unable to replace religion,
but she cannot dispense with the subjective reality upon which the latter
is grounded. It is pure Scholastic realism to imagine that the objective
and the impersonal suffice apart from the subjective in our experience.
Between the subjective and the objective no demarcation is given
which justifies from the philosophical standpoint the divisions which
science imagines for her own convenience " (p. 329).

1 Since writing these words, I have made (thanks firstly to Dr.
Schiller's review in Mind, July 191 1) the acquaintance of the important
work of M. Pradines upon the Conditions of Action. In the central
conception of this work, that action is " all-including " and that all
knowledge is a form of action, I find an important development of much
that the pragmatists have long been endeavouring to express, and also
in particular a development of the celebrated action philosophy of
M. Blondel. I am inclined, with Dr. Schiller, to regard the volumes of
M. Pradines as apparently the high-water mark of French pragmatist
philosophy in the general sense of the term, although I cannot but at
the same time hail with approval their occasional sharp criticism of
Pragmatism as to some extent " scepticism and irrationalism." I am
inclined to think, too, that the ethical philosophy of M. Pradines has
some of the same defects that I shall venture to discuss later in dealing
with the application (mainly by Dewey) of Pragmatism to moral theory.
Of course his Conditions of Action is by no means as original a production
as Blondel's book upon Action.

THE PRAGMATIST MOVEMENT 37

we began to hear of a renascence of spiritualism1
and idealism in France in connexion not merely
with the work of philosophers like Renouvier and
Lachelier and Fouillee2 and Boutroux, but with
men of letters like De Vogue, Lavisse, Faguet,
Desjardins3 and the rest, and some of the French
Pragmatism of to-day is but one of the more
specialized phases of the broader movement.

1 Fouillee speaks in his book upon the Idealist Movement and the
Reaction against Positive Science of the year 1851, as the time of the
triumph of " force," of " Naturalism " (Zola, Goncourt, etc.), and of the
revival of Idealism by Lachelier, Renouvier, and Boutroux.

2 See the celebrated work of A. Fouillee, La Psychologie des
idees-forces (Paris, 1890). I confess to having been greatly impressed
by this book when I first made its acquaintance. In particular, I can
think of an idea in Fouillee's book that anticipates even Bergson,
namely the fact that every idea or sensation is an effort that is
furthered or impeded. But Fouillee's works out in this book the active
of the volitional side of nearly every mental power and of the mental
life itself, refusing to separate "mind" and "bodily activity." It
really anticipates a great deal of the whole French philosophy and
psychology of action, including the work of Blondel and Bergson.

3 M. Paul Desjardins (at present a professor of " letters " at Sevres)
was influential in Paris about 1892-93 as the founder of a Union
pour I' Action morale," which published a monthly bulletin. This
society still exists, but under the name (and the change is indeed highly
significant of what Pragmatism in general really needs) L' Union pour
la veritt morale et sociale. I append a few words from one of the
bulletins I received from M. Desjardins. They are indicative of the
spiritualizations of thought and action for which the old society stood.
"II ne s'agit de rien moins que de renverser entierement l'echelle de
nos jugements, de nos attaches, de mettre en haut ce qui etait en bas, et
en bas ce qui etait en haut. II s'agit d'une conversion totale, en
somme. . . ." " La regie commune c'est la mediocrite d'ame, ou
meme ce qu'on pourrait appeler I'athHsme pratique. En effet, Dieu
etant, par rapport a notre conscience, la Volonte que le bien se realise,
ou la Regie vivante, on devient pratiquement, athee, fut-on d'ailleurs
tres persuade par les preuves philosophiques de l'existence de Dieu,
lorsqu'on perd la notion de cette Volonte immuable avec laquelle la
notre se confond activement des quelle mtrite le nom de volontt libre, etc."
In this last sentence there is a distinctly pragmatist note in the sense
of the action philosophy of Blondel and Bergson and the rest.

38 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM

And as for the special question of the influence
of James and his philosophy upon Bergson, and
of that of the possible return influence of Bergson
upon James,1 the evidence produced by Lalande
from Bergson himself is certainly all to the effect
that both men have worked very largely in-
dependently of each other, although perfectly
cognisant now and then of each other's publica-
tions. Both men, along with their followers
(and this is all that needs interest us), have
obviously been under the influence of ideas that
have long been in the air about the need of a philo-
sophy that is "more truly empirical"2 than the
traditional philosophy, and more truly inclined
to " discover what is involved in our actions in
the ultimate recess, when, unconsciously and
in spite of ourselves, we support existence and
cling to it whether we completely understand it
or not." 3

As for Pragmatism and pragmatist achieve-
ments in Germany, there is, as might well be
supposed, little need of saying much. The genius
of the country is against both ; and if there is any
Pragmatism in Germany, it must have contrived
somehow to have been " born again " of the

1 See also the recent book by Flournoy on the Philosophy of James
(Paris, 191 1), in which this interesting special subject is discussed as
well as the important difference between James and Bergson.

2 Rey in his Philosophic Moderne, 1908, speaks of the "gleaning of
the practical factors of rationalistic systems " as the " new line " in
French philosophy (Journ. of Phil., 1911, p. 226).

3 From the Lalande article already mentioned.

THE PRAGMATIST MOVEMENT 39

n

spirit ' before obtaining official recognition.1
So much even might be inferred from the other-
wise generous recognition accorded to the work
of James by scholars and thinkers like Eucken
and Stein2 and the rest. Those men cannot

1 This can be seen, for example, in the Preface to Die Philosophic
des A Is Ob, the quasi-Pragmatist book recently edited by Vaihinger, the
famous commentator on Kant. " We must distinguish in Pragmatism,"
it is there stated, " what is valuable from the uncritical exaggerations.
Uncritical Pragmatism is an epistemological Utilitarianism of the worst
sort ; what helps us to make life tolerable is true, etc. . . . Thus
Philosophy becomes again an ancilla theologiae ; nay, the state of
matters is even worse than this ; it becomes a meretrix theologorum."
This, by the way, is a strange and a striking book, and is perhaps the last
conspicuous instance from Germany of the vitality, and of the depths
of the roots of some of the principles of the pragmatists. The very
appearance of the name of Vaihinger in connexion with it (as the editor)
must be a considerable shock to rationalists and to Kantians, who have
long looked upon Vaihinger as one of the authoritative names in
German Transcendentalism. Here, however, he seems to agree with
those who treat Kant's ethical philosophy of postulates as the real
Kant, making him out, further, as the author of a far-reaching
philosophy of the " hypotheses " and the " fictions " that we must
use in the interpretation of the universe. With Dr. Schiller, who
reviews this work in Mind (19 12), I am inclined to think that it
travels too far in the direction of an entirely hypothetical concep-
tion of knowledge, out - pragmatising the pragmatists apparently.
The student who reads German will find it a veritable magazine of
information about nearly all the thinkers of the time who have prag-
matist or quasi-pragmatist leanings. All the names, for example, of the
German and French writers to whom I refer in this second chapter are
mentioned there [I had, of course, written my book before I saw
Vaihinger], along with many others. It is as serious an arraignment of
abstract rationalism as is to be found in contemporary literature, and
edited, as I say, by the Nestor of the Kant students of our time.

3 Especially in the open-minded and learned articles in the Archiv
ftir Philosophic, 1907, Band xiv., Professor Stein (of Bern) is known as
one of the most enthusiastic and voluminous writers upon Social
Philosophy in Germany. His best-known work is an encyclopedic
book upon the social question in the light of philosophy (Die soziale
Frage im Lichte der Philosophic, 1903). His tendency here is realistic
and naturalistic and evolutionistic, and he thinks (for a philosopher)
far too much of men like Herbert Spencer and Mach and Ostwald.

40 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM

see Pragmatism save in the broad light of
the " humanism " that has always characterised
philosophy, when properly appreciated, and under-
stood in the light of its true genesis. Pragma-
tism has in fact been long known in Germany
under the older names of " Voluntarism " and
" Humanism," although it may doubtless be
associated there with some of the more pro-
nounced tendencies of the hour, such as the recent
insistence of the " Gottingen Fries School " upon
the importance of the " genetic " and the " descrip-
tive ' ' point of view in regard even to the matter
of the supposed first principles of knowledge,
the hypothetical and methodological conception
of philosophy taken by philosophical scientists
like Mach and Ostwald1 and their followers, the

What one misses in Stein is a discussion of the social question in relation
to some of the deeper problems of philosophy, such as we find in men
of our own country like Mackenzie and Bosanquet, and Ritchie, and
Jones, and others. His work, however (it has been translated into
Russian and French), is a complete literary presentation of the subject,
and a valuable source of information. See my review notices of it
in the Phil. Rev. vol. xiv.

1 Mach and Ostwald both represent (for the purposes of our study)
the association that undoubtedly exists between Pragmatism and the
tendency of all the physical and natural sciences to form " hypotheses "
or conceptions, that are to them the best means of " describing " or
" explaining " (for any purpose) either facts, or the connexions between
facts. Mach (professor of the history and theory of the sciences in
Vienna) is a " phenomenalist " and " methodologist " who attacks all
a priorism, treating the matter of the arrangement of the " material " of
a science under the idea of the " most economic expenditure " of our
" mental energy." One of the best known of his books is his Analysis of
the Sensations (translated, along with his Popular Science Lectures, in the
" Open Court Library " of Chicago). In this work he carries out the
idea of his theory of knowledge as a question of the proper relation of
" facts " to " symbols." " Thing, body, matter," he says (p. 6),
" are all nothing apart from their so-called attributes." " Man possesses

THE PRAGMATIST MOVEMENT 41

" empiricism " and " realism " of thinkers like
the late Dr. Avenarius 1 of Zurich.

in its highest form the power of consciously and arbitrarily determining
his point of view." In his Introduction, he attempts to show how
" the ego and the relation of bodies to the ego give rise " to " problems "
in the relations simply of " certain complexes " of " sensation to each
other." While it is undoubtedly to the credit of Mach that he sees
the " subjective," or the " mental," factor in facts and things and objects,
it must be said that he ignores altogether the philosophical problems of
the ego, or the " self," as something more than a mere object among
objects.

Ostwald is one of the founders of the theory of " Energetics,"
the theory of the school that believes in substituting a dynamical philo-
sophy, for the older, atomic, or mechanical philosophy of matter and
motion. He put this philosophy forward in 1895 as the last gift of
the nineteenth to the twentieth century. He suggests how this idea of
energetics may be applied also to psychical processes, in so far as these
may be understood by conceptions that have proved to be useful in
our interpretation of the physical world. Our " consciousness would
thus come to be looked upon as a property of a peculiar kind of energy
of the nerves." The whole idea is a piece of phenomenalistic positivism,
and although Ostwald makes an attempt (somewhat in the manner of
Herbert Spencer) to explain the " forms," or the categories, of experience
as simply " norms " or " rules " that have been handed on from one
generation to another, he does not occupy himself with ultimate
philosophical questions about the nature either of matter or of energy.
His Natural Philosophy has recently been translated into English
(Holt & Co., 1910). Its Pragmatism lies in the fact of his looking
upon concepts and classification as " not questions " of the so-called
" essence " of the thing, " but rather as pertaining to purely practical
arrangements for an easier and more successful mastery of scientific
problems" (p. 67). He also takes a pragmatist, or "functional,"
conception of the mental life towards the close of this book. Professor
Ostwald lectured some years ago in the United States, and his lectures
were attended by students of philosophy and students of science. Pro-
fessor (now President) Hibben has written an interesting account of his
theory in its philosophical bearings in the Philosophical Review, vol. xii.

1 The philosophy of Avenarius (born in Paris, but died as Professor
of Inductive Philosophy in Zurich) is called " Empirical Criticism,"
which differs from Idealism by taking a more realistic attitude
to ordinary human experience. There is an excellent elementary
account of Avenarius in Mind for 1897 by Carstanjen of Zurich.
Avenarius goes back in some respects to the teaching of Comte as to
the need of interpreting all philosophical theories in the terms of the
social environment out of which they come.

42 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM

Then the so-called " teleological," or "prac-
tical," character of our human thinking has
also been recognized in modern German thought
long before the days of Peirce and Dewey, even
by such strictly academic thinkers as Lotze and
Sigwart. The work of the latter thinker upon
Logic, by the way, was translated into English
under distinctly Neo-Hegelian influences. In the
second portion of this work the universal pre-
suppositions of knowledge are considered, not
merely as a priori truths, but as akin in some
important respects " to the ethical principles by
which we are wont to determine and guide our
free conscious activity." x But even apart from
this matter of the natural association of Pragma-
tism with the Voluntarism that has long existed
in German philosophy,2 we may undoubtedly pass
to the following things in contemporary and recent
German thought as sympathetic, in the main, to
the pragmatist tendencies of James and Dewey
and Schiller : (i) the practical conception of
science and philosophy, as both of them a kind
of " economy of the attention," a sort of " con-
ceptual shorthand " 3 (for the purposes of the

1 Logic, vol. ii. p. 17. English translation by Miss Dendy. In this
same section of his work, Lotze talks of the demands of our thought as
" postulates " whose claims rest in the end upon our will — auf unserm
Wollen.

2 To be traced to Fichte's well-known initial interpretation of Kant
from the standpoint of the Practical Reason of the second " Critique,"
and to Schelling's late " positive" philosophy, and to Schopenhauer,
the will philosopher par excellence. See my Schopenhauer' s System in
its Philosophical Significance.

3 As an illustration of this " conceptual shorthand," I take the

THE PRAGMATIST MOVEMENT 43

" description " of our environment) that we have
referred to in the case of Mach and Ostwald ; (2) the
close association between the " metaphysical "
and the "cultural" in books like those of Jerusalem1
and Eleutheropulos ; 2 (3) the sharp criticism of

following lines from Professor Needham's book upon General Biology
(p. 222) in respect of " classification " and its relative and changing
character. "Whatever our views of relationship, the series in which
we arrange organisms are based upon the likenesses and differences we
find to exist among them. This is classification. We associate
organisms together under group names because, being so numerous and
so diverse, it is only thus that our minds can deal with them. Classifica-
tion furnishes the handles by which we move all our intellectual luggage.
We base our groupings on what we know of the organisms. Our
system of classification is therefore liable to change with every advance
of knowledge."

1 Professor Jerusalem (the translator of James's Pragmatism into
German) is known as one of the German discoverers of Pragmatism.
His Introduction to Philosophy (translated by Professor Sanders,
Macmillan & Co., N.Y., 1910) is an admirable, easy, and instructive
introduction to philosophy from a pragmatist point of view. It has
gone through four editions in Germany. It is quite free from any taint
of irrationalism and has sections upon the " theory of knowledge "
and the " theory of being." Its spirit may be inferred from the follow-
ing quotations. " My philosophy is characterized by the empirical
view point, the genetic method, and the biological and the social methods
of interpreting the human mind " (the Preface). " Philosophy is the
intellectual effort which is undertaken with a view to combining the
common experiences of life and the results of scientific investigation
into a harmonious and consistent world theory ; a world theory,
moreover, which is adapted to satisfy the requirements of the under-
standing and the demands of the heart. There was a time when
men believed that such a theory could be constructed from the pure
forms of thought, without much concern for the results of detailed
investigation. But that time is for ever past " (pp. 1 and 2).

2 Author of a work on Philosophy and Social Economy (Philosophic
und Wirthschaft), in which the fundamental idea is that philosophy is
essentially nothing more or less than a " conception of life " or a view
of the world in general, and that the older rationalistic philosophy will
therefore have to be modified in view of modern discoveries and modern
ways of looking at things. It has, of course, the limitations of such a
point of view, in so far as its author seems to forget that philosophy
must lead human life and not merely follow it. My present point is

44 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM

the Rationalism of the Critical Idealism by the
two last-mentioned thinkers, and by some of the
members of the new Fichte 1 School like Schellwien ;
and last but not least, (4) the tendency to take a
psychological2 and a sociological3 (instead of a
merely logical) view of the functions of thought

merely to mention of the existence and work of this man as one of the
continental thinkers who have anticipated the essentially social con-
ception of philosophy taken by the pragmatists.

1 It is easy to see the influence of Fichte's will philosophy and
practical idealism in Schellwien's books (Pkilosophie und Leben, Wille
und Erkenntniss, Der Geist der neuern Pkilosophie). He speaks of the
primacy of the will (in point of time only, of course), or of the "un-
conscious " in the life of man, allowing, however, that man gradually
transforms this natural life in the life of '* creative activity " that is
his proper life. He states (in the Spirit of the New Philosophy) the
pragmatist idea that " belief " (p. 32) or the " feeling " that we have
of the ultimate " unity " of " subject and object," precedes (also in
point of " time ") knowledge, pointing out, however, in the same place
the limitations of belief. These latter, he supposes, to be overcome
in the higher knowledge that we have in creative activity— an idea
which, I think, may be associated to some extent with the position of
Blondel.

2 In the Phil. Rev. (xvi. p. 250) Dr. Ewald speaks of this work of
this psychologizing school as existing alongside of the renewed interest
in Fichte and Schelling and Hegel. It is an attempt to revive the
teaching of Fries, a Kantian (at Jena) who attempted to establish the
Critique of Pure Reason upon a psychological basis, believing that
psychology, " based on internal experience," must form the basis of all
philosophy. It stands squarely upon the fact that all logical laws
and " categories," even the highest and most abstract, in order to
" come to consciousness in man," must be given to him as " psycho-
logical processes " — a position which is certainly true as far as it goes,
and which supports, say, the genetic psychological attitude of Professor
Dewey. Its attitude has been sharply criticized in some of his books
by Dr. Ernst Cassirer of Berlin, a well-known upholder of a more
rationalistic form of Neo-Kantianism.

3 Dr. Simmel of Berlin (like Stein) is a prominent representative of
this school (even in a recent striking book that he wrote upon the
philosophy of Kant) . He has written, for example, a most erudite work
upon the Philosophy of Money, and this at the same time with all his
university work as a fascinating and learned lecturer upon both ancient
and modern philosophy.

THE PRAGMATIST MOVEMENT 45

and philosophy, that is just as accentuated in
Germany at the present time as it is elsewhere.

James and Schiller have both been fond of
referring to the work of many of these last-
mentioned men as favourable to a conception of
philosophy less as a " theory of knowledge "
(or a " theory of being ") in the old sense than
as a Weltanschauungslehre (a view of the world
as whole), a " discussion of the various possible
programmes for man's life " to which reference
has already been made in the case of Papini and
others. And we might associate with their pre-
dilections and persuasions in this regard the
apparent Pragmatism also of a great scholar like
Harnack1 in reference to the subordination of
religious dogma to the realities of the religious
life, or the Pragmatism of Ritschl 2 himself, in

1 Without attempting to enter upon the matter of Harnack's
philosophy as a Neo- Kantian of the school of Ritschl, I am thinking
simply of things like the following from his book on the Essence of
Christianity. " It is to man that religion pertains, to man, as one who
in the midst of all change and progress himself never changes " (p. 8).
" The point of view of the philosophical theorists in the strict sense of
the word will find no place in these lectures. Had they been delivered
sixty years ago it would have been our endeavour to try to arrive by
speculative reasoning at some general conception of religion, and then
to define the Christian religion accordingly. But we have rightly
become sceptical about the value of this procedure. Latet dolus in
generalibus. We know to-day that life cannot be spanned by general
conceptions" (p. 9). See also his protest (on p. 220) against the sub-
stitution of a " Hellenistic " view of religion for religion itself — a protest
that is, according to Pfleiderer in his Development of Theology (p. 298), a
marked characteristic of Harnack's whole History of Dogma.

2 I am thinking of Ritschl's sharp distinction between " theoretical
knowledge " and "religious faith" (which rises to judgments of value
about the world that transcend even moral values), and of his idea that
the " truth " of faith is practical, and must be " lived." Pfleiderer says

46 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM

regard to the subordinate place in living
religion of mere intellectual theory, or even
some of the tendencies of the celebrated value-
philosophy of Rickert and Windelband1 and
Miinsterberg2 and the rest. But again the main
trouble about all this quasi-German support for
the pragmatists is that most of these contemporary
thinkers have taken pains to trace the roots of
their teaching back into the great systems of the

(in his Development of Theology, p. 184) that Ritschl's "conception of
religion is occupied with judgments of value [Werturtheile], i.e. with
conceptions of our relation to the world which are of moment solely
according to their value in awakening feelings of pleasure and pain, as
our dominion over the world is furthered or checked." His " acceptance
of the idea of God as [with Kant] a practical ' belief,' and not an
act of speculative cognition," is also to some extent a pragmatist
idea in the sense in which, in this book, I reject pragmatist ideas.
Ritschl seems to have in the main only a strongly practical interest
in dogmatics holding that " only the things vital are to be made vital
in the actual service of the church." He goes the length of holding
that " a merely philosophical view of the world has no place in
Christian theology," holding that " metaphysical inquiry " applied to
" nature " and to " spirit," as " things to be analysed, for the purpose of
finding out what they are in themselves, can from the nature of the case
have no great value for Christian theology." Of course he is right in
holding that the " proofs for the existence of God, conducted by the
purely metaphysical method, do not lead to the forces whose repre-
sentation is given in Christianity, but merely to conceptions of a
world-unity, which conceptions are neutral as regards all religion "
(The Theology of Albrecht Ritschl, Swing. Longmans, Green & Co.,
1 901). I think this last quotation from Ritschl may be used as an
expression of the idea of the pragmatists, that a true and complete
philosophy must serve as a "dynamic" to human endeavour and to
human motive.

1 See the reference to Windelband in the footnote upon p. 150.

2 I am thinking of Miinsterberg's contention in his Grundzuge and
his other books, that the life of actual persons can never be adequately
described by the objective sciences, by psycho-physics, and so on, and
of his apparent acceptance of the distinction of Rickert between the
" descriptive " and the " normative " sciences (logic, ethics, aesthetics,
and so on).

THE PRAGMATIST MOVEMENT 47

past. The pragmatists, on the other hand, have
been notoriously careless about the matter of the
various affiliations of their " corridor-like " and
eclectic theory.

There are many reasons, however, against regard-
ing even the philosophical expression of many of
the practical and scientific tendencies of Germany
as at all favourable to the acceptance of Prag-
matism as a satisfactory philosophy from the
German point of view. Among these reasons are :
(1) The fact that it is naturally impossible to find
any real support in past or present German philo-
sophy for the impossible breach that exists in
Pragmatism between the "theoretical" and the
" practical," and (2) the fact that Germany has
only recently passed through a period of sharp
conflict between the psychological (or the
" genetic ") and the logical point of view regard-
ing knowledge, resulting in a confessed victory
for the latter. And then again (3) even if there
is a partial correspondence between Pragmatism
and the quasi economic (or " practical ") con-
ception taken of philosophy by some of the
younger men in Germany who have not altogether
outlived their reaction against Rationalism, there
are other tendencies there that are far more
characteristic of the spirit and of the traditions
of the country. Among these are the New
Idealism generally, the strong Neo-Kantian move-
ment of the Marburg school * and their followers

1 Theleadersof this school are the two influential thinkersand teachers

48 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM

in different places, the revived interest in Hegel *
and in Schelling, the Neo-Romanticism of Jena,
with its booklets upon such topics as The Culture
of the Soul, Life with Nature, German Idealism,
and so on.2 And then (4) there are just as many
difficulties in the way of regarding the psycho-
logical and sociological philosophy of men like
Jerusalem and Eleutheropulos as anything like a
final philosophy of knowledge, as there is in
attempting to do the same thing with the merely
preliminary and tentative philosophy of James and
his associates.

Cohen and Natorp, the former the author of a well-known book upon
Kant's Theory of Experience (1871), formerly much used by English
and American students, and the latter the author of an equally famous
book upon Plato's Theory of Ideas, which makes an interesting attempt
to connect Plato's "Ideas" with the modern notion of the law of a
phenomenon. Cohen has given forth recently an important develop-
ment of the Kantian philosophy in his two remarkable books upon the
Logic of Pure Knowledge and the Ethic of the Pure Will. These works
exercise a great influence upon the entire liberal (Protestant and
Jewish) thought of the time in Germany. They teach a lofty spiritualism
and idealism in the realm of ethics, which transcends altogether any-
thing as yet attempted in this direction by Pragmatism.

1 See the instructive reports to the Philosophical Review by Dr.
Ewald of Vienna upon Contemporary Philosophy in Germany. In the
1907 volume he speaks of this renewed interest, "on a new basis," in
the work of the great founders of transcendentalism as an " important
movement partly within and partly outside of Neo-Kantianism," as
" a movement heralded by some and derided by others as a reaction,"
as the " fulfilment of a prophecy by von Hartmann that after Kant
we should have Fichte, and after Fichte, Schelling and Hegel." The
renewed interest in Schelling, and with it the revival of an interest in
university courses in the subject of the Philosophy of Nature (see
the recent work of Driesch upon the Science and Philosophy of the
Organism) is all part of the recent reaction in Germany against Posi-
tivism.

2 We may associate, I suppose, the new German journal Logos, an
international periodical for the " Philosophie der Kultur," with the
same movement.

THE PRAGMATIST MOVEMENT 49

Returning now to America and England,
although Pragmatism is eminently an American *
doctrine, it would, of course, be absurd to imagine
that Pragmatism has carried the entire thought
of the United States with it.2 It encountered there,
even at the outset, at least something of the con-
tempt and the incredulity and the hostility that it
met with elsewhere, and also much of the American
shrewd indifference to a much - advertised new
article. The message of James as a philosopher,
too, was doubtless discounted (at least by the well-
informed) in the light of his previous brilliant work
as a descriptive psychologist, and also, perhaps, in
the light of his wonderfully suggestive personality.3

What actually happened in America in respect
of the pragmatist movement was, first of all, the
sudden emergence of a magazine literature4 in

1 See Chapter VII. upon " Pragmatism as Americanism."

2 See an article in the Critical Review (edited by the late Professor
Salmond, of Aberdeen), by the author upon " Recent Tendencies in
American Philosophy." The year, I think, was either 1904 or 1905.

3 See p. 180.

4 Without pretending to anything like a representative or an ex-
haustive statement in the case of this magazine literature, I may mention
the following : Professor Perry of Harvard, in his valuable articles
for the Journal of Philosophy and Psychology, 1907, vol. iv., upon " A
Review of Pragmatism as a Philosophical Generalization," and a

Review of Pragmatism as a Theory of Knowledge " ; Professor
Armstrong in vol. v. of the same journal upon the " Evolution of
Pragmatism " ; and Professor Lovejoy in the 1908 vol. upon the
' Thirteen Pragmatisms." These are but a few out of the many that
might be mentioned. The reader who is interested in looking for more
such must simply consult for himself the Philosophical Review, and
Mind, and the Journal of Philosophy and Psychology, for some years
after, say, 1903. There is a good list of such articles in a German
Doctor Thesis by Professor MacEachran of the University of
Alberta, entitled Pragmatismus eine neue Richtung der Philosophic,

4

50 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM

connexion with the Will-to-Believe philosophy
of James and the California address, and in con-
nexion (according to the generous testimony of
James) with Deweyism or " Instrumentalism."
Much of this tiresome and hair-splitting magazine
discussion of " ideas as instruments of thought,"
and of the " consequences " (" theoretical " or
" practical " or what not) by which ideas were to
be " tested," was pronounced by James, in 1906,
to be largely crude and superficial. It had the
indirect merit, however, of yielding one or two
valuable estimates of the many inconsistencies
in Pragmatism, and of the many different kinds
of Pragmatism or instrumentalism that there
seemed to be, and of the value of Pragmatism as
a " theory of knowledge," and asa" philosophical
generalization." The upshot of the whole pre-
liminary discussion was (1) the discovery that,
Pragmatism having arisen (as Dewey himself put
it) out of a multitude of conflicting tendencies
in regard to what we might call the " approach '
to philosophy, would probably soon " dissolve
itself " back again into some of the streams out
of which it had arisen,1 and (2) the discovery that
all that this early " methodological " pragmatism
amounted to was the harmless doctrine that the

Leipzig, 1910. There is also a history of pragmatist articles in the 1907
(January) number of the Revue des Sciences, Philosophiques et Theo-
logiques.

1 That this has really taken place can be clearly seen, I think, if
we inspect the official programmes of the Proceedings of the American
Philosophical Association for the last year or two.

THE PRAGMATIST MOVEMENT 51

meaning of any conception expressed itself in the
past or future conduct or experience of actual, or
possible, sentient creatures.

We shall again take occasion * to refer to this
comparative failure of Pragmatism to give any-
systematic or unified account of the conse-
quences by which it would seek to test the truth
of propositions. Its failure, however, in this
connexion is a matter of secondary importance
in comparison with the great lesson 2 to be drawn
from its idea that there can be for man no objective
truth about the universe, apart from the idea of
its meaning 3 or significance to his experience and
to his conscious activity.

What is now taking place in America in this
second decade [i.e. in the years after 1908] of the
pragmatist movement is apparently (1) the
sharpest kind of official rationalist condemnation
of Pragmatism as an imperfectly proved and a
merely " subjective ' and a highly unsystematic
philosophy ; (2) the appearance of a number of
instructive booklets4 upon Pragmatism and the
pragmatist movement, some of them expository
and critical, some of them in the main sympathetic,
some of them condemnatory and even con-
temptuous, and some of them attempts at further

1 P- 144- 2 See p. 149.

3 See Chapter VI . , p. 1 49, upon the doctrine and the fact of ' ' Meaning. ' '
* Professor Pratt, What is Pragmatism ? (Macmillan & Co., 1909) ;
H. H. Bawden, The Principles of Pragmatism, a Philosophical Inter-
pretation of Experience, Boston, 1910 (a useful book presenting what
may be called a " phenomenological " account of Pragmatism) ; Moore,
Pragmatism and Its Critics.

52 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM

constructive work along pragmatist lines ; (3)
indications here and there of the acceptance and
the promulgation of older and newer doctrines
antithetic and hostile to Pragmatism — some of
them possibly as typically American as Pragmatism
itself.

As a single illustration of the partly constructive
work that is being attempted in the name and
the spirit of pragmatism, we may instance the line
of reflection entered upon by Professor Moore 1 in
consequence of his claim that to Pragmatism the
fundamental thing in any judgment or proposition
is not so much its consequences, but its " value."
This claim may, no doubt, be supported by the
many declarations of James and Schiller that the
" true," like the " good " and the " beautiful,"
is simply a " valuation," and not the fetish that
the rationalists make it out to be. It is doubtful,
however, as we may try to indicate, whether this
tl value " interpretation of Pragmatism can be
carried out independently of the more systematic
attempts at a general philosophy of value that are
being made to-day in Germany and America and
elsewhere. And then it would be a matter of no
ordinary difficulty to clear up the inconsistency
that doubtless exists between Pragmatism as a
value philosophy and Pragmatism as a mere
philosophy of " consequences." It is " immediate,"
and " verifiable," and " definitely appreciated '
consequences, rather than the higher values

1 In Pragmatism and Its Critics (Univ. of Chicago Press).

THE PRAGMATIST MOVEMENT 53

of our experience that (up to the present time)
seem to have bulked largely in the argumentations
of the pragmatists.

And as an illustration of a doctrine that is both
American and hostile to pragmatism, we may
instance the New Realism1 that was recently
launched in a collective manifesto in The Journal
of Philosophy and Scientific Methods. This
realism is, to be sure, hostile to every form of
" subjectivism " or personalism, and may in a
certain sense be regarded as the emergence into
full daylight of the realism or dualism that we
found to be lurking 2 in James's " radical empiri-

1 The manifesto has now become a book, The New Realism (Mac-
millan). For a useful account of the New Realism and the Old see
Professor Perry, Present Philosophical Tendencies, Part V.

2 The following are my reasons for saying that the " New Realism "
was already to some extent lurking in the " radical empiricism " of
James, (i) Although teaching unmistakably the " activity " of mind,
James seemed to think this activity " selective " rather than " creative "
(falling in this idea behind his much-admired Bergson). (2) Despite
this belief in the activity of the mind, he had the way of regarding
consciousness as (to some extent) the mind's " content " — an atti-
tude common to all empirical psychologists since Hume and the
English associationists. And from this position (legitimate so far from
the psychological point of view) he went on to the idea (expressed in a
troublesome form in the article, " Does Consciousness exist ? ") that
consciousness is not an entity or substance — of course it is not in the
ordinary sense of " entity." (3) Then from this he seemed to develop
the idea that the various " elements " that enter into consciousness to
be transformed into various " relationships " do not suffer any sub-
stantial change in this quasi-subjective " activity." Therefore, as
Professor Perry puts it (Present Tendencies, p. 353), " the elements or
terms which enter into consciousness and become its content may
now be regarded as the same elements which, in so far as otherwise related,
compose physical nature [italics mine]. The elements themselves, the
' materia prima,' or stuff of pure experience, are neither psychical nor
physical." It is in this last absurd sentence [simply a piece of quasi-
scientific analysis, the error of which Critical Idealism would expose

54 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM

cism." It is, therefore, as it were, one of the
signs that Pragmatism is perhaps breaking up in
America into some of the more elemental tendencies
out of which it developed — in this case the
American desire for operative (or effective) realism
and for a " direct " * contact with reality instead
of the indirect contact of so many metaphysical
systems.

It is only necessary to add here that it is to the
credit of American rationalism of the Neo-Hegelian
type that it has shown itself, notably in the
writings of Professor Royce,2 capable, not only of
criticising Pragmatism, but of seeking to incor-
porate, in a constructive philosophy of the
present, some of the features of the pragmatist
emphasis upon " will " and " achievement " and
" purpose." It is, therefore, in this respect at
least in line with some of the best tendencies in
contemporary European philosophy.

Lastly, there are certain tendencies of recent
English philosophy with which Pragmatism
has special affinities. Among these may be
mentioned : (i) the various general and specific

in a moment] that the roots, I think, of " new realism " are to be found
— a doctrine whose unmitigated externalism is the negation of all
philosophy.

1 See p. 164 and p. 230.

2 I refer to his Aberdeen " Gifford Lectures " on " The World and
The Individual," and to a well-known address of his upon " The
Eternal and the Practical " in the Proceedings of the American Philo-
sophical Association. In this latter pamphlet he shows that Prag-
matism and the philosophy of Consequences are impossible without
" the Eternal " and without Idealism.

THE PRAGMATIST MOVEMENT 55

criticisms x that have been made there for at least
two generations on the more or less formal and
abstract character of the metaphysic of our
Neo-Kantians and our Neo-Hegelians ; (2) the
concessions that have recently been made by pro-
minent rationalists to the undoubtedly purposive,
or " teleological," character of our human think-
ing, and to the connexion of our mental life
with our entire practical and spiritual activity.
Many of these concessions are now regarded as
the merest commonplaces of speculation, and we
shall probably refer to them in our next chapter.
Then there is (3) the well-known insistence of some
of our foremost psychologists, like Ward and Stout,2
upon the reality of activity and " purpose " in
mental process, and upon the part played by
them in the evolution of our intellectual life, and
of our adjustment to the world in which we find
ourselves. And (4) the ethical and social ideal -

1 The criticisms of which I am thinking are (to select but a few from
memory) Green's well-known admission in respect of Hegelianism, that
it would have " to be done all over again " ; Mr. Bradley's admission
that he is " not a Hegelian " and (recently) that he has " seen too much
of metaphysics " to place any serious weight upon its reasonings ;
Jowett's complaint (in the " life " by Campbell) that the Oxford
Hegelianism of his day was teaching students to place an undue reliance
upon "words" and "concepts" in the place of facts and things •
Dr. Bosanquet's admission (many years ago) that, of course, " gods
and men" were more than " bloodless categories " ; Professor Pringle
Pattison's criticism of Hegel in his Hegelianism and Personality ;
Professor Baillie's criticisms at the end of his Logic of Hegel ; Mr. Sturt's
criticism of Neo-Hegelianism in his Idola Theatri, etc.

2 See the following, for example, from Professor Stout : " Every
agreeable or disagreeable sensation has a conative or quasi-conative
aspect" (Manual of Psychology, p. 233). Also: " Perception is never
merely cognitive " (ibid. p. 242) ; it has a " conative character and a
feeling tone," etc.

56 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM

ism of such well-known members of our Neo-
Hegelian school as Professors Jones, Mackenzie,
and Muirhead. These scholars and thinkers
are just as insistent as the pragmatists upon
the idea that philosophy and thought are, and
should be, a practical social " dynamic " — that
is to say, " forces " and " motives " making for
the perfection of the common life. (5) A great
deal of the philosophy of science and of the philo-
sophy of axioms and postulates to be found in
British writers, from Mill and Jevons to Karl
Pearson and Mr. A. Sidgwick 1 and many others.

Apart from all this, however, or rather, in
addition to it, it may be truly said that one of the
striking things about recent British philosophical
literature2 is the stir and the activity that have been
excited in the rationalist camp by the writings of
the pragmatists and the " personal idealists," and
by the critics of these newer modes of thought.
All this has led to many such re-statements of the
problems of philosophy as are to be found in the
books of men like Joachim,3 Henry Jones,4 A. E.

1 A. Sidgwick's " Applied Axioms" (Mind, N.S. xiv. p. 42). This
is extremely useful, connecting the recent pragmatist movement with
the work of the English logicians. See in the same connexion the
articles of Captain Knox in the Quarterly Review (April 1909) on
" Pragmatism."

2 During the last ten years Mind has contained articles on the
pragmatist controversy by nearly all our prominent academic authorities:
Dr. Bradley, Dr. McTaggart, Professor Taylor, Professor Hoernle, Dr.
Schiller, Dr. Mellone, Dr. Boyce-Gibson, Mr. Hobhouse, and so on.

8 Particularly in his valuable book on Truth in which the weakness of
the Hegelian conception of truth is set forth along with that of other views.

4 In Idealism as a Practical Creed, in his Browning as a Religious and
Philosophical Teacher, and elsewhere.

THE PRAGMATIST MOVEMENT 57

Taylor,1 Boyce-Gibson,2 Henry H. Sturt,3 S. H.
Mellone,4 J. H. B. Joseph,5 and others, and even,
say, in such a representative book as that of Pro-
fessor Stewart upon the classical theme of Plato's
Theory of Ideas. In this work an attempt is made
to interpret Plato's " Ideas " in the light of
pragmatist considerations as but " categories "
or " points of view " which we find it convenient
to use in dealing with our sense experience.

1 In his Elements of Metaphysic, and in many of his recent reviews ;
in his review, for example, of Professor Bosanquet's Individuality and
Value, in the Review of Theology and Philosophy , and in his Mind
(July 1912) review of Professor Ward's Realm of Ends.

2 In his book upon the Philosophy of Eucken, in God With Us, and
elsewhere.

3 In Idola Theatri (an important criticism of Neo-Hegelian writers),
and elsewhere.

4 In Essays in Philosophical Construction, and in his book upon
Logic.

6 In his Introduction to Logic.

CHAPTER III

SOME FUNDAMENTAL CHARACTERISTICS

We shall now attempt a somewhat detailed
treatment of a few of the more characteristic
tendencies of Pragmatism. The following have
already been mentioned in our general sketch
of its development and of the appearance of the
pragmatist philosophy in Europe and America :
(i) the attempted modification by Pragmatism of
the extremes of Rationalism, and its dissatisfaction
with the rationalism of both science and philo-
sophy; (2) its progress from the stage of a mere
practical and experimental theory of truth to
a broad humanism in which philosophy itself
becomes (like art, say) merely an important
" dynamic " element in human culture ; (3) its
preference in the matter of first principles for
" faith " and " experience " and a trust in our
instinctive "beliefs" ; (4) its readiness to affiliate
itself with the various liberal and humanistic
tendencies in human thought, such as the philo-
sophy of " freedom," and the " hypothetical
method " of science, modern ethical and social

58

SOME FUNDAMENTAL CHARACTERISTICS 59

idealism, the religious reaction of recent years,
the voluntaristic trend in German post-Kantian
philosophy, and so on. Our subject in this
chapter, however, is rather that of the three or
four more or less characteristic assumptions and
contentions upon which all these and the many
other pragmatist tendencies may be said to rest.

The first and foremost of these assumptions is
the position that all truth is " made " truth,
"human " truth, truth related to human attitudes
and purposes, and that there is no " objective " or
" independent " truth, no truth " in whose estab-
lishment the function of giving human satisfaction,
in marrying previous parts of experience with
newer parts, has played no role." Truths were
" nothing," as it were, before they were " dis-
covered," and the most ancient truths were once
" plastic," or merely susceptible of proof or dis-
proof. Truth is " made " just like " health," or
11 wealth," or " value," and so on. Insistence,
we might say, upon this one note, along with the
entire line of reflection that it awakens in him, is
really, as Dewey reminds us, the main burden of
James's book upon Pragmatism. Equally char-
acteristic is it too of Dewey himself who is for ever
reverting to his doctrine of the factitious character
of truth. There is no " fixed distinction," he tells
us, " between the empirical values of the un-
reflective life and the most abstract process of
rational thought." And to Schiller, again, this
same thought is the beginning of everything in

60 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM

philosophy, for with an outspoken acceptance of
this doctrine of the " formation " of all truth,
Pragmatism, he thinks, can do at least two things
that Rationalism is for ever debarred from doing :
(i) distinguish adequately " truth " from " fact,"
and (2) distinguish adequately truth from
error. Whether these two things be, or be not,
the consequences of the doctrine in question [and
we shall return1 to the point] we may perhaps
accept it as, on the whole, harmonious with the
teaching of psychology about the nature of
our ideas as mental habits, or about thinking
as a restrained, or a guided, activity. It is in
harmony, too, with the palpable truism that all
" truth " must be truth that some beings or other
who have once " sought " truth (for some reasons
or other) have at last come to regard as satisfying
their search and their purposes. And this truism,
it would seem, must remain such in spite of, or
even along with, any meaning that there may be
in the idea of what we call " God's truth." By
this expression men understand, it would seem,
merely God's knowledge of truths or facts of which
we as men may happen to be ignorant. But then
there can have been no time in which God can be
imagined to have been ignorant of these or any
other matters. It is therefore not for Him truth
as opposed to falsehood.

And then, again, this pragmatist position about
all truth being " made " truth would seem to be

1 See p. 154.

SOME FUNDAMENTAL CHARACTERISTICS 61

valid in view of the difficulty (Plato ' spoke
of it) of reconciling God's supposed absolute
knowledge of reality with our finite and limited
apprehension of the same.2

The main interest, however, of pragmatists in
their somewhat tiresome insistence upon the
truism that all truth is made truth is their hostility
(Locke had it in his day) to the supposed rationalist
position that there is an " a priori " and " objec-
tive " truth independent altogether of human
activities and human purposes.3 The particular

1 " If God has this perfect authority and perfect knowledge, His
authority cannot rule us, nor His knowledge know us, or any human
thing ; just as our authority does not extend to the gods, nor our know-
ledge know anything which is divine ; so by parity of reason they, being
gods, are not our masters, neither do they know the things of men "
(Parmenides, 134, Jowett's Plato, vol. iv.).

2 This is, of course, a very old difficulty, involved in the problem
of the supposed pre-knowledge of God. Bradley deals with it in the
Mind (July 191 1) article upon " Some Aspects of Truth." His solution
(as Professor Dawes Hicks notices in the Hibbert Journal, January
1912) is the familiar Neo-Hegelian finding, that as a " particular judg-
ment" with a " unique context" my truth is "new," but "as an ele-
ment in an eternal reality " it was " waiting for me." Readers of
Green's Prolegomena are quite ready for this finding. Pragmatists,
of course, while insisting on the man-made character of truth, have not
as yet come in sight of the difficulties of the divine foreknowledge — in
relation to the free purposes and the free discoveries of mortals.

3 There is, it seems to me, a suggestion of this rationalist position
in the fact, for example, that Mr. Bertrana Russell begins his recent
booklet upon The Problems of Philosophy with the following inquiry
about knowledge : " Is there any knowledge in the world which is so
certain that no reasonable man could doubt it ? " I mean that the
initial and paramount importance attached here to this question
conveys the impression that the supreme reality for philosophy is still
some independently certain piece of knowledge. I prefer, with the
pragmatists and the humanists, to think of knowledge as concerned
with the purposes of persons as intelligent beings, or with the realities
revealed in the knowing process. Although there are passages in his
book that show Mr. Russell to be aware of the selves and the psychical
elements and processes that enter into knowing, they do not affect his

62 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM

object of their aversion is what Dewey * talks of as
" that dishonesty, that insincerity, characteristic
of philosophical discussion, that is manifested in
speaking and writing as if certain ultimate abstrac-
tions or concepts could be more real than human
purposes and human beings, and as if there could
be any contradiction between truth and purpose."
As we shall reflect at a later stage2 upon the
rationalist theory of truth, we may, meantime,
pass over this hostility with the remark that it is,
after all, only owing to certain peculiar circum-
stances (those, say, of its conflict with religion
and science and custom) in the development of
philosophy that its first principles have been
regarded by its votaries as the most real of all
realities. These devotees tend to forget in their
zeal that the pragmatist way of looking upon all
supposed first principles — that of the consideration
of their utility in and necessity as explanations of
our common experience and its realities — is the
only way of explaining their reality, even as
conceptions.

It requires to be added — so much may, indeed,
have already been inferred from the preceding
chapter — that, apart from their hint about the

prevailingly rationalistic and impersonal conception of knowledge and
philosophy.

1 In his sympathetic and characteristic review of James's " Prag-
matism " in the Journ. of Philos., 1908.

2 See p. 203 (the note) , and p. 263, where I suggest that no philosophy
can exist, or can possibly begin, without some direct contact with
reality, without the experience of some person or persons, without
assumptions of one kind or another.

SOME FUNDAMENTAL CHARACTERISTICS 63

highest truth being necessarily inclusive of the
highest human purposes, it is by no means easy
to find out from the pragmatists what they mean
by truth, or how they would define it. When
the matter is pressed home, they generally
confess that their attitude is in the main " psycho-
logical " rather than philosophical, that it is the
" making " of truth rather than its " nature "
or its " contents " or its systematic character
that interests them. It is the " dynamical "
point of view, as they put it, that is essential to
them. And out of the sphere and the associations
of this contention they do not really travel. They
will tell you what it means to hit upon this
particular way of looking upon truth, and how
stimulating it is to attempt to do so. And they
will give you many more or less artificial and
tentative, external, descriptions of their philosophy
by saying that ideas are " made for man," and
" not man for ideas," and so on. But, although
they deny both the common-sense view that truth
is a " correspondence " with external reality, and
the rationalist view that truth is a " coherent
system " on its own account, they never define
truth any more than do their opponents the
rationalists. It is a " commerce " and not a
" correspondence," they contend, a commerce *
between certain parts of our experience and
certain other parts, or a commerce between our
ideas and our purposes, but not a commerce with

1 See p. 162.

64 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM

reality, for the making of truth is itself, in
their eyes, the making of reality.

Secondly, it is another familiar characteristic
of Pragmatism that, although it fails to give a
satisfying account either of truth or reality, the
one thing of which it is for ever talking of, as
fundamental to our entire life as men, is belief.1
This is the one thing upon which it makes every-
thing else to hang — all knowledge and all action
and all theory. And it is, of course, its manifest
acceptance of belief as a fundamental principle of
our human life, and as a true measure of reality, that
has given to Pragmatism its religious atmosphere.2
It is this that has made it such a welcome and
such a credible creed to so many disillusioned
and free-thinking people to-day, as well as to so
many of the faithful and the orthodox. " For,
in principle, Pragmatism overcomes the old
antithesis of Faith and Reason. It shows, on the
one hand, that faith must underlie all reason
and pervade it, nay, that at bottom rationality

1 In this attitude Pragmatism is manifestly in a state of rebellion
against " Platonism," if we allow ourselves to think of Pragmatism
as capable of confronting Plato. Plato, as we know, definitely sub-
ordinates " belief " to " knowledge " and " truth." " As being is to
becoming," he says, " so is truth to belief (Timaeus, Jowett's transla-
tion). To Plato belief is a conjectural, or imaginative, estimate
of reality ; it deals rather with " appearance " or " becoming " than
with " reality." " True being " he thinks of as revealed in the Ideas,
or the rational entities that are his development and transformation
of the " definition " of Socrates. Against all this rationalism Prag-
matism (it is enough meantime merely to indicate the fact) would have
us return to the common-sense, or the religious, position that it is in-
variably what we believe in that determines our notion of reality.

2 Cf. p 159.

SOME FUNDAMENTAL CHARACTERISTICS 65

itself is the supremest postulate of Faith." x
" Truth," again, as James reminds us, " lives in
fact for the most part on a credit system. Our
thoughts and beliefs [how literally true this is !]
pass so long as nobody challenges them, just as
bank-notes pass so long as nobody refuses them." 2
Now it requires but the reflection of a moment
to see that the various facts and considerations
upon which the two last quotations, and the
general devotion of Pragmatism to " belief," both
repose, are all distinctly in favour of the accept-
ability of Pragmatism at the present time. There
is nothing in which people in general are more
interested at the beginning of this twentieth
century than in belief. It is this, for example,
that explains such a thing as the great success
to-day in our English-speaking world of such an
enterprise as the Hibbert Journal of Philosophy
and Religion, or the still greater phenomenon of
the world-wide interest of the hour in the subject
of comparative religion. Most modern men, the
writer is inclined to think, believe3 a great deal

1 From Dr. Schiller's Humanism.

3 Pragmatism, p. 207.

3 It is this dissatisfaction at once with the abstractions of science
and of rationalism and with the contradictions that seem to exist between
them all and the facts of life and experience as we feel them that
constitutes the great dualism, or the great opposition of modern times.
I do not wish to emphasize this dualism, nor do I wish to set forth faith
or belief in opposition to reason when I extract from both Pragmatism
and Idealism the position that it is belief rather than knowledge
that is our fundamental estimate of reality. I do not believe, as I
indicate in the text above, that this dualism is ultimate. It has come
about only from an unfortunate setting of some parts of our nature,
or of our experience in opposition to the whole of our nature, or the

5

66 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM

more than they know, the chief difficulty
about this fact being that there is no recognized
way of expressing it in our science or in
our philosophy, or of acting upon it in our
behaviour in society. It is, however, only the
undue prominence of mathematical and physical
science since the time of Descartes 1 that has
made evidence and demonstration the main
consideration of philosophy instead of belief,
man's true and fundamental estimate of reality.

We have already 2 pointed out that one of the
main results of Pragmatism is the acceptance on
the part of its leading upholders of our fundamental

whole of our experience. That the opposition, however, between reason
and faith still exists in many quarters, and that it is and has been the
opposition of modern times, and that the great want of our times is a
rational faith that shall recall the world of to-day out of its endless
" distraction " (the word is Dr. Bosanquet's), I am certainly inclined
to maintain. In proof of this statement it is enough to recall things
like the words of Goethe about the conflict of belief and unbelief as the
unique theme of the history of the world, or the " ethical headache
which was literally a splitting headache," that Mr. Chesterton finds in
the minds of many of our great Victorian writers. I shall take leave of
it here with three references to its existence taken from the words or
the work of living writers. The first shall be the opposition which Mr.
Bertrand Russell finds in his Philosophical Essays (in the " Free Man's
Worship ") between the " world which science presents for our belief "
and the " lofty thoughts that ennoble his little day." The second shall
be the inconsistency that exists in Mr. Hugh S. R. Elliot's book upon
Modern Science and the Illusions of Professor Bergson, between his initial
acceptance of the mechanical, evolutionary system of modern science
and his closing acceptance of feeling and poetry and love as the " deepest
forms of happiness." The third shall be the declaration of Professor
Sir Henry Jones of Glasgow (in the Hibbert Journal, 1903) that " one
of the characteristics of our time is the contradiction that exists between
its practical faith in morality and its theoretical distrust of the con-
ceptions on which they rest."

1 See p. 203 (note). 8 See p. 7.

SOME FUNDAMENTAL CHARACTERISTICS 67

beliefs about the ultimately real and about
the realization of our most deeply cherished
purposes. In fact, reality in general is for them,
we may say — in the absence from their writings
of any better description, — simply that which we
can " will," or " believe in," as the basis for action
and for conscious " creative " effort, or construct-
ive effort. As James himself puts it in his book
on The Meaning of Truth : " Since the only
realities we can talk about are objects believed in,
the pragmatist, whenever he says ' reality,' means
in the first instance what may count for the man
himself as a reality, what he believes at the moment
to be such. Sometimes the reality is a concrete
sensible presence. ... Or his idea may be that
of an abstract relation, say of that between the
sides and the hypotenuse of a triangle. . . .
Each reality verifies and validates its own idea
exclusively ; and in each case the verification
consists in the satisfactorily-ending consequences,
mental or physical, which the idea was to set up."
We shall later have to refer to the absence
from Pragmatism of a criterion for achievement
and for " consequences." And, as far as philo-
sophical theories are concerned, these are all,
to the pragmatists, true or false simply in
so far as they are practically credible or not.
James is quite explicit, for example, about
Pragmatism itself in this regard. " No prag-
matist," he holds, " can warrant the objective
truth of what he says about the universe ; he can

68 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM

only believe it." * There is faith, in short, for
the pragmatist, in every act, in every phase of
thought, the faith that is implied in the realiza-
tion of the purposes that underlie our attempted
acts and thoughts. They eagerly accept, for
example, the important doctrine of the modern
logician, and the modern psychologist, as to the
presence of volition in all " affirmation " and
" judgment/' seeing that in every case of affirma-
tion there is a more or less active readjustment
of our minds (or our bodies) to what either
stimulates or impedes our activity.

A third outstanding characteristic of Prag-
matism is the " deeper " view of human nature
upon which, in contrast to Rationalism, it supposes
itself to rest, and which it seeks to vindicate. It
is this supposedly deeper view of human nature for
which it is confessedly pleading when it insists,
as it is fond of doing, upon the connexion of
philosophy with the various theoretical and
practical pursuits of mankind, with sciences like
biology and psychology, and with social reform,2
and so on. We have, it may be remembered,
already intimated that even in practical
America men have had their doubts about the
depth of a philosophy that looks upon man as
made in the main for action and achievement
instead of, let us say, the realization of his higher
nature. Still, few of the readers of James can

1 From Pragmatism and its Misunderstanders.
2 See p. 173.

SOME FUNDAMENTAL CHARACTERISTICS 69

have altogether failed to appreciate the significance
of some of the many eloquent and suggestive
paragraphs he has written upon the limitations
of the rationalistic " temperament " and of its
unblushing sacrifice of the entire wealth of human
nature and of the various pulsating interests of
men to the imaginary exigencies of abstract logic
and " system." x To him and to his colleagues (as
to Socrates, for that part of it) man is firstly a
being who has habits and purposes, and who can,
to some extent, control the various forces of his
nature through true knowledge, and in this very
discrepancy between the real and the ideal does
there lie for the pragmatists the entire problem
of philosophy — the problem of Plato, that of the
attainment of true virtue through true knowledge.
Deferring, however, the question of the success
of the pragmatists in this matter of the unfolding
of the true relation between philosophy and
human nature, let us think of a few of the teachings

1 " You will be surprised to learn, then, that Messrs. Schiller's and
Dewey's theories have suffered a hailstorm of contempt and ridicule.
All rationalism has risen up against them. In influential quarters,
Mr. Schiller in particular has been treated like an impudent school-boy
who deserves a spanking. I should not mention this but for the fact
that it throws so much light upon that rationalist temper to which I have
opposed the temper of pragmatism. Pragmatism is uncomfortable away
from facts. Rationalism is comfortable only in the presence of abstrac-
tions. This pragmatist talk about truths in the plural, about their
utility and satisfactoriness, about the success with which they ' work,'
etc., suggests to the typical intellectualist mind a sort of coarse, lame,
second-rate makeshift article of truth " (James, Pragmatism, pp. 66-
67; italics mine). The words about Rationalism being comfortable
only in the world of abstractions are substantiated by the procedure of
Bosanquet, to whom I refer in Chapter VIII., or by the procedure of
Mr. Bertrand Russell, referred to on p. 169.

70 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM

of experience upon this truly important and
inevitable relation, which no philosophy indeed
can for one moment afford to neglect. Insistence
upon these facts or teachings and upon the reflec-
tions and criticisms to which they naturally give
rise is certainly a deeply marked characteristic
of Pragmatism.

Man, as has often been pointed out, is endowed
with the power of reflection, not so much to enable
him to understand the world either as a whole or
in its detailed workings as to assist him in the
further evolution of his life. His beliefs and
choices and his spiritual culture are all, as it were,
forces and influences in this direction. Indeed,
it is always the soul or the life principle that is
the important thing in any individual or any
people, so far as a place in the world (or in
" history ") is concerned.

Philosophers, as well as other men, often
exchange (in the words of Lecky) the " love of
truth " as such for the love of " the truth," that
is to say, for the love of the system and the
social arrangements that best suit their interests
as thinkers. And they too are just as eager as
other men for discipleship and influence and
honour. Knowledge with them, in other words,
means, as Bacon put it, " control " ; and even
with them it does not, and cannot, remain at
the stage of mere cognition. It becomes in the
end a conviction or a belief. And thus the
philosopher with his system (even a Plato, or a

SOME FUNDAMENTAL CHARACTERISTICS 71

Hegel) is after all but a part of the universe, to be
judged as such, along with other lives and other
systems — a circumstance hit off early in the
nineteenth century by German students when
they used to talk of one's being able (in Berlin)
to see the Welt-Geist (Hegel) " taking a walk " in
the Thiergarten.

Reality again, so far as either life or science
is concerned, means for every man that in which
he is most fundamentally interested — ions and
radium to the physicist of the hour, life to the
biologist, God to the theologian, progress to the
philanthropist, and so on.

Further, mankind in general is not likely to
abandon its habit of estimating all systems of
thought and philosophy from the point of view
of their value as keys, or aids, to the problem
of the meaning and the development of life as a
whole. There is no abstract " truth " or " good "
or " beauty " apart from the lives of beings who
contemplate, and who seek to create, such
things as truth and goodness and beauty.

To understand knowledge and intellect, again,
we must indeed look at them in their actual
development in connexion with the total vital
or personal activity either of the average or even
of the exceptional individual. And instead of
regarding the affections and the emotions as
inimical to knowledge, or as secondary and inferior
to it, we ought to remember that they rest in
general upon a broader and deeper attitude to

72 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM

reality than does either the perception of the
senses1 or the critical analysis of the under-
standing. In both of these cases is the knowledge
that we attain to limited in the main either to
what is before us under the conditions of time
and space, or to particular aspects of things that
we mark off, or separate, from the totality of
things. As Bergson reminds us, we " desire '
and " will " with the " whole " of our past, but
" think " only with " part " of it. Small wonder
then that James seeks to connect such a broad
phenomenon as religion with many of the un-
conscious factors (they are not all merely
" biological ") in the depth of our personality.
Some of the instincts and the phenomena that
we encounter there are things that transcend
altogether the world that is within the scope of
our senses or the reasoning faculties.

Truth, too, grows from age to age, and
is simply the formulated knowledge humanity
has of itself and its environment. And errors
disappear, not so much in consequence of their
logical refutation, as in consequence of their in-
utility and of their inability to control the life
and thought of the free man. Readers of Schopen-
hauer will remember his frequent insistence upon
this point of the gradual dissidence and dis-
appearance of error, in place of its summary
refutation.

1 See p. 235 in the Bergson chapter where it is suggested that per-
ception is limited to what interests us for vital or for practical purposes.

SOME FUNDAMENTAL CHARACTERISTICS 73

Our " reactions " upon reality are certainly
part of what we mean by " reality," and our
philosophy is only too truly " the history of our
heart and life " as well as that of our intellectual
activity. The historian of philosophy invariably
acts upon a recognition of the personal and
the national and the epochal influence in the
evolution of every philosophical system. And
even the new, or the fuller conception of life to
which a given genius may attain at some stage
or other of human civilization will still inevitably,
in its turn, give place to a newer or a more perfect
system.

Now Pragmatism is doubtless at fault in seeking
to create the impression that Rationalism would
seek to deny any, or all, of those characteristic
facts of human nature. Still, it is to some extent
justified in insisting upon their importance in view
of the sharp conflict (we shall later refer to it) that
is often supposed to exist between the theoretical
and the practical interests of mankind, and
that Rationalism sometimes seems to accept with
comparative equanimity.1 What Pragmatism is
itself most of all seeking after is a view of human
nature, and of things generally, in which the fullest
justice is done to the facts upon which this very
real conflict 2 of modern times may be said to rest.

A fourth characteristic of Pragmatism is its
notorious " anti-intellectualism," 3 its hostility to

1 Cf. p. 92. 2 See p. 65.

3 See p. 234 upon the " anti-intellectualism " in the philosophy of
Bergson.

74 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM

the merely dialectical use of terms and concepts
and categories,1 to argumentation that is unduly
detached from the facts and the needs of our
concrete human experience. This anti-intellect-
ualism we prefer meantime to consider not so
much in itself and on its own account (if this be
possible with a negative creed) as in the light of the
results it has had upon philosophy. There is, for
example, the general clearing of the ground that
has undoubtedly taken place as to the actual or
the possible meaning of many terms or conceptions
that have long been current with the transcen-
dentalists, such as " pure thought," the ' 'Absolute,"
' truth ' in and for itself, philosophy as the
" completely rational " interpretation of experi-
ence, and so on. And along with this clearing of
the ground there are (and also in consequence
of the pragmatist movement) a great many recent,
striking concessions of Rationalism to practical,
and to common-sense, ways of looking at things,
the very existence of which cannot but have an
important effect upon the philosophy of the near
future. Among some of the more typical of these
are the following :

From Mr. F. H. Bradley we have the emphatic
declarations that the principle of dialectical
opposition or the principle of " Non-Contradic-
tion ' (formerly, to himself and his followers, the
" rule of the game " in philosophy) " does not
settle anything about the nature of reality " ;

1 See p. 4 and p. 237.

SOME FUNDAMENTAL CHARACTERISTICS 75

that " truth " is an " hypothesis," and that
" except as a means to a foreign end it is useless
and impossible " ; and " when we judge truth by
its own standard it is defective because it fails to
include all the facts," 1 and because its contents
" cannot be made intelligible throughout and
entirely " ; that " no truth is idle," and that " all
truth " has " practical " and aesthetic " con-
sequences " ; that there is "no such existing
thing as pure thought " ; 2 that we cannot separate

1 From " Truth and Copying," Mind, No. 62.

a From " Truth and Practice," in Mind. Cf. '* This denial of tran-
scendence, this insistence that all ideas, and more especially such ideas
as those of God, are true and real just so far as they work, is to myself
most welcome " (Bradley, in Mind, 1908, p. 227, " Ambiguity of
Pragmatism "). Mr. Bradley has of recent years made so many such
concessions, and has philosophized with such an admirable degree of
independence, and has (also admirably) attached so much weight to his
own experience of " metaphysics," and of other things besides, that
many thinkers like Knox and Dewey and Schiller have been discussing
whether he can any longer be regarded as a rationalist. One could
certainly study, profitably, the whole evolution of philosophy in
England during the last forty years by studying Mr. Bradley's
development. He never was, of course, a Hegelian in the complete
sense (who ever was ?), and he has now certainly abandoned an
abstract, formalistic Rationalism.

By way of an additional quotation or two from Mr. Bradley, typical
of his advance in the direction of the practical philosophy for which
Pragmatism stands, we may append the following : " I long ago pointed
out that theory takes its origin from practical collision [the main
contention of Professor Dewey and his associates]. // Pragmatism
means this, I am a pragmatist " (from an article in Mind on the
" Ambiguity of Pragmatism" — italics mine). " We may reject the limita-
tion of knowledge to the mere world of events which happen, and may
deny the claim of this world to be taken as an ultimate foundation.
Reality or the Good will be the satisfaction of all the wants of our
nature, and theoretical truth will be the perception of ideas which directly
satisfy one of those wants, and so invariably make part of the general satis-
faction. This is a doctrine which, to my mind, commends itself as
true, though it naturally would call for a great deal of explanation "
(from Mind, July 1904, p. 325). And, as typical of the kind of final

76 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM

truth and practice ; that " absolute certainty is
not requisite for working purposes " ; that it is a
"superstition1 to think that the intellect is the
highest part of us," and that it is well to attack
a one-sided " intellectualism " ; that both " in-
tellectualism " and " voluntarism " are " one-
sided," and that he has no " objection to identify-
ing reality with goodness or satisfaction, so long as
this does not mean merely practical satisfaction." 2
Then from this same author comes the following
familiar statement about philosophy as a whole :
" Philosophy always will be hard, and what it
promises in the end is no clear vision nor any
complete understanding or vision, but its certain
reward is a continual and a heightened appreciation
[this is the result of science as well as of philosophy]
of the ineffable mystery of life, of life in all its
complexities and all its unity and all its worth." 3
Equally typical and equally important is
the following concession from Professor Taylor,

philosophy to which the philosophical reconstruction of the future must
somehow attain out of the present quarrel between Pragmatism and
Rationalism, the following : " If there were no force in the world but the
vested love of God, if the wills in the past were one in effort and in sub-
stance with the one Will, if in that Will they are living still and still are
so loving, and if again by faith, suffering, and love my will is made really
one with theirs, here indeed we should have found at once our answer
and our refuge. But with this we should pass surely beyond the limits
of any personal individualism " (from Mind, July 1904, p. 316). Dr.
Schiller, by the way, has a list of such concessions to Pragmatism on
the part of Mr. Bradley in Mind, 1910, p. 35.

1 Cf. the saying of Herbert Spencer (Autobiography, i. 253) that a
" belief in the unqualified supremacy of reason [is] the superstition of
philosophers."

2 See p. 147.

3 " Truth and Practice," Mind, No. 51.

SOME FUNDAMENTAL CHARACTERISTICS y7

although, of course, to many people it would seem
no concession at all, but rather the mere statement
of a fact, which our Neo-Hegelians have only made
themselves ridiculous by seeming to have so long
overlooked : " Mere truth for the intellect can never
be quite the same as ultimate reality. For in
mere truth we get reality only in its intellectual
aspect, as that which affords a higher satisfaction
to thought's demand for consistency and system-
atic unity in its object. And as we have seen,
this demand can never be quite satisfied by
thought itself.1 For thought, to remain thought,
must always be something less than the whole
reality which it knows." 2

And we may add also from Professor Taylor
the following declaration in respect of the notorious
inability of Neo-Hegelian Rationalism to furnish
the average man with a theory of reality in the
contemplation of which he can find at least an
adequate motive to conscious effort and achieve-
ment : " Quite apart from the facts, due to
personal shortcomings and confusions, it is inherent
in the nature of metaphysical study that it can
make no positive addition to our information,
and can itself supply no motive for practical
endeavour." 3

Many of those findings are obviously so
harmonious with some of the more familiar

1 It would be easy to quote to the same effect from other Hegelian
students, or, for that part of it, from Hegel himself.

2 Elements of Metaphysics, p. 411.
8 Ibid. p. 414.

78 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM

formulas of the pragmatists that there would
seem to be ample warrant for associating them
with the results of the pragmatist movement.
This is particularly the case, it would seem, with
the concession of Mr. Bradley with respect of the
" practical " or " hypothetical " conception that
we ought to entertain of " truth " and " thinking,"
and also with the strictures passed by him upon
" mere truth " and " mere intellectualism," and
with Professor Taylor's position in respect of the
inadequacy of the rationalist theory of reality,
as in no sense a " dynamic " or an " incentive "
for action. And we might well regard Professor
Taylor's finding in respect of mere systematic
truth or the " Absolute " (for they are the same
thing to him) as confirmatory of Dr. Schiller's im-
portant contention that " in Absolutism " the two
" poles " of the " moral " and the " intellectual "
character of the Deity " fall apart." This means,
we will remember, that the truth of abstract
intellectualism is not the truth for action,1
that absolutism is not able to effect or harmonize
between the truth of systematic knowledge and
moral truth — if, indeed, there be any such thing as
moral truth on the basis of a pure Rationalism.

To be sure, both the extent and even the reality
of all this supposed cession of ground in philo-
sophy to the pragmatists has been doubted and
denied by the representatives of Rationalism.
They would be questioned, too, by many sober

1 Cf. p. 14.

SOME FUNDAMENTAL CHARACTERISTICS 79

thinkers and scholars who have long regarded
Hegelian intellectualism and pragmatist " volun-
tarism " as extremes in philosophy, as inimical,
both of them, to the interests of a true and catholic
conception of philosophy. The latter, as we know
from Aristotle, should be inclusive of the realities
both of the intellectual and the practical life.

Pragmatist criticisms of Rationalism, again,
may fairly be claimed to have been to a large
extent anticipated by the independent findings
of living idealist thinkers like Professors Pringle-
Pattison, Baillie, Jones, and others, in respect of
the supposed extreme claims of Hegelianism, as
well as by similar findings and independent
constructive efforts on the part of the recent
group of the Oxford Personal Idealists.1 That
there is still a place for pragmatist anti-
intellectualism is evidently the conclusion to
be drawn from such things as the present wide
acceptance of the philosophy of Bergson, or
the recent declarations of Mr. Bradley that we
are justified " in the intelligent refusal to accept
as final an theoretical criterion which actually
so far exists," and that the "action of narrow
consistency must be definitely given up."

The reflection ought, moreover, to be inserted
here that even if Pragmatism has been of some
possible service in bringing forth from rationalists
some of their many recent confessions of the
limitations of an abstract intellectualism, it is

1 Sec the well-known volume Personal Idealism, edited by Mr. Sturt.

80 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM

not at all unlikely that Rationalism in its turn
may succeed in convicting Pragmatism of an
undue emphasis 1 upon volition and action and
upon merely practical truth.

We shall now terminate the foregoing char-
acterization of Pragmatism by a reference to two
or three other specific things for which it may,
with more or less justice, be supposed to stand in
philosophy. These are (i) the repudiation of
the "correspondence view"2 of the relation of

1 Cf. pp. 147 and 193.

2 By this notion is meant the common-sense idea that truth in all
cases " corresponds " to fact, my perception of the sunset to the
real sunset, my " idea " of a " true " friend to a real person whose
outward acts " correspond to " or " faithfully reflect " his inner feelings.
See the first chapter of Mr. Joachim's book upon The Nature of Truth,
where this notion is examined and found wanting. It is probably
the oldest notion of truth, and yet one that takes us readily into philo-
sophy from whatever point of view we examine it. It was held by
nearly all the Greek philosophers before the time of the Sophists, who
first began to teach that truth is what it " appears to be " — the " rela-
tivity " position that is upheld, for example, by Goethe, who said that
" When I know my relation to myself and to the outer world I call this
truth. And thus every man can have his own truth, and yet truth is
always the same." The common-sense view was held also by St.
Augustine in the words, " That is true what is really what it seems to
be (verum est quod ita est, ut videtur)," by Thomas Aquinas as the
" adequacy of the intellect to the thing," in so far as the intellect says
that that is which really is, or that that is not which is not (adaequatio
intellectus et rei), by Suarez, by Goclen, who made it a conformity of
the judgment with the thing. Its technical difficulties begin to appear,
say in Hobbes, who held that truth consists in the fact of the subject
and the predicate being a name of the same thing, or even in Locke,
who says : " Truth then seems to me in the proper import of the word
to signify nothing but the joining or separating of signs, as the things
signified by them, do agree, or disagree, one with another " (Essay, iv.
5. 2). How can things "agree" or "disagree" with one another?
And an " idea " of course is, anyhow, not a " thing " with a shape and
with dimensions that " correspond " to " things," any more than is
a " judgment " a relation of two " ideas " " corresponding " to the
" relations " of two " things."

SOME FUNDAMENTAL CHARACTERISTICS 81

truth to reality, (2) the rejection of the idea of
there being any ultimate or rigid distinction
between " appearance " and " reality," and (3)
the reaffirmation of the " teleological " point of
view as characteristic of philosophy in distinction
from science.

As for (1) it has already been pointed out that
this idea of the misleading character of the ordinary
" correspondence notion " of truth is claimed
by pragmatists as an important result of their
proposal to test truth by the standard of the
consequences involved in its acceptance.1 The
ordinary reader may not, to be sure, be aware of
the many difficulties that are apt to arise in philo-
sophy from an apparent acceptance of the common-
sense notion of truth as somehow simply a

1 " The mind is not a ' mirror ' which passively reflects what it
chances to come upon. It initiates and tries ; and its correspondence
with the ' outer world ' means that its effort successfully meets the
environment in behalf of the organic interest from which it sprang.
The mind, like an antenna, feels the way for the organism. It gropes
about, advances and recoils, making many random efforts and many
failures ; but it is always urged into taking the initiative by the pressure
of interest, and doomed to success or failure in some hour of trial when
it meets and engages the environment. Such is mind, and such,
according to James, are all its operations " (Perry, Present Philosophical
Tendencies, p. 351). Or the following : " I hope that," said James in
the " lectures " embodied in Pragmatism (New York, 1908) ..." the
concreteness and closeness to facts of pragmatism . . . may be what
approves itself to you as its most satisfactory peculiarity. It only
follows here the example of the sister sciences, interpreting the un-
observed by the observed. It brings old and new harmoniously to-
gether. It converts the absolutely empty notion of a static relation of
' correspondence ' between our minds and reality, into that of a rich and
active commerce (that any one may follow in detail and understand)
between particular thoughts of ours and the great universe of other
experiences in which they play their parts and have their uses " (p. 68 ;
italics mine).

6

82 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM

duplicate ora" copy " of external reality. There
is the difficulty, say, of our ever being able to prove
such a correspondence without being (or " going ")
somehow beyond both the truth and the reality
in question, so as to be able to detect either
coincidence or discrepancy. Or, we might again
require some bridge between the ideas in our
minds and the supposed reality outside them
— " sensations " say, or " experiences," some-
thing, in other words, that would be accepted
as " given " and indubitable both by idealists
and realists. And there would be the difficulty,
too, of saying whether we have to begin for the
purposes of all reflective study with what is
within consciousness or with what is outside
it — in matter say, or in things. And if the
former, how we can ever get to the latter,
and vice versa. And so on with the many
kindred subtleties that have divided thinkers into
idealists and realists and conceptualists, monists,
dualists, parallelists, and so on.

Now Pragmatism certainly does well in pro-
posing to steer clear of all such difficulties and
pitfalls of the ordinary " correspondence notion."
And as we shall immediately refer to its own
working philosophy in the matter, we shall mean-
time pass over this mere point of its rejection of
the " correspondence notion " with one or two
remarks of a critical nature, (i) Unfortunately
for the pragmatists the rejection of the corre-
spondence notion is just as important a feature

SOME FUNDAMENTAL CHARACTERISTICS 83

of Idealism1 as it is of Pragmatism. The latter
system therefore can lay no claim to any unique-
ness or superiority in this connexion. (2) Prag-
matism, as we may perhaps see, cannot maintain
its position that the distinction between " idea '
and " object " is one " within experience itself "
(rather than a distinction between experience and
something supposedly outside it) without travelling
further in the direction of Idealism 2 than it
has hitherto been prepared to do. By such a
travelling in the direction of Idealism we mean
a far more thorough-going recognition of the part
played in the making of reality by the " personal "
factor, than it has as yet contemplated either
in its " instrumentalism " or in its " radical
empiricism." (3) There is, after all, an element
of truth in the correspondence notion to which
Pragmatism fails to do justice. We shall refer
to this failure in a subsequent chapter 3 when
again looking into its theory of truth and
reality.

Despite these objections there is, however, at
least one particular respect in regard to which
Pragmatism may legitimately claim some credit
for its rejection of the correspondence notion.
This is its insistence that the truth is not (as it
must be on the correspondence theory) a " datum '
or a "presentation," not something given to

1 " On any view like mine to speak of truth as in the end copying
reality, would be senseless " (Bradley in Mind, July 191 1, " On some
Aspects of Truth").

a See p. 143 and p. 265. 3 See p. 127 and p. 133.

84 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM

us by the various objects and things without
us, or by their supposed effects upon our senses
and our memory and our understanding. It
rather, on the contrary, maintains Pragmatism,
a " construction " on the part of the mind, an
attitude of our " expectant " (or " believing ")
consciousness, into which our own reactions
upon things enter at least as much as do their
supposed effects and impressions upon us. Of
course the many difficulties of this thorny subject
are by no means cleared up by this mere indication
of the attitude of Pragmatism, and we shall return
in a later chapter1 to this idea of truth as a
construction of the mind instead of a datum,
taking care at the same time, however, to refer to
the failure of which we have spoken on the part
of Pragmatism to recognize the element of truth
that is still contained in the correspondence
notion.

(2) The rejection of the idea of any rigid, or
ultimate distinction between " appearance ' and
" reality." This is a still broader rejection than
the one to which we have just referred, and may,
therefore, be thought of as another more or less
fundamental reason for the rejection either of
the copy or of the correspondence theory of truth.
The reality of things, as Pragmatism conceives it,
is not something already " fixed " and " deter-
mined," but rather, something that is " plastic '
and " modifiable," something that is, in fact, under-

1 See pp. 148-9.

SOME FUNDAMENTAL CHARACTERISTICS 85

going a continuous process of modification, or
development, of one kind or another. It must
always, therefore, the pragmatist would hold, be
defined in terms of the experiences and the
activities through which it is known and revealed
and through which it is, to some extent, even
modified.1

Pragmatism, as we may remember, has been
called by James " immediate " or " radical "
empiricism, although in one of his last books he
seeks to give an independent development to these
two doctrines. The cardinal principle of this
philosophy is that " things are what they are
experienced as being, or that to give a just account
of anything is to tell what that thing is experienced
to be." 2 And it is perhaps this aspect of the new
philosophy of Pragmatism that is most amply and
most attractively exhibited in the books of James.
It is presented, too, with much freshness and skill
in Professor Bawden's3 book upon Pragmatism,
which is an attempt, he says, " to set forth the
necessary assumptions of a philosophy in which
experience becomes self-conscious as a method." 4

1 See p. 162. a What is Pragmatism? (Pratt), p. 21.

3 Principles of Pragmatism, Houghton Mifflin, 1910.

4 Ibid., Preface. This last sentence, by the way, may be taken as
one of the many illustrations that may be given of the crudities and
difficulties of some of the literature of Pragmatism. It shows that
Pragmatism may sometimes be as guilty of abstractionism as is
Rationalism itself. It is not " experience " that becomes " self-
conscious," but only " persons." And, similarly, it is only " persons "
who pursue " ends " and " satisfy " desires, and who may be said to
have a " method." Professor Bawden, of course, means that it is to the
credit of Pragmatism that it approaches experience just as it finds it,

86 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM

" The new philosophy," proceeds Bawden,1 " is
a pragmatic idealism. Its method is at once
intrinsic and immanent and organic or functional.
By saying that its method is functional, we mean
that its experience must be interpreted from
within. We cannot jump out of our skins . . .
we cannot pull ourselves up by our own boot-
straps. We find ourselves in mid-stream of the
Niagara of experience, and may define what it is
by working back and forth within the current."
" We do not know where we are going, but we
are on the way " [the contradiction is surely
apparent]. Then, like James, Bawden goes on to
interpret Pragmatism by showing what things
like self-consciousness, experience, science, social
consciousness, space, time, and causation are
by showing how they " appear," and how they
"function" — "experience" itself being simply,
to him and to his friends, a "dynamic
system," " self-sustaining," a " whole leaning on
nothing."

The extremes of this " immediate" or " radical "
philosophy appear to non - pragmatists to be
reached when we read words like those just quoted
about the Niagara stream of our experience, and
about our life as simply movement and acceleration,
or about the celebrated " I think " of Descartes
as equally well [!] set forth under the form " It

and that its chief method is the interpretation of the same experience —
an easy thing, doubtless, to profess, but somewhat difficult to carry out.
1 Principles of Pragmatism, Houghton Mifflin, 1910, pp. 44-45.

SOME FUNDAMENTAL CHARACTERISTICS 87

thinks," or " thinking is going on," or about the
" being " of the individual person as consisting
simply in a " doing." " All this we hold," says
Bawden, "to be not materialism but simply energism."
" There is no ' truth,' only ' truths ' — this is
another way of putting it — and the only criterion
of truth is the changing one of the image or the
idea which comes out of our impulses or of the
conflict of our habits." The end of all this
modern flowing philosophy is, of course, the
" Pluralism " of James, the universe as a society
of functioning selves in which reality " may exist
in a distributive form, or in the shape, not of an
All, but of a set of eaches." " The essence of life,"
as he puts it in his famous essay on Bergson,1 " is
its continually changing character," and we only
call it a "confusion" sometimes because we have
grown accustomed in our sciences and philosophies
to isolate " elements " and " differents " which in
reality are ' ' all dissolved in one another. ' ' 2 " Rela-
tions of every sort, of time, space, difference,
likeness, change, rate, cause, or what not, are just
as integral members of the sensational flux as
terms are." " Pluralism lets things really exist
in the each form, or distributively. Its type of
union ... is different from the monistic type
of dH-einheit. It is what I call the strung-along
type, the type of continuity, contiguity, or conca-
tenation." And so on.

(3) The reaffirmation of the teleological point
1 p. 253. a p. 256.

88 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM

of view. After the many illustrations and refer-
ences that have already been given in respect of
the tendencies of Pragmatism, it is perhaps hardly
necessary to point out that an insistence upon the
necessity to philosophy of the " teleological "
point of view, of the consideration of both
thoughts and things from the point of view of
their purpose or utility, is a deeply - marked
characteristic of Pragmatism. In itself this
demand can hardly be thought of as altogether
new, for the idea of considering the nature of
anything in the light of its final purpose or
end is really as old in our European thought
as the philosophy of Aristotle or Anaxagoras.
Almost equally familiar is the kindred idea upon
which Pragmatism is inclined to felicitate itself,
of finding the roots of metaphysic " in ethics," in
the facts of conduct, in the facts of the " ideal "
or the " personal " order which we tend1 in human
civilization to impose upon what is otherwise
thought of by science as the natural order. The
form, however, of the teleological argument to
which Pragmatism may legitimately be thought
to have directed our attention is that of the
possible place in the world of reality, and in
the world of thought, of the effort and the
free initiative of the individual. This place,
unfortunately (the case is quite different with
Bergson2), Pragmatism has been able, up to the
present time, to define, in the main, only negatively

1 See p. 146. 3 See p. 240 et jf.

SOME FUNDAMENTAL CHARACTERISTICS 89

— by means of its polemic against the completed
and the self -completing " Absolute " of the Neo-
Hegelian Rationalists. What this polemic is we
can best indicate by quoting from Hegel himself
a passage or a line of the reflection against which
it is seeking to enter an emphatic and a reasoned
protest, and then after this a passage or two from
some of our Anglo-Hegelians in the same con-
nexion.

" The consummation," says Hegel, in a familiar
and often-quoted passage, " of the Infinite aim
{i.e. of the purpose of God as omniscient and
almighty) consists merely in removing the illusion
which makes it seem unaccomplished." * Now
although there is a sense in which this great saying
must for ever be maintained to contain an element
of profound truth,2 the attitude of Pragmatism
in regard to it would be, firstly, that of a rooted
objection to its outspoken intellectualism. How
can the chief work of the Almighty be conceived
to be merely that of getting rid somehow from our
minds, or from his, of our mental confusions ?
And then, secondly, an equally rooted objection is
taken;to the implication that the individual human
being should allow himself to entertain, as possibly
true, a view of the general trend of things that

1 Wallace's Logic of Hegel, p. 304.

* There is a sentence in one of Hawthorne's stories to the effect that
man's work is always illusory to some extent, while God is the only
worker of realities. I would not go as far as this, believing, as I do,
with the pragmatists, that man is at least a fellow-worker with God.
But I do find Pragmatism lacking, as 1 indicate elsewhere, in any
adequate recognition of the work of God, or the Absolute in the universe.

go PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM

renders any notion of his playing an appreciable
part therein a theoretical and a practical absurdity.1
This notion (or " conceit," if you will) he can
surrender only by ceasing to think of his own
consciousness of " effort " and of the part played
by " effort " 2 and " invention " in the entire
animal and human world, and also of his con-
sciousness of duty and of the ideal in general.
This latter consciousness of itself bids him to
realize certain " norms " or regulative prescripts
simply because they are consonant with that
higher will which is to him the very truth of his
own nature. He cannot, in other words, believe
that he is consciously obliged to work and to
realize his higher nature for nothing. The accom-

1 I am thinking of such considerations as are suggested in the follow-
ing sentences from Maeterlinck : " As we advance through life, it is
more and more brought home to us that nothing takes place that is not
in accord with some curious, preconceived design ; and of this we never
breathe a word, we scarcely let our minds dwell upon it, but of its
existence, somewhere above our heads, we are absolutely convinced "
(The Treasure of the Humble, p. 17). " But this much at least is
abundantly proved to us, that in the work-a-day lives of the very
humblest of men spiritual phenomena manifest themselves — mysterious,
direct workings, that bring soul nearer to soul " (ibid. 33). " Is it
to-day or to-morrow that moulds us ? Do we not all spend the greater
part of our lives under the shadow of an event that has not yet come
to pass ? " (ibid. 51). I do not of course for one moment imply that
the facts of experience referred to in such sentences as these should be
received at any higher value than their face value, for there are indeed
many considerations to be thought of in connexion with this matter
of the realization of our plans and our destiny as individuals. But I
do mean that the beliefs to which men cling in this respect are just as
much part of the subject-matter of philosophy as other beliefs, say the
belief in truth as a whole, or the beliefs investigated by the Society for
Psychical Research. And there may conceivably be a view of human
nature upon which the beliefs in question are both natural and rational.

a See p. 101.

SOME FUNDAMENTAL CHARACTERISTICS 91

plishment of ends and of the right must, in other
words, be rationally believed by him to be part
of the nature of things. It is this conviction,
we feel sure, that animates Pragmatism in the
opposition it shares both with common sense and
with the radical thought of our time against the
meaninglessness to Hegelianism, or to Absolutism,1
many of the hopes and many of the convictions
that we feel to be so necessary and so real in the
life of mankind generally.

And there are other lines of reflection among
Neo-Hegelians against which Pragmatism is
equally determined to make a more or less definite
protest, in the interest, as before, of our practical
and of our moral activity. We may recall, to
begin with, the memorable words of Mr. Bradley,
in his would-be refutation of the charge that the
ideals of Absolutism " to some people " fail to
" satisfy our nature's demands." " Am I," he
indignantly asks, " to understand that we are to
have all we want, and have it just as we want
it ? " adding (almost in the next line) that he
" understands," of course, that the " views " of
Absolutism, or those of any other philosophy, are
to be compared " only with views " that aim at
"theoretical consistency" and not with mere
practical beliefs.2 Now, speaking for the moment
for Pragmatism, can it be truly philosophical to

1 See p. 198 on Dr. Bosanquet's dismissal of the problem of teleology
from the sphere of reasoned philosophy.

2 Appearance and Reality, p. 561.

92 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM

contemplate with equanimity the idea of any such
ultimate conflict as is implied in these words
between the demands of the intellect1 and the
demands of emotion — to use the term most
definitely expressive of a personal, as distinct
from a merely intellectual satisfaction ?

Then again there is, for example, the dictum
of Dr. McTaggart, that there is " no reason to trust
God's goodness without a demonstration which
removes the matter from the sphere of faith."2
May there not, we would ask, be a view of things
according to the truth of which the confidence
of the dying Socrates in the reasonableness
and the goodness of God are at least as reason-
able as his confession, at the same time, of his
ignorance of the precise, or the particular, fate
both of the just and of the unjust ? And is not,
too, such a position as that expressed in these
words of Dr. McTaggart's about a logically com-
plete reason for believing in the essential
righteousness of things now ruled out of court by
some of the concessions of his brother rationalists
to Pragmatism, to which reference has already been
made ? It is so ruled out, for example, even by
Mr. Bradley's condemnation as a " pernicious
prejudice " of the idea that " what is wanted for
working purpose is the last theoretical certainty
about things." 3

1 See p. 155.

a I think that I have taken this phrase from Some Dogmas of
Religion. 8 From " Truth and Copying," Mind, No. 62.

CHAPTER IV

PRAGMATISM AND HUMAN ACTIVITY

It requires now but a slight degree of penetration
to see that beneath this entire matter of an
apparent opposition between our " theoretical "
and our " practical " satisfaction, and beneath
much of the pragmatist insistence upon the
" consequences " of ideas and of systems of
thought, there is the great question of the simple
fact of human action and of its significance for
philosophy. And it might truly be said that the
raising of this question is not merely another of
the more or less definitely marked features of
Pragmatism, but in some respects it is one out-
standing characteristic.

For some reason or other, or for some strange
combination of reasons, the phenomenon that
we call "action"1 (the activity of man as an

1 By action in this chapter and elsewhere in this book, I do not mean
the mere exhibition or expenditure of physical energy. I mean human
activity in general, inclusive of the highest manifestations of this
activity, such as the search for truth, contemplation, belief, creative
activity of one kind or another, and so on. There is no belief and no
contemplation that is not practical as well as theoretical, no truth that
fails to shape and to mould the life of the person who entertains it. I

93

94 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM

agent) and the apparently simple facts of the
reality and the intelligibility of action have long
been regarded as matters of altogether secondary
or subordinate importance by the rationalism of
philosophy and by the mechanical philosophy of
science. This Rationalism and this ostensibly
certain and demonstrable mechanical philosophy
of science suppose that the one problem of
human thought is simply that of the nature of
truth or of the nature of reality (the reality
of the " physical " world) as if either (or each)
of these things were an entity on its own
account, an absolutely final finding or considera-
tion. That this has really been the case so far
as philosophy is concerned is proved by the fact
even of the existence of the many characteristic
deliverances and concessions of Rationalism in
respect of Pragmatism to which reference has
already been made in the preceding chapter.
And that it has also been the case so far as
science is concerned is proved by the existence
of the many dogmatic attempts of many natural
philosophers from Holbach to Haeckel to apply
the " iron laws " of matter and motion to the

quite agree with Maeterlinck, and with Bergson and others, that the
soul is to some extent limited by the demands of action and speech,
and by the duties and the conventions of social life, but I still believe
in the action test for contemplations and thoughts and beliefs and ideas,
however lofty. It is only the thoughts that we can act out, that we can
consciously act upon in our present human life, and that we can persuade
others to act upon, that are valuable to ourselves and to humanity. It
is to their discredit that so many men and so many thinkers entertain,
and give expression to, views about the universe which renders their
activities as agents and as thinkers and as seekers quite inexplicable.

PRAGMATISM AND HUMAN ACTIVITY 95

reality of everything else under heaven,1 and of
everything in the heavens in spite of the frequent
confessions of their own colleagues with regard to
the actual and the necessary limits and limitations
of science and of the scientific outlook.

Only slowly and gradually, as it were, has the
consideration come into the very forefront of our
speculative horizon that there is for man as a
thinking being no rigid separation between theory
and practice, between intellect and volition,
between action and thought, between fact and
act, between truth and reality.2 There is clearly
volition or aim, for example, in the search after
truth. And there is certainly purpose in the
attention 3 that is involved even in the simplest

1 There are, of course, no heavens in the old mediaeval and
Aristotelian sense after the work of Copernicus and Galileo in the
physical sciences, and of Kant in the realm of mind.

2 Professor Moore well points out (Pragmatism and its Critics, p. 13)
that the " challenge " of the idea that our thinking has " two founda-
tions : one, as the method of purposing — its ' practical ' function ; the
other as merely the expression of the specific and independent instinct
to know — its ' intellectual ' function," marks the " beginnings of the
pragmatic movement." The idea of two kinds of thought goes back to
Aristotle and is one of the most famous distinctions of thought. It
dominated the entire Middle Ages, and it is still at the root of the false
idea that " culture " can be separated from work and service for the
common good. I am glad, as I indicate in the text, a few lines further
on, that the idealists are doing their share with the pragmatists in
breaking it up. In America there is no practical distinction between
culture and work. See my chapter on Pragmatism as Americanism.

8 The importance of this consideration about the " attention " that
is (as a matter of fact and a matter of necessity) involved in all " percep-
tion," cannot possibly be exaggerated. We perceive in childhood and
throughout life in the main what interests us, and what affects our total
and organic activity. It is, that is to say, our motor activity, and its
direction, that determine what we see and perceive and experience.
And in the higher reaches of our life, on the levels of art and religion
and philosophy, this determining power becomes what we call our

96 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM

piece of perception, the selection of what interests
and affects us out of the total field of vision or ex-
perience. And it is equally certain that there
is thought in action — so long, that is to say,
as action is regarded as action and not as im-
pulse. Again, the man who wills the truth
submits himself to an imperative just as surely
as does the man who explicitly obeys the law of
duty. It is thus impossible, as it were, even
in the so-called intellectual life, to distinguish
absolutely between theoretical and practical con-
siderations— "truth" meaning invariably the
relations obtaining in some " sphere," or order,
of fact which we separate off for some purpose or
other from the infinite whole of reality. Equally
impossible is it to distinguish absolutely between
the theoretical and the practical in the case
of the highest theoretical activity, in the case,
say, of the " contemplation " that Aristotle talks
of as the most " godlike " activity of man. This
very contemplation, as our Neo-Hegelian * friends

reason and our will and our selective attention. Perception, in other
words, is a kind of selective activity, involving what we call impulse
and effort and will. Modern philosophy has forgotten this in its
treatment of our supposed perception of the world, taking this to
be something given instead of something that is constructed by our
activity. Hence its long struggle to overcome both the apparent
materialism of the world of the senses, and the gap, or hiatus, that
has been created by Rationalism between the world as we think it, and
the world as it really is.

1 E.g. Professor Bosanquet, in his 1908 inaugural lecture at St.
Andrews upon The Practical Value of Moral Philosophy. " Theory
does indeed belong to Practice. It is a form of conation " (p. 9). It
" should no doubt be understood as Theoria, or the entire unimpeded life
of the soul" (p. 11 ; italics mine).

PRAGMATISM AND HUMAN ACTIVITY 97

are always reminding us, is an activity that is
just as much a characteristic of man, as is his
power of setting his limbs in motion.

We have referred to the desire of the prag-
matists to represent, and to discover, a supposedly
deeper or more comprehensive view of human
nature than that implicitly acted upon by In-
tellectualism — a view that should provide, as
they think, for the organic unity of our active
and our so-called reflective tendencies. This
desire is surely eminently typical of what we
would like to think of as the rediscovery by
Pragmatism for philosophy, of the active, or
the volitional, aspects of the conscious life of
man, and along with this important side of our
human nature, the reality also of the activities
and the purposes that are revealed in what
we sometimes speak of as unconscious nature.
The world we know, it would hold, in the spirit
and almost in the letter of Bergson, lives and
grows by experiment,1 and by activities and pro-
cesses and adjustments. Pragmatism has doubt-
less, as we pointed out, been prone to think of
itself as the only philosophy that can bake bread,
that can speak to man in terms of the actual life
of effort and struggle that he seems called upon
to live in the environment in which he finds him-
self. And, as we have just been insisting, the

1 This is surely the teaching of the new physics in respect of the
radio-active view of matter. I take up this point again in the Bergson
chapter.

7

98 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM

main ground of its hostility to Rationalism is the
apparent tendency of the latter to treat the various
concepts and hypotheses that have been devised
to explain the world, and to render it intelligible,
as if they were themselves of more importance
than the real persons and the real happenings
that constitute the world of our experience.1

If it were at all desirable to recapitulate to
any extent those phenomena connected with
Pragmatism that seem to indicate its rediscovery
of the fact of action, and of the fact of its meaning
for philosophy, as its one outstanding characteristic,
we may point to such considerations as the follow-
ing : (i) The fact of its having sought to advance
from the stage of a mere " instrumentalist " view
of human thought to that of an outspoken
1 ' humanism ' ' or a socialized utilitarianism. (2) The
fact of its seeking to leave us (as the outcome
of philosophy) with all our more important
" beliefs," with a general " working " view of the
world in which such things as religion and ideals
and enthusiasm are adequately recognized.
Pragmatism is really, as we have put it, more
interested in belief than in knowledge, the former
being to it the characteristic, the conquering
attitude of man to the world in which he finds
himself. (3) Its main object is to establish a
dynamical view of reality, as that which is
" everywhere in the making," as that which
signifies to every person firstly that aspect of the

1 See p. 238.

PRAGMATISM AND HUMAN ACTIVITY 99

life of things in which he is for the time being
most vitally interested.1 (4) In the spirit of the
empirical philosophy generally its main anxiety
is to do the fullest justice to all the aspects of
our so-called human experience, looking upon
theories and systems as but points of view
for the interpretation of this experience, and of
the great universal life that transcends it. And
proceeding upon the theory that a true meta-
physic must become a true " dynamic " or a true
incentive to human motive, it seeks the relation-
ships and affiliations that have been pointed out
with all the different liberating and progressive
tendencies in the history of human thought.
(5) It would " consult moral experience directly,"
finding in the world of our ordinary moral and
social effort a spiritual reality 2 that raises the
individual out of and above and beyond himself.
And it bears testimony in its own more or less
imperfect manner to the autonomous element 3 in
our human personality that, in the moral life, and
in such things as religious aspiration and creative
effort and social service, transcends the merely
theoretical descriptions of the world with which
we are familiar in the generalizations of science
and of history.

Without attempting meanwhile to probe at all
deeply into this pragmatist glorification of "action"
and its importance to philosophy, let us think of a

1 See p. 143 or p. 229 (note).

2 See p. 34 in Chapter II. in reference to the idea of M. Blondel.

3 See p. 147 and p. 265.

ioo PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM

few of the considerations that may be urged in
support of this idea from sources outside those
of the mere practical tendencies and the affilia-
tions of Pragmatism itself.

There is first of all the consideration that it is
the fact of action that unites or brings together
what we call " desire " and what we call " thought,"
the world of our desires and emotions and the
world of our thoughts and our knowledge.
This is really a consideration of the utmost
importance to us when we think of what we have
allowed ourselves to call the characteristic dualism x
of modern times, the discrepancy that seems to
exist between the world of our desires and the
impersonal world of science — which latter world
educated people are apt to think of as the
world before which everything else must bend
and break, or at least bow. Our point here is not
merely that of the humiliating truth of the wisdom
of the wiseacres who used to tell us in our youth
that we will anyhow have to act in spite of all
our unanswered questions about things, but the
plain statement of the fact that (say or think what
we will) it is in conscious action that our desires
and our thoughts do come together, and that it is
there that they are both seen to be but partial
expressions of the one reality — the life that is
in things and in ourselves, and that engenders in
us both emotions and thoughts, even if the latter
do sometimes seem to lie " too deep for tears."

1 See p. 65, note 3.

PRAGMATISM AND HUMAN ACTIVITY 101

It is with this life and with the objects and
aims and ends and realities that develop and
sustain it that all our thoughts, as well as all
our desires, are concerned. If action, therefore,
could only be properly understood, if it can some-
how be seen in its universal or its cosmic signific-
ance, there would be no discrepancy and no gap
between the world of our ideals and the world of
our thoughts. We would know what we want,1 and
we would want and desire what we know we can
get — the complete development of our personality.
Again there is the evidence that exists in the
sciences of biology and anthropology in support
of the important role played in both animal
and human evolution by effort and choice and
volition and experimentation. " Already in the
contractibility of protoplasm and in the activities
of typical protozoons do we find ' activities ' that
imply 2 volition of some sort or degree, for there
appears to be some selection of food and some
spontaneity of movement : changes of direction,
the taking of a circuitous course in avoidance of
an obstruction, etc., indicate this." Then again,
" there are such things as the diversities in
secondary sexual characters (the ' after-thoughts
of reproduction ' as they are called), the endless
shift of parasites, the power of animals to alter
their coloration to suit environment, and the

1 Sec p. 192, note 3.

8 Needham, General Biology, 191 1. For the mention of this book as
a reliable recent manual I am indebted to my colleague, Professor
Willey of McGill University.

102 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM

complex ' internal stimuli ' of the higher animals
in their breeding periods and activities, which
make us see only too clearly what the so-called
struggle for life has been in the animal world." . . .

Coming up to man let us think of what scientists
point out as the effects of man's disturbing
influence in nature, and then pass from these on
to the facts of anthropology in respect of the
conquest of environment by what we call invention
and inheritance and free initiative. " In placing
invention," says a writer of to-day in a recent
brilliant book, " at the bottom of the scale of
conditions [i.e. of the conditions of social develop-
ment], I definitely break with the opinion that
human evolution is throughout a purely natural
process. ... It is pre-eminently an artificial
construction." 1 Now it requires but the reflection
of a moment or two upon considerations such as
the foregoing, and upon the attested facts of
history as to the breaking up of the tyranny
of habit and custom by the force of reflec-
tion and free action and free initiative, to grasp
how really great should be the significance to
philosophy of the active and the volitional nature
of man that is thus demonstrably at the root not
only of our progress, but of civilization itself.

If it be objected that while there cannot,
indeed, from the point of view of the general
culture and civilization of mankind, be any
question of the importance to philosophy of the

1 Marett, Anthropology, p. 155.

PRAGMATISM AND HUMAN ACTIVITY 103

active effort and of the active thought that underlie
this stupendous achievement, the case is perhaps
somewhat different when we try to think of the
pragmatist glorification of our human action from
the point of view of the (physical ?) universe as a
whole.1 To this reflection it is possible here to say
but one or two things. Firstly, there is apparently
at present no warrant in science for seeking to
separate off this human life of ours from the
evolution of animal life in general.2 Equally
little is there any warrant for separating the
evolution of living matter from the evolution of
what we call inanimate matter, not to speak of
the initial difficulty of accounting for things
like energy and radio-active matter, and the
evolution and the devolution that are calmly
claimed by science to be involved in the various
"systems' within the universe — apart from an
ordering and intelligent mind and will. There
is therefore, so far, no necessary presumption
against the idea of regarding human evolution as
at least in some sense a continuation or develop-
ment of the life that seems to pervade the uni-

1 Cf. supra, p. 101

2 So much may, I suppose, be inferred from the contentions (explicit
and implicit) of all biologists and evolutionists. Human life they all
seem to regard as a kind of continuity or development of the life of
universal nature, whether their theory of the origin of life be that of
(1) " spontaneous generation," (2) " cosmozoa " (germs capable of
life scattered throughout space), (3) " Preyer's theory of the continuity
of life," (4) " Pfliiger's theory of the chemical characteristics of proteid,"
or (5) the conclusion of Vervvorn himself, " that existing organisms are
derived in uninterrupted descent from the first living substance that
originated from lifeless substance" (General Physiology, p. 315).

104 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM

verse in general. And then, secondly, there is the
familiar reflection that nearly all that we think
we know about the universe as a whole is but an
interpretation of it in terms of the life and the
energy that we experience in ourselves and in
terms of some of the apparent conditions of this
life and this energy. For as Bergson reminds
us, " As thinking beings we may apply the laws
of our physics to our world, and extend them to
each of the worlds taken separately, but nothing
tells us that they apply to the entire universe nor
even that such affirmation has any meaning ;
for the universe is not made but is being made
continually. It is growing perhaps indefinitely
by the addition of new worlds." 1

On the ground, then, both of science and of
philosophy2 may it be definitely said that this
human action of ours, as apparently the highest
outcome of the forces of nature, becomes only too

1 Creative Evolution, pp. 245-5.

2 It is, I think, an important reflection that it is precisely in this very
reality of " action " that science and philosophy come together. That
all the sciences meet in the concept, or the fact, of action is, of
course, quite evident from the new knowledge of the new physics.
Professor M'Dougall has recently brought psychology into line with
the natural sciences by defining its subject-matter as the actions
or the " behaviour " of human beings and animals. And it is surely
not difficult to see that — as I try to indicate — it is in human behaviour
that philosophy and science come together. Another consideration
in respect of the philosophy of action that has long impressed me
is this. If there is one realm in which, more than anywhere else, our
traditional rationalism and our traditional empiricism really came
together in England, it is the realm of social philosophy, the realm of
human activity. It was the breaking down of the entire philosophy of
sensations in the matter of the proof of utilitarianism that caused John
Stuart Mill to take up the " social philosophy " in respect to which the
followers of positivism joined hands with the idealists.

PRAGMATISM AND HUMAN ACTIVITY 105

naturally and only too inevitably the highest
object of our reflective consideration. As Schopen-
hauer put it long ago, the human body is the only
object in nature that we know " on the inside."
And do or think what we will, it is this human
life of ours and this mind of ours that have peopled
the world of science and the world of philosophy
with all the categories and all the distinctions that
obtain there, with concepts like the " (Platonic)
Ideas," "form," "matter," "energy," "ether,"
" atom," " substance," " the individual," " the
universal," " empty space," " eternity," " the Ab-
solute," " value," " final end," and so on.

There is much doubtless in this action philo-
sophy, and much too in the matter of the
reasons that may be brought forward in its
support, that can become credible and intelligible
only as we proceed. But it must all count, it
would seem, in support of the idea of the prag-
matist rediscovery, for philosophy, of the im-
portance of our creative action and of our creative
thought. And then there are one or two additional
general considerations of which we may well think
in the same connexion.

Pragmatism boasts, as we know, of being
a highly democratic ! doctrine, of contending
for the emancipation of the individual and
his interests from the tyranny of all kinds
of absolutism, and all kinds of dogmatism
(whether philosophical, or scientific, or social).

1 See p. 185.

106 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM

No system either of thought or of practice, no
supposed " world- view " of things, no body of
scientific laws or abstract truths shall, as long as
it holds the field of our attention, entirely crush
out of existence the concrete interests and the free
self-development of the individual human being.

A tendency in this direction exists, it must be
admitted, in the " determinism " both of natural
science and of Hegelianism, and of the social
philosophy that has emanated from the one or
from the other. Pragmatism, on the contrary, in
all matters of the supposed determination, or the
attempted limitation, of the individual by what
has been accomplished either in Nature or in
human history, would incline to what we generally
speak of to-day asa" modernistic," ora" liberal-
istic," or even a " revolutionary," attitude. It
would reinterpret and reconstruct, in the light of
the present and its needs, not only the concepts and
the methods of science and philosophy, but also
the various institutions and the various social
practices of mankind.1

Similarity Pragmatism would protest, as does
the newer education and the newer sociology,
against any merely doctrinaire (or " intellectual-
istic ") conception of education and culture, sub-
stituting in its place the " efficiency " or the
" social service " 2 conception. And even if we
must admit that this more or less practical
ideal of education has been over-emphasized in

1 See p. 27. 2 See Chapter VII. p. 179.

PRAGMATISM AND HUMAN ACTIVITY 107

our time, it is still true, as with Goethe, that it
is only the " actively- free " man, the man who
can work out in service and true accomplishment
the ideal of human life, whose production should
be regarded as the aim of a sound educational or
social policy.

We shall later attempt to assign some definite
reasons for the failure of Pragmatism to make the
most of all this apparently justifiable insistence
upon action and upon the creative activity of
the individual, along with all this sympathy that
it seems to evince for a progressive and a libera-
tionist view of human policy.

Meantime, in view of all these considerations,
we cannot avoid making the reflection that it
is surely something of an anomaly in philo-
sophy that a thinker's " study " doubts about his
actions and about some of the main instinctive
beliefs of mankind (in which he himself shares)
should have come to be regarded — as they have
been by Rationalism — as considerations of a
greater importance than the actions, and the
beliefs, and the realities, of which they are the
expression. Far be it from the writer to suggest
that the suspension of judgment and the
refraining from activity,1 in the absence of
adequate reason and motive, are not, and have
not been of the greatest value to mankind in the
matter of the development of the higher faculties

1 I am thinking of Pyrrho and Arcesilaus and some of the Greek
sceptics and of their irroxv and arapa^ia.

108 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM

and the higher ideals of the mind. There may
well be, however, for Pragmatism, or for any
philosophy that can work it out satisfactorily,
in the free, creative, activity of man, in the
duty that lies upon us all of carrying on our
lives to the highest expression, a reason and
a truth that must be estimated at their logical
worth along with the many other reasons and
truths of which we are pleased to think as the
truth of things.

Short, however, of a more genuine attempt on
the part of Pragmatism than anything it has as
yet given us in this connexion to justify this
higher reason and truth that are embodied in
our consciousness of ourselves as persons, as
rational agents, all its mere " practicalism " and
all its " instrumentalism " are but the workaday
and the utilitarian philosophy of which we have
already complained in its earlier and cruder
professions.1

After some attention, then, to the matter of the
outstanding critical defects of Pragmatism, in its
preliminary and cruder forms, we shall again return
to our topic of the relatively new subject-matter
it has been endeavouring to place before philo-
sophy in its insistence upon the importance of
action, and upon the need of a " dynamic," instead
of an intellectualistic and " spectator-like " theory
of human personality.

1 See p. 26.

APPENDIX

109

APPENDIX TO CHAPTER IV

PHILOSOPHY AND THE ACTIVITY-EXPERIENCE

[In an article upon the above title in the International Journal
0/ Ethics, p. 1898, I attempted to deal with some aspects of the
problem that I have just raised in the preceding chapter. I
venture to append here some of the statements that I made
then upon the importance of action and the " activity-experi-
ence " to the philosophy of to-day. I am inclined to regard
them (although I have not looked at them until the present
moment of passing this book through the press) as a kind of
anticipation and confirmation of many of my present pages.
Part of my excuse, however, for inserting them here is a hope
that these references and suggestions may possibly be of service
to the general reader. The extracts follow as they were printed.]

I. It requires no very profound acquaintance with the trend
of the literature of general and specialized philosophy of the last
twenty-five years to detect a decidedly practical turn in the
recent speculative tendencies of philosophy and philosophers.
The older conception of philosophy or metaphysics as an attempt
to state (more or less systematically) the value of the world for
thought is being slowly modified, if not altogether disappearing,
into the attempt to explain or to grasp the significance of the
world from the stand-point of the moral and social activity of
man. The philosophical student must be to some extent conscious
of the difference in respect of both tone and subject-matter
between such books as Stirling's Secret of Hegel, E. Caird's Critical
Philosophy of Kant (the first editions of both works), Green's
Prolegomena to Ethics, and the most recent essays and books of
Professors A. Seth x and James 2 and Ward 3 and Sidgwick 4 and

1 Alan's Place in the Cosmos, a book consisting of essays and re-
views published by the author during the last four or five years. They
all advocate " humanism in opposition to naturalism," or " ethicism in
opposition to a too narrow intellectualism."

2 The Will to Believe, 1897.

* " Progress in Philosophy," art. Mind, 15, p. 213.

* Practical Ethics ; Essays.

no PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM

Baldwin,1 and of Mr. Bosanquet 2 and the late Mr. Nettleship,3
and between — to turn to Germany — the writings of Erdmann and
Kuno Fischer and Zeller and F. A. Lange, and those of Gizycki,
Paulsen, Windelband, Eucken, Hartmann, Deussen, Simmel, and
— in France — between the writings of Renouvier and Pillon and
Ravaisson, the " Neo-Kantianism " of the Critique Philosophique
(1872 -1877), and those of Fouillee, Weber (of Strassburg),
Seailles, Dunan, and others, and of general writers like de Vogue,
Desjardins, and Brunetiere, and of social philosophers like Bougie,
Tarde, Izoulet, and so on. The change of venue in these writers
alone, not to speak of the change of the interest of the educated
world from such books as Huxley's Hume and Renan's L'Avenir
de la Science and Du Bois Reymond's Die Sieben Weltrdthsel, and
Tyndall's Belfast Address, to the writings of Herbert Spencer (the
Sociology and the general essays on social evolution), Kidd,
Nordau, Nietzsche, Mr. Crozier (his important History of Civiliza-
tion), and Demolins,4 and the predominance of investigations into
general biology and comparative psychology and sociology over
merely logical and conceptual philosophy seem to afford us some
warrant for trying to think of what might be called a newer or
ethical idealism, an idealism of the will, an idealism of life, in

1 Mental Development — Social and Ethical Interpretations (a work
crowned by the Royal Academy of Denmark). We can see in this
book how a psychologist has been led into a far-reaching study of
social and ethical development in order to gain an understanding of the
growth of even the individual mind. We may indeed say that the
individualistic intellectualism of the older psychology is now no more.
It was too " abstract " a way of looking at mind. Professor Royce, it is
well known, has given, from the stand-point of a professed meta-
physician, a cordial welcome to the work of Professor Baldwin. In an
important review of Mr. Stout's two admirable volumes on Analytic
Psychology {Mind, July, 1897), Professor Royce has insisted strongly
upon the need of supplementing introspection by the " interpretation
of the reports and the conduct of other people " if we would know much
about " dynamic " psychology. It is this " dynamic " psychology —
the " dynamics " of the will and of the " feelings " — that I think consti-
tutes such an important advance upon the traditional " intellectual "
and " individualistic " psychology.

2 The Psychology of the Moral Self. Macmillan, 1897. I have tried,
in a short notice of this book in the Philosophical Review (March, 1898),
to indicate the importance of some of its chief contentions.

3 Philosophical Lectures and Remains, edited by Professor Bradley.

* Editor of La Science Sociale. His recent work on the Superiority of
the Anglo-Saxons (A quoi tient la supiriorite des Anglo-Saxons ?) — a
chapter in the study of the conditions of race survival — ran through
seventeen editions in a few months, and set the whole press of France
and Germany (other countries following suit) into commotion, as well as
calling forth pronunciamientos from most of the prominent editors and
critics of France, — men like Jules Lemaitre, Paul Bourget, Marcel
Prevost, Francois Coppee, Edouard Rod, G. Valbert, etc.

APPENDIX in

contradistinction to the older or intellectual (epistemological, Neo-
Kantian) idealism, the idealism of the intellect. Professor A.
Seth,1 in his recent volume on Man's Place in the Cosmos, suggests
that Mr. Bradley's treatise on Appearance and Reality has closed
the period of the absorption or assimilation of Kanto-Hegelian
principles by the English mind. And there is ample evidence in
contemporary philosophical literature to show that even the very
men who have, with the help of Stirling and Green and Caird and
Bradley and Wallace, " absorbed and assimilated " the principles
of critical idealism are now bent upon applying these principles to
the solution of concrete problems of art and life and conduct.
Two things alone would constitute a difference between the philo-
sophy of the last few years and that of the preceding generation :
An attempt (strongly 2 accentuated at the present moment) to
include elements of feeling and will in our final consciousness of
reality, and a tendency (inevitable since Comte and Hegel's
Philosophy of History) to extend the philosophical synthesis of the
merely " external," or physical, universe so as to make it include
the world of man's action and the world that is now glibly called
the "social organism." 3 A good deal of the epistemological and

1 Now Professor A. Seth Pringle-Pattison.

2 In different ways by all of the following English writers : Professor
A. Seth (" It is not in knowledge, then, as such, but in feeling and action
that reality is given," Man's Place, etc., p. 122, etc. etc.), by Mr.
Bradley {Appearance and Reality), by Mr. Balfour (in his Foundations of
Belief), and by Professor James. Professor Eucken, of Jena, in his
different books, also insists strongly upon the idea that it is not in
knowledge as such, but in the totality of our psychical experience that
the principles of philosophy must be sought. Paulsen, in his Einleitung
in die Philosophic, and Weber, in his History of Philosophy (books in
general use to-day), both advocate a kind of philosophy of the will, the
idea that the world is to be regarded as a striving on the part of wills
after a partly unconscious ideal. Simmel, in an important article in
the Revue de Metaphysique et de Morale, IV. 2, expresses the idea (which
it would be well to recognize generally at the present time) that truth is
not something objectively apart from us, but rather the name we give
to conceptions that have proved to be the guides to useful actions, and
so become part of the psychical heritage of human beings. Professor
Ribot, of Paris, has written more extensively upon the will and the
feelings than upon the intellect, — a fact in keeping with the scientific
demands of our day.

3 See, e.g., an article by Fouillee in the Revue Philosophique, XXI. 5,
with the very title " Nccessite d'une interpretation psychologique et
sociologique du monde." Fouillee finds there, as he does elsewhere,
that will is the principle that enables us to unify the physical with the
psychical world, — an illustration of the fact that the two characteristics
I am referring to are really one. A present instance of the intro-
duction of the element of will (the will of man, even) is to be seen in
the contention of such a book as M. Lucien Arreat's Les Croyances de

ii2 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM

metaphysical philosophy of this century has been merely cosmo-
logical, and at best psychological and individualistic. The philo-
sophy of the present is, necessarily, to a large extent, sociological
and collectivistic and historical. Renan once prophesied that this
would be so. And many other men perceived the same fact and
acted upon their perception of it — Goethe and Victor Hugo and
Carlyle, for example.

To be sure, any attempt to draw lines of novel and absolute
separation between writers of to-day and their immediate prede-
cessors would be absurd and impossible, just as would be the
attempt to force men who are still living and thinking and develop-
ing, into Procrustean beds of system and nomenclature. The
history of the philosophy of the last half of this century constitutes
a development as continuous and as logical as the philosophy of
any similar period of years wherein men have thought persistently
and truly upon the problems of life and mind. There were in the
'sixties men like Ulrici and Lotze (Renouvier, too, to some extent)
who divined the limitations of a merely intellectual philosophy,
and who saw clearly that the only way to effect a reconciliation
between philosophy and science would be to apply philosophy
itself to the problems of the life and thought of the time, just as
we find, in 1893, Dr. Edward Caird writing, in his Essays on
Literature and Philosophy, that " philosophy, in face of the
increasing complexity of modern life, has a harder task laid upon
it than ever was laid upon it before. It must emerge from the
region of abstract principles and show itself able to deal with the
manifold results of empirical science, giving to each of them its
proper place and value." Professor Campbell Fraser, while
welcoming and sympathetically referring to (in his books upon
Berkeley and Locke) the elements of positive value in English
and German idealism, has throughout his life contended for the
idea (expressed with greatest definiteness in his Gifford Lectures
on The Philosophy of Theism) that " in man, as a self-conscious
and self -determining agent," is to be found the " best key we
possess to the solution of the ultimate problem of the universe " ;
while Professor Sidgwick, by virtue of his captivating and
ingenious pertinacity in confining philosophical speculation to the
fines of the traditional English empiricism, and in keeping it free
from the ensnaring subtleties of system and methodology, has
exercised a healthful and corrective influence against the ex-
tremes alike of transcendentalism and naturalism. And it would

Demain (1898). According to Mind, M. Arreat proposes to substitute
the idea that man can by his efforts bring about the supremacy of
justice for the traditional idea that justice reigns in the universe.

APPENDIX 113

be rash to maintain that all the younger men in philosophy show
an intention to act upon the idea (expressed by Wundt, for
instance, in his Ethik) that a metaphysic should build upon the
facts of the moral life of man ; although we find a " Neo-
Hegelian " like Professor Mackenzie l saying that " even the
wealth of our inner life depends rather on the width of our
objective interests than on the intensity of our self-contempla-
tion " ; and an expounder of the ethics of dialectic evolution like
Professor Muirhead quoting 2 with approval the thought expressed
by George Eliot in the words, " The great world-struggle of
developing thought is continually foreshadowed in the struggle of
the affections seeking a justification for love and hope " ; and a
careful psychologist like Mr. Stout 3 deliberately penning the
words,4 " Our existence as conscious beings is essentially an
activity, and activity is a process which, by its very nature, is
directed towards an end, and can neither exist nor be conceived
apart from this end." There are, doubtless, many philosophers
of to-day who are convinced that philosophy is purely an intel-
lectual matter, and can never be anything else than an attempt to
analyze the world for thought — an attempt to state its value in the
terms of thought. Against all these and many similar considera-
tions it would be idle to set up a hard and fast codification or
characterization of the work of the philosophy or philosophers of
to-day. Still, the world will accord the name of philosopher to
any man — Renan, for example, or Spencer or Huxley or Nordau
or Nietzsche — who comes before it with views upon the universe
and humanity that may, for any conceivable reason, be regarded
as fundamental. And on this showing of things, as well as from
many indications in the work of those who are philosophers by
profession, it may be said that the predominating note of the
newer philosophy is its openness to the facts of the volitional and
emotional and moral and social aspects of man's life, as things
that take us further along the path of truth than the mere cate-
gories of thought and their manipulation by metaphysic and
epistemology.

II. The Newer Idealism does not dream of questioning the
positive work of the Kantian and Neo- Kantian and Neo-Hegelian
idealists. It knows only too well that even scientific men like

1 Manual of Ethics, according to Mr. Stout, International Journal of
Ethics, October 1894. There are many similar sentences and ideas in
the book.

2 Elements of Ethics, p. 232.

8 Now Professor of Logic in St. Andrews.

* International Journal of Ethics, October 1894, p. 119.

8

1 14 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM

HeLmholtz and Du Bois Reymond, that " positive " philosophers
like Riehl and Laas and Feuerbach and others have, through the
influence of the Kantian philosophy, learned and accepted the
fact of there being " ideal " or psychical or " mind-supplied "
factors in so-called external reality. There are among the
educated men of to-day very few Dr. Johnsons who ridicule the
psycho-physical, or the metaphysical, analysis of external reality,
who believe in a crass and crude and self-sufficient " matter "
utterly devoid of psychical attributes or characteristics. True,
Herbert Spencer has written words to the effect that " If the
Idealist (Berkeley) is right, then the doctrine of Evolution is
a dream " ; but then everything in Spencer's philosophy about
an " actuality lying behind appearances " and about our being
compelled " to regard every phenomenon as a manifestation of
some Power by which we are acted upon," is against the possi-
bility of our believing that, according to that philosophy, an
unconscious and non-spiritual " matter " could evolve itself into
conscious life and moral experience. The philosophers of to-day
have indeed rejoiced to see Kant's lesson popularized by such
various phases and movements of human thought as psycho-
physical research, art and aesthetic theory, the interest in
Buddhism (with its idealistic theory of the knowledge of the
senses), and the speculative biology of Weismann and others.
That people generally should see that matter is, for many reasons,
something more than mere matter, is to the student of Kant a
piece of fulfilled prophecy. And by a plea for a return to reality
and life and sociability from conceptualism and criticism and
speculative individualism no philosophical scholar for one moment
contemplates, as even conceivable, an overlooking of the idealistic
interpretation of the data of the senses supplied by Locke and
Berkeley and Hume, or of the idealistic interpretation of the data
of science and understanding supplied by Kant's " Copernican "
discovery. Any real view of the universe must now presuppose
the melting down of crass external reality into the phenomena of
sense and experience and the transformation of inorganic and
organic nature into so many planes or grades of being expressive
of the different forms (gravitation, cohesion, vital force, psychic
force) in which cosmic energy manifests itself.

Equally little does the Newer Idealism question the legitimacy
or the actual positive service of the " dialectic " of Hegel (as
Archimedean a leverage to humanity as was the " concept " of
Socrates or the " apperception " of Kant) that has shown the
world to be a system in which everything is related to everything
else, and shown, too, that all ways of looking at reality that stop

APPENDIX 115

short of the truths of personality and moral relationship are untrue
and inadequate. To use the words of Professor Howison, of
California, in the preface to the first edition of Professor Watson's J
latest volume (a book that connects the idealism of Glasgow and
Oxford with the convictions of the youth of the " Pacific Coast "),
the " dominant tone " of the militant and representative philosophy
of to-day, is " affirmative and idealistic. The decided majority
. . . are animated by the conviction that human thought is able
to solve the riddle of life positively ; to solve it in accord with the
ideal hopes and interests of human nature."

1 I think that I must here have meant Professor Watson's
Christianity and Idealism.

CHAPTER V

CRITICAL

Enough has perhaps now been said by way of an
indication of some of the main characteristics of
Pragmatism, and of the matter of its relations to
ordinary and to philosophical thinking. Its com-
plexity and some of its confusions and some of
its difficulties have also been referred to.

As for the affiliations and the associations of
Pragmatism, it would seem that it rests not so
much upon its own mere instrumentalism and
practicalism as upon some of the many broader
and deeper tendencies in ancient and modern
thought that have aimed at a dynamic, instead
of a static, interpretation of reality.

We have suggested, too, that there are evidently
things in traditional philosophy and in Rationalism
of which it fails to take cognizance, although it
has evidently many things to give to Rationalism
in the way of a constructive philosophy of human
life.

Now it would be easily possible to continue
our study of Pragmatism along some or all of those
different lines and points of view. In the matter,

116

CRITICAL 117

for example, of the affiliations and associations
of Pragmatism, we could show that, in addition
to such things as the "nominalism" and the
utilitarianism, and the positivism, and the " volun-
tarism " and the philosophy of hypotheses, and
the " anti-intellectualism " already referred to,
Pragmatism has an affinity with things as far
apart and as different as the Scottish Philosophy
of Common-sense, the sociological philosophy of
Comte and his followers, the philosophy of Fichte
with its great idea of the world as the " sensualized
sphere " of our duty, the " experience " philosophy
of Bacon and of the entire modern era, and so on.
There is even a "romantic" element in Prag-
matism, and it has, in fact, been called " romantic
utilitarianism."1 We can understand this if we
think of M. Berthelot's 2 association of it not only

1 And apart from the idealism and the ethical philosophy of which
I speak, in the next chapter, as necessary to convert Pragmatism into
the Humanism it would like to become, Pragmatism is really a kind of
romanticism, the reaction of a personal enthusiasm against the abstrac-
tions of a classical rationalism in philosophy. There is an element of
this romanticism in James's heroic philosophy of life, although I would
prefer to be the last man in the world to talk against this heroic romanti-
cism in any one. It is the great want of our time, and it is the thing
that is prized most in some of the men whom this ephemeral age of
ours still delights to honour. It was exhibited both in Browning and
in George Meredith, for example. Of the former Mr. Chesterton writes
in his trenchant, clean-sweeping little book on The Victorian Age in
Literature, p. 175 : " What he really was was a romantic. He offered
the cosmos as an adventure rather than a scheme." The same thing
could be said about James's *' Will to Believe " Philosophy. Meredith,
although far less of an idealist than Browning, was also an optimist by
temperament rather than by knowledge or by conviction — hence the
elevation of his tone and style in spite of his belated naturalism.

1 In Un Romantisme utilitaire (Paris, Alcan, 191 1), chiefly a study
of the Pragmatism of Nietzsche and Poincare.

n8 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM

with Poincare, but with Nietzsche, or of Dr.
Schiller's famous declaration that the genius of
a man's logical method should be loved and
reverenced by him as is " his bride."

And there is always in it, to be sure, the im-
portant element of sympathy with the religious
instincts of mankind. And this is the case, too,
whether these instincts are contemplated in some
of the forms to which reference has already been
made, or in the form, say, expressed by such a
typical modern thinker as the late Henry Sidgwick,
in his conviction that " Humanity will not, and
cannot, acquiesce in a Godless world." 1

Then again we might take up the point of the
relations of Pragmatism to doctrines new and old
in the history of philosophy, to the main points of
departure of different schools of thought, or to
fundamental and important positions in many of
the great philosophers. The writer finds that he
has noticed in this connexion the doctrines of
Stoicism and Epicureanism,2 the " probability '

1 I am indebted for this saying of one of my old teachers to Mr.
C. F. G. Masterman, in his essay upon Sidgwick in that judicious
and interesting book upon the transition from the nineteenth to the
twentieth century, In Peril of Change.

2 Stoicism and Epicureanism, as the matter is generally put, both
substitute the practical good of man as an individual for the
wisdom or the theoretical perfection that were contemplated by Plato
and Aristotle as the highest objects of human pursuit. For Cicero, too,
the chief problems of philosophy were in the main practical, the question
whether virtue alone is sufficient for happiness, the problem of practical
certainty as opposed to scepticism, the general belief in Providence and
in immortality, and so on. And Lucretius thinks of the main service
of philosophy as consisting in its power of emancipating the human
mind from superstition. All this is quite typical of the essentially

CRITICAL 119

philosophy of Locke1 and Butler, and Pascal,
the ethics and the natural theology of Cicero,
the " voluntarism " of Schopenhauer,2 Aristotle's
philosophy of the Practical Reason,3 Kant's philo-
sophy of the same, the religious philosophy of
theologians like Tertullian, Augustine, Duns Scotus,
and so on — to take only a few instances.4 The

practical nature of the Roman character, of its conception of education
as in the main discipline and duty, of its distrust of Greek intellectualism,
and of its preoccupation with the necessities of the struggle for existence
and for government, of its lack of leisure, and so on. I do not think
that the very first thing about Pragmatism is its desire to return to a
practical conception of life, although a tendency in this direction doubt-
less exists in it.

1 The idea that our " demonstrable knowledge is very short, if
indeed we have any at all, although our certainty is as great as our
happiness, beyond which we have no concernment to know or to be "
(Essay, iv. 2-14) ; or Locke's words : " I have always thought the actions
of men the best interpreters of their thoughts."

2 Schopenhauer, for example, used to be fond of repeating that his
own philosophy (which took will to be the fundamental reality) was on
its very face necessarily more of an ethic than a system like that of
Spinoza, for example, which could only be called an ethic by a sort
of Incus a non lucendo.

3 The Practical Reason to Aristotle is the reason that has to do with
the pursuit of aims and ends, in distinction from the reason that has
to do with knowledge, and the " universal " and science. This
twofold distinction has given many problems to his students and to his
commentators, and to succeeding generations. It is responsible for
the entire mediaeval and Renaissance separation of the intellectual life
and the intellectual virtues from the practical life and the practical
virtues.

4 It might be added here that Logic has always recognized the
validity, to some extent, of the argument " from consequences " of
which Pragmatism makes so much. The form of argumentation that
it calls the Dilemma is a proof of this statement. A chain of reasoning
that leads to impossible consequences, or that leads to consequences
inconsistent with previously admitted truths, is necessarily unsound.
That this test of tenable or untenable consequences has often
been used in philosophy in the large sense of the term must be known
only too well to the well-informed reader. As Sidgwick says in his
Method of Ethics : " The truth of a philosopher's premises will always

120 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM

view of man and his nature represented by all these
names is, in the main, an essentially practical,
a concrete, and a moral view as opposed to
an abstract and a rationalistic view. And of
course even to Plato knowledge was only an
element in the total spiritual philosophy of man,
while his master, Socrates, never really seemed
to make any separation between moral and
intellectual inquiries.

And as for positions in the great philosophers
between which and some of the tendencies of
Pragmatism there is more than a merely super-
ficial agreement, we might instance, for example,
the tendency of Hume1 to reduce many of the
leading categories of our thought to mere habits
of mind, to be explained on an instinctive rather
than a rationalistic basis ; or Comte's idea of the
error of separating reason from instinct ; 2 or the
idea of de Maistre and Bain, and many others that
" will " is implied in the notion of " exteriority " ;

be tested by the acceptability of his conclusions ; if in any im-
portant point he is found in flagrant conflict with common opinion,
his method will be declared invalid." Reid used the argument from
consequences in his examination of the sceptical philosophy of
Hume. It is used with effect in Mr. Arthur Balfour's Foundations
of Belief in regard to the supposed naturalism of physical science.
Edmund Burke applied it to some extent to political theories, or
to the abstract philosophical theories upon which some of them were
supposedly based.

1 Pragmatism has been called by some critics a " new-Humism "
on the ground of its tendency to do this very thing that is mentioned
here in respect of Hume. But the justice or the injustice of this appella-
tion is a very large question, into which it is needless for us to enter here.

2 Cf. " Intelligence is the aptitude to modify conduct in conformity
to the circumstances of each case " {The Positive Philosophy , Martineau,
i. 465).

CRITICAL 121

or the idea of Descartes * that the senses teach
us not so much " what is in reality in things," as
" what is beneficial 2 or hurtful to the composite
whole of mind and body " ; or the declaration of
Kant that the chief end of metaphysic is God and
immortality ; or the idea of Spencer 3 that the
belief in the unqualified supremacy of reason is a
superstition of philosophers ; or the idea of Plato
in the Sophist 4 that reality is the capacity for acting
or of being acted upon ; and so on.

As for such further confirmation of pragmatist
teaching as is to be found in typical modern
thinking and scholars, thought of almost at
random, it would be easy to quote in this con-
nexion from writers as diverse as Hoffding, Fouill£e,
Simmel, Wundt, Mach, Huxley, Hobhouse, and
many others. It might be called a typically
pragmatist idea, for example, on the part of Mr.
L. T. Hobhouse to hold that "The higher con-
ceptions by which idealism has so firmly held are
not to be ' scientifically ' treated in the sense of
being explained away. What is genuinely higher

1 Principles of Philosophy, Part II. iii. It is also an eminently
pragmatist idea on the part of Descartes to hold that " I should find
much more truth in the reasoning of each individual with reference to
the affairs in which he is personally interested, and the issue of which
must presently punish him if he has judged amiss, than in those con-
ducted by a man of letters in his study, regarding speculative matters
that are of no practical moment " (Method, Veitch's edition, p. 10).

2 Principles of Philosophy, Part II. iii. p. 233.

3 See Principles of Psychology, ch. ii., " Assumption of Meta-
physicians," and also elsewhere in his Essays.

4 " Any power of doing or suffering in a degree however slight was
held by us to be the definition of existence " (Sophist, Jowett's Plato,
iv. p. 465).

122 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM

we have . . . good reason to think must also be
truest," and we "cannot permanently acquiesce
in a way of thinking what would resolve it into
what is lowest." x These last words represent
almost a commonplace of the thought of the day.
It is held, for example, by men as different and as
far apart in their work, and yet as typical of phases
of our modern life, as Robert Browning and Sir
Oliver Lodge. The close dependence again of the
doctrines of any science upon the social life and
the prevalent thought of the generation is also
essentially a pragmatist idea. Its truth is recog-
nized and insisted upon in the most explicit
manner in the recent serviceable manifesto of Pro-
fessors Geddes and Thomson upon " Evolution,"2
and it obviously affects their whole philosophy
of life and mind. It figures too quite promi-
nently in the valuable short Introduction to
Science by Professor Thomson in the same series
of manuals.

Another typical book of to-day, again (that of
Professor Duncan on the New Knowledge of the new
physical science), definitely gives up, for example,
the " correspondence " 3 notion of truth, holding
that it is meaningless to think of reality as sorae-

1 The Theory of Knowledge, Preface, p. ix.

2 " The independence of the doctrines of any science from the social
life, the prevalent thought of the generation in which they arise, is
indeed a fiction, a superstition of the scientist which we would fain
shatter beyond all repair ; but the science becomes all the sounder for
recognizing its origins and its resources, its present limitations and its
need of fresh light from other minds, from different social moulds "
(pp. 215-216).

8 See p. 81.

CRITICAL 123

thing outside our thought and our experience of
which our ideas might be a possible duplicate. This
again we readily recognize as an essentially prag-
matist contention. So also is the same writer's
rejection of the notion of " absolute truth," J and
his confession of the "faith" that is always
involved in the thought of completeness or system
in our scientific knowledge. " We believe purely
as an act of faith and not at all of logic," he says,
" that the universe is essentially determinable
thousands of years hence, into some one system
which will account for everything and which will
be the truth." 2

Nor would it be at all difficult to find confirma-
tion for the pragmatist philosophy of ideas and
thoughts in what we may well think of as the
general reflective literature of our time, outside the
sphere, as it were, of strictly rational or academic
philosophy — in writers like F. D. Maurice, W.
Pater, A. W. Benn (who otherwise depreciates
what he calls " ophelism ") , J. H. Newman, Karl
Pearson, Carlyle, and others.3 Take the following,

* Cf. p. 13.

4 The New Knowledge, p. 255.

3 It would indeed be easy to quote from popular writers of the day,
like Mr. Chesterton or Mr. A. C. Benson or Mr. H. G. Wells, to show that
a knowledge of the existence of Pragmatism as a newer experimental
or " sociological " philosophy is now a commonplace of the day. Take
the following, for example, from Mr. Wells's Marriage (p. 521) : " It was
to be a pragmatist essay, a sustained attempt to undermine the con-
fidence of all that scholastic logic-chopping which still lingers like the
sequelae of a disease in our University philosophy ... a huge criticism
and cleaning up of the existing methods of formulation as a preliminary
to the wider and freer discussion of those religious and social issues our
generation still shrinks from." " It is grotesque," he said, " and utterly

124 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM

for example, quoted with approval from Herschel
by Karl Pearson : " The grand and indeed the
only character of truth is its capability of enduring
the test of universal experience, and coming un-
changed out of every possible form of fair dis-
cussion." x The idea again, for example, recently
expressed in a public article by such a widely read
and cleverly perverse writer as Mr. Bernard Shaw,2
that " the will that moves us is dogmatic : our
brain is only the very imperfect instrument by
which we devise practical means for satisfying
the will," might only too naturally be associated
with the pragmatist-like anti-intellectualism 3 of
Bergson, or, for that part of it, with the deeper
" voluntarism " of Schopenhauer. The following
quotation taken from Mr. Pater reveals how great
may be correspondence between the independent
findings of a finely sensitive mind like his, and the
positions to which the pragmatists are inclined in
respect of the psychology of religious belief. " The
supposed facts on which Christianity rests, utterly
incapable as they have become of any ordinary
test, seem to me matter of very much the same
sort of assent as we give to any assumption in the
strict and ultimate sense, moral. The question
whether these facts were real will, I think, always
continue to be what I should call one of those

true that the sanity and happiness of all the world lies in its habits of
generalization."

1 I cannot meantime trace, or place, this quotation, although I
remember copying it out of something by Karl Pearson.

2 In the Literary Digest for 191 1. 3 See p. 234.

CRITICAL 125

natural questions of the human mind." l Readers
of Carlyle will easily recognize what we might call
a more generalized statement of this same truth
of Pater's in the often-quoted words from Heroes
and Hero-Worship : 2 "By religion I do not mean
the church creed which a man professes, the
articles of faith which .... But the thing a man
does practically believe (and this often enough
without asserting it even to himself, much less to
others); the thing a man does practically lay to
heart and know for certain concerning his vital
relations to the mysterious universe, and his duty
and destiny there." It has long seemed to the
writer that a similar thing to this might be written
(and James has certainly written it) about a man's
" philosophy " as necessarily inclusive of his
working beliefs as well as of his mere reasoned
opinions, although it is the latter that are
generally (by what right ?) taken to be properly
the subject-matter of philosophy.3 And it is this
phase of the pragmatist philosophy that could, I
am inclined to think, be most readily illustrated
from the opinions of various living and dead writers
upon the general working philosophy of human
nature as we find this revealed in human history.
We are told, for example, by Mr. Hobhouse, in his
monumental work upon Morals in Evolution, that
in " Taoism the supreme principle of things may

1 From a letter to Mrs. Humphry Ward, quoted in A. C Benson's
Walter Pater, p. 200. 2 Lecture I. towards the beginning.

3 See p. 62 and p. 197. It should be remembered that our reasoned
opinions rest upon our working beliefs.

i26 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM

be left undefined as something that we experience
in ourselves if we throw ourselves upon it, but
which we know rather by following or living it
than by any process of ratiocination."1 And
" this mystical interpretation," he adds, " is not
confined to Taoism, but in one form or another
lies near to hand to all spiritual religions, and
expresses one mode of religious consciousness, its
aspiration to reach the heart of things and the
confidence that it has done so, and found rest
there."

We are reminded, of course, by all such con-
siderations of the philosophy of Bergson, and of its
brilliant attempt to make a synthesis of intuition
or instinct with reflection or thought, and indeed
it may well be that the past difficulties of philo-
sophy with intuition and instinct are due to the
fact of its error in unduly separating the intellect
from the " will to live," and from the " creative "
evolution that have been such integral factors in
the evolution of the life of humanity.

This entire matter, however, of the comparison
of pragmatist doctrines to typical tendencies in
the thought of the past and the present must be
treated by us as subordinate to our main purpose,
that of the estimation of the place of Pragmatism
in the constructive thought of the present time.
With a view to this it will be necessary to revert
to the criticism of Pragmatism.

The criticism that has already been made is

* Vol. ii. p. 86.

CRITICAL 127

that in the main Pragmatism is unsystematic and
complex and confusing, that it has no adequate
theory of " reality," and no unified theory of
philosophy, that it has no satisfactory criterion of
the " consequences " by which it proposes to test
truth, and that it has not worked out its philosophy
of the contribution of the individual with his
" activity " and his " purposes " to " reality "
generally, and that it is in danger of being a failure
in the realm of ethics.1

To all this we shall now seek to add a few words
more upon (1) the pragmatist criterion of truth,
(2) the weakness of Pragmatism in the realms of
logic and theory of knowledge, (3) its failure to
give consistent account of the nature of reality,
and (4) its unsatisfactoriness in the realm of
ethics.

(1) We have already expressed our agreement
with the finding of Professor Pratt 2 that the prag-
matist theory of truth amounts to no more than the
harmless doctrine that the meaning of any con-
ception expresses itself in the past, present, or
future conduct or experiences of actual, or possible,
sentient creatures. Taken literally, however, the
doctrine that truth should be tested by con-
sequences is not only harmless but also useless,
seeing that Omniscience alone could bring together
in thought or in imagination all the consequences
of an assertion. Again, it is literally false for the

1 Sec the reference in Chapter II. p. 26 to the opportunistic ethic
of Prezzolini. a In What is Pragmatism? Macmillan & Co.

128 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM

reason that the proof of truth is not in the first
instance any kind of " consequences," not even
the " verification " of which pragmatists are so
fond. If the truth of which we may happen to
be thinking is truth of " fact," its proof lies in its
correspondence (despite the difficulties 1 of the idea)
with the results of observation or perception.2
And if it be inferential truth, its proof is that of
its deduction from previously established truths,
or facts, upon a certain plane of knowledge
or experience. In short, Pragmatists forget
altogether the logical doctrine of the existence
(in the world of our human experience, of course)
of different established planes of reality, or
planes of ascertained knowledge in which all pro-
positions that are not nonsensical or trivial, are,
from their very inception, regarded as necessarily
true or false. The existence of these various
planes of experience or of thought is in fact implied
in the pragmatist doctrine of the fundamental
character of belief.3 According to this perfectly
correct doctrine, the objectivity of truth (i.e. its
reality or non-reality in the world of fact or in the
world of rational discourse) is the essential thing
about it, while the idea of its "consequences'
is not. A truth is a proposition whose validity
has already been established by evidence or

i Cf. p. 81.

2 Professor Pratt makes an attempt in his book on What is Prag-
matism ? (pp. 75-6-7) to show that the true meaning of the " correspond-
ence theory" is not inconsistent with Pragmatism or that Pragmatism
is not inconsistent with this truth.

8 Cf. supra, p. 64.

CRITICAL 129

by demonstration. It has then afterwards the
immediate "utility" of expressing in an intelli-
gible and convenient manner the fact of certain
connexions among things or events. And its
ultimate utility to mankind is also at the same
time assured, humanity being by its very nature a
society of persons who must act, and who act, upon
what they believe to be the truth or the reality
of things. But a proposition is by no means
true because it is useful. Constantine believed
eminently in the concord-producing utility of
certain confessions enunciated at the Council of
Nice, but his belief in this does not prove their
truth or reality outside the convictions of the faith-
ful. Nor does the pragmatist or utilitarian char-
acter of certain portions of the writings of the
Old Testament or of the Koran prove the matter
of their literal and factual truth in the ordinary
sense of these terms. As Hume said, " When any
opinion leads us into absurdities 'tis certainly false,
but 'tis not certain that an opinion is false because
it has dangerous consequences."

And then, apart from this conspicuous absence
of logic in the views of pragmatists upon " truth,"
the expression of their doctrine is so confusing that
it is almost impossible to extract any consistent
meaning out of it. They are continually con-
founding conceptions and ideas and propositions,
forgetful of the fact that truth resides not in
concepts and ideas but only in propositions.
While it may be indeed true, as against Rationalism,

130 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM

that all human conceptions whatsoever [and
it is only in connexion with " conceptions " that
Pragmatism is defined even in such an official place
as Baldwin's Dictionary of Philosophy x] have, and
must have, reference to actual or possible human
experience or consequences, it is by no means true
that the test of a proposition is anything other
than the evidence of which we have already spoken.

Then the pragmatists have never adequately
defined terms that are so essential to their purposes
as " practical," " truth," " fact," " reality," " con-
sequences," and they confound, too, " theories "
with " truths " and " concepts " just as they
confound concepts and propositions.

(2) That logic and the theory of proof is thus
one of the weak spots of Pragmatism has perhaps
then been sufficiently indicated. We have seen,
in fact, the readiness of Pragmatism to confess its
inability 2 to prove its own philosophy — that is,
to prove it in the ordinary sense of the term.3
That it should have made this confession is, of
course, only in keeping with the fact that its
interest in logic is confined to such subordinate
topics as the framing and verification of hypo-
theses, the development of concepts and judg-
ments in the " thought-process," and so on. Of
complete proof, as involving both deduction

1 See the Note on p. 21.

2 Cf. supra, p. 67.

3 Papini, in fact (in 1907), went the length of saying that you cannot
even define Pragmatism, admitting that it appeals only to certain kinds
of persons.

CRITICAL 131

and induction, it takes but the scantiest
recognition. And it has made almost no effort
to connect its discoveries in " genetic logic " and
in the theory of hypotheses with the traditional
body of logical doctrine.1 Nor, as may perhaps be
inferred from the preceding paragraph, has it made
any serious attempt to consider the question of the
discovery of new truth in relation to the more or
less perfectly formulated systems and schemes of
truth already in the possession of mankind.

The case is similar in regard to the " theory of
knowledge " of the pragmatists. While they have
made many important suggestions regarding the
relation of all the main categories and principles
of our human thought to the theoretical and
practical needs of mankind, there is in their
teachings little that is satisfactory and explicit
in the matter of the systematization of first
principles,2 and little too that is satisfactory in
respect of the relation of knowledge to reality.
They sometimes admit (with James) the importance
of general points of view like the " causal," the
"temporal," "end," and "purpose," and so on.
At other times they confess with Schiller that
questions about ultimate truth and ultimate

1 For a serviceable account, in English, of the differences between
the pragmatist philosophy of hypotheses and the more fully developed
philosophy of science of the day, see Father Walker's Theories of
Knowledge, chapter xiii., upon " Pragmatism and Physical Science."

2 Cf. supra, p. 10 and p. 15. And this failure to systematize be-
comes, it should be remembered, all the more exasperating, in view of
the prominence given by the pragmatists to the supreme principles of
" end " and " consequences."

i32 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM

reality cannot be allowed to weigh upon our spirits,
seeing that " actual knowing " always starts from
the " existing situation."

Now of course actual knowing certainly does
start from the particular case of the existing
situation, but, as all thinkers from Aristotle
to Hume have seen, it is by no means explained
by this existing situation. In real knowledge
this is always made intelligible by references to
points of view and to experiences that altogether
transcend it. The true theory of knowledge, in
short, involves the familiar Kantian distinction
between the " origin ' and the " validity " of
knowledge — a thing that the pragmatists seem
continually and deliberately to ignore. Schiller,
to be sure, reminds us with justice that we must
endeavour to " connect," rather than invariably
" contrast," the two terms of this distinction.
But this again is by no means what the pragmatists
themselves have done. They fail, in fact, to
connect their hints about the practical or ex-
perimental origin of most of our points of view
about reality with the problem of the validity
of first principles generally.

There is a suggestion here and there in their
writings that, as Schiller * puts it, there can be no
coherent system of postulates except as rooted
in personality, and that there are postulates
at every stage of our development. What this
statement means is that there are " points of

1 In the " Axioms as Postulates " essay in Personal Idealism.

CRITICAL 133

view " about reality that are incidental to the
stage of our natural life (as beings among other
beings), others to the stage of conscious sensations
and feelings, still others to that of our desires
and thoughts, to our aesthetic appreciation, to
our moral life, and so on. But, as I have already
said, there is little attempt on the part of the
pragmatists to distinguish these different stages
or planes of experience adequately from one
another.

(3) References have already been made to the
failures of our Anglo-American pragmatists to
attain to any intelligible and consistent kind of
reality, whether they conceive of this latter
as the sum-total of the efforts of aspiring and
achieving human beings, or with Schiller as an
"original, plastic sub-stratum," or as the reality
(whatever it is) that is gradually being brought
into being by the creative efforts of ourselves and
of beings higher or lower than ourselves in the
scale of existence. Their deepest thought in the
matter seems to be that the universe (our universe ?)
is essentially " incomplete," and that the truth of
God, as James puts it, " has to run the gauntlet
of other truths." One student of this topic,
Professor Leighton, has arrived at the conclusion
that pragmatism is essentially " acosmistic," x

1 Bourdeau makes the same charge, saying that all pragmatists
have the illusion that " reality is unstable." Professor Stout has
something similar in view in referring to Dr. Schiller's " primary
reality " in the Mind review of Studies in Humanism. It is only the
reality with which we have to do (reality vpbs was as an Aristotelian

134 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM

meaning, no doubt, and with good reason, that
Pragmatism has no place of any kind for objective
order or system. Now it is just this palpable
lack of an " objective," or rational, order that
renders the whole pragmatist philosophy liable
to the charges of (i) " subjectivism," and (2)
irrationality. There are in it, as we have tried
to point out, abundant hints of what reality must
be construed to be on the principles of any workable
or credible philosophy, namely something that
stimulates both our thought and our endeavour.
And there is in it the great truth that in action
we are not only in contact with reality as
such, but with a reality, moreover, that transcends
the imperfect reality of our lives as finite individuals
and the imperfect character of our limited effort
and struggle. But beyond the vague hints that
our efforts must somehow count in the .final
tale of reality, and that what the world of ex-
perience seems to be, it must somehow be con-
ceived ultimately to be, there is no standing-
ground in the entire pragmatist philosophy for
want of what, in plain English, must be termed
an intelligible theory of reality. " You see,"
says James, "how differently people take things.
The world we live in exists diffused and distributed

might say) that is " in the making " : for God there can be no such
distinction between process and product. But it is quite evident
that Pragmatism does not go far enough to solve, or even to see, such
difficulties. It confines itself in the main to the contention that man
must think of himself as a maker of reality to some extent — a conten-
tion that I hold to be both true and useful, as far as it goes.

CRITICAL 135

in the form of an indefinitely numerous lot of
eaches, coherent in all sorts of ways and degrees ;
and the tough-minded are perfectly willing to take
them at that valuation. They can stand the
world, their temper being well adapted to its
insecurity." *

The present writer, some years ago, in an article
in Mind,2 ventured to point out the absurdity of
expecting the public to believe in a philosophy
which sometimes speaks as if we could now, to-day,
by our efforts begin to make the world something
different from what it is or what it has been. " As
far as the past facts go," so James put it in 1899,
" there is indeed no difference. These facts are
bagged (is not the phraseology too recklessly
sporting ?), are captured, and the good that's in
them is gained, be the atoms, be the God their
cause." And again, " Theism and materialism,
so indifferent when taken retrospectively [?],
point, when we take them prospectively, to wholly
different, practical consequences, to opposite
outlooks of experience." And again, " But I say
that such an alternation of feelings, reasonable
enough in a consciousness that is prospective, as
ours now is, and whose world is partly yet to come,
would be absolutely senseless (!) and irrational in a
purely retrospective consciousness summing up a
world already past." Now on what theory of
things is it that the future of the world and our
future may be affected by ideal elements and

1 Pragmatism, p. 264. 2 "Pragmatism," October 1900.

136 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM

factors (God, Freedom, Recompense, Justice)
without having been so affected or determined
in the past ? x

(4) The unsatisfactoriness of Pragmatism in
the realm of ethics. Crucial and hopeless as is
the failure of Pragmatism in the realm of ethics,
a word or two had better be said of the right of
the critic to judge of it in this connexion. In the
first place, the thinking public has already ex-
pressed its distrust of a doctrine that scruples not
to avow its affinity with utilitarianism, with the
idea of testing truth and value by mere conse-
quences and by the idea of the useful. " The
word ' expedient,' " wrote a correspondent to
Professor James, " has no other meaning than that
of self-interest. The pursuit of this has ended by
landing a number of officers of national banks in
penitentiaries. A philosophy that leads to such
results must be unsound."

Then again, Professor Dewey (now doubtless
the foremost living pragmatist) is the joint author
of a book upon ethics, the most prominent feature
of which is the application of pragmatist-like
methods and principles to moral philosophy. This
book sums up, too, a great many previous illuminat-
ing discussions of his own upon ethical and educa-
tional problems, for all of which, and for its general
application of the principles of Humanism to the
realm of morals he has deservedly won the

1 The same line of reflection will be found in James's Pragmatism,
p. 96.

CRITICAL 137

praise of Professor James himself. So we have
thus the warrant both of the public and of Dewey
and James for seeking to judge Pragmatism from
the point of view of moral philosophy.

Another justification for seeking to judge of
Pragmatism from the point of view of moral
philosophy is that the whole weight of its
" humanism " and of its " valuation " philosophy
must inevitably fall upon its view of the moral
judgment. Dr. Schiller, we have seen, is quite
explicit in his opinion that for Humanism the roots
of metaphysics " lie, and must lie," in ethics.
And this is all the more the case, as it were, on
account of the proclamation1 by Pragmatism of
the inability of Intellectualism to understand
morality, and also on account of its recurring
contention in respect of the merely hypothetical
character of all intellectual truth.

1 Professor Moore has a chapter in his book (Pragmatism and its
Critics) devoted to the purpose of showing the necessary failure of
Absolutism (or of an Intellectualism of the absolutist order) in the
realm of ethics, finding in the experimentalism and the quasi-Darwinism
of Pragmatism an atmosphere that is, to say the least, more favourable
to the realities of our moral experience. While I cannot find so much
as he does in the hit-and-miss ethical philosophy of Pragmatism, I
quite sympathize with him in his rejection of Absolutism or Rational-
ism as a basis for ethics. The following are some of his reasons for
this rejection : (1) The " purpose " that is involved in the ethical life
must, according to Absolutism, be an all-inclusive and a fixed purpose,
allowing of no " advance " and no " retreat " — things that are impera-
tive to the idea of the reality of our efforts. (2) Absolutism does not
provide for human responsibility ; to it all actions and purposes are
those of the Absolute. (3) The ethical ideal of Absolutism is too
" static." (4) Absolutism does not provide any material for " new
goals and new ideals." See pp. 218-225 in my eighth chapter, where I
censure, in the interest of Pragmatism and Humanism, the ethical
philosophy of Professor Bosanquet.

138 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM

Now, unfortunately for Pragmatism, the one
thing that the otherwise illuminating book of
Dewey and Tufts almost completely fails to do,
as the writer has already sought to indicate, is to
provide a theory of the ordinary distinction
between right and wrong.1 The only theme that
is really successfully pursued in this typically
American book is the " constant discovery, forma-
tion, and re-formation of the ' self ' in the ' ends '
which an individual is called upon to sustain and
develop in virtue of his membership of a ' social
whole.' " But this is obviously a study in
" genetic psychology," or in the psychology of
ethics, but by no means a study in the theory of
ethics. " The controlling principle," it character-
istically tells us, " of the deliberation which renders
possible the formation of a voluntary or socialized
self out of our original instinctive impulses is the
love of the objects which make this transformation
possible." But what is it, we wish to know, that
distinguished the objects that make this trans-
formation possible from the objects that do not
do so ? The only answer that we can see in the
book is that anything is " moral " which makes
possible a "transition from individualism to efficient
social personality" — obviously again a purely
sociological point of view, leaving the question
of the standard of efficiency quite open. The
whole tendency, in short, of the pragmatist treat-

1 See p. 224, where I arrive at the conclusion that the same thing
may be said of the Absolutism of Dr. Bosanquet.

CRITICAL 139

ment of ethical principles is to the effect that
standards and theories of conduct are valuable
only in so far as they are, to a certain extent,
" fruitful " in giving us a certain " surveying
power ' in the perplexities and uncertainties of
" direct personal behaviour." They are all, in
other words, merely relative or useful, and none
of them is absolute and authoritative. It is this
last thing, however, that is the real desider-
atum of ethical theory. And so far as practice is
concerned, all that this Pragmatism or " Relativ-
ism ' in morals inevitably leads to is the con-
clusion that whatever brings about a change,
or a result, or a " new formation," or a new
" development " of the moral situation, is neces-
sarily moral, that " growth " and " liberation "
and " fruitfulness," and " experimentation " are
everything, and moral scruples and conscience
simply nothing. In the celebrated phrase of
Nietzsche, " Everything is permissible and nothing
is true or binding."

Is not, then, this would-be ethical phase of
Pragmatism just too modernistic, too merely
practical, too merely illuminative and enlighten-
ing ? And would it not be better for the
youth of America (for Dewey's book is in the
American Science Series) and other countries to
learn that not everything " practical " and " forma-
tive ' and " liberative " and " socializing ' is
moral in the strict sense of the term ? ' In saying

1 Students of that important nineteenth-century book upon Ethics,

140 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM

this I am, of course, giving but a very imperfect
idea of the contents of a book which is, in many
respects, both epoch-marking and epoch-making.
It is, however, unfortunately, in some respects,
only too much in touch with " present facts and
tendencies," with the regrettable tendency of
the hour, for example, to justify as right any
conduct that momentarily " improves the situa-
tion," or that " liberates the activities ' of the
parties concerned in it. It is not enough, in other
words (and this is all, I am inclined to think, that
Pragmatism can do in morals), to set up a some-
what suggestive picture of the " life of the moral
man in our present transitional ' and would-
be " constructive " age. A moral man does not
merely, in common parlance, " keep up with the
procession," going in for its endless "formations'
and " re-formations." He seeks to " lead "it,
and this leading of men, this setting up of a standard
of the legitimacy or of the illegitimacy of certain
social experiments is just what Pragmatism can-
not do in morals.

It is otherwise, doubtless, with a true human-
ism, or with the humanism that Pragmatism is
endeavouring to become.

the Methods of Ethics, by Henry Sidgwick, will remember that Sidgwick
expressly states it as a grave argument against Utilitarianism that it is
by no means confirmed by the study of the actual origin of moral
distinctions. As we go back in history we do not find that moral
prescriptions have merely a utilitarian value.

CHAPTER VI

PRAGMATISM AS HUMANISM

In spite of the objections that have been brought
in the preceding chapters against Pragmatism as
Instrumentalism and Practicalism, the great
thing about Pragmatism as the Humanism
that it is tending to become is the position that it
virtually occupies in respect of the ethical and the
personal factors that enter into all our notions
about final truth. To Pragmatism the im-
portance of these factors in this connexion is
apparent from the outset, it being to it the merest
truism that by final truth we cannot mean " truth "
existing on its own account, but rather the truth
of the world as inclusive of man and his purposes.
For so much it stands by its very letter as well as
by its spirit. And if we can find any confirmation
for this attitude in some of the concessions of the
rationalists that have been previously mentioned,
so much the better, as it were, for Pragmatism.

Now it might well seem as if Pragmatism by
the denial of an absolute or impersonal truth is

so far simply another version of modern agnosti-

141

142 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM

cism, or of the older doctrine of the " relativity "
of human knowledge. There is a great difference,
however, between these two things and Pragmatism.
A mere agnostical, or relativity, philosophy
generally carries with it the belief that the inmost
reality of things is both unknowable and out of all
relation alike to human purpose and to human
knowledge. Pragmatism, on the contrary, would
like to maintain — if it could do so logically — that
in human volition, we do know something about
the inward meaning of things, that the " develop-
mental " view of things is, when properly inter-
preted, the real view, that reality is at least what
it comes to be in our " purposes " and in our
ideals, and not something different from this.

The main reason, however, of the inability of
Pragmatism to do what it would like to do in this
connexion is what we have already complained
of as its failure either to recognize, or to use, the
help that could be afforded to it by (i) Idealism,
and by (2) the " normative " 1 view of ethical
science.

1 What I understand by the " normative idea of ethical science "
will become more apparent as I proceed. I may as well state,
however, that I look upon the distinction between the " descrip-
tive " ideals of science and the " normative " character of the ideals
of the ethical and the socio-political sciences as both fundamental
and far-reaching. There are two things, as it were, that constitute
what we might call the subject-matter of philosophy — "facts"
and " ideals " ; or, rather, it is the synthesis and reconciliation of
these two orders of reality that constitute the supreme problem of
philosophy. It is with the description of facts and of the laws of the
sequences of things that the " methodology " of science and of Prag-
matism is in the main concerned. And it is because Pragmatism
has hitherto shown itself unable to rise above the descriptive and

PRAGMATISM AS HUMANISM 143

In respect of the first point, we have already
suggested, for example, that Pragmatism is in-
clined in various ways to make much of its " radical
empiricism," its contention that reality must, to
begin with, be construed to be what it seems to
be in our actual dealings with it and in our actual
experience of it.1 To the biologist, as we put it
in our fourth chapter, reality is life ; to the
physicist it is energy ; to the theologian it is
the unfolding of the dealings of God with His
creatures ; to the sociologist it is the sphere of
the evolution of the social life of humanity ;
to the lover of truth it is a " partly intelligible
system." The only rational basis, however, for
all this constructive interpretation of reality is
the familiar idealist position of the necessary
implication of the " subject " in the " object,"
the fact that " things " or " existences " are
invariably thought of as the elements or com-
ponent parts in some working system or sphere
of reality that is contemplated by some being
or beings in reference to some purpose or end.
On its so-called lowest plane, indeed, reality is
conceived as the play of all the particles of matter,
or of all the elemental forces of nature, upon
each other. And on this construction of things

hypothetical science of the day to the ideals of the normative sciences
(ethics, aesthetics, etc.) that it is an imperfect philosophy of reality as
we know it, or of the different orders of reality.

1 Cf. Professor Ward in Naturalism and Agnosticism (vol. ii. p. 155) :
" What each one immediately deals with in his own experience is, I
repeat, objective reality in the most fundamental sense."

144 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM

the susceptibility of everything to the influence of
everything else is no less certainly assumed than in
the case of the world of life itself. But, as the
idealist realizes in a moment, there is no possibility
of separating, either in thought or experimentally,
this supposed physical world from the so-called
experiences and relations and laws through
which it is interpreted and described, even as a
world of objects or of forces. This is what
Parmenides saw ages ago when he said that
" thought " and " being " are the same thing,
that " being " belongs to " thought," that " being "
is the true object of thought, and that being is the
" rational " and the " thinkable " and not some-
thing outside thought. It is what a scientist, an
expounder of science, like Professor J . A. Thompson
means and partly states when he says, speaking
of the work of many of his fellow-scientists of the
day, " The matter of physical science is an
abstraction, whereas the matter of our direct
experience is in certain conditions the physical
basis of life and the home of the soul." *

To the objector who again retorts that this line
of reflection seems to rest upon a very large
assumption as to the nature of the apparently
illimitable physical universe, the idealist can but
reply, firstly, that we know nothing of the so-called
natural world save through the so-called spiritual
or psychical world,2 and secondly, that even the

1 Introduction to Science, p. 137.

2 " But if the primitive Amoebae gave rise ' in the natural course of
events ' to higher organisms and these to higher, until there emerged

PRAGMATISM AS HUMANISM 145

most complete description of the world from the
point of view of science would, of course, still leave
the world of our mental experiences entirely
unexplained. It is surely, therefore, so far, much
more logical to use this last world as at least the
partial explanation of the former rather than
vice versa.

And as for the " normative ' view of ethics
and the help it affords to Pragmatism in its
contention in respect of final truth, it may be
said, to begin with, that it is in the ethical life
that what we call the truth of things becomes
the basis of an ideal of personal achievement.
It is not merely of man's well-known trans-
formation and utilization of the forces of nature
that we are at present thinking, but of the fact
that in the moral life man " superposes," as
has been said, an order of his own upon the
so-called natural order of things, transforming it
into a spiritual order. This superposition, if we
will, this transformation, is revealed unmistak-
ably in the history of the facts of conduct.

In the recent elaborate researches in sociological
ethics of Hobhouse and Westermarck x we read,

the supreme Mammal, who by and by had a theory of it all, then the
primitive Amoebae which had in them the promise and the potency of
all this were very wonderful Amoebae indeed. There must have been
more in them than met the eye ! We must stock them with initiatives at
least. We are taking a good deal as 'given.' " [Italics mine.] — J. H.
Thomson, Introduction to Science, p. 137.

1 See Westermarck, vol. i. pp. 74, 93, 117, and chapter hi. generally.
The sentence further down in respect of the permanent fact of the moral
consciousness is from Hobhouse, vol. ii. p. 54. As instances of the latter,
Hobhouse talks of things like the " purity of the home, truthfulness,

10

146 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM

for example, of facts like the gradual " blunting
of the edges of barbarian ideas," and the recognition
of the " principal moral obligations " in the early
oriental civilizations, the existence of the "doctrine
of forgiveness," and of " disinterested retributive
kindly emotion," the acceptance and redistribution
by Confucius of the traditional standards of
Chinese ethics, the " transformation " by the
Hebrew prophets of the " law of a barbarous
people into the spiritual worship of one God," of
a God of " social justice," of " mercy," and finally
of " love." Both these writers, in view of such
facts and of other facts of a kindred nature, arrive
at the conclusion that the supreme authority
assigned to the moral law is not altogether an
illusion, that there is after all the " great permanent
fact of the moral consciousness persisting through
all stages of development, that whether we believe
or disbelieve in God, or religion, or nature, or what
not, there remain for all of us certain things to do
which affect us with a greater or less degree of
mental discomfort."

Now as we think of it, there is something that
Pragmatism fails to see in respect of this undoubted
transformation of the merely physical basis of our
life that takes place, or that has taken place, in
the moral life of humanity. While firmly holding
in its moral philosophy (we can see this in the

hospitality, help, etc., in Iran, of the doctrine of Non-Resistance in Lao
Tsze, of the high conception of personal righteousness revealed in the
Book of the Dead, of the contributions of monotheism to ethics, etc. etc.

PRAGMATISM AS HUMANISM 147

typical work of Dewey and Tufts *) to its far-
reaching principle that our entire intellectual life
has been worked out in the closest kind of relation
to our practical needs, Pragmatism has neverthe-
less failed to see that in the highest reaches of
our active life the controlling ideas (" justice,"
" humanity/' " courage," and so on) have a value
independently of any consequences other than
those of their realization in the purposes and in
the dispositions of men. Or, more definitely, it
is just because moral ideas, like any ideas, cannot
fail to work themselves out into our actions and
into our very dispositions and character, that it
becomes of the utmost importance to conceive
of the truth they embody as having a value
above all consequences and above all ordinary
utility. If sought ever and always for its own
sake, the highest kind of truth and insight, the
truth that we apprehend in our highest intuitions
and in our highest efforts, will inevitably tend to
the creation of a realm of " value," a realm of
personal worth and activity that we cannot but
regard as the highest reality,2 or the highest plane

1 Cf. p. 167.

2 It may, I suppose, be possible to exaggerate here and to fall to
some extent into what Mr. Bradley and Nietzsche and others have
thought of as the " radical vice of all goodness " — its tendency to forget
that other things, like beauty and truth, may also be thought of as
absolute " values," as revelations of the divine. What I am thinking
of here is simply the realm of fact that is implied, say, in the idea of
Horace, when he speaks of the upright man being undismayed even by
the fall of the heavens {impavidum ferient ruinae) or by the idea of
the Stoic sage that the virtuous man was as necessary to Jupiter
as Jupiter could be to him, or by the idea (attributed to Socrates) that

148 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM

of experience of which we are conscious. In this
thought, then, in the thought of the reality of the
life and work of human beings who have given all
for truth and goodness and love, there is surely at
least a partial clue to the value of the great idea
after which Pragmatism is blindly groping in its
contention of the importance even to metaphysics
of the notion of our human, " purposive " activity.
Indeed, when we think of the matter carefully
it is doubtful whether the human mind would ever
even have attained to the notion of ideal truth,
with the correlative thought of the shortcomings
or the limits of our ordinary knowledge, if it had
not been for the moral life and the serious problem
it sets before us as men — that of the complete
satisfaction or the complete assertion of our human
personality. We seek truth in the first instance
because we wish to act upon certainty or upon
adequate certainty, and because we feel that we
must be determined by what appeals to our own
convictions and motives, by what has become part
of our own life and consciousness. It is only in fact
because we will it, and because we want it, that the
" ideal " exists — the ideal of anything, more certain

if the rulers of the universe do not prefer the just man to the unjust it
is better to die than to live. If against all this sort of thing one is
reminded by realism of the " splendid immoralism " of Nature, of its
apparent indifference to all good and ill desert, I can but reply, as I
have done elsewhere in this book, that the Nature of which physical
science speaks is an " abstraction " and an unreality, and that it
matters, therefore, very little whether such a Nature is, or is not,
indifferent to morality. We know, however, of no Nature apart from
life, and mind, and consciousness, and thought, and will. It is God,
and not Nature, who makes the sun to shine on the just and the unjust.

PRAGMATISM AS HUMANISM 149

knowledge about something, for example, or grati-
fied curiosity, or satisfied desire, and so on. In
every case, say, of the pursuit of an ideal we desire
something or some state of things that does not yet
exist. The actual, if indeed (which is doubtful)
we can think of the actual merely as such, does
not engender the notion of the ideal, although
there is possibly a suggestion of the " ideal ' in
the " meaning " that we cannot, even in sense
perception,1 attach to the actual.

Even science, as we call it, is very far from
being a mere description of the actual, it is an
ideal " construction " or " interpretation " of the
same in the interest, not of mere utility, but of the
wonder and the curiosity and the intellectual and
aesthetical satisfaction of our entire personality,
of our disinterested love of the highest truth.2

1 By this " meaning " is to be understood firstly the effects upon our
appetitive and conative tendencies of the various specific items (whether
sensation, or affections, or emotions, or what not) of our experience,
the significance, that is to say, to our total general activity of all the
particular happenings and incidents of our experience. Psychologists
all tell us of the vast system of " dispositions " with which our psycho-
physical organism is equipped at birth, and through the help of which
we interpret the sensations and occurrences of our experience. And
in addition to these dispositions we have, in the case of the adult, the
coming into play of the many associations and memories that are
acquired during the experiences of a single lifetime. It is these various
associations that interpret to us the present and give it meaning. In a
higher sense we might interpret " meaning " as expressive of the higher
predicates, like the good and the beautiful and the true, that we apply
to some things in the world of our socialized experience. And in the
highest sense we might interpret it as the significance that we attach to
human history as distinguished from the mere course of events — the
significance upon which the philosophy of history reposes. See Eucken
in the article upon the Philosophy of History in the " systematic "
volume of Hinneberg's Kultur der Gegenwart.

2 See our second chapter upon the different continental and British

150 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM

A striking example of the part played by moral
and personal factors in the evolution of truth may
easily be found, as has already been suggested, in
some of the circumstances connected with the
evolution of the Platonic philosophy in the mind
of its creator. Plato's constant use of the dialogue
form of exposition is of itself an expression of the
fact that philosophy was always to him a living
and a personal thing, the outcome of an intellec-
tual emotion of the soul in its efforts after true
knowledge and spiritual perfection. It speaks also
of Plato's essentially social conception of philo-
sophy, as a creation arising out of the contact of
mind with mind, in the search after wisdom and
virtue and justice. And there is little doubt that
his own discontent with the social conditions of
his time and with the false wisdom of the sophists
was a powerful impulse in his mind in the develop-
ment of that body of intellectual and ethical truth
for all time that is to be found in his works. The
determining consideration, again, in the argu-
ments for immortality in the Phaedo is not so
much the imperfect physical and theoretical
philosophy on which they are partly made to

representatives of the hypothetical treatment of scientific laws and
conceptions that is such a well-marked tendency of the present time.
By no one perhaps was this theory put more emphatically than by
Windelband (of Strassburg) in his Prdludien (1884) and in his Geschichte
und Naturwissensckaft (1894). In the latter he contrasts the real
individuals and personalities with which the historians deal with the
impersonal abstractions of natural science. I fully subscribe to this
distinction, and think that it underlies a great deal of the thought of
recent times.

PRAGMATISM AS HUMANISM 151

repose as the tremendous conviction of Plato of
the supreme importance of right conduct, of his
belief in the principle of the " best."

Plato has a way, too, of talking of truth as a
kind of " addition " * to being and science, as a
" being " that " shares " somehow in the " idea
of the Good " — a tendency that, despite the
imperfect hold of the Greek mind upon the fact
and the conception of personality, we may also
look upon as a confirmation of the pragmatist
notion of the necessity of ethical and personal
factors in a complete theory of truth.

A still more important instance of the importance
of moral and practical factors to a final philosophy
of things is to be found in the lasting influence of
the great Hebrew teachers upon both the ancient
and the modern world, although the mere mention
of this topic is apt to give offence to some of our
Neo-Hellenists 2 and to thinkers like Schopen-
hauer and Nietzsche. The remarkable thing
about the Hebrew seers is their intuition of
God as " the living source of their life and strength

1 See " truth and real existence " in the Republic, 508 d — Jowett's
rendering of dX-fjOeii re xal t6 6v (" over which truth and real
existence are shining "). Also further in the same place, " The cause of
science and of truth," a/Way 5' cVio-t^s cuVae /ecu d\T70da?. In 389 e
we read that a " high value must be set on truth." Of course
to Plato " truth " is also, and perhaps even primarily, real existence,
as when he says (Rep. 585), " that which has less of truth will also have
less of essence." But in any case truth always means more for him
than " mere being," or existence, or " appearance," it is the highest
form of being, the object of " science," the great discovery of the
higher reason.

■ To Professor Bosanquet, for example; see below, p. 213, note 2.

152 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM

and joy/' not as a mere first principle of thought,
not as the substance of things, not as the mere
" end of patient search and striving," but as the
''first principle of life and feeling." x And their
work for the world lay in the bringing to an end
of the entire mythology and cosmology of the age
of fable and fancy, and the substitution for all
this of the worship of one God, as something
distinct and different from all the cults of
polytheism, as a great social and ethical achieve-
ment, as a true religion that loved justice and
social order because it loved God. " In Hebrew
poetry,"2 says a recent authority upon this subject,
" all things appear in action. The verb is the
predominating element in the sentence. And
though the shades of time distinctions are blurred,
the richness of the language throws the precise
complexion of the act into clear, strong light."
If this be so, there is, of course, no wonder that
this people elaborated for mankind a living and
practical, a " pragmatist " (if we will) view of
the world, which is so rich by way of its
very contrast both to Greek and to modern
scientific conceptions. With the enumeration of
two specific instances from this same writer
of the Hebrew perception of the importance of
practical and personal factors to a true grasp of
certain fundamental ideas, we may safely leave
this great source of some of the leading ideas of

1 The Poetry of the Old Testament, Professor A. R. Gordon.

2 Ibid. p. 4.

PRAGMATISM AS HUMANISM 153

our western world to take care of itself. " The
Hebrew counterpart to the Greek ideal of 6 KaXbs
Kayados, ' the finely-polished gentleman,' is hasid,
the adjective derived from hesed, that is 'the man
of love.' As God is love, the good man is likewise
a lover both of God and of his fellow-men. His
love is indeed the pure reflection of God's- — tender
and true and active as His is. For in no other
ancient religion are the fear and love of God so
indissolubly wedded to moral conduct." x And
secondly, speaking of immortality, Professor
Gordon says, " The glad hope of immortality
rests, not on speculative arguments from the nature
of the soul, but on the sure ground of religious
experience. Immortality is, in fact, a necessary
implicate of personal religion. The man that
lives with God is immortal as He is." 2

If the reader be inclined to interject here that
all that this pragmatist talk about the importance
of action obviously amounts to is simply the
position that the highest truth must somehow
take recognition of our beliefs as well as of our
knowledge, we can but reply that he is literally
so far in the right. Our point, however, for
Pragmatism would here be that belief rests not
merely upon the intellect, but upon the intellect
in conjunction with the active and the ethical
nature of man. It is mainly because we feel our-
selves to be active and legislative and creative,
mainly because we partly are and partly hope to

1 The Poetry of the Old Testament, p. 160. 2 Ibid. pp. 183-184.

154 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM

be, as the phrase has it, that we believe as well as
seek continually to know. Hence the Tightness
and the soundness of Pragmatism in its contention ;
the truth is not so much a datum (something given)
as a construction,1 or a thing that is made and
invented by way of an approximation to an ideal.
That it is this almost in the literal sense of these
words is evident from the fact of the slow and
gradual accumulation of truth and knowledge
about themselves and their environment by the
fleeting generations of men. And even to-day
the truth is not something that exists in
nature or in history or in some privileged in-
stitution, or in the teaching of some guild of
masters, but rather only in the attitude of mind
and heart of the human beings who continue to
seek it and to will it and to live it when and
where they may. Truth includes, too, the truth
of the social order, of civilization 2 — this last costly

1 It is this false conception of truth as a " datum " or " content "
that wrecks the whole of Mr. Bradley's argument in Appearance and
Reality. See on the contrary the following quotation from Professor
Boyce Gibson (Eucken's Philosophy of Life, p. 109) in respect of the
attitude of Eucken towards the idea of truth as a personal ideal.
" The ultimate criterion of truth is not the clearness and the distinct-
ness of our thinking, nor its correspondence with a reality external to
it, nor any other intellectualistic principle. It is spiritual fruitfulness
as invariably realized by the personal experient, invariably realized as
springing freshly and freely from the inexhaustible resources which
our freedom gains from its dependence upon God."

2 It is part of the greatness of Hegel, I think, to have sought to
include the truth of history and of the social order in the truth of philo-
sophy, or in spiritual truth generally. His error consists in not allowing
for the fresh revelations of truth that have come to the world through
the insight of individuals and through the actions and the creations of
original men.

PRAGMATISM AS HUMANISM 155

work being just as much the creation of the mind
and the behaviour of men as is knowledge itself.
And there can, it would seem, be but slight objec-
tion to an admission of the fact that it is only in
so far as the truth has been conceived as in-
clusive of the truth of human life as well as of that
of the world of things that humanity as a whole
seems to have any abiding interest in its existence,
even where, as in Omar Khayyam and in other
writings, the idea of its discovery is given up as
impossible. Only, in other words, as the working
out of the implications of desire does thought
live, and the completest thought is at bottom but
the working out of the deepest desire.1

These two elements of our life, thought and

1 There is a sentence in the Metaphysics of which I cannot but think
at this point, and which so far at least as the rationalist-pragmatist
issue is concerned is really one of the deepest and most instructive ideas
in the whole history of philosophy. It is one of Aristotle's troublesome
additional statements in reference to something that he has just been
discussing — in this case the " object of desire " and the " object of
thought." And what he adds in the present instance is this (Bk. xii. 7) :
" The primary objects of these two things are the same — tovtwv to.
wpuira to, avrd — rendered by Smith and Ross " the primary objects
oj thought and desire are the same." The translation, of course, is a matter
of some slight difficulty, turning upon the proper interpretation of
to. wpwra, " the first things," although, of course, the student soon
becomes familiar with what Aristotle means by " first things," and
" first philosophy," and " first in nature," and " first for us," and so
on. Themistius in his commentary on this passage (Commentaria in
Aristotelem Graeca, vol. v. i-vi ; Themistius in Metaphysica, 1072
and 17-30) puts it that " in the case of immaterial existences the
desirable and the intelligible are the same — in primis vero principiis
materiae non immixtis idem est desiderabile atque intelligibile." I
am inclined to use this great idea of the identity of the desirable
and the intelligible — for conscious, intelligent beings as the funda-
mental principle of the true Humanism of which Pragmatism is in
search. It is evidently in this identity that Professor Bosanquet

156 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM

desire, have had indeed a parallel development in
the life of mankind. What we call the predicate
of thought bespeaks invariably an underlying (or
personal) reaction or attitude towards the so-called
object of thought.1 When desire ceases, as it does
sometimes in the case of a disappointed man, or the
pessimist, or the agnostic, or the mystic, thought
too ceases. Even the philosophical mood, as like-
wise the expression of a desire, is as such com-
parable to other motives or desires, such as the
scientific or the practical or the emotional, and
subject, too, like them, to the various " conflicts "
of personality.2 The free speculative thought
or activity that, with the Greeks, we sometimes
think of as the highest attribute of our human
nature, is itself but the highest phase of that
free creative3 activity which we have found to

also believes in when he says : "lam persuaded that if we critically
understand what we really want and need, we shall find it established
by a straightforward argument " (Preface to Individuality and Value.
See the eighth chapter of this book). It is certainly true that the
constructive philosophy of which we are in search to-day must leave no
gap between thought and desire.

1 I find an illustration or a confirmation of this thought in the
following piece of insight of Mr. Chesterton in regard to the " good,"
which is no doubt a " predicate " of our total thought and feeling and
volition. "Or, in other words, man cannot escape Irom God, because
good is God in man ; and insists on omniscience " ( Victorian Age in Litera-
ture, p. 246 — italics mine). A belief in goodness is certainly a belief in
an active goodness greater than our own ; and it does raise a desire for
a comprehension of things.

2 The reader will find a good deal in Professor Baldwin's Social and
Ethical Interpretations of Mental Development upon the relation of
truth and thought to desire, and also upon the social, or the pragmatist
or the experimental test of beliefs.

3 See Chapter IX., in reference to Bergson's " creative activity."

PRAGMATISM AS HUMANISM 157

underlie the moral life and all the various construc-
tions of mankind, inclusive of the work of civiliza-
tion itself.

Lastly, there is, as we know, ample warrant
in the past and the present reflections of men of
science upon the apparent limits1 and limita-

1 The reader who is anxious to obtain a working idea of the limits
of knowledge from a scientific point of view had better consult such
pieces of literature as Sir Oliver Lodge's recent examination of Haeckel's
Riddle of the Universe, Professor Ward's Naturalism and Agnosticism,
Merz's History of European Thought during the Nineteenth Century, or
Verworn's General Physiology (with its interesting account of the
different theories of the origin of life, and its admission that after all
we know matter only through mind and sensation). Perusal of the
most recent accessible literature upon this whole subject will reveal
the fact that these old questions about the origin of life and motion,
and about the nature of evolution, are still as unsettled as they were in
the last half of the last century. It is not merely, however, of the
actual limits of science at any one time that we are obliged, as human
beings, to think, but of the limits of science in view of the fact that
our knowledge comes to us in part, under the conditions of space and
time, and under the conditions of the limits of our senses and of
our understanding. Knowledge is certainly limited in the light of
what beings other than ourselves may know, and in the light of what
we would like to know about the universe of life and mind.

I do not think that this whole question of the limits of our
knowledge is such a burning question to-day as it was some years ago,
there being several reasons for this. One is that we live in an age of
specialization and discursiveness and " technic." It is quite difficult
to meet with people who think that they may know, some day, every-
thing, from even some single point of view. And then the wide accept-
ance of the hypothetical or the pragmatist conception of knowledge
has caused us to look upon the matter of the limits of science and
knowledge as a relative one, as always related to, and conditioned
by, certain points of view and certain assumptions. We are not
even warranted, for example, in thinking of mind and matter as
separate in the old way, nor can we separate the life of the individual
from the life of the race, nor the world from God, nor man from
God, and so on. See an article by the writer (in 1898 in the Psy. Rev.)
upon " Professor Titchener's View of the Self," dealing with the actual,
and the necessary limits, of the point of view of Structural Psychology
in regard to the " self." Also Professor Titchener's reply to this article in
a subsequent number of the same review, and my own rejoinder.

158 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM

tions of our knowledge of our environment to
justify the correctness of the pragmatist in-
sistence upon the ethical and the personal factors
that enter into truth. Reference having already
been made to these limits, there is perhaps little
need of pursuing this topic any further, either
so far as the facts themselves are concerned or
so far as their admission by scientists and others
is concerned. How any supposed mere physical
order can ever come to know itself as such, either
in the minds of men or in the minds of beings
other than men, is of course the crowning diffi-
culty of what we call a physical philosophy —
a difficulty that transcends altogether the many
familiar and universally admitted difficulties in
respect of topics like the origin of motion and the
origin of life, and the infinite number of adjustments
and adaptations involved in the development
of the world of things and men with which we are
acquainted. Obviously, to say the very least,
only when some explanation of consciousness and
feeling and thought is added on to our knowledge
of Nature (fragmentary as is the latter at best)
will the demands of thought and of desire for
unity in our knowledge be satisfied or set
at rest. Now, of course, to religious thought all
this costly explanation, all this completion and
systematization of our knowledge are revealed,
in the main, only to a faith in God and to a
consequent faith in the final " perfection " of our
human life as the gradual evolution of a divine

PRAGMATISM AS HUMANISM 159

kingdom. And while Pragmatism cannot,
especially in its cruder or more popular form, be
credited with anything like a rational justification
of the religious point of view about reality and of
the vision it opens up, it may, nevertheless, in
virtue of its insistence upon such things as (1) the
rationality of the belief that accompanies all
knowledge, (2) the supposedly deeper pheno-
mena of the science of human nature to which
reference has already been made, and (3) the great
spiritual reality that is present to the individual
in the moral life, and that lifts him " out of him-
self," and that makes it impossible for him to
" understand himself by himself alone," x justifiably
lay claim to the possession of a thorough working
sympathy with the religious view of the world.

With the direction of the attention of the
reader to two important corollaries or consequences
of the " pluralism " and the " dynamic idealism "
of Pragmatism this chapter may well be brought
to a termination.

One of the most obvious corollaries of nearly
everything that has been put forward by us in the
foregoing chapters as pragmatist doctrine or
pragmatist tendency, is the marked distance at
which 2 it all seems to stand from the various
entanglements of the false philosophy of " sub-
jective," or " solipsistic " idealism. In other
words, while we have ventured to censure Prag-

1 See Chapter II. p. 35.
2 Despite what we spoke of in Chapter V. as its " subjectivism," p. 134.

160 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM

matism for its inability to recognize the elemental
truth1 in Idealism, we must now record it as a merit
of Pragmatism that it does not, like so much
modern philosophy, take its start with the " con-
tents " of the consciousness of the individual
as the one indubitable beginning, the one incon-
cussum quid for all speculation. This starting-
point has often, as we know, been taken (even by
students of philosophy) to be the very essence
of Idealism, but it is not so. Although there
is indeed no " object ' without a " subject,"
no " matter " without " mind," neither mind
nor matter is limited to my experience of the
same.2 It is impossible for me to interpret, or
even to express, to myself the contents of my
experience without using the terms and the con-
ceptions that have been invented by minds and
by personalities other than my own without whom
I could not, and do not, grow up into what I call
my " self-consciousness." 3 We have all talked

1 That is to say, the simple truth that there is no " object " without
a " subject," no " physical " world without a world of " psychical "
experiences on the part of some beings or some being. If our earth
existed before animated beings appeared upon it, it was only as a part
of some other " system " which we must think of as the object of some
mind or intelligence.

2 See p. 235, note 2, in the Bergson chapter, where it is suggested
that to Bergson human perceptions do not, of course, exhaust matter.

3 Among the many other good things in Mr. Marett's admirable
Anthropology (one of the freshest works upon the subject, suggestive
of the need, evidently felt in Oxford as well as elsewhere, of studying
philosophy and letters, and nearly everything else in the mental and
moral sciences, from the point of view of social anthropology) are the
clearness and the relevancy of illustration in his insistence upon the
importance of the " social factor " over all our thoughts of ourselves
as agents and students in the universe of things." Payne shows us

PRAGMATISM AS HUMANISM 161

of ourselves (as we know from experience and
from psychology) in the third person as objects
for a common social experience long before we
learn to use the first personal pronoun. And as
for the adult, his "ego' or self has a meaning
and a reality only in relation to, and in comparison
with, the other selves of whom he thinks as his
associates. An "ego" implies invariably also an
" alter " an "other," and thus our deepest thought
about the universe is always, actually and neces-
sarily, both personal and social. Even in art, and
in religion, and in philosophy, it is the communion
of mind with mind, of soul with soul, that
is at once our deepest experience and our deepest
desire.

I do not suggest for one moment that Prag-
matism is the only philosophy (if indeed we may
call it a philosophy at all) that is necessarily

(p. 146) " reason for believing that the collective ' we ' precedes ' I ' in the
order of linguistic evolution. To begin with, in America and elsewhere,
' we ' may be inclusive and mean ' all of us,' or selective, meaning ' some
of us only.' Hence a missionary must be very careful, and if he is
preaching, must use the inclusive ' we ' in saying ' we have sinned,'
whereas, in praying, he must use the selective ' we,' or God would be
included in the list of sinners. Similarly ' I ' has a collective form
amongst some American languages ; and this is ordinarily employed,
whereas the corresponding selective form is used only in special cases.
Thus, if the question be ' Who will help ? ' the Apache will reply, ' I-
amongst-others,' ' I-for-one ' ; but if he were recounting his personal
exploits, he says sheedah, ' I-by-myself,' to show they were wholly his
own. Here we seem to have group-consciousness holding its own against
individual self-consciousness, as being for primitive folk on the whole the
more normal attitude of mind." It is indeed to be hoped that, in the
future, philosophy, by discarding its abstractionism and its (closely
allied) solipsism, will do its share in making this " group conscious-
ness," this consciousness of our being indeed " fellow-workers" with
all men, once again a property of our minds and our thoughts.

11

162 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM

committed to Pluralism,1 nor am I, of course, blind
to the difficulties that Pluralism, as over against
Monism, presents to many thinking minds. But
I do here say that if Pragmatism be true, as
it is in the main (at least as an " approach " to
philosophy), it follows that the reality with
which we are in contact in all our thoughts and
in all our theorizing is not any or all of the " con-
tents " of the consciousness of the individual
thinker, but rather the common, personal life of
activity and experience and knowledge and
emotion that we as individuals share with
other individuals. This life is that of an entire
" world of intersubjective intercourse," 2 of a

1 One of Professor James's last books is called A Pluralistic Universe,
and both he and Professor Dewey have always written under the
pressure of the sociological interest of modern times. In short, it is
obvious that the " reality " underlying the entire pragmatist polemic
against the hypothetical character of the reading of the world
afforded us by the sciences, is the social and personal life that is the
deepest thing in our experience.

2 This idea of a " world of inter-subjective intercourse," although
now a commonplace of sociology, was first expressed for the writer in
the first series of the Gifford Lectures of Professor James Ward upon
" Naturalism and Agnosticism," in chapters xv. and xvi. The first of
these chapters deals with " Experience and Life," and the second with
the " inter-subjective intercourse " that is really presupposed in the
so-called individual experience of which the old psychology used to
make so much. The reader who wishes to follow out a development
of this idea of a " world of inter-subjective intercourse " cannot do better
than follow the argument of Professor Ward's second series of Gifford
Lectures (" The Realm of Ends," or " Pluralism and Theism "), in which
he will find a Humanism and Theism that is at least akin to the theodicy,
or the natural theology, of which we might suppose Pragmatism to be
enamoured. The double series of these Lectures might well be referred
to as an instance of the kind of classical English work in philosophy of
which we have spoken as not falling into the extremes either of Prag-
matism or of Rationalism. The strong point of the " Realm of Ends,"
from the point of view of this book upon Pragmatism and Idealism,

PRAGMATISM AS HUMANISM 163

communion of thought, and feeling, and effort in
which, as persons, we share the common life of
persons, and are members one of another.1

Truth itself, in fact, as may be seen, of course,
from the very connexion of the word truth with
other words like " try " 2 and " utter " (and in its

is that it moves from first to last in the reality of that world to which
the science and the philosophy of the day both seem to point the way.
In opposition to " subjectivism " it teaches a Humanism and a Pluralism
that we recognise as an expression of the realities of the world of our
common life and our common efforts, and from this Humanism it
proceeds to a Theism which its author seeks to defend from many of
the familiar difficulties of Naturalism. Were the writer concerned
with the matter of the development and the elaboration of the philo-
sophy that seems to have precipitated itself into his mind after some
years of reflection on the issues between the realists and the idealists,
between the rationalists and the pragmatists, he would have to begin
by saying that its outlines are at least represented for him in the theistic
and pluralistic philosophy of Professor Ward.

1 According to Professor Dawes Hicks in the Hibbert Journal for
April 191 3, there is a great deal in the articles of Professor Alexander on
" Collective Willing and Truth " that supports some of the positions I
am here attempting to indicate, as part of the outcome of the pragmatist-
rationalist controversy. " Both goodness and truth depend, in the first
place, on the recognition by one man of consciousness in others, and,
secondly, upon intersubjective intercourse " (p. 658).

2 I owe this reference (which I have attempted to verify) to a
suggestive and ingenious book (The New Word, by Mr. Allen Upward)
lent to me by a Montreal friend. Skeat, in his Dictionary, gives as the
meaning of truth, " firm, established, certain, honest, faithful," connect-
ing it with A.S. trlou, tryw (" preservation of a compact "), Teut. trewa,
saying that the " root " is " unknown." I suppose that similar things
might be said about the Greek word irebv in its different forms,
which Liddel and Scott connect with " Sans., satyas (verus), O. Nor.
Sannr, A.S. sdtk (sooth)." All this seems to justify the idea of the
social confirmation of truth for which I am inclined to stand, and the
connexion of intellectual truth with ethical truth, with the truth of
human life. I agree with Lotze that truths do not float above, or over,
or between, things, but that they exist only in the thought of a thinker,
in so far as he thinks, or in the action of a living being in the moment of
his action — the Microcosmos as quoted in Eisler, article " Wahrheit " in
the Worterbuch. The Truth for man would be the coherence of his

164 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM

root with words like " ware " and " verihood "), is
a social possession, implying both seekers and
finders, listeners and verifiers as well as speakers
and thinkers. Its existence implies a universe
of discourse, as the logicians put it, in which
thoughts and conceptions are elaborated and
corrected, not merely by a kind of self-analysis1
and internal development, but by the test of the
action to which they lead and of the " re-
sponses " they awaken in the lives and thoughts
of other persons. And it is this very sociological 2
and " pluralistic " character of Pragmatism that,
along with its tendency to " affirmation " in the
matter of the reality of the religious life, has
helped to render it (as far as it goes) such a living
and such a credible philosophy to-day.

Another consequence of the dynamic idealism
and the " radical empiricism " of Pragmatism
is the " immediacy " of our contact with
reality, for which it is naturally inclined to stand

knowledge and his beliefs, and there is no abstract truth, or truth in and
for itself, no impersonal " whole " of truth.

1 As in the Hegelian dialectic.

2 There is another important thing to think of in connexion with
this sociological character of Pragmatism. It is a characteristic that
may be used to overcome what we have elsewhere talked of as
its " subjectivism " and its " individualism," and its revolutionary
tendencies. It is, we might urge, a social and a collective standard of
truth that Pragmatism has in view when it thinks of " consequences "
and of the test of truth. Lalande takes up this idea in an article in the
Revue Philosophique (1906) on " Pragmatisme et Pragmaticisme,"
pointing out that Dr. Peirce would apparently tend to base his prag-
matism on the subordination of individual to collective thought. Dr.
Schiller too, I think, contemplates this social test of truth in his would-
be revival of the philosophy of Protagoras — that man is the measure of
reality — for man.

PRAGMATISM AS HUMANISM 165

in the matter of what we may call the philosophy
of perception. What this new " immediacy "
and this new directness of our contact with reality
would mean to philosophical and scientific thought
can be fully appreciated only by those who have
made the effort of years to live in a " thought
world," in which the first reality is what the
logicians term " mediation " * or inference, a
world of thoughts without the reality of a really
effective thinker, or the reality of a world of real
action — a world from which it is somehow im-
possible to escape either honestly or logically.
It would be a return, of course, on the part of
the thinker to the direct sense of life with which
we are familiar in instinct and in all true living
and in all real thought,2 in all honest effort and
accomplishment, and yet not a " return " in any
of the impossible senses in which men have often
(and with a tragic earnestness) sought to return
to Nature 3 and to the uncorrupted reality of things.

1 See below, p. 197, where we speak of this "mediation" as the
first fact for Professor Bosanquet as a prominent " Neo-Hegelian "
rationalist.

2 1 have been asked by a friendly critic if I would include " inference "
in this " real thought." I certainly would, because in all real inference
we are, or ought to be, concerned with a real subject-matter, a set of
relations among realities of one kind or another. Possibly all students
in all subjects (especially in philosophy) have lost time in following out
a set of inferences in and for themselves. But such a procedure is
justified by the increased power that we get over the real subject-matter
of our thought. When thought cannot be thus checked by the idea
of such increased power, it is idle thought.

3 I am thinking, of course, of the entire revolutionary and radical
social philosophy that harks back (in theory at least) to the " Social
Contract " and to the State of Nature philosophy of Rousseau and his
associates and predecessors.

166 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM

And we have not indeed done justice to the
" instrumentalism " and the " hypothetical "
treatment of ideas and of systems of thought for
which Pragmatism and Humanism both stand
until we see that so far from its being (almost in
any sense) the duty of the thinker to justify, to
his philosophy, this direct contact with the infinite
life of the world, that has been the common
possession of countless mortals who have lived
their life, it is, on the contrary, his duty to justify
(to himself and to his public) the various thought-
systems of metaphysic, by setting forth the various
points of departure and the various points of
contact they have in the reality of the life of
things.1

We spoke at the close of our fourth chapter
of the strange irony that may be discovered in
the fate of philosophers who have come to attach
a greater importance to their own speculations
and theories than to the great reality (whatever
it may be, or whatever it may prove itself to be)
of which all philosophy is but an imperfect
(although a necessary) explanation. And the
reader has doubtless come across the cynical
French definition of metaphysics as the " art of
losing one's way systematically " 2 (Vart de sigarer

1 See p. 184 of Chapter VII., where I speak of the ability to do this
as the invariable possession of the successful American teacher of
philosophy.

2 An equivalent of it, of course, exists in many sayings, in many
countries, in the conception of the task of the metaphysician as that of
" a blind man in a dark room hunting for a black cat which — is not
there," reproduced by Sir Ray Lankester in the recent book of H. S. R.

PRAGMATISM AS HUMANISM 167

avec methode). In view of all this, and in view of
all the inevitable pain and difficulty of the solitary
thinkers of all time, it is indeed not the least part
of the service of Pragmatism and Humanism, and
of the " vitalistic ' and " voluntaristic ' philo-
sophy with which it may be naturally associated
to-day, to have compelled even metaphysicians
to feel that it is the living reality of the world
that we know and that we experience, that is first,
last, and foremost the real subject-matter of
philosophy.

With the real sceptic, then, with David
Hume, we may indeed be " diffident " of our
" doubts " and at the same time absolutely " free "
and unprejudiced in our hold upon, and in our
treatment of, metaphysical systems as, all of them,
but so many more or less successful attempts to
state and explain, in terms appreciable by the
understanding and the reason, the character and
the reality of the infinite life with which we are in
contact in our acts and in our thoughts and in our
aspirations. Of the reality of that life we can
never be sceptical, for it is the life that we know
in that " world of inter-subjective " intercourse
that, according to Pragmatism and Humanism,
is implied even in sense-perception and in our
daily experience.

Eliot, Modern Science and the Illusions of Bergson. There is generally an
error or a fallacy in such descriptions of philosophy — in this Lankester
story the error that the secret of the world is a kind of " thing in itself "
out of all relation to everything we know and experience — the very error
against which the pragmatists are protesting.

CHAPTER VII

PRAGMATISM AS AMERICANISM

In adopting the title he has chosen for the heading
of this chapter the writer feels that he has laid
himself open to criticism from several different
points of view. What has philosophy as the
universal science to do with nationalism or with
any form of national characteristics ? Then even
if Pragmatism be discovered to be to some extent
" Americanism " in the realm of thought, is this
finding, or criticism, a piece of appreciation or a
piece of depreciation ? And again, is it possible
for any individual to grasp, and to understand,
and to describe such a living and such a far-
reaching force as the Americanism of to-day ?

The following things may be said by way of a
partial answer to these reflections : (i) There are
American characteristics in Pragmatism, and some
of them may profitably be studied by way of an
attempt to get all the light we can upon its essential
nature. Their presence therein has been detected
and recognized by critics, both American and
foreign, and reference has already been made to

168

PRAGMATISM AS AMERICANISM 169

some of them in this book. (2) There is no
universal reason in philosophy apart from its
manifestation in the thoughts and the activities
of peoples who have made or who are making their
mark upon human history. It may well be that
the common reason of mankind has as much to
learn from Americanism in the department of
theory as it has already been obliged to learn from
this same quarter in the realm of practice. (3)
One of the most important phases of our entire
subject is precisely this very matter of the appli-
cation of philosophy to " practice," of the in-
separability, to put it directly, of " theory " and
" practice." It would surely, therefore, be the
strangest kind of conceit (although signs of it
still exist here and there) x to debar philosophy

1 Mr. Bertrand Russell, for example, seems to me to have the
prejudice that philosophy is at its best only when occupied with studies
which (like the mathematics of his affections) are as remote as possible
from human life. " Real life is," he says, " to most men a long second-
best, a perpetual compromise between the ideal and the possible ; but
the world of pure reason knows no compromise, no practical limitations,
no barrier to the creative activity embodying in splendid edifices the
passionate aspiration after the perfect form from which all great work
springs. Remote from human passions, remote even from the pitiful
facts of nature, the generations have gradually created an ordered
cosmos where pure thought can dwell as in its natural home, and where
one, at least, of our nobler impulses can escape from the dreary exile
of the actual world." I cannot — as I have indicated elsewhere in
regard to Mr. Russell — see for one moment how there is any justification
for looking upon this " ordered cosmos " of mathematical physics as
anything other than an abstraction from the real world with which
we are acquainted. It is the creation of only one of our many human
interests. And I cannot see that the thought that occupies itself with
this world is any nobler than the thought that occupies itself with the
more complex worlds of life, and of birth and death, and of knowledge
and feeling and conduct. Mr. Russell might remember, for one thing,
that there have been men (Spinoza among them) who have attempted

170 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM

from the study of such a practical thing as the
Americanism of to-day. To connect the two
with any degree of success would certainly not
be to depreciate Pragmatism, but to strengthen
it by relating it to a spirit that is affecting the
entire life and thought of mankind.

One or two other important considerations
should also be borne in mind. It goes without
saying that there are in the United States and
elsewhere any number of Americans who see
beyond both contemporary Pragmatism and
contemporary Americanism, and to whom it
would be, therefore, but a partial estimate of
Pragmatism to characterize it as " Americanism."
So much, to be sure, might be inferred from some
things that have already been said in respect of
the reception and the fate of Pragmatism in its own
country. Again, it is one of the errors of the day
to think of Americanism as in the main merely
a belief in " practicality " and " efficiency." To
those who know it, Americanism is practical
idealism, and its aims, instead of being merely
materialistic and mechanical, are idealistic to
the point of being Utopian. The American belief
in work is not really a belief in work for its

to treat of human passions under the light of ascertainable laws, and
that it is (to say the very least) as legitimate for philosophy to seek
for reason and law in human life, and in the evolution of human
history, as in the abstract world of physical and mathematical science.
Can, too, a mathematical philosophy afford any final haven for the spirit
of man, without an examination of the mind of the mathematician and
of the nature of the concepts and symbols that he uses in his researches ?
There is a whole world of dispute and discussion about all these things.

PRAGMATISM AS AMERICANISM 171

own sake, but rather a faith in the endless possi-
bilities open to intelligent energy with resources
at its command. Lastly, it will here certainly
not be necessary either to think or to speak (even
if it were possible to do so) of all American
characteristics.1

Among the American - like characteristics in
Pragmatism that have already made them-
selves apparent in the foregoing chapters are
its insistence upon " action " and upon the free
creative effort of the individual, its insistence
upon the man-made (or the merely human)
character of most of our vaunted truths, its
instrumentalism, its radicalism,2 its empiricism

1 I have in view in fact only (or mainly) such American character-
istics as may be thought of in connexion with the newer intellectual
and social atmosphere of the present time, the atmosphere that im-
presses the visitor and the resident from the old world, the atmosphere
to the creation of which he himself and his fellow-immigrants have
contributed, as well as the native-born American of two generations
ago — to go no further back. I mean that anything like a far-reaching
analysis or consideration of the great qualities that go to make up the
" soul " of the United States is, of course, altogether beyond the sphere of
my attention for the present. I fully subscribe, in short, to the truth of
the following words of Professor Santayana, one of the most scholarly
and competent American students (both of philosophy and of life) of
the passing generation : " America is not simply a young country
with an old mentality ; it is a country with two mentalities, one a
survival of the beliefs and standards of the fathers, the other an expres-
sion of the instincts, practice, and discoveries of the younger generation.
In all the higher things of the mind — in religion, literature, in the moral
emotions, it is the hereditary spirit that still prevails, so much so, that
Mr. Bernard Shaw finds that America is a hundred years behind the
times." — " The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy," in Winds of
Doctrine (p. 187).

2 A contemporary American authority, Professor Bliss Perry, in his
book upon The American Mind naturally singles out radicalism as
one of the well-marked characteristics of Americans. Among the other
characteristics of which he speaks are those of the " love of exaggera-

172 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM

(that is to say, its endless faith in experience),
its democratic character, and its insistence
upon the necessity to philosophy of a broad,
tolerant, all-inclusive view of human nature. So,
too, are its insistence upon the basal character
of belief,1 and upon the importance of a creed
or a philosophy that really " works " in the lives
of intelligent men, its feeling of the inadequacy
of a merely scholastic or dialectical philosophy,
and even its quasi "practical' interpretation of
itself in the realms of philosophy and religion and
ethics — its confession of itself as a " corridor-
theory," as a point of approach to all the
different systems in the history of thought. In
addition to these characteristics we shall attempt
now to speak, in the most tentative spirit, firstly,
of some of the characteristics of American uni-
versity life of which Pragmatism may perhaps
be regarded as a partial expression or reflex,
and then after this, of such broadly -marked
and such well-known American characteristics
as the love of the concrete (in preference to
the abstract), the love of experiment and ex-

tion," " idealism," "optimism," "individualism," "public spirit." 1
refer, I think, to nearly all these things in my pages, although of course
I had not the benefit of Professor Perry's book in writing the present
chapter.

1 I am certainly one of those who insist that we must think of
America as (despite some appearances to the contrary — appearances
to be seen also, for example, in the West of Canada) fundamentally a
religious country. It was founded upon certain great religious ideas
that were a highly important counterpart to some of the eighteenth-
century fallacies about liberty and equality that exercised their
influence upon the fathers of the republic.

PRAGMATISM AS AMERICANISM 173

perimentation, an intolerance of doctrinairism
and of mere book-learning, the general demo-
cratic outlook on life and thought, the composite
or amalgam-like character of the present culture
of the United States, the sociological interest
that characterizes its people, and so on. All these
things are clearly to be seen in Pragmatism as a
would-be philosophical system, or as a preliminary
step in the evolution of such a system.

Owing very largely to the " elective " system
that still prevails in the universities of the United
States, Philosophy is there (to an extent some-
what inconceivable to the student of the European
continent) in the most active competition with
other studies, and the success of a professor of
philosophy is dependent on the success of his
method of presenting his subject to students
who all elect studies believed by them to be useful
or interesting or practically important. It has
long seemed to the writer that there is abundant
evidence in the writings of the pragmatists of this
inevitable attempt to make philosophy a " live "
subject in competition, say, with the other two
most popular subjects in American colleges, viz.
economics and biology. The importance to the
thought of to-day of biological and economic
considerations is one of the things most emphatic-
ally insisted upon by Professor Dewey in nearly
all his recent writings.1 And both he and James

1 He has recently published a volume dealing especially with the
contributions of Biology and Darwinism to philosophy.

i74 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM

— the fact is only too evident — have always written
under the pressure of the economic and socio-
logical interest of the American continent. And
even Schiller's Humanism has become, as we have
seen, very largely the metaphysics of the " evolu-
tionary process," a characterization which we make
below * as a kind of criticism of the philosophy of
Bergson. Our present point, however, is merely
that, owing to the generally competitive
character of the intellectual life there, this bio-
logical influence is felt more acutely in America
than elsewhere.

The one outstanding characteristic again of
every approved academic teacher in the United
States is his method of handling his subject, just
as the one thing that is claimed for Pragmatism by
its upholders is that it is particularly a "method-
ology " of thought rather than a complete philo-
sophy. To the university constituency of the
United States a professor without an approved
and successful method is as good as dead, for
no one would listen to him. The most manifest
sign, to be sure, of the possession of such an
effective method on the part of the university
lecturer is the demonstration of skill in the
treatment of his subject, in the " approach " that
he makes to it for the beginner, in his power
of setting the advanced student to work upon
fruitful problems, and of giving him a complete
" orientation " in the entire field under considera-

1 See p. 252.

PRAGMATISM AS AMERICANISM 175

tion. And then in addition to this he must be
able to indicate the practical and the educational
value of what he is teaching.

In his review of James's classical work upon
Pragmatism, Dewey, while indicating a number of
debatable points in the pragmatist philosophy,
declares emphatically his belief in that philosophy
as a method of " orientation." The title again of
Peirce's famous pamphlet was How to make Ideas
Clear — a phrase of itself suggestive enough of the
inquiring mind of the young student when
oppressed by apparently conflicting and com-
peting points of view. " We are acquainted with
a thing," says James, " as soon as we have learned
how to behave towards it, or how to meet the
behaviour we accept from it." In one of his
books he talks about physics, for example, as
giving us not so much a theory about things as
a " practical acquaintance " with bodies ; " the
power to take hold of them and handle them,"
indicating at the same time his opinion that this
way of regarding knowledge should be extended
to philosophy itself. All of this will serve as a
proof or illustration of the essentially " practical '
and " methodological ' conception of philosophy
taken by the pragmatists. Papini refers, we
remember, to the pragmatist philosophy as a
power of " commanding our material," of " manipu-
lating " for practical purposes the different
" thought-constructions " of the history of philo-
sophy. And those who have any familiarity

176 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM

with the early pragmatist magazine literature
know that the pragmatists used to be fond of
asking themselves such preliminary and " labora-
tory-like " inquiries as the following : " What is
truth known as ? ' " What is philosophy known
as? " " What are the different ' thought-levels '
upon which we seem to move in our ordin-
ary experience ? " They never exactly seem to "de-
fine ' philosophy for you, preferring to indicate
what it can do for you, and so on.

Turning now to the matter of American char-
acteristics that are broader and deeper than
the merely academic, we may find an illustra-
tion, for example, of the American practi-
cality and the love of the concrete (instead
of the abstract or the merely general) in the
following declaration of Professor James that
" the whole originality of Pragmatism, the whole
point in it, is its use of the concrete way of seeing.
It begins with concreteness and returns and ends
with it." Of the American love of novelty and
of interest we may find an illustration in the
determination of Pragmatism " never to discuss
a question that has absolutely no interest and no
meaning to any one." Of Pragmatism as an
exemplification of the American love of experiment,
and of experimentation, with a view to definite
and appreciable " returns," we may give the
following : "If you fully believe the pragmatic
method you cannot look on any such word,
i.e. ' God,' ' Matter,' ' Reason,' ' The Absolute,'

PRAGMATISM AS AMERICANISM 177

' Energy/ and such ' solving ' names, as closing
your quest. You must bring out in each word
its practical cash value, set it at work within the
stream of your experience. It appears less as a
solution then than as a programme for more work
and more particularly as an indication of the ways
in which existing realities may be changed." Of
the American intolerance for mere scholarship
and book-learning, and of the American inability
to leave any discovery or any finished product
alone without some attempt to " improve " upon
it or to put it to some new use, we may cite the
following : " When may a truth go into cold
storage in the encyclopaedias, and when shall it
come out for battle ? "

Another very strongly marked characteristic
of American life is the thoroughly eclectic and
composite character of its general culture and of
the general tone of its public life. American daily
life has become, as it were, a kind of social solvent,
a huge melting-pot for the culture and the habits
and the customs of peoples from all over the earth.
This also may be thought of as reflected in the
confessedly complex and amalgam-like character
of Pragmatism, in its boast and profession of being
a synthesis and a fusion of so many different
tendencies of human thought. As a juxtaposition,
or kind of compound solution, of such a variety
of things as the affirmations of religion, the
hypothetical method of science, realism, romanti-
cism, idealism, utilitarianism, and so on, it reminds

12

178 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM

us only too forcibly of the endless number of
social groups and traditions, the endless number
of interests and activities and projects to be seen
and felt in any large American city.

Still another general characteristic of American
life of which we may well think in connexion
with Pragmatism is the sociological interest of the
country, the pressure of which upon the prag-
matists and their writings has already been
referred to. The social problem in America has
now become * the one problem that is present with
everybody, and present most of all, perhaps,
with the European immigrant, who has for various
reasons hoped that he had left this problem behind
him. The effect of this upon Pragmatism is to be
seen, not merely in the very living hold that it is
inclined to take of philosophy and philosophical
problems,2 but in the fact of its boast of being a
"way of living " as well as a " way of thinking."
We have examined this idea in our remarks upon
the ethics of Pragmatism.

Of course the outstanding temperamental
American characteristic that is most clearly seen
in Pragmatism is the great fact of the inevitable
bent of the American mind to action and to
accomplishment, — its positive inability to enter-
tain any idea, or any set of ideas upon any subject
whatsoever, without experiencing at the same

1 The crucial characteristics of the Presidential campaign of 191 2
clearly showed this.

2 We can see this in the many valuable studies and addresses of
Professor Dewey upon educational and social problems.

PRAGMATISM AS AMERICANISM 179

time the inclination to use these ideas for invention
and contrivance,1 for organization and exploitation.
Any one who has lived in the United States must
in fact have become so habituated and so
accustomed to think of his thought and his
knowledge and his capacities in terms of their
possible social utility, that he simply cannot
refrain from judging of any scheme of thought or
of any set of ideas in the same light. Anywhere,
to be sure, in the United States will they allow a
man to think all he pleases about anything what-
soever— even pre-Socratic philosophy, say, or
esoteric Buddhism. And there is nothing indeed
of which the country is said, by those who know
it best, to stand so much in need as the most
persistent and the most profound thought about
all important matters. But such thought, it is
always added, must prove to be constructive and
positive in character, to be directed not merely
to the solution of useless questions or of questions
which have long ago been settled by others.

We shall now endeavour to think of the value 2

1 It is this fact, or the body of fact and tendency upon which it
rests, that causes Americans and all who know them or observe them, to
think and speak of the apparently purely " economic " or " business-
like " character of the greater part of their activities. Let me quote
Professor Bliss Perry here ..." the overwhelming preponderance of
the unmitigated business-man face [italics mine], the consummate mono-
tonous commonness of the pushing male crowd " (p. 158). " There
exists, in other words, in all classes of American society to-day, just as
there existed during the Revolution, during the ' transcendental '
movement, in the Civil War, an immense mass of unspiritualised,
unvitalised American manhood and womanhood " (p. 160).

3 And this despite of what I have called elsewhere the comparative
failure of Pragmatism to give a rational, and tenable account of
" personality " and of the " self."

180 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM

to philosophy and to the thought and practice of
the world (the two things are inseparable) of some
or all of these general and special characteristics
which we have sought to illustrate in Prag-
matism.

We might begin by suggesting the importance
to the world of the production and development
of a man of genius like James,1 whose fresh and
living presentation of the problems of philosophy
(as seen by a psychologist) has brought the sense
of a lasting and far-reaching obligation upon his
fellow-students everywhere. In no more favour-
able soil could James have grown up into the range
and plenitude of his influence than in that of
America and of Harvard University,2 that great

1 At the moment of his death (scribens est mortuus) James was
undoubtedly throughout the world the most talked -about English-
speaking philosopher, and nowhere more so than in Germany, the home
of the transcendentalism that he so doughtily and brilliantly attacked.
Stein says, for example, in his article upon "Pragmatism" (Archiv
fur Philosophie, 14, 1907, II. Ab.), that we "have had nothing like
it since Schopenhauer." I have often thought that James and his
work, along with the life and work of other notable American thinkers
(and along with the " lead " that America now certainly has over at
least England in some departments of study, like political and economic
science, experimental psychology, and so on), are part of the debt
America owed, some decades ago, to the Old World in the matter of
the training of many of her best professors — a debt she has long since
cancelled and overpaid. Readers, by the way, who desire more
authentic information about James and his work than the present
writer is either capable, or desirous, of giving in this book, may
peruse either the recent work of Professor Perry of Harvard upon
Present Philosophical Tendencies, or the work of M. Flournoy already
spoken of. Boutroux has a fine appreciation of the value of James's
philosophical work in the work to which I have already referred. And
there was naturally a crop of invaluable articles upon James in the
American reviews shortly after his death.

2 Think alone, for example, of what James says he learnt there from
a teacher like Agassiz : " The hours I spent with Agassiz so taught me

PRAGMATISM AS AMERICANISM 181

nursing-ground of the finest kind of American
imperialism. The great thing, of course, about
James was his invasion, through the activities of
his own personality,1 of the realm of philosophical
rationalism by the fact and the principle of active
personality. His whole general activity was a
living embodiment of the principle of all human-
ism, that personality and the various phases of
personal experience are of more importance to
philosophy in the way of theory than any number
of supposedly self-coherent, rational or abstract
systems, than any amount of reasoning that is
determined solely by the ideal of conceptual
consistency.

Then again, it might be held that the entire
academic world of to-day has a great deal to learn
from the conditions under which all subjects
(philosophy included) are taught and investigated
in the typical American university of the day.
We have referred to the fact that the American
professor or investigator faces the work of instruc-

the difference between all possible abstractionists and all livers in the
light of the world's concrete fulness that I have never been able to
forget it." — From an article upon James in the Journal of Philosophy ,
ix. p. 527.

1 While this book was passing through the press my eye fell upon
the following words of Professor Santayana in respect of this very person-
ality of James : " It was his personal spontaneity, similar to that of
Emerson, and his personal vitality similar to that of nobody else.
Conviction and ideas came to him, so to speak, from the subsoil. He
had a prophetic sympathy with the dawning sentiments of the age, with
the moods of the dumb majority. His way of thinking and feeling
represents the true America, and represented in a measure the whole
ultra-modern radical world " {Winds of Doctrine, p. 205).

182 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM

tion and research in an environment replete with
all modern facilities and conveniences.1 The very
existence of this environment along with the
presence throughout his country of university
men and workers from all over the world with all
their obvious merits and defects as " social types '
prevent him in a hundred ways from that slavery
to some one school of thought, to some one method
of research that is so often a characteristic of the
scholar of the old world. The entire information
and scholarship in any one science (say, philo-
sophy) is worth to him what he can make of it,
here and now, for himself and for his age and for
his immediate environment. He simply cannot
think of any idea or any line of reflection, in his
own or in any other field, without thinking at the
same time of its " consequences," immediate,
secondary, and remote. This inability is an
instance of the working of the pragmatist element

1 Including, say, the facilities of a completely indexed and authenti-
cated estimate of the work that has been done in different countries
upon his particular subject. It is easy to see that the habit and the
possibility of work in an environment such as this [and again and again
its system and its facilities simply stagger the European] is a thing
of the greatest value to the American professor so far as the idea of his
own best possible contribution to his age is concerned. Should he
merely do over again what others have done ? Or shall he try to work
in a really new field ? Or shall he give himself to the work of real
teaching, to the training of competent men, or to the " organization "
of his subject with his public ? It must be admitted, I think, that the
average American professor is a better teacher and guide in his subject
than his average colleague in many places in Europe. Hence the
justifiable discontent of many American students with what they
occasionally find abroad in the way of academic facilities for investiga-
tion and advanced study.

PRAGMATISM AS AMERICANISM 183

in scholarship and in thought with all its advantages
and disadvantages.1

And it is true too, it might be held, even upon
the principles of Idealism that the mere facts of
knowledge (for they are as endless in number as
are the different points of view from which we may
perceive and analyse phenomena) are " worth " 2
to-day very largely only what they have meant
and what they may yet mean to human life, to
human thought, to civilization. While there is
certainly no useless truth and no utterly un-
important fact, it is quite possible to burden
and hamper the mind of youth with supposed
truths and facts that have little or no relevancy
to any coherent or any real point of view about
human knowledge and human interests either of
the past or the present. It is merely, for example,
in the light of the effects that they have had upon
the life and thought of humanity 3 that the great

1 The latter (it is perhaps needless to state) have long been perfectly
evident to all American teachers of the first rank in the shape, say, of
the worthless " research " that is often represented in theses and
studies handed in for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, or for
other purposes. Anything that seems to be " work done," anything
that has attained to some " consequences " or other, has often been
published as studies and researches, and this despite the valuable things
that are to be associated with the idea of the pragmatist element in
American scholarship. The faults, too, of the undue specialization
that still obtains in many American institutions is also, as I have
indicated, becoming more and more apparent to American authorities.

2 I cannot see why idealists should have been so slow to accord to
Pragmatism the element of truth in this idea, and to admit that it
connects the pragmatist philosophy of " consequences " with the
idealist " value-philosophy."

3 The greater part, for example, of our British teaching and writing
about Kant and Hegel has taken little or no recognition of the

184 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM

philosophical systems of the past ought (after the
necessary period of preliminary study on the part
of the pupil) to be presented to students in uni-
versity lectures. A teacher who cannot set them
forth in this spirit is really not a teacher at all — a
man who can make his subject live again in the
thought of the present.1

If the limits of our space and our subject
permitted of the attempt, we might easily con-
tinue the study of the pragmatist element in
American scholarship from the point of view of
the whole general economy of a university as a
social institution, and from that of the benefit
that has accrued to the modern world from the
many successful attempts at the organization of
knowledge from an international point of view,
that have come into being under American
initiative.2

peculiar intellectual and social atmosphere under which Criticism and
Transcendentalism became intelligible and influential in Germany
and elsewhere, or of the equally important matter of the very
different ways in which the Kantian and the Hegelian philosophies
were interpreted by different schools and different tendencies of
thought. A similar thing might, I think, too, be said of the unduly
" intellectualistic " manner in which the teachings of Plato and Aristotle
have often been presented to our British students — under the influ-
ence partly of Hegelianism and partly of the doctrinairism and the
intellectualism of our academic Humanism since the time of the
Renaissance. Hence the great importance in Greek philosophy of
such a recent work as that of F. M. Cornford upon the relation
of Religion to Philosophy (From Religion to Philosophy, Arnold, 1912),
or of Professor Burnet's well-known Early Greek Philosophy.

1 As suggestive of the scant respect for authorities felt by the
active-minded American student, I may refer to the boast of Papini
that Pragmatism appeals to the virile and the proud-spirited who do
not wish to accept their thought from the past.

2 I am thinking of such events as the " World's Parliament of

PRAGMATISM AS AMERICANISM 185

Lastly it is surely impossible to exaggerate the
value to philosophy of the so-called " democratic," 1
open-minded attitude of Pragmatism that is seen
in its unprejudiced recognition of such things
as the ordinary facts of life, the struggle that
constitutes the life of the average man, the frag-
mentary and partial 2 character of most of our

Religions " (in Chicago in 1893), the recent international conferences
upon " ethical instruction in different countries," upon " racial
problems," upon " missions," etc. It would be idle to think that such
attempts at the organisation of the knowledge and the effort of the
thinking people in the world are quite devoid of philosophical import-
ance. One has only to study, say, von Hartmann, or modern social
reform, to be convinced of the contrary.

1 I trust I may be pardoned if I venture to suggest that in opposition
to the democratic attitude of Pragmatism to the ordinary facts of
life, and to the ordinary (but often heroic) life of ordinary men, the
view of man and the universe that is taken in such an important
idealistic book as Dr. Bosanquet's Individuality and Value is doubtless
unduly aristocratic or intellectualistic. It speaks rather of the Greek
view of life than of the modern democratic view. As an expression
of the quasi democratic attitude of James even in philosophy, we may
cite the following: " In this real world of sweat and dirt, it seems to
me that when a view of things is noble, that ought to count as a pre-
sumption against its truth, as a philosophical disqualification. The
Prince of Darkness may be a gentleman, as we are told he is, but what-
ever the God of earth and heaven is, he can surely be no gentleman.
His menial services are needed in the dust of our human trials."

Having rewritten this quotation two or three times, I have lost the
reference to its place in James's writings. It is one of the three books
upon Pragmatism and Pluralism.]

2 We may quote, I think, the following passage from Professor
Perry to show that the open-mindedness of James was not merely a
temperamental and an American characteristic in his case, but a
quality or attitude that rested upon an intellectual conviction in respect
of the function of ideas. " Since it is their office [i.e. the office of ideas]
to pave the way for direct knowledge, or to be temporarily substituted
for it, then efficiency is conditioned by their unobtrusiveness, by the
readiness with which they subordinate themselves. The commonest case
of an idea in James's sense is the word, and the most notable example
of his pragmatic or empirical method is his own scrupulous avoidance
of verbalism. It follows that since ideas are in and of themselves of

186 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM

knowledge, and so on. All this contrasts in the
most favourable way with the scholastic and the
Procrustean attitude to facts that has so long
characterized philosophical rationalism from
Leibniz and Wolff to the Kantians and to the
Neo-Kantians and the Neo-Hegelians of our own
time. Thanks partly to this direct and demo-
cratic attitude of mind on the part of the prag-
matists and humanists, and thanks too to the
entire psychological and sociological movement
of modern times, the points of view of the different
leading thinkers of different countries are beginning
to receive their fitting recognition in the general
economy of human thought to be compared with
each other, and with still other possible points of
view.

No one, it seems to me, can read the books of
James without feeling that philosophy can again,
as the universal science indeed, " begin any-
where " in a far less restricted sense than that in
which Hegel interpreted this ingenious saying
of his in respect of the freedom of human thinking.1

As for the inevitable drawbacks and limitations
of the very Americanism which we have been

no cognitive value, since they are essentially instrumental, they are
always on trial, and ' liable to modification in the course of future
experience.'" — Present Philosophical Tendencies, p. 364 (italics mine).

1 It is known to all students that some of the more important
writings of this prince of thinkers cannot be intelligibly approached
without a long preliminary study of the peculiar " dressing up," or
transformation, to which he subjects the various facts of life and
existence. And the same tiling is true (to a more modified extent)
of the writings of Kant.

PRAGMATISM AS AMERICANISM 187

endeavouring to discover in Pragmatism, it can-
not, to begin with, be entirely without an element
of risk to philosophy, and to the real welfare of a
country, that the highest kind of insight should
be brought too ruthlessly into competition with
the various specialized studies, and the various
utilitarian l pursuits of modern times, and with
popular tendencies generally. The public, for many
reasons, should not be too readily encouraged to
think of philosophy as merely " a " study like
other studies and pursuits, to be baited with the
idea of its utility and its profitable consequences.
Philosophy, on the contrary, is the universal study
that gives to all other studies and pursuits their
relative place and value. If left too much to be
a mere matter of choice on the part of the young
and the unthinking, it will soon find itself in
the neglected position of the wisdom that utters
her voice at the street corners. It must be
secured an integral, and even a necessary place
in the world of instruction — a condition that is
still the case, it is to be remembered, in Catholic 2

1 See the wise remark, in this very connexion, of the possible service
of philosophy to-day, of Dr. Bosanquet, reproduced upon p. 226. And
then, again, we must remember that an unduly pragmatist view of life
would tend to make people impervious to ideas that transcend the range
and the level of their ordinary interests and activities.

2 Cf. the following from Professor Pace's Preface to Introduction to
Philosophy, by Charles A. Dubray. " In Catholic colleges, importance
has always been attached to the study of philosophy both as a means
of culture and as a source of information regarding the great truths
which are influential in supporting Christian belief and in shaping
character." Of course these same words might be used as descriptive of
what Professor Santayana calls the "older tradition" in all American
colleges. It is interesting, by the way, to note also the pragmatist

188 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM

as distinguished from many so-called " liberal "
and " Protestant " seats of learning.

It is possible indeed, as we have already
suggested, that the recognition of an aristocratic
or a Catholic element in learning would, in
some respects, be of more true use in the schools
of America than a mere pragmatist philosophy
of life and education. And it is therefore not to
be wondered at that Americans themselves should
already have expressed something of a distrust for
a philosophy and an educational policy that are
too akin to the practical commercialism of the
hour.1

Then again, despite the large element of truth
that there is in the idea of philosophy " discover-
ing ' (rather than itself " being ") the true
" dynamic " or " motive-awakening " view of the
system of things in which we live, philosophy
itself was never intended to bear the entire weight
and strain that are put upon it by the pragmatists.
In their enthusiasm they would make out of it, as
we have seen, a religion (and a new one at that !)
and a social philosophy, as well as the theory
of knowledge and the " approach " to reality that
we are accustomed to look for in a system of
philosophy.

touch in the same Preface to this Catholic manual. " But if this
training is to be successful, philosophy must be presented, not as a
complex of abstruse speculations on far-off inaccessible topics, but as a
system of truths that enter with vital consequence into our ordinary
thinking and our everyday conduct."
1 See p. 136.

PRAGMATISM AS AMERICANISM 189

It is only in periods of transition and recon-
struction, like the present age, when men have
become acutely sensible of the limitations of
traditional views of things, that they are inclined
in their disappointment to look to scientific and
professional thinkers for creeds that shall take
the place of what they seem for the moment
to be losing. It is in such times chiefly that
philosophy flourishes, and that it is apt to acquire
an undue importance by being called upon to do
things that of itself it cannot do. Among the
latter impossibilities is to be placed, for example,
the idea of its being able to offer (almost in any
sense) a substitute for the direct experience * of
the common life, or for the realities of our affections
and our emotions, or for the ideals engendered
by the common life.

Owing partly to the limitations of the Intel-
lectualism that has hitherto characterized so much
of the culture and the educational policy of the
last century there are still everywhere scores of
people under the illusion that the truth of life will
be revealed to them in the theory of some book,
in the new views or the new gospel of some
emancipated and original thinker. In this vain
hope of theirs they are obviously forgetful of even
the pragmatist truth that all theories are but a
kind of transformation, or abstract expression,
of the experiences of real life and of real living.
And part of the trouble with the pragmatists is

1 See above, p. 34 and p. 165.

igo PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM

that they themselves have unwittingly ministered
to this mistaken attitude of mind by creating the
impression that their theory of taking the kingdom
of Heaven by storm, by the violence of their
postulations and of their plea for a " working
view" of things, is indeed the new gospel of
which men have long been in search. The race,
however, is not always to the swift and the eager,
nor the kingdom to those who are loudest in their
cryings of " Lord, Lord." And as a friend of mine
aptly applied it as against all practicalism and
Pragmatism, " there remaineth a rest to the
people of God." * The ordinary man, it should be
borne in mind, does not in a certain sense really
need philosophy. Its audience is with the few, and
it is to do it but scant service to think of making
it attractive to the many by the obliteration of
most of its distinctive characteristics and diffi-
culties, and by the failure to point out its inherent
limitations. It is not by any means, as we have
been indicating, a substitute either for life, or for
positive religion. Nor can it ever have much of
a message, even for the few, if they imagine them-
selves, on account of their wisdom, to be elevated
above the needs of the ordinary discipline of life.

Then again, there is surely an element of con-
siderable danger in the American-like depreciation

1 It is not, however, " rest " that the pragmatists want, even in
heaven, but renewed opportunities for achievement. " ' There shall be
news,' W. James was fond of saying with rapture, quoting from the
unpublished poem of a new friend, ' there shall be news in heaven.'"
— Professor Santayana in Winds of Doctrine, p. 209.

PRAGMATISM AS AMERICANISM 191

of doctrine and theory which we have noticed
in two or three different connexions on the part
of Pragmatism. In the busy, necessitous life of
the United States this depreciation 1 is sometimes
said to be visible in the great sacrifice of life2
and energy that is continually taking place there
owing to an unduly literal acceptance on the part
of every one of the idea that each individual has
a sort of divine right to seek and to interpret his
experience for himself. In Pragmatism it might
be said to be illustrated in the comparative weak-
ness in the essentials of logic and ethics to which
we have already referred, in the matter of a
sound theory of first principles. And also in its
failure to take any really critical recognition 3 of
the question of its theoretical and practical
affiliations to tendencies new and old, many or

1 In using this expression I am acutely conscious of its limitations
and of its misleading character. There is nothing in which Americans
so thoroughly believe as knowledge and instruction and information.
A belief in education is in fact the one prevailing religion of the
country — the one thing in which all classes, without any exception,
unfeignedly believe, and for which the entire country makes enormous
sacrifices.

2 In using this expression I am not blind to such outstanding char-
acteristics of American life as (i) the enormous amount of preventive
philanthropy that exists in the United States ; (2) the well-known
system of checks in the governmental machinery of the country ; (3)
the readiness with which Americans fly to legislation for the cure
of evils ; (4) the American sensitiveness to pain and their hesitation
about the infliction of suffering or punishment, etc. Nor do I forget
the sacrifice of life entailed by modern necessities and modern inven-
tions in countries other than America. I simply mean that owing to
the constant stream of immigration, and to the spirit of youthfulness
that pervades the country, the willingness of people to make experi-
ments with themselves and their lives is one of the many remarkable
things about the United States. 3 See p. 117.

i92 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM

most of which have long ago been estimated at
their true worth and value. Then there is its
comparatively superficial interpretation 1 of what
is known in the thought of the day as "Darwinism"
and " Evolutionism " and the endless belief of
the unthinking in " progress," and its failure
to see that its very Americanism2 and its very
popularity are things that are deserving of the
most careful study and criticism. What have the
pragmatists left in their hands of their theory, if
its mere " methodology " and its " efficiency-
philosophy " and its would-be enthusiasm were
eliminated from it ?

Like Americanism in general (which began, of
course, as a revolutionary and a " liberationist '
policy), Pragmatism is inclined in some ways
to make too much of peoples' rights and
interests, and too little of their duties and
privileges and of their real needs and their funda-
mental, human instincts. It is in the under-
standing alone of these latter things that true
wisdom and true satisfaction3 are to be found.
And like the American demand for pleasure

1 And this despite the enormous amount of work that has been
done by American biologists upon the "factors" of evolution, and
upon a true interpretation of Darwinism and of Weismannism and
of the evolutionary theory generally.

2 Even Professor James, for example, dismissed (far too readily, in
my opinion) as a " sociological romance " a well-known book (published
both in French and in English) by Professor Schinz entitled Anti-
Pragmatism. Although in some respects a superficial and exaggerated
piece of work, this book did discover certain important things about
Pragmatism and about its relation to American life.

3 It is probably a perception of this truth that has led Dr. Bosanquet

PRAGMATISM AS AMERICANISM 193

and for a good time generally, Pragmatism is in
many respects too much a mere philosophy of
" postulations " and " demands," too much a
mere formulation of the eager and impetuous
demands of the emancipated man and woman
of the time — as forgetful as they of many of the
deeper1 facts of life and of the economy of our
human civilization. In demanding that the
" consequences " of all pursuits (even those of
study and philosophy) shall be " satisfying," and
that philosophy shall satisfy our active nature,
it forgets the sense of disillusionment that comes
to all rash and mistaken effort. It certainly does
not follow that a man is going to get certain things
from the world and from philosophy merely because
he demands them any more than does the discovery
and the possession of happiness follow from the
"right"2 of the individual to seek it in his own best
way. Nor is it even true that man is called upon
to " act " to anything like the extent contemplated
by an unduly enthusiastic Americanism and an

to express the opinion that the whole pragmatist issue may be settled
by an examination of the notion of " satisfaction." He must mean,
I think, that satisfaction is impossible to man without a recognition
of many of the ideal factors that are almost entirely neglected by the
pragmatists — except by Bergson, if it be fair to call him a pragmatist.

1 Bourdeau, for example, has suggested that its God is not really
God, but merely an old domestic servant destined to do us personal
services — help us to carry our trunk and our cross in the midst of
sweat and dirt. He is not a gentleman even. " No wonder," he adds, " it
was condemned at Rome." See his Pragmatisme et Modernisme, p. 82.

2 I am thinking here of the words in the Constitution of the State
of California (they are printed in Mr. Bryce's American Commonwealth —
at least in the earlier editions) to the effect that it is the natural right
of all men to seek and to " obtain [!] " happiness.

13

i94 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM

unduly enthusiastic Pragmatism. The writer is
glad to be able to append in this connexion a
quotation taken by an American critic of Prag-
matism from Forberg in his criticism of the action-
philosophy of Fichte : " Action, action, is the
vocation of man ! Strictly speaking, this principle
is false. Man is not called upon to act, but to act
justly. If he cannot act without acting unjustly
he had better remain inactive."

It would not be difficult to match this quota-
tion, or perhaps to surpass it, with something from
Carlyle in respect of the littleness of man's claims,
not merely for enjoyment, but even for existence ;
but we will pass on.

Pragmatism, as we have suggested, certainly
falls too readily into line with the tendency of
the age to demand means and instruments and
utilities and working satisfactions, instead of
ends and purposes and values, to demand pleasure
and enjoyment instead of happiness and blessed-
ness. Instead of allowing itself to do this it
should have undertaken a criticism both of the
so-called "wants" of the age, and of the sound-
ness of its own views in respect of the truth
and the happiness that are proper to man as
man. There is a fine epigram of Goethe's in
respect of the limitations of the revolutionary
and the liberationist attitude of those who would
seek to " free " men without first trying to under-
stand them, and to help them to their true inward
development.

PRAGMATISM AS AMERICANISM 195

Alle Freiheits-Apostel, sie waren mir immer zuwider.
Willkur suchte doch nur jeder am Ende fur sich.
Willst du viele befrein, so wag' es vielen zu dienen.
Wie gefahrlich das sey, willst du es wissen ? Versuch's.1

Until Pragmatism then makes it clear that
it is the free rational activity, and the higher
spiritual nature of man that is to it the norm of
all our thought, and all our activity, and the true
test of all " consequences," it has not risen to the
height of the distinctive message that it is capable
of giving to the thought of the present time.
Unqualified by some of the ideal considerations
to which we have attempted, in its name, and in
its interest, to give an expression, it would not be,
for example, a philosophy that could be looked
upon by the great East as the last word of our
Western wisdom or our Western experience. It
will be well, however, to say nothing more in
this connexion until we have looked at the con-
siderations that follow (in our next chapter) upon
the lofty, but impersonal, idealisation of the life
and thought of man attempted by our Anglo-
Hegelian Rationalism, and until we have re-
flected, too, upon the more feasible form of
Idealism attempted in the remarkable philosophy
of Bergson,2 the greatest of all the pragmatists.

1 " Epigramme," Venice, 1790. [" I could never abide any of those
freedom-gospellers. All that they ever wanted was to get things
running so as to suit themselves. If you are anxious to set people free,
just make a beginning by trying to serve them. The simplest attempt
will teach you how dangerous this effort may be."]

2 See Chapter IX.

CHAPTER VIII

PRAGMATISM AND ANGLO-HEGELIAN
RATIONALISM

The form of Anglo-German Rationalism or Intel-
lectualism which I shall venture to select for the
purposes of consideration from the point of view
of Pragmatism and Humanism is the first volume
of the recent Gifford Lectures of Dr. Bernard
Bosanquet, who has long been regarded by the
philosophical public of Great Britain as one of the
most characteristic members of a certain section
of our Neo-Hegelian school. I shall first give the
barest outline of the argument and contentions
of " The Principle of Individuality and Value,"
and then venture upon some paragraphs of what
shall seem to me to be relevant criticism.

Dr. Bosanquet's initial position is a conception
of philosophy, and its task which is for him and his
book final and all-determining. To him Philo-
sophy is (as it is to some extent to Hegel) " logic "
or " the spirit of totality." It is " essentially of
the concrete and the whole," as Science is of the

" abstract and the part." Although the best thing

196

PRAGMATISM AND RATIONALISM 197

in life is not necessarily " philosophy," philosophy
in this sense of " logic " is the clue to " reality
and value and freedom," the key to everything,
in short, that we can, or that we should, or that we
actually do desire and need. It [philosophy] is
" a rendering in coherent thought of what lies at
the heart of actual life and love." His next step
is to indicate " the sort of things," or the sort of
" experiences," or the sort of " facts " that philo-
sophy needs as its material, if it would accomplish
its task as " universal logic." This he does
(1) negatively, by the rejection of any form of
" immediateness," or " simple apprehension," such
as the " solid fact," the " sense of being," or the
" unshareable self " of which we sometimes seem
to hear, or such as the " naive ideas " of " com-
pensating justice," x " ethics 2 which treats the indi-
vidual as isolated" and "teleology" 3 as "guidance
by finite minds," as the data (or as part of the data)
of philosophy ; and (2) positively, by declaring

1 On what grounds does Professor Bosanquet think of " compensating
justice " as a naive idea ? It is on the contrary one of the highest and
deepest, and one of the most comprehensive to which the human mind
has ever attained— giving rise to the various theogonies and theodicies
and religious systems of mankind. It is at the bottom, for example, of
the theodicy and the philosophy of Leibniz, the founder of the Rational-
ism of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Europe.

2 Could any system of ethics which took such an impossible and
such a belated conception of the individual be regarded as ethics at all ?

3 I do not think that this is a fair preliminary description of the
problem of teleology. A person who believes in the realization of
purpose in some experiences with which he thinks himself to be ac-
quainted does not plead for the guidance of the universe by finite minds,
but simply for a view of it that shall include the truth of human purposes.
And of course there may be in the universe beings other than ourselves
who also realize purposes.

198 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM

that his subject-matter throughout will be " the
principle of ' individuality/ of ' self -completeness/
as the clue to reality." This " individuality "
or " self-completeness " is then set forth in a
quasi-Platonic manner as the " universal," the
real " universal " being (he insists) the " concrete
universal," the " whole," that is to say, " the
logical system of connected members," that is to
him the " ideal of all thought." We must think
of this " individuality," therefore, either as "a
living world, complete and acting out of itself, a
positive, self-moulding cosmos," or "as a definite
striving of the universe " [I]1

The next question (so far as our partial purposes
are concerned) that Dr. Bosanquet asks is, " What
help do we get from the notion of a ' mind ' which
1 purposes ' or ' desires ' things in appreciating
the work of factors in the universe, or of the
universe as [ex-hypothesi] self-directing and self-
experiencing whole ? " The answer is spread
over several chapters, and is practically this, that
although there is undoubtedly a " teleology " in
the universe (in the shape of the " conjunctions
and results of the co-operation of men," or of
" the harmony of geological and biological evolu-
tion "), and although " minds such as ours play a
part in the work of direction, we cannot judge of
this work in question in any human manner."
The real test of teleology or value is " wholeness,"
" completeness," " individuality " [the topic of

1 Italics and exclamation mine.

PRAGMATISM AND RATIONALISM 199

the book], and it is made quite clear that it is the
"Absolute" who is "rear' and "individual"
and not we. We are, indeed, in our lives " carried
to the Absolute without a break," * and our nature
"is only in process of being communicated to us." 2
"We should not think of ourselves after the pattern
of separate things or personalities in the legal
sense, nor even as selves in the sense of isolation
and exclusion of others." " Individuality " being
this " logical self -completeness," there can be
only one " Individual," and this one Individual
is the one criterion of " value," or " reality," or
" existence," " importance " and " reality [!] "
being sides of the one " characteristic " [i.e.
" thinkableness " as a whole]. Dr. Bosanquet
confesses in his seventh chapter that this idea
of his of " individuality," or " reality," is es-
sentially the Greek idea that it is only the " whole
nature " of things that gives them their reality
or value.

We are then assured, towards the close of this
remarkable book, that " freedom " (the one thing

1 Italics mine. There is a large element of truth in this great idea
of Professor Bosanquet's, connecting [for our purposes] his philosophy
with the theism and the personalism for which we are contending as
the only true and real basis for Humanism.

2 Readers who remember Green's Prolegomena to Ethics will
remember that it is one of the difficulties of that remarkable, but one-
sided, production (exposed, I think, with many other defects in Pro-
fessor Taylor's brilliant, but unduly intellectualistic Problem of Conduct)
that it also seems to teach a kind of " Determinism " in ethics, in what
our nature is unduly communicated to us by the Absolute, or the
" Eternal Consciousness." This whole way of looking at things must
largely be abandoned to-day.

200 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM

that we mortals value as the greatest of all "goods")
is " the inherent effort of mind considered as a [!]
world, and that the " Absolute " [the " universal "
of logic, Plato's " Idea "] is the " high-water mark
of our effort," and that each " self " is " more like
a rising and a falling tide than an isolated pillar with
a fixed circumference." The great fact of the
book, the fact upon which its accomplished author
rests when he talks in his Preface of his belief,
" that in the main the work [of philosophy] has
been done," is the daily " transmutation of
experience according to the level of the mind's
energy and self-completeness," the continued and
the continuous "self -interpretation [of 'experience']
through the fundamental principle of individu-
ality."

Now it is quite obvious that according to many
of the considerations that have been put forward
as true in the foregoing chapters, this philosophy
of Dr. Bosanquet's which treats the " concept,"
or the " universal " as an end in itself (as the one
answer to all possible demands for a " teleology ")
and as an " individual," " a perfected and self-
perfecting [!] individual," can be regarded as
but another instance of the abstract Rationalism
against which Pragmatism and Humanism have
entered their protests. It is untrue, therefore,
to the real facts of knowledge and the real
facts of human nature. It will be sufficient to
state that the considerations of which we are
thinking are (in the main) the positions that have

PRAGMATISM AND RATIONALISM 201

been taken in respect of such things as : (1) the
claim that a true metaphysic must serve not
merely as an intellectual " system " but as a
" dynamic," and as a " motive " for action and
achievement; (2) the fact of the "instrumental"
character of thought and of ideas, and of all
systems (of science or of philosophy or of
politics) that fail to include as part of their data
the various ideals of mankind ; (3) the idea that
all truth and all thought imply a belief in the
existence of objects and persons independent of
the mere mental states or activities of the think-
ing individual, and that belief rather than know-
ledge is, and always has been, man's funda-
mental and working estimate of reality ; (4)
the fact that our human actions and re-actions
upon reality are a part of what we mean by
" reality," and that these actions and re-actions of
ours are real and not imaginary ; (5) the attitude
in general of Pragmatism to Rationalism ; (6) the
various concessions that have been made by
representative rationalists to the pragmatist
movement.

Dr. Bosanquet's theory of reality has already
impressed some of his most competent critics as
utterly inadequate as a motive or an incentive to
the efforts and endeavours of men as we know
them in history and in actual life, and we shall
immediately return to this topic. And although
there are many signs in his Lectures that he is
himself quite aware of the probability of such an

202 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM

impression, his book proceeds upon the even tenor
of its way, following wherever his argument may
lead him, irrespective entirely of the truth con-
tained in the facts and the positions we have
just recounted and reaffirmed. It lends itself,
therefore, only too naturally to our present use
of it as a highly instructive presentation of many,
or most, of the tendencies of Rationalism and
Intellectualism, against which Pragmatism and
Humanism would fain protest. At the same time
there is in it, as we hope to show, a fundamental
element 1 of truth and of fact without which there
could be no Pragmatism and no Humanism, and
indeed no philosophy at all.

A broad, pervading inconsistency 2 in In-

1 See below, p. 226.

2 It is, I am inclined to think, the existence of this contradiction in
Dr. Bosanquet's Lectures that will cause the average intelligent person
to turn away from them as not affording an adequate account of the
reality of the world of persons and things with which he knows himself
to be directly and indirectly acquainted. Another way of stating the
same thing would be to say that Absolutism fails to take any adequate
recognition of that most serious contradiction (or " defect ") in our ex-
perience of which we have already spoken as the great dualism of modern
times, the opposition between reason and faith an opposition that is
not relieved either by the greatest of the continually increasing dis-
coveries of science, or by any, or all, of the systems of all the thinkers.
Hegelianism in general assures us that from the point of view of a
" higher synthesis " this opposition does not exist or that it is somehow
" transcended." And its method of effecting this synthesis is to convert
the opposition between faith and reason into the opposition between
what it calls '* Understanding " and what it calls " Reason " [an
opposition that is to some extent a fictitious one, " reason " being, to
begin with, but another name for our power of framing general con-
ceptions or notions, and not therefore different from "understanding"].
It removes, that is to say, the opposition between two different phases
or aspects of our experience by denying the existence of one of
them altogether. It changes the opposition between knowledge and

PRAGMATISM AND RATIONALISM 203

dividuality and Value " which militates somewhat
seriously against the idea of its being regarded
as a tenable philosophy, is the obvious one
between the position (1) that true reality is
necessarily individual, and the position (2) that
reality is to be found in the " universal ' (or the
"concept ") of logic.1 It would, however, perhaps
be unfair to expect Dr. Bosanquet to effect a

faith into an opposition between an alleged lower and an alleged
higher way of knowing. This alleged higher way of knowing, how-
ever, is, when we look into it, but the old ideal of the perfect
demonstration of all the supposed contents of our knowledge (prin-
ciples and facts alike) that has haunted modern philosophy from the
time of Descartes. It is an unattainable ideal because no philosophy
in the world can begin without some assumption (either of " fact "
or of principle), and because our knowledge of the world comes
to us in a piecemeal fashion — under the conditions of time and
space. A fact prior to all the issues of the demand of Rationalism
for a supposedly perfect demonstration is the existence of the conscious
beings (Dr. Bosanquet himself, for example) who seek this supposed
certainty in order that they may act better — in ignorance of the fact that
complete initial certainty on our part as to all the issues and aspects
of our actions would tend to destroy the personal character of our
choice as moral agents, as beings who may occasionally act beyond the
given and the calculable, and set up precedents and ideals for ourselves
and for others — for humanity. It is this underlying faith then in the
reality of our moral and spiritual nature that we would alone oppose
(and only in a relative sense) to the supposed certainties of a completely
rational, or a priori, demonstration, the whole contention of humanism
being that it is in the interests of the former reality that the latter
certainties exist. The apparent opposition between faith and reason
would be surmounted by a philosophy that should make conscious-
ness of ourselves as persons the primal certainty, and all other forms
of consciousness or of knowledge secondary and tributary, as it were,
to this.

1 I am aware that there is a difference between the " universal " of
ordinary formal logic and Dr. Bosanquet's (or Hegel's) " concrete
universal," but it is needless for me to think of it here. Dr. Bosanquet
uses in his Lectures the phrase " logical universal " for his " concrete
universal " or his principle of positive coherence. It is always logical
coherence that he has in view.

204 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM

harmony between these two positions that Aris-
totle (who held them both) was himself very
largely unable to do. There is, in other words, a
standing and a lasting contradiction between
any and all philosophy which holds that it is
reason [or logic] alone that attains to truth and
reality, and the apparently natural and inevit-
able tendency of the human mind [it is repre-
sented in Dr. Bosanquet's own procedure] to
seek after " reality " in the " individual " thing,
or person, or being, and in the perfecting of
" individuality " in God (or in a kingdom of
perfected individuals).

The positive errors, however, which we would
venture to refer to as even more fatal to Dr.
Bosanquet's book than any of its incidental in-
consistencies are those connected with the following
pieces of procedure on his part : (i) his manifest
tendency to treat the " universal " as if it were
an entity on its own account with a sort of develop-
ment and " value " and " culmination " of its
own ; * (2) his tendency to talk and think as if
a " characteristic " or a " predicate " (i.e. the
" characteristic " or " quality " that some ex-
periencing being or some thinker attributes to
reality) could be treated as anything at all apart
from the action and the reaction of this " experient '

1 " For everywhere it is creative Logic, the nature of the whole working
in the detail, which constitutes experience, and is appreciable in so far
as experience has value." Now Logic of itself does not thus " work "
or " do " anything. It is men or persons who do things by the help
of logic and reasoning and other things — realities and forces, etc.

PRAGMATISM AND RATIONALISM 205

(or " thinker ") conceived as an agent ; (3) the
tendency to talk of " minds "x rather than persons,
as " purposing " and " desiring " things ; (4) his
tendency to talk as if " teleology " were " whole-
ness " ; (5) his tendency to regard (somewhat in the
manner of Spinoza) " selves " and " persons " as
like " rising and falling tides," and of the self as
a " world of content " 2 engaged in certain " trans-
formations " ; and (6) his tendency to think and
speak as if demonstration [" mediation " is perhaps
his favourite way of thinking of the logical process]
were an end in itself, as if we lived to think, instead
of thinking to live.

In opposition to all this it may be affirmed
firstly that every " conception " of the human
mind is but the more or less clear consciousness
of a disposition to activity, and is representative,
not so much of the " features " of objects which
might appear to be their " characteristics " from
a purely theoretical point of view, as of the different

1 Cf. p. 31. " We are minds," he says, "i.e. living microcosms, not
with hard and fast limits, but determined by our range and powers
which fluctuate very greatly." My point simply is that this is too
intellectual! stic a conception of man's personality. We have minds,
but we are not minds.

2 See p. 192. " But as the self is essentially a world of content en-
gaged in certain transformations"; and p. 193, " a conscious being . . .
is a world ... in which the Absolute begins to reveal its proper
nature." How can a " world of content " [that is to say, the " sphere
of discourse" of what some person is thinking for some purpose or
other] be " engaged " in certain transformations ? It is the person, or
the thinker, who is transforming the various data of his experience
for his purposes as a man among men. It is time that philosophy ceased
to make itself ridiculous by calmly writing down such abstractions as
if they were facts.

206 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM

ways in which objects have seemed to men to sub-
serve the needs of their souls and bodies. The
study of the development of the " concept " in
connexion with the facts of memory and with the
slow evolution of language, and with the "socialized
percepts " of daily life will all tend to confirm this
position. The phenomena of religion, for example,
and all the main concepts of all the religions are
to be studied not merely as intellectual phenomena,
as solutions of some of the many difficulties of
modern Agnosticism, or of modern Rationalism,
or of modern Criticism, but as an expressive
of the modes of behaviour of human beings (with
all their needs and all their ideals) towards
the universe in which they find themselves, and
towards the various beings, seen and unseen, which
this universe symbolises to them. These pheno-
mena and these conceptions are unintelligible, in
short, apart from the various activities and cults
and social practices and social experiences and
what not, with which they have dealt from first
to last.

Then it is literally impossible to separate in the
manner of Dr. Bosanquet the " predicate " of
thought from the active relations sustained by
things towards each other, or towards the human
beings who seek to interpret these active relations
for any or for all " purposes." Dr. Bosanquet's
idea, however, of the relation of " mind " to
" matter," to use these symbols for the nonce (for
they are but such), is in the main purely "repre-

PRAGMATISM AND RATIONALISM 207

sentational " x or intellectualistic.2 To him "mind"
seems to reflect either a " bodily content " or
some other kind of " content " 3 that seems to
exist for a " spectator " of the world, or for the
" Absolute," rather than for the man himself as an
agent, who of course uses his memories of himself,
or his " ideal " of himself, for renewed effort and
activity. One of the most important consequences
of this unduly intellectualistic view of mind is
that Dr. Bosanquet seems (both theoretically and
practically) unable to see the place of " mind,"
as " purpose," in ordinary life,4 or of the place of
mind in evolution,5 giving us in his difficult but
important chapter on the " relation of mind and
body ' a version of things that approaches only
too perilously close to Parallelism or Dualism, or
even to Materialism.6 And along with this quasi-
" representational " or " copy-like " theory of
mind there are to be associated his representational

1 Cf. " Mind as the significance and interpretation of reality," p. 27.

2 " Mind has nothing of its own but the active form of totality, every-
thing positive it draws from Nature."

8 This again is an abstraction, and how on earth can it be said that
" mind " and conscious life " reflect " merely certain abstractions (or
creations) of their own ? They have invented such terms as " content "
for certain purposes, and their own being and nature is therefore more
than these terms. Mind is not a " content " ; it makes all other things
" contents " for itself.

4 It has even there, according to Dr. Bosanquet, only its purely
theoretic function of working after its own perfection in the way of
attaining to a logical " universal." " The peculiarity of mind for us,
is to be a world of experience working itself out towards harmony and
completeness." This is simply not true.

6 " Finite consciousness, whether animal or human, did not make
its body."

6 " Thus there is nothing in mind which the physical counterpart
cannot represent." (Italics mine.)

208 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM

and intellectualistic views of the " self " * and the
" universal " 2 and " spirit." 3

There are, doubtless, hints in Dr. Bosanquet's
pages of a more " dynamic " view of mind or of
a deeper view 4 than this merely "representational "
view, but they are not developed or worked into the
main portion of his argument, which they would
doubtless very largely transform. This is greatly
to be regretted, for we remember that even Hegel
seemed to notice the splitting-up of the real
for our human purposes which takes place in the
ordinary judgment. And of course, as we have

1 " What we call the individual, then, is not a fixed essence, but a
living world of content representing a certain range of externality."
P. 289.

2 " The system of the universe, as was said in an earlier Lecture, might
be described as a representative system. Nature, or externality [!] fives
in the fives of conscious beings. (Italics mine.)

3 " Spirit is a light, a focus, a significance [!] which can only be by
contact with a ' nature ' an external world."

* " For, on the other hand, it has been urged and we feel, that it is
thought which constructs and sustains the fabric of experience, and that it
is thought-determinations which invest even sense-experience with its
value and its meaning. . . . The ultimate tendency of thought, we have
seen, is not to generalise, but to constitute a world," p. 55. Again, " the
true office of thought, we begin to see, is to build up, to inspire with
meaning, to intensify, to vivify. The object which thought, in the true
sense, has worked upon, is not a relic of decaying sense, but is a living
world, analogous to a perception of the beautiful, in which every thought-
determination adds fresh point and deeper bearing to every element of
the whole," p. 58. And on p. 178 he says that he sees no objection to
an idealist recognising the " use made of " " laws " and " dispositions "
in recent psychology. [How one wishes that Dr. Bosanquet had really
worked into his philosophy the idea that every mental " element " is
in a sense a " disposition " to activity !] Some of these statements of
Dr. Bosanquet's have almost a pragmatist ring about them, a suggestion
of a living and dynamic (rather than a merely intellectualistic) con-
ception of thought. They may therefore be associated by the reader
with the concessions to Pragmatism by other rationalists of which we
spoke in an early chapter (see p. 74).

PRAGMATISM AND RATIONALISM 209

noticed, all " purpose " is practical and theoretical
at one and the same time.

Then, thirdly, it is persons, and not " minds,"
who desire and purpose things, " mind ' being
a concept invented by the spectator of activity
in a person other than himself, which (from
the analogy of his own conscious activity and
experience) he believes to be purposive.1 Dr.
Bosanquet's use, too, of the expression "mind "
invariably leaves out of the range of consideration
the phenomena of desire and volition — intelligible,
both of them, only by reference to an end that
is to be understood from within, and not from
outside of the personality, from the point of
view of the mere spectator. The phenomena of
desire and volition are just as integral ingredients
of our lives as persons as are our cognitive states.

Fourthly, it is doubtful whether the treatment
of teleology as " wholeness " (or its sublimation
in " Individuality and Value " into " wholeness ")
is much of an explanation of this difficult topic,
or indeed whether it is any explanation at all.
Dr. Bosanquet, in fact, confesses that teleology
is a conception which " loses its distinctive meaning
as we deepen its philosophical interpretation, and
that it has very little meaning when applied to
the universe as a whole " [a thing that is apparent
to any Kantian student]. "It is impossible
seriously," he says, " to treat a mind which is the
universe [!] as a workman of limited resources,

1 See Chapter III. p. 90.

14

210 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM

aiming at some things and obliged to accept others
as means to these." And it is equally impossible,
he holds, to apply " to the universe " the dis-
tinction of " what is purpose for its own sake and
what is not so." In fact, Dr. Bosanquet's treat-
ment of teleology is thus mainly negative, as
including not only this rejection1 of the notion in
reference to the " universe as a whole," but its
rejection, too, in reference to the purposes of our
human life;2 although he admits (as of course
he must) that the conception of end or purpose
is drawn from some of the features (" the simplest
features," he says) of our " finite life," or " finite
consciousness," If the notion were "to be re-
tained at all," he says, " it could only be a
name for some principle which would help to tell
us what has value quite independent of being or not
being, the purpose of some mind." 3 Now, of course,
according to the Pragmatism and Humanism that
we have been considering in this book, no intelligent
person could take any conceivable interest in such
a useless fancy as a teleology of this kind. Thus
teleology is really blotted out altogether of
existence in this volume, and with its disappearance
there must go also the notion of any value that
might be intelligibly associated with the idea of the

1 I must say that apart from any questions in detail about this
rejection of teleology by Dr. Bosanquet, there is something inexplicable
about it to me. He cannot retain his own great notion of " wholeness "
without the idea of" end," because" wholeness " is a demand of thought
that is guided by some idea of purpose or end.

2 See p. 90.

3 Italics mine.

PRAGMATISM AND RATIONALISM 211

attainment of purposes or ends by the human
beings with whom we are acquainted in our
ordinary daily life.

We shall below1 refer to the fact that this
rejection of teleology and value is one that must
be regarded as fatal to ethics or to Absolutism in
the realm of ethics. It requires, too, to be added
here that even the most unprejudiced reading of
Dr. Bosanquet's work must create in the mind of
the reader the conviction that its author is
altogether unfair to the views of those who believe
in the existence of definite manifestations of
purpose in human life.2 He talks as if those who
uphold this idea or this fact are committed either
to the absurd notion that man is " the end of the
universe," or to the equally absurd notion that
" art, thought, society, history, in which mind
begins to transcend its finiteness should be ascribed
to the directive abilities of units in a plurality,
precisely apart from the world content and
the underlying solidarity of spirits, the medium
through which all great things are done."

With a view of bringing our discussion of these
striking Gifford Lectures within the scope of the
general subject of this book the following might
be regarded as their leading, fundamental char-
acteristics to which the most serious kind of
exception might well be taken : (1) its " abstrac-
tionism " 3 and its general injustice to fact due to

1 P. 225. 2 gee p. 90.

3 Having already given instances of this abstractionism in the case

212 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM

its initial and persistent " conviction " x [strange
to say, this is the very word used by Bosanquet]
that the real movement in things is a " logical "
movement ; (2) its fallacious conception of the task
of philosophy as mainly the obligation to think the
world " without contradiction " ; (3) its obvious
tendency in the direction of the " subjective
idealism " 2 that has been the bane of so much
modern philosophy and that is discarded altogether3
by Pragmatism and Humanism ; (4) its retention

of such things as the " self " and the " universal " and " spirit," it will
suffice to point out here in addition (i) its tendency to talk of " experi-
ence " and " experiences " as if there could be such things apart from the
prior real existence of the experients or the experiencing persons with
whom we are acquainted in our daily life, and (2) its tendency to talk
of getting at " the heart of actual life and love " in a " system " which
leaves no place for the real existence of either gods or men who live
and love. And then I trust that it may not be regarded as an
impertinence to allege as another puzzling piece of abstractionism on
the part of Dr. Bosanquet, that he has allowed himself to speak and
think in his book as if his theory of the " concrete universal " were
practically a new thing in the thought of our time — apart altogether,
that is to say, from the important work in this same direction of
other Neo-Hegelian writers, and apart, too, from the unique work of
Hegel in the same connexion.

1 See below, p. 230.

2 This is revealed in the main in its exposition of the world as the
logical system of a single complete individual experience — a tend-
ency that students of philosophy know to exist in Neo-Hegelianism
generally from Green to Bradley. I admit that this tendency is
literally a different thing from solipsism in the ordinary sense, as the
inability of a particular finite person to prove to himself that any
person or thing exists except himself. It is still, however, it seems
to me, possible to regard as solipsistic the tendency to set forth the
universe as the experience, or the thought, of a single experient or a
single thinker, even although the impersonalism of Dr. Bosanquet's
logical " whole ' conflicts somewhat with the individuality of his
Absolute.

8 Cf. p. 160.

PRAGMATISM AND RATIONALISM 213

of many of the characteristic polemical1 faults
of Neo-Hegelianism and its manifestation of a
similar spirit of polemical unfairness 2 on the part
of their accomplished author ; (5) its implica-
tion in several really hopeless contradictions in
addition to the broad contradiction already re-
ferred to ; (6) its failure [a common Neo-Hegelian
failing] to do justice to the spirit and (in certain
important regards) the letter of Kant ; (7) its
essential non-moralism or its apparently anti-
ethical character.

As for the first of these charges, the " abstrac-
tionism " of " Individuality and Value," coming
as it does on the top of the general perversity
of the book, is really a very disastrous thing

1 The well-known inability of Mr. Bradley, for example, to be content
with the reality of any portion or any phase of reality that falls short
of what he regards as absolute reality, and with the merely relative
meaning that he attaches to any category of the " finite." Also the
well-known Neo-Hegelian tendency to make an opponent forge the
weapon by which he is to be dislodged from any particular point of view.
In the case of Dr. Bosanquet this tendency takes the form of making
out any one who holds to a belief in the real existence of finite conscious
persons to hold the absurd position of believing in "an impervious
and isolated self," a thing, of course, that no one who knows anything
about biology or ethics, or social psychology, really does.

2 As another instance of Dr. Bosanquet's unintentional unfairness
to his opponents, I would note his positive injustice to Theism as such.
What many of us think of (however imperfectly) and believe in as God
is invariably to him " a theistic Demiurge in his blankness and isolation.' '
I do not believe in such an abstract Demiurge any more than I believe
in the separate, isolated self that he conjures up to his mind when he
thinks of personality. The problem of the twentieth century may well
be what Dr. Ward has signalised as the relation of God to the "Absolute "
of the Hegelian metaphysicians, but this suggestion simply means to
me the discovery on the part of philosophers of terms and concepts
more adequate to the Supreme Being than either the Absolute, or the
external deity rejected by Dr. Bosanquet.

214 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM

for philosophy. While we may pardon an en-
thusiastic literary Frenchman x for saying that,
" The fact is, you see, that a fine book is the end
for which the world was made," there is hardly
any excuse for a philosopher like Dr. Bosanquet
coming before the world with the appearance of
believing that the richly differentiated universe
that we know only in part, exists for the benefit
of the science that he represents, for the dialectic
of the metaphysician, to enable the " universal "
to " become more differentiated " and " more in-
dividualized," to become " more representative '
of the " whole." 2 We might compare, says Dr.
Bosanquet, in a striking and an enthralling3
passage, " the Absolute to Dante's mind as uttered
in the Divine Comedy ... as including in a
single, whole poetic experience a world of space
and persons, . . . things that, to any ordinary

1 Stephane Mallarme, according to Nordau in Degeneration, p. 103.

2 And the general reader must remember that the " whole " is always
(with all due respect to his high dialectic ability and his high temper
of mind and his scholarship) a kind of ignis fatuus in Dr. Bosanquet's
book, a kind of shadow thrown by the lamps and the tools of his own
choosing in his Quixotic search. The "whole" is the "perfected
individuality " of the individual who sets out to find truth in this
great world of ours with all its real possibilities of gain and loss.
It is the completion of the " system " of truth to which the truth-
seeker would fain reduce the entire universe, that becomes for him (for
the time being) the mere " subject-matter " of his thought. It is, that
is to say, in both cases, a purely formal conception— an abstraction,
although to Dr. Bosanquet it is the reality implied in the very exist-
ence and activity of the individual thinker. But the latter is the case
to him only because he looks upon man as existing to think instead of as
thinking to exist.

3 That is to say, for the scholar and the lover of Dante and Dante's
world.

PRAGMATISM AND RATIONALISM 215

mind, fall apart." Now even apart from the
highly interesting question of the manifestly great
and far-reaching influence of Dante over Dr.
Bosanquet, and apart, too, from the notable
modesty of Dr. Bosanquet's confession as to the
" imperfect " character of the simile just repro-
duced, no one to-day can think of attaching any
ultimate importance to " Dante's mind " without
thinking of the extent to which this truly great
man 1 was under the influence, not only of his own
passions and of the general " problem " of his own
life, but of such specialized influences as, for
example (1) the mediaeval dualism between the
City of God and the Empire of the World, (2)
Aristotle's unfortunate separation of the " intel-
lectual " and the " practical " virtues, (3) the evil
as well as the good of the dogmatic theology of
the fathers of the Church. Goethe is of infinitely
more value to us men of the twentieth century
than Dante. And one of the very things Goethe
is most calculated to teach us is precisely this very
matter of the limitations of the cultural ideal of the
Middle Ages and of the entire Renaissance period
that succeeded it.2 We should never, therefore,
think for a moment of taking Dr. Bosanquet's
intellectual abstractionism about the " universal "
literally without thinking at the same time of its

1 For he was not merely a " mind," reflecting " Italy " and " minds "
and " experiences."

2 And that, we might add, is still kept alive by some of our
humanists and educators of to-day as the ideal for both primary and
secondary education.

216 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM

limitations, and of its sources in Plato and in
Hegel and in Neo-Hegelian rationalism, and of
remembering with Hegel himself, " after all, the
movement of the notion is a sort of illusion."

Then, secondly, to attempt to think in philo-
sophy or any other science merely in accordance
with the Principle of <( Non-Contradiction' will
never1 take us beyond the few initial positions
of fact or of principle (God, "substance," pure
being, matter, identity, final cause, freedom, force,
the will, the idea a perfect being, or what not) with
which we happen for one reason or another to start
in our reflections. Nor will this procedure ac-
count, of course, for these initial assumptions or
facts.

Thirdly, in virtue of its implication in the
" solipsism ' and the " representationalism " of
Subjective Idealism, Dr. Bosanquet's " Absolute "
is inferior (both so far as fact and theory are con-
cerned) to the Pluralism and the possible Theism
of Pragmatism and Humanism to which we have
already made partial references.2

1 This is a thing that the beginner is taught in lectures introductory
to the study of the philosophy of Kant — in regard to Kant's relation
to the barren, dogmatic formalism of Wolff — a one-sided interpreter of
the philosophy of Leibniz. I am quite aware that Dr. Bosanquet does
not merely use the Principle of Non-Contradiction in the aggressive, or
polemical, manner of Mr. Bradley in Appearance and Reality. The
principle of positive coherence at which he aims, begins, to some extent,
where Mr. Bradley stopped. But it is still the idea of consistency or
inconsistency, with certain presuppositions of his own, that rules his
thinking ; it determines, from the very outset of his Lectures, what
he accepts and what he rejects.

2 See p. 152 and p. 156, note 2.

PRAGMATISM AND RATIONALISM 217

Fourthly, it is only natural that, on account of
these, its many polemical mannerisms, " Individu-
ality and Value " has already made upon some
of its critics the impression of being a book that
refuses to see things as they are — in the interests
of their forced adaptation to the purposes of a
preconceived philosophical theory.

Fifthly, there is certainly a sufficient number of
contradictions in " Individuality and Value " to
prevent it from being regarded as a consistent and
a workable (i.e. really explanatory) account of
our experience as we actually know it. Of these
contradictions we think the following may well be
enumerated here : (1) That between Dr. Bosan-
quet's professed principle of accepting as real only
that which is " mediated " or established by proof,
and the arbitrariness he displays in announcing
convictions like the following : " That what really
matters is not the preservation of separate minds
as such, but the qualities and achievement which,
as trustees of the universe, they elicit from the
resources assigned them." (2) The contradiction
between his belief in the conservation of " values "
without the conservation of the existence of the
individuals who " elicit " these " values," or who
are, as he puts it, the " trustees " for the " uni-
verse." (3) That between what he logically wants
(his " concrete individual ") and what he gives us
(an impersonal " system "). (4) The contradiction
between the completed personal life in God (or
in a perfected society of individuals) that most of

218 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM

us (judging from the great religions of the world)
want as human beings, and the impersonal
" conceptual " experience of his book. (5) The
contradiction that exists between his intellectual-
ism and his commendable belief in " great con-
victions " and " really satisfying emotions and
experiences. (6) The standing contradiction be-
tween his " solipsistic " view of reality (his reduc-
tion of the universe to the conceptual experience
of a single self -perfecting individual), and the
facts of history in support of the idea of the
" new," or the " creative " character of the con-
tributions of countless individuals and groups of
individuals, to the evolution of the life of the
world, or the life of the infinite number of worlds
that make up what we think of as the universe.
(7) The remarkable contradiction between Dr.
Bosanquet's calm rejection in his argumentation
of all " naive ideas " and his own na'ive or Greek-
like faith in reason, in the substantial existence of
the concept or the idea over and above the
phenomena and the phenomenal experiences which
it is used to intepret.

Lastly, as for the matter of the non-moralism or
the essentially anti-ethical character of " Individu-
ality and Value," this is a characteristic of the
book that should, as such, be partly apparent from
what has already been said, in respect of its main
argument and its main contentions, and in respect
of the apparent contributions of Pragmatism and
Humanism to philosophy generally. The abstrac-

PRAGMATISM AND RATIONALISM 219

tionism of the book, and the absence in it of any
real provision for the realities of purpose and
of accomplishment (and even of " movement "
and "process" in any real sense of these words),
are all obviously against the interests of ethics
and of conduct, as purposive, human action.
So, too, are the findings of the critics that Dr.
Bosanquet's " Absolute " is not a reality (for,
with Professor Taylor and others, man must x have
an Absolute, or a God, in whom he can believe as
real) that inspires to action and to motive on the
part of ordinary human beings. And it is also
fatal to the ethical interests of his book that he
does not see with the pragmatists that our human
actions and reactions must be regarded as part
of what we mean by " reality." And so on.

Apart, however, from these and other hostile
pre-suppositions the following would seem to be
the chief reasons for pronouncing, as unsatisfactory,
the merely incidental treatment that is accorded
in " Individuality and Value " to ethics and to
the ethical life.

(1) It is not "conduct" or the normative2
voluntary actions of human beings (in a
world or society of real human beings) requiring
" justice " and " guidance " and " help " that is
discussed in these Lectures, but abstractions like

1 I use this word " must " in a logical as well as in an ethical sense,
seeing that all judgment implies a belief in the reality of a world of
persons independent of the mere fact of " judgment " as a piece of
mental process.

2 See p. 145.

220 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM

" desire," or " ordinary desire," or " the selective
conations of finite minds," or " the active form of a
totality of striving " or [worst of all] the " self as
it happens to be," that are discussed there.

(2) Even if conduct, as of course an " organic
totality " in its way, be faced for the nonce in " In-
dividuality and Value," it is invariably branded
and thought of by Dr. Bosanquet as " naive moral-
ity," * and it is forthwith promptly transformed

1 On p. 345 the words are : " When we consider the naive or elementary
life of morality and religion " ; and on p. 346 : " The naive, or simple
self of every-day morality and religion," and the marginal heading of the
page upon which these words occur is " The naive good self compared
to grasp of a fundamental principle alone." Could anything more
clearly indicate what the Kantians call a confusion of categories [in the
case in point the categories of " goodness " and the categories of
"truth"] or what Aristotle calls a fieTapaais eh &\\o yivos, the un-
conscious treatment of one order of facts by the terms and conceptions
of another order of facts. To Dr. Bosanquet as the Neo-Hellenist that
he is in his professed creed, badness is practically stupidity, and " lack
of unification of life," and " failure of theoretical grasp." This con-
fusion between goodness and wisdom is again indicated on p. 347 in
the words : " A man is good in so far as his being is ' unified at ' all in
any sphere of wisdom or activity." [This is simply not true, and its
falsity is a more unforgivable thing in the case of Dr. Bosanquet
than it is in the case of the pragmatists who also tend to make
the ' moral ' a kind of ' unification ' or ' effectiveness ' in ' purpose ']
As a proof of Dr. Bosanquet's transformation of the facts of the ethical
life in the interest of logical theory, we can point to p. 334 : " Our
actions and ideas issue from our world as a conclusion from its premises,
or as a poem from its author's spirit," or to p. 53, where it is definitely
stated that the " self, as it happens to be," cannot, in any of its " three
aspects," " serve as a test of reality." To do the latter, it must, in his
opinion, follow the law of the " universal," i.e. become a logical con-
ception. Now of course (1) it is not the self " as it happens to be" that
is chiefly dealt with in ethics, but rather the self as it ought to be. And
(2) the ethical self, or the " person," does not follow the " law of the
universal " [a logical law] but the law of right and wrong [an ethical
law]. As a proof of the subordination of the facts of conduct to the
facts of aesthetics, we may take the words on p. 348 where aesthetic
excellence is said to be " goodness in the wider or (' shall we say ') in the

PRAGMATISM AND RATIONALISM 221

and transmuted, in the most open and unabashed
manner in the interests and exigencies of (1) logi-
cal theory, (2) aesthetics and aesthetic products
[perhaps Dr. Bosanquet's deepest or most emotional
interest], and (3) metaphysical theory of a highly
abstract character.

(3) The conception of ethics as a " normative
science " and of conduct as free and autonomous,1
and as the voluntary affirmation of a norm or
standard or type or ideal, is conspicuous by its
absence.

(4) There is really no place either in Dr.

narrower sense." Now the distinction between ethics and aesthetics is
not one of degree, but one of kind.

And as another illustration of his tendency to transform ethical facts
in the light of a metaphysical, or a logical, theory [they are the same
thing to him] we may quote the emphatic declaration on p. 356 : " Our
effort has been to bring the conception of moral and individual initiative
nearer to the idea of logical determination," or the equally outspoken
declaration on p. 353 : " But metaphysical theory, viewing the self in its
essential basis of moral solidarity with the natural and social world . . .
cannot admit that the independence of the self, though a fact, is more than
a partial fact." Or the words at the top of this same page : " The
primary principle that should govern the whole discussion is this, that the
attitude of moral judgment and responsibility for decisions is only one
among other attitudes and spheres of experience." These last words
alone would prove definitely the non-ethical character of " Individu-
ality and Value." The ethical life is to its author only a " quatenus
consider atur," only a possible point of view, only an aspect of reality,
only an aspect, therefore, of a " logical system." Now if the ethical life
of the world is to count for anything at all, it may be said that the
ethical life is no mere aspect of the life of the self, and no mere aspect
of the life of the world, seeing that " nature " in the sense of mere
" physical nature " does not come into the sphere of morality at all.
It is rather the activity of the " whole self," or the " normative "
reflection of the self as a whole upon all the merely partial or sub-
ordinate aspects of its activity, upon bodily life, economic life, intel-
lectual activity, and so on that constitutes the world of morality.

1 See p. 147, and p. 244.

222 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM

Bosanquet's " concrete universal " or in his
fugitive pages upon ethics for the reality of the
distinction between good and evil (as " willed "
in actions or as present in dispositions and tend-
encies). Good and evil1 are for him, " contents "
either for himself as a spectator of man's actions,
or for the " concrete universal," or the " whole,"
or the completed " individual " of his too consum-
mate book.

(5) Like nearly all forms of Absolutism (Hegel-
ianism, Neo-Hegelianism, Spinozism, Hobbism)
Dr. Bosanquet's ethics (or the vestigial ethics
with which he leaves us) comes perilously near
to what is known as Determinism 2 or Fatalism or
even Materialism.

1 Good and evil to Dr. Bosanquet are two quasi-rational systems
in active antagonism as claiming to attach different " principles and
predicates " to identical data. The essence of their antagonism to Dr.
Bosanquet is not, however, that evil is contemplated, as it must be
sooner or later, in repentance for example as wrong, but rather that the
" evil " is an imperfect " logical striving (p. 351) of the self after unity "
which is in " contradiction with a fuller and sounder striving " after
the same. The evil self is to him merely the vehicle of a logical con-
tradiction in the self.

2 This is seen in his admission (on p. 351) that the " bad will " no
less than the " good will " is a logical necessity, when taken along with
his doctrine about mind and body, his doctrine of the " dependence "
(p. 318) of the finite individual upon the external mechanical world.
Dr. Bosanquet, of course, thinks that even in this apparent Deter-
minism he is justifiably supplementing the ordinary ideas about the
" self " as " creative " and " originative " (p. 354), by the wider
recognition that I am more or less completely doing the work of the
" universe " as a " member " in a " greater self." And he adds in the
same sentence the words that " I am in a large measure continuous with
the greater (p. 355) self," and " dyed with its colours " — a further step
in Determinism, as it were, and a step which, with the preceding one
to which we have just referred, no critic can fail to connect with the
Determinism that we have already found to be implicated in his

PRAGMATISM AND RATIONALISM 223

As for the first of the preceding five points,
it is perfectly evident that any discussion of the
various psychological phenomena that are doubt-
less involved in conduct can be regarded as but
a preliminary step to the discussion of the real
problems of ethics — that of the actions and habits
and standards of persons who are the subjects of
rights and duties and who affirm certain actions
to be right, and certain other actions to be
wrong. The point, however, about Dr. Bosan-
quet's psychological abstractionism, especially
when it rises to the height of writing as if the
" self " as the " active form of a totality of striv-
ing,'' or the "self as it happens to be," were the
same thing as the " personal self " with which we
alone are mainly concerned in ethics, is that it
is but another instance of the old " spectator " 1
fallacy that we have already found to underlie his
whole treatment of the " self " and of " purpose "
and of " striving." Such a philosophy, or point of
view, is quite foreign to ethics, because it is only
in the ethical life that we think of ourselves
as " persons," as beings playing a part, as actors
or players upon the great stage of life. By
not facing the ethical life directly, from within,
instead of from without, Dr. Bosanquet has
entirely failed to understand it. And if he had

doctrine of the " self," and in his general doctrine that the " external "
must be frankly accepted as a factor in the universe.

1 By the " spectator " fallacy we mean his tendency to talk and
think of the self as it is for a spectator or student, looking at matters
from the outside, and not as the self is for the man himself.

224 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM

attempted this internal consideration of " person-
ality," his whole metaphysic of " individuality "
and of the great society of beings who inhabit.
(or who may be thought of as inhabiting) this
universe, would have been very different from
what it is.

Then as for the second and third points, it is
surely evident from the footnotes that have been
appended in connexion with the matter of his
transformation of the facts of ethics in the interests
of other things like logic, and aesthetics, and
metaphysics, that there is indeed, in Bosanquet,
no recognition of what must be called the genuine,
or independent reality of the moral life, or of the
moral ideal as a force in human nature. And
as for the fourth point, students of modern ethics
are naturally by this time perfectly familiar
with the tendency of Rationalism to make evil
action and the " evil self " simply the affirmation
of a " logically incoherent " point of view. It
exists in an English writer like Wollaston 1 as well
as in a German philosopher like Hegel. This
tendency is indeed a piece of sophistry and illu-
sion because the distinction between good and
evil, and the distinction between right and
wrong (perhaps the better and the more crucial
formulation of the two — for us moderns at least)

1 Wollaston is the English ethical philosopher who, according to
Leslie Stephen's account, thought, after thirty years of meditation,
that the only reason he had for not breaking his wife's head with a
stick was, that this would be tantamount to a denial that his wife was
his wife.

PRAGMATISM AND RATIONALISM 225

is unintelligible apart from the fact or the idea of
the existence of moral agents, who make (in their
volition, and in the judgments that accom-
pany or precede their volitions) a " norm," or
rule, or line between the ethically permissible
and the ethically unpermissible. The rationalism
that makes these distinctions merely a matter of
" logic," overlooks the fact that in actual life men
must be warded off from wrong-doing (and they
are in many cases actually so warded off by their
consciences and by other things, like the love
of home, or the love of honour, or the love of God)
by something stronger than the mere idea of a
possible theoretical mistake.

As for the fifth point of the Determinism or the
Necessitarianism that hangs like a sword of
Damocles over the entire ethic of Dr. Bosanquet,
the nature of this should be perfectly apparent
from many of the statements and considerations
that have been brought forward as typical of his
entire line of thought. He teaches a " passivism " 1
and an " intellectualism " that are just as pro-
nounced and just as essential to his thought as
they are to the great system of his master, Hegel,
in whose ambitious philosophy of spirit man's
whole destiny is unfolded without the possibility

1 See Idola Theatri by Henry Sturt (the editor of the well-known
" Personal Idealism " volume) of Oxford — a book that enumerates and
examines many of the fallacies of the Neo-Hegelian school. Mr. Sturt's
first chapter is entitled the " Passive Fallacy," which he calls, with
some degree of justice, the prime mistake of the idealistic philosophy,
meaning by this the " ignoring " of the " kinetic " and the " dynamic "
character of our experience.

226 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM

of his playing himself any appreciable part in the
impersonal, dialectic movement in which it is
made to consist.

It is now necessary to speak definitely and out-
spokenly of the element of supreme truth and
value in Dr. Bosanquet's unique book, of the
positive contribution it makes to philosophy and
to natural theology.1 This is, in a word, its
tribute to the permanent element of truth and
reality in the idealistic philosophy. And he testi-
fies to this in his " belief" that in the main the work
of philosophy has been done, and " that what is now
needed is to recall and concentrate the modern
mind from its distraction rather than to invent
wholly new theoretic conceptions." This declara-
tion is of itself a position of considerable import-
ance, however widely one is obliged to differ from
its author as to what exactly it is that has already
been demonstrated and accomplished " in philo-
sophy." If there has really been " nothing done "
in philosophy since the time of Socrates, if philo-
sophy is to-day no true antithesis of, and corrective
to science, then there is possible neither Prag-
matism, nor Humanism, nor any other, possibly
more fundamental, philosophy. There can, as
Dr. Bosanquet puts it, indeed be no progress if no
definite ground is ever to be recognized as gained."
This then is the first thing of transcendent im-
portance in " Individuality and Value," its insist-

1 It is Natural Theology that is the subject proper of the Gifford
Lectures.

PRAGMATISM AND RATIONALISM 227

ance upon the fundamentally different estimate
of reality given by philosophy in distinction from
science and its merely hypothetical treatment
of reality. This " difference " is, of course, but
natural, seeing that to philosophy there are no
things or phenomena without minds, or persons
or beings to whom they appear as things and
phenomena.

The second great thing of " Individuality and
Value ' is its insistence upon the need to all
philosophy of a recognized grasp of the principle
of " Meaning." x What this instance implies to
Dr. Bosanquet is, that " at no point in our lives
[either] as [agents or] thinkers are we to accept
any supposed element of fact or circumstance as
having any significance " apart from the great
"whole' or the great "reality," with which we
believe ourselves to be in contact in our daily
experience, when interpreted in the light of our
consciousness of ourselves as persons. In the letter
of the book his interpretation of the great "whole,"
or the great reality, of life is by no means as
broad and as deep as the one at which we have
just hinted in attempting to describe his position.
But overriding altogether the mere intellectualism
of Dr. Bosanquet's interpretation, is the fact of
the dynamic idealism for which he virtually stands,2
in virtue of the great and the simple effort of his
lectures 3 to find " value " in " our daily experience

1 See p. 149 of Chapter VI.

2 With, we might almost say, the pragmatists and the humanists.

3 This is really their main distinguishing characteristic and merit.

228 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM

with its huge obstinate plurality of independent
facts." He would start, as we mentioned (at the
beginning of this chapter), with what he believes
to be " the daily transformation of our experience
as verified within what we uncritically take as our
private consciousness, so far as its weakness may
permit," and " as verified on a larger scale when
we think of such splendid creations as the State and
fine art and religion," and when we think, too, of
" the mode of our participation in them." Now
again nothing could indeed be more nobly true
(in idea) of the great work of the philosopher than
the proper theory and description of this " daily
transformation " of our lives, out of the life of
" sense " and the life of selfishness, into the
spiritual communion1 that is the essence of all
right thinking and all right living.

But we may go further than all this and
signalize one or two things in Dr. Bosanquet that
we venture to construe as a kind of unconscious
testimony, on his part, to the very humanism for
which we have been contending throughout.

The things to which we refer are, firstly, his use
of the word " belief " 2 in speaking of his opinion
that the work of philosophy has in the main been
accomplished, and, second, his fine and really
praiseworthy 3 confession that his lectures, whatever

1 See p. 162.

2 " Indeed, I do not conceal my belief that in the main the work has
been done." — Preface.

3 I think that the confession is a praiseworthy one in view of the
fact of the prejudice of Rationalism, that philosophy has nothing to do
with convictions but only with knowledge.

PRAGMATISM AND RATIONALISM 229

they may have done or may not have done, at least
" contain the record of a very strong conviction."
Dr. Bosanquet's departure, in the letter of his
argumentation, from the spirit of these declarations
only accentuates what we regard as the regrettable
failure and abstractionism of his whole official
(or professed) philosophy.

His use of the word belief1 shows that it is,

» By belief I have understood throughout this book simply man's
working sense for reality, and I am inclined to think that this is almost
the best definition that could be given of it — our working sense for
reality. It is at least, despite its apparent evasiveness, most in harmony
with the pragmatist-humanist inclusion of will elements and feeling
elements in our knowledge and in our apprehension of reality. It is
also in harmony with the conception of reality which may, in my
opinion, be extracted from both Pragmatism and Idealism — that reality
is what it proves itself to be in the daily transformation of our experi-
ence. By the retention of the term " working " in this attempted
definition I express my agreement with the idea that action, and the
willingness to act, is an essential element in belief. The outstanding
positions in the definitions of belief that are generally given in philo-
sophical dictionaries are, firstly, that belief is a conviction or subjective
apprehension of truth or reality in distinction from demonstrable
knowledge or direct evidence ; and, secondly, that feeling elements and
action elements enter into it. I am inclined to think that the sharp
antithesis between belief and knowledge, or the tendency of philo-
sophical books to emphasise the difference between belief and know-
ledge, is a characteristic, or consequence, of our modern way of looking
at things, of our break with the unfortunate, medieval conception of
faith and of the higher reason. The study of the facts either of the
history of religion or of the history of science, will convince us, I think,
that it is always belief, and that it still is belief (as the working sense
for reality), that is man's measure of reality, our knowledge about the
universe being at all times but a more or less perfect working out of our
beliefs and of their implications — of our sense of the different ways in
which the world affects us, and of the ways in which we are affected
towards it. Nor do I think, as I have indicated in different places, that
" reality " can be defined apart from belief, reality being that in which
we believe for all purposes, theoretical and practical and emotional.
In the conception of reality as a world of intersubjective intercourse
in which beings, or persons at different stages of development, share in
a common spiritual life, we have attained so far (and only so far) to

230 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM

after all his professional homage to " mediation '
and to the necessary abstractions of logic and
system, belief and not knowledge that is to him
the final and " working " estimate of truth and
of reality. And the same conclusion follows from
the second matter of the confession of which we
have spoken, that his entire argumentation is but
the expression of a strong conviction.1 It is again,
therefore, we would insist a spiritual conviction,
and not a conceptual system that is actually
and necessarily the moving force of his entire
intellectual activity. And, we would add to his
own face, it is a conviction moreover that " works,"
and not a " logical whole " or a mere conceptual
ideal, that he must (as a philosopher) engender in
the mind of his average reader about reality. His
" logical whole " and his " individuality as logi-
cal completeness," " work " with him [Professor
Bosanquet] for the reason that he is primarily
an intellectual worker, a worker in the realm
of mind. But reality (as the whole world of
human work and human effort is there to

the truth that is common to an idealism of the type of Dr. Bosanquet's,
and to pragmatist-humanism when properly developed and interpreted.
There are, I find, upon thinking of the matter, any number of philo-
sophers and thinkers who interpret belief, in the larger sense of the
term, as our complete and final estimate of reality, and as therefore not
exclusive of, but inclusive of knowledge in the ordinary sense of the
term.

1 He even says in the Abstract of his first lecture upon the " Central
Experiences," that Lord Gifford's desire that his lecturers should "try
to communicate " a "grave experience " is the demand that "intro-
duces us to the double task of philosophy. It [philosophy] needs the
best of logic, but also the best of life, and neither can be had in philo-
sophy without the other."

PRAGMATISM AND RATIONALISM 231

tell us) is more than an intellectual system.
And what is a conviction to him is not
necessarily a conviction that works with the
ordinary man, who knows reality better than
he does, or who knows it (like himself) in his
desires and in his beliefs rather than in the
terms and conceptions that are the mere tools
of the intellect and the specialist. For, taking
his book as a whole, we may say about it that the
dissolution of reality into a conceptual system
that is effected there is at best but another con-
vincing proof of the truth of the words of the
great David Hume,1 that the understanding,
" when it acts alone, and according to its most
general principles, entirely subverts itself, and
leaves not the slightest degree of evidence in any
proposition, either in philosophy or common life."

1 Treatise upon Human Nature, sect. vii. (Green and Grose, i. 547).

NOTE

It is necessary for me to append a few words as to the possible
connexion between the foregoing criticism of the first volume of
Dr. Bosanquet's Gifford Lectures and the subject-matter of the
second volume, which appeared while I was preparing the manu-
script of this book for the press. I have been able only to inspect
its contents and to inform myself about the ways in which it has
impressed some of its representative critics. What I have thus
learned does not, in my opinion, make it necessary for me to unsay
or to rewrite what I have said in this chapter. My desire was to
indicate the kind of criticism that the pragmatists and the human-
ists, as far as I understand them, would be inclined to make of
Absolutism as represented in the Principle of Individuality and
Value as the last significant Anglo-Hegelian output. This, I

232 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM

think, I have done, and the reader may be desirably left to himself
to settle the question of the relation of the first of Dr. Bosanquet's
books to its companion volume that appeared in the following
calendar year. I cannot, however, be so wilfully blind to the
existence of this second great " Gifford " book of his as to appear
to ignore the fact, that on its very face and surface it seems to do
many of the things that I have allowed myself to signalize as
things that Absolutism and Anglo-Hegelianism have not done, or
have done but imperfectly. Its very title, The Value and Destiny
of the Individual, and the titles of many of its chapters, and the
reception accorded to it in such instructive reviews as those of
Professor Sir Henry Jones and Professor Muirhead (in the July
numbers of the Hibbert Journal and Mind respectively), are to
my mind convincing proof that it is by far the most serious Anglo-
Hegelian attempt of the passing generation to deal with many of
the objections that have been brought against Rationalistic
Idealism by the pragmatists and the voluntarists, by the defenders
of faith and feeling and experience, and (before all these recent
people) by many independent idealist writers of our time in
England and elsewhere. In the interest of truth and of the
thinking public generally, I append the mere titles of some of the
chapters and divisions of Dr. Bosanquet's second volume : " The
Value of Personal Feeling, and the Grounds of the Distinctness
of Persons," " The Moulding of Souls," " The Miracle of Will,"
the " Hazards and Hardships of Finite Selfhood," the " Stability
and Security of Finite Selfhood," " The Religious Consciousness,"
"The Destiny of the Finite Self," "The Gates of the Future."
There is in all the rich content that is thus indicated, and in all
the high and deep discussion of " the ideas of a lifetime " that it
includes, a veritable mine of philosophical reflection for the reader
who desires to think in a connected, or Hegelian, manner about
things — a mine, too, that is at least indicative of the wide territory
both of fact and of principle upon which pragmatist philosophy
must enter before it can become a true philosophy. I cannot find,
however — this was surely not to be expected in a thinker of Dr.
Bosanquet's power — that the principles of argumentation that
determined the nature and contents of the earlier volume have un-
dergone any modification in its success or successor ; indeed, what
is here offered, and discovered by the reader and the critics, is but
a continuation and application of the same dialectic principles to
" finite beings, that is, in effect to human souls." If any one
will take upon himself the task of estimating the success or the
non-success of the enterprise he will travel through a piece of
philosophical writing that is as comprehensive and as coherent,
and as elevating in its tone, as anything that has appeared from
the Neo-Hegelian camp. The things that I chiefly feel and believe
about it are, firstly, that its account of the facts of life and thought
are, again, all determined by certain presuppositions about con-
ceivability and about the principles of contradiction and negation ;
secondly, that it is still the same " whole " of logic that is to it
the test of all reality and individuality ; and, thirdly, that it is,

PRAGMATISM AND RATIONALISM 233

again, a great pity that Dr. Bosanquet should not have acted upon
some sort of recognition of the relation of his own dialectical
principles to those of his master Hegel, or to those of some of his
Neo-Hegelian predecessors in England and America. Although
it is almost an impertinence on the part of one who has just made
the acquaintance of this outstanding volume to speak in any detail
of its contents, I can indicate part of my meaning by pointing
out that it is throughout such things as " finite mind," the " finite
mind " that is " best understood by approaching it from the side of
the continuum " [the " whole "], the "finite mind " that is "shaped
by the universe," that is " torn between existence and self-
transcendence," " appearance," an " externality which is the
object of mind," the " positive principle of totality or individuality
manifesting itself in a number of forms," " good " and " evil as
attitudes concerning a creature's whole being," " volition " in
terms of the " principle that there is for every situation a larger
and more effective point of view than the given " — that are dis-
cussed, and not the real persons who have what they call
" minds " and " volitions " and " attitudes," and who invent all
these principles and distinctions to describe the world of their
experience and the world of their thoughts. As against him
Pragmatism and Humanism would, I think, both insist that the
first reality for all thought and speculation is not the " logical
whole " that underlies, in the mind of the thinker, the greater
number of all his categories and distinctions, but the life and the
fives of the persons in a world of inter-subjective intercourse,
wherein these points of view are used for different purposes. And I
cannot see how Dr. Bosanquet is entitled to scorn all those who
hold to the idea of the reality of the fives of the persons who are
agents and thinkers in this personal realm, which is for us the
highest reality of the universe, as believers in the " exclusiveness
of personality," although I would certainly agree with him that
our experience, when properly interpreted, carries us beyond the
subjectivism and the individualism of some forms of Pragmatism
or Pluralism. The reader who is anxious to know about the real
value of the Hegelianism upon which Dr. Bosanquet's philosophy
reposes should consult the work of Croce upon the " living " and
the " dead " elements in Hegel's System. It has recently been
translated into English. Dr. Bosanquet, like many Hegelians,
seems to me to overlook almost entirely the important elements
in the philosophy of Kant — of some of which I speak of in the
next chapter as developed in the spiritualistic philosophy of
Bergson.

CHAPTER IX

PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM IN THE
PHILOSOPHY OF BERGSON 1

The pragmatist elements in the philosophy of
Bergson of which it is, perhaps, legitimate for us
to speak here are (i) his " Anti-Intellectualism,"
and (2) his " Activism " or " Actionism." The
latter culminates in his freedom-philosophy and
his spiritualism. I shall comment shortly upon
these two things, and then suggest one or two
general criticisms of his philosophy as a whole.

Bergson's anti-intellectualism rests ultimately
upon his contention that the human intellect is
related in the main to the needs of action, that the
brain is an organ of action rather than an organ

1 I had originally the idea of calling this chapter by the more modest
title of a note upon " pragmatist elements " in the teaching of
Bergson. I have allowed myself to call it a chapter partly for the sake
of symmetry, and partly because the footnotes and the criticism
(of his Idealism) have carried it beyond the limits of a note. I find, too,
(as I have partly indicated in my preface) in the teaching of Bergson so
many things that make up almost the very body of truth and fact upon
which Pragmatism, and Humanism, and Idealism all repose (or ought to
repose) that I quote them directly in my footnotes. They indicate to
me the scope and the territory of my entire subject. And they are a
confirmation to me of much that I had myself arrived at before I read
a line of Bergson.

234

THE PHILOSOPHY OF BERGSON 235

of thought, that our intelligence is at home
only in the realm of the physical and the mathe-
matical sciences,1 that contrivance and inven-
tion and the practical comprehension of the
" material " are its proper activities, and that
for these latter purposes it splits up the world
of the senses and the understanding into a dis-
continuous aggregate of physical units, which
it then proceeds to reconstruct in a spatial
and temporal order. We perceive in Nature,
he holds, what interests 2 us in the way of

1 " Our intelligence, as it leaves the hands of nature, has for its chief
object the unorganised solid" (Creative Evolution, p. 162); "of im-
mobility alone does the intellect form a clear idea " (ibid. 164). " The
aspect of life that is accessible to the intellect — as indeed to our senses,
of which our intellect is the extension — is that which offers a hold to
action" (ibid. 170). "We see that the intellect, so skilful in dealing
with the inert, is awkward the moment it touches the living. Whether
it wants to treat the life of the body or the life of the mind, it pro-
ceeds with the rigour, the stiffness, and the brutality of the instrument
not designed for such use. The history of hygiene or of pedagogy
teaches us much in this matter. When we think of the cardinal,
urgent, and constant need we have to preserve our bodies and to raise
our souls, of the special facilities given to each of us in this field to
experiment continually on ourselves and on others, of the palpable
injury by which the wrongness of a medical or a pedagogical practice
is made manifest and punished at once, we are amazed at the stupidity
and especially at the persistence of errors. We may easily find their
origin in the natural obstinacy with which we treat the living like the
lifeless, and think all reality, however fluid, under the form of the
sharply-defined solid. We are at ease only in the discontinuous, in the
immobile, in the dead. The intellect is characterised by a natural inability
to comprehend life " (Creative Evolution, p. 174). (Italics mine.)

2 " I look and I think I see, I listen and I think I hear, I examine
myself and I think I am reading the very depths of my heart. But
what I see and hear of the outer world is purely and simply a selection
made by my senses to serve as a light to my conduct ; what I know of
myself is what comes to the surface, what participates in my actions.
My senses and my consciousness, therefore, give me no more than a
practical simplification of reality in the vision they furnish me of myself

236 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM

our vital needs ; our intellect is adapted, not
for the understanding or the purely rational
(" abstract ") comprehension of " causality " and
the "life of things," but for the maintenance
and furtherance of our own lives, and for the
creation of the instruments and agencies (signs,
language, tools, imagined sequences and laws,
essences, causes, the "descriptions" of science,
the special senses, the convolutions of the brain,
etc.) that minister to this. Science is to-
day still penetrated through and through with
primitive metaphysics, with the metaphysics
of animism, with a belief in separate things
like forces, atoms, elements, or what not —
indicative all of them of its attempt to " divide
up " the real that it may command it for theoretical
and practical purposes. We can see this in the
' structural psychology " 1 of the day and its
analysis of our mental life into " elements," in

and of things, the differences that are useless to man are obliterated,
the resemblances that are useful to him are emphasised ; ways are
traced out for me in advance along which my activity is to travel.
These ways are the ways which all mankind has trod before me. Things
have been classified with a view to the use I can derive from them "
(Laughter, p. 151). " Life implies the acceptance of the utilitarian side
of things in order to respond to them by appropriate reactions ; all
other impressions must be dimmed or else reach us vague and blurred "
(ibid. p. 131). These last words give us a glimpse of a very important
part of Bergson's teaching— his idea, namely (Voltaire has it in his
Micromegas), that " matter " is greater than our perceptions, that our
perceptions reveal to us only those aspects of the physical universe
with which we are practically concerned.

1 Some years ago psychologists began to distinguish a " structural "
from a " functional " psychology, meaning by the former what is
otherwise called Psycho- Physics or (to some extent) Experimental
Psychology.

THE PHILOSOPHY OF BERGSON 237

respect of the number and character of which
there are lasting differences of opinion among the
masters of the science — into " impressions," and
" affections," and sensations, images, memories,
ideas, and so on. And we can see it, too, in the
erroneous attempts sometimes made by psycho-
logists to treat these entities as if they had clearly
defined temporal and spatial characteristics or
qualities.

The supreme mistake of philosophy, according
to Bergson, has been to import into the domain of
speculation a method of thinking that was origin-
ally destined for action. It has forgotten that
nearly all the leading conceptions of common
sense and of science and of " analysis " have
been invented, not for final and general, but for
relative and particular purposes. And it has
fallen too readily under the influence of a certain
traditional view of the relations between meta-
physics and science — the view, namely, that
philosophy should just take the findings of
science and of common -sense about the world
as its initial material, subjecting them, of course,
to a certain preliminary reinterpretation, but
finally reconstructing them, almost as they were,
into a system.1 The one thing, in short, that

1 Cf. " At first sight it may seem prudent to leave the consideration
of facts to positive science, to let physics and chemistry busy them-
selves with matter, the biological and psychological sciences with life.
The task of the philosopher is then clearly defined. He takes facts and
laws from the scientist's hand, and whether he tries to go beyond them
in order to reach their deeper causes, or whether he thinks it impossible
to go further, and even proves it by the analysis of scientific knowledge,

238 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM

philosophy has failed to understand is the life
and the movement and the process of the
world, as an infinitely more important fact than
the endless terms and conceptions and entities
(" will," " reason," " Ideas," etc.) into which it
has been analysed. We might sum up the whole
by saying that Bergson's anti-intellectualism is
simply a protest, not against the use, but only
against the " systematic misuse " x of general con-
ceptions that have been current in science and
philosophy " since the time of Socrates," a protest,
however, that in his case is not merely general and
negative, but particularised and positive.

2

in both cases he has for the facts and relations, handed over by science,
the sort of respect that is due to a final verdict. To this knowledge he
adds a critique of the faculty of knowing, and also, if he thinks
proper, a metaphysic ; but the matter of knowledge he regards as the
affair of science, and not of philosophy " (Creative Evolution, pp. 204-5).
[All this represents only too faithfully what even some of our Neo-
Kantians have been saying, and teaching, although there is an error
in their whole procedure here.]

1 Schopenhauer's phrase. See my book upon Schopenhauer's
System.

2 It is chiefly in Matter and Memory (in which, by the way, there
are pages and pages of criticism of the rationalism of philosophy that
are as valuable as anything we have in philosophy since the time of
Descartes — Kant not excepted) that we are to look for the detailed
philosophy of sensation and of perception, and the detailed philosophy
of science upon which this protest of Bergson's against the excesses of
" conceptualism " rests. I indicate, too, at different places in this
chapter some of the other special considerations upon which it rests.
The gist of the whole is to be found, perhaps, in his contention that our
science and our philosophy of the past centuries have both regarded
" perception " as teaching us (somehow) what things are independently
of their effect upon us, and of their place in the moving equilibrium of
things — the truth being on the contrary (with Pragmatism and Human-
ism) that our knowledge has throughout a necessary relation to
ourselves and to our place in the universe, and to our liberation from
matter in the life of the spirit.

THE PHILOSOPHY OF BERGSON 239

Like any and all anti-intellectualism, Bergson's
anti-intellectualism is liable to serious misinter-
pretation, and it is currently misinterpreted and
misrepresented as " irrationalism." His intention,
however, is not to destroy and to condemn philo-
sophy and reasoning, and to exalt mere in-
tuition and faith, but rather to " liberate " x
our human consciousness of ourselves and of the
world from the dogmatism of what he regards to
be the utilitarian intellect, from the many hopeless
contradictions and antinomies and puzzles of
the mere analytic understanding. Philosophy, in
particular, he would free from the last traces and
symptoms of scientific rationalism, although fully
aware of the fact that our modern philosophy had
its very departure from the rationalism of the
great founders of modern science like Kepler and
Galileo and the rest.

He would strike at the roots of all this confident

1 He expresses this idea in the following way in the Introduction to
Matter and Memory: " Psychology has for its object the study of the
human mind for practical utility," whereas in " metaphysics " we see
" this same mind striving (the idea, as we say elsewhere, is not free from
difficulty) to transcend the conditions of useful action and to come back
to itself as to a pure creative energy." Or in the following sentences
from his Creative Evolution : " We must remember that philosophy,
as we define it, has not yet become completely conscious of itself. Physics
understands its role when it pushes matter into the direction of
spatiality ; but has metaphysics understood its role when it has simply
trodden the steps of physics, in the chimerical hope of going farther
in the same direction ? Should not its own task be, on the contrary, to
remount the incline that physics descends, to bring matters back to its
origins, and to build up progressively a cosmology which would be, so to
speak, a reversed psychology. All that which seems positive to the
physicist and to the geometrician would become, from this new point
of view, an interruption or inversion of the true positivity which would
have to be defined in psychological terms " (pp. 219-20, italics mine).

240 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM

rationalism or scientific philosophy by opening
up a broader and a deeper view of truth than
that afforded to the merely piece-meal and
utilitarian view.

As for the Actionism and the action philosophy
of Bergson, this is perhaps more in line than any
other tendency of the day with the new life and
the new thought of the twentieth century, although
(like Pragmatism) it stands in need of correction
or revision by the principles of a sound ethical
philosophy, by the Idealism that is not, and can-
not be, the mere creation of to-day or yesterday.
In essence it is, to begin with, but an extension to
the mind as a whole and to all its so-called special
faculties (" sensation," " perception," " memory,"
" ideation," " judgment," " thinking," " emotion,"
and the rest) of the " dynamic," * instead of the

1 As an indication of what the acceptance of the dynamic instead of
the static view of matter on the part of Bergson means, I cite the phrase
(or the conception) on p. 82 of Matter and Memory, the effect that " matter
is here as elsewhere the vehicle of an action," or the even more emphatic
declaration on p. 261 of Creative Evolution, " There are no things, there
are only actions." It is impossible, of course, that these mere extracts
can convey to the mind of the casual reader the same significance
that they obtain in their setting in the pages of Bergson, although it is
surely almost a matter of common knowledge about his teaching, that
one of the first things it does is to begin with the same activistic or
" actionistic " view of nature and matter that seems to be the stock
in trade of the physics of our time since the discoveries pertaining to
radio-activity, etc. Being only a layman in such matters, I may be
excused for quoting from a recent booklet (whose very presence in the
series in which it appears is to people like myself a guarantee of its
scientific reliability) in which I find this same activistic view of
matter that I find in Bergson. " What are the processes by which the
primary rock material is shifted ? There is the wind that, etc. etc. . . .
There are the streams and rivers that, etc. . . . There is the sea
constantly wearing away, etc. . . . Then there are ' subtle ' physical

THE PHILOSOPHY OF BERGSON 241

older, static point of view that the recent science
of our time has applied to matter and to life, and
that Pragmatism and the " hypothetical method '
have sought to apply to all the ordinary concep-
tions and constructions that exist in the different
domains of the different sciences.1 It is also,
from our point of view, as we may see, an attempt
at the expression, in the terms of a comparatively
simple philosophy, of many of the considerations
in respect of knowledge and conduct that have
been brought forward in the preceding pages of
this book. We have already dwelt in different
ways, for example, upon the fact that there is
no perception or sensation without an organic
reaction on the part of the percipient or the
sentient being, that an idea is in a sense a motor

and ' chemical ' forces. And the action of plants. . . . Hence by
various mechanical, organic, and chemical processes the materials origin-
ally scattered through the rocks of the earth's crust, and floating
in the air or water, are collected into layers and form beds of sand,
clay, limestone, salt, and the various mineral fuels, including peat and
coal " (The Making of the Earth, by Professor Gregory, F.R.S., of
Glasgow University: Williams and Norgate).

It is only right to state here, or to remind the reader in this matter
of a " dynamic " view of matter, that Bergson not only dissipates
matter into force or energy or activity (as do the physicists of
to-day), but also actually credits the world of matter and life with a
kind of consciousness (and why not be courageous about it ? ) in
which what I have already called the " susceptibility of everything to
everything else," or the action of everything upon everything else,
becomes credible and intelligible. " No doubt, also, the material universe
itself, defined as the totality of images, is a kind of consciousness in which
everything compensates and neutralises everything else, a consciousness of
which all the potential parts, balancing each other by a reaction which is
always equal to the action, reciprocally hinder each from standing out "
(Matter and Memory, p. 313).

1 See Chapter III., and also the references to Mach, Ostwald,
Poincare, and others, in the second chapter and elsewhere.

16

242 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM

attitude (a way of comprehending particulars or
particular facts in relation to our purposes and
our ends), that a logical judgment represents
a " division " of the real, or of the processes of
Nature, for some purpose or other, that our
whole mental life is purposive, that there is no
" pure " cognition without attendant emotion and1
volition, that it is in action that desire and
thought come together, that our whole know-
ledge of the world is necessarily a knowledge of it
in terms of our purposes and our highest attitudes,
and so on. All of this is, as it were, an indication
of the psychological and the logical considerations
upon which Bergson bases his positive,2 activistic,
philosophy of mind.

1 " There is no intelligence in which some traces of instinct are not
to be discovered, more, no instinct that is not surrounded with a fringe
of intelligence" (Creative Evolution, p. 143).

2 ' ' We will not dwell here upon a point we have dealt with in former
works. Let us merely recall that a theory [the theory of contemporary
physiological psychology] such as that according to which consciousness
is attached to certain neurons, and is thrown off from their work like
a phosphorescence, may be accepted by the scientist for the detail of
analysis ; it is a convenient mode of expression. But it is nothing else.
In reality, a living being is a centre of action. It represents a certain
sum of contingency entering into the world, that is to say, a certain
quantity of possible action — a quantity variable with individuals and
especially with species. The nervous system of an animal marks out
the flexible lines on which its action will run (although the potential
energy is accumulated in the muscles rather than in the nervous system
itself) ; its nervous centres indicate, by their development and their
configuration, the more or less extended choice it will have among
more or less numerous and complicated actions. Now, since the
awakening of consciousness in a living creature is the more complete,
the greater the latitude of choice allowed to it and the larger the amount
of action bestowed upon it, it is clear that the development of conscious-
ness will appear to be dependent on that of the nervous centres. On
the other hand, every state of consciousness being, in one aspect of it,

THE PHILOSOPHY OF BERGSON 243

It is to be remembered in Bergson's interest
that when we speak of his Actionism * we do not
mean a narrowing down2 on his part of the activities
of the soul to physical labour and to mere utili-
tarian effort, but its capacity, also, for that
creative activity which he takes to be the very
keynote of personal life and the evolutionary
process.

As for the freedom-philosophy with which
Bergson's Actionism is to be associated, this is
worked out by him, firstly, in the most perfect
correspondence with what he believes to be the
facts of life and mind ; and, secondly, in terms of
that anti-rationalism (or hostility to the merely

a question put to the motor activity and even the beginning of a reply,
there is no psychical event that does not imply the entry into play of the
cortical mechanisms. Everything seems, therefore, to happen as if
consciousness sprang from the brain, and as if the detail of conscious
activity were modelled on that of the cerebral activity. In reality
consciousness does not spring from the brain, but brain and conscious-
ness correspond because equally they measure . . . the quantity of
choice that the living being has at its disposal " (Creative Evolution,
pp. 266-7).

1 " Instead of starting from affection [or ' sensation ' in the old
sense of the haphazard sensation] of which we can say nothing, since
there is no reason why it should be what it is rather than anything else,
we start from action, that is to say, from our power of effecting changes
in things, a faculty attested by consciousness, and towards which all
the powers of the organised body are seen to converge. So we place
ourselves at once in the midst of extended images [to Bergson as an
idealist things are at the same time images or ideas for a con-
sciousness in other things, or in us, or in beings other than ourselves],
and in this material universe we perceive centres of indetermination
characteristic of life " (Matter and Memory, p. 67).

a Cf. the words in the Preface to Matter and Memory: " The whole
personality, which, normally narrowed down by action, expands with the
unscrewing of the vice in which it has allowed itself to be squeezed," or the
words in the same place about the task of metaphysics being the attempt
of the " mind striving to transcend the conditions of useful action."

244 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM

scientific intellect) which is his working theory of
knowledge. His views upon this subject have
also been depreciated and misunderstood by some
of his opponents who attack what they call his
" intuitional " treatment of the freedom-question
— his insistence upon the direct intuition of our
life that we have when we act consciously, and
when we are " most ourselves " — when we act out
" freely " our own nature. To him the primary
fact for any human being is the life-impulse that
is both instinctive and reflective, that is certainly
far more of a fundamental reality than any of
those entities or concepts (" cells," " atoms,"
" forces," " laws," or what not) which, with Kant,
he clearly sees to be the creation of the intellect
for its descriptive and practical purposes. This
life is " free " in the sense that we are not " deter-
mined " by any or all of those forces and laws to
which our intellect subjects everything else, but
which it cannot apply to the life that is more than
mere matter, that is a real becoming and a
real process, a real creation and development.

The " spiritualism," again, of his interpreta-
tion of this life and activity rests, to begin with,
upon his opinion that the very inception of
the activity, and the adjustment, and the
selection in which the simplest life-effort, and
the simplest perception of a living being con-
sist, indicate the presence and the operation of a
controlling agency,1 or mind, or principle of

1 We refer elsewhere in this chapter to Bergson's idea that living

THE PHILOSOPHY OF BERGSON 245

spiritual " choice " that is not, and cannot be,
explained on the principles of a mechanical science
or philosophy. This principle is, in a word, the
life-force, or the creative activity, the elan vital

beings are " centres of indetermination," that is to say, creatures who
hold their place in nature and that of their species by " persisting in
their own being " (the language of Spinoza) by acting and reacting
upon some of the many forces of nature that act upon them, and by
avoiding the action of other forces and other animals. " They allow
to pass through them," he says, " so to speak, those external influences
which are indifferent to them ; the others isolated become ' perceptions '
by their very isolation" {Matter and Memory, pp. 28, 29) . We also refer to
Bergson's idea that the life-force has expressed itself along different
grades of being (mineral, animal, and so on). Both these ideas are a
partial explanation of what we mean by the presence of a spiritual
activity in both inanimate and animate nature. So also is Bergson's
idea that the purely mechanical explanation either of nature or of
life is but a device of the intellect for the purposes of description.
More specifically it is expressed, too, in his idea that " Our representa-
tion of matter is the measure of our possible action upon bodies ; it
results from the discarding of what has no interest for our needs, or
more generally for our functions" {Matter and Memory, p. 30), or that
" Consciousness" is just this choice of *' attaining to " or attending to
" certain parts and certain aspects of those parts " of the " material
universe " {ibid. p. 31), or that" sense-perception " is an" elementary
question to my motor activity." " The truth is that my nervous
system, interposed between the objects which affect my body and
those which I can influence, is a mere conductor, transmitting, sending
back, or inhibiting movement. This conductor is composed of an
enormous number of threads which stretch from the periphery to the
centre, and from the centre to the periphery. As many threads pass
from the periphery to the centre, so many points of space are there able
to make an appeal to my will, and to put, so to speak, an elementary
question to my motor activity. Every such question is what is termed a
perception " {ibid. 40, 41 ; italics mine). Or, as he puts it, on p. 313, " No
doubt the choice of perception from among images in general is the
effect of a discernment which foreshadows spirit. . . . But to touch the
reality of spirit we must place ourselves at the point where an individual
consciousness, continuing and retaining the past in a present enriched
by it, thus escapes the law of necessity, the law which ordains that the
past shall ever follow itself in a present which merely repeats it in
another form, and that all things shall ever be flowing away. When
we pass from pure perception to memory, we definitely abandon matter
for spirit."

246 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM

of which we read so much in his books, that has
"seized upon matter," vitalizing it into force and
energy, into the " play " upon each other of all
the varied activities and grades and forms of the
will to live, and into the various forms of socialized
and co-operative living on the part of animals and
men. We shall immediately remark upon the
matter of the apparent limitations of this spiritual
philosophy of life, or reality, that is here but
indicated or stated.

One of its essential features, so far as we are
at present concerned, is his claim that his in-
troduction of a spiritual principle into the life-
force, or the creative activity that has expressed
itself in the various grades and forms of life, both
animal and human, is not a phase of the old philo-
sophy 1 or theology of " final causes " or of a pre-
determined 2 " teleology." To this old finalism or

1 Bergson is always able to detect the relapses even of " mechanism "
and of the mechanical philosophy of science into " finalism," as
when he says on p. 72 of his Creative Evolution, " To sum up, if the
accidental variations that bring about evolution are insensible varia-
tions, some good genius must be appealed to — the genius of the future
species — in order to preserve and accumulate these variations, for
" selection " will not look after this. If, on the other hand, the acci-
dental variations are sudden, then, for the previous function to go on,
or for a new function to take its place, all the changes that have
happened together must be complementary. So we have to fall back
on the good genius again to obtain the convergence of simultaneous
changes, as before to be assured of the continuity of direction of succes-
sive variations."

2 We must remember that to Bergson evolution has taken place
along different lines — those of Automatism (in plant-life), Instinct (in
animal life), and Intelligence (in human life and the higher animals), and
that along none of those lines are we to fall into the errors either of
materialism, or of " Darwinism " (the belief in " accidental variations "),
or of the " design-philosophy," or even of theories like neo-Lamarckian-

THE PHILOSOPHY OF BERGSON 247

teleology 1 the life of organic nature (the " organs "
and " cells," the " instinctive " actions, and the
" adjustments " of animals, and so on) were all
due to the work of a pre-existing, calculating
intelligence operating upon matter ; whereas to
him they are but different expressions or creations
of the life-force that is as little predetermined
in organic evolution, as it is in the realm of the
activities interpreted for us (in part) by the newer
physics and the newer chemistry — in the processes,
for example, that are exemplified in the generation
of a star out of a nebula. This entire treatment,
however, of the notion of purpose in nature is a
matter of great difficulty in the philosophy of
Bergson, and his own thought (as I shall presently
state) is apt to strike us as just as hypothetical as
some of the views he attempts to combat. It
raises, too, the question of the valuation of his
philosophy as a whole, and of its relation to the
great thinker who still stands in the very centre
of the entire modern movement from Copernicus
to Comte and Darwin — Immanuel Kant.2

We shall best get at the matter of the fuller
developments of the philosophy of Bergson that
are of interest to us at present, by indicating some

ism " or neo-vitalism. To him all these philosophies are but imperfect
and hypothetical attempts to grasp " movement " and " life " which
both " transcend finality, if we understand by finality the realisation of
an idea conceived or conceivable in advance" (Creative Evolution, p. 236).

1 " Paleyism " or " Miltonism " are still good names for the thing,
I have read in some competent book upon Evolution.

2 See below, p. 261.

248 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM

of the results that would accrue from it to the
constructive philosophy in which we are interested
as the outcome of Pragmatism and Idealism.
Among these would be, firstly, a new and a fresh,
and yet a perfectly rational apprehension of the
fact of the necessarily abstract and hypothetical *
character of the analyses to which our world
is subjected by the science and by the technic
and the supposed " economy " of our present
culture.2 Then an equally new and equally

1 To Bergson concepts are just as hypothetical in the realm of
science, as they are to thinkers like Mach and Poincare, and
Professor Ward of Cambridge. See the following, for example,
from Matter and Memory (p. 263) : " We shall never explain by
means of particles, whatever these may be, the simple properties of
matter ; at most we can thus follow out into corpuscles as artificial as
the corpus, the body itself — the actions and reactions of this body
with regard to all the others. This is precisely the object of chemistry.
It studies bodies rather than matter ; and so we understand why it stops
at the atom, which is still endowed with the general properties of
matter. But the materiality of the atom dissolves more and more
under the eyes of the physicist. We have no reason, for instance, for
representing the atom to ourselves as a solid, rather than as a liquid
or gaseous, nor for picturing the reciprocal action of atoms by shocks
rather than in any other way." Or, the following characteristic
passage from the same book (p. 280) in respect of the hypothetical
character of the concepts of " pure time " and " pure space " : " Homo-
geneous space and homogeneous time are then neither properties of
things nor essential conditions of our faculty of knowing them ; they
express, in an abstract form, the double work of solidification and of
division, which we effect on the moving continuity of the real in order
to obtain there a fulcrum for our action, in order to fix within it
starting-points for our operation, in short, to introduce into it real
changes. They are the diagrammatic designs of our eventual action
upon matter."

2 Like his celebrated contemporary Eucken, and like many other
thinkers of their time, Bergson is profoundly convinced of the one-
sidedness of the so-called scientific culture of our day, and of the
error of any and all conceptions of education and of social policy that
are based upon it. Although I refer below to the limitations of his view
that the intellect is adapted only to matter and to mechanical construe-

THE PHILOSOPHY OF BERGSON 249

rational (or " rationally grounded ") conviction
of the inadequacy of the physical and the scientific
categories to the comprehension and the explana-
tion of life and of the life of the spirit. Thirdly,
a confirmation of many of the tendencies to which
the Pragmatism and the Voluntarism and the
Humanism of the last century have given a more
or less one-sided and imperfect formulation.
Among such confirmed tendencies are (a) the
attempt they have all made to attain to a deeper x
view of human nature than the view hitherto
taken by rationalism and intellectualism, (/3) their
emphasis upon the freedom and the initiative 2

tion, I append the following quotation as symptomatic of his value
as a spiritual teacher in our scientific age: " As regards human in-
telligence (Creative Evolution, pp. 145-6) it has not been sufficiently
noted that mechanical invention has been from the first its essential
feature, that even to-day our social life gravitates around the manufacture
and use of artificial instruments. . . . This we hardly realise, because it
takes longer to change ourselves than to change our tools. ... In thousands
of years, when seen from the distance, only the broad lines of our present
age will be visible, our wars and our revolutions will count for little, even
supposing they are remembered at all, but the steam-engine, and the
procession of inventions of every kind that accompanied it, will perhaps
be spoken of as we speak of the bronze or of the chipped stone of pre-
historic times ; it will serve to define an age."

1 I find this in Bergson's whole attribution of much of our " per-
ceptual " and " scientific " knowledge of things to the " needs of
action," and in the detailed reasons that we attempt on pp. 236-238 to
indicate for his polemic against rationalism.

2 This confirmation I find in Bergson's whole philosophy of per-
ception and sensation referred to on p. 236, and in his idea of a living
being as a " centre of action " or " a centre of indetermination." In
fact it is obvious that he is one of the very greatest of the upholders
of the "freedom" of the life of the individual, and of the fact that
each new individual contributes something new of its own to the sum-
total of existence, to the life of its species, and to the life of the world.
Of course there is no more an explanation in his teaching of the causes
of " variation" or the differences at birth between the off-spring of
men and of animals, than there is in the philosophy of Darwin.

250 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM

of the individual and upon the necessity, on the
part of philosophy, of a " dynamic " or " motive-
awakening " 1 theory of reality, (7) their insistence 2

1 The idea of this necessity is confirmed in Bergson's whole philosophy
of man's life as a life of action, as a constant surmounting of obstacles,
as a life that reacts in its own way upon the life of nature, upon the life
of the human species as such, upon the infinite life and energy and
" love " of God — if we may soar to this great thought. See, for
example, what he writes in explanation of the " discordance " of
which he speaks thus : " Our freedom, in the very movements by
which it is affirmed, creates the growing habits that will stifle it
if it fails to renew itself by a constant effort : it is dogged by
automatism. The letter kills the spirit. And our most ardent enthusi-
asm, as soon as it is externalised into action, is so naturally congealed
into the cold calculation of interest or vanity, the one takes so easily
the shape of the other, that we might confuse them together, doubt
our sincerity, deny goodness and love." The explanatory words are
the following. [They are quite typical of the kind of philosophy of life
that Bergson thinks of as alone worthy of the name of a philosophy of
the living. And the reference to " love," as the highest " dynamic "
force in this world of ours, occurs at their close.] " The profound cause
of this discordance lies in an irremediable difference of rhythm. Life
is general, is mobility itself ; particular manifestations of life accept
this mobility reluctantly, and constantly lag behind. It is always
going ahead ; they want to mark time. Evolution in general would
fain go on in a straight line ; each special evolution is a kind of circle.
Like eddies of dust raised by the wind as it passes, the living turn on
themselves, borne up by the great blast of life. They are therefore
relatively stable, and counterfeit immobility so well that we treat each
of them as a thing rather than as a progress, forgetting that the very
permanence of their form is only the outline of a movement. At times,
however, in a fleeting vision, the invisible breath that bears them is
materialised before our eyes. We have this sudden illumination before
certain forms of maternal love, so striking and in most animals so touching,
observable even in the solicitude of the plant for its seed. This love >
in which some have seen the great mystery of life, may possibly deliver us
life's secret. It shows us each generation leaning over the generation
that shall follow. It allows us a glimpse of the fact that the living
being is above all a thoroughfare, and that the essence of life is in the
movement by which life is transmitted " (Creative Evolution, pp. 134-5 >
italics mine). It is surely needless to point out how much truer to
human nature, truer therefore to an important part of reality, this life-
philosophy is than the abstractionism of Professor Bosanquet in the
preceding chapter.

2 This insistence is, I think, amply confirmed by the very fact of

THE PHILOSOPHY OF BERGSON 251

similarly upon the necessity to our thought of a
direct contact with reality, and upon the impossi-
bility of our beginning in philosophy without
assumptions of one kind or another, (8) their
refusal to make any ultimate separation * between
the intellect and the will, between the highest
thought and the highest emotion, (e) their
tendency to regard belief 2 rather than know-

the immediate contact with life and reality indicated in the quotation
that is given in the preceding note upon the " motive-awakening,"
or the " dynamic " character of the philosophy of Bergson. It is also
confirmed in his manifest insistence upon the one fact that all philosophy
must assume (and has for ever assumed) the fact of life, the fact of the
life and thought of God that underlies all our life and all our thought.

1 This position of the pragmatists is certainly confirmed by Bergson's
entire doctrine of the brain and of the intellect — that their main service
is, in the first instance, to interpret the " life " of things, its relation to
our own will and to our practical activity. I have suggested, too, in
this chapter that it is obviously a characteristic, or a consequence, of
the philosophy of Bergson that our highest thought about ourselves
and about the world should be relative to, and provocative, of our
highest emotion.

2 It is only with some degree of care and reservation that I wish to
refer to any apparent confirmation of this idea by Bergson. And, as
always, I object to the idea of any ultimate separation or " dualism "
between faith and knowledge — faith being implied in all " knowledge."
There is no opposition in Bergson, or in the principles of his philosophy,
between faith and knowledge ; it is rather his idea that " the faculty
of seeing should be made one with the act of willing " (Creative Evolu~
Hon, 250; his italics), and that " philosophy" should "proceed, with
the powers of conceptual thought alone, to the ideal reconstruction of all
things, even of life (C.E. xi. ; italics mine). My reasons for finding in his
writings a confirmation of the idea that it is indeed our rational and
spiritual faith, rather than our demonstrable knowledge, that is to us
the measure of truth and reality, are such considerations as the
following (in addition to those of the clauses just quoted), his close
association between the intellectual and the " volitional," his general
faith in " creative evolution," in the idea that our " consciousness "
means for us " new choices " and (real) " new possibilities," his faith
in the higher intuitions of the mind, in the spiritual nature of man, his
belief that the building up of the true philosophy of the future will
involve " the collective and progressive effort of many thinkers, of

252 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM

ledge as our fundamental estimate of truth and
reality.

A fourth constructive result, however, of the
philosophy of Bergson would be not the mere
confirmation of any number of pragmatist and
humanist tendencies, but their integration, and
their transformation into the evidences and the
manifestation of a new spiritual philosophy
of life and of the universe generally. It is this
possible quasi integration and transformation of so
many of the tendencies of Pragmatism and
Voluntarism and of the Philosophy of Science of
the day, that makes Bergson the greatest of
all the pragmatists — although the term hardly
occurs in his main writings, and although he
breathes from first to last the air of an idealism 1
and a spiritualism that is above and beyond
all the mere instrumentalism, and the mere
empiricism and the ethical opportunism of
Pragmatism.

The following are some of the difficulties and
counter-considerations that stand in the way of the
intelligibility and the supposed novelty of the philo-
sophy of Bergson. (i) It is in some respects but
a biological philosophy after all, a would-be philo-
sophical interpretation of the " evolutionary pro-
cess ' which takes many things for granted and

many observers also, completing, correcting, and improving one an-
other " (C.E. xiv.), etc. etc.
1 See below, p. 257, note 1.

THE PHILOSOPHY OF BERGSON 253

ignores many difficulties. Some of these things
are the life-force itself, the ilan de vie, the vital
aspects that he sees in the forces of nature, the
" eternal movement " of which he is always
speaking as the only reality and as the very life
of the universe, the whole " adaptation ' philo-
sophy that characterises his own teleology despite
his attacks on "mechanism" and on "finalism,"
and so on. One is tempted, indeed, to think
that in much of all this he forgets his own doctrine
of the hypothetical character of science and
philosophy, and that, in his very anxiety to
escape from mechanism and from rationalism,
and Paleyism, he credits Nature with a con-
tingency and a " freedom " l that corresponds
in their way to the chaos, of which the Greeks
thought as a necessary background to the
cosmos. He seems, in other words, to deify into
a kind of eternal " becoming " and a quasi free
and creative " duration," his own (necessary)
inability to grasp the system of things.

Then, secondly, there is a veritable crop of
difficulties that arise out of his contention that our
intellect is adapted " only to matter." What, for
example, of the various non-utilitarian 2 intuitions
of art and morality and religion, that are as un-

1 See p. 14 in reference to Dr. Schiller's suggestion that " freedom "
may " pervade the universe."

2 " From time to time, however, in a fit of absent-mindedness,
nature raises up souls that are more detached from life. . . . Were this
detachment complete, did the soul no longer cleave to action by any
of its perceptions, it would be the soul of an artist such as the world
has never yet seen " {Laughter, p. 154).

254 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM

doubtedly facts of our conscious experience as is
our comprehension and utilisation of " matter "
for the various purposes of civilisation ? 1 If it be
literally true that our understanding is " in-
capacitated " for the comprehension of life and
of the creative activities of the soul, a new set
of categories and a higher form of intelligence
(than the merely material) must be elaborated
for this special purpose. And if this higher form
of intelligence be the " intuition " of which
Bergson undoubtedly makes so much, then he
must be more careful than he often is in suggesting
that intuition and a philosophy of our intuitions
" must go counter to the intellect." 2 His theory
of art reduces itself, for example, in the main to
the negative contention that spiritual perception
is always simply " anti-mechanical," 3 simply the
power of seeing things in another way than that
of the engineer or the craftsman, the homofaber.

1 Cf. p. 235.

2 Cf. " We must break with scientific habits which are adapted to
the fundamental requirements of thought, we must do violence to the
mind, go counter to the natural bent of the intellect. But that is just the
function of philosophy " (Creative Evolution, p. 31).

3 " So art, whether it be painting or sculpture, poetry or music, has
no other object than to brush aside the utilitarian symbols, the con-
ventional and socially accepted generalities, in short, everything that
veils reality from us, in order to bring us face to face with reality itself "
(Laughter, p. 157). It is true that if we read further on this page, and
elsewhere in Bergson, we will be able to see that there is for him in art
and in the spiritual life a kind of intelligence and knowledge. But it
is difficult to work out an expression or a characterisation of this in-
telligence and this knowledge. " Art," he says, " is only a more direct
vision of reality." And again : " Realism is in the work when idealism
is in the soul, and it is only through ideality that we can resume contact
with reality " (ibid.).

THE PHILOSOPHY OF BERGSON 255

Thirdly, there are many dualisms or oppositions
in his doctrine or expressed teaching, reducible
all of them to the one great Cartesian dualism
between the mind and the matter that are said
by him to intersect in memory, and in percep-
tion, and in the life of the spirit generally — the
opposition, for example, between instinct and in-
telligence, that between intelligence and intuition,1
between the "mechanical" and the "organic,"
between the " upward " and the " downward "
movements that he attributes to the life-force.
And there is a striking inconsistency between
his apparent acceptance of the teaching of Kant
in respect of the limitations of the physical and
the temporal way of looking at things (ourselves
included and our actions) and his belief in an
eternal " duration," 2 or movement, or process of

1 It is only fair to Bergson to remember that he is himself aware of
the appearances of this dualism in his writings, that he apologises as it
were for them, intending the distinction to be, not absolute, but relative.
" Let us say at the outset that the distinctions we are going to make
will be too sharply drawn, just because we wish to define in instinct
what is instinctive, and in intelligence what is intelligent, whereas all
concrete instinct is mingled with intelligence, as all real intelligence is
penetrated by instinct. Moreover [this is quite an important ex-
pression of Bergson's objection to the old " faculty " psychology],
neither intelligence nor instinct lends itself to rigid definition ; they are
tendencies and not things. Also it must not be forgotten that .... we
are considering intelligence and instinct as going out of life which deposits
them along its course" (Creative Evolution, p. 143).

2 He talks in the Creative Evolution of a " real time " and a "pure
duration " of a real duration that " bites " into things and leaves on
them the mark of its tooth, of a " ceaseless upspringing of something
new," of " our progress in pure duration," or a " movement which
creates at once the intellectuality of mind and the materiality of
things" (p. 217). I have no hesitation in saying that all this is un-
thinkable to me, and that it might indeed be criticised by Rational-
ism as inconsistent with our highest and most real view of things.

256 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM

which he is always speaking as the very life
and texture of everything. This " real " or
"pure" "duration" is a thing that troubles all
students of his philosophy ; it seems to make
Bergson believe in what James talked of as a
" strung-along " universe. And there is an in-
consistency between the supremacy that he seems
willing to accord to mind and spirit in the case of
the new individuals who are always being born
into the world, and the absence of a similar
supremacy (or determining role) in the case of
the mind or spirit without whose existence and
operation the universe is unthinkable.1

As for the latter contradiction, we may note in
his favour that he talks, at least once or twice, of
"God" as "unceasing life " 2 and " active freedom,"
and I am inclined to take this master thought as
possibly a kind of foundation for his rich and
suggestive philosophy of life and reality. But
there is in his writings nothing like the thorough-
going attempt that we find in the philosophy of
Aristotle 3 to ground the motion and the life of

1 He admits himself that " If our analysis is correct, it is conscious-
ness, or rather supra-consciousness that is at the origin of life "
(Creative Evolution, p. 275).

2 " Now, if the same kind of action is going on everywhere, whether
it is that which is striving to remake itself, I simply express this probable
similitude when I speak of a centre from which worlds shoot out as rockets
in a fireworks display — provided, however, that I do not present [there
is a great idea here, a true piece of ' Kantianism '] this centre as a
thing, but as a continuity of shooting out. God thus defined has
nothing of the already made. He is unceasing life, action, freedom.
Creation so conceived is not a mystery ; we experience it in ourselves
when we act freely " (Creative Evolution, p. 262).

3 See p. 155, note 1.

THE PHILOSOPHY OF BERGSON 257

the world in God as its final cause and its
ultimate explanation. Equally little is there in
Bergson a thorough-going attempt to work out
the Idealism1 upon which his whole system reposes
— his initial conception of objects as " images,"
or " ideas " for a consciousness, or for the life-
force, or for the different " centres of activity "
with which he peoples the worlds.

Fourthly, there is the drawback from the point
of view of social philosophy about the thought
of Bergson to which we have already made
reference — that it lacks somehow the ethical and
the social idealism that would warrant us in think-
ing of it as a worthy rival or substitute for the
philosophy of history of the great idealists of the

1 It is somewhat difficult, and it is not necessary for our purposes,
to explain what might be meant by the " Idealism " of Bergson — at
least in the sense of a cosmology, a theory of the " real " It is
claimed for him, and he claims for himself that he is in a sense both an
"idealist" and a "realist," believing at once (i) that matter is an
"abstraction" (an unreality), and (2) that there is more in matter
than the qualities revealed by our perceptions. [We must remember
that he objects to the idea of qualities in things in the old static
sense. " There are no things ; there are only actions."] What we might
mean by his initial idealism is the following : " Matter, in our view, is an
aggregate of images. And by ' image ' we mean [Matter and Memory,
the Introduction] a certain existence which is more than that which
the idealist calls a representation, but less than that which the realist
calls a thing — an existence placed half-way between the ' thing ' and
the ' representation.' This conception of matter is simply that of
common sense." ..." For common sense, then, the object exists in
itself, and, on the other hand, the object is in itself pictorial, as we
perceive it : image it is, but a self-existing image." Now, this very idea
of a " self-existing image " implies to me the whole idealism of philo-
sophy, and Bergson is not free of it And, of course, as we have surely
seen, his " creative-evolution " philosophy is a stupendous piece of
idealism, but an idealism moreover to which the science of the day is
also inclining.

17

258 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM

past and the present. It is necessary to speak
here with the utmost caution if we would avoid
doing injustice 1 to Bergson. We cannot mean,
for example, that he does not do justice 2 to the
social factor in human development of which we
have heard so much, perhaps too much, from the
sociologists.3 We might mean, however, and we
do in a sense mean that he has not made as much
as he might have done of this factor, by develop-
ing for the thought of to-day the reality of that
world of " spiritual communion " and " inter-

1 There is so much that is positive and valuable in his teaching,
that he is but little affected by formal criticism.

2 Cf. " We have now enumerated a few of the essential features of
human intelligence. But we have hitherto considered the individual
in isolation, without taking account of social life. In reality man is a
being who lives in society. If it be true [even] that the human intellect
aims at fabrication, we must add that, for that as well as other purposes,
it is associated with other intellects. Now it is difficult to imagine a
society whose members do not communicate by signs," etc. etc.
(Creative Evolution, p. 166). Indeed all readers of Bergson know
that he is constantly making use of the social factor and of " co-opera-
tion " by way of accounting for the general advance of mankind. It
may be appropriate in this same connexion to cite the magnificent
passage towards the close of Creative Evolution in which he rises to the
very heights of the idea [Schopenhauer and Hartmann had it before him,
and also before the socialists and the collectivists] of humanity's being
possibly able to surmount even the greatest of the obstacles that beset
it in its onward path : " As the smallest grain of dust [Creative Evolution,
pp. 285-6] is bound up with our entire solar system, drawn along with
it in that undivided movement of descent which is materiality itself,
so all organised beings, from the humblest to the highest, ... do but
evidence a single impulsion, the inverse of the movement of matter,
and in itself indivisible. All the living hold together, and all yield to
the same tremendous push. The animal takes its stand on the plant,
man bestrides animality, and the whole of humanity, in space and in
time, is one immense army galloping beside and before and behind
each of us in an overwhelming charge to beat down every resistance
and clear the most formidable obstacles, perhaps even death."

3 Cf. p. 160 and p. 262.

THE PHILOSOPHY OF BERGSON 259

subjective intercourse " of which we have spoken
more than once.

Then we might also contend that Bergson has
not as yet, in his philosophy of human life, taken
much cognizance of the deeper x experiences of
life, of the specifically ethical and religious feelings
and thoughts of men. With the pragmatists he
is unduly optimistic about the free expansive
development of the individual. Against this
objection it may be replied, that he has so
thoroughly assimilated into the very texture of
his thought and feeling some of the finest things in
the spiritualism and the idealism of the reflective
thought of France 2 that we would not, if we could,
wish the germinal or fructifying elements in his
system to be different from what they are. His
" social ' message is perhaps after all the best
thing that it can be — the need of the inward
spiritualization of the life and thought of the
individual.

Lastly, in addition to the fine traditional

1 He comes in sight of some of them, as he often does of so many
things. " It is as if a vague and formless being, whom we may call,
as we will [C.E., p. 281], man or superman, had sought to realise him-
self, and had succeeded only by abandoning a part of himself on the
way. The losses are represented by the rest of the animal world, and
even by the vegetable world, at least in what these have that is positive
and above the accidents of evolution."

2 From what has been said in this chapter about Bergson, and from
the remarks that were made in the second chapter about Renouvier
and the French Critical Philosophy, the reader may perhaps be willing
to admit that our Anglo-American Transcendental philosophy would
perhaps not have been so abstract and so rationalistic had it devoted
more attention, than it has evidently given, to some of the more repre-
sentative French thinkers of the nineteenth century.

17a

260 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM

spiritualism and libertarianism of French philo-
sophy, we may think of the voluntarism of Kant
and Schopenhauer as also militating somewhat
against the idea of Bergson's originality 1 in
philosophy. Despite this it is still possible to
regard him as one of important, modern, exponents
of just that development of the Kantian philosophy
that became imperative after Darwinism. He
has indeed inaugurated for us that reading of the
' theory of knowledge " in terms of the " theory
of life " 2 which is his true and real continua-

1 We must remember that nowhere in his writings does Bergson
claim any great originality for his many illuminative points of view.
He is at once far too much of a catholic scholar (in the matter of the
history of philosophy, say), and far too much of a scientist (a man in
living touch with the realities and the theories of the science of the day)
for this. His findings about life and mind are the outcome of a broad
study of the considerations of science and of history and of criticism.
By way, for example, of a quotation from a scientific work upon
biology that seems to me to reveal some apparent basis in fact (as seen
by naturalists) for the " creative evolution " upon which Bergson bases
his philosophy, I append the following : " We have gone far enough
to see that the development of an organism from an egg is a truly
wonderful process. We need but go back again and look at the marvel-
lous simplicity of the egg to be convinced of it. Not only do cells
differentiate, but cell-groups act together like well-drilled battalions,
cleaving apart here, fusing together there, forming protective coverings
or communicating channels, apparently creating out of nothing, a whole
set of nutritive and reproductive organs, all in orderly and progressive
sequence, producing in the end that orderly disposed cell aggregate,
that individual life unit which we know as an earthworm. Although
the forces involved are beyond our ken, the grosser processes are evident "
(Needham, General Biology, p. 175; italics mine). Of course it is
evident from his books that Bergson does not take much account of
such difficult facts and topics as the mistakes of instinct, etc. And
I have just spoken of his optimistic avoidance of some of the deeper
problems of the moral and spiritual life of man.

2 " This amounts to saying that the theory of knowledge and theory
of life seem to us inseparable [Creative Evolution, p. xiii. ; italics
Bergson's]. A theory of life that is not accompanied by a criticism of
knowledge is obliged to accept, as they stand, the concepts which the

THE PHILOSOPHY OF BERGSON 261

tion of the critical work of Kant. Hypothetical
although it may be in many respects, it moves
(owing to his thorough absorption in the many
facts and theories of the biology of recent years)
in an atmosphere that is altogether above the
confines of the physical and the mathematical *
sciences with which alone Kant was (in the main)
directly acquainted. It is time that, with the
help he affords in his free handling of the facts
of life and of the supposed facts and theories of
science, we should transform the exiguous " epis-
temology"2 of the past generation into the more
perfect hold upon " criticism " and upon the life of
things that is represented in his thought.

understanding puts at its disposal : it can but enclose the facts, willing
or not, in pre-existing frames which it regards as ultimate. It thus
obtains a symbolism which is convenient, perhaps even necessary to
positive science, but not a direct vision of its object."

1 I more than agree with Bergson that our whole modern
philosophy since Descartes has been unduly influenced by physics
and mathematics. And I deplore the fact that the " New Realism "
which has come upon us by way of a reaction (see p. 53) from the
subjectivism of Pragmatism, should be travelling apparently in this
backward direction — away, to say the very least, from some of the
things clearly seen even by biologists and psychologists. See p. 144.

3 As I have indicated in my Preface, I am certainly the last person
in the world to affect to disparage the importance of the thin end of the
wedge of Critical Idealism introduced into the English-speaking world
by Green and the Cairds, and their first followers (like the writers in the
old Seth-Haldane, Essays on Philosophical Criticism). Their theory
of knowledge, or " epistemology," was simply everything to the im-
poverished condition of our philosophy at the time, but, as Bergson
points out, it still left many of us [the fault perhaps was our own, to some
extent] in the position of " taking " the scientific reading of the world as
so far true, and of thinking that we had done well in philosophy when
we simply partly " transformed " it. The really important thing was
to see with this epistemology that the scientific reading of the world is
not in any sense initial " fact " for philosophy.

CONCLUDING REMARKS

Enough has now been said in the foregoing
pages about Pragmatism and the philosophy
of Actionism in relation to Rationalism, and
to the Personalism and the Humanism that
they would substitute for it and for Absolutism.
Indications have been given too of the short-
comings and the defects of this very Personalism
or Humanism, and of some of the different
lines along which it would require to be re-
considered and developed to constitute a satis-
factory philosophy. In addition to some of the
greater names in the history of philosophy, I
have referred — in the footnotes and elsewhere — to
the thoughts and the works of living writers who
might be profitably studied by the reader in this
connexion.

Pragmatism is in some respects but a sociological
or an anthropological doctrine significant of the
rediscovery by our age of the doctrine of man,
and of its desire to accord to this doctrine the
importance that is its due. It represented, to

begin with (in its Instrumentalism chiefly), the

262

CONCLUDING REMARKS 263

discontent of a dying century with the weight of
its own creations in the realm of science and
theory along with a newer and fresher conscious-
ness of the fact that there can be no rigid separa-
tion of philosophy from the general thought and
practice of mankind. And even if we accept this
idea of the supremacy of the doctrine of man over
both philosophy and science, this does not mean
that we exalt the worker and the prophet over
all knowledge, but simply that philosophy must
have a theory of reality that provides for their
existence and function alongside of those of the
thinker or the student as such. The true philo-
sophy is in fact the true doctrine of man.

Another lesson that we may learn from Prag-
matism and Humanism is the truth of the con-
tention that there can be no philosophy without
assumptions of one kind or another, without facts
and intuitions and immediate experiences. A
philosophy itself is an act or a creation, repre-
sentative of the attention of the thinker to certain
aspects of his experience and of the experience of
the world which he shares with other thinkers and
with other agents. And, as Bergson has reminded
us, it is often the great intuition underlying the
attention and the thought of a philosopher that
is of more worth to the world than the dialectic, or
the logic, through the aid of which it is set forth
and elaborated. This latter he may frequently
have inherited or absorbed from the schools of
his time.

264 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM

The reason why the idealists and the dialecti-
cians of our time have so often fought shy of
beginning with the immediate or the " given," is
partly that they are not yet in their thoughts
perfectly free of some taint or tincture of the
supposed realism or dualism of the common-sense
philosophy or the correspondence view of truth.
They seem to have the fear that if they admit a
given element of fact in speculation they will
unconsciously be admitting that there is something
outside thought and immediate experience in the
true sense of these terms. In this fear they are
forgetful of the great lesson of Idealism that there
is nothing " outside ' thought and consciousness,
no " object " without a " subject," that the world is
'phenomenal" of a great experience, which they
and other men are engaged in interpreting, and of
which we may all become directly conscious. And
while to God the end of all experiences and pro-
cesses is known from the beginning, or apart from
the mere time and space limitations that affect us
as finite beings, it is still true that for us as men
and as thinkers the reality of things is not " given "
apart from the contribution to it that we ourselves
make in our responsive and in our creative activity.
In contending, therefore, for the reality, in every
philosophy, of this assumption of ourselves and
of the working value of our thought and of our
activity, Pragmatism has been contending in its
own fashion for the great doctrine of the sove-
reignty of the spirit which (when properly inter-

CONCLUDING REMARKS 265

preted) is the one thing that can indeed recall the
modern mind out of its endless dispersion and dis-
traction, and out of its reputed present indiffer-
ence. It is in the placing of this great reality
before the world, or, rather, of the view of human
nature that makes it a possibility, and in intelligi-
bility, that (in my opinion) the significance of
Pragmatism consists, along with that of the various
doctrines with which it may be naturally associ-
ated. There are many indications in the best
thought and practice of our time that humanity is
again awakening to a creative and a self-deter-
minative view of itself, of its experience, and of
its powers. Of the presuppositions and the con-
ditions under which this idea may be regarded
as true and intelligible I have already spoken.
Its proper interpretation, however, along with the
exposition of the metaphysic upon which it must
be made to repose, is at least part of the work
of the philosophy of the future — if philosophy is
true to its task of leading and guiding the thought
of mankind.

INDEX

Absolutism, 13, chap. viii.
Action, 91 n., 105, chap. iv.
Activity-Experience, 105, 109
Alexander, S., 163
Anti-Intellectualism, 73, 239
Appearance and Reality, 84
Arcesilaus, 155
Aristotle, 155
Armstrong (Prof.), 49 n.
Attention, 119
Augustine, 107
Avenarius, 41

Bain, 120

Baldwin, J. M., 156, now.

Bawden (Prof.), 17, 85

Belief, 64, 65, 229 n., 251

Bergson, 72, 104, 126

Berthelot, 117

Blondel, 32, 34

Bosanquet, B., no, 185, chap, viii

Bourdeau, 26, 133 »., 193

Boyce-Gibson (Prof.), 154

Bradley, F. H., 74, 75, 91

Browning, R., 117

Brunschvig, 30

Bryce, James, 193

Butler, 119

Caird, E., 112

Carlyle, 125

Chesterton, W. K., 117, 156

Cohen, 48 n.

Common-sense Beliefs, 7

Common-sense Philosophy, 117

Comte, 120

Contemplation, 96

Cornford, 184

Curtis (Prof. M. M.), 22

Dawes-Hicks (Prof.), 163

De Maistre, 170

Descartes, 66, 121

Desjardins, P., 37

Dewey, J., 16, 17, 37, 62, 147,

173. 175
Du Bois Reymond, no
Duncan (Prof.), 122
Duns Scotus, 119

Eleutheropulos, 43
Elliot, H. S. R., 66
Epicureanism, 118
Eucken, 39, 154
Ewald (Dr.), 44, 48

Flournoy, 180
Fouillee, 37 n.
Fraser, A. C, 112
Futurism, 26

Geddes, P., 123
Goethe, 195, 215
Gordon, A., 152-3
Green, T. H., 199
Gregory (Prof.), 24

Inge (Dean), 29, 31
Invention, 192

James, W., 3, 4, 24, 35, 39, 45.

5°. 65, 135, 182, 192 n.
Jerusalem, W., 43
Joachim, 56
Jones, Sir H., 56
Joseph, 57

Kant, 119, 121, 247
Kant and Hegel, 183
Knox (Capt.), 15

Lalande, A., 29, 33, 164
Lankester (Sir R.), 167

267

268

INDEX

Lecky, 70

Leighton (Prof.), 133
Le Roy, 31
Locke, 61, 119
Lovejoy (Prof.), 49

MacEachran (Prof.), 49 n.
Mach, 40

Mackenzie, J. S., 112
Maeterlinck, 90
Mallarme, 214
Marett, 160

Mastermann, G. F. G., 118
M'Dougall, 104
McTaggart, J. M. E., 92
Meaning, 21, 51, 149
Mellone, 57
Merz, 157
Munsterberg, 46

Natorp, 48

Needham (Prof.), 101, 260
New Realism, 53
Nietzsche, 118, 139, 151

Ostwald, 40, 41

Pace (Prof.), 187

Paleyism, 247

Papini, 24, 135

Pascal, 119

Pater, W., 124

Peirce, 3, 22

Perry (Prof.), 53, 185

Perry, Bliss, 171, 179

Plato, 57, 61, 121, 150, 151

Pluralism, 87

Poincare, 30

Pradines, 36 n.

Pragmatism, and American philo-
sophy, 49, chap. vii. ; and
British thought, 54 ; and
French thought, 28 ; and Ger-
man thought, 38 ; and Italian
thought, 23 ; a democratic
doctrine, 105 ; its ethics, 136 ;
its pluralism, 162 ; its socio-
logical character, 164, 262 ; its
theory of knowledge, 131 ; its

theory of truth, 127 ; its theory
of reality, 135
Pratt (Prof.), 51, 127

Radical Empiricism, 85

Renan, no

Renouvier, 29

Rey, 31

Riley, W., 26 n.

Ritzsche, 45

Royce, J., 54

Russell, B., 61, 66 n., 169

Santayana, 171, 181, 190

Schellwien, 44

Schiller, F. C. S., 12, 14, 16, 132,

133

Schinz, 192 n.

Schopenhauer, 28, 119, 151, 260

Seth, James, 14 n.

Seth-Haldane, 260

Shaw, Bernard, 124

Sidgwick, H., 56, 118, 119 n., 140

Sigwart, 42

Simmel, 44

Spencer, 41 m,

Starbuck, 28

Stoicism, 118

Stout, G. F., 55

Subjective Idealism, 259

Taylor, A. E., 57, 77, 78, 199 n., 2 19

Teleology, 88, 198

Tertullian, 119

Theism, 215 n.

Themistius, 155

Thompson, J. H., 144

Titchener, 157

Truth, 59, 81, 163

Tufts, 147

Tyndall, no

Vaihinger, 39

Walker, L. J., 31
Ward, James, 30, 55, 143, 162
Wells, H. G., 123
Westermarck, 145
Windelband, 46, 150
Wollaston, 224

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