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WHAT IS PRAGMATISM?

By the Same Author

"THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF *»

New York. Thb Macmillan Company. 1907

WHAT IS PRAGMATISM?

BY

JAMES BISSETT PRATT, Ph.D.

ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF PHILOSOPHY
IN WILLIAMS COLLEGE

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
1909

AU rights reserved

\^6

Copyright, 1909,
By the MACMILLAN COMPANY.

Set up and electrotyped. Published February, 1909. Reprinted
June, 1909.

Nartjjoat) H^tne

J. 8. Gushing (Jo. — Berwick & Smith Co.

Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.

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9

tBo

JOHN EDWARD RUSSELL

THE KEENEST AND KINDLIEST CRITIC OF PRAGMATISM

THIS BOOK IS INSCRIBED

IN GRATEFUL AND SINCERE AFFECTION

PREFACE

During the spring of 1908 I received an
invitation from Mr. Stephen F. Weston to
give a course of six lectures the following
summer at the Glenmore Summer School,
and to choose my own subject. Unfortu-
nately for the school, as it turned out, I
decided to make use of the opportunity to
say certain things about pragmatism that
had long been stirring in my soul ; and
" Pragmatism, A Critique," was, accordingly,
advertised in the circular of the school as
the subject of my lectures. I say my choice
was unfortunate for the school, for when,
after a twenty-mile drive into the heart of
the Adirondacks, I reached Glenmore, I
found that the patrons of the school had to
a man (and almost to a woman) postponed
their arrival to the following week, and it
looked as if Mr. Weston and myself would

Vill PREFACE

constitute the bulk of the audience. By the
help of the neighbors, however, we managed
to corral several philosophers who were
known to be at large in the mountains, and
several lovers of philosophy, who by their
kindly interest and helpful suggestions more
than made up for the paucity of their num-
bers. The purpose of the publication of this
book is, therefore, to show those who did not
go to Glenmore last summer (and this in-
cludes a fairly large portion of the human
race) how much they missed.

The criticisms of my friends at Glenmore
proved decidedly valuable, and the following
pages have, therefore, been somewhat recast
since I gave the lectures; yet it has seemed
advisable to retain the lecture form as best
adapted to somewhat popular and informal
exposition. For though I have nowhere
allowed the desire for simplicity and popu-
larity to interfere with thoroughness of treat-
ment, and though I have used technical
language where exactness demanded it, my
aim has been throughout to give an exposi-

PREFACE IX

tion and critique of pragmatism which the
general reader could follow without too
much effort. I cannot flatter myself that
he will always find the following pages inter-
esting or easy, but if he really cares to know
about pragmatism and hence comes armed
with patience, he will, I hope, find them
clear.

Although the controversy over pragma-
tism has now been waging for several years,
and although the non-pragmatists have been
quite as numerous and as active as their
opponents, their contributions to the dis-
cussion have been confined almost entirely
to the technical periodicals, whereas the
pragmatist side has been presented to the
public in three or four books which have
commanded a fairly wide reading. Of course
the " public " never reads the technical
periodicals, and there is, therefore, a place
for a book which (while not presupposing any
prior knowledge of the subject) shall present,
with some attempt at comprehensiveness and
unity, the position of those who find them-

X PREFACE

selves unable to accept the pragmatist view.
Two such books have appeared in France,
but there is as yet (so far as I am aware) no
book in English which has this aim.

It is, of course, with this aim that I have
written the following pages. It would be
disingenuous in me should I not frankly
declare war on pragmatism even in my
preface. But I hope my readers will do me
the justice to believe me when I say that
to criticise pragmatism has been only my
secondary object, my chief aim being to
understa7id it and to help others to do so.
When the movement first began I was an
enthusiastic pragmatist, and my enthusiasm
lasted until I came to understand clearly
what it really meant. And though I am
no longer one of its supporters, its charm is
still so strong upon me that I am eager to
see it completely developed and carefully
expressed, and the good seed which indu-
bitably is in it threshed out and separated
from the immense amount of chaff which
bears its name. Threshing only can save

PREFACE XI

whatever of value there is in it ; and I hope
my pragmatist friends will at least see in
my book a sincere attempt to aid them in
our common task of "making our ideas
clear."

My thanks are due to the editors of the
Journal of Philosophy^ Psychology^ and Sci-
entific Methods, for their courtesy in permit-
ting me to make use (in Lectures II and III)
of material taken from two articles of mine
which appeared in their Journal during the
years 1907 and 1908. And most of all I
wish to acknowledge with sincere gratitude
the invaluable and unfailing assistance, ad-
vice, and guidance which I have received
from Professor John E. Russell of Williams
College. It was at first his intention to
collaborate with me upon a book of this
nature, but lack of time prevented him from
carrying out his part of the plan, — to the
very considerable loss of the many who
would have read this book had he been its
principal author. But the loss has not been
absolute ; for those of my readers who have

Xll PREFACE

followed the controversy over pragmatism
will recognize that very much of what is
best in this book is due to him,

WiLLIAMSTOWN, MASS.,

February i, 1909.

CONTENTS

LECTURE I

PAGE

Meaning and Method in Pragmatism . , . i

LECTURE II
The Ambiguity of Truth 47

LECTURE III
The Pragmatic View of the Truth Relation . 81

LECTURE IV
Pragmatism and Knowledge 133

LECTURE V
Pragmatism and Religion 173

LECTURE VI
The "Practical" Point of View . , . .211

Index • . 255

LECTURE I
MEANING AND METHOD IN PRAGMATISM

WHAT IS PRAGMATISM?
LECTURE I

MEANING AND METHOD IN PRAGMATISM

I REMEMBER oncc hearing a professor of
*' Real Property " in one of our leading law
schools discuss very learnedly and at con-
siderable length the question whether any
one in the United States really owned any
land. To put it in the professor's words, the
question was (if I remember aright) whether
the title to land was ever actually vested in
the individual or whether he was merely an
occupant, the real owner being the state.
On the one hand, the professor pointed
out, the individual could do what he liked
with his land, could deed it to whom he
pleased and dispose of it in any way that
suited him. But, on the other hand, there
was the power of eminent domain, the right

3

4 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM?

of the state to condemn the land and take it
from him, for a suitable consideration, at any
time. This being the case, in whom is the
ownership really vested ?

The conclusion to which most of us came,
as I remember it, was that this was one of
the mysteries of the law which the mind of
man could never fathom. Doubtless the
land belonged to some one ; in fact, it very
obviously belonged either to the individual
or to the state. But to which of these it
really belonged was a question which could
probably never be answered.

Now if there had been among us at the
time a pragmatist philosopher, he would prob-
ably have addressed us in Some such words
as these : " My friends," he would have said,
"your difficulty is all of your own making.
You think you are puzzling over a very deep
problem ; but there is really no problem
here to puzzle over. What you take for
depth is in fact only the muddiness of your
own thought. For consider: What you
want to know is in whom the ownership of

MEANING AND METHOD 5

the land is vested. That being the case,
your first question should be, What do we
mean by ownership? And the answer to
this is simple enough; namely, the right
to do this, that, and the other with the object
owned. Enumerate all the things that can
be done with land ; then the right to do just
these things is ownership. And once you
have enumerated these rights, you have ex-
hausted the meaning of the term. If owner-
ship means anything more than this, what is
it? You cannot say. Except in the con-
crete and practical sense I have defined,
'ownership'' means just nothing at all, — it
is a mere term without content. Of course,
one's ownership may be more or less limited,
according as one has the right to do fewer
or more things with the object one 'owns.'
Hence, to return to your particular question,
the individual owns the land in the sense of
being able to dig in it, build on it, sell it, or
give it away, etc. ; and the state owns it
in the sense of being able to take it from the
individual if it desires. And so your ques-

6 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM?

tion answers itself. In short, your insoluble
mystery is merely gratuitous mystification
of your own making. It seems a mystery
only because it is meaningless."

I have used this illustration, drawn from
a field at some distance from philosophy,
to show how the pragmatist may often
succeed in solving our problems for us by
simply demonstrating to us that they are
no problems at all. Don't seek to solve a
question, says pragmatism, until you know
what you mean by it. Think so far as
possible in concrete terms. Never let your-
self be hoodwinked and browbeaten by big
words and verbal abstractions. Remember
that the meaning of philosophical terms
may often be in inverse proportion to
their length. Words are but pragmatists'
counters ; they do but reckon with them ;
but they are the money of non-pragmatists.
Concerning every object of discussion ask
the question : Wlmt is it known as ? What
does it mean to me? For, as G. H. Lewes
has said, and as Aristotle said long before

MEANING AND METHOD 7

him, a thing is what it does. All that it
can ever mean is just the difference that
s^t can make to some one. There is no
genuine difference that does not make a
difference.

Well, every pragmatist will tell you this
is pragmatism; and I trust all my hearers
are good pragmatists. It goes without say-
ing that I am one. Who, indeed, could
resist a doctrine so delightfully healthy,
clear-cut, simple, and helpful ? It has the
salt air of the sea in it and the ozone
of the mountains. With this philosophy
within one's grasp, who would choose to
be bound down in servile submission to
verbal abstractions, and to spend one's days
discussing problems that have no meaning?
Rather let us think clearly and to the point,
and sign an intellectual Declaration of
Independence from all unmeaning con-
cepts. It is not surprising that the new
philosophy is advancing victoriously over
the land, and that all sorts and conditions
of men are joining the procession. In the

8 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM?

glow of our loyalty we are willing to march
against any foe, under our banner, upon
whose ample folds we have written, " Away
with Logomachy and Meaningless Abstrac-
tions ! "

But alas ! where is the foe ? Who is it
that is championing logomachy and meaning-
less abstractions ? If belief in clear thought
and the other admirable things named above
be pragmatism, are we not all pragmatists ?
— Indeed, we do not all practice what we
preach (not even all the leaders of pragma-
tism do that), but who would not give his
enthusiastic assent to the laudable doctrines
and admonitions set out above? — And if
we are all pragmatists and there be no foe
to fight, the rather disconcerting question
presents itself why we should make such
a fuss about it. Unless pragmatism has
something more distinctive and original to
offer, is it really anything more than a
new and rather superfluous name for some
exceedingly old and common ways of think-
ing ?

MEANING AND METHOD 9

Of course pragmatism is more than this,
— otherwise it would resemble a Fourth
of July oration on " Liberty " in a New
England village, or a revival among the
sanctified. Pragmatism seeks and claims
to be strenuous, militant, — a plan of cam-
paign rather than a celebration or an ex-
perience meeting. So much of pragmatism
as I have described thus far is only its
spirit ; but it is in addition to this a definite
and technical doctrine or group of doc-
trines on certain fundamental philosophical
questions. " Pragmatism (according to Mr.
James) is a temper of mind, an attitude ;
it is also a theory of the nature of ideas
and truth ; and finally it is a theory about
reality." ^ More specifically, it may be said
that pragmatism offers us a theory of mean-
ing, a theory of truth, and a theory of
knowledge; that it is trying to work out
a theory of reality; and that it is also a
general point of view or way of looking

^ Professor Dewey in " What does Pragmatism mean by
Practical ?" Jour, of Phil., Vol. V, p. 85.

lO WHAT IS PRAGMATISM?

at things, — a way that is in part peculiar
to pragmatists, in part adopted by them
from a larger tendency or attitude which
colors much of contemporary thought. I
shall take up each of these things in
turn in the following lectures, beginning
to-day with a consideration of the pragma-
tist doctrine of the nature of meaning and
of the method of dealing with philosophical
problems which pragmatism naturally de-
duces from that doctrine.

" Meaning " and " method " are, I confess,
not intrinsically interesting subjects. I wish
I had something more attractive to offer
you, but it really is not my fault. I might,
of course, give you just a general " point of
view " which would, perhaps, not be alto-
gether without interest; but I mean to do
no such thing. I mean to treat the techni-
cal doctrines of pragmatism in as exact a
fashion as I can — any other treatment of
them I should consider an insult to my audi-
ence. Pragmatism has been defined by its
founder as a way " to make our ideas clear " ;

MEANING AND METHOD II

hence its doctrines must themselves certainly
be clear and capable of exact formulation.
We should not be satisfied — and so far as
we are good pragmatists we cannot be sat-
isfied — with any loose definitions and any
vague tendencies and generalities. So long
as we allow ourselves to be soothed and
satisfied by them we shall be very far from
making our ideas clear. We must there-
fore do pragmatism the justice to take it
seriously, to sift the formulations of it given
by the leading pragmatists, and not to rest
satisfied till we see exactly what they mean.
Such a thorough-going examination of prag-
matic meaning and method may seem to
some of you at times dry, difficult, and per-
haps over-technical. But if you are really
consistent, sincere, and honest pragmatists
at heart, you will not hesitate at any diffi-
culty in the effort to make your ideas clear
and to free yourselves from the power of
mere words and phrases. Those, on the
other hand, who are pragmatists in name
only I am sure will stay behind, content with

\

1 2 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM ?

" words " and " tendencies," and will continue
to throw their caps in air, shouting, " Hurrah
for Pragmatism ! " without being over-curious
as to what it really is, or why they should
make such a noise about it.

Pragmatism may be regarded as the result
of two confluent, though not altogether con-
sistent, streams of tendency. The first, and
probably the less influential, of these may be
traced back as far as Kant's doctrine of the
primacy of the practical reason. We cannot,
said Kant, prove the reality of God, freedom,
immortality, and the moral law. But since
we are volitional, active, rational beings we
have both the right and the duty \.o postulate
the reality of these things and whatever else
may be essential to moral action. It is in-
deed possible that we are not free; but we
are bound to act as if we were free, and
since freedom is essential to morality, it is
our duty to believe in it.

Practically this same brave moral doctrine
was revived and reformulated in 1896 by
Professor James's "Will to Believe," — a

MEANING AND METHOD 1 3

book that has stirred America as have few-
philosophic works of our generation. In the
first essay of the volume (which gave its title
to the whole) Professor James points out that
faith is itself a force and often makes real
its own object ; and that when w^e are faced
with genuinely possible alternatives we have
a right to accept and believe that one whose
acceptance will contribute most to our moral
life. Here and elsewhere, moreover,r James
shows that in morality and metaphysics and
religion, as well as in science, we are justi-
fied in testing the truth of a belief by its
usefulness.

The second and probably the more im-
portant source of pragmatism is the modern
scientific view of the meaning of hypotheses.
Hypotheses, " natural laws," scientific gener-
alizations, etc., are, as most scientists now
maintain, merely short-hand expressions of
human experience. They are handy ways
of telling us what has happened or what we
may expect. They are not so much de-
scriptions of an outer and independent " na-

14 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM?

ture " as ways of summarizing and explaining
our experience. Their whole meaning is ex-
hausted after they have told us (directly or
indirectly) how things act upon us and how
we react upon things. That I may be sure
not to misrepresent the modern logic of
science as pragmatism understands it, let
me make use of a sentence from Ostwald,
quoted with approval by Professor James in
his recent book.

" All realities influence our practice, and
that influence is their meaning for us. I am
accustomed to put questions to my classes in
this way: In what respects would the world
be different if this alternative or that were
true? If I can find nothing that would be-
come different, then the alternative has no
sense." ^

In a somewhat similar spirit Karl Pear-
son defines a law of science (or of " nature ")
as "a resume in mental shorthand, which
replaces for us a lengthy description of the
sequences among our sense impressions." *

^ Quoted by James in " Pragmatism," p. 48.
' *' Grammar of Science," p. 87.

MEANING AND METHOD 15

The scientist, in short, sees that his hypoth-
eses and laws ultimately get all their mean-
ing from our experience. And, moreover, he
no longer regards them purely as ends in
themselves; rather are they now his instru-
ments by the use of which human action may
profitably be guided. Hence he is less con-
cerned than were his predecessors with the
question whether his hypotheses are true;
what concerns him most is their usefulness.
His great question concerning any proposed
generalization is. Does it work? And this
for two reasons: in the first place, because
its working is practically more important to
him than its merely theoretical truth; and
secondly, because the only test he has for its
truth is its successful working. Unless it
works, he has no reason to believe it true.
Moreover, as truth and usefulness are both
forms of value, the scientist who has no time
nor fondness for what he calls " logic chop-
ping" has a tendency to identify the two,
without asking himself too curiously whether
his hypothesis is true because it is useful or
useful because it is true.

1 6 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM?

It was from this view of the nature of
scientific hypotheses that pragmatism, in the
more technical sense, took its rise. The
name originated with Mr. C. S. Pierce, who
in 1878 published his epoch-making article
(for so it turned out to be) entitled " How to
make our Ideas Clear." ^ In this paper Mr.
Pierce laid down the thesis that the whole
meaning of any object consists in the habit
or reaction it establishes or induces (directly
or indirectly) in us. " Consider what effects
which might conceivably have practical bear-
ings we consider the object of our concep-
tion to have. Then our conception of these
effects is the whole of our conception of the
object.'"^ The word "practical" Mr. Pierce
is here using in its strict and etymological
sense, as referring to action.^ Thus we are
told that to develop the meaning of a
thought " we have simply to determine what
habit it induces, for what a thing means is
simply what habit it involves."* "There is

^ In the Popular Science Monthly^ Vol. XII, pp. 286-302.
' P- 293- ' From the Greek Trpay/xo, action. * p. 292.

MEANING AND METHOD \^

no distinction of meaning so fine as to con-
sist in anything but a possible difference of
practice."^ Quite in line with this view of
the practical nature of meaning is Professor
Dewey's use of the word idea as synonymous
with " plan of action " or " intention to act in
a certain way." ^

Now the assertion (if intended to be taken
literally) that all distinction of meaning con-
sists in a possible difference of practice cannot
be allowed to go unchallenged. It may be
true that most concepts and beliefs — or, if
you insist, that all concepts and beliefs —
result ultimately in action. From that it
does not follow that all their meaning con-
sists in such resulting action. Doubtless
much of their meaning does consist in that. —
My concept of an object is largely made up
of the way I should act in its presence. As
Royce has well said, I do not know the
meaning of ''lion'' if I think it an animal I
might pat on the head, saying, " Nice little

1 p. 293.

2 Cf., for instance, Mind, Vol. XVI, pp. 335-336, and
Jour, of Phil., Vol. V, p. 88, etc.

1 8 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM?

lion." — But though this is true, there re-
mains always in our concepts and beliefs a
group of characteristics which are not to be
reduced to any reactions or habits of our
own. These may be of as many sorts as
there are kinds of experience or psychic
states in addition to action. Sensational and
emotional facts are of course the most obvi-
ous. The distinction between a red house
and a green house does not consist in a dif-
ference of practice. Even granted there is a
difference in practice or "attitude" resulting,
that would not constitute the whole of the dis-
tinction. " Practice " surely cannot be taken
to mean the whole of experience. (If it were
so taken, Mr. Pierce's expressions about it
would become the most absurdly obvious
truisms.) But if it be not the whole of experi-
ence, there is no good reason for insisting that
it is the only type of experience which contrib-
utes anything toward the meaning of ideas.

This point is so obvious that I surely need
not labor it further. And I am made still
more confident that I may be relieved of this

MEANING AND METHOD 19

ungrateful task by the fact that Professor
James long ago saw this weakness in Mr.
Pierce's formulation of pragmatism, and
therefore " transmogrified " it (as Pierce
puts it) and laid the foundations of his
own pragmatism in more inclusive terms.
In his famous California Address of Au-
gust 26, 1898, — which we might almost call
the birthday of pragmatism, — he says : —

" I think myself that it [the principle
of pragmatism] should be expressed more
broadly than Mr. Pierce expresses it. . . . I
should prefer to express Pierce's principle
by saying that the effective meaning of
any philosophic proposition can always be
brought down to some particular conse-
quence in our future practical experience,
whether active or passive; the point lying
rather in the fact that the experience must
be particular than in the fact that it must
be active." ^ This interpretation of the term
practical as meaning concrete and particular
rather than as referring to action, Pro-

^Jour. of Phil., Vol. I, p. 674. Italics mine.

20 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM?

lessor James has consistently maintained
ever since.^

Taking this modified and enlarged state-
ment of the pragmatic view of meaning,
let us try to see exactly what it amounts to.
As I understand it, pragmatism aims by it
to do two things. First, it seeks to give
us a definite, exact, and technical doctrine
of the nature of meaning — to show us what
meaning consists in and, therefore, when it
is present and when absent. And, sec-
ondly, by means of this doctrine, it aims to
formulate for us a method of choosing our
problems, which shall eliminate for us a
number of meaningless questions and help
us to see what is worth discussing and what
is not. With these aims in view, let us now
examine some of the more carefully worded
statements of the pragmatic doctrine.

In Baldwin's " Dictionary of Philosophy,"
Professor James defines pragmatism as

^ Cf. his definition of pragmatism in Baldwin's Dictionary
and his article, " The Pragmatic Account of Truth," in the
Phil. Rev. for January, 1908, especially p. 14. Also " Prag-
matism," Lecture II, passim.

MEANING AND METHOD 21

"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 experiences 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 consequences, then it must
really be only the first conception under a
different name."

The fundamental postulate of " imme-
diate empiricism " (a pseudonym for prag-
matism) is, according to Professor Dewey,
just this : " 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." " The
real significance of this principle is that of
a method of philosophical analysis. If you
wish to find out what any philosophic term

22 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM?

means, go to experience and see what it is
experienced as'' ^

In the same spirit Papini writes : " The
meaning of theories consists uniquely in the
consequences" which those who beHeve them
true may expect from them."^ Dr. Schiller
puts it thus : " To say that a truth has
consequences and that what has none is
meaningless, means that it has a bearing
upon some human interest. Its 'conse-
quences ' must be consequences io some
one for some purpose. If it is clearly
grasped that the ' truth ' with which we
are concerned is truth for man and that
the ' consequences ' are human too, it is
really superfluous to add either that the
consequences must be practical or that
they must be good."^

Owing to a misunderstanding of some
of the pragmatists' statements, they have

1 " The Postulate of Immediate Empiricism," four, of
Phil., Vol. II, pp. 397 and 399.

' " Introduzione aJ Pragmatismo," Leonardo, February,
1907, p. 28.

' "Studies in Humanism," p. 5.

i

MEANING AND METHOD 23

been accused of including among the
' consequences ' that give meaning only-
such as are practical in the ordinary
sense of the word, — bread and butter con-
sequences one might call them. Put in
this bald and sweeping way, this criticism
is based on a radical misunderstanding of
pragmatism. All the leading pragmatists
insist that among these * practical conse-
quences ' they include such things as
logical consistency, intellectual satisfaction,
harmony of mental content, etc. James
has more than once made the statement
that to him practical means simply par-
ticular or concrete;'^ and Schiller has fre-
quently pointed out that what are commonly
called theoretical consequences are prac-
tical in his broad use of the word, and
that, in fact, " all consequences are prac-
tical sooner or later." ^ If all consequences
are practical sooner or later, it is at first,
indeed, a little hard to see why so much

1 a. Jour, of Phil., Vol. I, p. 674; Phil. Rev., Vol. XVII,
pp. 14 and If. 2 « Studies in Humanism," p. 6.

24 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM?

emphasis should be laid upon their being
practical, or why so much ado should be
made over the word ; it would seem to be
something like a distinction without a dif-
ference, rather useless as a guide or tool,
and hence most unpragmatic. Moreover,
there are passages in which the pragmatists
seem to forget their own broad use of the
word practical, and to condemn certain
" intellectualistic " questions as unworthy
of discussion because far removed from
our " practical " needs. And it must also
be added that while the pragmatists usually
recognize the value of our theoretical in-
terests, they insist that in the last analysis
this value is entirely dependent on the
" practical " in the narrower sense of the
term, — that our intellectual activities get
all their worth ultimately from the fact
that they guide and influence the reaction
of the individual upon the environment.
This is what Dr. Schiller really has in
mind when he says, "all consequences are
practical sooner or later." It would seem,

MEANING AND METHOD 2$

therefore, that the " bread and butter " criti-
cism is not altogether without foundation.
Of this, however, I hope to have more to say
at another time. For the present the impor-
tant thing for us to note is the fact that prag-
matism is not justly open to the charge
of completely disregarding our theoretic
interests, — no matter how it may, later on,
interpret them.

And now let us come to closer quarters
with the pragmatic doctrine of meaning.
There are one or two points in it which
have never been clear to me, and which, so
far as I am aware, no pragmatist writer has
attempted to clear up. As these points are
vital to our problem, I must have more light
on them before I know whether I am a prag-
matist or not. So let us return for a moment
to our definitions. I repeat: According to
Professor James, "the meaning of any phil-
osophical proposition can always be brought
down to some particular consequence in
our future practical experience." According
to Dr. Schiller, the " consequences " must

26 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM?

be " consequences to some one./or some pur-
pose." Now I ask (and it is an important
question), What does James mean by ''our
experience " ? To whom does Schiller refer
by the words " some one " ? Obviously there
are three possible interpretations. The prag-
matist may mean, namely, that only that con-
cept or theory has meaning which makes a
("practical") difference (i) to me, the individ-
ual, or (2) to all human beings of all times, or
(3) to all actual or possible rational or senti-
ent beings. If the pragmatist theory is to be of
any help to us whatever, we must know which
of these three positions it takes. In the lack,
therefore, of any authoritative statements
on this subject from the pragmatists, let us
examine each of these possible positions in
turn for ourselves.

The first position suggested above may,
I suppose, be dismissed at once. It is most
unlikely that any pragmatist will hold that
only that has any meaning which has con-
sequences in the shape of conduct or experi-
ences in his own individual life and mind.

MEANING AND METHOD 27

For even if one should hold so preposterous
a position, he could scarcely give it out seri-
ously as a philosophic method. The ques-
tion whether there will be a railway to the
north pole five hundred years hence can cer-
tainly not be expressed in consequences to
me as an individual, " either in the shape of
conduct to be recommended or in that of
experiences to be expected." And yet the
question certainly has meaning, because its
consequences may be expressed in the con-
duct or experience of some one else. For
the same reason various questions of ancient
history have meaning, even for me. Nor can
we logically stop short of the whole human
race, in interpreting the meaning of " some
one."

But what justification have we for stop-
ping here } How can we logically disregard
the real or possible experiences or any real
or possible sentient beings ? Would there
be no meaning in saying that an ichthyo-
saurus, who perished ages before the birth of
the first man, suffered pain or perceived the

28 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM?

light? Is there now no memting in Mr.
Percival Lowell's assertion that there are
sentient and rational beings on Mars ? There
is, so far as I can see, not a single detail of
any human experience that would in any way
be different, whichever side of these ques-
tions you should take. And yet the ques-
tions certainly have a meaning, and have a
meaning to us, because they have conse-
quences in the conduct and experiences of
real or possible sentient beings ; namely, the
ichthyosaurus and the Martians.

The consequences which give meaning,
therefore, cannot be confined to the human
race, but must include all those which occur
in the experience of any sentient creatures.
If from this, however, we are tempted to con-
clude that there is nothing unique or original
in the doctrine of the pragmatist, he may
remind us that we have as yet failed to note
one of its most important characteristics.
The " consequences " which, according to
pragmatism, alone give meaning are " conse-
quences in OMX future practical experience."

MEANING AND METHOD 29

It is not past nor present consequences, but
"conduct to be recommended'' "experiences
to be expected',' that count in giving signifi-
cance to a proposition. A good deal is made,
first and last, in various pragmatic writings,
of this conception that it is only in the future
consequences that meaning resides, and it
will therefore be worth our while to consider
it in some detail. This we can best do by-
applying it to a concrete example.^

The example I shall choose is the one
which appears most often in Professor
James's writings^ as an illustration of the
pragmatist doctrine of meaning. " Imagine,"
says Professor James, " the entire contents
of the world to be once for all irrevocably
given. Imagine it to end this very moment,

^This same emphasis upon the future is implicit (as Pro-
fessor Montague has shown) in the pragmatic attempt to
make truth only a kind of goodness.

^ It occurs both in the California Address and in " Prag-
matism " (from which I here quote it, p. 96), and we would
seem, therefore, to be justified in taking it as a typical illustra-
tion of pragmatic meaning — provided, of course, that we do
not raise against it the criticism forestalled by Professor James
himself in his "Pragmatic Account of Truth," Phil. Rev.,
Vol. XVII, p. s, note.

30 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM?

and to have no future ; and then let a theist
and a materialist apply their rival explana-
tions to its history. The theist shows how
a God made it; and the materialist shows,
and we will suppose with equal success, how
it resulted from blind physical forces. Then
let the pragmatist be asked to choose be-
tween their theories. How can he apply
his test if the world is already completed ?
Concepts are things to come back into ex-
perience with, things to make us look for
differences. But by hypothesis there is to
be no more experience, and no possible dif-
ferences can be looked for. Both theories
have shown all their consequences, and by
the hypothesis we are adopting these are
identical. The pragmatist must conse-
quently say that the two theories, in spite
of their different-sounding names, mean ex-
actly the same thing, and that the dispute
is purely verbal."^

The point of this illustration is, of course,

^ Professor James adds here a parenthetical sentence
which, if taken as in any sense limiting or modifying his illus-
tration, destroys the entire force of his argument. I have
therefore omitted it.

MEANING AND METHOD 3 1

to show that it is only in y^^/^r^ consequences
that genuine meaning can reside. Now, in
the first place, it is important to note that,
with the pragmatist view, and under the sup-
posed conditions, — the end of the world, —
any question of past or present fact would
necessarily be unmeaning. The theistic-
materialistic controversy is not peculiar in
this respect. To say at the end of the world,
" Professor James wrote the book ' Pragma-
tism,' " and to say, " Mr. Bradley wrote it,"
would mean exactly the same thing, since
the consequences are once for all what they
are, and no future consequences can be looked
for. That this must be true of all questions,
no matter how full of meaning they now
seem to us, follows necessarily from the very
nature of the case, once you admit the prag-
matic doctrine. For if all meanings can be
brought down to consequences " in our
future practical experience," and if, by hy-
pothesis, we have no future practical experi-
ence, it must follow, as the night the day,
that there can no longer be any meaning in
anything.

32 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM?

And it must also be noted that this con-
clusion not only will, according to pragma-
tism, hold true at the end of the world for all
questions, but that, on the same principles,
it must also hold true of many questions
even now. To take a very commonplace
example : suppose three gentlemen discuss-
ing after dinner the age of the wine they
have been drinking. One of them says that
it is three years old, one that it is thirteen.
Reasons are given by both, but neither can
prove his point to the satisfaction of the
other. The dispute is referred to the third
gentleman, who happens to be a pragmatist.
How can he apply his test, since the wine,
having become once for all what it was, has
now been drunk, and the bottle is empty.?
Both theories have shown all their con-
sequences, and these are identical. " The
pragmatist must consequently say that the
two theories, in spite of their different-sound-
ing names, mean exactly the same thing,"
that to say the wine is three years old is only
another way of saying it is thirteen years old.

MEANING AND METHOD 33

and that the dispute is purely verbal. In like
manner, the date of Sargon I, the authorship
of the Pentateuch, the question of the Greek
tactics at Salamis, all being without future
consequences to us, must be for the pragma-
tist absolutely meaningless. In short, from
history, geology, biology, astronomy, — from
every field of human thought, — come ques-
tions over which scholars are spending years
of research, yet which are certainly even
now fully as meaningless as the theistic-
materialistic controversy will be at the end
of time, and which therefore according to
the pragmatist doctrine are purely verbal
disputes.^

The response may be made that the hy-
potheses and questions just referred to have
pragmatic consequences in the sense of fit-
ting in more or less well with our otherwise

^ By the above I do not, of course, mean that no pragma-
tist has a right to a past fact ; I simply wish to point out that
he has no right to one so long as he sticks to his assertion
that all meaning is confined to future consequences, and more
especially to the interpretation of this assertion exemplified
by James's illustration of the end of the world.

34 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM?

grounded beliefs, and hence producing greater
or less mental harmony. But the answer to
this is, in the first place, that this can be the
case only on condition that these questions
and hypotheses already have meaning. Their
harmonizing with our other beliefs presup-
poses their meaning and does not produce
it, — hence their meaning does not consist
in these consequences. And in the second
place, if this answer of the pragmatist holds
of the questions I have suggested, it holds
equally well of the materialistic-theistic con-
troversy at the end of the world and of every
question which rationalistic philosophers are
to-day discussing. There is scarcely a ques-
tion seriously raised to-day by any school of
philosophy so " intellectualistic " that it is
lacking in consequences of intellectual har-
mony, hence not one which the pragmatist
formula, if thus broadly interpreted, would
rule out.

Pragmatism must choose between the
broad and the narrow interpretation of its
doctrine. If it chooses the latter, it must

MEANING AND METHOD 35

maintain explicitly that only that has mean-
ing which (i) has consequences in the expe-
rience or conduct of us human beings, or (2)
has future consequences for some one, or (3)
has both. Some of the expressions used by
the pragmatists seem clearly to show that
they prefer the narrow interpretation. But,
as I think must now be clear to you all, this
position is untenable. For, to repeat, (i)
that obviously has meaning which has con-
sequences to any conceivable sentient crea-
ture. Though theism and materialism
should have identical consequences for me
and for all human beings, they certainly
have not for God (whether he be real or
hypothetical). It makes a difference to God
whether He exists or not, even if this be the
last moment of time. And there is no more
reason for ruling out God's experience or
that of the ichthyosaurus or the Martian, or
of Jupiter or Thor, than that of Adam or of
Sargon I. Surely I know what I mean
when I speak of the experiences of Betsy
Prig or Sairey Gamp or even those of the

36 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM?

doubly mythological Mrs. Harris. Whatever
makes a difference to any conceivable sentient
creature has at least some meaning. And
(2) it is impossible to see why only future
consequences should count, and past ones
give no meaning. If the pragmatist is
unable to get any meaning out of past con-
sequences, or out of consequences to sen-
tient beings who are not human, that is his
misfortune. But as for the rest of us, we
know perfectly well what we mean when we
say Mars is inhabited, or the birds preceded
the mammals, quite aside from any conse-
quences, future or past, to human beings.
And in like manner, were this the last mo-
ment of time we should know perfectly well
what we meant by saying, The world is due
to an intelligent, self-conscious Being, or,
The world is due to the concourse of uncon-
scious atoms ; and we should know also that
these two meanings were altogether different.
It would seem, therefore, that pragmatism
is logically forced to adopt only the broadest
possible interpretation of its doctrine, an

MEANING AND METHOD 37

interpretation which could be expressed as
follows: ^he meaning of any conception ex-
presses itself in the past, present, or future
conduct or experience of actual or possible
sentient creatures. And if this is the prag-
matist doctrine, it certainly is sound. But
the odd thing about it is that it exhibits
pragmatism as (so far forth) nothing but a
restatement of idealism. If this be prag-
matism, we shall soon find the subjectivists
and the pan-psychists joining the procession ;
yes, even the prophets of the Absolute will
be donning pragmatist colors and learning
war no more. The lion shall eat straw
like the ox ; and James and Royce, Dewey
and Lotze, Schiller and Bradley (!), shall lie
down together. Only the radical realists
shall be left out of the love feast.

I do not want to be understood as seeking
a cheap and easy victory over pragmatism,
nor as desiring to ridicule it. What I want
is genuinely to understand it. And I seri-
ously contend that pragmatism either must
take the untenable position of denying

38 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM?

meaning where meaning obviously is, or else
must admit that there is nothing unique in
its doctrine. It either stands for an absurd-
ity or else, so far as I can see, it has contrib-
uted nothing of importance to the problem
in question and has merely repeated the gen-
eral view of idealism, which it might almost
as well have quoted (in somewhat different
words, to be sure, but in substance and with-
out all this ado) from any one of several
passages in "Appearance and Reality."
What shall we say, then, to these things ?
Is Bradley also among the pragmatists ?

If any pragmatist or pragmatist proselyte
has consented to follow me thus far, he will
probably say at this point. At least pragma-
tism offers a practical and useful method for
determining what philosophic questions are
really worth discussing, and by application of
this method we shall be enabled to elimi-
nate a large body of worthless and abstract
problems which are now lumbering up our
minds to no useful purpose. This method, he
would probably continue, might be summed

MEANING AND METHOD 39

up in the rule never to discuss anything
unless it has some genuine human interest,
unless it makes a real difference to some one.
Now if by this rule pragmatism means,
once more, simply the maxim to avoid lo-
gomachy, we shall certainly say Amen to its
time-honored admonition. But if it means
something more than this, we must ask,
What is really meant? Truly we should
discuss only that which is worth discussing;
but who is to determine what this is ? And
the point upon which we are here most in
need of enlightenment is this : Does prag-
matism include among its "genuine human
interests " the intellectual desire for knowl-
edge for its own sake ? If it does not, then
we must at least point out the fact that " in-
tellectualistic metaphysics " is not the only
thing tabooed. A large proportion of the
problems of higher mathematics, history,
archaeology, astronomy, geology, literary
criticism, etc., are as certainly vetoed and
forbidden. The courses in our universities
must be cut down by half. For in every

40 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM?

field of scholarly inquiry there are innumer-
able questions which awaken no more " re-
sponsive active feelings " in " us practical
Americans " and call for no more " particu-
lar conduct of our own " than do the vari-
ous theological and metaphysical problems
against which the pragmatists inveigh.
The distance of the nearest fixed star, the
problems of the higher mathematics, the age
of the Rig Veda, awaken as little " sense of
reality " in most of us as do the various
" philosophic propositions that will never
make an appreciable difference to us in
action." One and all, they are open to the
same reproach of not " making any differ-
ence " to a living soul — except the differ-
ence which comes with the satisfaction of
knowing. But by what right, after all, shall
these things be declared not worth discuss-
ing? Surely every genuine question —
every question, that is, which has meaning
and is not logomachy — is worth solving to
him who wishes to solve it. If you, per-
sonally, are not interested in mathematics or

MEANING AND METHOD 41

metaphysics, by all means steer clear of
them. But it is surely unworthy of the
broad, human, and empirical spirit that
characterizes all true pragmatists to attempt
to dogmatize as to what all men shall find
or ought to find interesting.

In fact, if the question be thus put, the
pragmatists might, perhaps, say that the
purely theoretic interest should be taken
into account and recognized as one of the
things that give problems their value. But
if this is the case, again I ask, What prob-
lem, then, is ruled out beyond mere verbal
disputes which all would rule out? How
does the pragmatist rule or method assist us
in choosing our problems ? Can the prag-
matist name us one single problem which
philosophers are discussing to-day which
should not, on his own showing, be recog-
nized as worth while ? Take, as a concrete
example, the most extreme case thinkable,
— or, letting the pragmatists choose for
us, consider the one Professor James has
selected as his favorite mark, — the " aseity "

42 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM?

of God.^ The choice was excellent for the
purpose, for it seems to interest but few, and
the name sounds remote and even absurd.
Yet there certainly have been many, and
still are some, who would genuinely like to
know whether there is a divine Being who
derives his existence from himself, or
whether everything in the universe, " God "
included, is bound on the weary wheel of
external derivation. And in spite of the
disrepute into which Scholasticism has
brought the subject, I think, on the whole,
nearly every one of us here would be more
genuinely interested in knowing about the
attributes of God than about the distances
between the fixed stars. Of course the dis-
cussion of these theological things is not reli-
gion. But to condemn all such discussion
because it is not this that "keeps religion
going" is like condemning astronomy be-
cause it does not give us light and heat.

^ Cf. James's California Address, yb«r. of Phil., Vol. I, pp.
680-681, and " Varieties of Religious Experience," pp. 445-
446.

MEANING AND METHOD 43

And, to conclude, the whole matter may be
put in the form of a dilemma : If, on the one
hand, the various questions which pragma-
tism would taboo are of genuine intellectual
interest to any one, they are, on pragmatist
principles, worth his investigation and dis-
cussion. And if, on the other hand, they
are not of interest to any one, it would seem
hardly pragmatic to spend breath, ink, and
time in attempting to prevent their investi-
gation.

If, therefore, the intellectual desire to
know be admitted as a pragmatic interest, I
cannot see that pragmatism helps us one
whit in the selection of our problems, — un-
less, indeed, we are to take seriously the
implication sometimes given by certain
pragmatist writers ; namely, that only those
topics are worth discussing which are to
their taste. This, for instance, is the im-
pression one gets on reading Papini, The
pragmatist, he tells us, will " not concern
himself with a large part of the classical
problems of metaphysics (in particular with

44 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM?

the universal and rational explanation of all
things), which are for him unreal problems
and devoid of meaning. . . . He will have
an antipathy for all forms of monism . . .
and for the ' reality ' of the ordinary man. . . .
For the pragmatist, no metaphysical hypoth-
esis is truer than another. He who feels the
need of having one may choose according to
his purposes and tastes."^ But in spite of
Papini, most pragmatists (including Papini
himself) have a metaphysic ; and certainly no
American or British pragmatist would take
seriously the suggestion one seems to get out
of the rather dogmatic article from which I
have just quoted — the suggestion, namely,
of an Index Expurgatorius, to be issued by
a pragmatic pope, proscribing all questions
which are not of interest to him.

It is disappointing indeed to come back
from our long search thus empty-handed.
But if we are to be honest with ourselves, I
think we must admit that pragmatism's

^ "Introduzione al Pragraatismo," Leonardo, February,
1907, pp. 28-30.

MEANING AND METHOD 45

much-vaunted method, if it is to save itself
from absurd dogmatism, really sifts down to
the following rather trifling rule : Never dis-
cuss a question which has absolutely no
interest and no meaning to any one. Prag-
matism's insistence upon the concrete and its
warnings against logomachy, I confess, are
admirable. And its view of meaning as de-
pendent on some 07tes experience seems
philosophically sound. But both of these
things are to be found in almost every school
of philosophy and are far too common to be
appropriated by any one group of thinkers
as their peculiar merit or message. And
when pragmatism attempts to go beyond
these somewhat commonplace precepts, it
lands in dogmatism and absurdity.

Meaning and method, however, are, after
all, but the beginning of pragmatism. Im-
portant as these are in judging it, its doc-
trine of truth is more vital still. It may be,
then, that here we shall find something both
unique and tenable, — a genuine and val-
uable contribution to philosophy and to

46 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM?

clear thinking. But " truth " is a large and
perplexing question (as you will soon see to
your sorrow), and the consideration of it
must therefore be postponed to the next
lecture.

LECTURE II
THE AMBIGUITY OF "TRUTH"

LECTURE II

THE AMBIGUITY OF "TRUTH"*

Pragmatism has been likened by one of
its foremost exponents to the corridor of a
hotel. It is a way of approach to a number
of diverse but related philosophic doctrines,
rather than itself a new philosophy. And
yet, in spite of the perfect intellectual free-
dom and non-conformity of the pragmatists,
all or nearly all of them would insist that
there are two or three important articles
of faith common to all pragmatist creeds ;
and that the most important of these is the
new meaning which pragmatism has given
to the word truth. This new theory of
truth is by far the most fundamental and
important doctrine yet proposed by the
new movement. It gives the point of view

^ Portions of this and the following lectures appeared in
the Jour, of Phil., Vol. IV, pp. 320-324, and Vol. V, pp.
122-131.

s 49

50 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM?

from which the pragmatist sees his world,
it is the center from which most of his
other doctrines take their start. It is, in
fact, even more Hke the corridor of a hotel
than pragmatism itself, — its doctrine of
meaning being the front steps. To get
at any of the other pragmatist doctrines
one must first of all pass these. The ques-
tion of truth, moreover, is even more impor-
tant than that of meaning, and is, in fact, the
most fundamental, the most crucial point
to be met with in the whole pragmatic prob-
lem, and a thorough understanding of it is
essential to all our subsequent studies. Prag-
matism stands or falls with its conception
of truth.

Before attempting an exposition of the
new meaning assigned to this word, how-
ever, it may be well to remind you (what
you undoubtedly know perfectly well) that
ever since Pilate's time the word truth
has been notoriously ambiguous. Stop
half a dozen men in the street and ask
them. What is truth .'' and you will prob-

THE AMBIGUITY OF "TRUTH" 5 1

ably get as many different answers. The
number of ways in which the word truth
may be used seems, however, to be reducible
to three, and a clear understanding of these
and of the distinctions between them is
absolutely indispensable to any one who
would thoroughly comprehend pragmatism.
This lecture, therefore, will be devoted to
an attempt to clear up this rather difficult
subject, and to explain some of the different
meanings given to the word truth — our
exposition and criticism of the more techni-
cal pragmatist use of the word being re-
served for the next lecture. The subject,
I say, may prove difficult ; yet I trust it
will not be hopelessly so. For it is my
firm belief that the difficulties which it
usually presents are almost entirely due to
a neglect of the distinctions referred to,
and to a constant and unconscious confusion
between the different senses of the word
truth.

The three different ways in which the
word truth is commonly used are, then, the

52 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM?

following: (i) as a synonym for "reality";
(2) as a synonym for known " fact " or
verified and accepted belief ; (3) as the
relation or quality belonging to an " idea "
which makes it " true " — its trueness. We
shall now consider each of these in their
order. '

The first of these uses is quite common
in popular speech. The word is thus em-
ployed as synonymous sometimes with the
whole of reality, more often with a part
only ; namely, that rather indefinite part
which in popular discourses is referred to
as Infinite, Eternal, Changeless, etc. Nor
is the identification of truth with reality
confined to popular speech ; philosophers
of the Platonic and Hegelian type — the
absolutists in general — have often a ten-
dency in this direction. Truth is thus re-
garded as " objective," " systematic," inde-
pendent of our human thinking, and as
really another name for ultimate reality.
This general position is maintained, for in-
stance, by Mr. Bradley and Mr. Joachim.

THE AMBIGUITY OF "TRUTH" 53

Thus in a recent article ^ Mr. Bradley tells
us that " Truth is the whole Universe realiz-
ing itself in one aspect." Truth and reality
must be identical, for were there any dif-
ference between them, truth would fall short
of reality and so fail to be true. Against
this view of truth pragmatism — using
especially the sword-like pen of Dr. Schiller,
— has done magnificent battle, and has,
in my opinion, come off with most of the
spoils of war. It has shown the confusion
which such a view brings into our termi-
nology, its lack of self-consistency, and the
almost inevitable skepticism consequent
upon it, owing to its " dehumanizing " of
truth.

In all this pragmatism is decidedly in the
right; for the philosophic identification of
truth with reality seems, to me at least, quite
untenable, and the popular use of the word
in this sense most unfortunate. Mr. Bradley
himself has shown that truth " in passing
over into reality" ceases to be mere truth

1 "On Truth and Copying," J/m^, April, 1907.

54 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM ?

and that "truth at once is and is not reality."
In short, this kind of reasoning, so far from
what Professor Dewey calls the concrete
situation, is most unsatisfactory and inevita-
bly develops its own destructive "dialectic."

Nor is the popular use of " truth " in the
sense of reality any more satisfactory, al-
though not open to the same logical criti-
cisms. Its tendency toward vagueness,
rhetoric, and a capital T ought to be enough
to condemn it in the eyes of all those who
would think clearly. To use the mildest of
epithets, it is at least exceedingly unfortu-
nate, both because of its haziness and also
because the word truth is badly needed else-
where,— a remark which applies to both the
popular and the philosophic use of the word
referred to. The English language is none
too rich in clear-cut philosophic terms, and
it is most unwise and most conducive to
ambiguity to use up a good word like truth
on something for which we already have
another good word, namely reality. For, of
course, if "truth" is to mean everything, it

THE AMBIGUITY OF "TRUTH" 55

will end by meaning nothing. In its attack
upon the identification of truth with reality,
pragmatism has, therefore, done a genuine
service to the cause of clear thinking.

The second general meaning commonly
applied to the word truth is perfectly clear-
cut, definite, and justifiable — its identifica-
tion, namely, with known fact^ with the true
and more or less completely verified beliefs
that go to make up the mass of human
knowledge. That twice two is four, that the
earth revolves upon its axis, that virtue is its
own reward, — these we speak of as " truths."
In like manner, we speak of the various
" truths " of science or of the body of moral
and religious '' truths." Or we may go still
further, and, combining all the general and
important facts known to the race, we may
speak of this whole as truth, — or even, if
you like, as Truth. A capital letter is no
serious danger if you keep your eyes open.
Only we must remember that here as else-
where eternal vigilance is the price of safety;
and the history of philosophy shows many

56 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM?

examples of the inherent human tendency
toward worship manifesting itself in an*
apotheosis of this very capital T. Thus it
has come about that the human element in
all the truth we know has often been quite
lost from sight. Now it may very well be that
there is an Absolute or Divine Mind, and that
in that Mind there exist all manner of truths
which have in them no human element. It is
far from my purpose to decry monism or abso-
lutism. But certain it is that the only truths
we know or ever can know contain ipso facto
a human element, and that this element can-
not be lightly despised. It is in the pointing
out of just this fact, in the emphasis laid upon
just this human side of human truth, that the
chief merit of pragmatism or humanism lies.
It may indeed be seriously questioned whether
the " intellectualists " in their treatment of
truth have so completely left out of account
its human side as they are accused of doing.
I know of few who maintain the existence
of "truth with no one thinking it," which
pragmatists often refer to as the type of

THE AMBIGUITY OF "TRUTH" 57

truth of the intellectuahsts. There are, to
be sure, a few EngHsh thinkers who hold
to that doctrine. But I should certainly
challenge the assertion that this is the dis-
tinctive doctrine of the non-pragmatist and
the consequent implication that in attacking
it pragmatism has been quite original. As
a non-pragmatist I repudiate any such
doctrine. " Discarnate truth," truths which
no one, not even an Absolute, thinks, like
Platonic Ideas in an abstract empyrean, are
as little to the taste of most non-pragmatists
as to that of James, Schiller, and Dewey.
And we have only sincere admiration for the
brilliant exposition given by them of the
contributions which we men make to our
own truth.

In his admirable paper on " The Ambigu-
ity of Truth," Dr. Schiller makes a useful
distinction between those beliefs which have
not yet been vindicated and those which
have been proved true. " If not all that
claims truth is true, must we not distinguish
this initial claim from whatever procedure

58 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM?

subsequently justifies or validates? Truth
therefore will become ambiguous. It will
mean primarily a claim which may or may
not turn out to be valid. It will mean,
secondarily, such a claim after it has been
tested and ratified, by processes which it be-
hooves us to examine. In the first sense,
as a claim, it will always have to be regarded
with suspicion. For we shall not know
whether it is really and fully true, and we
shall tend to reserve this honorable predicate
for what has victoriously sustained its
claim." ^ In other words, at least two things
are essential, according to the pragmatist,
for the definition of " a truth" in the full and
exact sense of the word : (i) it shall be a claim
which some one makes, a belief or judgment
which some one holds ; (2) it shall have been
validated and verified as true. A claim not
yet verified is not yet a truth, insists the prag-
matist. And, here though we might indeed
quarrel with him, we need not. There is of
course an obvious difference between a claim's

1 " Studies in Humanism," pp. 144-145.

THE AMBIGUITY OF "TRUTH" 59

being true and its being known as true ; and
hence, if one cared to do so, one might very
consistently maintain that a true claim is " a
truth " even if not yet verified. Such an ob-
jection to the pragmatist's definition, however,
would be largely verbal, and upon questions
of terminology either side may well make
concessions. It makes but little difference
whether we call a claim which is true but
unverified " a truth " or merely a true claim.
And as it is my earnest desire not to be
hypercritical but to go with the pragmatist
just as far as possible, I shall agree to define
" a truth " as a true claim that has been
verified.^

1 With this understanding of our terminology, therefore,
the non-pragmatist need not and does not insist on unverifi-
able truths, though he does insist that there may be and
doubtless are innumerable beliefs which are trite though as
yet unverified or even unverifiable. The failure to grasp this
distinction is the cause of Dr. Schiller's caricature of the non-
pragmatist position. Cf. his review of Professor James's
book in Mind, Vol. XVI, p. 600. The non-pragmatist is not
driven to assert " unknowables " in any other sense than that
there doubtless are many things in heaven and earth that we
can never know — an assertion which, I suppose, pragmatism
would hardly deny.

6o WHAT IS PRAGMATISM?

So much being agreed and understood, let
us now take a brief survey of the pragma-
tist's admirable description of the way our
truths originate and grow. In doing so, how-
ever, let me remind you of the importance
of keeping in mind constantly that here
there is as yet no question of the true-
ness of a claim or belief. The distinction
between "a truth" and the trueness of that
truth must never be lost from sight.

A large part of the writings of the three
leading pragmatists is taken up with admir-
able psychological descriptions of "the making
of truth." For being part of the content of
our minds, our truths have a natural history,
and the general course of their development
may be clearly traced. Each truth which you
or I possess originates and grows within
a perfectly concrete situation and is due to
perfectly definite conditions. Our beliefs
are intellectual tools which serve us in more
or less useful ways. The process by which
they get themselves verified and thus cease
to be mere claims and become truths, the

THE AMBIGUITY OF "TRUTH" 6 1

application of these " truths," and the modi-
fications they undergo, — all this can be
traced within the stream of consciousness as
concrete psychic fact. If now we ask our-
selves how, more in detail, our claims are
verified and proved true, we find that, if the
answer must be given in a single phrase, the
best way to describe what happens is to say
that those claims are accepted as truths which
work, which are useful, which combine har-
moniously with our previously accepted
truths. By their fruits ye shall know them.
As we never can get outside of our own ex-
perience and compare our truths with any-
thing beyond them, the best if not the only
test left us by which we may separate the
sheep from the goats, the potential truths
from the invalid claims, is to see which of
several possible combinations of claims is the
most self -consistent and inclusive ; or, if it be
a question of a single claim, to observe how
well it works, how far it aids in harmoniz-
ing all our experience. Thus when a jury is
weighing the two possible views of the evi-

62 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM?

dence presented respectively by the defense
and by the prosecution, what it is really
about is an endeavor to see which view is
most consistent with itself and which, at the
same time, is able to interpret and harmonize
the largest number of individual claims. Or
when a scientist is trying to decide whether
an hypothesis is true, his test is again the
question. How useful is it in harmonizing all
the accepted facts and leading the mind out
of its state of uncertainty to a feeling of in-
ner peace and intellectual satisfaction ? The
truth is that which works best, and that which
works best is the truth.

Successful working is therefore the tag or
ear-mark by which we distinguish the true
idea. But, as you doubtless perceive, this
only leads us to the more fundamental and
difficult question as to what we mean by the
idea's being true, the question of the nature
of the thing tagged or marked. For it is
clear enough that there is a difference be-
tween a thing and its tag, — between an
object and the sign which proves to us the

THE AMBIGUITY OF "TRUTH" 63

presence of that object. Although we have
been informed how to tell a true idea when
we happen upon one, we must still ask what
is meant by the truth of the idea, what it is
that the sign of it signifies. The distinction
between a thing and the evidence of it, be-
tween an object and its tag, is doubtless plain
as day to you all ; but as the distinction is an
extremely important one, and as it is often
overlooked, I shall, in good pragmatist fash-
ion, seek a concrete illustration of it from a
realm of practical life far removed from the
abstractions of philosophy. Let us, for ex-
ample, suppose that Mennen's face is, as he
says, upon every box of toilet powder made
by him. The presence of his face would,
then, be a good test by which to determine
whether in any given instance we have the
genuine article or not. But the important
thing about the powder, after all, is its own
nature and make-up rather than the pretty
picture associated with it ; and we should
hardly say that the contents of the box is
what it is because its cover bears the image

64 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM?

of Mennen's never-to-be-forgotten face. If a
pupil asks his teacher about a triangle, the
latter may refer him to page 52 of Loomis's
Geometry and page 63 of Wentworth's for a
diagram, and the pupil may learn to distin-
guish a triangle from a square in this way.
But even if the triangle were figured on no
other pages than these, one would not define
triangle as "the figure on pages 52 and 63,"
nor give this as the meanhig of the term.
In other words, the meaning or nature of a
material, a quality, a relation, is one thing;
the sign by which you make sure of its pres-
ence is another. And, in like manner (to
return to the question that immediately con-
cerns us), the ear-mark by which we have
now learned to tell a true idea from a false
one does not answer the further question,
what we mean by its being true. Doubtless
ideas are proved true by their consequences,
as the pragmatists say; but when we prove
them true, what are we proving ? What is it
that such a process of verification verifies ?
A mere psychological description of what

THE AMBIGUITY OF "TRUTH" 65

happens within our experience is obviously
here quite insufficient. And this brings us
to the third use of the word truth, the true-
ness of a belief. To put it tersely, then, what
do we mean when we say that an idea is
true ?

To this question there are certainly two
and possibly several quite distinct answers.
And it will throw light on the real meaning
of the answer which pragmatism gives if we
first consider the answer which pragmatism
rejects, — the interpretation, namely, given
by " common sense," or " intellectualism," or
" realism " (as you like). This interpretation
commonly goes under the name of the " cor-
respondence theory," and runs in brief some-
what as follows : The truth relation, or the
quality of trueness, is neither a part of our
thought or experience, nor a part of the other
reality to which our thought refers, but is
rather a relation between our thought and
its chosen object, between our idea or judg-
ment and the thing which it means. And
this relation is simply one of corresp07idence.

66 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM?

A caricature of the theory frequently set up
by its opponents maintains that correspo7idence
must mean copying, and that the thought
which thus "copies" reality is a sort of pho-
tograph of the original ; that we \\2mq. pictures
of things in our heads, and that if the pic-
tures are good pictures we have truth.

Now the upholder of the correspondence
theory will agree with his critics that the
copy theory as thus described would deserve
all the uncomplimentary epithets they are so
able in devising for it. Such a theory would
be both bad psychology and bad episte-
mology. For, in the first place, it is obvious
that the great majority of all those thoughts
which can be called either true or false are
not pictures ; and if they were, it is hard to
see how their simply being like external
things could make them true. A billiard
ball is not true, no matter how much it may
resemble another billiard ball. Two pains
are not true, though they be as like as two
peas. Whatever truth may be, it is at any
rate something more than chance resem-

THE AMBIGUITY OF "TRUTH" 67

blance. The knowing thought must mean
its object, must choose and adopt it, and once
it has done so no copying will be necessary.

The real common-sense theory, as I under-
stand it, may then be stated as follows :
" Truth," or the relation of " correspondence,"
means, not copying, but merely this simple
thing, that the object of which one is thinking
is as one thinks it. Or, to put the same
thing in other words, the truth or trueness of
an idea is its conformity to fact.

It would seem, oddly enough, that this
very obvious and natural explanation of the
meaning of the truth relation is the one
thing in the universe which is capable of
bringing together the absolutist and the
pragmatist. Deadly enemies at every other
point, they stand manfully shoulder to
shoulder in attacking the correspondence
theory. Whatever else truth may mean, they
are agreed it shall not mean this. For Mr.
Bradley it is far too simple, and for Professor
James, apparently, it is not simple enough.
In commenting upon the formulation of the

68 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM?

doctrine just given (that the object of which
one is thinking is as one thinks it), Professor
James finds the word " as " to be " anything
but simple." " What it most immediately
suggests," he continues, " is that the idea
should be like the object; but most of our
ideas, being abstract concepts, bear almost
no resemblance to their objects. ... I now
formally ask . . . what this ' as 'ness in itself
consists in — for it seems to me that it ought
to consist in something assignable and de-
scribable and not remain a pure mystery."^
Paulsen has somewhere remarked that
" the absurd has this advantage in common
with truth, that it cannot be refuted." And
it might be added that the most ultimately
simple expression of the commonest fact has
this disadvantage in common with the self-
contradictory, that it cannot be explained.
As Dr. Ewer has pointed out in connection
with this very question of Professor James's,
" We recognize similar questions about in-

1 " Professor Pratt on Truth," Jour, of Phil, Vol. IV,
pp. 466-467.

THE AMBIGUITY OF "TRUTH" 69

dubitable facts that have no answer: ' How
can a body move ? ' ' How can a body
exclude other bodies from the space it
occupies ? ' ' How can one event follow
another ? ' . . , To them no answers can
be given which do not contain the very
ideas of motion, temporal succession, etc.,
that are under fire. Details and accessories
of the process may be elucidated, but the
essential character is implied throughout."^
In short, it is the very simplicity of the re-
lation between our thought and the thing
of which we are thinking that makes it in-
capable of reduction to simpler terms. It
may be a " pure mystery " no doubt ; but if
so, then I ask in turn that something be
named me which is not a mystery. And
even if the nature of the case permitted my
accepting Professor James's challenge and
naming something else which "this 'as'ness
in itself consists in," he could again ask the
same question concerning this new thing,
and so ad infinitum.

i"The Anti-realistic 'How?'">«^- of Phil, Vol. IV,
p. 631.

70 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM?

But though I cannot analyze an ulti-
mately simple relation into its parts and
tell what ' as 'ness consists in, it will, I feel
sure, clear up the matter completely to the
non-pragmatic reader if I apply the corre-
spondence theory of truth to a concrete and
very commonplace example. John, let us
say, thinks Peter has a toothache ; the ob-
ject of John's thought is Peter's present
experience ; and as a fact Peter has a tooth-
ache. And John's thought is true, accord-
ing to the correspondence theory, because its
object is as he thinks it. That is what con-
stitutes it true, that is the meaning of its
trueness. And I confess it is impossible
for me to see how anything could be simpler
than this. To torture it into some sort of
mysterious and crude " copy theory," and to
insist upon further simplification and de-
mand what 'as 'ness consists in, seems to
me a manufacture of unnecessary difficulties.
At any rate, if this explanation of the mean-
ing of " true " be not simple and clear, I
despair of ever making anything clear to
philosophers.

THE AMBIGUITY OF "TRUTH" 7 1

But lack of simplicity is not the only
charge brought against the correspondence
theory by pragmatism. Leaving this ques-
tion to Professor James, Dr. Schiller attacks
it in two other quarters. In the first place
he tells us that this view of truth " speedily
leads us to a hopeless impasse once the
question is raised — How are we to know
whether our ' truth ' ' corresponds ' or
' agrees ' with its real object ? For to decide
this question must we not be able to com-
pare ' thought ' and ' reality,' and to contem-
plate each apart from the other } This,
however, seems impossible. ' Thought ' and
' reality ' cannot be got apart, and conse-
quently the doctrine of their ' correspond-
ence ' has in the end no meaning. We
are not aware of any reality except by its
representation in our ' thought ' and per
contra, the whole meaning of ' thought ' re-
sides ultimately in its reference to ' reality.' " '

By the above, Dr. Schiller can hardly
mean simply that all reality is some form

^ " Humanism," pp. 45-46.

72 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM?

of experience, for there is, of course, nothing
to prevent two independent experiences —
my thought and my neighbor's experience,
for instance — from corresponding (in the
sense defined above). More probably Dr.
Schiller means that we can never get imme-
diately at any reality but our own thought
or experience, that we can never get outside
of our own minds, and that every part of
reality which is to be directly grasped by
us must become part of our own experience ;
and that, hence, we are not able to compare
and contemplate thought and reality apart
from each other. If I am right in this in-
terpretation, then by saying, " Thought and
reality cannot be got apart," he means that
we cannot get them apart. Certainly this
is far from proving that they cannot be apart
and correspond, and that the " doctrine of
their correspondence has in the end no
meaning''' Its meaning is perfectly obvi-
ous — at least to every one whose eyes are
not afflicted with pragmatic cataracts. But,
to make it concrete, let us again take an ex-

THE AMBIGUITY OF "TRUTH" 73

ample. I am thinking, let us say, that my
friend B is in Constantinople. Let us say,
too, that though I am and remain without
any experience of Constantinople, my friend
B actually is there. Surely thought and
reality are here " apart " — though it remains
a fact that they cannot " be got apart," i.e.
by any individual human experience. Dr.
Schiller's argument would therefore seem to
prove nothing more than that if truth con-
sists in correspondence, it must transcend the
individual human mind — it must be a rela-
tion such that only one of its terms is in
the individual's experience ; which is exactly
what the upholders of the theory in question
have always maintained.

Dr. Schiller has, however, another objec-
tion to the doctrine of correspondence, —
namely, that if truth consists in this relation
we can never know whether in any given
case the correspondence holds or not ; we
shall never be able to tell whether a given
thought is true.

In answer to this an upholder of the old

74 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM?

theory might well respond : " What of it ?
Suppose this so ; would that make the na-
ture and meaning of truth as defined incon-
sistent or impossible ? " And here we come
upon a point of considerable importance —
the question, namely, whether my thought
can be true if I do not know it to be true.
On this the pragmatists seem to be divided.
Sometimes they admit that such a thought
would be true,^ sometimes they avoid the
issue,^ and sometimes they flatly deny the
possibility.^ This latter position seems to
rest upon a failure to distinguish between " a
truth," and the truth relation, the quality
of trueness or of being true. Granted that
a " claim " must be verified to become " a
truth," does it follow that there are no such
things as true though unverified claims ?
Surely the pragmatist would hesitate to call
all such claims false. And it is rather hard
to see how they could be neither true nor
false, though simple enough to understand
that (according to the useful though arbitrary
^ E.g. James. ^ E.g. Schiller. ^ £g^ Dewey and Schiller.

THE AMBIGUITY OF "TRUTH" 75

definition) they are as yet neither " truths "
nor falsehoods. It is therefore one thing to
have a true idea or make a vaHd claim, and
quite another to know that the idea is true
or the claim valid. Hence Dr. Schiller's as-
sertion that we cannot find out whether our
thought is true is utterly irrelevant to the
question what we mean by its being true.
The test of truth is one thing ; the nature
or meaning of truth quite another.

But it is not the case that on the corre-
spondence theory we cannot tell whether a
thought is true. To be sure, the shadow of
a very theoretical doubt may always be left
us in all matters outside of our immediate
here and now. The proofs that my friend B
is in Constantinople may be false, I may be
dreaming, this may be a solipsistic world,
etc. But such a doubt is so exceedingly theo-
retical that it ought to have no terrors for
any man — least of all for a pragmatist. If,
however, his pragmatic conscience is still un-
accountably troubled by so purely theoretic
and academic a question, let him tell us how

76 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM?

his theory of truth avoids the difficulty.
And to show that it is here no better off
than the much-reviled correspondence theory,
I need surely do no more than summon Pro-
fessor James as my witness. For in dealing
with this very question he writes, " If there is
to be truth, both realities and beliefs about
them must conspire to make it ; but whether
there ever is such a thing, or how any one
can be sure that his own beliefs possess it,
pragmatism never pretends to determine."^
— The fact is, as a practical matter, much the
same tests of truth hold, no matter what your
theory. If you grant that it is at all possible
for me to prove that Boston is in Massachu-
setts, that Caesar lived before Napoleon,
that my friend B is in Constantinople,
then on the correspondence theory as well
as on any other I can know that my thought
is true.

This being the case, it is really hard to
see why pragmatism has rejected it. The

1 " The Pragmatist Account of Truth," Phil. Rev., Vol.
XVII, p. 8.

THE AMBIGUITY OF ''TRUTH" 'J']

correspondence view of truth is perfectly con-
sistent with the humanistic attitude toward
truth and the making of truth. It not only
admits but insists that our human thought
is indispensable to the truth relation, and that
without it such a relation could not exist. It
is essentially realistic (which ought to please
pragmatism, for pragmatism at least pretends
to be realistic), and it combines more natu-
rally and easily with empiricism than with
rationalism. And it is glad to admit that
the way our ideas " work " in the broad sense
is one of the most important tests of their
being true. In spite of all this, however,
the leading pragmatists, one and all, refuse
to accept the theory, considering it either
quite inadequate or flatly meaningless and
false.

This is a fact which I wish especially to
emphasize. One frequently gets the impres-
sion from the writings of the pragmatists
that all they have done is innocently to call
attention to an obvious characteristic of the
truth relation, which their opponents have

7^ WHAT IS PRAGMATISM?

thereupon unaccountably and wickedly de-
nied, and that the latter are, therefore, at
all points the aggressors. As a fact, the
exact opposite of this is the case. No one,
so far as I know, denies the usefulness of
truth nor the value of successful working as
verification of the true idea. And if the
pragmatists had been satisfied with pointing
this out and with their further (rather con-
fusing and unwarranted) endeavor to identify
the word " truth " with " successful working,"
and had stopped there, no one would have
thought it worth while to dispute with them
over a matter which would obviously have
been one of terminology only. But they
have not stopped there; and the question at
issue is really one of fundamental importance
to clear thinking for the reason that the
pragmatists have not only appropriated the
word truth to their own meaning, but also
insist that the meaning which most other
philosophers have given to the word is no
meaning at all. It is they, therefore, rather
than the non-pragmatists, who are the real

THE AMBIGUITY OF "TRUTH" 79

aggressors and who refuse, rather intoler-
antly, to recognize the existence of any other
relation or characteristic of a true idea besides
that which they themselves designate by the
word truth. In one of his latest contribu-
tions to the subject, Professor James says of
the correspondence theory: "Surely this is
not a counter-theory of truth to ours. It is
the renunciation of all articulate theory. It
is but a claim to the right to call certain
ideas true anyhow; and this is what I meant
by saying that the anti-pragmatists offer us
no real alternative, and that our account is
literally the only positive theory extant." ^
Unconditional surrender, in other words, is
the only terms pragmatism will offer its
opponents ; and the non-pragmatist, no mat-
ter how peaceable his disposition, is thus
forced to take up arms in very self-defense.
This categorical denial by the pragmatists
that there is any meaning in the correspond-
ence theory must be kept constantly in mind

^ Review of Hebert's " Le Pragmatisme," Jour, of Phil.,
Vol. V, p. 692.

8o WHAT IS PRAGMATISM?

in our attempt to understand the theory (or
theories?) of the truth relation which they
propose in its place. This, however, is a
large question, and we must postpone con-
sideration of it to the next lecture.

LECTURE III

THE PRAGMATIC VIEW OF THE TRUTH
RELATION

LECTURE III

THE PRAGMATIC VIEW OF THE TRUTH
RELATION

No one can fully grasp the pragmatic
meaning of the truth relation without first
understanding the pragmatic view of the
nature of " a truth " or verified human claim
discussed in the last lecture. And the
reason is, as I shall try to show, that
the former grows out of the latter and is the
result of a complete confusion between the
two uses of the word truth. It is impossible
to read half a dozen pages of pragmatist
writing on this subject without coming upon
at least one, and usually many, instances of
utter failure to distinguish between " truth "
as known fact, or mental possession, and
"truth" as trueness or that quality or rela-
tion characterizing a true idea which makes
it true. I trust that by this time you all

83

84 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM?

are clear on this distinction and appreciate
its importance. For it is from a failure to
make this distinction that pragmatism has
fallen into the pitiful and unnecessary diffi-
culties, inconsistencies, and impossible situa-
tions, which I shall try to point out.

There are several roads by which pragma-
tism seems to have moved from its position
on the nature of " a truth " to the meaning
it has given to the truth relation. Of these
I shall point out two. (i) We have noted
the emphasis placed by pragmatists upon
the concrete, psychological nature of our
human truths. These do not, they insist,
dwell apart in a Platonic realm ; they are all
of them concrete mental facts, they are of
such stuff as dreams and feelings and sensa-
tions are made of. To banish the abstract
from philosophy so far as possible and to sub-
stitute for it the individual concrete in the
interests of clear thinking has been one of
the great and excellent aims of pragmatism.
What more natural, therefore, than to use
the same concrete method in dealing with

THE PRAGMATIC VIEW OF TRUTH 85

the further question of the trueness of ideas ?
If truth in this sense be a relation, it must,
insists the pragmatist, be a concrete relation.
In fact, long before pragmatism was heard of
Professor James sought in his " Principles of
Psychology " to interpret every relation con-
cretely so far as possible/ This principle
applied to the truth relation makes it no
mere correspondence as defined above, but
rather the chain or succession of things or
events or experiences that are to be found
either between an idea and its object or
between a judgment and its vindication.
Not only, therefore, is " a truth " concrete ;
pragmatism insists that its trueness also shall
be a concrete thing or group of things. It is
this chain of intermediating things or experi-
ences that not only proves it true but also
makes it true, and constitutes its truth. The
truth relation is therefore not " saltatory " but
"ambulatory " '^ — it consists not in the mere
fact that our object is there as we think it, but

^ See especially Vol. I, pp. 243 ff. ; Vol. II, pp. 148 ff.
3 « A Word more about Truth," Jour, of Phil., Vol. IV,
pp. 396 f.

86 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM?

in the actual experiential process of getting at
it or as near it as may be. " The links of ex-
perience sequent upon an idea, which mediate
between it and reality, form and, for the prag-
matist, indeed, are the co7tcrete relation of
truth that may obtain between the idea and
that reality. They, he says, are all that we
mean when we speak of the idea ' pointing '
to the reality, ' fitting ' it, ' corresponding '
with it or ' agreeing ' with it, — they and
other similar mediating trains of verifica-
tion. Such mediating events make the idea
' true.' The idea itself, if it exists at all, is
also a concrete event ; so that pragmatism
insists that truth in the singular is only a
collective name for truths in the plural,
these consisting always of series of definite
events." ^ I shall not at this point offer any
criticism of this view that true^iess is a collec-
tive name for concrete psychic truths, being
concerned here merely in pointing out this
first mode of transition from the latter to the
former.

1 " The Pragmatist Account of Truth," Phil. Rev., VoL
XVII, p. II.

THE PRAGMATIC VIEW OF TRUTH B>y

(2) Another road which has led the prag-
matist to the same result starts from the
view already dealt with that our " truths "
are made, that they begin as claims and are
verified within our experience, and that the
test of their verity is their working, their
consequences, their application. Now the
pragmatist contention that a claim must be
verified in order to become " a truth " is
neither novel nor open to any serious criti-
cism ; but the pragmatist takes it for granted
that once this is admitted it follows that the
claim is made true by being verified and that
its trueness consists in its verification.
Verification thereby ceases to be the pro-
cess of provmg an idea to be true and
becomes the process of making it true.
" Truths are logical values," says Dr. Schil-
ler ; and he adds, " It directly follows from
this definition of truth that all ' truths '
must be verified to be properly true. . . .
To become really true it has to be tested,
and it is tested by being applied. . . . The
truth of an assertion depends upon its appli-

88 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM?

cation. ... In short, truths must be used to
become true, and (in the end) to stay true." ^
Just how " it directly follows " " that all
truths must be verified to be properly true "
may not seem so obvious to us as it does to
Dr. Schiller ; for the premise to such a con-
clusion must evidently be that no belief can
be true unless it is known to be true, and
the logical consequence is, of course, that
there are no such things as true but unveri-
fied beliefs, and that before a belief is veri-
fied it is either false or else neither true nor
false.

Let me sum up this rather difficult point
in a few words. We all agree that verifica-
tion is essential to the making of a claim in-
to a truth ; but the pragmatist draws from
this the conclusion that the truth itrueness)
of the claim depends on and consists in its
verification. This, I maintain, is a flagrant
case of using the word truth in two per-
fectly distinct senses as if it meant the same
thing both times and as if it had but one

1 " Studies in Humanism," pp. 7-9.

THE PRAGMATIC VIEW OF TRUTH 89

meaning. It is a confusion between a
" truth " and " trueness," — a fallacy from
which flow, as will be seen, the most serious
consequences.

Or, to put the same thing in another
light, the claim being proved true by its
working, by its consequences, it is said to be
made true (notice, not made " a truth " but
made trtie) by these consequences. Its true-
ness thus consists in these consequences.
" The truth (validity) of a truth (claim), "
says Schiller, "is tested and established by
the value of its consequences."^ This sen-
tence is perfectly harmless, but the pragma-
tist does not stop here. From it he deduces
the rather amazing conclusion that since its
usefulness proves it true, its trueness con-
sists in its being useful. The test of truth
and the meaning of truth are thus com-
pletely identified.

So much for pragmatism's roads of ap-
proach to its final view of the truth relation.
And now, lest I should unwittingly misrep-
* " Studies in Humanism," p. 160.

9b WHAT IS PRAGMATISM?

resent that view, let the three great prag-
matists speak for it : —

Professor James : " Theoretical truth is
no relation between our mind and the arche-
typal reality. It falls within the mind, be-
ing the accord of some of its processes and
objects with other processes and objects."^
" Truth happens to an idea. It becomes
true, is made true by events. Its verity is
in fact an event, a process; the process,
namely, of its verifying itself, its wen-Jicalion.
Its validity is the process of its w^Wd-ation."^
" The truth of our beliefs consists in general
in their giving satisfaction."^ "The links
of experience sequent upon an idea, which
mediate between it and a reality, form, and
for the pragmatist, indeed, are the concrete re-
lation of truth. . . . Such mediating events
make the idea true."^ "The truth relation
is a definitely experienceable relation. . . .
The relation to its object that makes an idea

* " Humanism and Truth once More," Mind, Vol. XIV,
p. 198. ^ "Pragmatism," p. 201.

8 "The Pragmatist Account of Truth," Phil. Rev.^ Vol.
XVII, p. 5. * /did., p. II.

THE PRAGMATIC VIEW OF TRUTH 9 1

true in any given instance is, we say, em-
bodied in intermediate details of reality
which lead towards the object, which vary
in every instance, and which in every in-
stance can be concretely traced. The chain
of workings which an idea sets up is the opin-
ion's truth, falsity, or irrelevancy, as the case
may be. . . . These 'workings' differ in
every single instance, they never transcend
experience, they consist of particulars, men-
tal or sensible, and they admit of con-
crete description in every individual case.
Pragmatists are unable to see what you can
possibly mea7i by calling an idea true, unless
you mean that between it as a terminus a
quo in some one's mind and some particular
reality as a terminus ad quem, such concrete
workings do or may intervene. Their direc-
tion constitutes the idea's reference to that
reality, their satisfactoriness constitutes its
adaptation thereto, and the two things to-
gether constitute the ' truth ' of the idea for
its possessor. " ^

1 Hubert's " Le Pragmatisme," Jour, of Phil.^ Vol. V,
pp. 691-692.

92 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM?

Dr. Schiller : Truth is " a function of our
intellectual activity or a manipulation of our
objects which turns out to be useful."^
While some truths may be conceived as cor-
respondences or agreements, this is only
on condition " that these processes remain
strictly immanent in human knowing."
They are " valuable and serviceable cross-
references which obtain withi7t our expe-
rience." ^ " All truths must be verified to be
properly true." ^ " If truth could win no
recognition, it would so far not work, and
so fail to be true." ^

Professor Dewey : " Truth is an expe-
rienced^ relation of characteristic quality of
things, and it has no meaning outside of
such [experienced] relation." ® " From this
[the pragmatic] point of view verification
and truth are two names for the same thing."

^ " Humanism," p. 6i.

2 « Mr. Bradley's Theory of Truth," Mind, Vol. XVI,
p. 404. ^ " Studies in Humanism," p. 8.

* Ibid., p. 70. * Italics mine.

« "The Experimental Theory of Knowledge," Mind^ Vol.
XV, p. 305.

THE PRAGMATIC VIEW OF TRUTH 93

As an illustration, Professor Dewey cites an
idea that a certain noise comes from a street
car; this idea being investigated and verified
becomes true. Had it not been verified it
never would have been true, — even if as a
fact the noise had really come from the car.
To say that the idea was true before it was
verified is, he insists, either tautologous (" be-
ing just a restatement of the fact that the
idea has, as a matter of fact, worked success-
fully "), or else, in any other sense, it is sim-
ply false. Exactly speaking, the idea is not
true till it works out, for its working and its
truth are identical. " What the experimen-
talist means is that the effective working of
the idea and its truth are one and the same
thing — this working being neither the cause
nor the evidence of truth but its nature." ^

To give a fair presentation of the prag-
matist view of truth, however, I must add
that throughout the writings of Professor
James — and more especially in what he

^ " Reality and the Criterion of Truth for Ideas," Mind,
Vol. XVI, pp. 335-337-

94 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM?

has published since the appearance of his
" Pragmatism " — there runs, parallel with
the view expressed above, a different and
decidedly less radical description of the na-
ture of the truth relation.^ Thus verifiability
is often spoken of as being as good as veri-
fication. And in the Journal of PJiilosophy
for August 15, 1907, he writes, "Truth is
essentially a relation between two things, an
idea, on the one hand, and a reality outside
of the idea, on the other. This relation, like
all relations, has its fundamentum^ namely
the matrix of experiential circumstance, psy-
chological as well as physical, in which the
correlated terms are found embedded. . . .
What constitutes the relation known as truth,
I now say, is just the existence in tJie empiri-
cal world of this fundamentum of circum-
stance surrounding object and idea and ready

^ I should add, however, that in his latest treatment of the
subject, namely in his review of Hubert's recent book on
Pragmatism, Professor James seems to have returned part
way to the more radical view, while still maintaining the
reality and independence of the object. See the Jour, of
Phil, for December 3, 1908.

THE PRAGMATIC VIEW OF TRUTH 95

to be either short-circuited or traversed at
full length. So long as it exists and a satis-
factory passage through it between the object
and the idea is possible, that idea will both
be true, and will have been true of that
object, whether fully developed verification
has taken place or not. The nature and
place and affinities of the object, of course,
play as vital a part in making the particular
passage possible as do the nature and associ-
ative tendencies of the idea; so that the
notion that truth could fall altogether inside
of the thinker's experience and be something
purely psychological is absurd." And in a
more recent article,^ while still maintaining
that the truth relation must be a chain of
" concrete " links, he comes still closer to the
correspondence theory. " The pragmatizing
epistemologist posits a reality and a mind
with ideas. What now, he asks, can make
those ideas true of that reality? Ordinary
epistemology contents itself with the vague

1 " The Pragmatist Account of Truth," Phil. Rev., Vol-
XVII, pp. 1-17.

96 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM?

statement that the ideas must 'correspond'
or ' agree ' ; the pragmatist insists upon being
more concrete and asks what such agreement
may mean in detail. He finds first that the
ideas must point to or lead towards that
reality and no other, and then that the point-
ings and leadings must yield satisfaction as
their result." " The pragmatist calls satisfac-
tions indispensable for truth-building, but ex-
pressly calls them insufficient unless reality
be also incidentally led to. If the reality he
assumed were canceled from his universe of
discourse, he would straightway give the
name of falsehoods to the beliefs remaining
in spite of all their satisfactoriness. For him,
as for his critic, there can be no truth if there
is nothing to be true about. Ideas are so
much flat psychological surface unless some
mirrored matter gives them cognitive luster."
" Ideas are practically useful which we can
verify by the sum total of all their leadings,
and the reality of whose objects may thus be
considered established beyond doubt. That
these ideas should be true in advance of and

THE PRAGMATIC VIEW OF TRUTH 97

apart from their utility, that, in other words,
their objects should be really there, is the
very condition of their having that kind of
utility." And even in his "Pragmatism"
Professor James in one place writes, "When
new experiences lead to retrospective judg-
ments, using the past tense, what these judg-
ments utter was true, even though no past
thinker had been led there." ^

How far Dr. Schiller goes with Professor
James in his modified view of truth, I am
unable to say. Professor James insists that
he and Schiller agree absolutely on the sub-
ject.^ Yet it is certainly very difficult to find
in any of Dr. Schiller's writings anything
comparable in explicitness to the expressions
just quoted from Professor James. And Pro-
fessor Dewey certainly stands firmly on the
expressions quoted from him and remains
always consistently radical.

After listening to the quotations I have
just read you from the three leading prag-

1 p. 223.

"^ See his review of Hubert's " Le Pragmatisme," in the
Jour, of Phil., Vol. V, pp. 693-694.

98 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM?

matists, you may understand why the critics
of pragmatism have been so constantly —
and justly! — accused of misunderstanding
it.

And I am free to confess that it is beyond
my power to formulate, on the basis of what
the pragmatists have written, a single con-
sistent and harmonious pragmatic doctrine
concerning the nature of the truth relation.
The best I can do for pragmatism is to make
two doctrines of truth out of the expressions
quoted above ; and, indeed, it must be evident
to you all that we have here two quite dis-
tinct views — one radical and one somewhat
modified — as to the meaning of truth. The
former of these holds that truth is the pro-
cess of verification which goes on within
experience ; that it consists in the successful
working of the idea, in the concrete steps
within consciousness that lead from the
unverified claim to the full and satisfying
assurance of its " goodness." The modified
view, on the other hand, maintains that there
are two factors which go to make up the

THE PRAGMATIC VIEW OF TRUTH 99

trueness of an idea: namely, (i) the concrete
steps of its leading and the subjective satis-
factions resulting (as described by the radical
view) ; and also (2) the actual presence in
reahty of the object which the idea means.
Let us note a little more in detail three of
the most important differences between these
two views.

(i) The most obvious difference is the
recognition found in the more moderate view
that it is indispensable for the trueness of an
idea that its object should really " be there." ^
Truth thus ceases to be " wholly within our
experience," or "an experienced relation,"
and becomes instead a relation which com-
pletely transcends (or may transcend) any
single finite experience. It is not merely
a " process " nor a felt " leading " from one
part of our experience to another. It is no
more psychical than physical in its nature.
It is a relation between an idea and a reality

1 Numerous expressions of the moderate pragmatist show
that by the object's being really "there" he means not only
that the object exists but that it exists independently of the
individual's experience, and (at times) outside of it.

lOO WHAT IS PRAGMATISM?

which may be " beyond the direct experience
of the particular cognizer," ^ a relation which,
apparently, no one short of a Roycean Ab-
solute need ever experience. It must be
evident to all how completely this differs
from the radical view which takes no note
of any reality outside the individual's expe-
rience as essential to truth, and which
makes truth wholly a process within expe-
rience. And this brings us to the second
difference between the two theories.

(2) Since the modified view of truth rec-
ognizes an outer reality as relevant and es-
sential, it can and does maintain that an idea
may be true before it is verified, whereas the
radical view insists that truth consists in the
actual process of verification, and that, hence,
the idea is not true till so proved. Thus we
have here another case of flat contradiction,
Professor Dewey saying that the idea is not
true before verified, and Professor James say-
ing that it is. A less obvious but equally

^ Professor James in the Jour, of Phil., Vol. IV, p. 403,
note.

THE PRAGMATIC VIEW OF TRUTH lOI

important phase of this same disagreement
is the question of verifiabihty. Professor
Dewey and the left wing maintain, as has
been seen, that actual verification is essential
to truth ; Professor James and the right wing
maintain that verifiabihty is quite sufficient;
while the center, under both Dr. Schiller and
Professor James, insists that after all there
isn't any real difference between the meanings
of these two words. Whether there is such a
difference or not, I must leave to your judg-
ment. For my own part, I had always sup-
posed there was the same difference as that
between mere possibility and the concrete
process of making the possibility an actuality;
and I had also thought that this was a real
difference. Columbus's idea that he could
cross the Atlantic was merely verifiable so
long as he stayed in Spain, and this its quality
of verifiabihty (which it already possessed
while he was still in Spain), had always seemed
to me quite a different thing from the concrete
steps of getting ships, manning them, hoist-
ing anchor and raising sail and all the other

I02 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM?

links in the chain of actual verification.
And it must, I think, be evident to all who
are not pragmatists that it is one thing to say
the full process of verification is essential to
truth and a very different thing to say that
verifiability alone is essential. For verifia-
bility is not a process nor a succession of
events in time, it is not included within any
one's experience, but is a general condition
or set of conditions which transcends every
single finite experience. It is not a felt
"leading," it is not a "form of the good," nor
a "satisfactory working," nor any other ex-
perience or experience-process. It is, if you
like, the possibility of these, but it is not
these. It is a totality of relations which are
not, and will never be, within any finite ex-
perience. It is a present condition of the
idea, not something that " happens to " it.
It is not " made " ; it is already there. It is
immeasurably more harmonious with the
correspondence theory of truth than with
that of radical pragmatism. The harmony
which Dr. Schiller has brought about be-

J

THE PRAGMATIC VIEW OF TRUTH 103

tween verification and verifiability is of the
same sort that usually obtains between the
lion and the lamb when they lie down to-
gether. " It is," he tells us, " impossible to
separate verifiability from verification — the
potentiality does not exist apart from the ac-
tuality from which it is an ex post facto in-
ference. A claim to truth, therefore, can
only be regarded as verifiable on the strength
of past experiences of verifications, and a
' verifiable ' truth which is never verified is
really unverifiable." ^ It would seem, thus,
that the reason why verification and verifia-
bility cannot be separated is the same that
makes it impossible to separate the lion and
the lamb after they have lain down together.
It is, therefore, obvious why Dr. Schiller in-
sists that there is no difference between the
two; to his pragmatic mind there really is

1 "Ultima Ratio?" Jour, of Phil., Vol. IV, p. 493, note.
The non-pragmatist, of course, agrees with Schiller that a po-
tentiality cannot exist apart from an actuality, but he insists
that the actuality which makes an idea verifiable is not actual
verification, but the existing condition of relevant reality, the
nature of the fact in question and the idea's conformity to
that fact.

I04 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM ?

no such thing as verifiability, it having been
completely swallowed by verification. All
of which is new evidence of the great differ-
ence between the view that considers mere
verifiability without verification sufficient for
truth and that which insists that actual veri-
fication is essential.

(3) The third difference between the left
and right wings of pragmatism is hardly
more than a variant on the second, and yet
deserves especial notice. It is, namely, con-
cerned with the question of the " successful
working," or the " consequences," of an idea.
Radical pragmatism maintains that these not
only prove the idea true, but make it true and
constitute its truth. Modified pragmatism
denies the latter statement. Professor Dewey
says, " The effective working of the idea
and its truth are one and the same thing
— this working being neither the cause nor
the evidence of truth but its nature." Pro-
fessor James says, " That these ideas {i£.
useful ideas) should be true in advance of
and apart from their utility, that, in other

THE PRAGMATIC VIEW OF TRUTH 105

words, their objects should be really there,
is the very condition of their having that
kind of utility." In other words, to put it
briefly, the left wing of pragmatism main-
tains that ideas are true because they are
useful ; the right wing maintains that they
are useful because they are true.

Let us now examine more in detail this
modified form of the pragmatic doctrine.
In the first place, it is obvious that this is
an attempt to steer a middle course between
radical pragmatism and the old correspond-
ence theory. It has sought for a combi-
nation of pragmatism and common sense as
a sort of golden mean. The result has
been, on the one hand, that it has avoided
some of the difficult positions of the radical
form ; but, on the other hand, it is question-
able whether it has not sought to reconcile
several things which are quite irreconcilable.
It would seem to be trying that notoriously
difficult feat of eating one's cake and keep-
ing it too. Thus it is hard to see how
" satisfactions " and the concrete " links of

I06 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM?

experience " are " indispensable " to truth, if
at the same time an idea can be true in ad-
vance of and apart from these satisfactions
and Hnks of experience.

The modified pragmatist view would
therefore seem to be open to two different
interpretations, according to which of its
two seemingly inconsistent factors one
chooses to emphasize as the essential part.
If one emphasizes the assertion that the
idea is true before it is verified, that its
truth consists just in the existence of the
relation between it and its object even if
this be " short-circuited," and that it is its
truth that makes it useful rather than its
usefulness that makes it true, it is indeed
no longer subject to criticism, because it
has simply turned into the old correspond-
ence theory under a new name. All that
was distinctive in it has evaporated, and all
that remains is the name " pragmatic " —
like the grin on the face of Alice's Cheshire
cat after the face of the cat had faded
away. But if, on the other hand, we choose

THE PRAGMATIC VIEW OF TRUTH 107

to say that the indispensability of the sat-
isfactions and of the concrete Hnks of ex-
perience forms the essential part of the
doctrine, then we shall have avoided the
frying pan, indeed, but only to fall danger-
ously near the fire. There will, of course,
still be this difference between moderate
and radical pragmatism : that for the former
the object must really " be there " and that
the satisfactions, etc., though indispensable,
will not be sufficient. Yet, if these satis-
factions are really indispensable, a belief
which is verifiable but not yet verified is
not true. My idea that my friend is in
Constantinople will not be a true idea (even
if as a fact he is there) until I have actu-
ally gone through the links of concrete ex-
perience which verify it and actually have
the satisfactions which witness to its truth.
Truth and the test of truth will thus still
be largely confused ; the proof of a propo-
sition will form at least a part of its true-
ness. This doctrine, therefore, though
differing in some details from the radical

Io8 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM?

pragmatism of Professor Dewey, will still
be subject to most of the criticisms to which
the latter view (as Professor James himself,
apparently, sees perfectly well) is so manifest
a mark. Hence, modified pragmatism must
either return to the much-abused correspon-
dence theory or else accept most of the
absurd consequences to which radical prag-
matism will lead us. I see no way of avoiding
this dilemma. To stick to both interpreta-
tions and to use the word truth in " this large
loose way " is to contradict oneself. One can-
not long ride upon two horses going in op-
posite directions ; one must choose between
them — or fall between them. Here as else-
where it will ultimately prove impossible to
run with the hare and hunt with the hounds.
We come now at last to a closer examina-
tion of the more radical pragmatic view
of the truth relation. And to understand
it thoroughly we must first notice a cer-
tain peculiarity in the use of the important
word idea which will go far to explain
the rather startling conclusion as to the

THE PRAGMATIC VIEW OF TRUTH IO9

nature of truth to which it comes. When
one first dips into the literature of pragma-
tism, one is somewhat mystified by recurrent
phrases such as " the efficient working of
an idea," " the idea's leading," etc. The
various uses of this phrase point, I think,
to an important difference in the intellectual-
istic and the pragmatic meaning of " idea "
in connection with the truth problem. To
the pragmatist the word idea means any
representative content that leads to action
or helps to bring order into a given situa-
tion. Hence Professor Dewey's synonym
for it — namely, " plan of action." Thus
the important thing about an idea to the
pragmatist is, not its present relation to its
object, but its influence upon conduct, its
motive power or guiding force. Starting
from the biological view of mind, the prag-
matist insists that the purpose of thought
is, not the acquisition of " truth," but the
useful reaction of the organism upon the
environment. Our "ideas" are thus essen-
tially tools by which to handle and to

no WHAT IS PRAGMATISM?

mold our experience. In short, they are
to the pragmatist, as I have said, not so
much beHefs or judgments as "plans of
action." From this it follows naturally and
almost inevitably that if the term truth is
to be applied to such " ideas," it cannot be
in the sense of " correspondence " as de-
fined above.^ As " a plan of action " is
not an assertion about something outside
our experience, but a way of grouping our
data or guiding our conduct, it cannot, of
course, be maintained that its "truth" depends
upon its relation to some outer reality.
One indeed may wonder that the word
truth should be applied to it at all, but once
so applied it is evident that there is nothing
for it to mean but usefulness and successful
action. A true idea in this sense is there-
fore one that works. This is especially
manifest in the case of the laws of science,
and I believe it was partly in this connection
that the pragmatic identification of truth with
usefulness first suggested itself. In so far as

^ See p. 67

THE PRAGMATIC VIEW OF TRUTH III

a scientific law is a mere short-hand expres-
sion for our experience, a mere formula for
the condensed description of perceptions, its
truth may be said to consist in its work-
ing.^ In short, if an hypothesis proves
itself a useful tool, it is forthwith called
true, — true, that is, for immediate practical
purposes, — and thus truth comes to be re-
garded as merely a "form of the good."
As an example, Professor Dewey speaks of
the invention of the telephone as a plan
of action or idea that worked itself out, i.e.
proved itself " true." And it is evident
that if the word trtie is to be applied to
inventions and similar plans of action at all,
their " truth " is indeed " wholly an affair
of making them true."

Before entering any criticism upon this
view we must first note, for the sake of
our own comprehension of the subject, the

^ A deeper reflection, however, will inevitably raise the
question why it works, and this can hardly be answered with-
out reference to an environing reality ; and thus we shall be
brought back to the stricter sense of truth and the correspond-
ence theory.

112 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM?

decidedly different meaning given to "idea"
by the non-pragmatist. When the non-
pragmatist says an " idea " is true, he uses
the word to mean, not a plan of action,
but a judgment. To him an idea which
is not a judgment but is a mere image or
plan or formula may lead in what direction
it likes, it may be useful, successful, satis-
factory, or their opposites, it may have
any function you will, but it is not in the
category of things that can be either true
or false. In Bosanquet's words, "truth and
falsehood are coextensive with judgment."^
This being the case, the non-pragmatist
does not and cannot consider " true " a
predicate of the same kind as " benevolent "
or " luminous " or " good " (as the pragma-
tist suggests), nor can he identify " truth " (in
the sense of trueness) with a " function " or
" leading " or " process."

And now to return to the pragmatist
use of the word. Granted that, if the
term truth is to be applied to a plan

^ " Logic," Vol. I, p. 72.

THE PRAGMATIC VIEW OF TRUTH I13

or purpose at all, it may as well mean
successful execution as anything else, is
not the use of the word in this connec-
tion, to say the least, unnatural and unnec-
essarily confusing? An invention may be
useful and may work and be successful,
my plan to go downtown may be wise and
good, but to call either of them true would
seem to be a step toward the invention of
a new language.

And in spite of the undoubted truth in
the biological view of mind, in spite of the
fact that all ideas in some sense work them-
selves out, it is not true that all " ideas,"
judgments included, are merely plans of
action. A judgment has at least two differ-
ent aspects. From one point of view it is
indeed a motor idea which influences con-
duct and works itself out. From another
point of view it is an assertion about some
reality not itself, and between it and that
reality there is a relation which simply is not
to be identified with the results of the judg-
ment. This distinction between the two

114 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM?

aspects of a judgment, or between judgments
and plans of action, seems to be quite
overlooked by thinkers of widely different
schools — e.g. by Professor Dewey, on the
one hand, and Professor Royce,^ on the other.
These writers often deal with the subject of
truth as if there were no distinction between
judgment and purpose. Thus Professor
Dewey tries to interpret judgments as plans
of action by saying " the agreement, corre-
spondence, is between purpose, plan, and its
own execution, fulfillment."^ But take any
ordinary judgment such as " The sun is shin-
ing," or " The Greeks defeated the Persians

^ Professor Moore has conclusively shown that if " idea "
be taken to mean purpose, as Royce insists it shall, then the
"truth" of an idea must be the fulfillment of the purpose
within our experience, and not (as Royce says) the "corre-
spondence between our ideas and their objects." To reach
any relation between an idea and a reality outside of one's
private stream of consciousness, Royce has practically to give
up the purposive function of ideas as their most essential
characteristic, and to speak of them as representative. See
"The World and the Individual," Lectures I, VII, and VIII,
and Moore's " Some Logical Aspects of Purpose," in " Studies
in Logical Theory," pp. 341-382.

2 " The Control of Ideas by Facts," >«r. of Phil., Vol. IV,
p. 202.

THE PRAGMATIC VIEW OF TRUTH II5

at Salamis." Where, in this case, is the plan
and where the fulfillment? Or take at ran-
dom any judgment from Professor Dewey's
writings — for example, this, " Reality as such
is an entire situation." How can this, at
least without much forced and unnatural in-
terpretation, be called ""apian of actio^i'"}
To reduce all judgments to plans of action,
to add that plans of action are true because
they work, and to conclude that therefore
the truth of a judgment consists in its work-
ing is hardly a cogent syllogism.

We come now to our final evaluation of
the radical pragmatic view of the truth rela-
tion. For the radical pragmatist, truth is to
be identified with " the psychological or bio-
logical processes by which it is pursued and
attained." ^ " The effective working of the
idea and its truth are one and the same
thing," for it is "an experienced relation."
The truth of an idea is " an event, a process,
the process, namely, of its verifying itself, its
verification."

^Professor Montague in the/our. of Phil., Vol. IV, p. 100.

Il6 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM?

One here feels tempted to ask : If truth be
really identical with its proof, if it be nothing
but the process of its verification, or the pro-
cesses by which it is pursued and attained,
what is it that is proved and verified, what is
it that is pursued and attained? Are we
verifying verification and pursuing pursuit ?
This indeed sounds like logomachy, but it
really is not. For surely verification is veri-
fication of something. If you say it is the
verification of the idea, just what do you
mean .? Certainly not the verification of the
idea as a mere psychical existent. It must
be, if it is anything at all, the verification of
the idea's trueness, the demonstration that
its claim is a rightful claim — is a rightful
claim, mind you, not will be rightful. Here,
let us say, is an assertion. As yet it is a
mere claim. But it claims to be true — ue.
it claims that it is true. Now you verify it.
It thereby becomes " a truth," but what you
have verified is that it was true already.
The very fact, therefore, that you verify pre-
supposes that the trueness of the assertion or

THE PRAGMATIC VIEW OF TRUTH I17

claim is something prior to and independent
of its verification. The very use of the
words veriJicatio7i and proof presupposes
that truth is something distinct from any
process of proof. Thus, though pragmatism
may properly speak of successful and satis-
factory experiences, it is hard to see how it
can consistently use the term verification at
all. To me, at least, it would seem as easy to
lift oneself by one's boot straps as to compre-
hend how truth can consist in the process of
its own verification, or how it (or anything
else, for that matter) can be " the processes
by which it is pursued and attained."

And now, to make matters perfectly clear,
let us apply to this radical pragmatic mean-
ing of truth the same illustration which was
used in the preceding lecture to bring out
the exact meaning of the correspondence
theory. Poor Peter, you will remember, has
a toothache, and John, who is thinking
about his friend, has an idea that Peter has
a toothache. As for the pragmatist the
truth of an idea means its "efficient work-

Il8 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM?

ing," its " satisfactoriness, " " the process of
its verification," the truth of John's idea will
" consist in " its satisfactoriness to John, in
its efficient working, in its verifying itself.
If it works, if it harmonizes with John's later
experiences of Peter's actions, if it leads in a
direction that is worth while, it is true (a
statement to which, indeed, all might assent),
and its truth consists in this working, this
harmony, this verification process. John's
thought, the pragmatist insists, becomes true
only when it has worked out successfully,
only when his later experience confirms it
by being consistent with it, — for remember,
truth is not verifiability, but the process of
verification. "Truth happens to an idea.
It becomes true, is macte true by events. "
At the time when John had the thought
about Peter the thought was neither true
nor false, for the process of verification had
not yet begun, nothing had as yet happened
to the idea. To be sure, Peter had a tooth-
ache, just as John thought, but, all the same,
John's thought was not true. It did not

THE PRAGMATIC VIEW OF TRUTH 1 19

become true until several hours afterward, —
in fact, we may suppose, not until Peter,
having cured his toothache, told John about
it. The thought, " Peter has a toothache, "
thus, as it happens, turns out not to have
been true while Peter actually had the
toothache, and to have become true only
after he had ceased to have a toothache. It
became true only by being proved true, and
its truth consisted in the process of its proof.
One might, perhaps, be tempted to ask what
it was that was proved, and to say to the
pragmatist. Either the satisfactoriness, the
successful leading, is a proof of something
outside of John's immediate experience,
something by which his idea is to be judged
and justified (in which case truth ceases to
be a mere verification process and becomes
at least verifiability) ; or else it is merely
John's subjective feeling of satisfaction and
of successful leading and consistency, with no
reference to anything else to justify it, — in
which case it may indeed be pleasant and
" good, " but it is hard to see why it should

I20 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM?

be called true. For suppose that at the
same time with John's thought, Tom thinks
Peter has not a toothache. Suppose that,
being a little stupid and perhaps a little hard
of hearing, he misinterprets John's actions
and expressions, and that later on he is as-
sured by some one equally misinformed that
Peter certainly had no toothache. His
thought thus works out, is successful, har-
monizes with his later experience, is to
him genuinely verified. The whole matter
ends here, and he drops the question com-
pletely, never investigating further. Were
the thoughts of both John and Tom true.?
Now it will not do to respond, " No ;
Tom's thought was 7iot genumely verified.
Only that thought was really verified and
therefore true which would have worked out
had both been investigated sufficiently. "
For what do you mean by "'sufficiently'"}
Sufficiently for what } To argue thus would
be to presuppose a criterion (apart from
the leading of the thought) to which
the thought must correspond if it is to

THE PRAGMATIC VIEW OF TRUTH 121

be true. If you distinguish between a
"genuine " verification and one that is only
subjectively satisfactory, you appeal to some
other criterion than the process of verifica-
tion — in other words, you go over to the non-
pragmatist's point of view. If, on the other
hand, you stick to your pragmatic criterion
and say that the truth of the thought con-
sists in its actual satisfactoriness, then the
question becomes pertinent: Were the
thoughts of both boys true ? Obviously
they were, for both worked, both were satisfac-
tory, both were verified. Hence it was true
at the same time and in the same sense that
Peter had a toothache and that Peter had
not a toothache. Nor is there anything
surprising in this, if truth be nothing but a
particular kind of satisfactory experience.
The principle of contradiction has no mean-
ing and can no longer hold if truth be alto-
gether within one's experience.

To set the problem in another light, let
me put the following dilemma : Either there
is a real and relevant world outside of your

122 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM?

private stream of consciousness, — it may be
a material world or one made up of other
selves, — or else there is no such world and
you need reckon only with your own private
experiences. If you admit that this outer
world exists and that you judge about the
things or persons in it, you must also admit
that the relation between these things or
persons and your judgments of them is a
fact which deserves to be recognized, and
that, in one sense at least, the validity of
your judgments depends on this relation.
You may call this relation truth or reserve
the term truth for something else, as you
like; but, aside from terminology, once you
recognize this relation and its bearing upon
your judgments, you have essentially ac-
cepted the non-pragmatist's position. On
the other hand, deny the existence of this
relation and its relevancy to your judgments,
and you either deny that there is any world
outside your own conscious experience, or
else you afifirm that if such a world there
be, it is nothing and never can be anything

THE PRAGMATIC VIEW OF TRUTH 123

to you. And when you have done this, how
far are you from soHpsism ? The non-prag-
matist might be wilHng to admit that if
this be a soHpsistic world, " truth " might as
well mean " effective working " as anything
else.^ But if it be a world in which one
makes genuine references to outer realities
that never come within one's private stream
of consciousness, then the relation between
those realities and one's judgment about
them (a relation which from the nature of
the case one can never experience) is some-
thing which cannot be neglected, but must
be reckoned with, call it what you will.^

^ It is interesting to note in this connection that all Pro-
fessor Dewey's and Professor Moore's contributions to
" Studies in Logical Theory," as well as most of Professor
Dewey's more recent papers on truth and knowledge, could
perfectly well have been written from the standpoint of
solipsism — and, in fact, it is difficult to see how some of them
could have been written from any other.

■^ The dilemma just proposed I suggested some time ago
in the Jour, of Phil. (Vol. V, p. 131), and shortly afterward
Professor Dewey replied to it in the course of an article of his
in the same Journal (Vol. V, pp. 375-381). The gist of his
reply is the insistence that my dilemma holds only for those
who start with the " metaphysical " presupposition of a
" mind," on one side, and " objects," on the other side, external

124 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM?

Before closing this lecture there is one
question which I should like to put to the

to it. The pragmatist makes no such presupposition, but is
dealing with the problem only from the " logical standpoint,
to which the solipsistic controversy is irrelevant ; — since a
logical inquiry is concerned only with inferential relations
among things, not with preconceptions about a lonely con-
sciousness, or soul, or self."

Professor Dewey then goes on to put the following ques-
tions, which he considers the truly relevant ones in a logical
discussion (and which of course are expressed in such a way
as to indicate the pragmatist's answers) : " (i) Do ideas pre-
sent themselves except in situations which are doubtful and
inquired into? . . . (2) Are the ' ideas ' anything else except
the suggestions, conjectures, hypotheses, theories tentatively
entertained during a suspended conclusion? (3) . . . Do
they serve to direct observation, colligate data, and guide
experimentation, or are they otiose? (4) If the ideas have
a function in directing the reflective process, does success in
performing the function have anything to do with the logical
worth or validity of the ideas? (5) And finally, does this
matter of validity have anything to do with the question of
truth ? Does ' truth ' mean something inherently different
from the fact that the conclusion of one judgment is itself
applicable in further situations of doubt and inquiry?"

(PP- 378-379-)

To these questions I think the following answers may be
made: (i) The first question is largely one of terminology.
For the sake of the argument let us grant that " ideas " are to
be found only in situations that are doubtful. This is
certainly true of "ideas" in the sense Professor Dewey
attributes to the word. I cannot see that this makes outer

THE PRAGMATIC VIEW OF TRUTH 125

pragmatist, — a definite answer to which
might clear up some of the obscurities of

reference and correspondence any less essential to their
meaning. (2) The second question is much more important.
And here too let us accept the pragmatist's answer. " Ideas,"
let us say, are nothing but " suggestions," " conjectures,"
*' hypotheses," " theories." But the question now arises, IV/tat
are "suggestions," "theories," and the like? Are not con-
jectures, hypotheses, and theories about something? Do they
not mean and refer to something not themselves, and is not
this object of theirs often a contemporaneously existing thing?
Is not a theory (when seriously maintained) a judgment that
something is thus-and-so? And if this be the case, is not
correspondence (in the sense I have defined) essential? If
correspondence be ruled out, is not the whole content and
significance of hypotheses and theories and the rest com-
pletely lost? And does not Professor Dewey grant substan-
tially the whole non-pragmatist contention for correspondence
when he writes, " The logical idea is short for a certain judg-
ment about a thing. It states the way an object is judged to
be, the way we take it in the inference process, as distinct from
the way it actually may be." (p. 378.) (3) Certainly hypoth-
eses and theories " serve to direct observation, guide experi-
mentation," etc. But the prior and more important logical
question (which Professor Dewey omits) is this : How do they
do it? How comes it that they manage to succeed, that they
lead us in the right direction, while certain other hypotheses
fail ? Theories, conjectures, etc., of course are instruments —
who denies it? But the fundamental question is how it is
possible for them to be instruments and what it is that makes
some successful guides and some unsuccessful. So far as I
can see the pragmatist has no answer to this. The non-

126 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM?

the subject, namely this : Is pragmatism
true, and if so in what sense is it true ?

And, first of all, is it true in the pragmatic
sense? This is certainly a question which
is very hard to answer. Since pragmatism
has worked satisfactorily to the pragmatist,
it evidently is true — to him. But with
equal certainty it is not true to the non-

pragmatist answer of course is that hypotheses succeed in
guiding experimentation in so far as they correspond to the
already existing reality which is their object and which they
mean. And this brings us to the fourth and fifth questions,
to which the non-pragmatist answer is, in short, that the
idea's success in performing its function is, no doubt, closely
related to its validity and truth, but that the pragmatist has
put the matter just the wrong way about, since it is the truth
of the idea that makes it successful, not its success that makes
it true. Its success is, if you like, the cause of our recognition
of its truth, but the idea would never have succeeded at all
had it not first been true.

The problem under discussion is indeed a logical one.
But for that very reason it must deal with something more
than " relations among things." It must consider also the
meaning of those things. It must go deeper than the mere
tracing out of what ideas do, as instruments, etc., in our ex-
perience. The previous question for logic is what these
hypotheses are and mean, and how they act. And I still be-
lieve it impossible to face these questions squarely without
accepting the one or the other horn of the dilemma proposed
above.

THE PRAGMATIC VIEW OF TRUTH 127

pragmatist, for to him it is not satisfac-
tory— it has not been verified. It is in
exactly the position of any other unverified
claim, and I hope we need not remind the
pragmatist of his oft-repeated assertion that
an unverified claim is not yet true. Prag-
matism therefore (like so many other things
in the pragmatic world) is both true and
false at the same time. " And the best of
the joke is," as Plato would say, that inas-
much as the non-pragmatists (as yet at least)
far outnumber the pragmatists, it follows
that pragmatism is true in only a small mi-
nority of cases. Of course no one (not
even a humanist) would seriously start out
to determine the truth of a doctrine by
counting human heads ; and yet if it really
be the case that a doctrine is not true till
verified, and is made true by verification, it
would seem not altogether irrelevant to con-
sider the number of those who regard its
verification complete.

But it is evident that even if pragmatism
were true in the pragmatic sense, this would

128 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM?

not satisfy the pragmatists. They believe
it is true in the non-pragmatic sense. Like
other rational beings, they are not satisfied
(except at times) with having their doctrine
accepted: they want to show that it ought
to be accepted. They believe it is true no
matter what people think, already true
whether verified or not. That is why they
are so eager to verify it. That is the very
presupposition of all their argument. They
insist, in other words, that the pragmatist
doctrine of truth is true in the non-prag-
matic sense — true on the correspondence
theory of truth.

But alas ! When they do that, they sur-
render the whole matter. To insist that a
doctrine must be verified in order to be true
and to add that this doctrine is true whether
verified or not, is as simple a manner as can
be found of contradicting oneself. Pragma-
tists, I am sure, will call this "logic-chopping "
— a simple and useful device when one has
been reduced to unavoidable self-contradic-
tion. But inasmuch as this is altogether

THE PRAGMATIC VIEW OF TRUTH 1 29

a matter of logic I fail to see the force of
the reproach. Inconsistency is the one great
sin in thinking, and the inconsistency just
pointed out runs through all the arguments
by which the pragmatist seeks to prove his
position. At every point he is — no doubt,
unconsciously — making use of the very con-
ception of truth which he is trying to refute ;
he is claiming for his doctrine the very kind
of truth which he says is no truth at all.
Consistently he should do the one or the
other of two things : either give up his doc-
trine of truth ; or else cease claiming that it
is true and that logically we ought to accept
it, and be content with enjoying it and pro-
claiming its satisfactoriness.

This latter is in fact the course which two
of the leading pragmatists, in moments of
insight, have actually taken. Speaking of
the pragmatists and their universe of dis-
course. Professor James says, " Whether
what they themselves say about that uni-
verse is objectively true, i.e. whether the
pragmatic theory of truth is true really, they

I30 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM?

cannot warrant, — they can only believe it."^
And in a spirit of candor, to illustrate fur-
ther the fact that pragmatism is a mental
attitude rather than a logical position, he
compares it to general skepticism. This, he
says, " you can no more kill off by logic than
you can kill off obstinacy or practical joking.
This is why it is so irritating. . . . No more
can logic kill the pragmatist's behavior."
And I may say in passing that the history
of pragmatism amply confirms this assertion.
With equal consistency Dr. Schiller ad-
mits that "the pragmatic theory has to be
adopted before it can be verified," and that
therefore it would be absurd in pragmatism
to attempt to prove itself true to one who
had not first adopted it.^ It seems therefore
to be a case of credo ut intelligam. One must
not expect to be convinced of the pragmatic
truth by vain arguments ; one must taste and

1 " The Pragmatist's Account of Truth," Phil. Rev., Vol.
XVII, p. i6, note 2.

^ See the instructive discussion between him and Pro-
fessor Russell on this subject, in the /tf«r. of Phil., Vol. IV,
pp. 235-243 and 482-494.

THE PRAGMATIC VIEW OF TRUTH 1 31

see that it is good. Nor are you to think
this is mere idle jesting; it is the logical
and inevitable outcome of the pragmatic
doctrine of truth. When this is fully realized
pragmatism may indeed still flourish — just
as " practical joking " and " obstinacy " and
" general skepticism " and unreasoning faith
still flourish ; but the consistent pragmatist
at least will then cease to argue and begin
rather to exhort ; and pragmatism will be
recognized as being primarily, not a serious
philosophical doctrine, but rather one of the
varieties of religious experience.

As I said at the beginning of this lecture,
the pragmatic doctrine of truth is the key-
stone to the whole edifice. And the in-
herent weakness in it which I have tried to
point out affects fatally the entire super-
structure. How it reappears in the prag-
matic doctrine of knowledge I shall try to
show in the following lecture.

LECTURE IV

PRAGMATISM AND KNOWLEDGE

LECTURE IV

PRAGMATISM AND KNOWLEDGE

Every one who has read with attention
the Fourth Book of Locke's famous Essay,
and has learned that knowledge is " noth-
ing but the perception of the connection
and agreement or disagreement and repug-
nancy of any of our ideas," must have
noted with surprise the fact that one of
the four kinds of agreement between our
ideas is what Locke calls " real existence."
" The fourth and last sort " (of agree-
ment), says he, " is that of actual and real
existence agreeing to any idea " — that is,
the agreement of something: which " has
a real existence outside the mind," such as
" God," with our idea of it. It is hard, of
course, to see what " ideas " agree in this
fourth kind of knowledge, or how the agree-
ment of an idea with something outside the

135

136 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM?

mind can be classed under knowledge at
all if knowledge be "nothing but the per-
ception of the agreement of our ideas."
This inconsistency in Locke's theory of
knowledge has often been pointed out and
indeed is perfectly clear. But what con-
cerns us here is the fact that it seems to
be hereditary and has been handed down,
like the original sin of Adam or — what is
worse — like an "innate idea," to Locke's
lineal descendants, our friends the pragma-
tists. To make this clear, however, will
require an entire lecture ; and we shall
therefore devote this hour to a considera-
tion of the pragmatic view of knowledge.

In considering pragmatism's doctrine of
truth, you will remember, we found it help-
ful to outline first of all the non-pragma-
tist's view, for by noting what the prag-
matist denied we were better able to
understand what he affirmed. The same
method will be of even more value here ;
hence before trying to get at the prag-
matic meaning of knowledge I shall take

PRAGMATISM AND KNOWLEDGE 1 37

up the view which pragmatism attacks.
This view has had many formulations,
but the one first suggested, by the great
" intellectuahst," Plato, is perhaps as
satisfactory as any. It is found in the
Theaetetus and is in these words: Knowl-
edge is " true opinion accompanied with
reason." There is more substance in this
very brief definition than may appear on
the surface, and to make its meaning clear
it should be divided, like a preacher's text,
into firstly, secondly, and thirdly. Firstly,
then, knowledge is a certain kind of opin-
ion^ i.e. it is a judgment or thought about
something. Secondly, it must be true.
And, thirdly, the individual who holds it
true must have sufficient reason for so
doing — he must be able to prove it true,
at least to himself. A word of further ex-
planation about each of these may not be
out of place.

Perhaps the most important, because the
most fundamental, of these three points is
the first. Opinion is about something, it

138 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM?

means or points to something not itself,
and hence involves " transcendence." This
of course is a terrifying term, and the prag-
matist (vi^ho denies transcendence) makes
capital out of its terrors. Really, however,
there is nothing dreadful about this word,
— it is a very simple thing after all, —
though no doubt sufficiently mysterious to
those who start out with the presupposi-
tion that it is impossible. It means simply
this : that when we " know " or " mean "
something, the object of our thought is not
our thought itself and may even be some-
thing completely outside of our experience,
past, present, or future. If any of you are
unfamiliar with the term and still think it
something very hard and "metaphysical,"
and that it is too " abstract " to be accepted
by common sense, let me put you this ques-
tion and ask your answer: When you are
thinking of your neighbor's headache, do
you mean by that headache something in
your experience, or something out of your
experience but in his? If you mean the

PRAGMATISM AND KNOWLEDGE 1 39

latter, you are a believer in transcendence.
This belief, in fact, is very much older than
" Philosophy " and is one of the fundamen-
tal principles of common sense — as Pro-
fessor James himself would doubtless tell
you. It is, in short, simply the belief that
you can mean something which is entirely
outside of your own experience.

To be sure, if we take the view that
every content of consciousness, our know-
ing thought included, is merely so much
psychic stuff and nothing else, that it is
simply felt, like an abdominal pain, and
has no reference to anything outside itself,
then, of course, transcendence becomes a
mystery, because, in fact, meaning itself
becomes a mystery. And so the prag-
matist asks. How can a psychic state tran-
scend itself ? How can it mean anything
but itself.'' — One might respond by the
question. How can time pass } How can
a thing move.'' — There may be many an-
swers to questions such as these ; but the
simplest and certainly the most empirical

I40 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM?

is just this : that as a fact things do
move, time does pass, and our thoughts
do meajt things other than themselves.
Transcendence is merely one of those ul-
timately simple things which, just because
they are ultimate and simple elements of
experience, can never be explained further,
nor analyzed further, but must be merely
recognized and accepted. That it is in
one sense a mystery is of course perfectly
obvious : so is consciousness. But to
prove by this that it is impossible, and to
mystify ourselves over it, is simply gra-
tuitous mystification. The truth is, a cog-
nitive idea — a thought which means its
object — has another characteristic than
merely that of being felt — like a mos-
quito bite. It has that too, of course; it
is a genuine part of the stream of experi-
ence. But it is more than that. It means
something besides itself and, it may be,
something outside of the entire stream of
consciousness to which it belongs. And
to shut our eyes tx) this peculiarity of our

PRAGMATISM AND KNOWLEDGE 141

thought in the interests of simpHfication
and " concreteness " is very unempirical, and
as poor psychology as it is epistemology.

So much for what is meant by saying
that knowledge is opinion. And now the
secondly and thirdly of our text from Plato
may be easily disposed of. The secondly,
in fact, — namely that the opinion must be
true, — has already been explained in my
two lectures on truth. But to be in posses-
sion of genuine knowledge we must have
something more than opinion which happens
to be true ; we must, according to the tra-
ditional philosophy, be also in possession of
reasons which prove the opinion to be true.
This is a subordinate point so far as our
present purposes are concerned and may be
shortly dismissed. In brief, it may be said
that whatever sort of proof any one — pfag-
matist or non-pragmatist — believes in, and
has to furnish, is here relevant. Of course I
cannot get outside my own experience and
compare my idea with the outer reality —
your headache, let us say — which it means.

142 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM?

This kind of proof is out of the question,
and quite as much so for pragmatists as for
others, as Professor James admits.^ But
there are other ways of proving — notably
the negative method of consistency, and the
scientific (or pragmatic) method of noting
results. Only the former method, to be
sure, gives absolute demonstration, and the
latter alone, even at its best, will not enable
us to prove the truth of our ideas any more
completely and absolutely than science can
prove that the sun will rise to-morrow, or
than history can prove that it rose yesterday,
or than pragmatism can refute solipsism (a
performance which is particularly difficult
for pragmatism). We can seldom attain the
absolute kind of proof furnished by mathe-
matics. But so purely theoretical an ideal
of demonstration belongs rightly to an effete
rationalism, and the pragmatist is certainly

^ Pragmatists " cannot do without the wider knower [who
should compare ideas with objects] any more than they can do
without the reality, if they want to prove a case of knowing.
. . . Whether what they themselves say about the whole uni-
verse is objectively true they cannot warrant — they can only
believe iV — Phil. Rev., Vol. XVII, p. i6. note 2.

PRAGMATISM AND KNOWLEDGE 1 43

the last man who should demand its realiza-
tion. In short, the transcendence-view of
knowledge is no more inconsistent with
proof than is any other. And with this
enough has been said for our present pur-
poses of exegesis, and I trust the text from
Plato is now sufficiently clear.

I have gone thus into detail with the
ordinary view of knowledge because it is
this view which pragmatism denies. Our
next aim must therefore be to get a clear
notion of the theory of knowledge set up by
the pragmatists as a substitute for the one re-
jected. The essential characteristic of this
pragmatic view is the attempt to avoid tran-
scendence (in the sense outlined above), and
to present knowledge as a concrete expe-
rience process entirely within the conscious
life of the individual.

To be more explicit, knowledge is, in the
words of Professor Dewey, " a doubt-inquiry-
answer experience." It arises when our
reality, our facts, are somehow unsatisfactory'
and self-discrepant, and it has a definite, prac-

144 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM?

tical function, namely the reorganization
of our experience upon the basis of a plan of
action, which brings definite good results
and makes our experience harmonious and
satisfactory once more. Mere immediate ex-
perience is not knowledge ; to be knowledge
it must be in some ways disharmonious or
insufficient, it must point to or suggest some
sort of experience not itself. This further ex-
perience when it comes must bring harmony
into consciousness once more, which by ful-
filling the need of the preceding experience
shall abolish knowledge by substituting im-
mediacy. There are thus three stages in the
knowing process. The first is that of " doubt "
in which the facts of experience show them-
selves self-discrepant, disharmonious, and in
need of rearrangement or supplementation.
In the second stage — or that of " inquiry "
— an " idea " or " plan or action " or tenta-
tive arrangement of present and absent facts
is suggested and tried. Finally, in the third
stage this " plan " is found to work, and ex-
perience once more becomes harmonious
and is no longer cognitional.

PRAGMATISM AND KNOWLEDGE 1 45

To illustrate by two examples of Professor
Dewey's : I hear a fearsome noise and am
frightened. I do not understand it. My
situation is self-discrepant. Therefore I set
out to solve the enigma. I make the hypoth-
esis that the cause of the noise is the
window curtain rattling in the wind. This
leads me to certain actions which result in
the verification of my hypothesis. My ex-
perience now is one of satisfaction rather
than of knowledge, but I am able to look
back at the second stage, where I formed
the hypothesis, and see that it was cogni-
tional. Or, I smell a sweet odor. I wonder
what it is. The odor thus ceases to be
merely an odor and becomes transformed
into a cognitional odor which means a rose.
This leads me to certain acts which result in
the full realization of the rose by all my
senses. In short, to sum up: "An experi-
ence is a knowledge if in its quale there is
an experienced distinction and connection
of two elements of the following sort : one
means or intends the presence of the other

146 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM?

in the same fashion in which itself is already
present, while the other is that which, while
not present in the same fashion, must be-
come so present if the meaning or intention
of its companion or yoke fellow is to be ful-
filled through an operation it sets up." ^

Professor James's view of knowledge,
though varying in some details from that
of Professor Dewey, is not essentially dif-
ferent. Especially in the attempt to avoid
transcendence and to make knowledge a
thoroughly " concrete " process that " lives
inside the tissue of experience," are the two
views at one. To use a distinction of Pro-
fessor James's, knowledge is not " saltatory "
but " ambulatory " — it is not a leap from
idea to object over an empty chasm, but
an experienced process of gradual transition
every step of which is felt. " Intervening
experiences are as indispensable foundations
for a concrete relation of cognition as in-
tervening space is for a relation of distance.

* Professor Dewey, " The Experimental Theory of Knowl-
edge," Mind, Vol. XV, p. 30X.

PRAGMATISM AND KNOWLEDGE 1 47

Cognition, whenever we take it concretely,
means determinate ambulation, through in-
termediaries, from a terminus a quo to or
toward a terminus ad quem. As the inter-
mediaries are other than the termini and
connected with them with the usual asso-
ciative bonds, there would appear to be
nothing especially unique about the process
of knowing. They fall wholly within ex-
perience ; and we need use, in describing
them, no other categories than those which
we employ in describing other natural pro-
cesses." ^

In describing Professor James's view of
knowledge I can probably do no better than
continue to quote from his own lucid ex-
position. " Suppose me to be sitting here
in my library in Cambridge, at ten minutes
walk from ' Memorial Hall,' and to be
thinking truly of the latter object. My
mind may have before it only the name,
or it may have a clear image, or it may

1 "A Word more about Truth," Jour, of Phil., Vol. IV,
P- 399-

148 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM?

have a very dim image of the hall, but
such intrinsic differences in the image make
no difference in its cognitive function.
Certain extrinsic phenomena, special ex-
periences of conjunction, are what impart
to the image its knowing office. ... If I
can lead you to the hall, and tell you of its
history and present uses ; if in its presence
I now feel my idea to be continued ; if the
associates of the image and of the felt hall
run parallel, so that each term of the one
context corresponds serially, as I walk, with
an answering term of the other ; why then
my soul was prophetic, and my idea must
be, and by common consent would be,
called cognizant of reality. That percept
was what it meant, for into it my idea has
passed by conjunctive experiences of same-
ness and fulfilled intention. Nowhere is
there jar, but every later moment matches
and corroborates an earlier.

" In this matching and corroborating,
taken in no transcendental sense, but de-
noting definitely felt transitions, lies all

PRAGMATISM AND KNOWLEDGE 1 49

that the knowing of a percept by an idea
can possibly contain or signify. Wherever
such transitions are felt, the first experience
knows the last one. Knowledge thus lives
inside the tissue of experience. It is made;
and made bv relations that unroll themselves
in time. Whenever certain intermediaries
are given, such that, as they develop toward
their terminus, there is experience from
point to point of one direction followed,
and finally of one process fulfilled, the re-
sult is that their starting point thereby be-
comes a knower and their terminus an
object meant or known. That is all that
knowing (in the simple case considered) can
be known-as, that is the whole of its
nature put into experiential terms. When-
ever such is the sequence of our experiences,
we may freely say that we had the terminal
object ' in mind ' from the outset, although
at the outset nothing was there in us but a
flat piece of substantive experience like any
other, with no self-transcendency about it,
and no mystery save the mystery of coming

I50 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM?

into existence and of being followed by other
pieces of substantive experience, with con-
junctively transitional experiences between."^

The prime characteristic of the pragmatic
view of knowledge is, as I have said, its
attempt to avoid transcendence. It is that
which makes it unique and distinguishes it
from other views. Before examining for
ourselves, however, the possibility of knowl-
edge without transcendence, I should point
out that each of the leading pragmatists
admits (at times at least) a kind of tran-
scendence. In this, however, they do not
seem to be entirely at one. Professor
Dewey points to a transcendence within
the individual's experience, while Professor
James goes farther and admits a reference
to things entirely outside of it.

In his admirably clear article, " The Ex-
perimental Theory of Knowledge," from
which I have already quoted. Professor
Dewey points out that a cognitional ex-

^ " A World of Pure Experience," Jour, of Phil.., Vol. I,
PP- 539-540.

PRAGMATISM AND KNOWLEDGE 15 1

perience " is contemporaneously aware of
meaning something beyond itself." The
odor which knows the rose, for instance,
is not merely an odor, not merely "a flat
piece of substantive experience like any
other." If it were merely that, there would
be no question of knowledge, according to
Dewey. It must have the additional quality
of meaning or intending "something be-
yond itself." " The odor knows the rose ;
the rose is known by the odor; and the
import of each term is constituted by the
relationship in which it stands to the other."
Now in all this I, of course, agree. But
I should like to point out that this fnea7iing
or intendmg of something beyond itself by
the cognitional experience does not consist
in and is not constituted by the subsequent
concrete steps of fulfillment. The cogni-
tional experience or idea already means or
intends the rose before the fulfilling expe-
riences come ; and should consciousness
suddenly cease or be turned into a new
direction and the fulfilling experiences never

152 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM?

come, it would still be true that the idea
in question did really mean and intend the
rose.

But if a cognitive experience may thus
mean a fulfilling experience which has not
yet come and which possibly may never come,
why may it not equally well mean or intend
an experience which by the nature of the
case never can come ? I recognize that
Professor Dewey here admits only a refer-
ence from one part to another of the in-
dividual's experience ; but if the possibility
of such reference is thus once admitted,
why may not the individual's thought refer
to and mean something in some one else's
experience ? If it can mean or intend some-
thing beyond itself at all, it is hard to see
why this something must be one kind of
experience rather than another. And if
you grant this, the whole non-pragmatist
view of transcendence is admitted.

In some respects Professor James would
go even farther in his concessions than
Professor Dewey, for he frankly admits the

PRAGMATISM AND KNOWLEDGE 1 53

reference of our thoughts to things quite
without our own actual experience. " The
known," he tells us, may be " a possible ex-
perience, either of that subject or of another,
to which the said conjunctive transitions
would lead if sufficiently prolonged." ^ This,
however, in Professor James's view, does
not involve transcendence, apparently be-
cause experience in general is nowhere
transcended, because there are connecting
links of concrete experience actual or at
least possible between my thought and its
object ; and also because, as he maintains,
my thought's reference to its object con-
sists just in those actual or possible "con-
junctive transitional experiences."

For one, I confess it is hard for me to
see how this avoids transcendence. The
battle of Marathon, for instance, is cer-
tainly not a part of my experience, yet is
known by me; and the fact that there are
possible experiences between me and it and

* "A World of Pure Experience,"/^''- of Phil., Vol. \,
P- 538.

154 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM?

that if I were now 2400 years old I might
have witnessed the battle, does not make
it any the less true that my actual experi-
ence — and apparently all actual experience
— has to be transcended if I am to know
or to mean it. In fact, once it is admitted
that the idea's object may be within some
one else's experience, the whole transcend-
ence controversy would seem to be settled,
and the non-pragmatist position granted.

But this Professor James would not admit.
Knowledge, he insists, is ambulatory, not
saltatory. The meaning or reference of an
idea is not a leap to its object but a con-
crete and experienced process. " Knowing
is made by the ambulation through the
intervening experiences."^ " If we believe,
with common sense, in so-called ' sensible '
realities, the idea may not only lead us
toward its object, but may put the latter into
our very hand, make it our immediate sen-
sation. But if, as most reflective people
opine, sensible realities are not true realities,

"^ Jour, of Phil, Vol. IV, p. 399.

PRAGMATISM AND KNOWLEDGE 155

but only their appearances, our idea brings
us at least so far, puts us in touch with
reality's most authentic substitutes and
representatives." ^ They lead us as near to
the real object which we mean as we can
ever get; and there, of course, they stop.
The pity is that Professor James's explana-
tion stops there too, and hence fails to
touch upon the most important part of the
problem — the relation, namely, between
these last terms within our experience and
the outer objects of which these experi-
ences of ours are only "substitutes and
representatives." One feels like asking, Is
this relation ambulatory or saltatory ? If it
be ambulatory, who is it that ambulates ?
It is certainly not we, for we can get no
farther directly than to the "substitutes
and representatives," never to the " true
realities " which they mean. Or is it the
object that ambulates ? If knowledge be an
experience process, who experiences it ? And
if the relation between the " true realities "

^/aur. of Phil, Vol. IV, p. 398.

156 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM?

and their " representatives " be a saltatory
relation, is not knowledge saltatory, and are
we not forced back to the non-pragmatist's
view outlined at the beginning of this
lecture ?

The truth seems to be that genuine tran-
scendence is unavoidable wherever the cogni-
tive idea — the knowing thought — means to
have for its object something besides itself.
And if this object be something within an-
other's life, then there must be a genuine
transcendence of the individual's entire expe-
rience— a leap from idea to object with no
felt transition — as, for example, when I think
oi your headache. There are no felt transi-
tions between our experiences. My con-
sciousness never runs into yours. Nor does
it solve the difficulties of this particular prob-
lem to point out, as Professor James does,^
that our minds have space in common ; for
they remain apart none the less, and there is
no experience of transition between them.
In Professor James's own words : " Neither

^Jour. of Phil., Vol. I, pp. 565-568.

PRAGMATISM AND KNOWLEDGE 1 57

contemporaneity nor proximity in space, nor
similarity of quality and content are able to
fuse thoughts together which are sundered
by this barrier of belonging to different per-
sonal minds. The breaches between such
thoughts are the most absolute breaches in
nature." ^

In his " Psychology," Professor James has
rightly laid great emphasis on the difference
between a succession of experiences and an
experience of succession. Now the prag-
matist theory of knowledge requires both of
these. It must have an unbroken succession
of intermediating experiences, and it must
also have, with this, the experience of the
succession or transition. But in no case
where my object is something in your expe-
rience can either of these essentials be proved
to be present ; and one of them is certainly
absent. If there be a succession of interme-
diaries between my thought and your head-
ache— or between my thought and Nebu-
chadnezzar's headache — neither you nor I
1 "Psychology," p. 153.

158 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM?

nor Nebuchadnezzar ever experiences the
succession. My experiences break off where
yours begin. This fact is of great impor-
tance, for it bars out the sense of transition
and fulfillment which forms so important an
element in the pragmatist description of
knowledge, — the sense of fulfillment due to
a continuous passage from the original idea
to the known object. If this comes at all
when I know your headache, it comes not
with the object but quite on my side of the
" epistemological gulf." The gulf is still
there to be transcended.

But let us examine a case in which the
object and the thought which means it are
both within the same stream of experience —
the type of case best fitted to exemplify the
pragmatist view of knowledge and the easiest
for it to explain. And to make sure that
our example is orthodox, let us take the case
outlined by Professor James. Suppose,
then, I am sitting in Cambridge, at some
distance from Memorial Hall, and have
in my mind " nothing but a flat piece of

PRAGMATISM AND KNOWLEDGE 1 59

substantive experience with no self-transcend-
ency about it." This flat piece of substan-
tive experience is an image of Memorial
Hall. It is followed by a series of transi-
tional experiences, muscle and joint sensa-
tions, visual and auditory sensations, which
change and succeed each other rapidly, and
connected with them there is an experience
of one direction being followed. Finally, one
of these exfoliating experiences is the per-
cept of Memorial Hall, and with this percept
comes a sense of process fulfilled. This suc-
cession of experiences crowned by the sense
of fulfillment, says the pragmatist, is knowl-
edge. And now let me point out one peculi-
arity of this view. When the intermediaries
have been experienced and the process is ful-
filled— when, that is, we have got our per-
cept of Memorial Hall — " the result is," as
Professor James says, "that their starting
point thereby becomes a knower and their ter-
minus an object meant or known." ^ This, of
course, is an exact statement of the necessary

'^Jour. of Phil., Vol. I, p. 540,

l6o WHAT IS PRAGMATISM?

outcome of the doctrine. The italics are
mine, but they might as well have been in
the original. The idea of Memorial Hall,
which we called the knowing thought, and
which started the process going, does not
become a " knower " till long after it has
vanished and has been replaced by many
intermediaries and finally by the fulfilling
percept. In like manner. Memorial Hall was
never " known " nor even " meant " till then.
Hence the " kiiower"" did not know nor mean
anything so long as it existed, but became a
knower only after it had ceased to exist alto-
gether; and in like manner Memorial Hall
was never known nor mea^it until the idea
which knew and meant it had altogether
vanished.

Where, then, one naturally asks, does
knowledge come in ? Not at the terminus a
quo, for the idea has not yet become a
knower — its knowing, according to the
pragmatist, consists i^t the intermediaries
and the fulfilling experience. Not at the
terminus ad quern, for now there is no

PRAGMATISM AND KNOWLEDGE l6l

longer a knower but merely a direct ex-
perience. Not in the intermediaries, for
with them we have neither knower nor ful-
fillment. Of course it may be said that
when at last I see Memorial Hall, the
original image of it returns, hence is present
as a knower. But this will not fit the the-
ory for several reasons. In the first place, as
every psychologist knows, the original image
cannot return ; one like it may come, but not
the same identical experience. And indeed,
if it be this reproduced idea, now present, that
is the real knower, why speak of the original
idea and the intermediaries at all? Why
not simply describe your present experience .?
Or, possibly, the pragmatist may say that
when the fulfilling experience has come, we
look back at the original idea and see that it
— what ? Knew the object ? No, for it was
not yet a knower. Was true ? No, for
truth consists in the intermediating and ful-
filling experiences which at that time did
not yet exist. Shall we say that it resembled
or was like the percept of Memorial Hall.'*

1 62 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM?

But no, for it may have been very unlike,
and even if it were very like the percept, this
way of putting things would be a reversion
to the " copy theory " in its crudest and most
unpragmatic form. Or shall we say simply
that it started the process going ? This un-
doubtedly would be true ; but what of it ?
Does it help us out at all in seeing where
knowledge comes in ? The sensation of
hunger might have started me toward Memo-
rial Hall quite as well ; does the sensation of
hunger therefore "become a knower" when I
look at the Hall ? The truth is, when the
knowing thought which already means some-
thing not itself is replaced by " a flat piece of
substantive experience like any other," knowl-
edge must at once vanish away, and we shall
have left merely a succession of experiences
such as the proverbial polyp might enjoy.
To have a succession of experiences (or even
an experience of succession) is one thing ; to
know is quite another.

There is one more characteristic of the
pragmatist view of knowledge which should

PRAGMATISM AND KNOWLEDGE 1 63

be noted before we bring this lecture to a
close ; namely, its (perfectly consistent) re-
fusal to insist that knowledge must be true.
It does insist, of course, that knowledge
must be true in the pragmatic sense of being
satisfactory, etc. ; but, quite properly, it fails
to say anything about its being true in any
other sense. This is as it should be ; and
yet it forces one to ask some such question
as this : In knowledge do we really know ?
Take, for example, Professor Dewey's
illustration already used. I hear a fearsome
noise and am filled with fright ; then, look-
ing back on my experience and analyzing it,
I come to the conclusion that it was only the
noise of the window curtain. And to vary
the illustration a little at this point, let us
suppose that you too have been frightened
by the noise, but come to the conclusion that
it was due to a fluttering awning. And let
us add that you were right and that it really
was the awning (if the pragmatist will allow
us the use of such an expression), but that
I never come to know this and that the win-

1 64 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM?

dow-curtain theory remains my final and (to
me) perfectly satisfactory solution of the
problem. Is this solution knowledge? Do
I know that the curtain was the cause of the
noise ?

Now if the pragmatist answers in the
negative, and maintains that this is not a
genuine case of knowledge, then it follows
that knowledge is not merely a process in
which a final opinion or "experience" is sub-
stituted for a former experience because
more satisfactory to the experiencer. It is
more than " an answering or telling experi-
ence in which an unquestioned thing re-
places a dubious thing." It must not merely
be an answering experience ; it must give the
true answer (" true " here being used in the
non-pragmatist sense). And it cannot then
be defined in terms of experience alone as
a "doubt-inquiry-answer experience." The
complete definition of knowledge must in-
clude something which distinguishes the
true from the false, a reference to a reality
beyond the experience itself which makes it

PRAGMATISM AND KNOWLEDGE 165

true. It must be defined in terms not essen-
tially different from those of Plato — " true
opinion with reason."

But the pragmatist probably will take the
other course and deny that correspondence
to an outer reality is necessary. He will
identify knowledge with the psychological
process in the individual's experience leading
to the final solution of the problem and the
sense of satisfaction and fulfillment — the an-
swering experience which substitutes the
unquestioned thing for the dubious thing —
in short, with the " window-curtain theory "
of our illustration. He will say that if this
is in all respects satisfactory to me, it is for
me knowledge — quite aside from the ques-
tion whether it is " true " or not. Or, rather,
he will of course insist (if he be consistent)
that my theory is true since it satisfies me
and silences my doubt. It is true, that is, in
the pragmatic sense.

I am not altogether certain, however, that
the pragmatist will be willing to maintain
this position permanently. For it clearly

1 66 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM?

has its difficulties, — difficulties which even
a pragmatist must eventually come to see.
If there were only one individual involved,
the difficulty might be glossed over; but
you will remember that, according to our ex-
ample, there were two of us concerned, and
that while I " knew " the cause of the noise
was the curtain, you " knew " it was the awn-
ing. Each of us now goes his way fully
persuaded in his own mind. The final ex-
perience of each has all the ear marks which
Dewey and James describe as belonging to
the final term in the knowledge process.
For, be it observed, there is not one thing
in the pragmatist description of knowledge
which would not apply perfectly well to a
case of mistaken opinion in which the indi-
vidual had and always retained a complete
sense of certainty. Here, in fact, is the cru-
cial point of the controversy — the prag-
matists insisting that knowledge can be
sufficiently described and defined without go-
ing beyond the experience of the knowing
individual ; the non-pragmatists maintaining

' PRAGMATISM AND KNOWLEDGE 1 67

that a reference to something outside of his
experience is essential. And, in a sense, the
whole problem may be said to hinge on the
question of mistaken or false opinion. How
will the pragmatist interpret this ? — For surely
he cannot deny that we are often mistaken
even when we feel and continue to feel most
sure. — The question really is unavoidable:
When one is mistaken but satisfied, does he
know ? Did you and I both ^uow the cause
of the fearsome noise when we had contrary
opinions concerning it ?

The pragmatist cannot respond that he
means by knowledge only that opinion or
" experience " which works out ; for by hy-
pothesis both opinions work out, both are
satisfactory so far as investigated, so far as
*' worked." And if he amends his statement
so as to say that he means by knowledge
only that opinion which would work if
carried out, then he is unconsciously sur-
rendering his whole case by smuggling in
the idea of a conditioning environment
which determines whether or not the " ex-

1 68 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM?

perience " can work, and which cannot itself
be identified with the experience or any part
of it. He would be saying that after all it is
not the " satisfactoriness " of the experience
that makes it knowledge but rather the ex-
perience's right to be satisfactory, — a right
determined not by itself but by the nature
of the conditioning environment. And so he
would be back with us again in the " mys-
tery " of transcendence.

In short, it would seem that the pragmatist
is logically shut up to the one or the other
of two alternatives : either he must accept
transcendence in the old-fashioned sense, or
else he must maintain that there is no essen-
tial difference between true and false opinion
and that both are equally worthy of the name
knowledge, so long as each remains satisfac-
tory to its possessor. You cannot lift your-
self by your boot straps ; nor give the length
of a river in terms of itself and with no ob-
jective unit ; nor distinguish knowledge from
error by mere description of what happens
within one individual's experience. Unless

PRAGMATISM AND KNOWLEDGE 1 69

there be transcendence, there is no criterion
for judging between two opinions, except, of
course, the relative subjective satisfactoriness
of the two. And if contradictory opinions
may both be knowledge, provided they are
equally satisfactory to their possessors, then
each man is the measure of all things with a
vengeance, and it becomes the most blatant
sort of self-contradiction for the pragmatist
to try to prove his view to be knowledge and
ours error. — As I have said in another con-
nection, the thing for him to do is to feel —
and to exhort.

There is an old story, which many of you
may have heard, of a countryman going to
a circus and standing spellbound and in-
credulous before a dromedary with its many
humps and its impossible legs and neck. All
the other sight-seers passed out of the men-
agerie, but he still remained with his eyes
riveted on the beast. Finally, at the end of
half an hour, he drew himself together, with
the proud consciousness of the triumph of
reason over the senses, and exclaimed:
" Hell ! There ain't any such animal ! "

I70 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM?

The attitude of our pragmatist friends
toward transcendence is not essentially dif-
ferent from that of the farmer toward the
dromedary. They cannot frame a judgment
about anything outside of themselves, they
cannot even claim the truth of their own
theory, without presupposing the thing they
deny. It is there, plainly, before their very
eyes. Yet they bravely maintain their
stand — like the farmer. And their reason
for so doing, moreover, seems to be essen-
tially the same as his. There couldn't be
any such animal as a dromedary because it
looked so different from the cow and the
pig and the other beasts of the farm. So
there can't be any such thing as tran*
scendence because it is so different from
the " concrete " experience processes studied
by psychology. Hence what passes for
transcendence must be explained away in
terms of experience " with no mystery
about it." To reduce all mental states to
their simplest terms is certainly one of
the proper aims of the student of psychol-

PRAGMATISM AND KNOWLEDGE 171

ogy and epistemology, and, perhaps, it is not
surprising that the pragmatist seeks to re-
gard the cognitive idea which means its
object as " nothing but a flat piece of sub-
stantive experience " with no nonsense about
it. To interpret the knowing thought as be-
longing to the same general class as the
mosquito bite is doubtless a consummation
devoutly to be wished. But, unfortunately,
the knowing thought resists any such simpli-
fication. It means more than it is. If tran-
scendence is a mystery, it is at least a very
real mystery, and the attempt to ignore it or
to explain it away is bound to end in failure.
It is not true that everything is like every-
thing else. There are several things in this
world which are sui generis. One of these
things is the dromedary. Another is knowl-
edge.

LECTURE V

PRAGMATISM AND RELIGION

LECTURE V

PRAGMATISM AND RELIGION

Somehow or other pragmatism has got
itself pretty generally associated in the pub-
lic mind with religion. It seems to be the
common impression that at this critical mo-
ment in the warfare of religion with agnos-
ticism the pragmatists have come up to the
help of the Lord against the mighty, and
that, thanks to their new-forged and new-
fashioned weapons, victory is secure. It is
this belief, I suppose, which more than any-
thing else explains the wide and growing
popularity of the new philosophy. For, after
all, no other philosophical problems have so
great and so permanent a hold upon the in-
terests of the people at large as have those
that deal with religion. For this very rea-
son, moreover, no philosophical ideas deserve
and require more careful scrutiny than those

17s

176 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM?

which affect the religious views of the com-
munity. Since, therefore, there is so con-
siderable a tendency to-day to throw one's
cap in air and shout, " The sword of the
Lord and of Pragmatism ! " it behooves all
those who have the interests of religion at
heart to look carefully into the question
whence pragmatism has gained its religious
reputation and how well it deserves it. What
is the nature and the temper of this newly
patented pragmatic sword, and is it so sure
a defense that we may with safety throw
aside for it our older weapons ? Just what
is it that pragmatism proves and how does
it prove it ? If we trust our religious beliefs
to its defense, just what surety have we that
they will be defended and that when we get
them back again they will still be recogniz-
able? When the question is put in this way,
the controversy over the meaning and valid-
ity of pragmatism ceases to be a merely
academic matter, and is seen to be fraught
with truly human and living interest.

Now in itself pragmatism is neither re-

PRAGMATISM AND RELIGION 1 77

ligious nor irreligious. It is essentially a
doctrine or group of kindred doctrines con-
cerning the nature of meaning, truth, and
knowledge. It is epistemological and logical
rather than metaphysical, theological, ethical,
or religious. Hence in completing our dis-
cussion of knowledge, truth, and meaning, I
have finished all that I shall have to say of
the fundamental principles of pragmatism. If
not over-scrupulous about consistency, it is
possible to hold any one of several different
views on metaphysics, religion, ethics, etc.,
and still be a pragmatist, — and in fact on
many important metaphysical questions our
leading pragmatists hold very divergent posi-
tions. While all this is true, however, it
must not be overlooked that one's episte-
mology is pretty sure to color or even
determine one's metaphysics, and therefore
to influence one's religious views — so far
as these are a matter of reasoning at all.
Whence two things follow. In the first
place, there is a certain family resemblance
between the metaphysical and religious

178 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM?

views of most pragmatists, due not so much
to logic as to disposition ; to minds that hold
the pragmatic view of truth the same gen-
eral type of philosophic attitude seems to
be natural. And secondly, the fundamental
principles of pragmatic epistemology when
consistently applied to certain philosophical
and theological problems ought to determine,
and logically must determine, one's attitude
toward them, whether as a matter of fact
they do determine the attitude of individual
pragmatists or not.

It will, in fact, be recalled that at the be-
ginning of these lectures I set down as one
of the characteristic features of pragmatism
its attempt to work out a theory of reality.
Unfortunately for our purposes, however,
this is as yet only an attempt; the prag-
matic view of reality is as yet in so embry-
onic and unformed a condition that it would
be premature and unfair for a non-prag-
matist to try to state it. Its central doc-
trine seems to be that reality is not stiff and
static and independent of us, but is made

PRAGMATISM AND RELIGION 1 79

largely by our interests and desires; and
that "knowledge is reality making a partic-
ular and specified sort of change in itself."^
Just how far pragmatism will carry this gen-
eral doctrine and just what it will make out
of it remains as yet to be seen. It is to be
hoped, in particular, that Professor Dewey
will elaborate his view of reality and formu-
late it in terms which the non-pragmatist
reader can understand. In its present in-
cipient state, as I have said, it would be un-
fair for one who is not a pragmatist and
cannot speak with any authority to attempt
to expound it, and much more unfair for him
to criticise it. I shall, therefore, leave the
subject here, and simply refer any of you
who would like to know more about it to
the following sources: Schiller's essay on
*' The Ethical Basis of Metaphysics " in
"Humanism,"^ and his two essays entitled
" The Making of Truth " and " The Making

^ Professor Dewey, " Does Reality possess Practical
Character?" in the volume of "Essays Philosophical and
Psychological, in Honor of William James," p. 59.

2 pp. 1-17.

l8o WHAT IS PRAGMATISM?

of Reality," respectively, in his " Studies in
Humanism " ; ^ Dewey's contributions to the
" Studies in Logical Theory," ^ his series of
papers on " The Control of Ideas by Facts "
in Volume IV of \ki^ Journal of Philosophy f
and his most recent statement on the sub-
ject (already quoted from) in the Columbia
Festschrift for James ; namely, " Does Re-
ality possess Practical Character ? " ; * and
James's lecture on " Pragmatism and Hu-
manism " in his " Pragmatism." ^

But while I shall not venture to expound
the pragmatic view of reality in general, I
believe I shall be justified in discussing the
attitude of pragmatism toward the particular
kind of metaphysical problem referred to in
the title of this lecture — the religious prob-
lem. On this many of the leading prag-
matists have very decided views, — views
determined, as I said above, largely by nat-
ural disposition, — and these views they have
expressed clearly and at considerable length.

1 pp. 179-203, 421-451- ^ pp- 1-85-

8 pp. 197-203, 253-259, 309-319.

* pp. 53-80- 6 pp. 239-270.

PRAGMATISM AND RELIGION l8l

Moreover, the fundamental epistemological
principles of pragmatism have a necessary
and direct bearing upon the religious prob-
lems which even a non-pragmatist has a
right to point out. The present lecture,
therefore, falls naturally into two parts, —
it must deal with the general attitude which
most pragmatists by temperament hold to-
ward religion, and, secondly, it must outline
more definitely and in particular the view
which pragmatism as such ought to hold if its
presuppositions are to be logically carried out.
The same temperamental bias which
makes the pragmatist lean toward a vol-
untaristic psychology and define truth in
terms of value usually tends to make him
also a pluralist rather than a monist, a be-
liever in free will rather than in determin-
ism, an upholder of the strenuous, dynamic,
dramatic view of the universe in which there
are real dangers and genuine crises, rather
than an advocate of absolutism with its
peaceful and static world in which every-
thing is saved from all eternity. To the

1 82 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM?

pragmatist of the James-Schiller type, re-
ligion means something very vital and real.
The religious view of the world for him
is not just the naturalistic view under a
new light and with a new name, as is the
case too often with some Hegelian philoso-
phers; it is a genuinely and practically dif-
ferent world — different in the pragmatic
sense of making a differe7ice. " Religion,"
says Professor James, " in her fullest exercise
of function, is not a mere illumination of
facts already elsewhere given, not a mere
passion, like love, which views things in a
rosier light. It is indeed that, but it is
something more ; namely, a postulator of
new facts as well. The world interpreted
religiously is not the materialistic world over
again, with an altered expression ; it must
have, over and above the altered expression,
a natural constitution different at some
points from that which a materialistic world
would have. It must be such that different
events can be expected in it, different con-
duct be required."^

^ " The Varieties of Religious Experience," p. 518.

PRAGMATISM AND RELIGION 183

And, to be more explicit, the pragmatic
temper finds especially congenial the psy-
chological rather than the scholastic view
of religion. It likes to look upon religion
neither as a divine revelation nor as a phil-
osophical construction, but as an essentially
human product and one which gets its justi-
fication and authority, and its proof (so far
as it has any), from the very nature of man,
and from its own usefulness to man. Pro-
fessor James speaks of his method of evalu-
ating religions as " the elimination of the
humanly unfit and the survival of the hu-
manly fittest, applied to religious beliefs " ;
and, he adds, "if we look at history candidly
and without prejudice, we have to admit
that no religion has ever in the long run
established or proved itself in any other way.
Religions have approved themselves ; they
have ministered to sundry vital needs which
they found reigning. When they violated
other needs too strongly, or when other
faiths came which served the same needs
better, the first religions were supplanted."^

^ " The Varieties of Religious Experience," p. 331.

1 84 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM?

Hence the pragmatist is likely to look
with a good deal of favor on the " psychology
of religion " and to emphasize the human
utility of the various religious concepts.
Nor does this involve any lack of belief in
the religious view of the universe on the
part of the pragmatist. He is indeed
skeptical of the value of the historical
proofs of God, and is the chief antagonist of
the idealistic Absolute. Yet, for all that, he
is, as a rule, essentially and temperamentally
religious, and he has his own arguments for
a religious Weltanschauung. One of these
he finds in the very nature of man and of re-
ligion as portrayed by contemporary psy-
chology. Religion goes deeper than do any
of its intellectual formulations ; it springs not
from the abstract reason but from the whole
man. It is biological rather than intellec-
tual, and is an almost instinctive reaction of
man to his environment. Religious belief of
some kind is a normal and almost a neces-
sary human product, and for this reason may
be and (in fact) must be trusted. Moreover,

PRAGMATISM AND RELIGION 1 85

our trust in it is justified in the same gen-
eral way in which scientific hypotheses are
justified: it stands the test of usefulness. It
works; it ministers to human needs ; it com-
bines harmoniously, on the whole, with hu-
man experience, and it furthers human life
and happiness. This, says the pragmatist,
is the only kind of verification to be found
in science, and though in the case of reli-
gion the verification is much less exact and
complete, it is essentially of the same nature
and is sufficient to justify our trust until
positively overthrown. For although the
beliefs of religion are as yet only partially
verified, that is what one must expect from
the enormous magnitude and complexity of
religion's problem ; and it must be remem-
bered, too, that the relatively simple " laws "
and " truths " of science, now universally
accepted, were one day in the same position
and started out as mere postulates. " Sci-
ence too takes risks, " as Schiller says, " and
ventures herself on postulates, hypotheses,
and analogies, which seem wild, until they

1 86 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM?

are tamed to our service and confirmed in
their allegiance. She too must end by say-
ing Credo ut intelligam. And she does
this because she must. For, as Professor
Dewey has admirably shown, all values and
meanings rest upon beliefs, and, 'we cannot
preserve significance and decline the per-
sonal attitude in which it is inscribed and
operative. . . .' We start, then, always from
the postulates of faith, and transmute them,
slowly, into the axioms of reason. The
presuppositions of scientific knowledge and
religious faith are the same." ^

Pragmatism thus seeks to prove the truth
of religion by its good and satisfactory con-
sequences. Here, however, a distinction
must be made ; namely, between the " good, "
harmonious, and logically confirmatory con-
sequences of religious concepts as such, and
the good and pleasant consequences which
come from believing these concepts. It is
one thing to say a belief is true because the
logical consequences that flow from it fit in

^ " Studies in Humanism," pp. 361-362.

PRAGMATISM AND RELIGION 187

harmoniously with our otherwise grounded
knowledge ; and quite another thing to call
it true because it is pleasant to believe.
We may conceive, therefore, two perfectly
distinct methods of verification through con-
sequences. The first is exactly that used by
science ; the second (namely, through conse-
quences which flow not from the idea as
such but from our believing it) is very far
removed from the scientific method, and is
held only by pragmatists — if it be really held
even by them. That it is so held by some
at least, would seem to be clear from such
expressions as the following : " If theologi-
cal ideas prove to have a value for concrete
life, they will be true, in the sense of being
good for so much. " "So far as the Absolute
affords comfort it surely is not sterile, it has
that amount of value ; it performs a concrete
function. As a good pragmatist I myself
ought to call the Absolute true in so far
forth then ; and I unhesitatingly now do
so."^ It would seem, therefore, that any-

^ " Pragmatism," p. 73.

1 88 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM?

thing is true " in so far forth " which it is
comfortable to beheve. But whether prag-
matism really holds this doctrine is doubtful.
As Professor Dewey says, " Light would
be thrown upon how Mr. James conceives
this matter by statements from him on such
points as these : If ideas terminate in good
consequences, but yet the goodness of the
consequences was no part of the intention
of the idea, does the goodness have any ver-
ifying force ? If the goodness of conse-
quences arises from the context of the idea
in belief rather than from the idea itself, does
it have any verifying force ? If an idea leads
to consequences which are good in the one
respect only of fulfilling the intent of the idea
(as when one drinks a liquid to test the idea
that it is a poison) does the badness of the
consequences in every other respect detract
from the verifying force of these conse-
quences ?"^

Certainly if pragmatism means that any-

^ " What does Pragmatism mean by Practical ? " Jour, of
Pkil., Vol. V, pp. 93-94.

PRAGMATISM AND RELIGION 1 89

thing may be proved true if the consequences
of believing it are comforting, it is provided
with a very cheap and easy method of dem-
onstration. Pragmatists are always indig-
nant at the common accusation that they
teach us we may believe whatever we like ;
but it must be admitted there is consider-
able excuse, as Professor Dewey has himself
pointed out above, for this interpretation of
their doctrine. However, I shall not press
this point farther nor take seriously the im-
plication that any good consequences which
flow from our belief in an hypothesis can be
used to prove its truth. And certainly if
pragmatism does not mean to use this rather
questionable method of verification, but seeks
to demonstrate the truth of relio:ious doctrines
purely from their own proper and necessary
consequences, it is on good logical and scien-
tific ground. How far these consequences
actually do prove the doctrines referred to is,
of course, another question ; and it must be
admitted that pragmatism has as yet made
but little serious attempt in concrete detail

I90 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM?

to furnish this sort of verification for our
rehgious concepts.

So much for the pragmatist's way of prov-
ing the truth of our rehgious behefs. But
this is only a part of what he has to say in
defense of faith. For, he continues, even if
the proof of rehgion be not complete, it is at
least as good as that of the opposite view,
and therefore, seeing that one must choose
between rival hypotheses neither of which
can be demonstrated, one has a right to take
refuge in the will to believe. For belief,
after all, is no mere cold intellectualistic state
of mind, but has in it an element of will and
of emotion. On vital questions where there
is genuine uncertainty one cannot forever
keep decision in abeyance. Hence the prag-
matist, as a general thing, takes his stand
and makes his life venture on the side which
promises most if once accepted. Life is
better, sweeter, more worthy and worth while
with some sort of religious belief than with-
out it ; hence, says the pragmatist, since such
a belief is at least as well grounded as its

PRAGMATISM AND RELIGION 191

rival, let us deliberately adopt it as a working
hypothesis until it is discredited.

Thus a road is opened to religious faith
even for those who feel (as modern men are
coming more and more to feel) that demon-
stration in religious matters is no longer to
be expected. For such men, this is perhaps
the only protection against a rather sad skep-
ticism. And it is a protection because it
shows that skepticism itself is quite as much
a voluntary choice as is the religious attitude.
Choose we must, whether we will or no.
Says Professor James, in the famous book
which is the very Gospel of this Justification
of Faith, " We cannot escape the issue by re-
maining skeptical and waiting for more light,
because although we do avoid error in that
way, if religion be untrue, we lose the good
if it be true, just as certainly as if we posi-
tively choose to disbelieve. . . . Skepticism
then is not avoidance of option ; it is option
of a certain particular kind of risk. Better
risk loss of truth than chance of error — that
is your faith-vetoer's exact position. He is

192 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM?

actively playing his stake as much as the be-
liever is ; he is backing the field against the
religious hypothesis, just as the believer is
backing the religious hypothesis against the
field. To preach skepticism to us as a duty
until ' sufficient evidence ' for religion be
found, is tantamount, therefore, to telling us,
when in the presence of the religious hypoth-
esis, that to yield to our fear of its being
error is wiser and better than to yield to our
hope that it may be true. . . . And dupery
for dupery, what proof is there that dupery
through hope is so much worse than dupery
through fear ? I, for one, can see no proof ;
and I simply refuse obedience to the scien-
tist's command to imitate his kind of option,
in a case where my own stake is important
enough to give me the right to choose my
own form of risk. If religion be true and
the evidence for it be still insufficient, I do
not wish by putting your extinguisher upon
my nature (which feels to me as if it had
after all some business in this matter) to for-
feit my sole chance in life of getting upon the

PRAGMATISM AND RELIGION 1 93

winning side — that chance depending, of
course, on my wilHngness to run the risk of
acting as if my passional need of taking the
world religiously might be prophetic and
right." 1

This, as I have said, is the position taken
by most pragmatists. That it is so is due to
the general tendencies of their disposition and
temperament, rather than to any logical and
necessary connection between it and their
epistemology. Nor is it by any means pecul-
iar to them. It was already old long before
pragmatism was born, and is to-day enthusi-
astically supported by many pronounced
antagonists of pragmatism. Cicero voiced
something very like it when he said he
would rather be wrong with Plato than right
with Plato's opponents. And every one will
remember that Kant came even nearer to
the " will to believe " when he destroyed
knowledge in order to substitute faith. It
was, of course, this general point of view
that prompted his advocacy of the primacy

1 "The Will to Believe," pp. 26-27.
o

194 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM?

of the practical reason and his moral argu-
ment for God. This same attempt to found
religion on the moral will was carried farther
by Fichte and still farther by Ritschl. The
merit of Professor James's brilliant book lay
not so much in its originality, as in its giv-
ing this century-old doctrine a broader
philosophical setting and foundation, by
showing that not only religious belief but
nearly all belief is in part a matter of will,
and in presenting the right to believe in a
form at once so persuasive and so inspiring.
I think I shall be justified in saying that
James's " Will to Believe " has been one of
the greatest influences for genuine religious
faith that have appeared in the last half
century.

So much for the religious views actually
held by many pragmatists. And now for the
less interesting but really more important
attempt to work out the logical consequences
of pragmatic epistemology as applied to re-
ligious problems. Our question therefore is
not, What attitude does the pragmatist usually

PRAGMATISM AND RELIGION 1 95

take? but What attitude ought he to take if
he is going to be faithful to his own presup-
positions ?

I have said that the view which holds the
beliefs of religion to be true because of
their value for life, and which maintains that
we have a right to believe them even when
unverified, is not peculiar to pragmatism,
and that it does not follow from the funda-
mental principles concerning knowledge,
truth, and meaning which alone are uniquely
pragmatic. But one must go farther than
this : and, in fact, the thesis which I shall
seek to maintain will be that it is logically
inconsistent to proclaim and carry out the
more extreme and radical pragmatic prin-
ciples, and at the same time cling to the
religious view of the universe and seek to
uphold genuine belief in it.

The extreme pragmatist view, if I under-
stand it aright, maintains that the meaning
of any philosophic proposition can always be
brought down to some particular conse-
quence in human experience. A true belief

196 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM?

if it has any meaning always " has a bearing
on some human interest." " Theoretical
truth is no relation between our mind and
the archetypal reality. It falls within the
mind, being the accord of some of its pro-
cesses and objects with other processes and
objects." It is " an experienced relation," or
" the effective working of an idea," or the
process of the idea's verification. Hence all
genuine meaning and all truth (and, of
course, all knowledge as well) lie within the
individual's experience, or, at the broadest,
within the experience of the human race.
The beliefs of religion, on the other hand, —
the very beliefs for which we have seen the
pragmatists so valiantly fighting, — are
largely concerned with matters which by
their nature lie beyond the limits of human
experience. Primal among these, for ex-
ample, is the belief in a God, — not merely
in future experiences of yours and mine
which will be " the same as if " there were a
God, but in the actual present existence of a
divine being who by definition is not within

PRAGMATISM AND RELIGION 197

the experience of any or all of us. What-
ever the pragmatists may mean by God, this
at least is what the religious man means by
the term and what the pragmatist is natu-
rally supposed to mean when arguing for the
religious hypothesis. And it must be clear
to every one that if all truth and meaning
are confined to consequences within our
human experience, we are deprived of all
right to talk about and believe in a being
who by the very conditions of the argument
is not included within our experience.

To this the pragmatist will reply that the
very peculiarities of the pragmatic epistemol-
ogy which I have pointed out make it really
the only sure salvation from philosophic
doubt. All other views of truth and knowl-
edge but his own, the pragmatist will main-
tain, are by their nature doomed to end in
skepticism. For once admit the necessity of
transcendence, the existence of a chasm be-
tween your idea and its object, and you have
made knowledge forever impossible. Knowl-
edge is possible and skepticism vanquished

198 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM?

only for a theory which denies the existence
of any chasm and the necessity of any tran-
scendence. This is exactly what pragmatism
does. It points out that the whole of your
genuine meaning can always be summed up
in some possible difference in your own (or
other human) life ; that truth is only a con-
crete process within the mind ; and that
knowledge is a succession of the doubt-in-
quiry-answer type and "lives wholly inside
the tissue of experience." Hence your idea
and its object are not separated by any chasm,
but are both parts of the same chain and
united by intermediaries of the same nature.
Your idea therefore may genuinely know its
object and may be proved true since its truth
consists just in its satisfactory working. Ap-
ply this now to religion, and all becomes clear.
" If theological ideas prove to have a value
for concrete life, they will be true in the
sense of being good for so much." " On prag-
matistic principles if the hypothesis of God
works satisfactorily in the widest sense of
the word, it is true." ^ Of course, you must

*" Pragmatism," pp. ii and 299.

PRAGMATISM AND RELIGION 1 99

consider with care the question whether it
does really work satisfactorily ; but if it does,
that is all you mean by its being true, and
thus the chasm and the need of transcend-
ence is avoided.

Thus pragmatism attempts to save us from
philosophic doubt by making knowledge,
truth, and meaning have their entire being
within the tissue of human experience. But
it was not the things within human expe-
rience which we were ever tempted to doubt.
It was the things outside human expe-
rience, — God, immortality, the moral nature
of the universe, the final victory of the right,
— it was of these we felt doubtful. And
how does pragmatism help us here ? It does
not pretend to tell us what our future expe-
rience will be, much less to declare to us the
things that are outside all possible human
experience. Its message is really this : You
may believe there is a God because all you
mean by a God is certain " adjustments of
our attitudes of hope and expectation." A
" vague confidence in the future is the sole

200 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM?

pragmatic meaning at present discernible in
the terms design and designer." " Other
than this practical significance, the words
God, free will, design, have none." ^

" When I affirm that the metaphysical the-
ory of the Absolute \s false,'' says Schiller, "I
only mean that it is useless, that it simplifies
nothing and complicates everything."^ And
the consistent pragmatist, of course, holds the
converse of this; namely, that when he
affirms that the theory of God is true he
means only that it is useful, that it simplifies
things within experience — not that there
really is a God. This (if I understand him)
is the avowed attitude of Professor Dewey,
and it certainly is the only logical and con-
sistent attitude of any pragmatist who takes
his own doctrines of truth and meaning
seriously.

Of course, this view of religion is not
what the reading public understands the
pragmatist to mean when he so bravely
tells us we have a right to believe in God.

1 "Pragmatism," pp. 115, 121. "^ "Humanism," p. 59.

PRAGMATISM AND RELIGION 20I

There is a general impression abroad that
pragmatism has somehow discovered a
short cut to God and religion which makes
skepticism no longer tenable, and that if
one ever became a real philosophical prag-
matist, one would understand what it was.
And in fact nearly all the pragmatists
themselves, except perhaps Professor Dewey
and some of his followers, at times feel the
need of something more solid and objective
than the sort of " God " one comes to by
strict pragmatic principles. Thus at the
close of his " Varieties of Religious Experi-
ence," Professor James points out that one's
" subjective way of feeling things " is not
all one wants from religious beliefs ; one
wants to know also about the ''objective
truth of their content " ; and he adds in a
note, " The word ' truth ' is here taken to
mean something additional to bare value
for life."^ The attempt of Professor James
to prove the old-fashioned God by the new-
fashioned argument is well criticised by

1 p. 509-

202 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM?

Professor Dewey in the admirable article
from which I have already quoted. " Con-
sider," he says, " the case of design. Mr.
James begins by accepting a ready-made
notion, to which he then applies the prag-
matic criterion. The traditional notion is
that of a ' seeing force that runs things.'
This is rationalistically and retrospectively
empty; its being there makes no difference.
But ' returning with it into experience, we
gain a more confiding outlook on the future.
If not a blind force but a seeing force runs
things, we may reasonably expect better
issues. This vague co7tfidence in the future
is the sole pragmatic meajting at present dis-
cernible in the terms design ajid designer'
[quoted from James]. Now," Dewey con-
tinues, " is this intended to replace the mean-
ing of a ' seeing force which runs things '?
Or is it intended to superadd a pragmatic
value and validation to that concept of a see-
ing force.? Or does it mean that, irrespec-
tive of the existence of any such object, a
belief in it has that value t Strict prag-

PRAGMATISM AND RELIGION 203

matism would seem to require the first in-
terpretation, but I do not think that is what
Mr. James intends."

Professor Dewey then takes up the ques-
tion of theism and materialism. Strict
pragmatism would tell us that the only
meaning of theism lies in the differences it
makes to us, and would therefore substi-
tute these concrete experiential differences
for the old view of God as a " superhu-
man power," and would, as Dewey says,
" simply abolish the meaning of an ante-
cedent power." ^

In short, we have in the common, loose,
pragmatic treatment of religion another illus-
tration of the tendency to smuggle in
" intellectualistic " results to fill out the
deficiencies left by pragmatic methods.
" When God is presented as the name of
an experienced fact, and theistic theories
are taken as methods of interpreting that
fact for purposes of response, we are on

^ " What does Pragmatism mean by Practical ? " pp. 90
and 91.

204 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM?

good pragmatic ground. But when it is
declared that ' On pragmatist principles if
the hypothesis of God works satisfactorily
in the widest sense of the word it is true,'
the implication to the innocent reader is
far otherwise. We can hardly put the same
eloquence into the naked pragmatic assertion,
' If the hypothesis of God works satisfac-
torily in the widest sense of the word it
does work satisfactorily in the widest sense
of the word.' God as an addition to an
already smoky image of reality at large, God
as an aesthetic anticipation of what visual
and other experiences we may have face to
face when we have passed over the river,
God in these simple ' copy ' ways of con-
sidering our ideas must be omitted. God
must be the name of a fact in our experi-
ence, and the determination of His ways
must be the determination of our way of
working out our wills in the light of that
fact." 1

1 Max Eastman in " The Pragmatic Meaning of Pragma-
tism," a paper read before the Psychological Section of the
New York Academy of Sciences.

PRAGMATISM AND RELIGION 205

The logical outcome of pragmatism, there-
fore, when applied to religion is not salva-
tion from philosophic doubt, but a necessary
and ineradicable skepticism. This, indeed,
might have been foreseen from the outset.
We shall recognise it clearly enough if, with
the light we have now attained, we read over
again some of its fundamental principles.
Take, for example, its chief "postulate," as
presented by Professor Dewey. " Things —
anything, everything, in the ordinary or
non-technical use of the term thing — are
what they are experienced as. Hence if
one wishes to describe anything truly, his
task is to tell what it is experienced as
being." " The real significance of the prin-
ciple is that of a method of philosophical
analysis. If you wish to find out what sub-
jective, objective, physical, mental, cosmic,
psychic, cause, substance, purpose, activity,
evil, being, quantity — any philosophical
term in short — means, go to experience and
see what it is experienced as.'' And, the
pragmatist would of course continue, God

206 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM?

and the other objects of religion are what
we experience them as, and (for us and our
behef at least) nothing more. Certain aspects
of our experience is all they can meaji for us.
And it is the same with their truth. Since the
truth of an idea means merely the fact that the
idea works, that fact is all you mean when you
say the idea is true. Nothing more, noth-
ing " transcendent " nor " cosmic " must be
sought from it. It is a very simple matter,
you see, — like the multiplication table, —
"we simply fill the hole with the dirt we
dug out. Why are twice two four.? Be-
cause, in fact, four is twice two." It is thus a
very easy thing to prove our belief in God to
be true by the good consequences that flow
from it, because all we mean by God is just
those good consequences. The real out-
come of pragmatism is therefore an assur-
ance that the questions in which ordinary
religious people are interested are essentially
insoluble, — hopelessly insoluble, in fact,
because of the very nature of knowledge and
truth and meaning, — and that we should

PRAGMATISM AND RELIGION 207

therefore go about our business and fulfill
as an hireling our day. For, as Professor
Dewey says, " The appropriate subject-
matter of awareness is not reality at large, a
metaphysical heaven to be mimeographed at
many removes upon a badly constructed
mental carbon paper which yields at best
only fragmentary, blurred, and erroneous
copies. Its proper and legitimate object is
that relationship of organism and environ-
ment in which functioning is most amply
and effectively attained ; or by which, in
case of obstruction and consequent needed
experimentation, its later eventual free
course is most facilitated. As for the other
reality, metaphysical reality at large, it may,
so far as awareness is concerned, go to its
own place." ^

This consignment of all questions about
reality at large which do not directly concern
the functioning of the organism to their
" own place " (which may be anywhere you

1 " Does Reality Possess Practical Character?" in the
Columbia Festschrift for James, pp. 70-71.

2o8 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM?

like except amongst suitable subjects for
human discussion) is perfectly justified by,
and, in fact, is the only logical conclusion
from the fundamental principles of pragma-
tism. For if these principles be correct, 'tis
idle for us creatures of a day, who cannot
even mean anything beyond our own experi-
ence, to spend our time on questions neces-
sarily so remote and inaccessible as are those
which religious people tJiink they are dis-
cussing and about which they think they
care. From them we are separated by a
chasm much more impossible to pass than
that which the rationalists seek to bridge
with their method of transcendence. For if
pragmatism be true, it is not a chasm, but an
infinite stretch of empty space that bounds
each of us — or at least the race — on every
hand, so that if there be another side we at
least can neither know nor even mean it.
On such an epistemology the discussion of
the old problems of religion becomes essen-
tially a silly waste of time and gray matter,
which might better be spent in tilling the

PRAGMATISM AND RELIGION 209

soil and nourishing our psychophysical
organism. " The Infinite, the Eternal, the
All-good — these are names empty of all real
meaning, idle fancies for minds that will
dream or idly speculate instead of seeking to
know and to make better the only real world
there is, the world of experience. This
world admits no reference to a superhuman
reality. We are thus left with reality that is
fragmentary only, with experience that is
made up of flying, ever changing moments,
with thought that never wins final truth,
with temporal processes and no eternal
to justify and give them meaning; with
finite progress and no goal finally won ;
with a better and no best as the ultimate
standard of value judgments. For the satis-
faction of ethical and religious ideals and
aspirations we must look to our possibly
better selves. Our idealized selves are our
gods; and the cry after the Divine, the
Eternal, the Complete in knowledge and
goodness, must be satisfied with that frag-
ment of truth and goodness which is all

2IO WHAT IS PRAGMATISM?

that our finite lives can possess in their
best estate."^

Of course, this is not what most pragma-
tists actually hold. But it is, I maintain, the
logical outcome of their fundamental princi-
ples — the principles which alone are pecul-
iar to their philosophy. In short, if strictly
carried out to its logical conclusions, prag-
matism is essentially a philosophy of skepti-
cism. Or better still, perhaps, in Papini's
naive and ingenuous expression, " Pragma-
tism is really less a philosophy than a
method of doing without one."

^ Professor Russell, " Objective Idealism and Revised
Empiricism — Discussion," Phil. Rev., Vol. XV, p. 633.

LECTURE VI
THE "PRACTICAL" POINT OF VIEW

LECTURE VI

THE "PRACTICAL" POINT OF VIEW

"Howsoever these things are in men's
depraved judgments and affections, yet truth,
which only doth judge itself, teacheth that
the inquiry of truth, which is the love-
making or wooing of it; the knowledge of
truth, which is the presence of it ; and the
belief of truth, which is the enjoying of it,
is the sovereign good of human nature."
These words of Francis Bacon contain
within them the ultimate justification of all
philosophy. Whoever accepts them will
hold that philosophical investigation is an
end in itself, needing no apology or de-
fense ; while to the man who challenges
them most philosophy will seem but a sorry
waste of energy.

The present controversy over pragmatism

may at times appear to the non-technical
213

214 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM?

reader a battle between ghosts and shad-
ows, a smoky discharge of weightless pro-
jectiles, a ridiculously noisy war of words
in a realm so far removed from the world
of real life as to be quite out of touch with
any genuine human interest. And even
those of us who have somehow got en-
tangled in the struggle feel now and then
{crede experto) a disheartening doubt that
perhaps the game is not worth the candle
after all, and that maybe our manuscripts
were better used for building fires and
baking bread. This sense of uncertainty,
however, and of the possible worthlessness
of one's efforts, is not peculiar to those
involved in the pragmatist controversy.
Doubt of the same discouraging sort is
apt to come at times upon every one en-
gaged in theoretical pursuits of any nature
and make him question seriously and sadly
the value of his work. The Spirit that
Denies is not far from any one of us, and
is ever ready with his disconcerting sugges-
tion, " It may be clever, but is it worth

THE "PRACTICAL" POINT OF VIEW 215

while ? " At such moments it is well to
turn back to our Francis Bacon and read
again the comforting words of the father
of English philosophy. They bring back
courage to our hearts as the touch of
earth renewed the strength of Antaeus.
The possession of truth is "the sovereign
good of human nature." We again feel
sure that this is so ; for " truth, which alone
doth judge itself, teacheth" it. To make
"an unusually obstinate attempt to think
clearly and consistently,"^ to carry out our
thoughts to their logical conclusions, to see
what we really mean and must mean by
knowledge and truth, these may be pecul-
iarly difficult and dreary tasks, but they
are worth our while if the possession of
truth is worth our while. The pragmatist
controversy is not logomachy nor is it un-
important. If the traditional view of truth
and knowledge is meaningless, as the prag-
matists contend, then we ought to know it,
and not slumber on in dogmatic confidence

^ James's famous definition of metaphysics.

2l6 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM?

that our old bottles will stand the strain
of the new wine which modern logic and
modern science are pouring into them. If
new bottles are necessary, by all means let
us have them before the old ones perish
and the wine be spilt. And if, on the
other hand, the pragmatist substitutes for
our older concepts are self-contradictory and
land us in absurd and untenable positions,
that too we ought to know. For clear think-
ing is worth while for its own sake, and
knowledge of the truth "is the sovereign
good of human nature."

Nor is the aim of either the pragmatists
or their opponents merely controversial.
At times it may seem so, but this appear-
ance is merely superficial. To get the
better of the other side is merely an inci-
dental aim, and deep down below this runs
the genuine and serious desire of both
parties to get at the truth for its own sake.
In a very real sense there is no controversy
here but an investigation, there are not
two parties but one, and the aim of all con-

THE "PRACTICAL" POINT OF VIEW 217

cerned is to give each other mutual aid in
the common search. The non-pragmatists
genuinely wish to see pragmatism com-
pletely developed and clearly expressed,
and the pragmatists welcome all criticism,
adverse or favorable, knowing that this will
only aid them in thinking out their own
thoughts logically and to the end. We
are really partners rather than opponents,
each seeking the same thing, each making
common cause with the rest, and each
wishing the other Godspeed.

In man's long search after truth — " the
lovemaking and wooing of it," as Bacon
would say — it is possible to make out two
chief tendencies or types of attitude. One
class of mind has been so carried away
with the joy of mental achievement, so en-
chanted by the glory of truth, that in seeking
and proclaiming it as the supreme end of
life it has quite overlooked the fact that
truth is not only an end but a means as
well ; that it not only is a good, but also is
good for something. The other type of

2l8 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM?

truth-seeker, noting the error of overem-
phasis on truth merely as an end, has
sought to counterbalance this mistake by
claying its emphasis upon the practical value
of truth and its possession ; pointing out
that truth and knowledge are means to all
sorts of other good things, that they are
tools and implements which should be used
as well as enjoyed, and that in our enthu-
siasm over the possession of these things,
the humbler practical values of life must
not be slightedj

It is to this latter tendency that pragma-
tism belongs and it is to this broad, living,
human point of view that it owes its rather
striking popularity and the rapid progress
that it has made among non-technical read-
ers. For certainly it is not the special
technical doctrines of pragmatism that have
aroused so much real interest among the
reading public. There is no great sponta-
neous curiosity in the community at large
concerning the interpretation of the terms
" meaning," " truth," and " knowledge." It

THE "PRACTICAL" POINT OF VIEW 219

is rather the pragmatist's large, big-hearted,
practical way of looking at things that has
attracted the general attention to what he
has to say. The reading public is seldom
interested in the technical and exact side of
any science or discipline. It naturally and
quite properly hates exactness. It likes
X-rays and electrons and geological periods
and light years and the survival of the fit-
test; but when it comes to technical meth-
ods and exact descriptions and definitions,
it "wants to be excused." And, therefore,
it loves pragmatism not as a technical phil-
osophical doctrine, but as an interesting,
belligerent, " practical " point of view.

As such, however, pragmatism is, as I
have said, only a part of a larger tendency,
— a tendency which, though one of the
most important characteristics of contempo-
rary thought, is rather difficult to name or
define. It might be called the empirical or
the biological or the historical or, perhaps,
simply the practical point of view. It has
permeated so much of our thinking and has

2 20 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM?

taken on so many shades and aspects that
it has no longer very much unity except as
a general "psychological atmosphere," and
also, perhaps, as a universal protest against
the point of view which it opposes and has
in part replaced. To make more plain what
I have in mind, it will be necessary to say
a few words about this prior point of view,
which may be called (for want of a better
name) that of excessive intellectualism.

By this I mean, of course, the tendency
already pointed out, which considers truth
only as an end and never as a means, and
so in part divorces truth and knowledge
from the world of active and practical life.
This way of conceiving things probably ante-
dates history. It had no father, and it seems
to have dominated in large part the thought
of many of the ancient philosophers. The
most famous of its early representatives was,
of course, Plato.^ For his severance of the

^ It should also be pointed out, however, that there is a
decidedly pragmatic tendency in Plato, inherited from his
spiritual father, Socrates, and seen especially in his doctrine
of the Idea of the Good.

THE "PRACTICAL" POINT OF VIEW 221

world of " illusion " from the " real " world of
Ideas, however great its value in some re-
spects, was certainly the first long step
toward the separation of " true knowledge "
from the practical world of action and con-
crete experience. And, immeasurable as is
Plato's gift to philosophy, it cannot be denied
that his sharp separation of our meanings
from our individual, living experience, in
which alone they are genuinely real, was
fatal for both. The inaccessible and change-
less world of abstract concepts, which Plato
is at least supposed to have believed in, was
erected for the purpose of explaining the
changing world which we actually experi-
ence, and the chasm which was made be-
tween them defeated the very purpose for
which the two had been distinguished. The
purely and abstractly logical and intellec-
tualistic, purified from all human taint, was
so completely divorced from the emotional
and volitional, from the struggle and en-
deavor of concrete, pulsing actuality, that
it became next to useless as a means of

222 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM?

rationalizing the world of our actual human
experience. And while philosophy was con-
structing this purely " ideal " realm, an ab-
stract psychology was dividing man's mind
into three sharply sundered faculties, and
not only made reason supreme (as indeed
it should), but abs.tractly " pure " and in-
dependent.

How far the above is a statement of
Plato's philosophy and how far a caricature
of it, is a question which for our present
purposes is irrelevant ; for this at least is
the interpretation of his meaning which
has had most influence in the history of
human thought. And it resulted in an
exaltation of the abstract intellect and a
contempt for the "passions" and feelings,
the impulses and will attitudes of man,
which dominated thought for two thousand
years. Man was regarded and defined as
a " thinking animal." That he was an
animal was most unfortunate ; for thought,
"pure" thought, was his "essence." The
animal nature of man was hardly worthy of

THE "PRACTICAL" POINT OF VIEW 223

investigation, the proper study of mankind
being the abstract " Universals " of mediae-
val " Realism."

Other influences besides that of Plato
were brought to bear in this direction, —
in fact, almost every philosopher for more
than a thousand years contributed his share.
Aristotle's was certainly too catholic a na-
ture, too empirical a mind, to be a slave to
any such excessive intellectualism ; yet his
thought was so interpreted and his work
so used that for centuries his influence also
tended to bind philosophy and science in
intellectualistic fetters. This was largely
due, of course, to his placing the " theoreti-
cal reason " far above the " practical reason."
The syllogism, moreover, which he had
contrived as a practical tool for man's use
was made a fetish, and elaborated for its
own sake. And the questions upon which
it was used and to which most scholastic
thinkers devoted their lives were sadly re-
mote from human experience. Doubtless
the abstractions and absurdities of mediaeval

224 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM?

thinkers have been greatly and unfairly-
exaggerated ; yet, when all is said, it must
be admitted that their views of man's na-
ture and of man's problems were often false
in the extreme, and their quibbles and logom-
achy, their absurd interest in purely verbal
questions, their expenditure of years upon
mere fantastic puzzles, meant a pitiful and
irreparable waste of really great intellectual
power.

The point of view of excessive intellec-
tualism did not die with the mediaeval school-
men. It has its representatives to-day, and
it is against this tendency to worship the
purely abstract intellect and its artificial
problems that the modern spirit in general,
and pragmatism in particular, protest. The
newer point of view made its appearance
in philosophy long, long ago; but from the
growth of the natural sciences in the last
century, the development of the historical
sense, and especially the spread of biologi-
cal ideas, it has taken new strength and
even a new form. The attitude of the age

THE "PRACTICAL" POINT OF VIEW 225

is expressed by the motto, " Knowledge is
power!' The suitable subjects for human
investigation are seen to be those which
belong to this very world in which we live,
and to our actual experience, — the prob-
lems whose answers will make a real dif-
ference to us. Already two hundred years
ago it was perceived that " the proper study
of mankind is man " ; and now that man
has come to be studied seriously, empirically,
scientifically, it is seen that he is a very
different sort of creature from that which
scholasticism painted him. A "thinking ani-
mal," if you like, he is indeed ; but the
modern conception puts the emphasis on the
" animal " rather than on the " thinking."
For, as it views him, man is not an ani-
mal in order that he may think ; he thinks in
order that he may be a better animal. Life
is no longer conceived as existing for the
sake of knowledge ; knowledge exists for the
sake of life. Thought is not the " essence "
of man, nor is it for its own sake. It is
merely one of man's tools by which he may

2 26 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM?

the better react upon his environment, and
therefore stands upon the same plane as his
eyes and his stomach. It was developed by
the struggle for existence according to the
law of the survival of the fittest, for the defi-
nite purpose of guiding the organism and
so of helping to preserve the individual and
to perpetuate the race. And contemporary
physiological psychology, adopting the bio-
logical point of view, has carried it out in
detail, showing the exact place of thought
in the economy of nature, — its position in
the reflex arc pointing to its sole function;
namely, the guidance of the individual's
action upon the environment. Conscious-
ness is really only a stop-gap for mechanical
action. In the words of an eminent German
psychologist,^ it is the " defect of habit."
And our own foremost physiological psy-
chologist writes as follows : —

" The structural unity of the nervous
system is a triad, neither of whose elements
has any independent existence. The sen-

1 Max Dessoir in " Das Doppel-ich."

THE "PRACTICAL" POINT OF VIEW 227

sory impression exists only for the sake of
awakening the central process of reflection,
and the central process of reflection exists
only for the sake of calling forth the final
act. All action is thus r^-action upon the
outer world ; and the middle stage of con-
sideration or contemplation or thinking is
only a place of transit, the bottom of a loop,
both of whose ends have their point of
application in the outer world. If it should
ever have no roots in the outer world, if
it should ever happen that it led to no
active measures, it would fail of its essential
function, and would have to be considered
either pathological or abortive. The cur-
rent of life which runs in at our eyes or
ears is meant to run out at our hands,
feet, or lips. The only use of the thoughts
it occasions while inside is to determine
its direction to whichever of these organs
shall, on the whole, under the circumstances
actually present, act in the way most pro-
pitious to our welfare." ^

^ James, " Reflex Action and Theism," in " The Will to
Believe," pp. 113, 114.

228 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM?

The difference between what may be
called the intellectualistic and the practical
views of thought and knowledge is admi-
rably stated in another passage by the same
brilliant writer. To the question, he says,
why we must intellectualize, interpret, and
understand our originally pure or raw expe-
rience, rationalism and pragmatism give dif-
ferent answers. " The rationalistic answer is
that the theoretic life is absolute and its
interests imperative, and that to understand
is simply the duty of man, and that he who
questions this need not be argued with, for
by the fact of arguing he gives away his
case. The pragmatic answer is that the
environment kills as well as sustains us, and
that the tendency of raw experience to extin-
guish the experient himself is lessened just
in the degree in which the elements in it
that have a practical bearing upon life are
analyzed out of the continuum and verbally
fixed and coupled together, so that we may
know what is in the wind for us and get
ready to react in time. Had pure experi-

THE "PRACTICAL" POINT OF VIEW 229

ence, the pragmatist says, been always per-
fectly healthy, there would never have been
the necessity of isolating or verbalizing any
of its terms. We should just have experi-
enced inarticulately and unintellectually en-
joyed. This leaning on ' reaction ' in the
pragmatist account implies that whenever
we intellectualize a relatively pure experi-
ence, we ought to do so for the sake of
redescending to the purer or more concrete
level again ; and that if an intellect stays
aloft among its abstract terms and general-
ized relations, and does not reinsert itself
with its conclusions into some particular
point of the immediate stream of life, it
fails to finish out its function and leaves
its normal race unrun.

" Most rationalists nowadays will agree
that pragmatism gives a true enough ac-
count of the way in which our intellect
arose at first, but they will deny these later
implications. The case, they will say, re-
sembles that of sexual love. Originating in
the animal need of getting another genera-

230 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM?

tion born, this passion has developed second-
arily such imperious spiritual needs that if
you ask why another generation ought to
be born at all, the answer is : ' Chiefly that
love may go on/ Just so with our intellect :
it originated as a practical means of serving
life ; but it has developed incidentally the
function of understanding absolute truth ;
and life itself now seems to be given chiefly
as a means by which that function may be
prosecuted."^ All of which the upholders
of the practical or biological point of view
of course deny.

The advantages of this viewpoint are, of
course, too obvious to need enumeration.
It brings down knowledge from the skies
and makes it concrete, useful, and living.
It directs investigation into paths which
lead us to genuine and valuable results.
And it brings about a simplification and
systematization of our knowledge which, to
the scientist, is hard to overvalue. The

i"The Thing and its Relations," /^'w^- ^ '^'■^^'^•j Vol. II,
PP- 30-31-

THE "PRACTICAL" POINT OF VIEW 231

various facts of psychology now get a defi-
nite setting and fit in with the biological
facts, with a place for everything and every-
thing in its place, like beads on a string.
The one great biological purpose — the
forwarding of the life of the individual and
of the race — is seen to dominate and to
determine each detail, and thus makes the
whole circle of the life sciences beautifully
systematic and complete.

Nor is it the life sciences alone that have
thus been systematized and illumined by
the newer point of view. The biologists
have found it possible to apply their for-
mula to ethics as well ; and by the aid of it
have sought to throw new light on the
meaning of duty and the moral imperative.
Thus from them we learn that man's chief
end is to put himself in line with the prog-
ress of evolution and to make the purpose
and aim of evolution his own. This aim
and purpose is, we are told, the preserva-
tion of the individual and the reproduction
and " development " of the race. This is

2 32 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM?

shown by such facts as the following :
that the organism is brought to full per-
fection at the age of reproduction, that after
that age is passed degeneration begins to set
in, — the teeth decay and fall out, the eye
grows less keen, the bodily force is abated,
etc., etc. Individual preservation and race
reproduction being thus the purpose of the
evolutionary process, a " scientific " psychol-
ogy must interpret all of man's functions
in this light. His emotions are for the
sake of stimulating him to action, his
thought is for the guidance of that action,
the action always aiming directly or in-
directly at self-preservation or race repro-
duction. Nothing else is for its own sake ;
or, at any rate, if there seem to be other
ultimate aims than action, they are either
pathological or abortive. Hence knowledge
is purely " practical " and for the sake of
action, and the end of righteousness and
ground of morality is the preservation of
the race.

Nor have the physiological psychologists

THE "PRACTICAL" POINT OF VIEW 233

been behindhand in assisting the biologists
to reformulate our ethical concepts. From
one of the most enthusiastic of their num-
ber, for example, I quote the following: —
" Although to-day the old-fashioned dual-
ism of sense and reason has been set aside
in the higher scientific circles, and although
psycho-physiological science is now in a con-
dition to provide the necessary data for a
detailed psycho-physiology of the Moral Im-
perative," ethics " still continues to waste
its efforts in the quest for the criterion of
conduct." To seek for a moral criterion is
vain, nor is the real truth about the prob-
lems of right and wrong to be discovered by
the antiquated and intellectualistic meth-
ods of the ethical philosophers. It is to
be gained only by a study of the reflex-arc.
Genuinely to understand the moral impera-
tive, it must be got at from the psycho-
physiological point of view. Such a truly
scientific study shows that "the Moral Im-
perative is the psychic correlate of a reflec-
tive, cerebro-spinal, ideo-motor process, the

234 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM?

efferent end of which is organized into
motor tracts coordinated for a specific
action." ^

After what I have said of the over-em-
phasis in years past upon the abstract intel-
lect and of the great value of the more
modern practical point of view, I hope I
shall not be accused of doing the latter
injustice if I say that in some ways the
reaction seems to have gone too far. The
last quotation will perhaps illustrate my
meaning. The biological tendency of con-
temporary thought has contributed a great
deal of value to our science and philosophy,
but like many another excellent tendency it
has, in my opinion, been somewhat over-
emphasized. It has pressed its splendidly
useful and illuminating formulae too far, it
has attempted to simplify too much, and in
doing so it has become somewhat narrow,
somewhat blind, and somewhat unempirical.
Its formulas are able to explain a great deal

^ Professor Leuba in " The Psycho-physiology of the
Moral Imperative," Am. Jour, of Psy^Vol. VIII, pp. 529-530.

THE "PRACTICAL" POINT OF VIEW 235

of our reality; but, in our enthusiastic ap-
plication of them, many things which they
do not fit have been either bent out of shape
or completely disregarded and left out of
account. In fact the whole point and pur-
pose of this lecture is to protest against
this excessive practical or biological point
of view, and to urge a partial return to some-
thing like the old-fashioned intellectualism.
I am very far from denying either the ex-
cesses to which intellectualism has been
carried, or the great value of the newer
tendency. The reaction was needed, and it
has been wonderfully productive and fruit-
ful. But, to my thinking, the pendulum has
now swung too far in the anti-intellectualistic
direction.

Especially is this the case with the bio-
logical view of morality and knowledge.
As to the former I need only point out
that it is a very loose kind of reasoning
which would hold it possible to determine
anything about the highest good and the
moral imperative from either the course of

236 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM?

evolution or the nature of the reflex-arc. It
may be indeed that the " progress " of evolu-
tion tends toward the highest good, but if
we know this to be so it is because we know
independently of the facts of evolution what
we mean by the highest good. The moral
imperative may indeed be " the psychic cor-
relate of a reflective, cerebro-spinal, ideo-
motor process," but it is not the moral
imperative because of its correlation to this
fearful and wonderful function. The ques-
tion how duty is possible, the question what
obligation means, are hardly answerable by
pointing to the reflex-arc. The truth is, in
our reaction against scholastic " logic-chop-
ping," description is being substituted for
definition, psychology for logic, the ought
is neglected for the is, and questions of
meaning are set aside or " answered " by
theories of origin. Above all (in " the
higher scientific circles " especially), the
mighty shibboleth " Evolution " and the
facts of physiological psychology are com-
ing to be regarded as having the answer

THE "PRACTICAL" POINT OF VIEW 237

to nearly all real questions. " Develop-
ment " is the catchword of the times —
without too much curiosity as to what we
are developing toward, or why we should
do it.

Nor should the " practical " view of knowl-
edge go altogether unchallenged. No one,
indeed, would any longer deny the practical
value of knowledge and thought in guiding
the reaction of the individual upon his en-
vironment. But when it is maintained that
this is the only value to be found in knowl-
edge and reason, that all human values are
ultimately matters of action, and that the
possession of truth is always a means and
never an end in itself, then, as it seems to
me, it is time to call a halt and to reassert
the old and trite thesis that to know the
truth is worth while for its own sake. The
whole splendid tradition of humanity's
scholars and thinkers from the Greeks to
the present day is evidence of this. The
existence of pragmatism itself proves it. The
noble army of "those who know," from

238 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM?

their master down, rises up to testify to the
fact that knowledge itself, and even apart
from its practical results, is one of the
things most exceedingly worth while. And
not only " worth while " is it ; it is as gen-
uinely human, as genuinely natural and
normal as is digestion or movement or
reproduction. In the words of " that im-
mortal sentence " of Aristotle's — ''All men
by nature desire knowledge!' ^ Nor can I
here refrain from quoting a little more at
length from "the master of those who know."
" If men philosophized in order to escape
ignorance it is evident that they pursued
wisdom just for the sake of knowing, not
for the sake of any advantage it might
bring. This is shown too by the course
of events. For it is only after practically
all things that are necessary for the comfort
and convenience of life had been provided
that this kind of knowledge began to be
sought. Clearly, then, we pursue this knowl-
edge for the sake of no extraneous use to

^ '< Metaphysics," I, i.

THE "PRACTICAL" POINT OF VIEW 239

which it may be put; but, just as we call
a man free who serves his own and not
another's will, so also this science is the
only one of all the sciences that is liberal,
for it is the only one that exists for its
own sake. . . . More necessary, indeed,
every other science may be than this ; more
excellent there is none." ^

I have ventured to dwell thus at length
on the value of knowledge for its own sake
to the human mind because the tendencies
of contemporary thought (of which prag-
matism is one of the most conspicuous
representatives) seem to call for a protest
from some one. This is perhaps the first
time since the days of Plato when such a
protest has been needed. That the posses-
sion of reason and of truth was in itself one
of the many genuine values of human life,
irrespective of what you could do with them,
was to our fathers simply a truism. But
we, in our enthusiastic assertions that reason
is for the sake of life, are almost forgetting
1 Ibid., I, 2 (Bake well's Translation).

240 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM?

that reason is a part and a product of life,
— in fact its finest product and " the sov-
ereign good of human nature " — and that
in a very true sense, therefore, life may
also be for the sake of reason.

And I speak of this not only because
the protest seems to me timely and need-
ful, but also because in the modern de-
thronement of reason, the new disregard
of certain old distinctions, and the partial
substitution of psychology for logic, there
is apt to be involved a loss of respect for
careful thought and a decreased endeavor
after logical consistency. In our revolt
against " rationalistic abstractions " and
" pure reason " we are in danger of for-
getting that the Principles of Contradiction
and Identity still hold whether we recog-
nize them or not, and that the canons of
Aristotle's Logic cannot be disobeyed with
impunity. We decry the logomachy, the
hair-splitting distinctions, and the "logic-
chopping " of the scholastics ; yet it may
well be that in throwing these aside we

THE "PRACTICAL" POINT OF VIEW 241

are surrendering some of the clear think-
ing that went with them.

Unless I have quite failed of my purpose
in the preceding lectures, I need bring
forth no further evidence of the dangers
just referred to than pragmatism itself.
Pragmatism is one of the signs of the
times and is perhaps the most typical repre-
sentative of the tendencies of which I have
been speaking. A brief repetition and sum-
mary of its principal positions will therefore
not be out of place in concluding this, our
final lecture.

Pragmatism has too great contempt for
" logic-chopping " and " hair-splitting dis-
tinctions " to be willing to define for us
exactly its view of the nature of meaning.
The meaning of any concept, it assures us,
is limited to the future practical conse-
quences which come from it; — but, as it
turns out, these ''practical consequences "
mean theoretical ones also ; and it is not at
all certain that the "future consequences"
need be future after all. Pragmatism is in-

242 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM?

deed fully persuaded that nothing can have
meaning which has not consequences in
some one's experience ; but whether this
" some one " refers merely to " ourselves "
or may include sentient beings of the re-
mote past and the distant future, God, and
even purely imaginary beings, we cannot
yet be perfectly sure. The new doctrine of
meaning, on which pragmatism is founded,
therefore amounts to this: that meaning is
somehow or other related to experience,
and probably limited to human experience.
Further than this the pragmatist is pre-
vented from refining, — for fear, apparently,
of chopping logic.

In his treatment of truth the pragmatist
again on principle refuses (or is unable) to
recognize a somewhat subtle but very real
and important distinction ; namely, that
between the meaning of a thing and the
proof of it, the distinction between the
7iature of a relation and our knowledge of
it. The assertion that an idea might be
true when not known to be true seems to

THE "PRACTICAL" POINT OF VIEW 243

him meaningless; nor is he willing to admit
any distinction between the truth of an
idea and the concrete verification of its
truth. When you prove the truth of a
thing, the proof and the thing proved are
one. In like manner, once you admit that
a true idea usually " works," so that you
can test its truth by its working, pragma-
tism immediately concludes that its truth
co7isists in its working, that its working
is all you mean by its truth. In other
words, since trueness and working usually
go together, the two are identified, and we
are told that we have here not two con-
cepts but one, and that when we say true-
ness we mean working. And the question
is not even asked whether the idea is true
because it works or works because it is
true — the one conception being simply
substituted for the other.^ All of which,
in good, old-fashioned, much-derided scho-
lastic language, is a complete confusion

^ Here I should make exception of Professor James, who,
in one passage, says plainly (as has been pointed out) that
the idea works because it is true.

244 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM?

between " essence " and " accidents " ; ix.^
between what we mean by truth and the
mark or incidental quality by which we
decide whether we have it or not.

Failure to make distinctions of this kind
and to seek for exactness in definition, and
possibly also in part a pragmatic belittling
of the rules of formal logic have led the
pragmatists into the still more serious logi-
cal difficulties pointed out in our second
lecture on Truth. The moderate pragma-
tists hold that the working of an idea is
essential to its truth, yet that the idea may
be true before it works ; v/hile the radical
school which makes the truth of an idea
altogether a matter of satisfactory sequent
experience is forced thereby to admit that
under certain quite natural circumstances
contradictory opposites must both be true at
the same time and in the same sense. And
both schools in all their writings are con-
stantly seeking to establish for their theory
the very kind of truth which that theory
maintains is impossible and meaningless.

THE "PRACTICAL" POINT OF VIEW 245

In the pragmatic doctrine of knowledge
both the odd characteristics of the " large,
loose way of pragmatism " (as the prag-
matists so picturesquely and truthfully
designate their method) reappear ; namely,
its curious habit of shying at impor-
tant distinctions and the consequent
want of consistency that naturally results
from looseness of thought. Thus prag-
matism will not admit that there is any
conceivable difference between a defini-
tion of the nature of knowledge and a
psychological description of the mental pro-
cesses experienced by the individual when
he knows. It will not consider the possi-
bility that knowledge can be a different
sort of thing from an individual's mental
process. When you ask what is meant by
knowledge pragmatism answers by telling
you how you feel when you have it. The
possibility of transcendence being thus dog-
matically denied, error too becomes, in the
long run, merely the way you feel. It is,
therefore, quite possible for you and me to

246 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM?

hold diametrically opposite views on the
same subject and both be said to know,
provided we are both satisfied and remain
satisfied with our respective opinions. Each
man thus becomes for himself the measure
of all things, and each man has knowledge
provided his experience continues to feel
satisfactory. And yet the pragmatist is cer-
tain that on this question he is in posses-
sion of knowledge and you are not, no
matter how you feel about it.

These principles concerning meaning,
truth, and knowledge are, as I have said,
the presuppositions and foundations of prag-
matism. But before bringing these lectures
to a close one word more should perhaps
be added concerning the general pragmatic
view of metaphysics and religion. Before
doing this, however, I must make a dis-
tinction between the pragmatists ; for in
their metaphysical and religious attitudes
they are far from being of one mind.

Professor James has divided all thinkers
into two types, the " tough-minded " and the

THE "PRACTICAL" POINT OF VIEW 247

" tender-minded." The former tend to take
the naturalistic, scientific, strictly logical
view of the world, uninfluenced by human
aspirations and desires. The latter look at
things in more idealistic fashion ; with them
religion and beauty and optimism have
more influence than the bare facts of sci-
ence or the cold results of reasoning. James
has also pointed out that pragmatism is a
compromise between the two types, sharing
in the characteristics of each. This de-
scription seems to me most apt, in respect
both to the two types in general and to the
position of pragmatism in particular. To
carry it still further into detail, one might
say more specifically that the pragmatist
is tough-minded intellectually and tender-
minded emotionally; or, better still, perhaps,
that he is tough-mmded and tender-hearted.
It might, however, be more exact to say
that there is really no such being as " the
pragmatist," but that there are many prag-
matists and that they are divisible roughly
into two schools, — the tough-minded and
the tender-minded respectively.

248 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM?

The tender-minded school is by far the more
popular of the two — and, I suppose, justly
so. It is interested in the logical and episte-
mological principles of pragmatism not so
much on their own account, as for the sake
of the more humanly important and interest-
ing conclusions that may be drawn from
them. Its heart is really not so much in
logic as in metaphysics and especially in
religion. Its pragmatist technique it re-
gards purely pragmatically, as a means
rather than as an end. The eternally ab-
sorbing questions of philosophy which have
always appealed and always will appeal to
the popular and the philosophic mind alike,
are the things it really cares for. It is
also essentially human. It dislikes blood-
less abstractions and technical terminology
and strives always to be clear, concrete,
and vital. It is broad in its sympathies,
charitable in its interpretations, and impa-
tient only of scholastic logic-worship and
the rationalistic Absolute. It has a fine
feeling for reality, and will not allow its

THE "PRACTICAL" POINT OF VIEW 249

own logical presuppositions permanently
to hide from it the real living world. Its
view of the universe being essentially opti-
mistic (or at least " melioristic "), it likes
interestmg things and believes in them.
Uninteresting things it finds hard to accept.
The rationalistic view of the world musi be
false because it is " inert," " static," " stag-
nantly intellectualistic," — and the opposite
view must be true because it is " dynamic "
and " dramatic." The tender-minded prag-
matist is, in fact, the very impersonation
of the will to believe and the great pro-
tagonist in the world of philosophy of the
strenuous life. He treats philosophical
questions in a large, generous, practical
way, hates logic-chopping, and does not
take even his own principles too seriously.
It is fortunate for his conclusions that
this is the case ; for they are reached not
because of the pragmatist principles so much
as in spite of them. No better illustration
could be given of the oft-repeated remark
that our philosophical arguments are, as a

250 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM?

rule, afterthoughts which we construct to
excuse or buoy up beliefs that originate
and subsist quite independently of reason-
ing. Only, in the case of pragmatism the
philosophical presuppositions do not even
excuse the belief. The tender-minded prag-
matist accepts " God " and the conclusions
of a religious metaphysics in much the
same way as does the old-fashioned thinker,
quite oblivious of the fact that if knowledge
be merely experienced transition and truth
be merely satisfactory consequences and
transcendence be nothing but nonsense, it
becomes quite absurd to take the old
religious beliefs seriously.

This fact is seen with perfect distinct-
ness by the tough-minded pragmatist. He
was, in truth, the first to point it out, nor
has he been the last in drawing attention
to the inconsistencies of his tender-minded
brother. Thus, as we saw in the last
lecture. Professor Dewey, with his tough-
minded disregard for our prejudices, shows
that if we cling to our pragmatist presup-

THE "PRACTICAL" POINT OF VIEW 251

positions we can no longer mean by " God "
a " seeing force that runs things," but only
a vague expectation of better issues in our
own experience. Both he and James, in
fact, unite in saying : " This vague con-
fidence in the future is the sole pragmatic
meaning at present discernible in the terms
design and designer." For the old notion
of " God " as an antecedent Power who
was and is and is to come, the consistent
pragmatist will carefully " substitute " the
concrete differences which under certain
conditions we shall experience, and he will
"simply abolish the meaning of an antece-
dent power."

With the same unemotional logic, the
tough-minded pragmatist points out that
the biological view of thought and knowl-
edge leads one inevitably to the same
conclusion and shuts out the hypothetical
objects of metaphysics and theology from
the proper field of human thought. The
mind exists for the purpose of guiding the
reaction of the psycho-physical organism

252 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM?

upon its surroundings, and " its proper and
legitimate object is that relationship of
organism and environment in which func-
tioning is most amply and effectively at-
tained." The only realities that have or
can have any genuine meaning for us are
of the " practical " sort. All other " reality "
— " metaphysical reality at large " — may,
therefore, go to its own place.

By thus deducing the logical conse-
quences of his doctrine the tough-minded
pragmatist has put us decidedly in his debt ;
for now we can see clearly that the prag-
matist controversy is not a mere academic
discussion, but has truly pragmatic impor-
tance. For it opens up the whole ques-
tion of the nature of man and his position
in Reality. Is man indeed what the bio-
logical pragmatist considers him — a crea-
ture of the environment, a successful animal,
whose one aim is practical reaction upon
his surroundings ? Or is he a twofold
being? Is he what the pragmatist de-
scribes and, in addition to that, also what

THE "PRACTICAL" POINT OF VIEW 253

Plato thought him — a citizen of the realm
of eternal reason, the outgrown ape, who
means more than he is, whose reach should
and does exceed his grasp, who " partly
is and wholly hopes to be " ?

If the pragmatist is right, if it be true
that man cannot mean more than he ex-
periences, that his reach cannot exceed his
grasp, if " God " and the " moral nature of
the Universe " in the old sense are really
meaningless terms, and if all this follows
inevitably from the analysis of our mean-
ings and our knowledge, then let us by all
means know it, and give in our adherence
to the pragmatic and biological view. But
let us not accept this analysis too lightly
nor without long weighing of its worth,
forgetful of the consequences which such
acceptance must logically carry in its train.
The concepts we have been considering in
these lectures may have seemed abstract
and lifeless, but the deepest questions of
our destiny ultimately hang upon them.
And the attitude which we shall adopt

254 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM?

toward the pragmatist principles will, if we
be consistent, determine our whole philos-
ophy, our whole outlook upon life and
upon the world. If this fact be clearly
grasped I am sure no further excuse need
be pleaded for the difficult and, I fear,
dreary discussions that I have led you
through during the course of these lectures.

INDEX

Absolute, 37, 56, 57, 100, 184,

187, 200, 248.
Action in Pragmatism, 16, 18, 19,

226, 227, 237.
Aristotle, 223, 238-240.

Bacon, 213, 215.

Biological View of Mind, 109,
113, 225-230, 234-237, SSI-
ass-

Bosanquet, 112.

Bradley, 31, 37, 38, 52, 53, 67.

Cicero, 193.

"Claim," 57-63, 74, 75. 83, 87-89,

98, 103, 127.
Correspondence Theory of Truth,

65-79, 9Si 9^> '°a> ^°^> ^°8,

III note, 128.

Dessoir, 226.

Dewey, 9 note, 17, 21, 37, 57, 74
note, 92, 93, 97, 100, 101, 104,
108, 109, III, 114, 115, 123 note,
124 note, 125 note, 143, 145,
146, 150, 152, 163, 166, 179,
180, 186, 188, 200-203, 205,
207, 250.

Eastman, 204 note.
Ethics, see Morality.
Ewer, 68.

Faith, 13, 186, 190-194.
Fichte, 194.

Future Experience, 19, 28-37,
199, 241, 251.

God, 12, 30, 35, 42, 135, 184,
196-206, 209, 242, 250, 251,
253-

"Idea" in Pragmatism, 109-115,

124 note, 125 note.
Intellectualism, see Rationalism.

James, 10, 12-14, 19, 20, 23, 25,
26, 29, 30 note, 31, 33 note,
37, 41, 42 note, 57, 67, 68,
71, 74 note, 76, 79, 85, 90, 93-
97, 100, loi, 108, 129, 139, 142,
146-150, 152-159, 166, 180, 182,
183, 188, 191, 194, 201-203,
215 note, 226-230, 243 note,
246, 247, 251.

Joachim, 52.

Kant, 12, 193.

Knowledge, 9, 131, 135-171, 177,
179, 196-199, 206, 213, 215,
216, 218, 220, 225, 230, "232,
23s. 237-239, 242, 245. 246,
250. 253-

Leuba, 233, 234.
Locke, 135, 136.
Logic, 14, 124 note, 126 note, 129,

130, 178, 236, 244.
Lotze, 37.
Lowell, 28.

Man, 222-232, 252, 253.
Materialism, 30, 31, 33-36, 303.
Meaning, 9-46, 50, 63-65, 72, 74,
75. 78, 79. 139. 154. 177.

">

25s

256

INDEX

186, 195-200, 202-206, 209,
218, 221, 236, 241, 242, 246,

253-
Metaphysics, 13, 39, 41. 43. 44,

177, 207, 246, 248, 250-253.
Method in Pragmatism, 10, 12, 20,

38-45-
Modified Pragmatism, 94-108,

244.
Montague, 29 note 1, 115 note.
Moore, 114 note, 123 note.
Morality, 13, 231-236.

Ostwald, 14.

Papini, 22, 43, 44, 210.

Paulsen, 68.

Pearson, 14.

Pierce, 15, 16, 19.

"Plan of Action," 17, 109-115,

144.
Plato, 127, 137, 141, 143. 165, 193,

220-223, 239, 253.
Practical Experience, 16, 19, 25,

28, 241.

Rationalism, 77, 142, 220-224,
228-230, 235, 237-240, 249.

Realism, 37, 65, 223.

Reality, Pragmatic Theory of, 9,
178-180.

Religion, 13, 42, 175-210, 246-
248, 250-253.

Ritschl, 194.

Royce, 17, 37, 114.

Russell, 130 note 2, 210 note.

Satisfaction, see Usefulness.
Schiller, 22, 23, 25, 26, 37, 53, 57,

59. 71-73. 74 note, 75, 87-89,
92, 97, 101-103, 130, 179, 182,
185, 200.

Scholasticism, 42, 223-225, 240.

Science, 13, 14, 55, no, 185, 187,
224, 233, 239, 247.

Skepticism, 130, 131, 191, 197,
201, 205, 210.

Socrates, 220 note.

Successful Working, see Useful-
ness.

Theism, 30, 31, 33-36, 203.

Theoretic Interests in Pragma-
tism, 23-25, 39-43-

Transcendence Theory of Knowl-
edge, 138-140, 143, 149-162,
1 68-1 71, 197-199, 206, 208,
245, 250.

Trueness, 52, 60, 65, 67, 70, 74,
83, 85, 86, 88, 89, 107, 112,

243-
Truth, 8, 13, 15, 22, 45, 46, 47-
131, 141, 161, 177, 181, 185,
196-201, 204, 206, 209, 213,
215-220, 237, 239, 242-244, 246,
250.

Usefulness, 13, 15, 61, 62, 90-121,
124 note, 125 note, 126, 145,
158, 159, 164-169, 185-189,
196, 198-200, 204, 206, 243,
244, 250.

Verifiability, 94, 101-104, 118,
119.

Verification, 61-64, 78, 86-88, 90-
107, 115-121, 127, 128, 145, 165,
185-190, 196, 198, 243-

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